The Time Before This
Page 7
Of course, he did not discover this all at once; it took endless experiment before he had mastered the control system – or even part of it.
‘I spent hours – days – practising with the various mechanisms,’ he said. ‘It was like playing trains – with trains. It took me a long time to notice that the trolleys moved faster when I spread my feet apart. Then I discovered that whichever floor – well, they were huge shelves, really – whichever shelf I pointed at directly, with a straight arm, came down noiselessly to my own level, for unloading on to the trolleys. Then when the trolley moved away, the whole system of shelving went back to its normal position. It was immensely ingenious. We certainly could not match it at our present stage.’
He constantly stressed this – that the place reflected a technological standard far in advance of our own. And if other proof of an incredible antiquity were needed, it was in the food itself.
Some of it was modern, in the sense that it could be recognized; other categories could only be guessed at; the endless galleries of ancient yet sophisticated food, in this whole city of provisions, continued to astonish him, wherever he explored. There were jars of oil and wine. There were towering silos of some kind of grain. There were millions of loaves of bread on racks. There were tubs of pressed meat. There were huge carcasses, birds and animals of unknown shape – he noticed one vaguely like a mammoth, but with a great flaring snout instead of a trunk; another like a hen, but a hen as big as an ostrich, with four wings and four legs. (‘Like the bumble-bee,’ said Shepherd with a faint smile, ‘it was aerodynamically impossible.’) There were acres and acres of fish the size of fat cattle, very carefully graded in weight and perhaps in quality; he guessed that they were part of a controlled herd, probably grazed under water on beds of kelp.
‘I found that idea heartening,’ he said in parenthesis. ‘Because it was so promising for our own future. These people seemed to have tapped the riches of the sea, and brought them under control, as we control the soil now. Those fish had been bred and raised in underwater pastures … There were other things, concentrates, from the same area.’ He smiled again. ‘I thought I was very brave when I ate some.’
A question was irresistible. ‘What did it taste like?’
‘Seaweed. But a mouthful of it satisfied my hunger for a whole day.’
Now, it seemed, he was nearing the end of his account; his voice was weakening, and his face grey with exhaustion. At one point he appeared to have fallen asleep, and we had to wait many minutes until, unprompted, he took up his story again.
He spent more than two months in the great ice box; exploring, mapping, taking notes, making sketches. He never discovered how these stores were listed or labelled; he saw no writing of any kind, but there was a large number of soft-metal plaques set into the floor, each bearing a certain number of indentations arranged in various shapes. It was possible that this was some kind of card index system, which an expert could read at a glance. The only human bodies he discovered were those of the original seven men; he thought it probable that there were other entrances and other guardrooms, which he did not reach.
The ice mountain was on the very edge of the coast, but there were no traces of any harbour installation. However, the water level had dropped more than a thousand feet, bearing, over the centuries, everything movable with it. Shepherd conjectured that outside distribution might have been by air, handled from launching platforms on the ice. He spent weeks of pondering on such riddles; considering the intricacies of the ice box, it did not seem that the men who could build an instrument of such complexity would have any difficulty in solving their logistical problems.
‘I found it very sad to leave,’ he said towards the end. His voice had slowed, and sunk to a murmur. ‘The place had an unbelievable fascination, even though to be alone in its vastness seemed to reduce me to the status of a pigmy – a jungle pigmy in a terrifying urban canyon. I wanted to grow, to master it, and to enjoy it for ever … But I had to remind myself that there were problems which twentieth-century man had not yet solved – such as getting home again in an Arctic winter. And of course I was wildly impatient to tell the world about it … On the last day I made up a package, as much as I dared carry, of some of the smaller items. I had a last run on one of the trolleys, up to the outer doorway. Then it was time to go.
‘As I left, I touched the shoulder of the small scaly man, for luck. How I longed to question him … I needed luck, I can tell you, on that journey back.’
He paused now for a long time. His eyes were closed. When he opened them, he was staring directly at me.
‘You see what this means, don’t you? It is a clear warning from the past. It means that there was a sophisticated world, of applied science, millions of years ago, which all but vanished. There can be no other explanation. That world reached at least the same stage as we have now, and then it destroyed itself. Why? Because it discovered more than it knew how to use. So have we. It happened then, and it can happen now, unless we retreat from it. Like them, we have only one more step to take.’
I was stupid with prolonged concentration, and lack of sleep. ‘What happened then, exactly?’
He muttered, almost testily: ‘I told you – the last of their wars, and the end of the world.’
Then he fell silent again. Presently his breathing grew deeper, and his head fell to one side, and he was at last at rest.
It was dawn when I stood up; the pale light, falling on the bed, showed the old man’s hands paper-thin on top of the blanket, and his face sunken and deeply lined. He would talk no more that night. I stretched, and found that my whole body was aching; my head fluttered emptily, and then, a moment afterwards, felt as if it would burst if it were burdened with a single thought more. I wanted to live some time, very quietly, with this story before I came to grips with it.
