Don't Look Now and Other Stories

  "Oh, don't worry," he answered, smiling. "Mac will explain all that."

  He poured some juice into his own glass and said, "Cheers." I ignored the toast and listened to the echo of the ping-pong balls.

  "You told me," I continued, "that all the work was done in this building where we are now."

  "That's right," he said.

  "But where do all the personnel hang out?" I persisted.

  "Personnel?" he echoed, frowning. "There are no personnel. That's to say, there's only Mac, Robbie, Janus--I suppose you'd count Janus--and myself. And now of course you."

  I put down my glass and stared. Was he having me on? No, he seemed perfectly serious. Tossing down his orange juice like a cupbearer of the gods quaffing ambrosia, he watched me from behind the bar.

  "It's O.K., you know," he said. "We're a very happy party."

  I did not doubt it. What with cocoa, ping-pong, and the booming bittern, this team of sportsmen would make the members of a Women's Institute seem like trolls.

  My baser instincts made me yearn to prick the youngster's pride.

  "And what," I asked, "is your position on the staff? Ganymede to the professor's Jove?"

  To my intense surprise he laughed, and with an ear cocked to the further room, where the sound of balls had ceased, set two more glasses down upon the bar and filled them both with juice.

  "How smart of you to guess," he answered. "That's roughly the idea... to snatch me from this earth to a doubtful heaven. No, seriously, I'm Mac's guinea pig, along with Janus's daughter and Cerberus the dog."

  At that moment the door opened and two men came into the room.

  Instinctively I recognized MacLean. He was fiftyish, craggy, tall, with the pale, rather light blue eyes which I associate with drunkards, criminals and fighter pilots--in my view the three frequently combine. His lightish hair receded from a high forehead, and the prominent nose was matched by a thrusting chin. He wore baggy corduroy trousers and an immense pullover with a turtleneck.

  His companion was sallow, bespectacled and squat. Shorts and a baggy shirt gave him a boy scout appearance, nor did the circular sweat stains under his armpits enhance his charm.

  MacLean advanced towards me holding out his hand, the broad smile of welcome suggesting I had already become one of his small band of brothers.

  "I'm so very glad to see you," he said. "I do hope Ken has been looking after you all right. Such a wretched evening for your first glimpse of Saxmere, but we'll do better for you tomorrow, won't we, Robbie?"

  His voice, his manner, was that of an old-fashioned host. I might have been a late arrival at a country-house shoot. He put his hand on my shoulder and urged me towards the bar.

  "Orange juice for all, please, Ken," he said, and, turning to me, "We've heard tremendous things about you from A.E.L. I can't tell you how grateful I am to them--to John in particular--for allowing you to come. And above all to yourself. We'll do everything we can to make your visit memorable. Robbie, Ken, I want you to drink to--it's Stephen, isn't it? Shall we say Steve?--and to the success of our joint efforts."

  I forced a smile, and felt it become a fixture on my face. Robbie, the boy scout, blinked at me from behind his spectacles.

  "Your very good health," he said. "I'm the Johannes factotum here. I do everything from exploding gases to taking Ken's temperature, as well as exercising the dog. When in trouble send for me."

  I laughed, then swiftly realized that the falsetto, music-hall comedian voice was in fact his own, and not assumed for the occasion.

  We crossed the corridor to a room facing the front, plain and bare like the one we had left, with a table set for four. A long-faced, saturnine fellow, with close-cropped grizzled hair, stood by the sideboard.

  "Meet Janus," Mac said to me. "I don't know how they feed you at A.E.L., but Janus sees we none of us starve."

  I favored the steward with a cheerful nod. He replied to it with a grunt, and I instantly doubted his willingness to run errands for me to the Three Cocks. I waited for MacLean to say grace, which would somehow have seemed in character, but none was forthcoming, and Janus set before him an enormous old-fashioned soup tureen shaped like a jerry, from which my new chief ladled a steaming, saffron-colored brew. It was surprisingly good. The grilled Dover sole that followed was better still, and the cheese souffle feather-light. The meal took us some fifty minutes to consume, and by the end of it I was ready to make peace with my fellow men.

