The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  He repeated: “What would you do, James?”

  “I’d tear it apart — with my bare hands, if necessary.”

  “And how do you tear apart something that’s only half there?”

  I couldn’t accept this. “It’s ‘there’ enough to be lowered to the ground on a rattly old hoist.”

  “Yes. But why are you suddenly denying your own brand of thinking, James? This is the hare you’ve been chasing. The moment you have it in your sights you apply the safety-catch. Why?”

  It was true, and I knew why. I’d never expected to be jolted back to earth by someone as categorically sane as Nicola — with all that implied — and I was trying to pretend I hadn’t got a past.

  Tesh had caught me at it just in time. Nicola would be just about as interested in a masked version of me as she would in a tailor’s dummy.

  I tried again. “What they lowered on a hoist was the physical container for whatever goes on inside.”

  “That’s better…But even that is pretty glib. I do wish you’d start thinking, James. Just because you’ve decided — suddenly — not to be neurotic, there’s no need to switch off your intuition. We need you, so stop hiding. Okay? Now! These are my plans…”

  I had to interrupt him and put more money in the coin-box. When that was done I let him go ahead. And from the tone of it all I realized at once that there was far more cause for concern and on a far wider scale than I had realized. No longer was this a kind of abstract battle, bound up in my bankruptcy and Helen and a feud with Guy Endleby; it was beginning to sound a lot more like that figurative bomb. And though I still couldn’t quite grasp the dimensions of the issue, at least Tesh’s instructions were easy enough to understand.

  “Anyway, I want you to take over my place up here for a while. Here you can be in constant touch. I can also rig some expenses for you, and a car.”

  I protested that surely Davvitt and people would be on to this and it would simply draw attention to my activities.

  “I don’t think so. I shall leak certain things. Don’t be pompous about it, but the story will be that I’ve taken pity on an old friend. Your present accommodation is crippling your morale and as I don’t need my own place I’ve simply loaned it to you. You must also have some transport. As it wouldn’t be likely that I’d fit you out with everything from a dinner suit to an executive aircraft — so to speak — they’ve got to think you’re using Julian Gray’s car…they must know you drove her down from Doncaster that night. So my Ministry has arranged with the Police for an identical Vauxhall — even with the same plates.”

  “Aren’t we taking a lot for granted? Nicola might not like cheating her father in this way. It’s one thing for me to use her father’s car with her consent; quite another to indulge in this kind of masquerade. Anyway, wouldn’t he find out?”

  “Well, you don’t have to park the bloody thing next to his as a matter of course, do you? Nicola may be her father’s daughter in normal matters, but you can tell from her attitude when she was telling us about the dog that she’s scared stiff of what he’s been doing.”

  “When is all this to happen?”

  “Right away, if you agree.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “In Ministry accommodation elsewhere; but in direct touch with you by telephone.”

  “The green one in your office at the flat?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause.

  I said: “You must be very sure things are coming to a head.”

  “Can’t you sense it?”

  “I presumed you had more than vague feelings to go on.”

  “I have, James. But please don’t try and pump me. There’s no need for you to know my exact whereabouts either. All I need to know is whether you agree to this.”

  “I can move in straight away.”

  “Good. I’ve sent you a key. It’ll be in your mail this morning.”

  I acknowledged this and hung up.

  What I hadn’t said was that the key would not necessarily mean I intended to take every order of Tesh’s in the blind. Therefore I did not tell him that I intended to visit Dr Flaske off my own bat. No doubt he would learn of this soon enough from his Intelligence sources.

  Later I called Nicola at Fortnum’s.

  She was a bit taken aback, at first, by my sudden high spirits, but soon there was laughter in her voice and that was all right.

  Finally, I put a call through to the quaint Dr Flaske. He couldn’t think who the hell I was — we had, in fact, met several times — but being a nice fellow, he said, when I asked if I could bring a friend: “Bring half a dozen.”

  “One will do,” I said.

