The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  “One of them might have a pied-à-terre in the area.”

  “Or anywhere else. Why there? Anyway, they made the obvious checks, at least. There’s no Davvitt or Gray or Pollenner in the phone book for that area. The only thing you have to go on is pure hunch.”

  “Anything wrong with my hunches up to now?”

  “Nothing. Only this one didn’t lead anywhere. Don’t be so greedy.”

  “But I take it the police haven’t stopped looking for the other car?”

  “They’ll keep looking.”

  “And they don’t want to interview me?”

  “They haven’t mentioned it.” He grinned. “Disappointed?” I got up and put on my jacket. “I want to make sure I’m free to go.”

  “I’ll check; but I think you’ve done your bit.”

  I chucked him a look. “Not so long ago you seemed to think I might come in useful later.”

  “I’m sorry if your ego feels wounded, but you must realize that there are by now literally thousands of people on the job. Your discoveries are costing the nation a fortune and all police have been recalled from leave. Even the Civil Defence have been placed on the alert — though nobody’s told them what for. You’ve made your mark, all right.”

  “And just what the hell does anyone think the Civil Defence can do about it if the egg isn’t neutralized?”

  He looked thoroughly bored again.

  I reflected that it didn’t take long for the great armada of Officialdom to quench any latent belief in an individual.

  “Oh, they could always make tea,” he said.

  *

  Beyond trying to explain myself to those who may still think that I am capable of lying back and doing nothing the moment Authority takes the initiative out of my hands, I won’t waste time on the frustrations of the ensuing twenty-four hours.

  The worst part of it was the ridiculous gap that existed between the police work and the internal security departments of the ministries involved.

  Because had they compared the right notes at the right moment they would have drawn maximum significance from what I read in the papers on Monday.

  During the whole of the drive back to London I was obsessed by the thought that I’d missed something when in fact I hadn’t at all. They had. All I could do was to return to London in the faint hope that Nicola might guess my whereabouts and phone me.

  Arriving at Tesh’s flat late on the Sunday, I spent the night, in fact, almost exclusively on the phone to people who were convinced that my amateur offerings were by now outdated. It was like preparing the food for a dinner party on the assumption that I was to play host — only to be asked to leave the dining-room because my guests could eat it so much better than I. But no word came from Nicola.

  The shrivelled primroses on the bed and the floor made my heart ache. I even found myself at one point going from room to room looking for her, in the hallucinatory hope that for some inexplicable reason she might really be there all the time.

  When I entered the bathroom on this mission the emotion welled up inside me and I was reduced to sobs. I think this had a sobering effect in the end; because though I felt hollow throughout my body and dazed in my mind, at least I pulled myself together enough to have a bath and shave and go out for some papers.

  This interminable wait took me up to eleven o’clock on Monday morning, and I judged that by this time the government departments in charge must either have located the egg or else would be forced to take the plunge and raise the international alarm, with an ensuing panic quite unimaginable.

  The papers revealed nothing. The security shutdown was one hundred per cent complete.

  Gruelling, too, was the suspense which stemmed from indecision. Here in the flat there was a chance that someone might phone and let me know what was going on and what was wanted of me. If on the other hand my instinct about Brighton were right all the time I was criminally wasting time. So the hardest part of all was to stay put. Twice I went down to the jeep and got as far as starting the engine…only to dash upstairs convinced I would find the telephone ringing. It wasn’t; and its very muteness threatened to turn my mind; creating spirals of tension in my brain which gained ground all the time until they triggered off snatches of conversation almost as if I could actually hear them.

  ‘I chose the wrong hotel. My father…He had a secret life too.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound as if it fits.’

  ‘Different kind’

  ‘How many kinds are there?’

  ‘There’s a place near Brighton — ’

  ‘Don’t tell me you chose Brighton?’

  What place near Brighton? What kind of secret life?

  Was he doing private research there? — as Davvitt had done on the roof at Trasgate?

