Dr. Pethwick saw the banked-up traffic, and the convulsions that ensued upon trying to clear away the broken-down vehicles. He realised that his setting of his instrument had not been quite as accurate as it might have been. He had only barred King William Street traffic, and though this might cause a good deal of trouble, the trouble could be avoided to a large extent by diverting all traffic—as the police inspector proposed to do—from the street.
Humanity is a good deal more educable than flies are, even although the recent history of humanity might make this seem improbable. A fly encountering a window pane will refuse to believe in the existence of a transparent substance impervious to flies, however forcibly the fact is demonstrated to him by the bumps his nose receives when he flies against the pane. It only took three bad jams at the mouth of King William Street to convince the authorities that for some reason which they could not imagine, and which they had never before encountered, King William Street was unsuitable that day for motor traffic. It was unfortunate for them that they reached this decision just when Dr. Pethwick was making his way back to Hammer Court through the crowds.
Hammer Court, when Dr. Pethwick reached it, appeared just the same as ever. It was quite unchanged by the fact that history was being made a hundred yards away. Dr. Pethwick strolled across the yard—his chest out a little under the influence of the double-breasted coat—and in through the door at the corner and down the dark staircase to his office. He took the precaution of looking round before unlocking the door; it was just possible that someone might hear the buzz of the make-and-break when the door was open if he were standing near. Dr. Pethwick entered quickly and locked the door behind him; on the table the make-and-break was still buzzing in its low monotone—not nearly as noisy as the typewriters on the floor above—and the dull glow from the emitter was still evident.
Pethwick had guessed the cause of the slight error in laying his emitter. His compass did not indicate the exact magnetic north; even in a City office there must be a certain amount of deflection caused by iron piping in the walls and similar objects. But as he had reached a result by experiment there was no need for tedious correction, even if that were possible with the instruments at his disposition. A very brief calculation in solid trigonometry sufficed. Across the line on the paper on the table he drew another one, at a very slight angle. Then he rotated his emitter until the instrument was exactly parallel to the new line.
It certainly was not Mr. Prodgers’ lucky day. He had reported the surprising misadventure which had overtaken his lorry to the clerk of the works at Finsbury Pavement, and now he was on his way back to the yard to bring up the reserve lorry—a prehistoric Ford which he hated—seated beside the driver of an empty lorry returning to refill. They came out round the Bank of England from Princes Street; the police were diverting all traffic bound for London Bridge through Lombard Street and Gracechurch Street. But as the lorry came lumbering out into the open space on which the Duke of Wellington looks down with his sightless bronze eyes—the very point which a taxicab driver had once described to Dr. Pethwick as ‘the ‘eart and centre of the City,’ the lorry slowed up abruptly, just as if someone had switched off the ignition.
‘Gawd lumme!’ said Mr. Prodgers, ‘we’ve got ’em again.’
He put out a restraining hand and stopped his mate from precipitating himself down from the driver’s cab to turn the starting handle.
‘That’s all right,’ said Mr. Prodgers. ‘There’s plenty like us.’
From their position of vantage, stationary midway in the triangle made by the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, and the Mansion House, they had a clear view of all the streets which centre upon that spot—Cheapside and Queen Victoria Street and Princes Street and Cornhill and Lombard Street and Threadneedle Street, to say nothing of the now deserted King William Street. And wherever they turned their eyes, at each waiting queue of traffic in turn, there were people trying to start motor cars that obstinately refused to go. All round them, on the central crossing itself, there were other vehicles in the same condition.
Dr. Pethwick had laid his instruments correctly enough now. Where before he had merely been pressing an artery, he now had checked the action of the heart. It would not be a matter of an hour or two; it would take all day and all night to clear up the difficulties so caused. The Klein–Pethwick Effect emerged from the emitter underground in Hammer Court in a cone of dispersion, and the conic section just above ground level outside the Royal Exchange was an ellipse something over a hundred yards along the major axis and something under that amount wide. Practically all the area covered by that ellipse—of a superficial area of some nine thousand square yards—was crammed with motor traffic. The police were presented now with the problem of getting some two hundred broken-down motor vehicles out of the way. When they should have done that, they would next have to face a situation whereby every important road in the City of London was barred. All the precious half square mile centring round the Bank of England, where the freehold value of a single square foot of land is equal to a working man’s income for a couple of years, was endangered by the complete cessation of all cross traffic
Society from the days of the Romans at least had been dependent on ease of communication; within the last thirty years there had grown up a new dependence upon motor vehicles. Dr. Pethwick was injuring society at its most tender point.
