The Peace Machine

by Bob Shaw

  He waited for her to contradict him, directly or by inference, but she said, “You shouldn’t drink a lot. It doesn’t agree with you.”

  “It agrees with me better than some things.”

  She turned to face him, and spoke hesitantly. “I get the impression that… all this has really hurt you, Lucas, and it surprises me. Did you not understand what you were letting yourself in for?”

  Hutchman stared at his wife. He had always loved her most when she wore the sort of friendly, familiar clothes she had on now. Her face was grave and beautiful in the subdued orange light, imbued with the power to make him whole again. He thought of his first batch of envelopes, sorted and separated now, speeding on the first stages of the journeys from which no power of his could bring them back.

  “Go to hell, you,” he said thickly and walked out of the room.

  Early next morning Hutchman drove east almost as far as Maidstone and dispatched another sheaf of envelopes. The weather was sunny and relatively warm. He got back to the house to find Vicky and David having a late breakfast. The boy was eating cereal and trying to do arithmetic problems at the same time.

  “Dad,” he shouted accusingly. “Why do sums have to have hundreds, tens, and units? Why couldn’t it all be units? That way there’d be no carrying to do.”

  “It wouldn’t work very well, son. But why are you doing homework on a Sunday morning?”

  David shrugged. “The teacher hates me.”

  “That’s not true, David,” Vicky put in.

  “Then why does she give me more sums than the other boys?”

  “To help you.” Vicky glanced up at Hutchman appealingly. He took David’s book and pencil, jotted down the answers to the remaining problems, and handed it back to the boy.

  “Thanks, Dad.” David looked at him in wonderment, then darted out of the kitchen whooping with glee.

  “Why did you do that?” Vicky lifted the coffeepot, poured an extra cup, and pushed it across the table to Hutchman. “You’ve always said that sort of thing didn’t help him.”

  “We seemed to be immortal in those days.”

  “Meaning?’

  “Perhaps there isn’t enough time to do everything slowly and properly.”

  Vicky pressed her hand to her throat. “I’ve been watching you, Lucas. You don’t act like a man who’s been…” She sighed. “What would you say if I told you I hadn’t been unfaithful in the clinical sense of the word?”

  “I’d say what you’ve said to me several hundred times in the past — that doing it in the mind is just as bad.”

  “But what if it was nauseating to my mind, and I only — “

  “What are you trying to do to me?” he demanded harshly, pressing the knuckles of one hand to his lips in case they should tremble. After all that’s happened, he wondered in panic, am I going to fall? Can the lady dissolve her homunculus in acid and recreate him at will?

  “Lucas, have you been unfaithful to me?” Her face was that of a priestess.

  “No.”

  “Then what has all this been about?”

  Hutchman, standing with the coffee cup in his hands, felt his knees begin to orbit in minute circles which threatened to become larger and bring him down. A fearsome shift took place in his mind. Why do I need the machine? The spread of the information is all that matters. World-wide knowledge of how to build the antibomb machine would, by itself, make the possession of any nuclear device too risky. Even if the machine were destroyed my envelopes could still go out as a didactic hoax. Better still, I could open all the remaining envelopes and remove the letter — and just send the information. And without the hardware I could be safe. They need never find me…

  He became aware that the telephone was ringing. Vicky halfrose from the table, but he waved her back, hurried impatiently into the hall, and lifted the instrument, cutting it short in the middle of a peal.

  “Hutchman speaking.”

  “Good morning, Lucas.” The woman’s voice seemed to speak to him from another existence, something completely alien and irrelevant to Hutchman as he was on that bright Sunday morning. It took a genuine mental effort for him to identify the speaker as Andrea Knight.

  “Hello,” he said uneasily. “I thought you’d have been at Gat wick by this time.”

  “That was the original plan, but I’ve been transferred to a later flight.”

  “Oh!” Hutchman tried to understand why she had rung him. To gloat? To try to make him feel worse by pretending to try to make him feel better?

  “Lucas, I’d like to see you today. Can you come round to my flat?”

