98.4

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Stergen’s country retreat lay hidden from the road, along a short, rocky track under huge, alien ilex trees. Once round the nick I saw a solitary outside light — one of those glass-contained fittings you find on a ship’s deck, only this one was stuck on the side of a concrete shed. There was nothing in the shed except old motor tyres; but opposite was the house itself.

  Clearly, this had been a farm. Outhouses were clustered into untidy groups and these were linked by rough stone tracks; but the barns were in disrepair, and the odd items of farm machinery rusting away under lean-to roofs had been neglected for years.

  The only sound was the irregular thump of carbide explosions, as scarecrow-bombs, planted in the cornfields all around, ignited in the night every half minute or so and sent out a dry, unechoing blast like a small-calibre gun.

  At first I was quite sure no one was around; though I knew that Stergen’s research place — if indeed it were really here in this improbable setting — was underground. But by the glow from that single lamp I could see that the door of the house itself stood open. It seemed somehow imperative to see why.

  It was a warm night but the house felt damp and cold. When I switched the light on in the front room even the bulb was bare — not to mention the walls, which were faded green and drab for their lack of adornment. The stone floor would have seemed all right under a farmer’s boots; under mine it was about as reminiscent of a home as the highway to Minehead, which passed — I judged — about four miles to the south.

  I pushed a few doors experimentally — there were five leading off this room. The kitchen showed signs of desultory use — mostly the heating of canned food, and some of these stood half empty on the cooker. A plate or two — not washed — showed that someone had snatched a meal purely for fuel-value and not for comfort.

  I returned to the centre room when I heard a faint click, as if someone had turned another light on.

  At first I couldn’t see what it was, until an object that hadn’t been there a few seconds before, drew my attention to the floor at the far corner of the room.

  It was a beetle on its back.

  The wretched thing had dropped, evidently, from a beam overhead; and now it lay, mechanically continuing the integrated leg-movements required for crawling, stupendously incapacitated.

  I did not know at the time why such a cold sense of fury gripped me though of course I do now — unconsciously I was being reminded of something else, a threat which lay latent within the situation. But I stooped down and stared malevolently at the creature.

  An oozy gloss had appeared on its black body, where the impact of the fall had damaged the tissue. The thing was doomed, yet I couldn’t kill it. I could only gloat; feeling, I think, that it was paying a price — the primitive appeasing of unfriendly gods who might just settle for this disgusting sacrifice ... if only for a while.

  That was when the girl came in.

  She saw me stooping and didn’t say anything. Just looked. Now, I think I must almost have been in a trance state, so powerfully did that ridiculous animal affect me. Not till its movements suddenly convulsed into disorientated patterns of confusion did I get up and look at her.

  ‘Aren’t you going to kill it?’ she asked.

  ‘I think I hate it too much. I had a girl friend who studied insects. The funny thing is, she couldn’t get emotional about such a thing. I can’t imagine that. I would have thought there was something basic, a sort of difference between us and them, that she couldn’t have avoided. She never thought of it. To her, it was like collecting stamps. The fact that they’re alive is beside the point.’

  The girl said: ‘It’s hardly surprising that you’re talking about her in the past.’

  ‘I suppose not. But it didn’t seem to matter then.’

  We were silent, while the girl heated coffee. And I was grateful just to hear her busying herself in the kitchen. My abrupt bachelordom had implied more than one type of starvation.

  Yet her presence here worried me; and moreover there was strain — even fear — in her face. She was holding it back, I knew; as if it were in some way vital to her that I shouldn’t catch on. Instead she demanded that I notice her sex-appeal and not the whiteness around the mouth and eyes that suggested latent illness.

  It wasn’t at all difficult. She had the brunette pride of being that shows in stance, in style of walking, in unconscious head-movements that come from being used to knowing that the men are looking. Hair, just down to her shoulders, glossed from good management and natural quality. Her clothes — quite wrong for this incongruous setting — reflected exciting spirit in the body ... a kind of alertness to herself and to the effect of herself on me. There was softness, too: an ease with the fact of being feminine which Ruth had never had. This girl would decide in advance whether or not to be seduced and would have her own clear reasons for it. The only conflict was between some malaise she was deliberately hiding and the womanpower she was nevertheless determined to turn on.

  I knew that this hidden despair was her reason for thinking me so eligible. Any conceit I might once have had as a man had been long since pummelled by too many negative events. I knew she was the kind who in any case would have found conceit intolerable.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘That all the world is dead except you.’

  She looked at me a moment, then clacked heels across the uncarpeted floor. Stared out of the window at the lights of the huge power house. Knowing I was watching her every move. It’s this place,’ she said.

  ‘You’re its antidote.’

  She was at once the most sensual and yet the loneliest woman I think I’ve ever been alone with. She knew my mind was in this state. I think I was trembling a little. She saw this and said gently: ‘I’ve no right to provide it.’

  Two-and-two added immediately in my mind. I made a mental note about the degree of rapport between us that made such rapid addition possible. ‘You’re here because of Philip Thorne.’

  ‘But I don’t want to try and guess any more.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because unless I told you everything — what led to my being here now — you couldn’t possibly understand enough.’

