98.4

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  It took me forty-eight hours — working night and day — to make the entire machine, stopping only for the visits of a Little Man who came every morning to succour Henry.

  But the manufacture of my Black Box was nothing compared with the problem of trying to compose conversations with people who weren’t there. At first these sounded stilted and unreal, as did the metronome-like rhythm of my synthetic heartbeat. I tried dashing up and down the stairs, in an effort to break the monotony of my doggedly regular pulse. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds (in case you think it sounds easy) because to edit together long stretches of different pulse-rates, without leaving out half a beat at the join of the tape, was a studio job and I had neither the equipment nor the experience. Added to this was the task of mixing in the sound of my voice, which had to bear relation to the cardiac rate ... it sounds less convincing if you’re heard to exclaim you’ve won two hundred thousand pounds on the football pools — with your pulse still pumping a boorish seventy-six.

  Listening in to the bona-fide radio signals sent by Henry I found that my voice, when picked up from the skin surface of the chest, had an unearthly muffled quality which was difficult to simulate artificially. It took me a further two days to realize that all I had to do was to do the same thing with the mike I was using for the dummy recordings, in which case I got the heartbeat free of charge.

  I scrapped everything and started again; and by this time I was getting quite good at making up dialogue. A library of quite plausible conversations was now accumulating; and for these I began a sort of filing system designed to prevent the giveaway of using the same tape twice.

  During all these experiments I had to be vigilant for every day the Little Man came to visit me to examine the bleeper, in case I might be so rash as to break the seal and worry its inwards, as a cat inspects a mouse. He was a dapper, jovial fellow in a bowler hat and said my golly and my gosh all the time. He always hung about until he got a cup of tea.

  ‘Yes, my golly! A sweltering day like this and no tea is asking too much ... ah, good. I see we haven’t given in to our curiosity, then? Splendid ... These bleepers are really most ingenious. Save a lot of embarrassment.’ I thought that depended, but didn’t risk saying so. ‘Do you get used to it, eventually?’ he asked, sipping noisily. ‘I personally can’t imagine wearing a thing like that all the time.’

  ‘Well, I do take it off in the bath,’ I explained.

  ‘Needn’t, you know!’ he shrilled. ‘Waterproof. Shockproof.’

  ‘Like a Swiss watch,’ I chimed. ‘Like proof-proof.’

  ‘Quite.’ He slashed the cup down into the saucer. ‘Must get on. See you tomorrow. Don’t bother to take it off in the bath. Good day.’

  With rather a wan, self-sardonic nobleness which I knew was doomed to peter out, I decided not to implicate Louise by getting in touch with her, though this wouldn’t have been difficult. I had in fact already discovered, by means of devious enquiries that produced the news at second hand from Elstree, that her full name was Louise Tresbaine. Of course what I was really doing, with all this great show of diligence in rigging electronic clay pigeons, was freeing myself for a date. And although, presumably, I was allowed feminine company it certainly wasn’t supposed to be her.

  Then I heard — through sources that I could not talk back to — that Louise was ‘back in hospital’. Now, what did this mean? Did it mean that she was back on the job? Surely the phrasing would then have been ‘back in the hospital’. The difference of one word made all the difference.

  I could find out neither the name of the hospital where she worked, nor what the trouble was if she wasn’t working. But looking back now on the suppressed frailty I had discerned beneath the pert exterior, it had me worried.

  Had it just been shock, that made her look like that? — Was it because of Thorne solely? Certainly the impression was clear that she had been afflicted suddenly. Her whole attitude, her warmth and her yielding vitality, implied that good health had helped mould both mind and body. I could do nothing about it; and probably even if I contacted her and asked her outright she wouldn’t say. This she had already made clear. I must wait.

  Meanwhile I continued my enquiries as best I could into the background on Stergen. I’d been following the Czech situation on TV and I happened to be viewing when they announced on BBC-2 a forthcoming programme on which Stergen was to appear. I made a note of the date and the time. But most of my viewing was spent watching the pressure on the Czechs. The Russians had manacled Dubcek, torn out the telephone and dragged him into conference in Moscow. In defiance of Truth, however, my set blew out. Angrily I had the back off, just as they were showing pictures transmitted by brave pirate stations who had smuggled out film. This led to my getting a colour set; and for a while everyone had a yellow complexion and the sky was a hilarious but unlikely shade of orange.

