“And you don’t think they have any right to be.”
She said: “You were using your instinct, just then — weren’t you?”
We suddenly found both our expressions raw. I said grimly: “Never mind what I was using. Let’s just get out.”
Something had happened to the group at the window, as Jane and I were still staring at each other; and evidently I’d been overheard.
One of the men said something quietly to the other members of the group, then left them and came up to us. His expression was uncompromising and he said to me: “Who are you?”
I simply gave my name.
He said: “Didn’t Professor Brundash ask you to leave?”
I glanced across at Jane. She didn’t know quite what to do and I couldn’t blame her.
So she just went on typing, trying to ignore me. ‘It is not possible to comment on priorities, and I am…’
“Well?”
Jane looked up for a split second. It was her last chance and she knew it.
But like so many people in the world, she was more afraid of authority than of the events authority alleges to control.
She just gave a tiny shake of her head. ‘Not empowered myself to make a decision, as you know…’
I turned and left the room without speaking.
Outside, there was an oppressive atmosphere of suspended animation. The sun seemed to have grown hotter, the scent from those curious weeds richer, as if the elements of nature had combined in an effort to reassure. But I saw in the blank faces around me that indefinable look of preparation that conveys an inner knowledge of impending death.
I felt irresolute, unable to see what was to happen to me personally. If, as seemed certain, I had escaped this holocaust when it had actually happened, why was I able to be in two eras at the same time? Could this not mean that in fact it was by no means certain that I was assured my own survival?
Up on the zigzag a desperate little traffic jam had developed. Horns blared and engines revved as people tried to turn and go back. I gauged they were two miles away. If they thought they themselves were in range of the egg, what hope had I?
Panic seized me. I do not excuse it; but in fact I believe it stemmed from the realization that I could help no one. I was thrown back on myself. Maybe if I could find a truck?
I ran around the corner of the patio. Out in the clearing, one or two other people got the same idea, ran toward a parked jeep which stood just outside the main building, under the clock. It was the only vehicle in sight. Someone jumped in, stood on the starter button. The engine wouldn’t fire.
I watched the heads at the window above. People were looking down at the jeep, disappeared from the windows, then dashed down the fire-escape as the man in the jeep still tried to start it. He got it going and drove off as people were still piling in. They fouled the steering wheel and the driver couldn’t control the jeep. There was a roar of the engine as the jeep turned full-circle and hit the electric fence with a sizzling flash, igniting the engine and setting the whole vehicle alight. They got out all right, but with no place to go.
Others saw the incident. Ugly little groups of hysterical people were collecting in the brilliant sunshine around the clearing; hoping for leadership and staring, agonized, at the poles bearing the loudspeakers, awaiting guidance.
Voices came through the speakers, as if the mike had been switched on and the man on the button couldn’t think of anything to say. All that came over was the argument behind him. The speakers immediately went dead again.
Abruptly, the sound of typing that had been coming from the office came to an end. The shouting started up in there. I pulled myself together. Surely I could still get that girl out?
I started to run back, was headed off as the occupants — led by the man who had just told me to go to blazes — started to barge out of there. Jane wasn’t among them and it was impossible to get through. And I saw that these people were running straight for the other groups who had seen the jeep incident and arbitrarily had chosen the opposite direction. The two phallanxes met at the corner of the patio and the result was a fiasco.
The whole panic had started so quickly I realized these now-terrorized souls had been living on their nerves all too long. One signal and that was enough. Nothing scares so much as the disaster you’ve been awaiting all the time…
To avoid the crush I darted into the canteen. There was a single individual sitting at a window table. From the set of his shoulders and the sunglasses lying on the table I guessed, with a shock, who it was.
He looked around when he heard my footsteps.
It was Miles.
Stupidly, I expected him to recognize me. He didn’t, but he looked most unfriendly. “Are you the chap who was wandering about out there by Structure One?” — By ‘Structure One’ he meant the egg.
I didn’t think this was any time to start an argument. I said: “If there’s a way out of here, I think we ought to try it.”
“Yes…no doubt you do. And what about all those people?”
“Are you trying to blame me?”
Arrogantly, he still sat where he was, finishing a coffee. “You seem all ready to do so,” he said.
I said: “If you and your colleagues choose by your actions to take the responsibility for a Universe, don’t you think you should take people like me into account?”
He got up, quite calmly, indicating the door at the far end. “I think we can make the Communications Room,” he said, and added in answer to my question: “If only people like you wouldn’t search for the reasons for things when you’re not qualified to do so.”
I said: “My only crime is existing. If it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else.”
We had reached the door. He paused with his hand on the knob; looked at me smiling oddly: “Ah! But it wasn’t. Was it?”
“That merely makes me an instrument of fate.”
He flung wide the door. “Look out there! Look at them! Don’t they need someone to accept the guilt?”
Seeing them, I found that the remorse which he himself could not accept, and which he had therefore handed over to me, was not too great a sacrifice.
Impotently, far too late, the loudspeakers boomed: “Everyone stay where you are! I’m going to reduce power! Just stay where you are! You’ll kill each other if you panic!”
