The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Then I seemed to hear a dog barking; and at the same time as this, Nicola’s face, quite beautiful but so frightened and tragic in expression, loomed at me enormous and kept coming right up to me, then receding and then coming back. Her lips were moving, softly and appealingly, and though I can’t remember any voice I knew what she was saying.

  ‘No body, no funeral…’

  Over and over the words came; and though I wasn’t frightened at this point I had a terrible premonition — as if any moment a dreadful secret was to be revealed and — I guessed — not by her. The puzzled, distressed gentleness in her eyes did not indicate understanding, but rather an appeal to me to penetrate the mystery more deeply than it was prudent to dare.

  In the dream, then, I agreed. I must have nodded or something; for she seemed satisfied and her face changed, coming toward me and somehow right through me and spreading out until her blurred features were just part of the moonlight.

  The dog had stopped barking and there was complete silence. I lay there waiting, watching…feeling I should know what would happen but only sweating with dread. The metallic tapping had stopped; but my own breathing was audible. Soon I began to realize that my respiration was getting louder, that it was being amplified, that it was subject to the same echoing quality as the tapping noise had been.

  I found myself getting out of bed and going toward the bathroom. I went to the window and looked out. The view was exactly the same as the night of the cats; but I seemed to be searching not for them or the dog but the reason for the echoing of my own breathing.

  The tap was dripping. The tap was dripping in rhythm with my lungs. And the echo of the dripping tap was also metallic. Tap…tapping…Was this, then, the source of the previous sound?

  It seemed natural to try and check the point, even though the two concepts were only linked by word association. I turned off the tap.

  As I did so, the sky seemed to be changing to a copper colour; and it changed everything with it. The TV antennae, the rolls of wire-netting, even the chimney-pots…they all turned to copper.

  Now, I was on the roof. My roof? No, miraculously the roof I had made the journey on before. But there was a difference. There was no longer a concrete edifice on Davvitt’s place; instead a solitary object, made of copper, lay on the concrete of the roof.

  I stooped to pick it up. At first I thought it was the collar that I had found there before, changed into metal. Then I found it was somewhat larger. On it was a medallion. Bandy was engraved upon it.

  The sound of my own breathing was now almost deafening; and I looked up, trying to discover the explanation. And I thought I saw why. The copper sky was rapidly closing in until I saw it was made of copper…a huge, metal enclosure, but gradually contracting, shrinking around me, trapping me, compressing and reducing my surroundings and making nonsense of their proportions.

  I screamed. The echo, ghastly in its acoustical pandemonium, seemed to cause the hollow in which I was trapped to deflate violently around me, in a series of giant jerks, until I could see the rivets that joined the seams.

  Then the copper face of Tesh appeared. His expression was as it had been the previous night and he was shaking his head.

  This time, when he spoke, I clearly heard the words and they impinged against the inside of the cavity and came back to me, horribly distorted after a succession of echoes, and they were these: ‘You were there, James…You were there!’

  I was standing, alone, in an enormous clear space, like a desert. There was no movement, no sound. There had to be some explanation. For where had the copper shell gone? I should have been inside it, crushed to nothingness. There was just the moon.

  Well…not exactly the moon, for it was slowly changing its shape. At first, of course, it went to the shape of an egg — I had almost manoeuvred it into doing that — but there was something else…It happened just as a dark, streaky cloud began to pass across its surface.

  I recognized what the moon had become just before it was completely obscured.

  When I saw what it was, I panicked. I ran and ran, knowing what I was looking for and knowing also that it was there to be found.

  . And I found it, there in the desert. An ordinary, uncomplicated telephone box. The only deviation was the colour of the phone. It was green…the standard colour for a Secrephone. I dialled 999. As I was dialling, other people around me, people I hadn’t noticed before, started to run. They too, were in terror, and their cries grew outside the glass of the phone box. And everywhere I looked, out of the three glass sides of the phone-booth, people were running. Some of them were pointing up to where the moon had been…

  ‘Which service do you require?’ asked the calm voice from the telephone receiver.

