Read The Stone That Never Came Down Online
Authors: John Brunner
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General
The Stone That Never Came Down (8 page)
“But now I can fit together in my mind all the hints, all the clues he was referring to, directly or by implication. I can make a pattern of them, the same way he must have done. And do you know what the pattern shows?”
He glanced from one to the other of them, as though challenging them to contradict.
“What the pattern shows is World War Three.”
BOOK TWO
Crescent
“I was a Zen Buddhist in the 9th grade, a Hindu in the 10th, I just smoked dope in the 11th grade, then I became a vegetarian, but now I’ve found the Lord.”
–An eighteen-year-old Jesus freak, quoted in
The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog
IX
“Look at them! Look!” Half out of his seat although the safety-belt lights were still on, Don Gebhart pointed through the window of the airliner as it taxied towards the terminal at London Airport. He was a rangy man with a prominent Adam’s apple, who always dressed in black; skeletal, he did not look in the least like a person who readily grew excited, and in fact was not. But this was an exception.
“Thousands of them!” he went on. “And a cabinet minister right in there with the rest! Even a pop group doesn’t get a welcome like this nowadays–and Lady Washgrave has promised they’ll line the route into the city, too, clear to your hotel!”
Bobbing under grey sleet like a field of lunatic flowers, streamers hung from dayglo-painted crosses repeated and repeated the slogan: welcome brother bradshaw!
“I hope they don’t catch cold,” Bradshaw muttered.
“Oh, Bob, what’s wrong with you?” Gebhart demanded. “You should be glad that so many people want you to lead them to the light–you’ve
got
to be glad!”
“I’ll do my best,” Bradshaw sighed.
The welcome was indeed fantastic. The hysteria grew and grew while he was posing for the cameras with the Right Honourable Henry Charkall-Phelps, and Lady Washgrave, and a dozen public figures who were patrons of her Campaign, and it reached such a climax as he was being escorted to the limousine awaiting him that the crowd broke the police cordon and mobbed him with crosses and bouquets.
And, in one case, a cut-throat razor.
Just in time, he flung up his arm as he saw the glint of steel, and the bone of his forearm blunted the blade on the way towards its intended target. But there was a sudden wash of brilliant red under the TV lights lining his path, and it turned to grey as all colour and all sensation drained from the world.
“My name is Heather Pogson,” the girl who had wielded the razor told reporters. “I am twenty-one. Last time I saw Bob Bradshaw was eight years ago. He took me to a party where everybody was smoking pot, and when I was stoned he screwed me and made me pregnant. But then he claimed it wasn’t his fault and ran away back to America. My baby–our baby–had to be aborted. I swore I’d get him, somehow, next time he came in range. I’m only sorry there were too many people in the way for me to slash his face instead of his arm.”
Then two policewomen closed in and took her away to jail, whereupon the reporters went to see whether Lady Washgrave had recovered yet. On being splashed with Bradshaw’s blood, she had fainted.
It was very cold in the warehouse. David Sawyer struggled not to let his teeth chatter, as though that faint a sound might be heard from the skylight through which they expected the intruders to approach.
Rexwell’s had never been robbed. It was a wonder, considering that their products–cassette recorders and miniature transistor radios–were ideal booty for a thief: easy to hide, constantly in demand, relatively expensive, and backed by the reputation of a well-known brand-name. The management had at first pooh-poohed the idea of setting an ambush here, saying how good their plant security must be. But they hadn’t run across Harry Bott before, and Sawyer had. When Harry took an interest in premises previously unburgled, it followed that he had spotted something other villains had missed. Using all his powers of persuasion, he had finally put the point over. Even so …!
“He’d damned well better show,” he muttered to Epton, across the aisle between the stacked crates with his radio to his ear. “Four times I’ve had that bugger in the dock–four! And each time he’s whistled up the parish priest to say what a good family man he is, how his kids would starve while he was inside … Are you
sure
about the sniff?”
“How can I be sure?” Epton answered grumpily. “All I can say is what I’ve already told you–Stuffy Wilkins has seen him paying far too much attention to this place lately, and if the night watchman can’t be relied on, who can?”
“Agreed, agreed. But I wish we could nab that brother-in-law of his instead,” Sawyer sighed. He meant Joe Feathers; he and Harry Bott had married sisters. What hard-drug traffic was left in North-West London was notoriously due to him.
“Fat chance!” Epton countered scornfully. “Up there in his big house with his luxury cars and his–”
The radio said softly, “Alpha Hotel, Alpha Hotel, we have a bogey for you. Austin van Kilo Lima Kilo nine-ah-three-ah-six-ah, known to have been stolen!”