The words jolted Miles into action. “Christ! Come on!”
He indicated one of the concrete blisters, like that of the control room from where Davvitt issued his useless promise over the speakers. We had about two hundred yards to run, against the direction of the crowd.
People were falling and sprawling headlong, trampling each other. Glancing up in a wild moment, I saw a car on the zigzag fall clear over the escarpment, then crash in a sheet of burning petrol on the rocks below.
One or two people, some way behind us, realized our intentions. They saw us, stopped running away from us, pointed, then ran in our direction.
Other groups, seeing them, followed suit. Those at the rear, realizing that once having reached the control room we’d bolt ourselves in, diverted and started running toward the electric fence. I couldn’t see Jane among them. I know a fatalist when I see one. She would be watching, quite quietly, from the window, still smoking a cigarette that wouldn’t be manufactured for another six years.
We reached the blister. Miles heaved open the steel door, already partly ajar, and clanged it shut after us with a deep thud which made my ears sing. He pressed a button which electrically clamped it. We were in a mini-fortress. It had no other occupants.
4.28 by all the clocks.
Elaborate instrumentation on a panel, including a television monitor screen, showed the position quite clearly.
We saw Brundash, in close-up. He seemed to be trying to tear the egg apart with his bare hands, attempting to undo an inspection panel under its belly. The white-coated man ran up the steel ladder after him, carrying a field telephone with trailing flex which h
e’d reeled out from the main control room. He said something into it which we couldn’t hear. But we heard Davvitt, tense, brusque now, but collected. He said over the speakers: “Yes, I can hear you now.”
Miles thrust a hand forward to the panel, where there was a patchboard of plugs, as in a manual telephone exchange. I understood that Miles was trying to tap into the telephone circuit between Brundash and Control. As he tried one socket after another with the plug and cord he had in his hand, he said: “We’ll even feel that Pulse in here…I’m not sure what it will do.”
I asked: “How do these blister-shelters work? How are they protected?”
His answer was cryptic. “They are equal and opposite to Structure One.” He got the right circuit and Brundash’s voice broke through the loudspeakers above our heads. “Dick! Can you hear me?”
“Affirmative.”
“Tell those people over the loudspeakers to stay clear of the wire.”
“It’s too late.”
“Get the panic out of your voice, man, and try!”
Davvitt on loudspeakers: “Listen everybody. Stay clear of the wire. You must stay clear of the wire!”
Brundash on phone: “Where’s Gray?”
Davvitt on phone: “Up in Security.”
“Get him!”
“I can’t. They’re cut right off.”
Brundash: “My compliments to his security arrangements!”
I watched, fascinated and appalled, as Brundash roared this last comment into the phone, then wrenched off the panel he’d been tearing at and rammed his fist inside.
Quietly, Miles confided to me: “One second’s exposure to that and you can guess the rest.”
My hatred for the super-paranoiac Brundash and all his works came through in my look. “What’s the difference?”
But Miles couldn’t have blamed the great science hooligan for what he was…only me, for where I was. I think it was the twisted logic I hated more than anything else.
But I had to concede one thing: that great, tawny-armed monster out there had courage. More than his share.
In a way, of course, it was destined to be shared…
He just sizzled with impatience when Davvitt said on the telephone: “There isn’t a hope, Herbie. You can’t stop it. Get down here fast!”
Brundash knew this was useless. And I could see why.
In some fearful way, the proportions were getting different.
It was as if the egg was beginning to swell.
Brundash was still trying to say something, but his voice was garbled and racing.
It was on a different time-scale.
The picture on the screen began to shimmer. Indistinctly I got the impression that people were being drawn toward the egg. They seemed somehow flattened against the thing as it grew enormous by comparison. I could no longer make out the clear image of Brundash. Like the others, he had taken on the extra dimension. That which was visible had taken on the curvature of the egg.
Miles, his emotions saturated utterly, said in a flat voice: “Thirty seconds to go. Peak-Pulse at four thirty-one.”
Beyond the egg, you could see that the rest of the site was still comparatively undistorted. And, for a fleeting moment, I saw Jane. She had left the office, was frozen to the spot…unable, now, to move…
It was then that the terrible wail began to go up. Compared with that horror-dissonance, the screaming cats had been as nothing. I couldn’t bear it, this semi-garbled version of so many interlocked tragedies.
I leapt forward and tore out the plug on the patchboard.
Then, only Davvitt’s voice, gasping, guilt-ridden, insane with grief…
“Oh God, oh no! Please not this!” — Like a child, helpless.
A kind of wave was crossing the screen now, permeating farther and farther outward, toward the office block.
I saw Jane hold her arms up quite slowly, in a sort of gesture of supplication — It might almost have been a welcome, so strange a mystic picture did the action portray.
Davvitt’s voice: “Nine…eight…seven…”
Vibrations…a sort of swelling, thrumming around us.
Miles opened his mouth and spoke, but the sound did not carry through the waves.