  “Sorry,” he said coldly. “I don’t see any point…”

  “It’s about the envelope you gave me to post for you.”

  “Well?” He suddenly found difficulty in breathing.

  “I opened it.”

  “You what?”

  “It occurred to me that I should know what I was carrying into Moscow. After all, I’m a practicing socialist, and if the article was intended for publication anyway…”

  “You’re a socialist?” he asked faintly.

  “Yes. 1 told you that last night.”

  “So you did.” He recalled Andrea saying as much, but then it had seemed unimportant. He took a deep breath. “Well, what did you think of my little hoax? Childish, isn’t it?”

  There was a long pause. “Not very childish, Lucas, no.”

  “But I assure you…”

  “I showed the papers to a friend and he didn’t laugh much, either.”

  “You’d no right to do that.” He made a feeble attempt at blustering.

  “And you’d no right to involve me in something like this. Would you like to come round here and discuss the matter?”

  “Just try stopping me.” He threw the phone down and strode into the kitchen. “Something has come up on the Jack-and-Jill program. I have to go out for an hour.”

  Vicky looked concerned. “On Sunday? Is it serious?”

  “Not serious — just urgent. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “All right. Lucas.” She smiled tremulously, in a way that hurt him to see. “We have to sit down together and talk.”

  “I know.” He ran out to his car, broadsided it out onto the road in a turn which sent gravel hissing through the shrubbery like grapeshot, and accelerated fiercely in the direction of Camburn. The traffic was light — with a scattering of people on their way for a pre-lunch drink — and he made good time, the concentration on fast motoring relieving him of the necessity to plan his immediate actions. When he reached the apartment block where Andrea lived it looked unfamiliar in the lemoncoloured sunlight. He stopped the car and glanced up at the top floor. There was nobody at the windows of her flat. He walked quickly to the elevator and rode up in it, staring distastefully at the aluminium walls which in their distorted reflections seemed to store visual records of the previous night’s madness. He thumbed Andrea’s doorbell, still without taking time to think of what he might say or do. She opened the door within seconds. Her dusky face, with its pouting lower lip, was immobile as she stood aside to let him enter.

  “Listen, Andrea,” he said. “Let’s get all the nonsense over with quickly. Give me back my papers and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

  “I want you to meet Aubrey Welland,” she replied tonelessly.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hutchman.” A stocky, bespectacled young man, with a square-jawed face and the look of a rugby-playing schoolteacher, emerged from the kitchen. He was wearing a red tie and in the lapel of his tweed jacket was a small, brass hammer-and-sickle badge. He nodded when he saw the direction of Hutchman’s gaze. “Yes, I’m a member of the Party. Have you never seen one before?”

  “I didn’t come here to play games.” Hutchman was depressingly aware that he sounded like a retired major. “You have some papers belonging to me, and I want them back.”

  Welland appeared to consider the request for a moment. “Comrade Knight tells me you are a professional m
athematician with a special knowledge of nuclear physics.”

  Hutchman glanced at Andrea, who eyed him bleakly, and he realized he was getting nowhere by standing on his dignity. “That’s correct. Look, I tried to play a very childish practical joke and now I realize just how stupid it was. Can’t we — “

  “I’m a mathematician myself,” Welland interrupted. “Not in your league, of course, but I think I have some appreciation of genuine creative maths.”

  “If you had, you’d recognize an outright spoof when you saw one.” An idea formed in the back of Hutchman’s mind. “Didn’t you notice the anomaly in the way I handled the Legendre functions?” He smiled condescendingly, and waited.

  “No.” Welland lost a little of his composure. He reached into his inside pocket, then changed his mind, and withdrew his hand — but not before Hutchman had glimpsed and identified the corner of a white envelope. “I’m going to take some convincing about that.”

  Hutchman shrugged. “Let me convince you, then. Where are the papers?”

  “I’ll keep the papers,” Welland snapped.