  Young Ken--whose conversation during dinner had consisted of a series of private jokes with Robbie, while MacLean discoursed on mountain climbing in Crete, the beauty of flamingos on the wing in the Camargue, and the peculiar composition of Piero della Francesca's Flagellation of Christ--was the first to rise from the table and ask leave to be dismissed.

  MacLean nodded. "Don't read too late," he said. "Robbie will turn your light out if you do. Nine thirty's the limit."

  The youngster smiled, and bade the three of us goodnight. I asked whether Ken was in training to race the dog around the marsh and back.

  "No," answered MacLean abruptly, "but he needs a lot of sleep. Let's to billiards."

  He led the way from the dining room back to the so-called bar, while I prepared myself for half an hour or so in the room beyond--nothing loath, for I rather fancied myself with a cue--but as we passed through, and I saw nothing but a ping-pong table and a dartboard, Robbie, noticing my puzzled expression, boomed in my ear, "A quote from Shakespeare, the Serpent of old Nile. Mac means he wants to brief you." He pushed me gently forward and then vanished. I followed my leader through yet another door, soundproofed this time, and we entered the chill atmosphere of what appeared to be half working lab, half clinic, streamlined and severe. It even had an operating table under a center light, and instruments and jars behind glass panels on the walls.

  "Robbie's department," said MacLean. "He can do anything here from developing a virus to taking out your tonsils."

  I made no comment, having small desire to offer myself as a potential victim to the boy scout's doubtful ministrations, and we passed from the laboratory to the room adjoining.

  "You'll feel more at home here," observed MacLean, and as he switched on the lights I saw that we had reached the electronics department. The first installation to which we came appeared similar to the one we had built for the G.P.O. some years ago--that is to say, a computer capable of speech, though its vocabulary was limited and the actual "voice" was far from perfect. MacLean's box of tricks, however, had various accessories, and I went up to examine them closely.

  "He's neat, don't you think?" said MacLean, rather like a proud father showing off his newborn infant. "I call him Charon 1."

  We all have pet names for our inventions, and Hermes had seemed particularly appropriate for the winged messenger we had developed for the G.P.O. Charon, if I remembered rightly, was the ferryman who conveyed the spirits of the dead across the Styx. I supposed this was MacLean's own brand of humor.

  "What does it do?" I asked cautiously.

  "It has several functions," answered MacLean, "which I'll explain later, but your main concern will be the voice mechanism."

  He went through a starting-up procedure, much as we had done at A.E.L., but the result was very different. The voice reproduction was perfect, and he had got rid of all the hesitation.

  "I'm using the computer for certain experiments in the field of hypnosis," he went on. "These involve programming it with a series of questions. The answers are then fed back into the computer, and are themselves used to modify the questions that follow. What do you think of that?"

  "It's fantastic!" I answered. "You've gone miles beyond what anybody else is doing."

  I was indeed flabbergasted, and wondered just how he had done it--as well as keeping it all so secret. We thought we had achieved all that could be done in this particular field at A.E.L.

  "Yes," said Mac, "your experts will hardly improve upon it. Charon 1 will have many uses, especially in the medical world
. I won't go into any more details tonight, except to say that it is primarily connected with an experiment I'm working on which the Ministry knows nothing whatever about."

  He smiled, and here we go, I thought, now we're coming to the "experiments of a dubious nature" which my chief had warned me about. I said nothing, and MacLean moved to a different installation.

  "This," he said, "is what really concerns the government, and the military chaps in particular. You know, of course, that blast is difficult to control. An airplane breaking the sound barrier may shatter windows indiscriminately, but not one particular window, or one particular target. Charon 2 can do just that." He crossed the room to a cabinet, took out a glass jar, and placed it on the working bench by the wall. Then he threw a switch on his second installation, and the glass shivered to fragments.

