The Quy Effect

by Arthur Sellings

  The Quy Effect

  Arthur Sellings

  One

  The bang that destroyed the silence over Belvedere Marshes that April evening was the biggest anybody in the neighborhood had heard for years.

  One thing was sure: nobody needed to ring the alarm in. Sirens and firebells were going like mad. And, though there was, so far anyway, no fire or other visible aftermath, nobody was in any doubt about where the noise had come from—Riverside Way.

  For all its grandiloquent name, Riverside Way was a poorly maintained road which had been built only to serve a cluster of small to medium-size factories and which petered out into the marshes a few yards beyond them. It was in that direction that the crowds set off, on foot, on bicycles and in cars, impeding—to the curses of ambulance men, firemen and civil defense workers—the rescue vehicles that were also converging on the incident.

  Thrillseekers and rescue workers alike found it without difficulty. Under a fitfully moonlit sky, half the Hypertronics factory lay in ruins. It was the last factory in the road, a relative newcomer of a few years before. Now the wincingly-green glass front of the office block, stark in the light of clustering headlamps, was cracked across in several places. One of the squat white towers that had surmounted it was lying in the road. The other was leaning tipsily, the flag of Hypertronics flapping like a battle-torn banner from a flagpole that had cracked in half without utterly parting.

  One end of the factory itself was roofless; the rest still had cover, but the explosion had ripped out one wall and the base of the cantilever with it, collapsing the roof. At two points, taller machines poked up through it.

  Mercifully, it being a Saturday night, no night shifts were being worked in this or any of the neighboring factories. The latter—notably King-Size Popcorn, Eye-bright Optical Lenses and Hilo Pocketbooks Ltd.—seemed to have escaped serious damage; though gaping windows and, here and there, gashed concrete bore witness to the explosion that had wrecked Hypertronics.

  The night watchman had escaped unhurt; he had been sharing a pot of tea with the watchman of King-Size when the big bang had happened—a chance that had almost certainly saved his life. But he was careful not to mention that fact to the rescuers as he led the way past the office block and the factory to the center of the explosion, the remotest of the scattered buildings of Hypertronics.

  Only the concrete floor and stumps of walls, like the excavated ruins of some ancient city, gave any indication that there had been a building here at all.

  “What was in here?” the control officer of the fire service asked the watchman. “Any explosives or dangerous work going on?”

  “Only what I’ve been trying to tell you,” said the watchman, whose babbled words had been silenced so far by the control officer. “There wasn’t nothing explosive, not that I know of. And if there had’ve been I’d have been told. I know there was some kind of hush-hush work going on in here, but—”

  “Hush-hush? You do mean dangerous, then? Was there any equipment left on over the weekend?”

  “I was just going to tell you,” the watchman said testily. “Somebody was working in here.”

  “This evening, you mean?”

  “Course I mean this evening.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Quy.”

  “Quy?” The fire officer had shown no emotion at the news that somebody had been on the spot, but his eyebrows lifted slightly now at the unusual name. His pen hovered over a clipboard. “How do you spell that?”

  “Q-U-Y.”

  “And you pronounce it like that—Kwye?”

  “That’s the way he always did.”

  “First names?”

  “I don’t remember right now. But what the hell are you bothering with details like that for now? Why don’t you try and—”

  He stopped, interrupted not by words but by the cold, unemotional gaze of the fire officer as it traversed the space where once there had been a building. And the watchman realized that he had protested only out of loyalty. He had liked old Quy. He was like one of the men, with none of the snootiness of the rest of the high-ups. He used to eat in the workers’ canteen, on the few occasions when he seemed to remember meals, as if he despised the tablecloths and napkins of the staff room—or the other members of the staff.