  “All right.” Hutchman smiled again. “If you want to make a fool of yourself with your Party bosses, go ahead. To me it’s all part of the joke.” He half-turned away, then sprang at Welland, throwing the other man’s jacket open with his left hand and grasping the envelope with his right. Welland gasped and clamped his hands over Hutchman’s wrists. Hutchman exerted all the power of his bowtoughened muscles, Welland’s grip weakened, and the envelope fluttered to the floor. Welland snarled and tried to drag him away from it and they went on a grotesque waltz across the room. The edge of a long coffee table hit the back of Hutchman’s legs and to prevent himself going down he stepped up onto it, bringing Welland with him. Welland raised his knee and Hutchman, trying to protect his groin, flung the other man sideways. Too late, he realized, they were close to the window. There was an explosive bursting of glass, and suddenly the cool November air was streaming into the room. The lacy material clogged around Hutchman’s fingers and mouth as he looked downwards through angular petals of glass. People were running into the forecourt, and a woman was screaming. Hutchman saw why.

  Welland had landed on a cast-iron railing and, even from a height of four storeys, it was obvious that he was dead.

  CHAPTER 8

  Detective Inspector Crombie-Carson was a lean, acidulous man who made no concessions to his own or anybody else’s humanity. His face was small but crowded with large features, as though all the intervening areas had shrunk and caused the dominant objects to draw together. Horn-rimmed spectacles, a sandy moustache, and one protuberant mole also found room, somehow, on his countenance.

  “It’s damned unsatisfactory,” he said in clipped military tones, staring with open belligerence at Hutchman. “You left your home on a Sunday morning and drove from Crymchurch to here to have a drink with Miss Knight?”

  “That’s it.” Hutchman had been feeling ill since he saw the television-camera team among the crowd below. “Andrea and I have known each other since our university days.”

  “And your wife has no objections to these little excursions?”

  “Ah… my wife didn’t know where I was.” Hutchman drew his lips into the semblance of a smile and tried not to think about Vicky. “I told her I was going to work for an hour.”

  “I see.” Crombie-Carson gazed at Hutchman in disgust. From the start of the interview he had shown no trace of the behind-this-badge-I’m-just-another-human-being attitude with which many police officers eased their relationship with the public. He was doing a job for which he expected to be hated and was more than ready to hate in return. “How did you feel when you arrived and found that Mr. Welland was already here with Miss Knight?”

  “I didn’t mind — I knew he was here before I set out. I told you I merely stopped by for a drink and a chat.”

  “But you told your wife you were going to work.”

  “My domestic situation is complicated. My wife is… unreasonably jealous.”

  “How unfortunate for you.” Crombie-Carson’s mouth thinned for an instant, packing his features even closer together. “It’s surprising how many men I encounter who have the same cross to bear.”

  Hutchman frowned. “What are you trying to say, Inspector?”

  “I never try to say things. I have an excellent command of the language, and my words always convey my exact meaning.”

  “You seemed to be implying something more.”

  “Really?” Crombie-Carson sounded genuinely puzzled. “You must have read something into my words, Mr. Hutchman. Have you been to this flat on previous occasions?”

  “No.” Hutchman made the denial instinctively.

  “That’s strange. Both the occupants of the ground-floor flat say that your car was…”

  “During the day, I meant. I was here last night.”

  The Inspector permitted himself a little smile. “Until about 11:30?”

  “Until about 11:30,” Hutchman agreed.

  “And what excuse did you give your wife last night?”

  “That I was out drinking.”

  “I see.” Crombie-Carson glanced at the uniformed sergeant who was standing beside Andrea, and the sergeant nodded slowly, conveying a message which Hutchman could not understand. “Now, Miss Knight. As I understand it, Mr. Welland decided to visit you this morning.”

  “Yes.” Andrea spoke tiredly, exhaling grey smoke as she stared at the floor.

  “Sunday appears to be a busy day for you.”

  “On the contrary.” Andrea gave no indication of having seen any semantic shadings in Crombie-Carson’s remark. “I make a point of relaxing on Sundays.”