  "Rather neat, don't you think?" said MacLean. "But of course the point is the long-range use, should you wish to inflict serious damage on specific objects at a distance. I personally don't--blast doesn't interest me--but the Services would find it effective on occasion. It's just a case of a special method of transmission. But my particular concern is high-frequency response between individuals, and between people and animals. I'm keeping this quiet from my masters, who give me a grant." He put his fingers on another control on the second installation. "You won't see anything with this one," he said. "It's the call note with which I control Cerberus. Human beings can't pick it up."

  We waited in silence, and a few minutes later I heard the sound of a dog scratching at the further door. MacLean let him in. "All right. Good boy. Lie down." He turned to me, smiling. "Nothing really in that--he was only the other side of the building--but we've got him to obey orders from long distances. It could be quite useful in an emergency." He glanced at his watch. "I wonder if Mrs. J. will forgive me," he murmured. "It's only a quarter past nine after all. And I do so enjoy showing off." His schoolboy grin was suddenly infectious.

  "What are you going to do?" I asked.

  "Bring her small daughter to the telephone, or wake her up if she's asleep."

  He made another adjustment to the apparatus, and once again we waited. In about two minutes the telephone rang. MacLean crossed the room to answer it. "Hullo?" he said. "Sorry, Mrs. J. Just an experiment. I'm sorry if I've woken her up. Yes, put her on. Hullo, Niki. No, it's all right. You can go back to bed. Sleep tight." He replaced the receiver, then bent down to pat Cerberus stretched at his feet.

  "Children, like dogs, are particularly easy to train," he said. "Or put it this way--their sixth sense, the one that picks up these signals, is highly developed. Niki has her own call note, just as Cerberus does, and the fact that she suffers from retarded development makes her an excellent subject."

  He patted his box of tricks in much the same fashion that he had patted his dog. Then he glanced up at me and smiled.

  "Any questions?"

  "Obviously," I replied. "The first being, what is the exact object of the exercise? Are you trying to prove that certain high-frequency signals have potentialities not only for destruction but also for controlling the receptive mechanism in an animal, and also the human brain?"

  I forced a composure I was far from feeling. If these were the sort of experiments that were going on at Saxmere, small wonder the place had been shrugged aside as a crackpot's paradise.

  MacLean looked at me thoughtfully. "Of course Charon 2 could be said to prove exactly that," he said, "though this is not my intention. The Ministry may possibly be very disappointed in consequence. No, I personally am trying to tackle something more far-reaching." He paused, then put his hand on my shoulder. "We'll leave Charons 1 and 2 for tonight. Come outside for a breath of air."

  We left by the door which the dog had scratched at. It led to another corridor, and finally to an entrance at the back of the building. MacLean unbolted the door and I followed him through. The rain had ceased and the air was clean and cold, the sky brilliant with stars. In the distance, beyond the line of sand dunes, I could hear the roar of sea breaking upon shingle.

  MacLean inhaled deeply, his face turned seaward. Then he looked upward at the stars. I lit a cigarette and waited for him to speak.

  "Have you any experience of poltergeists?" he asked.

  "Things that go bump in the night?" I said. "No, I can't say I have." I offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head.

  "What you watched just now," said MacLean, "the glass shivering to pieces, is the same thing. Electrical force, released. Mrs. J. had trouble with crashing objects long before I developed Charon. Saucepans, and so on, hurling themselves about at the coastguard's cottage where they live. It was Niki, of course."

  I stared at him, incredulous. "You mean the child?"

  "Yes."

  He thrust his hands in his pockets and began pacing up and down. "Naturally, she was quite unaware of the fact," he continued. "So were her parents. It was only psychic energy exploding, extra strong in her case because her brain is undeveloped, and since she is the only survivor of identical twins the force was doubled."

  This was rather too much to swallow, and I laughed. He swung round and faced me.

  "Have you a better solution?" he asked.

  "No," I admitted, "but surely..."

  "Exactly," he interrupted. "Nobody ever has. There are hundreds, thousands of cases of these so-called phenomena, and almost every time they are reported there is evidence to show that a child, or someone who is regarded as of substandard intelligence, was in the locality at the time." He resumed his walk and I beside him, the dog at our heels.

  "So what?" I said.