  But he wouldn’t be seen in the canteen again—or anywhere else—the watchman thought, as he followed the gaze of the fire officer. Bricks and concrete and steel girders had vanished utterly. What chance could flesh and blood have had? The watchman shivered at the thought; there wasn’t a trace of either left. No gruesome smear of blood or tatter of overall coat even to show that old Quy had been in here when it had happened. But he must have been. When old Quy stayed on to work, he worked. He didn’t go off for cups of tea.

  Across the shattered landscape came a fireman with a walkie-talkie.

  “A casualty just been found, sir.”

  The fire officer followed him. The watchman hurried after them.

  A hundred yards or more they squelched across the marsh, pushing a way through the crowds, till they reached the ambulance men. A white-coated doctor was kneeling over a figure sprawled in the grass. The light was dim her at the limit of the headlamps and the floodlights that the rescue men had rigged up.

  “My gawd!” the watchman said. “All in one piece!”

  “He’s all right,” the doctor said. “Fractured scapula and multiple bruising. But nothing serious, no damage to organs that I can make out, and no hemorrhaging. Don’t suppose anybody knows who he is? Looks like a tramp to me.”

  The man looked like one. The rescue workers had swathed him in blankets against loss of body heat in shock. The doctor had pulled it aside for his examination, revealing a gaunt figure clad in a tattered, checked shirt and a pair of baggy rat-colored corduroy trousers held lip by a large safety pin. The face above the clothes was old and lined, prickled with white stubble and surmounted by a shock of yellow-white hair. Lying there, his eyes shut, he could easily have been taken for a down-and-out sleeping off a bout with the meth bottle.

  But the watchman leaped indignantly to his defense.

  “Tramp!” he echoed. “That’s Mr. Quy.” He turned to the fire officer. “The one I was telling you about.”

  “You do know him, then?” said the doctor.

  “He’s some kind of research worker at the factory,” said the fire officer.

  “You mean—?” The doctor was young; he looked even younger in his surprise. His head jerked in the direction of the wrecked buildings. “You mean—he was in there?”

  “So was I,” the watchman lied, thinking it time he got his own story in order. “I must have been protected by a wall.” He’d check and find a likely one before old Maddox and the rest of the bosses turned up, as they were bound to do before long.

  “But you weren’t blown three hundred feet,” the doc—tor said. “This man must have been on the site of the explosion to have been thrown this far.”

  “Course he was,” said the watchman. “He was the one who caused it.”

  “Careful,” the fire officer said, turning on him sharply. “That hasn’t been established yet. My report on an incident is confidential, but just you mind what you say to other people.”

  “But it must have been him. I know it wasn’t me, and we were the only two here tonight.”

  “Well, it’s a miracle,” the doctor. said. “This soft ground must have cushioned his fall. Even so—”

  He shook his head wonderingly, then nodded to the ambulance men. They had strapped up the casualty’s shoulder; now they wrapped the gaunt form back in the blankets, laid it on a stretcher and were about to hoist it when the eyes flickered open. They were bloodshot and red-rimmed. The old man’s lips moved
.

  The doctor bent over him, listening for a moment. Then he straightened and gestured to the stretcher-bearers to take the casualty away to the ambulance that waited, its blue lamp flashing, at the end of the road.

  “What did he say?” the fire officer asked.

  The young doctor looked at him and grinned. “It sounded suspiciously like ‘Whisky’ to me.”

  Two

  “The phone’s ringing, dear.”

  “Eh? Lord, no! Not on a Sunday morning!” He turned away from the early morning light that squinted through the curtains.

  “It could be the Ministry.”

  The word jerked his eyes open. “It had better not be anyone else,” he grumbled as he got stiffly out of bed. He flung on a dressing gown, groped into slippers and shuffled downstairs.

  “Fortis three nine double-o.”

  “Who is that, please?”

  It was a woman’s voice. Even in his only barely awake state, he was sure he didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t anybody from the Ministry, he was sure of that.

  He told her—curtly.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Key,” said the voice. “I must have been given a wrong number. I’m trying to locate a Mr. Preston Quy.”

