The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Not now. The final lie italicized all those that had led up to it.

  With a calm that amazed me I said: “Guy, please do me the favour of accepting something from Helen. I always suspected she loathed you really. Now I know for certain.”

  And the fist that I smashed into his face had all the pent-up hatred of the long months of solitude and regret and misery that was now epitomized by the sleekly-finished equipment displayed in the front lab.

  He didn’t react, just slumped back into his chair with the blood oozing from his mouth.

  “You’ve no idea,” I said, “how much better that makes me feel.”

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. But from his expression it appeared that we were now conversing in a language he understood. He didn’t for a moment question my action-fist.

  So I used my voice in the same way: “Now tell me some facts. First, what happened out there? How did Tesh crash?”

  “There was a kind of Pulse. Not what they expected…something all mixed up with whatever you were doing down there in the valley. It wasn’t the usual sort of Pulse.”

  “Was it brought on by the exposure of the egg to bombardment by that machine in there?”

  “Possibly. Dr Flaske didn’t think so, apparently. He said it couldn’t make any difference.”

  “At what point did he say that?”

  “He and Tesh arrived before it came to a head. He said it when we were still setting up.”

  “What particles were used in the bombardment?”

  “Deuterons. We brought heavy hydrogen up with us from Trasgate.”

  “Can you make any sense of firing deuterons at the egg?”

  “None. I’m not a scientist.”

  “How did they get the egg away if everything was so confused that Tesh’s jeep went over the side?”

  “I think there is some way of making the Structure influence what’s going on around it so as to give it a clear way through.”

  “How?”

  “You’re more likely to know that.”

  “I thought I was just a dabbling amateur upsetting everyone else’s applecart?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that any more.” He added with defiance: “That’s what you kept telling Helen. That’s what Helen told me.”

  “So where have they taken the egg now?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “You must have! They’ve relied on you all the time. Now they’re utterly desperate. Is this the moment for them to block you out?”

  “They left when the Structure was live. Nothing was clear at that time.”

  “Do you know where to get in touch with them?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think they’ll get in touch with you?”

  “No. I don’t see what purpose they could hope to fulfil by doing that.”

  “But presumably you’re aware that they can’t be in a panic for no reason? — that they’re infinitely afraid of what that egg might do next?”

  He looked straight at me. “Yes. So am I.”

  “Yet you did nothing to help the proper authorities?”

  He said scornfully: “Who on earth are the proper authorities? Tesh said himself that you didn’t agree with him on certain vital issues. If you want to know, he was quite glad to be rid of you when you went down the valley. Oh, but you won’t believe anything I say.”

  I did believe that. But didn’t say so. I went on without a break. “Are you aware that he had security people chasing after you?”

  A sly, evasive smile here. “Oh Lord, yes! Playing cops and robbers.”

  “Where are those people now?”

  “We created a diversion.”

  “Why? Isn’t that just another horrific example of your irresponsibility?”

  “They were a bloody nuisance and hadn’t a clue, anyway. How could they help? They reflected Tesh’s own brash way of looking at things.”

  “All right. Where did you divert them to?”

  “Kendal. We had two vans up here. We sent the one we brought the Structure up in originally to Kendal. They followed it.”

  “They’re not that stupid.”

  “We used statistical distortion also. As we did before, in Trasgate.”

  “But if the egg is out of control, how can it be controlled in that way?”

  A blank stare. “Because it suits the egg,” he said.

  Silence. I thought of Brundash, being weirdly absorbed into the mush of matter on that television screen, where I was sealed tight in the blister. And to some degree, at any rate, I had to accept this statement.

  I slammed home with: “Now tell me, isn’t it true that you have been using all these half-demented scientists to your own ends all the time? — that in some way you traded on the fact that they were blaming me for something quite meaningless? — that you gained financially by your company’s acquisition of a great number of my patents and my designs? — that you convinced Davvitt and Miles and even Dr Julian Gray that everything you were doing was justified because I was Public Enemy Number One?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “That’s what I know! There’s all that stuff in the lab to prove it! How did the company reward you, Guy, without Tesh getting to know? You’d better tell me or I won’t hesitate to smash you up a bit further. It seems to work pretty well.”

  He seemed to weigh this up. “The company,” he said eventually, “saw the commercial possibilities of the Structure. For instance, it can cause the fission process to race. That would mean that almost anything could be done with the simplest nuclear reactor.”

  “Do you have any evidence of such direct interference with Space/Time as that?”

  “I don’t, but the holding company has already been formed.”

  “Oh, I see. They got you to spy on all these learned maniacs and to grab my patents so that in return you would get a substantial holding in the new venture? Can’t you see something faintly ridiculous about the paranoiac concept that anyone can buy shares in the way the Universe is run?”

  “I didn’t think it amounted to that at the time.”

  “Do you now?”

  “I can see that they are playing with fire.”

  “To put it mildly!”

  “Have you finished this grand inquisition?”

  “Not quite. Tell me about Jane.”

  “Jane who?”

  “Oh, come on! You must have known her? — the girl who was Davvitt’s secretary back in nineteen fifty-nine?”