  She glanced at me for a second to see if I understood. I did; but it set me back a bit from Chindale’s point of view. I said: ‘And you can’t tell me?’

  ‘It’s something that if you knew it —’

  ‘ — I’d realize why I can’t be told ... ?’ I could see from her altered gaze that this was what she had meant.

  ‘Then it would be too late.’

  ‘Tell me just one thing: How long ago were you through with Philip Thorne?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just tell me? Please?’

  ‘About six months.

  ‘That long?’

  ‘He wouldn’t let go. And he was in great trouble.’

  ‘And that’s what led to ... to what happened tonight?’

  She said as a statement of fact: ‘That’s all I’m telling you.’ There was no anger, no other emotion. She just said it.

  Suddenly this girl I didn’t know was in my arms. The life in her was the completest expression of absolute existence that could be touched. I could not but be frank in my hold; and the girl discarded her demureness instantly, as if she were some marvellously subtle whore impatient for duty.

  Then, by some frightened instinct, we both looked down at the beetle at the same time.

  I’d thought it to be completely dead. Now, as we looked, there came a jerky convulsion, as the treacle-black legs grabbed at the air, rocking the animal slightly on the bevel of its back. It jerked still, was again dead.

  It was a symbol and it stopped us. There was something about it that contradicted all that was fragrant and fresh about the girl and all that was physical in me. She broke away gently, considerately. All the tension went to her voice: ‘We don’t know each other’s names!’

  ‘That’s quite usual; Mine happens to be Nig
el. And yours?’

  ‘ — Happens to be Louise!’ A flick of a smile. ‘Have you got a cigarette? — I’m starving for one.’

  We both saw my hands fumble the case as I offered them. She drew on hers, then caught something in my expression. ‘It surprises you that I smoke?’

  ‘You’re so clean.

  She smiled as if she knew everything about me. ‘And you’re not?’

  We were more relaxed and we got talking. I told her about the sculptress’ psychoanalysis at the party. Later she asked me if I was with Group Three. I said no, I had been one peg down in Group Two. I couldn’t tell her about Charles Chindale or exactly why I’d turned up but I think she guessed even then that this was a security matter. She didn’t seem to mind generalities about the organization as long as I didn’t mention Thorne. ‘And what.’ I asked her, ‘was Michael for?’

  ‘Isn’t he awful!’

  ‘I’m so glad someone else finds him objectionable. I’ve got plenty of weirdie friends, but even in these enlightened days I don’t see how you can force yourself to like someone because he’s queer. Does he have a second name?’

  ‘Oh, yes, but he doesn’t like it much.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s illegitimate.’

  ‘How unfair of him,’ I said, ‘to have so many reasons for being so very nasty. What’s he do, besides what he does?’

  ‘He’s the link man for the teenagers.’

  This baffled me. ‘Sorry. What teenagers?’

  When she answered she slid back into the atmosphere of the present. We were back there with the smashed beetle and the muted shot-fire outside and the remoteness of backroad Somerset.

  ‘They use all sorts of things,’ she said. Even LSD ... and more advanced drugs than that, even.’

  ‘Drugs? What for?’

  ‘A sort of cult. A space cult. Man and the stars — it may sound incredible but they take themselves deadly seriously.’ She wandered to the window and looked out towards the Bight. There the nuclear world glittered from the shoreline and helped her consider the unknowns. ‘As you can imagine, it had an odd effect on ...’ — she turned, speaking as if for the first time she was really trying to work out what it all meant — ‘ ... on their sense of enquiry: the things they really wanted to know, the things they were prepared to sacrifice because of it.’

  ‘Like people.’

  — Thorne again ... and I wished I hadn’t said it. But she showed it was all right. I went on: ‘How did it start? — this cult?’

  ‘Well, it had already started. Hadn’t it? What about the pop scene, as it was not long ago in flower power days? People started going on trips; and I suppose there must have been something about the psychedelic cult that Stergen thought he could use. God knows how — but then you’d have to be as way out as the “Flower People” to understand Stergen anyway.’

  ‘I thought flower personages were out of business?’

  ‘There are still quite a few in Stergen’s garden.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ — I was beginning to wonder how deeply involved she really was. Eyes can be adorable and dangerous at the same time. How had she met Thorne, anyway?

  But she said quite fluently: ‘Mostly through my job.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’m the sort of odd-job-girl at my hospital in London.’

  ‘Couldn’t I know which one?’

  The eyelashes swept down to conceal the sudden opaqueness of the pupils. Her sensual caress at that point was calculated to distract. ‘You’ll know eventually.’

  ‘All right. How odd was the job?’

  ‘A sort of chief cleaner-upper of the neurology files.’

  ‘Come on, be serious. This isn’t modesty, it’s just obstinate. Obviously you have an important position or you wouldn’t dress like that.’

  She said defiantly: ‘That doesn’t follow.’

  I said irritably: ‘Anyway this job is some sort of outside liaison work? — And through it you came into contact with Group Three? How?’

  ‘Via Michael.’