  He sighed heavily. “That’s me.”

  “Oh? Oh yes, I see. You pronounce it Key.”

  “It’s an old French name,” he told her testily. “Who are you, and what do you want at this unearthly hour of the morning?”

  A half-minute later he put the receiver down.

  “Who was it, dear?” came his wife’s voice—from upstairs, a second after the terminal ting.

  “It’s father.” His voice was annoyed. “He’s in the hospital.”

  “Father’s what? All right. I’m coming down.”

  In a few moments she did so, a frilly yellow negligee only exaggerating her square dumpy figure.

  “Whose?”

  “Mine. He’s in the hospital. Do they think everybody keeps hospital hours?”

  “Oh, the poor dear. It must be serious for them to ring you up this early. What is it—his heart at last? Only the other day I was thinking—”

  “Heart? That’s a good one! He’s got a heart made of chrome steel and vulcanized rubber. No, the crazy old coot’s gone and blown himself up.”

  “Oh no! We must go and see him. Which hospital is he at?”

  “The Erith General.”

  “Erith? Where’s that?”

  “A dreary place the other side of creation. The other side of London, anyway. Trust him. And there’s no need for us to go haring out there. He’s all right—just a cracked collarbone and bruises.”

  She gave him a sharp glance. “All right? Fractures can be serious at his age. Complications can set in. Just how old is he?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Seventy-odd. Seventy-two, I think.”

  “Well, we must certainly go and see him as soon as we can today. I’ll get the coffee on.”

  She retreated to the kitchen. Preston sighed, shook his head, then followed her.

  He sat down at the breakfast table morosely, looking out over the—garden. It was large, like the house. The trees were budding and birds were flittering between their branches in the level rays of the early morning sun. He lit a cigarette, conscious of his wife’s disapproving glance. Another morning she would have protested at his lighting one before breakfast, but today the glance melted into a permissive half-smile.

  He was stubbing it out when coffee was set in front of him. His wife sat down with him.

  “I’d like a cigarette too,” she said.

  He gave her one and lit it, with another for himself, making a mental resolve to cut out his usual mid-morning cigarette to compensate. One couldn’t be blamed for smoking if one had a responsible job like his, but ten a day was what he kept it down to, even on the hardest days. He didn’t even let a fussing Minister push up his quota. That would have been a moral defeat.

  “Why do you hate your father?” his wife said suddenly.

  He blinked at her, surprised and indignant. “Hate him? I don’t hate him.” He took a deep drag at his cigarette, feeling less annoyed with his wife than with the fact that his hand was trembling slightly. Then he shrugged. “Perhaps I do. And perhaps not. I’ve tried often enough. And with enough reason to. But it’s the other way round. He hates me—he always has.”

  “Oh no—you can’t say that. I know there’s not much love lost between you, but he gave you your education, at least. You wouldn’t have got where you are today without that.”

  He laughed hollowly. “Education! Fat lot of education he ever gave me.”

  “Oh, I know you won scholarships and things, dear. All—the same—”

  “All the same nothing. It was my mother who scrimped and saved to see that I got proper tuition, saw me through University. It wasn’t like today then—the grants were pretty meager.”

  She looked at him pensively. “You have told me before. About your mother. But you’ve never talked much about your father. Only when he’s got into some kind of a scrape. And then you only get angry—”

  “Who’s being angry?”

  “Short, anyway. And hurt. I know you went through some tough times, but—”

  “Tough? No, they weren’t all that tough. No tougher in the thirties than they were for a lot of other people. And I was still only a kid when the war broke out. During the depression years we had it better than a lot—and we could have had it better still. If the old man hadn’t been such an old bas—”

  “Preston!”

  “I didn’t say it, did I?” In fact, he was going to say basket, one of the euphemisms with which he hedged himself round. He grimaced. “All right, pull up the black leather couch, if that’s what you want.”