He himself, however, at the moment, was not very immediately concerned about all this. He was occupied with writing a letter, seated at the typewriting table which Mr. Freeman had sold him, with his apparatus buzzing away at his elbow on the big table. He was writing with care, employing the same script of Roman capitals which he had used when he wrote his previous letter to the Editor of The Times. It took him a long time; perhaps a little more than two hours. When he had finished it, he folded it into a long envelope which he addressed as before and laid it aside. Then with one long slender finger he switched off the current, and by that single movement made life possible once more in the City of London. He dismantled his apparatus, and locked it away again in the cupboard. He was about to take his hat and his letter and start out when he suddenly remembered that he was still wearing his beautiful suit; if he had not realised this he might have gone home and displayed himself in all his glory to Mary and so ruined his plans. He changed his clothes hurriedly, grabbed his letter, and came out of Hammer Court, a shabby, rather insignificant man.
The streets seethed with people. There were harassed policemen everywhere, and there were broken-down motor-cars and buses parked along the kerbs in every street. Dr. Pethwick thought of posting his letter, made a rapid calculation of time and space, and decided on delivering it himself. He had not the remotest idea where Printing House Square might be, but by a piece of deduction which would have been surprising in him a fortnight ago he decided that it must be near Fleet Street, and so walked down Queen Victoria Street in that direction. New Bridge Street, too, was full of policemen, busily diverting the traffic which wished to go City-wards, warning all eastbound traffic to keep to Cannon Street and Fenchurch Street, and sending everything which aimed more north than along the weary round through Aldersgate Street and Old Street.
A messenger boy told Dr. Pethwick where to find Printing House Square, and Dr. Pethwick with his own hand dropped his letter into the solid brass letter-box of The Times. When he came back into Queen Victoria Street he noticed the posters which the boys who sold the evening newspapers were displaying. The very sight of their wording sent a thrill through him; he felt a hot flush beneath his skin. ‘Amazing Traffic Scenes in City,’ said one. ‘Traffic Breakdown. What Experts Think,’ said another, while the third pinned its faith to a more generalised expression and merely announced ‘Sensation in City.’
It illustrates the oddity of human nature that the sight of these contents bills should rouse Dr. Pethwick to excitement in the way it did, while he had been so little moved when with his own eyes he had seen the actual results of his action
s. His hand trembled a little as he searched for a penny and bought a paper. There were flaring headlines right across the front page; half the remainder of the front page displayed a photograph taken of the traffic crossing in front of the Royal Exchange, showing horses busily engaged in pulling motor-buses out of the way. Dr. Pethwick was so interested in reading all about it that he collided over and over again with people walking in the street. The fifth collision was such a severe one that it shook him into a half-dazed condition; when he recovered he made himself put his paper in his pocket while he walked to the station.
Once in the train, he read with avidity. The newspaper he had bought happened to be the one which had displayed ‘What Experts Think’ on its contents bill, and when Dr. Pethwick glanced down this column he realised what an amazing amount of balderdash experts think. There was some excuse for them, of course. Half of them had been rung up on the telephone and had been asked for their opinion the moment they had been given a very inaccurate account of the facts. Most of the reporters had been misled by irrelevant details—because in a good many cases the drivers of vehicles under the influence of the Klein–Pethwick Effect had pressed their self-starter switches for an absurdly long time. And as the rotation of a starting motor depends on magnetism, the motors had refused to rotate; and in that case much heavier currents passed through the coils than passed when the motor was in motion, with the result that dynamotor coils were burnt out, and accumulator plates buckled, and the whole electrical apparatus of the motor-car ruined even in cases where, having coil ignition, the whole damage done might have been merely temporary if the drivers had used moderation.
These crumpled accumulator plates and burnt-out insulations had naturally claimed as much attention as, or even more than, any temporary difficulty with a spark coil; and excited newspaper men, pouring out on the telephone to bewildered scientists a whole mass of information, true and false, misleading and otherwise, had elicited the most amazing suggestions; and by the time these suggestions had been scribbled down in shorthand by someone with no scientific knowledge whatever, transcribed by someone with even less, set up in type and proofread in a hurry by people whose ignorance of scientific terminology is proverbial, the result was extraordinary. The great Norbury had given an opinion—of course; no scientific article in the evening press would be complete without Norbury—and had apparently hazarded a guess that atmospheric electricity might be the cause of the trouble. Presumably Norbury had said something about ‘Lightning, you know, is one result of atmospheric electricity,’ while trying to make himself clear over a defective telephone, and the result was that there was a cross-heading in the article to the effect that ‘Famous Scientist Suggests Lightning as a Cause.’ On the other hand, Dodgson, the constructional engineer—who knew no more about electricity than a schoolboy—had come a little nearer the mark in the half-dozen wild shots he made when he suggested that perhaps someone experimenting with a new form of beam wireless was responsible for the damage. The most honest opinion was given in the opening words of an interview with a prominent manufacturer of motor-cars, who began with: ‘I simply cannot understand it.’ It was inevitable, all the same, that he should go on with: ‘But as far as I can make out very few of our cars were affected.’