  *

  “It’s uncanny,” said Nicola. “Here we are driving about in Daddy’s car…his number plates, his accessories…even his seat covers!” She switched on the headlights as she turned off the Oxford road — “Only it’s not!”

  I said: “I’m not sure I like those seat covers, though. I don’t happen to be a lover of the Scots. What tartan is it, anyway?”

  “The McPhonies,” she explained. “Famous Highland pseudo-fabric family. They’ve had a three hundred years’ feud going on with the McPolythenes.”

  “Who won?”

  “They did the cowardly thing — made a truce so as to gang up against the McJaps.”

  She drove on in silence, not showing any amusement at the conversation — she seldom smiled at our mutual attempts at wit — but looking very earnest behind the wheel. The sleek upward curve of her lips owed itself more to the exacting challenge of a situation brought about by Tesh. I had his seduction suite and he had provided me with a dead spitten image of Gray’s car. To behave as if some fiendish plan on the part of a most unvirtuous cupid wasn’t built into the situation was a considerable strain on what may have survived of my own gallantry, and equally so upon Nicola’s ability to balance out a sense of being manipulated without balancing me out with it.

  So as we headed for Great Missenden — which, like all villages prefixed with the word ‘Great’, isn’t — I watched Nicola at the wheel of this replica-car and, of course, she looked exactly as I had expected…alertly taut-bodied, yet relaxed.

  Great Missenden is a small, agreeable blob on the map and you can easily miss the turning in the darkness. But we had not yet reached Amersham and I was content to be passenger and let my thoughts wander.

  I thought of the moment I had walked into the impeccable Fortnum’s of Piccadilly, after dropping my things at Tesh’s place and cleaning up in Nicola’s bathroom (how could I not think of it as Nicola’s?) and how she had looked then. She had smiled up demurely from the task of serving a lady whose voice fell little short of Paul Robeson’s and whose capacity for crystallized fruit was inexplicable. After this he-lady had boomed her succulent gratitude and retired down the steps for the street, dangling various cartons on their little loops from the greedy fingers which itched to rip them all open at the same time, Nicola watched the receding figure un-cruelly and started putting the rejected goodies back in place. “You might not be surprised to know,” she said, arranging some tantalizing Turkish Delight in a ruthlessly appetizing array, “that you have just seen the customer who bought the other egg.”

  We just couldn’t seem to get away from that.

  I cleared my throat and said loudly: “Lunch is served. At Lyons’!”

  Casually, not looking up from her stomach-menacing artwork, she said: “Lyons’ it is. Let’s go.”

  It was then I asked how she felt about meeting yet another professor. “He’s a funny old boy who has made himself the local character of a village in Bucks. Dr Flaske.”

  We emerged into Piccadilly and Nicola said gravely: “Dr Flaske, the Glassblower’s Son…It’s getting to be like Happy Families…except none of them seem to be very happy.”

  “With the exception of William Flaske,” I explained. “He beams all the time.”

  “Oh, a real movie physicist?”

  “Absent
-minded and everything,” I assured.

  Now, looking economically neat and small in the driver’s seat, provocative for the fact that no hint of sex had been expressed between us, she cast me a quick look which took her hair by surprise. The manner in which it exposed a fresh-contoured brow and imp-like features, subtly enshadowed by the reflected backbeam of the headlights, had a noticeable effect on my heart rate. She didn’t miss the response on my eyes, either, but she said: “Thank you, for ticking me off, the other night.”

  “I was scared stiff.”

  She looked back at the road. “Funny. You didn’t give that impression at all.” She drove on, and what I could see of her face, in the backthrow of light from fleeting-low branches of intermittent road-trees, stopped time and space in the only way I ever want it to…the vixen lips slightly apart through their hunger commanding…Her frank breathlessness; her natural warmth paradoxically cool, conceding that passion is for spending, not for duress.

  She said: “Darling? How did the car stop?”

  *

  I was beginning, for what seemed the first time in an impossibly long period, to find things funny.

  Like our arrival at Dr Flaske’s house.