  She flinched from the imputation of feminine inquisitiveness. “I just don’t want to see you getting yourself all upset. Any time your father’s name comes up you really do get terribly agitated.”

  “Perhaps I’m just mad at myself for not being able to forget the past. Perhaps my control isn’t good enough. If I tell you, perhaps you’ll realize then why I never talk about it much.

  “My father… I don’t know where to begin. Perhaps it’s really a kind of philosophical thing, outraged beliefs and all that. I’m not a religious man, you know that, Doris, but I do believe that if a man’s on this earth he should do his utmost to strive to—well, fulfill himself.”

  “It’s strange that you should make that judgment on your father—of all people. I think he’s the most dedicated man I’ve ever met. He hasn’t wasted his talents, surely?”

  “Name one thing that he ever followed through.”

  “Well—there was his water softener. Ours is still as good as new. And his kitchen slicing machine. There’s nothing quite as good on the market, even now.”

  “Oh—the great Universal Housewife’s Friend! I remember printing the cards for them on a ramshackle printing machine he rigged up. I was about eight at the time. He hawked them round the shops. But they’re only gadgets.”

  “Good gadgets.”

  “All right, but gadgets. They were just things he threw off to make money when he needed it. If he’d protected them well enough; either one of them would probably still be paying royalties now and my mother would be living in some kind of comfort in a little cottage in Sussex, or somewhere, instead of—”

  His voice broke off.

  “You can’t blame your mother’s death on him!”

  “Can’t I? Sometimes the spirit gives up the struggle, just like the body.”

  His wife changed tack quickly. “Anyway, you can’t measure a man’s dedication by his worldly success. Your father’s a scientist.”

  “My father’s a tinkerer. Always has been and always will be. The original Man With the Grasshopper Mind. Do you remember those ads?”

  “Why are you so bitter? You’ve told me yourself that he pioneered a lot of things.”

  “That’s just what I mean. Somewhere in
him there was once a tremendous mind. I always used to think so, anyway. I worshipped that man—that mind. Oh yes, he pioneered a lot of things, but you won’t find one mention of him in the histories of any of them. Look up the history of television, you’ll find the names of Baird and Zworykin: You’ll even find an honored place for Nipkow back in the eighteen-eighties. But Quy? Not a word. Rocketry? Goddard, Ley, von Oberth, Tsiolkowski, Esnault-Pelterie.” He smiled bitterly. “I think the Mid-Sussex Express mentioned the name of Quy when he burned down a sizable piece of Ashdown Forest back in the twenties.”

  “Science isn’t all honors.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? You won’t find my name mentioned anywhere either—except in inter-departmental memos.”

  “You’re young yet.”

  “I’m forty-three. I chose my career with my eyes open. I don’t fancy I shall take up original research again after all these years. I’m not complaining. Science is teamwork these days. The administrator, the organizer, is just as important as the man at the bench, probably more so. Research is too complicated now. The day of the lone inventor is over. You need too much money, too many minds working with you, too many technicians working for you.

  “But the old man could never work as a member of a team. He was always the lone pioneer. I grew up in a world where there was still room for the breed. Baird, Fleming—the radio valve Fleming, not the penicillin one—Rutherford. Even Rutherford was one of a team—the kingpin of it, but a team man all the same. He couldn’t have achieved what he did without the backing of a university. It was already a dying race. Fleming was a part of history then.”

  “But the other Fleming—the penicillin one. Wasn’t he postwar?”

  “Wartime. Another team man. A hospital laboratory, not a shed in the garden. The shed in the garden has had it. So has the cellar with apparatus draped round the walls. When I was a kid that was the kind of place my father spent all his time in. When he wasn’t going the rounds trying to sweet-talk somebody into investing a packet in the latest wild scheme he’d cooked up. Oh, my father wasn’t a man of single talents. He had a smooth tongue—and quite a way with women. Or he thought he had.”