  I tried following up this slim line of enquiry. A phone call to Brighton Town Council, another to the Industrial Research Institute…no dice.

  Then, a faint flicker of light, so obtuse it surely didn’t amount to half-glowworm-power, from the Physics & Biology Experimental Centre near the Hove end of the beach.

  Yes…they thought a Dr Gray sometimes came there to see one of their members who was interested in zoology.

  Zoology? Did they mean Dr Julian Gray?

  Yes…they believed so. It was some time ago, of course…

  Of course! And it would be a different Julian and his name wasn’t Gray it was Purple and he was a Portuguese but do go on…

  “As far as I can remember,” said the lady at the other end, “Dr Gray bought a pair of swans from him.”

  Swans!

  What the hell? Swans.

  This was no reason to go slamming the jeep into gear and careering down to Brighton.

  But it was a thought. It did not take the hunt any farther from Brighton. It took it less than one per cent closer, but it was a thought…

  Time-check: twenty-four hours after Sanger had woken me with the tea, so abruptly to reduce me down to size.

  Four o’clock.

  That meant twelve hours and thirty-one minutes to Pulse. Phone Sanger. It won’t be any use. But phone him.

  He wasn’t even there. No, the deputy physicist could not possibly speak to me. Well, surely I was aware that there were problems? No, they could not give me Sanger’s whereabouts. No, they weren’t permitted to say whether or not it had been decided to shut down the remaining reactors around Windscale, nor any other reactors. Sorry. Orders.

  I lost my temper and swore at the man, nearly broke the telephone as I slammed the receiver back — and read the papers through once again.

  Only this time I lay a mental slide rule across the print and absorbed every line. And surely, this was it?

  Scholarship Awards

  The Standing Committee of the Penrose Exchange Scholarship Scheme for young scientists will meet today at the Stafford-Albion Hotel, Brighton, in order to interview the finalists. The distinguished examiners include many visitors from abroad as well as local personalities connected with —

  And this was the bit!…

  connected with The Physics & Biology Experimental Centre under whose auspices the scheme was originally endowed.

  Interviewed last night at his hotel in Brighton, Professor Hogarth White, Director of Physics for the University of California, commented: “Personally I welcome any scheme which refutes the alleged brain-drain. As a matter of fact there are several U.S. candidates who do not apparently think that working in England means being starved either literally or else starved of facilities and equipment. This is also, as far as I know, one of the few occasions when scientists both from the United States and Soviet Union may meet and speak to each other on issues that do not savour of cold war and mutual suspicion.”

  I needed no more.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘I eat litter.’

  The stark little man who was really a garbage bin, who was replica’d all the way down the beach, stood guard at the root of the West Pier, his meaningless grin cramme
d with yoghourt cartons, coke bottles and the tangled remains of a kite. He boasted a black tie; countersunk eyeholes; a round, blank, battered faceful of cracked paint and a gnarled blue jacket. In the half shadow he seemed unfunny and deathlike. A mummy.

  Beyond him, as the crowd thinned-out in preparation now for the trek to wherever, the rusting stanchions stood holding the pier up; and somewhere on that pier — I was convinced — Nicola awaited her father…for I had spotted the original Vauxhall by its slightly different hub-caps and the car was parked on a meter with just a half-hour to go.

  The receptionist at the Stafford-Albion had treated me oddly, as if something had already gone wrong in there and consequently my enquiry might be connected with whatever had happened.

  “He must be somewhere near-by,” she told me, after a lot of parrying — clearly she wasn’t keen to give much information. “They all have to come back to take the final vote.”

  “At what time?”

  “Eight o’clock. Perhaps I could take a message?”

  “No thanks.” It was then just after seven.

  “I’m sure he would prefer it if he knew who was making the enquiry.”

  “And I’d prefer not.”