Mary said two things to me, in farewell. One was: ‘I will stay, and watch,’ and the other: ‘You must believe him, Peter.’ The last appeal, in a voice as small as conscience, followed me as I went stiffly down the stairs, and out into the brilliant cold.
If in Doubt
‘He’s very sick,’ wrote Mary, in a scribbled note which reached me at the hotel. ‘But wants to see you as soon as he can. Will let you know.’
So, for two days, I waited, and was secretly glad of it, and spent the time trying to come to terms with what I thought and felt and believed about the old man’s story. I found that, somewhere between the personal and the professional planes, a split had already developed, and that the split was right down the middle of what I was entitled to call my soul. It was as fundamental as that.
Of course, as a newsman, I didn’t believe a word of what he had said; to hear and then to reject such stories was one of the ways I earned my living. It was no reflection on him … All sorts of people thought they had come across an earth-shaking story; at times it seemed that half the world wanted to catch you by the sleeve and tell you about the flying saucer in the back garden. It was often impossible to distinguish where the core of fact ended and the lunatic fringe began. Even in a short career, I had already encountered some beauties.
Moreover, these were only the self-deluders. There was also an army of liars who saw their names in print as part of the illuminated missal of history.
One developed, over the years, a certain hard-boiled cynicism; it was often a newsman’s best armour. It did not make him a better person, but it allowed fewer mistakes in an area where mistakes showed up in plain black and white, adorned with a red face rampant. I had come not to believe in the lost jewellery of film stars, or the marriage of true minds between a rich woman of fifty-five and a youthful European nobleman. I had serious doubts about the little old lady who stole to buy milk for her retarded grandchildren; and a resolute disbelief that a thug who robbed and kicked to death his victim was acting out some childish trauma and should be asked not to do it again.
Great strokes of philanthropy never accidentally leaked to the newspapers. Ev
angelists did not sell out Madison Square Garden to the exclusive glory of the Lord. Love affairs never became notorious by chance; they were the domain of exhibitionists who often showed what they could do in public because they were no good anywhere else. There were scarcely any blind beggars, and no reluctant dictators at all.
One could enlarge the area indefinitely; one often had to; from love and politics it slopped over easily into commerce. There was no such character as an insurance man who bled his company white in order to safeguard your future. I could not believe that new cars were fabulous one year, rubbish the next. There were no sales of furs at sacrifice prices.
Above all, there were positively no old men who discovered million-year-old refrigerators beyond the Arctic Circle.
On the Journal, we had an officially inspired motto: ‘If in doubt, check.’ They were always hammering it in, particularly where the juniors were concerned; they even had it printed on cards, like the silly signs that said ‘THINK!’ or (for funny people) ‘THIMK!’ or (for funny US presidents) ‘THE BUCK STOPS HERE’. So I checked, with the man who was always hammering it in the hardest; Bill Bradman of the Journal. It was high time for me to do so, because, in spite of all the warning signals, I was in doubt, the greatest doubt of my life so far.
When I put through my call to Bradman, I found that he, at least, had not changed.
‘How’s the boy reporter?’ was his greeting. He always said this; it always infuriated me. But that was not the reason he used these words; it was because he actually thought that I saw myself as some apprentice wonder-child of the newspaper world. That made it more infuriating still. Many such half-truths have this amount of penetration.
I returned his greeting, not too enthusiastically, and we talked for some time about the work in hand. Bradman did not sound in too much of a hurry, and he wasn’t pressing me for delivery – which was one of the reasons why I liked working for the Journal and for him; if they trusted you with a story, they trusted you to produce it when it was ready. It was a no-nagging paper. But he did ask if I had any more trips to make, and when I would be back.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered – and it sounded so inadequate, even to myself, that I had to improve on it. ‘I’ve got what I came for, I guess. But there’s always a chance of another story.’
‘Another story, another time.’ He had grown a little more businesslike. ‘You know what I want the series to cover. Don’t go steaming off into the blue looking for the abominable snowman. We’ve got him right here already–’ and he mentioned a cabinet minister for whom he had less than total respect. ‘If you’ve got enough material, bring it back and let’s take a look at it.’
‘There might be something else worthwhile.’ On the verge of talking about it, I suddenly wanted to skirt round the subject. ‘I met someone up here … Have you ever heard of a man called Shepherd?’
‘Yes,’ he said curtly.
‘Well, I met–’
‘What do you mean, a man called Shepherd?’ he interrupted me, with a prompt show of bad temper. ‘Strewth, there must be a million of them! There must be twenty thousand Shepherds in Canada! What sort of a question is that? Which Shepherd? Who? Where?’
‘I just wondered if you’d heard of an old man called Shepherd. I met him up here.’
‘Give me strength!’ he said, and sounded as if he meant it. ‘An old man? That narrows the field by about ten per cent …’ Then, when I did not answer, he seemed to check himself, and asked: ‘What’s all this about? Are you on to something, boy?’
‘I might be. He’s an old man. He’s lived up here a long time. He knows the north. I think he’s Canadian, but he might be English. I wondered if you’d heard of him.’