“That must be them!” Sawyer whispered thankfully, and they waited out the rest of the time in tense silence.
Then at last there was a scraping at the skylight, and it was heard to creak back on its hinges, and he rose and moved into the aisle directly under it and shone his powerful flashlight upwards and said in a mild voice, “Okay, it’s a fair cop, isn’t it?”
But Harry was so startled that he lost his footing and tried to grab the skylight to stop himself falling and only half-managed it and came smashing down on top of Sawyer in such a welter of broken glass that both of them had to be rushed to hospital.
–Hope to goodness the kid’s okay. Hasn’t been much of a Christmas for him … “Season of good cheer!” Maybe if you’re white and in work and have plenty of money! Though I must admit Cissy’s family did their best for both of us. And the other brothers and sisters, too. That’s a thing missing from buckra society in London, this give-and-take kind of helpfulness. They do say it used to be found in the old East End, and went with the Blitz. Now even the people who used to be notorious for mutual support, like the Jews, even they seem to have given it up. Trust the goddamn whites not to know when they had a good thing going for them!
Circumspect, but moving quickly because it was another dark and very cold night, with sleet pelting down which had soaked and frozen him to the marrow, Valentine Crawford approached the block of low-rent council flats which was his home, humming Big Bill Broonzy’s
Black Brown and White
to keep up his spirits.
–Wish I didn’t have to leave the boy alone, but bringing him out with that cough of his in weather like tonight … Still, I hope he’ll be pleased with these toys.
He’d managed to acquire some very good stuff for Toussaint, and paid next to nothing for it. It came from a street-market. The trader had meant all the items to sell before Christmas, and today had marked them down because he was in a hurry to push his barrow home out of the wet.
Now, up the outside stairs. Here he was always cautious; this time he was especially so, because during the holiday the light at the corner of his landing had been broken by a gang of drunken youths throwing stones, and it hadn’t yet been repaired.
–Another ten paces, and …
“There he is,” a voice muttered, and two dark shapes rushed from deep shadow. He raised his purchases to shield his face, so they went for his belly instead, and a line that burned like ice was drawn across him hip to hip. He fell screaming in a clutter of ill-wrapped parcels and they kicked him a couple of times and ran down to the street laughing with satisfaction. Whoever they were.
–Bloody awful Christmas! Bloody awful weather! Bloody awful people! Bloody army! If I’d known I was letting myself in for this lot I’d never have signed up!
Dennis Stevens had been no farther north before than Birmingham. Now, with the rest of his patrol–five counting the officer in command–he was nervously marching along a road in a slummy district of Glasgow where half the street-lamps had been smashed and every window was dark, though he was convinced people were watching on every side, waiting to do something dreadful.
He’d had vague mental pictures, as a boy, of army life. His father had been conscripted for National Service and spent a year in Cyprus. But those images of a strange country where you couldn’t read the writing, let alone speak the language, and swarthy snipers lurked among sun-scorched rocks, didn’t seem to correspond at any point with this reality of walking down a cold street carrying a gun.
–I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. It must be what they
want
the government to do: send us here. Otherwise why would they be planting bombs and setting buildings on fire and all the rest of it? The more they do of that sort of thing, the more troops are going to be shipped north, and in the end, far as I can see, the whole bloody city is going to be a pile of smoking ruins!
Somebody had celebrated Christmas by blowing up the Town Hall. He’d seen the casualties. Only half a dozen of them, people who’d been walking or driving past, because of course the place was empty over the holiday, but it had turned his stomach to watch them being carried away.
–And who’d want to live in a ruined city?
And then …
“Down!” A scream from the lieutenant leading the patrol, and Dennis Stevens reacted just that fraction too late. From a rooftop someone had thrown a chopper-bomb, full of nails and old razor-blades and bits of glass. It landed square at his heels and cut him up, as his sergeant later told reporters, “like a side of butcher’s meat.”
He heard a rattle of shots, and carried that and pain into oblivion.
“It’s a disaster!” moaned Amelia, Lady Washgrave. “The trouble we had to go to, and the expense, issuing all those revised leaflets, and having stickers pasted over our Crusade posters at the last moment–”
“Calm yourself, ma’am,” Don Gebhart soothed. “Everything will be okay.”
“But the dirt the papers have dug up!” She was literally wringing her hands. “
I
didn’t know that last time he was here he was arrested for possessing marijuana! Nobody told
me!
I really think the Home Secretary ought to have known, though, and I’m going to ring up Mr Charkall-Phelps right away and give him a piece of my mind!”