  I couldn’t waste too much time on trying to put this right. I’d got Henry’s understudy — my Black Box — working quite well by now and I made an appointment to see Chindale. Meanwhile I’d got some press photos of Stergen and some personality notes. From these I gleaned he had a mania for appearing on television anyway. He loved the floodlight of publicity; but when not in its glare he was busy on medical projects by no means palatable to the press eye. But little facts and facets tucked away among inscrutable non-clues peered out of obscure reports, blurring the personality of the man and producing a mass of contradictions. But the press photos did not fit the insinuations offered by Michael Nobody (I had given up trying to find out his second name). Here on the files the picture showed an impressive face, though not renowned for its smile. It was a shop-front snapshot of the compulsive Great Man, driven on by the tireless inner daemon. Slightly hooked nose between smouldering eyes of high definition; determined, rather grim mouth set tight in the muscle; narrow chin with a faint cleft ... the whole face tilted upward 3° in the standard Great-Man aggressiveness so well suited to top-line photography. All of it spelled out Success. The face riveted you with it; demanding a confession from you that he was the more significant and would remain so.

  *

  I was tired of all this solitary hanging around. When my appointment with Chindale came up I was glad to see him. I wish I could say he was glad to see me.

  ‘What the devil is that thing?’

  ‘It’s a Black Box.’

  ‘It isn’t black.’

  ‘They never are.’

  ‘Never mind that ... what’s it do?’

  ‘It thinks I’m talking to an old university friend, and is broadcasting that impression to Group Three.’ I explained about Henry. Chindale had insisted on meeting me at easily the worst hotel in London. We were only a block to the south of the Hilton and I couldn’t see what would have been wrong with meeting there.

  The view from where we were now, in a glasshouse of a roof-top bar, showed Hyde Park Corner dizzily below in an intriguing mosaic of totally stalemated traffic. It was awesome to see so many people incontrovertibly stuck.

  ‘I told you not to go blustering into that dirty great crypt down in Somerset ... Blast! — Now I’ve run out of cigarettes.’

  ‘The waiter will bring some.’

  He tapped the empty packet. ‘Not these he won’t!’ The sweltering heat, magnified by the glass walls, had seemingly concentrated on Chindale’s face. He wiped the sweat away with a handkerchief. ‘What did you find out? — Anything useful?’

  I told him about the operation that I’d seen going on in the Helical. ‘So what do they do?’ he scorned. ‘Saw people in half, then join one half of one person to the other half of the other? The mind boggles. Endless fun could be had by all ... a sort of Identi-kit game using real people ...’

  In the end I managed to whistle up some of his special cigarettes by sending out for them. Inexplicably they made all the difference. ‘It’s as well you know the layout down there, in point of fact. We think they’ve got a submarine base and you’ll have to take a proper shufti at the
whole set-up — only properly planned, please.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I’ll let you know. You’ll need to be really mobile, though. Do you know a good pilot you can rely on?’

  I thought a bit. ‘Yes. A man called Simmonds.’

  ‘Airline?’

  ‘Sort of. He has a few light aircraft he rents out.’

  ‘Not my idea of an airline. Still, it sounds all right. And to quote the adverts Its Safer by Air.’

  ‘Not in those things it isn’t.’

  ‘I meant securitywise. It’s difficult to follow an aircraft without looking conspicuous.’

  ‘So my suspicion that some kind of weapon is involved has some basis?’

  ‘I thought you’d realize that straight away,’ said Chindale. ‘You’d have to be pretty thick to miss it ...’ I received a steady look — ‘knowing what you know.’

  ‘I don’t understand what it is you think I know,’ I said.

  ‘There are rumours about you.’

  ‘From which source?’