  I didn’t believe her. Michael was far too arrogant to seek mental treatment. She sensed my incredulity and spoke in cold anger. ‘You may be in security but I’m not one of your damned interrogees. The reason I’m not exactly a Michael fan is because he lured some deserving patients away from our drug unit. I wanted to find out why.’

  ‘I still don’t get it.’

  ‘In five minutes why should you? Even oracles take longer on the job. I didn’t realize you were so uppity.’

  I grinned and held her eyes and forced her to smile. ‘I’ll behave.’

  ‘No, it’s me. I just don’t like talking about it, that’s all. But I think you’d find it worth while following up on this Michael.’

  ‘Any leads?’

  She thought a bit. ‘Yes, I think so ... He has a recording company. The wildest pop you’ve ever heard.’

  ‘I heard some pretty lurid efforts on the drive down. One was — roughly speaking — about having it off in Outer Space. It didn’t sound very comfortable.’

  Her smile was just a faint re-alignment of slightly parted lips. I got very close to them again, but she turned away, with an air of detached concentration. ‘That’s one of theirs. But there are classical records as well. You ought to hear them.’

  ‘Ought?’

  ‘Yes, Nigel.’ She was having a go at getting used to my name. ‘Ought.’ Our lips brushed almost by chance. But we were still held back by something. The tension affecting us both. We observed a two minute silence because of it. Then she said dully: ‘What are you going to do? — Now?’

  I hesitated, made a decision, expressed it. ‘I think I know how to get into Stergen’s place.’

  ‘Oh.’ A tiny question in her eyes, then it went. ‘I don’t advise it.’

  ‘Nobody does.’ I had my hand on the door handle. We both felt indescribably flat.

  ‘Don’t say you were talking to me,’ she said.

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  FOUR

  I might have gone on trying to divorce my past from the immediate present but for one tiny event that hardly qualifies even as an episode. Perhaps meeting Louise had heightened my awareness to things; for what I did was simply to look up at the stars.

  Living for years as I had in the polluted atmosphere that encloses London and the home counties I’d forgotten what it meant to look at a clear sky. Now, as I emerged from this vacuum of a house that Stergen had done so little about, I noticed the extraordinary vividness of the Plough, of Cassiopeia, of the planet Venus which shone like the iodine lamps aircraft use for landing. The view from Mount Palomar would look something like this: but I needed no two hundred inch telescope to see the one alien body that mingled so innocently with the natural solar satellites. And indeed, at first I thought it was Mars.

  But it moved perceptibly, this glowing intruder of a summers night. A glance at The Times would have confirmed the schedule to which the communications satellites conform — I was observing a ball of metal packed with transistors; and I stood there for a while, till this pretender passed behind a barn roof and pursued its captive orbit around the earth.

  It made me think.

  Having a mental block about one’s past is all right so long as no one else knows the truth. And actually, security work makes a virtue out of forgetting things. In my own case, Group Three had made sure of it — which is why they had first ensured that I stayed put on the rung below in Group Two, and second, had given a few screws a backward turn so that I was too discredited to be a menace if I let anything slip.

  Up to now the safe-combination in my own mind, concerning the ignominious merger to which Michael had referred, was concealed even from me. In my business you lock these things away as a matter of course. Otherwise it’s impossible to remember who is supposed to know what ... and usually there’s little time to spend trying to sort it all out. Find an executive glancing at the wrong file, be manoeuvred into discuss
ing its contents, and you can’t just erase what you’ve said in an unguarded moment if he isn’t supposed to know.

  But supposing someone else did know the clutter I’d been living with? Suppose Chindale did? Why had he picked me, anyway? Did he know, for instance, about an odious business-pimp who answered to the name of Vince Halliard? — a man I’d let off the hook because I’d been outmanoeuvred six years previously? ...

  That satellite glowing in the sky took on too much meaning for me to ignore. On top of what Louise had just been saying about a space cult it seemed to be tearing at the security arrangements I had used to fog my own memory.

  A very unpleasant memory of St Tropez ...

  I took a few paces in the penumbral shadow thrown by the single lamp outside. The concrete nearby was recently engineered — the rest of the yard was heavily pitted. It seemed possible that the entrance to Stergen’s underground establishment might be somewhere by this particular shed. Or even inside it. I went to take a look. Up to now I’d been thinking of Stergen’s private domain as a hovel scraped out of the good red earth with his own bare hands. Now I wondered.

  Senior officers of the UN do not get fascinated by bits of organic tape out of a morbid concern for medical ethics. The purpose of the UN is to maintain peace. Nothing had been said about weapons of war; but the timing of Chindale’s sudden appearance in my life was odd. The Russians had for weeks been sitting on the Czech border playing war games. But were they games at all? — or were they grim comment on Dubcek’s freedom regime? And if they were, what would be the likely effect of this development on right-wing Washington? ...

  I found a door which gave access to an inner compartment to the shed. As I did so, my brain was reeling from some possibilities which suddenly presented themselves. They meant that I hadn’t been thinking at all. They meant that I’d got slack and slow-witted from disuse; they meant I’d got stagnant from bungled love; they meant —