“Ma’am, that was before his conversion,” Gebhart insisted. “And isn’t it one of the chief reasons for your Crusade that in the bad old days of even eight years ago things like that were being allowed to happen–girls of thirteen being debauched by young men, sometimes even with the consent of their parents?”
Conscious of having scored a point, though sweating slightly because it had been such a near thing, he added, “So don’t you worry, ma’am. I’ve talked with Bob’s doctors and they say he’s getting on fine, just fine. Like the posters promise, he’s going to be there on schedule come January first, and who could ask for better proof of his devotion to the cause of the Lord?”
“Professor Kneller?” the phone said softly.
“Ah … Yes! Who is that?”
“Professor, does the term ‘VC’ mean anything to you?”
“What? Who
is
that speaking?”
“Ah. I thought you might recognise the name. I think we ought to have a quiet talk.”
“I said
who is that
?”
“Do you know a pub called the Hampstead Arms? If you would care to meet me …”
X
“I wonder why ‘Mr X’ chose this of all pubs for our rendezvous,” Kneller muttered as he braked his car opposite the Hampstead Arms.
“Was it Maurice’s regular local, Hector?” Randolph asked from the back seat.
“No, but he liked it better than the one nearest his home. I came here with him two or three times.” Climbing out of the car, Hector shivered. Though the snow and sleet had stopped and the sky was clear, the wind was knife-keen.
“All I can say is, I hope we’re not on a complete fool’s errand,” Kneller grunted as he locked the driver’s door.
“Or walking into an ambush laid by the killer,” Hector suggested.
Kneller stared in horror, then relaxed and gave a snort.
“Hah! I took you seriously for a moment. If that’s what you think, why did you agree to come with us?”
Hastening across the road, he pulled open the pub door and stood back to let his companions pass ahead. Hector, going first, stopped so abruptly Randolph bumped into him.
“What’s the matter?”
“Sorry! I just recognised someone. The man at the table in the corner.” With a jerk of his head Hector indicated a thin man with a skimpy new brown beard, wearing a black anorak, sitting next to an attractive dark-haired woman in a blue coat. Both of them had reacted to the newcomers’ arrival … but then, so had everybody else in the crowded bar, if only to glance up and see who had let in that blast of freezing air and made the Christmas decorations dance.
“Who is he?” Kneller muttered. “He looks vaguely familiar.”
“Name of Fry,” Hector answered. “Came to our casualty department the other day with a friend who’d been beaten up by a godhead gang. Funny to find him this far north. I recall he said he lives in Kentish Town.”
“Lured by this place’s sudden notoriety?” Randolph suggested sourly. “I bet they haven’t done this much business for ages … Did you say he was beaten up by godheads?”
“Not him. His friend. The same morning my office was vandalised–I mean, the same morning I found it had been.”
“Aren’t they bastards?” Randolph shuddered. “You’ve seen the evening papers?” One lay on the seat of a nearby chair which was temporarily vacant; he pointed at it. “Two of them have been charged with setting fire to a Hindu temple in Willesden. Synagogues next, I suppose.”
“What do you mean, next?” Kneller countered. “More like already! Ask my Jewish friends about it … Well, what’s it to be, assuming I can fight my way through and get served?”
“Just a minute,” Hector said. “Fry’s coming this way.”
Pushing towards them with a crooked smile, the brown-bearded man said quietly, “Good evening, Dr Campbell. I didn’t expect to meet you here.”
“I–ah …” Hector hesitated, unwilling to get involved in conversation owing to the reason which had brought them. As though divining his thoughts, Malcolm turned his smile into a grin.
“But I did expect Professor Kneller and Dr Randolph.”
There was a dead pause between them, while the rest of the pub chatter continued unabated.
“You?”
Kneller forced out at last.
“Forgive the cloak-and-dagger approach, but it was a shot in the dark anyway, and even if I suggested this place for our meeting I couldn’t be sure you’d take me seriously. I’m glad you did so, though.” Lowering his voice, Malcolm added, “You see, Maurice Post not only talked to me in here the night he died, but gave me some VC.”
“You mean you took it?” Randolph clenched his fists.
“Yes.”
“And–?” Kneller demanded.
“And here I am.”
“Side-effects?”
“Yes, but … Look, get some drinks and join us in the corner. The friend I’m with knows all about it. You can talk freely in front of her.”
When, by a combination of pushing and arrogance, they had contrived to group chairs for them all around the table where Malcolm and Ruth were sitting, Kneller took a gulp of his beer and said, “Fry! I thought I recognised you. Weren’t you the teacher who got hounded out of his job about a year ago?”
“That’s right.”