You could still faintly hear the speaker, Davvitt’s countdown…but now the voice was beginning to shift in pitch, running fast, like a tape running at the wrong speed and getting gradually higher and higher…Yet at the same time the process seemed to be slow…a paradox impossible to convey at all.
“…six…five…four…”
The egg, as such, had disappeared. You couldn’t make out any outline on that screen…just a series of confused flashes and nonsensical jigsaws — not, as I’d half-expected, a hideous conglomeration of human limbs, but a swirling pattern of abstracts that was far from ugly. The Root Mean Square of humankind is far from being an ugly thing…
“…three…two…one…”
I was not fully conscious. I was being imparted the fringe of a force that doesn’t have a reaction to go with it. A comment would be senseless…
Tink…
Tink-tank…Tink…
It took me a long while to realize what that faint clinking noise was.
At first, I thought it was the dripping tap, in my marble bathroom.
Or maybe a mechanic hammering gently at train-wheels, the far end of the train.
Or maybe, was I on Davvitt’s roof? Would I open my eyes and find he had just rolled me over with his foot?
But this stench? What was it?
Tink…tink-tink…tink…went the loose piece of roof.
There were still traces of mist, a smelly dankness which clung to the place like an old, wet carpet lying on the sodden floor of a ruin.
The wind had dropped, just that little bit, so that the loose tongue of tin-roof played a more melancholy lament.
For some reason, I wandered, quite slowly, back to the office block, back to Jane’s typewriter. I don’t know what I had expected…some message perhaps? I would have liked some final contact with this sad feminine mirage. But the letter was just the same, unfinished, as before.
The sheet of paper had become slightly wetted. I found that I was crying.
Yet there was something.
For as I stood there, the wind blew a piece of paper from among the cobwebbed rubbish on a neighbouring desk.
I picked it up.
It was a photograph, much faded. And it depicted a family group…a flash-photograph probably taken by the press. Nicola…and that would be the mother staring out into the clearing.
And Dr Gray? — heavy-jowled, handsome yet somehow cruel, watching Nicola so closely as she in turn watched the dog near-by?
I didn’t know for certain.
What was interesting was the egg-shaped thing in the background. I was reminded of Tesh’s remark, something about the egg being ‘only half there’.
Because, though the superstructure was clearly visible and well defined, the egg itself — with its solid copper shell — was blurred.
Stage Four
Chapter Eleven
A couple of RAF police came trundling down the valley toward me on motor-bikes. As they approached one of them saw me and said something into the walkie-talkie radio mounted on the handlebars. The two bikes bucked over the last hump of turf, then the riders applied valve-lift and skidded to a stop beside me, their engines haugh-haugh-haughing to silence.
The big fellow with the radio looked me up and down and I thought at first they were about to arrest me for trespassing. But I couldn’t see on what grounds. Near-by was the jumble of no entry signs. There was no written opposition to pedestrians.
“Mr Fulbright?” asked the big bloke.
I said that was me.
“They’ve been looking for you.”
“Why?”
“May we leave that to Captain Duquay? He’s waiting for you at the airfield, sir. If you wouldn’t mind riding pillion?”
I felt groggy and da
zed, but I climbed on the back and the two bikes turned round and we rode the grass and the mud, slicing cross-country, till the Valetta was once again in sight, parked now immediately in front of the crew hut.
We were watched thoughtfully by a few people standing around as we drew up, winged-in by the Valetta and jammed tightly between that and the hut.
Duquay came out immediately. He looked grim and only said, slightly absently: “Come in, will you?”
The two bikes roared away.
Following Duquay in, I found myself in a surprisingly comfortable environment for a tin shack. It had a proper, brickwork fireplace halfway along. Mounted over this was the typical mess clock — an old wooden propeller, elegantly french-polished, with the clockface at the centre.
Duquay seemed oddly different from the exponent of sangfroid aloft a few hours before. He looked tired and untidy, with an irritating lock of hair coming down over his eyes. His manner was distant. A few seconds later I was to find out why.
“Would you like a drink or anything?”
“No thanks.”
“Tesh a friend of yours?”
“Yes. An old friend.”
He turned his back. “They’re both dead. I hate telling you this.”
“Tesh and Dr Flaske are dead?”
“Yes. Afraid so.” He turned round. He just loathed breaking the news. “Bloody, isn’t it? Especially after that lucky escape yonder.” He thumbed vaguely in the direction of the cliff we had so nearly hit. “The jeep driver…he’s had it, too. Apparently they took that difficult pass road up the hill to K.L.K. They got up there all right — at least, as far as I can make out — but they must have got out of control coming down.”
“I think I will have a drink.”
“Yes. I don’t blame you. I can’t join you, unfortunately, as we have orders to fly straight back. You’d better come with us.” He went to the drink cupboard, started pouring me a Scotch.
I said: “I’ll have to stick around for a while. How long can you wait?”
“Not long. The Air Ministry want a personal report from me about that approach…the instrument business.”
“Are you in trouble over it?”
The Egg-Shaped Thing Page 15