  ‘Does a rumour have an obvious source? Let’s say I have contacts in Washington.’

  ‘Oh. The dossier.’

  ‘Right.’ Chindale paused, looking at me oddly. ‘I’m just wondering how much you’ve really forgotten. But then they do tell me that you security people have a trick of forgetting what doesn’t suit your books.’

  ‘Would it suit them now?’

  ‘It might not suit your pride. Apparently you swallowed a good deal of it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Six years ago. In St Tropez.’ He got up. ‘You’d better do some remembering — however painful.’

  I said: ‘It might help me to meet your contacts.’

  ‘You leave my contacts alone.’

  Tim Fine appeared at my flat the next day, having been warned by his phone-tapping fraternity that I was taking what seemed like an over-dedicated interest in political affairs.

  He handed me a sheet of paper. ‘There are your movements over the period when you intruded on us down in Somerset.’

  ‘I know my movements at that time.’

  He sighed patiently. ‘I mean we’ve set up a kind of alibi.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ I didn’t though.

  ‘Yes. We don’t want the Russians to find any gaps which might encourage them to gain from your inside knowledge.’

  He seemed to be obsessed by the Russians all the time. ‘What Russians?’

  ‘Any Russians,’ he said vaguely. ‘I fully accept that you don’t think there are any but we’ve found it otherwise. Can I come in, please? I’ve got a new battery for your bleeper.’ I offered him tea but he evidently thought this rather infra dig. ‘No indeed. Why are you so interested in the Czech situation?’

  I showed him in. ‘Isn’t everybody?’

  ‘Back numbers from the Telegraph ... ? — your daily visit to the Reuters machine at the Ritz?’

  ‘Teleprinters are so often installed in draughty corridors.’

  He was incapable of taking remarks like this other than absolutely literally. ‘In summer?’ He was getting less like Roy Emerson every moment. Now I got a prim little smirk of disapproval. ‘You really mustn’t pursue any of that. Could you take off your bleeper?’ I retrieved it from under my shirt and he stripped off the seal as if he could have done it in his sleep. Clearly he had dozens of these on his books. He popped in the new battery and went on: ‘Perhaps it would be best if you concentrated on getting a new job.’

  ‘I haven’t yet received my reference from Lord Dineham.’

  He handed the gadget back. ‘Lord Dineham told me what his terms were.’

  ‘Oh ... staying out of his hair.’

  ‘I’m afraid you didn’t.’

  ‘I’ll try harder.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he promised, like an avuncular probation officer on a juvenile case. ‘But I think he’ll take some convincing. I see you have colour TV.’

  ‘Most of the programmes I’ve been watching lately have been in black and white.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He got up. ‘I expect the Czech Television Service find the luxury of colour cameras a little unwieldy in their clandestine studios. Try a different channel; then we can relax.’ He showed himself out and left the door open.

  But I couldn’t keep my mind off Louise and didn’t sleep at all that night.

  Finally the day dawned when Stergen was to appear on TV. With due sense of occasion I spent the day tampering with the blues and greens and reds of the television screen, doing my best to coerce them into aligning a tinted picture less like one of those illustrated tea-towels. I had the hack off with this object in mind for several hours when one of those gentlemen-announcers on BBC-2 introduced Stergen. I darted round the front, to observe that at last I’d got what I believe is called the dynamic convergence exactly right. Stergen, smiling expectantly, was splendidly reproduced on my set. Yet colour showed him up. The eyes were too pale where in monochrome they had depth. There was insufficient change in tint between lip and flesh as if the face was getting worn away syphilitically.

  There was a certain sickness there.

  The interview girl shook her locks and calculatingly disarmed. Alternating between wistful stammer and articulate questionnaire she did a melting-down job until he began to talk.

  She was saying now: ‘But surely, there’s no real limit — is there? — to the type of organ you transplant? ... Logically, if you can transplant any of them you can transplant them all?’

  A charming little laugh from Stergen. ‘You forget that doctors aren’t really interested in transplanting organs for the sake of doing so. No — you’re searching for an all-embracing logic when there isn’t one.’