“Of all the incredible coincidences! Maurice mentioned you to me only a couple of weeks back.”
“And to me,” Hector said. “Last time I saw him he cited your case as an example of what’s wrong with our society. He said–let me get this right–he said that among the chief reasons why we can’t cope with the consequences of our own ingenuity is that whenever a genuinely open-minded teacher tries to pass that attitude on to his pupils, the entrenched authorities grow frightened and shut his mouth.”
“Which is true,” Malcolm said with a nod. “He said roughly the same to me, instancing those opponents of Darwin who would rather have lost a limb than abandon Special Creation. But I can see Professor Kneller wants to question me.”
“So do I!” Randolph snapped. “If you knew how … No, you do the talking. What’s VC done to you?”
“Intensified my sensory perceptions to a degree I wouldn’t have imagined possible. Beginning with the senses we most neglect. I hope Ruth won’t mind my saying”–with a sidelong glance–“that it first showed on the tactile level.”
Ruth pulled a face at him, which broke down into a grin.
“Hearing and smell followed concurrently, and sight was affected last. I seem to be able to adjust far faster than before to low light-levels; the rod-cone change-over is almost under voluntary control. As for the senses we don’t normally call, senses … Ruth, that can of fruit-juice I wouldn’t drink.”
She nodded. “I opened it this morning. It tasted okay to me. But when Malcolm looked at the fine print on the label he found it declared some unpronounceable preservative, and this afternoon we looked it up at the library.”
“It’s a suspected carcinogen,” Malcolm said. “Banned in Spain, Israel, and the States, but apparently not in South Africa, where the juice came from.” He made a helpless gesture. “It’s supposed to be tasteless. How I knew it was in there, I can’t say. I just
knew.
”
“Not because he’d seen the label,” Ruth supplied. “I’d decanted the contents and thrown the can away.”
Kneller and Randolph exchanged stares. “By the sound of it,” Kneller said slowly, “Maurice’s wildest hopes are being overfulfilled!”
Randolph leaned forward. “How did you come to meet Maurice, Mr Fry?”
“Pure chance. I passed by here and came in for a drink. It was five-forty by the clock over the bar.” He pointed, but when the others glanced around all they could see was paper streamers and dangling strips of tinsel. “He asked if I was Malcolm Fry, the ex-teacher, and we started talking. And went on for a good three hours. Making me, I may say, very late for a date with Ruth.”
“And he actually gave you some VC?” Hector snapped.
“Yes, in a little yellow capsule.”
“Was he drunk?”
“Very. I think I know why. I suspect I also know why he got killed.”
Kneller pursed his lips. “Explain!” he commanded.
“Well, the next afternoon I decided to get drunk, too. While I didn’t realise it at the time, there was a valid reason. I was feeling the full impact of the VC. It was as though my senses had been whetted to intolerable keenness. I had to damp down the inrush of data, and alcohol did help. In fact a friend of mine who was manic-depressive before he was stabilised on lithium salts once said alcohol was the best emergency prophylactic against his manic phase. Of course, though, assuming that Dr Post had dosed himself with VC, what he should have done was go to bed and sleep the clock around four or five times.”
“Did it make you sleep for a long time?” Hector demanded.
“I slept clear through Christmas Day, Boxing Day, over five hours into the morning of the twenty-seventh.”
“Evans and Newman!” Hector said with a snap of his fingers.
Kneller looked a question at him. He amplified. “The Evans-Newman theory of sleep states that we don’t sleep to recover from fatigue, only in order to dream. The idea is that the brain needs the chance to review the sense-data accumulated during the previous period of wakefulness and use them to update its programming, so to speak. If you go without sleep for too long, you become irritable, your short-term memory breaks down, and eventually you hallucinate.”
“Precisely,” Malcolm said. “I’m convinced the main reason why I’m here, and tolerably rational, after this fantastic experience, is that Ruth and another friend of ours decided not to have me hospitalised, but leave me to wake up in my own time. But for that …!” He gave–Ruth’s arm an affectionate squeeze.
“When I met Maurice, on the other hand, I imagine he was well past the point at which he should have collapsed into bed. He was already rather aggressive when I insisted at last that I
must
go away, and since he was drunk as well he could all too easily have got involved in a quarrel … That is pure guesswork, though. I gather the police are making no progress in the case, and I may be absolutely wrong.”
Hector tugged at his beard. “This–this long period of sleep. You think it was purely due to sensory overload?”
“No, another factor is involved.”
“Memory!” Kneller exclaimed.