‘Could be.’ I could almost hear Bradman scratching his ear with his pencil, which was his trick when thinking hard. ‘Shepherd? Shepherd?’ He was dredging up Shepherds from a cloudy pool labelled ‘S’. ‘There was a hockey player called Shepherd. Henry Shepherd. No, he runs that girlie bar in Montreal. There was Paul Shepherd and the woman in the car-trunk. They hanged him … There was Bishop Shepherd, out in Manitoba somewhere. Is this one a bishop?’
‘No.’
‘Shepherd … What does he do?’
‘Nothing much, now. He used to explore, make trips up north.’
‘You’re a big help … There was a Shepherd involved in that timber concession swindle in Vancouver. But he’s sitting it out in Mexico … Couldn’t be Grant Shepherd. He’s dead. Must be.’
‘Who’s Grant Shepherd?’
‘Don’t you kids know anything?’ demanded Bradman, with a return of ill temper, and the habitual unfairness of the old. Give us time, I thought; one fine day, we will grow into human shape … Then his private filing system came into play, the capacity which I envied above all things. ‘Grant Shepherd went to jail for threatening the Russian delegate at the United Nations. Just after the war, when the iron curtain thing started. About nineteen-forty-eight. He tried to get their ambassador to read something, or look at something, and then he started raising Cain. He wouldn’t promise to keep away from UN headquarters, so they locked him up till he cooled off. Don’t you remember?’
‘In nineteen-forty-eight I was eleven.’
‘Hell, it was on the radio …’ But under his irritation was a professional alertness. ‘You think you’ve met Grant Shepherd?’
‘It sounds like it.’
‘He’s probably a nut case by now. What’s this all about, anyway?’
‘Oh, he was telling some stories.’ For no reason at all, I had now panicked; I could not bring myself to tell Bill Bradman what the old man had said. I would not expose him to another range of unbelievers. ‘I’ll have a second session with him, and see if it works out.’
‘I wouldn’t waste much time on him.’
‘OK.’ But it was not quite possible to leave it thus. ‘Did you ever see him?’
‘No.’
‘But did people believe him?’
‘The police didn’t … What do you mean, believe? What is there to believe, anyway?’
‘He wants to stop another war.’
‘Him and me both …’ There was a crackling sound, on the long wire between Bone Lake and Toronto, and the volume began to fade. It seemed to mark the return of isolation for me, and I was wholeheartedly glad of it. Bradman said something which I could not make out, and then I heard his last words: ‘Whatever it is, it had better be good.’
I was beginning to believe that it was. Indeed, from that very instant, the process of interior separation began. The phone call had taken care of one aspect, the hard-boiled professional side – what Mary had labelled ‘smart alec’. When I put the receiver back on its hook, faith flooded in, and took over.
It is time to say a little more about myself; not too much – just enough to make sense. It is the only way I can explain what now began to take hold, as the enormous and shattering effect of the old man’s story broke through, and became impossible to subdue.
My short voyage started with the home, where all things must start; a home from which my father, deeply loved, desolately mourned by my mother, vanished at a single stroke. But she was not made bitter by this loss; although his hideous death, when she learned about it later, struck her to the heart, the heart was never vanquished. After the first paralysing shock, she set herself (as I know now) to repair the damage; the damage to herself, to an only child whose face was a permanent question mark (‘Who is God?’ – ‘What’s for supper?’) and to our small ship which had met this wicked storm. To have a brave widow for a mother can never be a handicap. In my case, it furnished abright faith to grow on.
Her rule was mostly negative, mostly ‘not’ – and it was none the worse for that. If you can form the habit of not being a liar, not being a thief, not being cruel, and not kicking people in the face as you go up the ladder, you must be somewhere on the path to Heaven. It was Heaven my mother intended me to aim at; there was no mistake about that, either.
From all this, and especially from my father’s death, it was natural that war was the most hated image in our lives. War denied Christ; it denied humanity; what in the world was left to justify it?
But although, throughout my adult life, war had been an urgent possibility, I had draped all my thinking in an obstinate flag of truce. War was wicked; no quarrel could be just; ‘the bomb’ was the most wicked item of all; if good men forswore it, it would go away. Wrapped in this cosy moral blanket, I had settled for neutrality.
My mistake – as from today, astonishingly, it had become a mistake – was in thinking that one pious resolve was enough to clear the conscience. Of course it was not, and of course it solved nothing. Such resolution needed friends, converts, allies – by the score, the hundred, the thousand, the million. This, I now began to realize, in a slow-burning flash of recognition, was the lesson of the old man’s story; unless we took to heart his sort of warning, we were all doomed. The story dovetailed so neatly with what I felt and believed that its impact, if accepted, could only be fantastic.
Once I had absorbed it, I could not escape it. For a hundred reasons, I knew that it would hang round my neck for ever – or until I did something about it. What one man could do, to reverse history, to cure such infection, was not yet imaginable. But I would have to think of something, or be branded a runaway for ever.