  "So that," he went on, "it suggests we all possess an untapped source of energy within us that awaits release. Call it, if you like, Force Six. It works in the same way as the high-frequency impulse which I released just now from Charon. Here is the explanation of telepathy, precognition, and all the so-called psychic mysteries. The power we develop in any electronic device is the same as the power that the Janus child possesses--with one difference, to date: we can control the one but not the other."

  I saw his meaning, but not where the discussion was leading us. God knows life is complicated enough without seeking to probe the unconscious forces that may lie dormant within man, especially if the connecting link must first be an animal, or an idiot child.

  "All right," I said, "so you tap this Force Six, as you call it. Not only in Janus's daughter, but in all animals, in backward children, and finally in the human race. You have us breaking glasses, sending saucepans flying, exchanging messages by telepathic communication, and so on and so forth; but wouldn't it add immeasurably to our difficulties, so that we ended up in the complete chaos from which we presumably sprang?"

  This time it was MacLean who laughed. Our walk had taken us to a ridge of high ground, and we were looking across the sand dunes to the sea beyond. The long shingle beach seemed to stretch into eternity, as drear and featureless as the marsh behind it. The sea broke with a monotonous roar, sucking at the dragging stones, only to renew the effort and spend itself once more.

  "No doubt it would," he said, "but that's not what I'm after. Man will find a proper use for Force Six in his own good time. I want to make it work for him after the body dies."

  I threw my cigarette onto the ground and watched it glow an instant before it flickered to a wet stub.

  "What on earth do you mean?" I asked him.

  He was looking at me, trying to size up my reaction to his words. I could not make up my mind if he was mad or not, but there was something vaguely endearing about him as he stood there, hunched, speculative, like an overgrown schoolboy in his corduroy bags and his old turtlenecked sweater.

  "I'm quite serious," he said. "The energy is there, you know, when it leaves the body on the point of death. Think of the appalling wastage through the centuries; all that energy escaping as we die, when it might be used for the benefit of mankind. It's the oldest of theories, of course, that the soul escapes through the nostrils or
the mouth--the Greeks believed in it, so do certain African tribes today. You and I are not concerned with souls, and we know that our intelligence dies with our body. But not the vital spark. The life force continues as energy, uncontrolled, and up to the present... useless. It's above us and around us as we stand talking here."

  Once again he threw back his head and looked at the stars, and I wondered what deep inner loneliness had driven him to this vain quest after the intangible. Then I remembered that his wife had died. Doubtless this theoretical bunk had saved him.

  "I'm afraid it will take you a lifetime to prove," I said to him.

  "No," he answered. "At the most a couple of months. You see, Charon 3, which I didn't show you, has a built-in storage unit, to receive and contain power, or, to be exact, to receive and contain Force Six when it is available." He paused. The glance he threw at me was curious, speculative. I waited for him to continue. "The groundwork has all been done," he said. "We are geared and ready for the great experiment, when Charons 1 and 3 will be used in conjunction, but I need an assistant, fully trained to work both installations, when the moment comes. I'll be perfectly frank with you. Your predecessor here at Saxmere wouldn't cooperate. Oh yes, you had one. I asked your chief at A.E.L. not to tell you--I preferred to tell you myself. Your predecessor refused his cooperation for reasons of conscience which I respect."

  I stared. I was not surprised at the other fellow refusing to cooperate, but I did not see where ethics came into it.

  "He was a Catholic," explained MacLean. "Believing as he did in the survival of the soul and its sojourn in purgatory, he couldn't stomach any idea of imprisoning the life force and making it work for us here on earth. Which, as I have told you, is my intention."

  He turned away from the sea and began walking back the way we had come. The lights were all extinguished in the low line of prefabs where presumably we were to eat, work, sleep and have our being during the eight weeks that lay ahead. Behind them loomed the square tower of the disused radar station, a monument to the ingenuity of man.

  "They told me at A.E.L. you had no religious scruples," went on MacLean. "Neither have the rest of us at Saxmere, though we like to think of ourselves as dedicated men. As young Ken puts it himself, it comes to the same thing as giving your eyes to a hospital, or your kidneys to cold storage. The problem is ours, not his."