  ‘Einstein,’ I said.

  ‘What is the number you’re speaking from?’

  The voices outside had grown so loud I could scarcely hear the operator. But I shouted: ‘The number? It all depends how you look at it!’

  The operator sounded as if he were trying to keep his patience, despite himself. ‘What is the nature of the emergency, caller?’

  ‘There’s a roulette wheel in the sky,’ I explained.

  ‘Oh, that. Didn’t you know it’s impossible? How can you have an egg-shaped roulette wheel? The same number would come up every time…’

  I screamed back: ‘Then why didn’t everyone else dial 999 at exactly the same time as I did?’

  The person at the other end started to laugh.

  The laughter grew, until gradually I realized that the crowd outside the phone-booth had ceased to panic. Instead, they stood quite still, forming a dense circle round the box. And they were all shrieking with laughter…at me.

  One of them was a teenage girl dressed in a fantasized version of the vogue of the moment. When her face turned toward me I recognized her, although her prototype in life was in her mid-twenties. For, despite the exotic, tinsel-like makeup stuck to her face and the tiny sequins on her eyelashes, she was Helen all right. And though she mocked me, along with the others, it was as if it were somehow against her will. There was sorrow felt over which side she was on. ‘Boozums went broke, did Boozums, then?’

  I said furiously: ‘But it hasn’t happened, yet.’

  ‘But Boozums is undeniably in a mess, isn’t Boozums?’

  Then Davvitt was there. His shrivelled little hand, impeccably manicured but shrunk down to the size of a china doll’s, clasped a giant glassful of tomato-juice. Silencing the crowd with his free hand he turned to the girl, sapphire-eyed. ‘Mr Boozum,’ he said, with an incomprehensibly alcoholic slur, ‘has a persecution complex. That’s all it is, ladies and gentlemen. The egg-shaped thing he’s so worried about is a Freudian symbol.’

  Suddenly the sequin girl gave a shriek of laughter. Hardly able to speak, she managed to gurgle: ‘Don’t you see? Oh, don’t you see? It’s a Freud Egg!’

  Then I saw Nicola again. She said something gentle to the sequin-girl, who seemed surprised, then mollified. Nicola looked at me, rather questioningly, then at the crowd, assessing them. Then she nodded over her shoulder to a man who looked like a foreman. He nodded back, and shouted something to a whole gang of workmen.

  And under his instructions these workmen dragged an enormous chain. It seemed unspeakably heavy; but they contrived to draw it right around the crowd, in a huge circle of chain.

  The sand of the desert had solidified into concrete now, and the chain made a deafening clanking noise as the gang strained at it. They drew it tighter and tighter, in ever-diminishing circles, so that the victims were forced inward and the chain had gone round them once, twice, three times. The sequin-girl seemed to understand this, acquiesced without complaint.

  Nicola said to me: ‘Davvitt wants you to imagine you’re imagining that you’re imagining that you’re imagining…’

  *

  It took me some while to realize that the clanking sound of a chain functioning on a pulley was coming through the window from the street o
utside. The dream had been so vivid to me, so complete in itself, that it didn’t seem possible that it could owe its sequence of events to anything outside it.

  Yet there it was again…you could hear the creak of the pulley and cleat as it juddered under the strain of the hoist; the rattle of loose chain as it was paid out, slapping against the side of a building.

  Who on earth could be using a hoist at this hour?

  I crossed to the window.

  I could see nothing unusual…only the unhealthy, jaundiced glow from the street lamps. Whatever was happening around the corner was blanked-off from me.

  I nearly went back to bed until it suddenly occurred to me that the hoist sounded as if it might be in the region of Davvitt’s house.

  What’s going on?