  The point was that we drove down a little lane that bulged with rustic charm. It had everything; thatched cottages, and elderly-looking lamp-posts and small trees shedding their blossom — for it was no longer spring. There were little driveways with five-barred gates and pretty names written on them. Then we shot around the final corner and there, caught in the blazing headlights, was the chunk of concrete lunacy that Flaske thought was a house.

  Characteristically, Nicola felt no instinct to react, though I was half afraid the stark accommodation apparatus before her might symbolize a sort of disillusionment. But she just said: “Gosh!” with little vehemence and found that the bright cones of light thrown forward by the car fitted exactly over the two round windows on the front of the house. They stared back at us like two enormous eyes.

  “If only they’d blink,” said Nicola.

  At the door, the Doctor said: “You told me you hoped to bring a friend; but one so charming? — what an occasion for me! Do come in, my dear; and don’t attempt to hide your astonishment at this…” He left out the word, as if after searching for it over the years he still couldn’t find anything suitable. Leading the way in, he went on: “You see, all my life I had a vision, an idea in here” — he tapped his head with his index finger — “which should have got out by the time I was three years old…five, at the latest.” He threw his hands up in a wonderfully articulate gesture. “Instead of that I waited till I was fifty-one. And look! I mean, I ask you!”

  Nicola said: “I bet you rather like it, really.”

  “Young woman, I’m supposed to be a benevolent old professor. In this age of ‘images’ that happens to be mine. Now, it wouldn’t do at all if I openly defied the product of my own creative imagination.”

  We all drank sherry (which he knew I didn’t like!) and he kept us amused for a while on the lighter side of nuclear physics, although, as he said: “I’m not really sure there should be a lighter side. It’s rather like telling improper stories in Church, isn’t it? — you can’t tell funny stories on some subjects without people getting fussed — CA funny thing happened on the way to Hiroshima’, for instance, is hardly a very good start to an anecdote. Still, some funny things do occasionally happen — even to physicists.”

  Flaske carefully pursued the complicated ritual of someone whose pipe-smoking constituted a way of life. The implement he produced from a well-worn pocket-flap was well-matured and none too clean either…an S-bend of a thing which he stuffed while his eyes danced, jovially (and perhaps a bit sadistically) outward, more at Nicola than me. “You see,” he explained, “in science we have to play games…perfectly serious games and with perfectly serious meanings. Take ordinary light. Daylight. What is it? Do you know?”

  Nicola shook her head, just cueing him, amused at the buildup, knowing full well the old boy was attracted and was showing frayed peacock feathers after they had been stored in seclusion for so long. “Tell us,” she said.

  He engulfed himself in an alarming quantity of tobacco smoke, then waved it clear. When we could see him again he continued: “Light moves. It’s fast traffic going along a road. It consists of something. And yet…does it? Just as you think it’s going to obey the traffic laws it stubbornly refuses to conform.

  “Presto! Perhaps it isn’t traffic at all. Perhaps it is waves, then? Ah, yes! That must be it! Look, we can prove, quite definitely, it is waves. It can be in two places at once, and the traffic can’t do that!” More smoke and he disappeared again.

  Re-emerging, he said: “But…not so fast! There’s a thing called the photo-electric effect. Now, who cares what that is? Sounds boring, doesn’t it? It certainly bores the wave theory. Waves can’t do it. Only traffic can do it!

  “Well. All right! Perhaps light is sometimes one and sometimes the other? Surely, this must be it? Help! As soon as you set out to prove it consists of waves, it does a backdouble and behaves like the solid stuff. As soon as you absolutely know for certain it’s that, all of a sudden it isn’t! It’s waves again. Beastly, isn’t it?”

  Nicola said: “It must be both at once.”

  “Aha! If only you’d been available when everyone else got so muddled! You see, they got so worried they made it into a joke. Which I’ll tell you…”

  Nicola knew perfectly well that the answer had been implicit in the way Flaske had put the conundrum, but in good humour she accepted the compliment that she had out-thought every scientist in all the quantum p’s and q’s right up to the time of Niels Bohr’s final acceptance of an impossible paradox…

  Nicola was wondering whether he was going to get to his joke.