“Precisely. Much, perhaps most, of the overload is not due to present-time input, but to a kind of stock-taking which represents to consciousness all the data already in store.” Malcolm gave a wry smile, passing his fingers through his untidy brown hair. “Believe you me, that’s exhausting! And not entirely pleasant. But in my case at any rate it has come under control–or at least not got out of control.”
Nodding, Kneller said, “It fits. Oh, yes, it all fits.”
“What worries me”–Ruth spoke up with mingled diffidence and defiance–“is this. Malcolm claims he’s perfectly all right now, he feels fine. Maybe he is okay. But the only other person we know about who’s undergone the experience does seem to have suffered some sort of–well, derangement! Giving a capsule of VC to a complete stranger: can you call that rational? Quite apart from the question of using himself as a guinea-pig!”
Once more Kneller and Randolph exchanged meaningful looks. The latter said, “We’re not certain he did dose himself deliberately. You see, the supportive medium we use to–to breed VC, as it were, is volatile, and though we maintain strict precautions it’s true that Dr Post opened the sealed vats several times as often as anybody else. Just one faulty filter-mask could have allowed a threshold quantity to be inhaled.”
“So you know there is a threshold quantity,” Malcolm said.
“Yes, we’ve demonstrated it with rats, chickens, hamsters … It’s tiny. Of the order of a few million molecules.”
“Proportionately, would it be larger or smaller in the case of a human being?”
Randolph hesitated. “Conceivably, smaller. In view of our more complex nervous systems.”
He took a gulp of his half-forgotten beer. “But there’s another reason for assuming Maurice inhaled VC by accident, even though he did later–ah–abstract a sample from the lab, a possible sign of derangement one must concede. You see, he was always meticulous about his research work. We’ve turned over his home, his office, his lab, and found no trace of any record of his experiences. Even if he had decided to experiment on himself without telling us, which I can’t accept, it would have been foreign to his character not to leave a detailed day-by-day description of the consequences.”
“It’s still possible one may be found,” Kneller grunted. “Right this minute our Institute is infested with–”
“Wilfred, you’re not supposed to talk about that!” Randolph snapped.
“The hell with them. I hate their guts, and in particular I hate that smarmy time-serving boot-licker Gifford!
He
has no right to call himself a scientist!”
“Let me guess,” Malcolm said. “You’ve been invaded by government investigators? Ministry of Defence?”
“Home Office … or so they claim. In fact I think you may well be right. At any rate they have all the nastier habits of the trained security man. Currently they’re looking for records Maurice might have left at a secret address in our computers, and our work is at a standstill. It’s all we can do to keep the test animals fed.”
There was a pause. Eventually Malcolm said, “Wasn’t there mention in the papers of a note which Dr Post left?”
Kneller nodded. “A weirder farrago of rubbish you never saw. That’s why I’m so relieved–I really am–to find you so … well, rational!”
“Do you happen to have a copy?” Malcolm murmured.
Slightly sheepish, Kneller felt in his pocket. “As a matter of fact, I did manage to make a photostat. I’ve spent half Christmas puzzling over it, and I’m no wiser. Here.”
Malcolm took the sheet of paper he was offered, glanced at it, and passed it to Ruth. Having read it more slowly, she exclaimed, “Why, it’s like something out of
Finnegans Wake!
”
“Right! Professor, Dr Post
did
leave a record of his experience–at any rate, as complete a record as he thought would be necessary, knowing that with total recall he could later compile as detailed an analysis as anyone might wish for. And here it is. Not a farrago of rubbish, but the result of trying to condense scores of different levels of experience–real and vicarious–into the narrowest possible compass. Language isn’t designed to carry that kind of load. Not ordinary language, anyhow.”
Kneller, frowning, retrieved the paper, and after another reading of it sighed, reaching for his drink.
“On that I’ll have to take your word. There’s another and I think more important point. If our reasoning is correct, and Maurice inhaled VC accidentally at the outset, the fact stands that he did later steal some from the Institute and hid it in gelatine capsules to make it look like his asthma remedy, and gave some to you. Not altogether, as your friend remarked, a rational pattern of behaviour! So we’ve invoked the aid of Dr Campbell. As well as being Dr Post’s GP, he was a personal friend of his, and he was among the first people, outside the Institute, to learn about VC. Even now not many people know about it. Its existence has been efficiently hushed up. The one reporter who got to Maurice’s landlady seized on a garbled reference to it, but the old lady, thank goodness, failed to catch half of what we were saying and misrepeated the remainder! So when you mentioned it on the phone, we–well, we guessed something like this
might
have happened, even though we didn’t think it was very likely. And it’s a miracle to find that we can talk to, and study, someone in the early stages of–uh–infection, as it were.”