In the crowded railway carriage there was actually a new topic of conversation to replace the discussion of the prevailing heat which had done duty for three weeks now. Men were exchanging their impressions of the traffic block, and their theories of its cause—and most of these theories were no wilder than those put forward in the paper Dr. Pethwick held. Dr. Pethwick found it all so exciting that he almost forgot to get out of the train when it arrived at his station; he just managed to precipitate himself down from the door, after treading on half a dozen feet on his way to it, just as the train began to move off again. The guard shouted at him; the porter looked at him disapprovingly; the people on the platform turned and stared; but for once in his life Dr. Pethwick was unmoved by publicity. He noticed none of it as, clutching his paper, he made his way to the station exit.
Dr. Pethwick retained enough of the keen practical sense which had carried him through so far to endeavour to make himself at least appear normal when he reached home. But Mary, even though, after a long day with her friends, she was not quite as perceptive as she might have been, could not help but notice something a little strange about him. There was a little more colour in his face than usual; there was a kind of intensification of his personality which impressed itself upon her. And he had bought and brought home an evening paper, which was a most unusual action for him; and once, more extraordinary still, he raised his thin voice in song, drumming with his fingers upon the table. He only stopped when he saw her looking at him in amazement.
‘Anyone would think this heat suited you,’ she snapped.
‘So it does,’ said Pethwick.
Mary eyed him more closely than ever. She noted how large a tea he ate—which was not really surprising seeing that he had, as usual, forgotten to have any lunch. Mary could not make it out. The vigorous appetite and the high spirits seemed to rule out the first two suspicions—drink and women. Anyway, she was in Norway. And he did nothing towards clearing tea away or washing up—he left it all to her as though that was his usual habit. When he had finished his meal he plunged once more into re-reading the evening paper; and, now she came to think of it, his glances had strayed over to that paper several times during the meal—and yet the paper bore every sign of having been well read already. Later on, when he put it down at last, she was able to take possession of it and look through it herself. She could see nothing in it which could account for this new manner of his.
For a moment she formed a theory that he might have drawn a big prize in a sweepstake, but there was nothing about sweepstakes, no list of prize-winners, in the paper. The only other possibility which occurred to her was that he might have been betting successfully. She found it hard to believe, but as it was the only explanation she could think of she decided that that was what it must be. Reassured, she turned the paper over and ran her eyes over the front page.
‘Did you see anything of this traffic jam they talk about here?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Pethwick. He was ready for anything now. ‘It held me up a bit when I was coming back across London.’
‘I suppose it wasn’t nearly as bad as they say,’ sniffed Mary. ‘You can never believe anything you read in the papers nowadays.’
‘Oh, it was pretty bad,’ said Pethwick calmly.
Chapter Fifteen
During the night the newspapers had plenty of time to make up their minds about the City traffic jam. Whatever it was which had been holding up the traffic ended its activity some time late in the afternoon—some time after four o'clock. That was certain, for when a car-load of scientists obtained police permission to make experiments, and drove gaily into the road junction outside the Royal Exchange at twenty minutes past four they were sadly disappointed to find that their car did not stop, but travelled from Cheapside to Cornhill without hesitation. They were left lamenting, with no data to go on save what could be obtained by examination of the helpless cars which were by now distributed in repairing garages all round London.
One or two of the saner newspapers were able to produce quite a good analysis of the course of events. They were able to work out how the phenomenon had manifested itself first at the end of King William Street and, after persisting there for an hour and a half, from about 10 a.m. to 11.30, had suddenly shifted itself fifty yards into the main street junction. After that, however, opinion was very sharply divided. To some minds the conclusion was obvious, that the trouble was due to human agency, which had first made a bad shot before correcting its aim and settling down upon the most sensitive area (from a traffic point of view) in all London.
But other newspapers could not bring themselves to believe this. For one thing, they flinched from facing the important conclusion that if it were true some person or pe
rsons had London’s traffic at their mercy. For another, they formed a muddled picture of what had happened. The disjointed narratives of various eye-witnesses seemed to indicate a repeated shifting of the scene of the disturbance—over a small area, it is true, but a shifting all the same. These newspapers decided after much cogitation to give their opinion in favour of some sort of electrical disturbance or other, which by pure chance had focused itself on the point where it would be most felt. After all, as Norbury wrote in an article on a leader page, there could have been electrical storms affecting magnetos in the Sahara since the world first took shape without anyone knowing of them, because there were no magnetos in the Sahara. Perhaps this recent scorching hot summer in England, and perhaps—Norbury put the suggestion forward with unwonted diffidence—new recent electrical methods in England, broadcasting for instance, or the new high-tension grid system all over the country—had brought about some conditions never reproduced before. It was all a little wild, but Norbury could write well, and he was able to mask most of the weak points in his argument from the not very intelligent mass of his readers by a skilful vagueness. Norbury himself, if the truth must be told, had hesitated for one delirious moment over plunging for a hypothesis that the phenomenon might be due to an attempt by sentient beings on some other planet to attract the attention of mankind. That really seemed as likely to him as the event he was discussing, but he decided in the end to play for safety.