  He held up a protesting hand. “I have prepared the ground. I have come to my joke. It is this. One of the scientists on the Oak Ridge project was suffering from nervous exhaustion. Instead of sending him off to a farmyard — as they should have done — to gaze at cows, lady farmworkers and other rustic exhibits…instead of that they sent him to a psychiatrist. By way of conversation our twitching scientist referred back to the bad old days when they were still trying to prove the wretched riddle positively one way or the other. So he started out on the wave/particle duality business.”

  I pulled a face. “The very mention of the word duality!”

  Flaske blew smoke all over the place in his delight. “Our scientist was now in big trouble. He should have seen the warning frown on the face of the wise owl behind the walnut desk…the puzzled, protective air of anxiety. He saw none of this. He went blindly on, finally quoting the old adage: ‘On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we regard light as consisting of waves — ’”

  I filled in: “‘On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays we think of it as particles, and’” — we said the last bit together — “‘on Sundays we simply pray’.”

  “Whereupon,” continued the Doctor, “whereupon the psychiatrist immediately phoned through to Oak Ridge and announced that one of the most vital members of the atom bomb team was in advanced schizophrenia. They had a devil of a time getting him back on the job.”

  It was all very good-humoured and frivolous, but I knew perfectly well Flaske had some definite purpose in telling this particular story — it was hardly a show-stopper. So I asked him why he did so.

  “Because paradox,” he said, “makes people odd — and it is this kind of paradox that governs modern physics.” He broke off. Then, looking sly: “Mr Fulbright, you’d make an appalling detective. It’s your timing that gives you away. Do you know what I’m referring to?”

  I thought I did, but I let him go on.

  “I leave a message with Davvitt’s answering service. They can’t find him, so eventually they call me back. In so doing they reveal that some unknown person took the message. And within ten minutes of their call back to me you telephone and say you want to come and see me. We
ll? Am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you interested in what Davvitt is doing, Mr Fulbright? Rather a remote line, isn’t it, for an electronics engineer? I mean, your Dekatron was just fine, but?”

  I stared at him through the smoke. “I think paradox has made Davvitt odd — among other people.”

  Nicola suddenly cast her eyes down.

  Flaske said: “He’s moved it. Hasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “He’s moved it.”

  There was silence.

  Flaske falsely brightened up and said to Nicola, with a big beam: “But I deem it atrocious manners to discuss such scientific blarney in the presence of so beautiful a creature!” Nicola: “Perhaps, Doctor, there is a duality theory about women also. It’s generous of you to consider me decorative; but not quite so generous to think me stupid.”

  “Ah, I see! On Fridays! Forgive my own stupidity Miss Gray…Gray…”

  The obvious thought occurred to him: “Young woman, I am not only being stupid; I am also demonstrating my ignorance. And what right has old Graybags to a daughter like you?”

  Nicola said: “‘Old Graybags’ knows what I’m really like!”

  I had taken a back seat throughout this shameless flirtation. Now I said to Flaske: “Do you know Dr Gray personally?”

  “I know nobody,” he said, “which is what makes me original. Ever since Oak Ridge, it became the thing for physicists to congeal into teams…and the result was a series of the most horrible bangs in history.”

  “Eve come to you about something different.”

  “Not bangs?”

  “Not exactly bangs.”

  An inscrutable look: “I thought probably not. No doubt you’re wondering what I phoned Davvitt for.”

  I said: “Whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t to tell him you would back him to the hilt for a Nobel prize.”

  The pipe came out of the mouth. “The point is, can we stop him?”

  I was watching Nicola uneasily. The conflict was crisscrossing her brow. Somehow I knew we were both thinking about her father; in particular my thoughts were focused on Tesh’s transcript of what had been said, so long ago, out there in the Los Alamos desert.