  If I could have foreseen any particular reason why Davvitt might have had cause to move his apparatus from the roof of his house no doubt I would have dressed more quickly. Stupidly, I had assumed that, far from taking anything away, the probability was that something was being added. But at last the penny dropped. I cursed my dim-wittedness and threw some clothes on. A few minutes later I was down in the street.

  I got around the corner just in time to see a large furniture van and a car pulling away together. Furious that I had neither transport nor communications, I stood there helplessly watching the tail-lights disappearing round the next corner.

  There were no lights on in any of the windows of Davvitt’s bit of street — it’s marvellous what the British won’t take any notice of — so without thinking why, I ran up Davvitt’s frontdoor steps and banged on the door.

  I needn’t have bothered to knock. The door gave, and I found myself inside. I ran upstairs, to the room where I’d been given such anaemic coffee. Confusion in here — the miserable trestle of sagging creeper, half pulled away from the wall, told its own story of sudden chaos.

  My foot kicked against an empty tin. I picked it up. It smelled faintly of coffee. I chucked it away angrily, went up the last flight of normal stairs to where the thinner of the two steel doors stood open. Then the concrete and steel companionway. At the top, the cat-walk that led to the inside of the concrete blockhouse. No steel door!

  Inside it was singularly unrevealing. I found the ventilator with the louvres. Looked out through the louvres at a perfectly moonlit night. Nothing odd about that. But over my head half the roof had been demolished. Chunks of concrete were piled up in the corner of the place.

  I studied the flooring. On it was a large steel base-plate with mounting-flanges right-angled on to the anchoring. Something large and quite heavy had stood here.

  Nothing else in there whatsoever.

  I found myself laughing. I’d been so beautifully had. So much for my elaborate arrangements to take a closer look tomorrow night. I was just chasing shadows, then! The laughter sounded hollow and amplified by the concrete walls. It seemed like the mockery of my dream.

  Tesh had discovered the first shadow, in the desert of New Mexico; and this had been all of twenty years ago…almost a different age. The age of something new and exciting and horrific; a sudden rude proximity to the pulsating truth of the atom itself, and the power locked within it. Rapidly, with an amazing degree of sang-froid, society had learned to shrug its shoulders and carry on as if nothing had happened. All except a handful of people. These had taken a sharp left turn, completely stopped communicating with the rest of science. No papers had been published by Gray or Davvitt for anyone else to share. Whatever lunatic thing they had hit upon, it existed in a nether world of sudden comings and goings, of compulsive actions, of half-expressed terrors like a seven-guinea Easter egg offered to a child, and a house suddenly flushed of its grotesque contents.

  Downstairs, signs of hasty packing in the bedroom…burned papers in the grate. Nothing of interest here; but next along this corridor was a small room which had obviously been used as a reference library. Stacks of books on nuclear physics, the Quantum and — of course — various elaborations on the Relativity theory. I recognized a few old friends…I’d had a go at this once, though most of it was long forgotten. One book entirely alien to all this: an illustrated glossy on the subject of swans.

  I was leafing through this, trying to work out what it was doing there, when the phone rang.

  I had nothing to lose by answering it…

  “Oh, this is the answering service,” it said. “Is that you, Dr Davvitt?”

  I did not attempt an impersonation. Part of this girl’s job was to be on the alert for that. Just occasionally something slips out this way that can give a client a very bad time…

  I said: “No, I’m a friend of his. He’ll be out for a few minutes. Is this urgent?”

  “Well…no. We were just worried because Dr Davvitt said he would call us at one o’clock, or whenever he got back from dinner in London. He asked us to hold all messages till then.”

  “I may as well take them down for him.”

  She hesitated. Then: “There’s just one. From Dr Flaske.”

  Flaske! I knew him. Back in the Sceptre days he had expressed an interest in my Type Y4 Dekatron, wanted one in his lab. A month later my company wound up in Carey Street, so no Dekatron.