  Well played, that man. He certainly knew how to talk on Late Night Line-up ... he sounded just the same as all the others.

  ‘But I gather ...’ and our hostess flashed us a wide smile ... deferential, but carrying the auntilescent authority of the BBC. ‘I gather there are certain aspects of surgery that particularly attract your interest?’

  ‘There are many. For instance: why do the incredibly inefficient mammals known as homo sapiens get the best brain? Why encase it in such a formidable contraption as the human body?’

  She held her expression fixed at fascinated. ‘Can you suggest a better one?’

  ‘I can’t, no. But then, I don’t make people.’

  Toss of Polycolor hair. ‘As a critic, though? ...’

  ‘As a critic I’d say that Nature, or Evolution, or God ... however you like to put it ... can’t be blind to the fact that we are now entering an age in which the brain is very rapidly becoming the one essential.’

  Her nod to his nod. ‘The Essential Man ... your famous paper.’

  ‘I don’t know about famous! Everybody knows this. I just happen to be the man who first wrote it down with the medical background.’

  The girl reached the Nightly Controversial Point. ‘Dr Stergen ... Is it true — at least in essence — that you aim to take a shortcut in evolution by finding out just how much “body” we will ultimately have?’ She grinned. ‘The question sounds ridiculous put that way. But could you give us some sort of line on what you are doing? — in your private researches?’

  Pause. Stergen the Magnificent, the godman, in charge of human destiny.

  But Stergen the cautious, playing for time, faced with the unexpected shaft of curiosity.

  Camera-One to close-up. Ill-defined mouth a little bit dry. Eyes fractionally withdrawn.

  Cut to Camera-Two. The interview-girl, face further tilted, hair tossed over one eye as if to conceal a certain gleam.

  Cut to Camera-One. Stergen. ‘Humanity is never concerned,’ he declaims, ‘with the unimportant detail of its means of advancement. All we doctors are committed, in the final analysis, to the relief of every type of pain. Each of the myriad steps in medical research are only important as links in the chain of progress. Some of those links seem frightening if every detail is explained. My job
is to find the solutions — not explain myself at every stage.’

  ‘Aren’t you blinding us with rhetoric?’

  ‘It depends how much you think I should concede to mass media.’

  ‘Then you’re saying you are ducking the question — and that the public doesn’t have any right to know?’

  ‘The issues are technical. How could the man in the street —’

  ‘ — The issue of whether we are to have a body or not isn’t technical.’

  ‘Because you are over-simplifying to such an extent that it doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Then what does? Has anyone yet kept — say — a human head alive in a laboratory?’

  Stergen smiled sweetly, and replied with absolute calm: ‘They’ve managed to keep mine alive.’

  She leaned forward ‘Alive to what, Dr Stergen? — to the danger of answering direct questions?’

  It was a decidedly nasty moment, and Stergen looked as if he would spring at her. But he had it made. ‘Yes ... There is a danger of terrorizing the public by such questions as your own. Let me tell you something. The world is going to come to an end! Terrifying, isn’t it?’

  The girl beamed. ‘How long have we got?’

  ‘About three billion years.’

  The show was over. ‘Thank you for coming, Dr Stergen.’

  ‘I’m glad I did.’

  — He wasn’t, though.

  *

  The end of my period in purdah came when I was in the bath next day. Obedient to the letter I had Henry clamped to my breast and was serenading him full pelt, when suddenly, like the wishing well scene from Snow White, my voice was echoed an octave higher, apparently from the overflow pipe.

  This was not a development I could easily adjust to so early in the morning. But I was provided now with a further clue:

  ‘I’m down the drain!’ cooed the voice.

  Louise had gone by mistake to the house next door in search of me.

  My cardiac reactions must have given some cause for interest at the listening end but I kept silent.

  Sploosh of water as I bent forward and put my ear to the drain-hole. How Freudian can you get? I heard her laughter, then: ‘I think I’m in the wrong house. Can I come in? If it’s all right, pull out the —’ ... She broke off, had to control her voice ... ‘pull out the plug twice!’