  “Very well…”

  Then I had left the foyer, noting without surprise that two men tried to follow me after a nod from her. This confirmed at least one suspicion of mine: Gray or Davvitt or someone, anyway, must have started the scare. These clumsy amateur sleuths — whom even I could shake off very easily — were conspicuous, had nothing to do with the police or with professionals, were unhappy in their work, were faintly absurd.

  Making sure they didn’t observe that the jeep was my means of transportation I dodged in back of the building, where the bus station was, then picked up the jeep when I was quite sure they had lost contact.

  I wanted to turn east, but that way I would have to go left past the hotel entrance where the harassed pair were still looking out for me. So I went the other way, then took that labyrinth of priced-up antique shops known as The Lanes, dodged around the one-way system of the Grand Parade, tapped my feet impatiently for two sets of obstinate lights.

  Floodlighting came on as I waited at the second set; and the Pavilion — that fantastic joke pulled by the Prince Regent in pseudo-Turkish — came up from shadow into a brash glare as my lights went green and I motored left along Marine Parade.

  Tired Town-Council happy-lighting wound around each lamp-standard…happy-bulbs slung over the road (with occasional of their number unlit and not replaced)…and happy-thingummies in flickering neon to represent — approximately — fountains and sort-of-mobiles and sort-of-round-abouts in grimly unprepossessing shapes and sizes in due deference of the Mayor’s idea of public taste which the Mayor figures inferior to his…but no sign of the Vauxhall this way.

  I turned the jeep and headed back west, this time passing the hotel regardless and pausing for a moment at the entrance of the Palace Pier. I choked on its purple floodlighting and drove on at a trickle, checking each parked car as I went.

  Until I found it…

  As I exchanged an impassive stare with the garbage man I chewed over whether or not to report my discovery to Windscale. I was tempted not to do so for two reasons — one sensible and the other less so.

  The sensible reason was that a police hunt would simply panic these madmen, perhaps into catastrophe. They had, in any case, a bewilderingly effective and unfamiliar weapon against pursuit which had no antidote.

  The less sensible reason was simple spite. Sanger was an offensive know-all who had no right to the information.

  In the end I compromised by planning to call the authorities after I had spoken to Gray or one of them and consequently had some idea of what might be done.

  I don’t want to seem childish but it’s true that the rising excitement I felt as I paid my threepence to get on the pier owed itself as much to seeing Nicola again as it did to the tension of everything else. But then I needed her desperately; I realized as I clacked briskly along the boards, picking my way in and out of milling teenagers and screeching transistors and strolling families straddling my path hand in hand…I realized that the loneliness of my position was insufferable and tormenting. Unlike Sanger, or Duquay, or almost anyone else connected with the events which had so battered my brain, I had no label, no status, no team. I was me. Yet it was more than conceivable that I had, through highly fortuitous case history, literally the fate of an Age entrapped somewhere among the screaming-head thoughts that so remoted me away from my surroundings and rendered the pier-scene incomprehensibly banal.

  Then I thought I saw her!

  At a run, almost literally knocking people flying, I scorched down the planking and grabbed hold of a girl by the shoulders. She turned, looked at me blankly, then afraid.

  She blazed: “Who the hell do you think you are? Let go!”

  “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone I knew.”

  She shrugged indifferently. “Isn’t that what they all say? What’s with people like you, anyway?”

  “I said, I’m sorry. I don’t like molesting people any more than you like being molested.”

  “Well go away then and drop dead.”

  No sign of the real Nicola.

  No sign of Gray.

  It looked as if I would have to wait until eight o’clock, then risk the hotel.

  A swishing-noise out to sea gradually made itself felt upon my consciousness.

  It sounded a bit like a jet aircraft, but not quite; and it shrilled over the squawk of a microscopic transistor making up for lost size by squealing Stones music from the hand of its holder…a long-haired youth who was studying to be Mick Jagger and — visually — didn’t have far to go before graduation.

  What I heard was a hovercraft.