  “Why should I have known her?”

  “Because she was so goddam miserable she didn’t care whether she died or not. Someone like you must have been at work. You were up here quite a bit of the time, no doubt? So wouldn’t it be just your speed to look a few of them up and down just for kicks?”

  “You mean the way you looked Nicola up and down just for kicks?”

  “Remind me to get you to say that in front of Nicola some time. Right now just tell me if you knew Jane.”

  After a pause: “Yes. But you’re wrong to suppose she was miserable on my account. We went out a couple of times, but she wasn’t interested. Surely you know why she would have given herself up to the Structure? You’re the one who should know what happens.”

  “I don’t begin to understand what happens.”

  “You certainly won’t understand by trying to pin it on me.” He looked at me uncertainly, his head on one side. “Have you seen it happen?”

  I wondered whether he had any inkling of what had gone on down in the valley. For some reason I held back. But I said: “In some way they go around the Mobius curve.” I got a blank stare, so I said: “Some kind of twist in space,” and I still got the same blank stare.

  Then, sardonically, he remarked: “If space is a Nothing, how do you twist a Nothing?”

  I could only give him one of those general-purpose parables and I could just see the contorted look of horror on Davvitt’s face at such make-do answers. I said: “If you think of T
ime/ Space as an idea rather than a thing, you can imagine it being twisted.”

  “There are a lot of stars, out there in your Idea,” he said.

  I didn’t pursue this any farther. “I’m not here to try to explain the secrets of the Universe.”

  “All right…let’s accept your ‘twist in space’. Let’s even accept that under certain conditions people who come into contact with Structure One go round the twist.” His eyes flattened. “But if Jane went round it, what’s to stop Nicola going round it too?”

  I looked at him hard. “The fact that she’s safe in Tesh’s flat.”

  He smiled now — a sadistic expression containing no humour. “You overestimate your own influence, Fulbright.”

  Something made me leap at him. I felt murderous, but kept my voice low. “Where is she?” I got a backhold on his arm, forcing it round. I was stronger than I knew and he yelled from pain. I didn’t relent. “Where?”

  “Damn you! I don’t know! Gray phoned her from here.”

  “Why?”

  “How do I know why? Have you gone mad? You’re breaking my arm!”

  I found myself increasing the pressure. “By Christ, you could have stopped him!”

  “Could you stop her? Why don’t you find out what Davvitt is really afraid of before you go on threatening me with lawsuits and broken limbs?”

  I let go.

  Of course I knew.

  They were afraid of the next Pulse.

  And if each Pulse were stronger than the one before, and if the one I saw in the valley — in one sense a long time ago — was anything to go by, it wasn’t too hard to see why panic had completely unhinged the minds of those who once had thought they were controlling their creation.

  Guy forced his arm against the window frame as he stared down toward the old Moorbridge place. He was courageous about pain, but I didn’t regret inflicting it.

  I was thinking of the victims to whose fate he had been blinded by nothing much worse than ignorance.

  My own ignorance was bad enough. Intuition minus mathematics equals a charlatan.

  Even if I had guessed a little of what the egg-shaped thing had done, there was one thing that with my crass brand of quackery I could not see:

  Where was it getting its power from?

  Chapter Twelve

  They gave me dinner in the officers’ hut where I had talked things over so briefly with Duquay. There were only three of them at this tiny air base, but they were pleasantly civilized. Scorning hard liquor, they had an arrangement with the wine merchant who had supplied them since the war days, and we washed down an illicitly-captured pheasant with a most amiable Hock.

  I think it was by mutual consent that all references to the tragedy were barred. Instinctively I felt I needed time out, that if I were going to have the capacity to think and act entirely on my own I sorely needed to relax.

  But I wasn’t absolutely and entirely alone. Major Wiggins of the U.S. Attaché had sent a most immediate signal to the Officer-Commanding, having evidently been informed of the events of the day via the Ministry to whom Duquay had reported. The signal consolidated upon Duquay’s own initial advisory that I should be afforded facilities and requested I telephone the Embassy and report.

  I waited until after dinner before I did so, cashing a cheque with the mess secretary on the strength of the expense account that Tesh had arranged at the same time.

  On the phone Wiggins sounded just as official and distant as before. It seemed that telephones did something to him and this time there was no scrambler to blame. This omission also meant that we had to be very careful what was said. I inferred it was Wiggins’ view that by now a good deal of press interest must have been alerted and phone-tapping is always on the cards. The telephone lines from Moorbridge ran on poles all the way to Penrith. It would have been too easy for words.

  “Have you a definite plan?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  This was untrue — I hadn’t. But I didn’t want official interference unless some hard information was being offered with it. I certainly had the germ of an idea which I hoped to swill about on the afterglow provided by that excellent wine.

  “You will find me at this number at all times,” he croaked. “If, ar, I am not here my staff will, ar, rapidly locate me.”

  I asked after Duquay’s co-pilot.

  “Hospitalized,” he answered.

  As I hung up I wondered why on earth Wiggins posed exclusively on the phone as being totally without human feeling. The mention of Tesh and Dr Flaske left him entirely without comment.