  Right now, I was surprised the name came up. I would have sworn the old boy would have steered wide of people like Davvitt…On conscientious grounds Flaske had refused Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, had put his signature to a round-robin he even sent the Germans, urging the non-development of the atom bomb…

  But on the phone I said: “Yes? What’s the message?”

  “He just wants Dr Davvitt to phone him at Great Missenden in the morning.” She gave me the number.

  I hung up, very thoughtfully, lit a cigarette, and tried to figure this new one.

  The answer was — quite literally — staring me in the face:

  Selected Lectures

  TRENDS IN PHYSICS

  W. A. Flaske.

  …bound elegantly in green and black leather, with the colophon of a reputable publisher embossed on the spine.

  I took it out of the shelf, flipped through the pages, came to one heavily sidelined, and read.

  The passage was one cigarette long, and was quite enough to convince me that W. A. Flaske was anything but sympathetic toward the activities in which Davvitt and others had been involved. Flaske, though often typecast as an old dodderer by people who didn’t know the full spectrum of his personality, had a habit of relinquishing his benevolent image with bewildering suddenness — as the printed text of this spontaneous lecture clearly showed. One passage read:

  Sometimes I think the attitude of the scientist today is akin to that of the restless ne’er-do-well who, having experienced every known erotic process, seeks beyond that until he is morally a member of the Hellfire Club.

  The orgy of science today owes itself, it seems to me, to the same meandering fascination for what is different, instead of the pursuit of what is beneficial to mankind. At a time when our nuclear power stations have not progressed beyond the equivalent, in terms of development, of Stevenson’s Beam Engine, we have groups of physicists investigating areas of blarney-physics so remote from the mainstream of scientific research, yet so dangerous in their implications, that good brains and better money are being poured into a pit of technological decadence from which there can be no return.

  Strong medicine — and, judging from the margin comments in Davvitt’s spindly handwriting, not very well received. Bully for Dr Flaske! Here, then, was a potential ally, and one not to be wasted.

  I resolved to phone him in the morning. From what I remembered, he would be a delightful person for Nicola to meet. We could make an evening of it.

  Before leaving Davvitt’s library I took one more look at the sole offering on Natural History — the thing about swans.

  It was then that I suddenly remembered that swans had featured in my dreams. At this time I dismissed this as a mere oddity.

  Yet I should have thought twice. For as I put th
e book down I happened to catch the handwritten legend on the title page: Ex Libris Julian Gray, 1959

  Nicola’s father!

  Chapter Six

  The thought of seeing Nicola cheered me and I rose at seven and sang in my ridiculous marble bathroom.

  At eight I called Tesh, from a coin-box.

  I asked him if his Intelligence sources had informed him that Davvitt had moved the apparatus from the roof.

  Affirmative, he said…though it was not clear to anyone why he had done it. “They only took the apparatus as far as the K.L.K. factory in the New Town a couple of miles down the road. Presumably Davvitt wants to set it up in the Experimental Wing.”

  Tesh seemed puzzled by a move so local, preferring the theory that Davvitt really intended to take the apparatus up north to Moorbridge.

  “But I thought that place had been closed?” I said.

  “It has. But K.L.K. have an establishment across the valley from the old place. It came into being because they had a contract to develop and supply certain electronic equipment…closed-circuit television, things like that. Later they equipped a bigger lab altogether, also on the hill there, for atom smashing and all the rest of it. They still produce a few radio-isotopes for industry.”

  I asked Tesh what he thought this sudden nocturnal upheaval might mean.

  “Panic.”

  “But why? Surely not just because I gatecrashed on Davvitt’s roof the other night?”

  Tesh said: “Look, this is an open line and I can’t be specific. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve made the plans I shall be telling you about in a moment. But speaking metaphorically, supposing you had made an atom bomb which you thought was inert but which suddenly went supercritical? What would you do?”

  The question startled me. I hadn’t thought of anything as unarguably concrete and I didn’t think Tesh’s analogy had much to do with a so-called ‘Relativity Machine’. “Oh, come off it!”