  The hybrid thing was slicking across choppy water in the semi-darkness at what seemed at least fifty knots, probably more, cutting atop the rolling waves in a foam-bath of spray which caught the shimmer from the pier and crystalled into bright colours in a halo round the hull.

  Heads turned, watching the craft heading toward its land-home beyond the playbeach. Slowed prop jet hissing — it sounded like an old locomotive blowing off steam — the thing suddenly ran out of water and miraculously crawled up the beach, slinking about on the sand looking for some place to sit down. There, it crinkled its rubber skirt and curtsied with monstrous ineptitude before a small group of hover-lovers near its shed. Its body slumped on to the sand and sagged into immobility, with an immense sigh of relief.

  When I got back to the road the Vauxhall had gone.

  Furious with myself for lingering over that hovercraft at such a time, I raced back to the Stafford-Albion in the jeep, only to find that Gray had cut his appointment at the signing ceremony or whatever it was and had left a message for a deputy to do it for him.

  I told the girl on the desk: “You’ve simply got to tell me where he’s gone.”

  She looked at me with a completely flat expression. “I’ve no idea.”

  “Surely someone must know where he lives?”

  “I suggest you look in the phone book.”

  “He’s not in the phone book.”

  “Then I can’t help you.”

  I put my fists on the desk top. “I don’t want to worry anybody but do I have to get the police here? You haven’t the remotest idea how much is at stake. It’s quite essential I get your co-operation!”

  “Look, yourself!” Her eyes blazed up at me this time. “Dr Gray gave me the strictest instructions to give no information to you. So I suggest you stop throwing your weight about and leave.”

  “When did he say this?”

  “Just now.”

  So he’d seen me on the pier after all.

  She went on: “As for the police, from what I hear they’d be more interested in interviewing you than Dr Gray. By all means call them.” She dumped the phone in front of me. “Help yourself.”

  I ignored it, and
before she could stop me I followed the cardboard sign which arrowed the way to the conference room. She stood up and shouted something to the commissionaire, but I didn’t wait to hear what.

  Swing-doors gave access to the room and my entrance did not exactly go unnoticed.

  There were several groups of men having drinks and refreshments. On my abrupt entrance they all turned and stared — reduced to silence instantly.

  I said without hesitation: “If anyone knows where Dr Gray went would they please tell me immediately.”

  The gaping silence prevailed, till they started muttering to each other, twittering like crickets on a hot night out. Obviously Gray had let something drop during the afternoon. You could practically map out these peoples’ nerve-ends with the naked eye.

  Almost immediately the receptionist appeared in the doorway with the commissionaire.

  I simply couldn’t afford to be harassed…I couldn’t afford the time. And as further interest was being displayed audibly from along the corridor I thought it might be quite difficult to get away.

  Opposite me was another pair of doors, leading to the lounge. So I marched straight past the goggling conferees and went through them. The commissionaire, in his hurry to carry out what he considered to be a duty, crashed head-on with one entire group which failed to get out of the way, and there was the satisfying sound of splintering glass.

  In the lounge, the leader of a palm-court orchestra was tuning his fiddle and smirking unctuously at a captive cocktail audience, which he addressed through a microphone, announcing the next number as though it had been personally composed for him that afternoon. Gypsy-Slav-Drip-Waltz-Music oozed off the fiddle as he beamed at the backs of one of the most inattentive audiences I’ve ever seen.

  But they noticed me all right. I must have left quite a trail of drinks tipped into people’s laps as I went flat out for the other exit.

  “Here! What’s the hurry?”

  The harmless individual whose Pernod was dribbling down his jacket-front was simply trying to be law-abiding — with overtones.

  He saw that the receptionist had appeared in the opposite doorway with the commissionaire in tow and heard them shout something which stopped the violinist halfway through the most unreliable glissando that ever tormented a violin string. The note died halfway up the neck of the instrument as several people rose to their feet. The orchestra stopped playing at various different barlines on the page. Habit made it necessary to apply a gargantuan effort in order to stop playing at all.