  Then, one of my many attempts to raise Nicola. Again, I was unsuccessful. Trying her father’s London number, another blank. I chewed this over.

  I could imagine how the initial stages of the seduction away from that flat of Tesh’s had begun. I knew that the father still had some kind of a hold on her, didn’t flatter myself that I’d solved that single-handed and in one night.

  ‘Yes. He busts me up often…’

  No doubt. But on this occasion Nicola wasn’t going to have time to respond in kind with a dirty weekend in a Brighton hotel — interrupted or otherwise.

  The Officer-Commanding, this conscientious fellow who had taken less wine than the rest of us with which to calm his nerves, was sitting next to me in the mess just after I reached this point in mental meanderings. He said: “By Christ! You made me jump!”

  “Sorry! I got an idea!”

  “Do they always hit you like a runaway propeller?”

  “Brighton!” I expleted. “What’s in Brighton?”

  He mopped up spilled wine forgivingly, then shouted across to the mess secretary. “Bob! What’s in Brighton?”

  Bob looked up from a magazine lugubriously. “There’s a fucking great floral clock you can read up to eight hundred feet. That way you know it’s tulip minutes to rhododendron o’clock. Very useful.”

  “I mean that might interest Mr Fulbright?”

  “A number of rather smashing hotels.”

  “Again?”

  “Hovercraft base.”

  The O.C. looked across at me. “Any good?”

  “No good.”

  The O.C.: “The man says no good, Bob.”

  “Yes. I heard him. What’s he looking for?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Something nuclear. Electronics. Anything.”

  “He says, something nuclear.”

  “I know nothing nuclear. Not in Brighton. There are all sorts of other things, though. A Butlin’s hotel, near Telscombe Cliffs. The St Dunstan’s place for the blind, up on the hill there…If it’s something nuclear you want, why not phone the Atomic Energy Authority? They should know. Have some more Hock. Perhaps that’ll help.”

  I did. It didn’t help. Nor did the A.E.A. They know of nothing nuclear in Brighton. “Hovercraft, yes. Hotels, yes. Nuclear establishments, no.”

  I felt it was time I stopped getting drunk. I switched to coffee. Later when I had sobered, and when I had tried Nicola twice more, someone produced a one-inch map of the Brighton area.

  Nothing.

  It was now eleven o’clock. Someone suggested I stay the night. I accepted. There didn’t seem to be anything else I could do about it.

  Long after the lights had gone out in all the other huts I was lying there in my clothes, absolutely certain in my own mind that I had all the information I needed, that I should know what to do, that I should know what the dangers really were, that I should know how to act.

  The wine didn’t make me sleepy; it made me uneasy — or rather, something did. The O.C.’s final advice before he turned in was: “Look. Take my word for it. You look like someone in the ‘before’ picture of an ad about insomnia. Here’s a pair of pyjamas. Get in them. And stop thinking about that girl — it never gets me to sleep, I must say!”

  Well, I did think about Nicola and it didn’t make me sleep and he was quite right.

  It didn’t look as if the insomnia ad was g
oing to get followed-up by a suitable ‘after’ picture this night…

  Where was it getting its power from?

  The hut they had hospitably allotted was exclusively occupied by me except for an inexorably active refrigerator, the compressor of which kept switching itself on with a deafening ‘Tchum-um-um-um!’ followed by a glissando up the scale until it settled to a steady hum.

  When you got used to the hum it clicked again and went back down the scale and you had to get used to the silence again, until the whole ghastly business was repeated from the top.

  I found myself counting the fitful bursts of life of the machine and timing the cycles of the performance. It took you by surprise all the time because the intervals weren’t exactly regular…

  Tttchummm!

  I swung myself off the bed and resorted to chain smoking.

  Tk-tk-tk-tk…and silence. What a perfect torture! If the time intervals had been exactly regular, of course, the brain could have got used to it. They weren’t, and it didn’t.

  My undistinguished military service, which had occurred with outstanding brevity at the tail-end of the war (I was still undergoing officer-cadet training when the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) told me that guard-rooms were provisioned with hot drinks. And I needed to talk to someone. The refrigerator had won, hands down.

  I put my shoes back on, then slipped quietly out into the night, headed for the glow of lights near the exit.

  It was a muggy night, sky piled high with towering black cloud. I thought we might be in for a storm. There was no moon visible.

  The sergeant of the guard jovially offered to share piping-hot cocoa from a big Thermos canister. On the bunks near-by two relief men slept noisily. But we sat at the wooden table, talking irrelevances. The sergeant, I remember, was an enthusiastic (if non-practising) pacifist. He talked of idyllic world governments, benignly dismantling all nuclear weapons and planting huge gardens where the military bases had been.

  He paused in the middle of the discussion to wake a relief man unceremoniously. He did this, without getting up, by means of a broom standing against the wall; clonking the man a few times on the stomach. The victim woke peacefully and yawned. The sergeant replaced the broom against the wall and said to me: “You don’t seem to think my government would get by, on that.”