  “Very good. So after Mr. Welland had been here for about an hour you decided it would be a good idea for him to meet Mr. Hutchman.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  Andrea raised her eyes. “Why what?”

  “Why did you think a Communist high-school teacher and a guided-missile expert should get together?”

  “Their professions or politics didn’t come into it. I often introduce my friends to each other.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course.” Andrea was pale, but in control of herself. “Besides, people with dissimilar backgrounds often react together in a more interesting way than…”

  “I can well believe it.” Crombie-Carson thrust his hands into the pockets of his gray showerproof, walked to the shattered window, and looked down into the street for a moment. “And this morning, while your two visitors were reacting interestingly with each other, Mr. Welland decided to get up on this coffee table and fix your curtains for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was wrong with the curtains?”

  “They weren’t closing properly. The runners were jamming on the rail.”

  “I see.” Crombie-Carson twitched the curtains experimentally. They slid easily along the rail with a series of subdued multiple clicks.

  Andrea eyed him squarely. “Aubrey must have cleared the obstruction before he fell.”

  “Probably.” The Inspector nodded morosely. “If he had still been working on the rail he might have clutched it when he felt the table tip up underneath him. That way he would have pulled panels and everything down — but he mightn’t have gone out.”

  “I think he had finished,” Hutchman put in. “I think he was in the act of getting down when the table couped.”

  “Couped! An interesting verb, that. Scots, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Hutchman said warily.

  “You were both in the room when the accident happened?”

  “Yes, but we weren’t looking at the window. There was a crash… and he was gone.”

  Crombie-Carson gave Andrea a speculative look. “I understand that as well as teaching mathematics Mr. Welland was games master at his school.”

  “I believe he was.”

  “What an unfortunate time for his reactions
to fail him — perhaps he had had too much to drink.”

  “No. He hadn’t drunk anything.”

  The Inspector’s face was impassive, compressed. “Mr. Hutchman said he was expecting to have a drink when he got here.”

  “I was,” Hutchman replied irritably, “but not to get stuck into a boozing session the moment I arrived.”

  “I see,” Crombie-Carson commented. “There are certain proprieties to be observed, of course.” He walked slowly around the room, pausing every few paces to make a hissing intake of breath. “I shall want you both to make written statements. In the meantime, do not make any trips outside the local area without getting permission from me. Come along, sergeant.” The two policemen left the apartment with a final look around, and during the moment the door was open men’s voices flooded in from the landing, raucous and eager.

  “Pleasant fellow,” Hutchman said. “Ex-colonial police, I’d say.”

  Andrea jumped up from the couch and advanced on him, head thrust forward. “I should have told the truth. I should have handed you over.”

  “No, you did the right thing. Communize the cloisters as much as you want to, but don’t get any deeper into this business. Believe me, Andrea, all hell is going to break loose very shortly.”

  “Shortly?” Andrea snorted.

  “That’s right. I assure you — you’ve seen nothing yet.” I sound like Leslie Howard as Pimpernel Smith, Hutchman thought, as he let himself out. Several waiting men flashed press cards in his face, crowded around, and followed him into the elevator. Their presence helped him to sustain the role. He forced himself to sound civilized and unperturbed as he repeated the story of the accident, but when he got into the car his legs began to tremble so violently that he was almost unable to operate the foot pedals. The car jerked away from the knot of people gathered outside the building and as he turned it toward Crymchurch he noticed with a dull sense of shock that the sky was darkening. He had left home in mid-morning, telling Vicky he was going to the office for one hour — and she had believed him. Just as they had reached the far side of despair she had, for some reason lost in the complexities of the human condition, begun to believe in him. Now he was returning to her with the dusk, bringing as much pain as any two people could bear. Hutchman touched the white envelope in his pocket. Supposing he showed its contents to Vicky? At least one other person, still alive, had seen his work, so why not Vicky? Would it convince her? Would it make any difference to anything? Could he justify involving her to that extent just as the human chain reaction triggered off by his actions was on the point of becoming super-critical? The explosion was coming, inevitably, and he was going to be at the center of it. He was ground zero.