Her lips tightened. “I’d be interested to hear how you can drink like that and hold down a job as a teacher.”
“I’d be even more interested,” Ambrose put in heartily, “to hear your first-hand account of…”
Snook silenced him with an upraised hand. “Hold on a moment, Boyd.”
“Boyce.”
“Sorry—Boyce. I’d be most interested of the lot to hear why this lady keeps quizzing me about my private business.”
“I’m with UNESCO.” Prudence took a silver badge from her purse. “Which means that your salary comes…”
“My salary,” Snook interrupted, “consists largely of one crate of gin and one sack of coffee every two weeks. Any hard cash I get I earn by repairing automobile engines around the mine. In between times I teach English to miners on the nights when they’ve no money left for pleasures of the flesh. These clothes I’m wearing are the same ones they gave me when I came here three years ago. I often eat my dinner straight out of the can, and I brush my teeth with salt. I get drunk a lot, but otherwise I’m a model prisoner. Now, is there anything else you want to know about me?”
Prudence looked concerned, but gave no ground. “You claim you’re a prisoner here?”
“What else?”
“How about political refugee? I understand there’s the question of a fighter plane which disappeared from Malaq.”
Snook shook his head emphatically. “The pilot of that plane is a political refugee here. I was a passenger who thought it was going in the opposite direction, and I’m a prisoner here because I refused to service it for the Barandian Army.” Snook was alarmed to discover that he had discarded all his defences for a woman he had met only a few minutes earlier.
“I’ll include this in my report.” Prudence held her silver badge closer to her mouth, revealing that it was also a recorder, and her lips developed an amused quirk. “Do you spell your name just the way it sounds?”
“It is a funny name, isn’t it?” Snook said, slipping back into character. “How clever of you to decide to be born into a family called Devonald.”
The colour rose in Prudence’s cheeks. “I didn’t mean…”
Snook turned away from her. “Boyce, what’s going on here? Are you a UNESCO man, too? I came here because I thought you were interested in what we saw at the mine.”
“I’m a private researcher and I’m intensely interested in what you saw.” Ambrose gave Prudence a reproachful glance.
“It was pure coincidence that I met Miss Devonald—perhaps if we arranged separate appointments…”
“There’s no need—I’m going to shut up for a while,” Prudence said, and suddenly Snook saw in her the schoolgirl she had been not many years earlier. He began to feel like a veteran legionary who had chosen to sharpen his sword on a raw recruit.
“Gil, have you any idea of what you actually did see at the mine?” Ambrose tapped Snook’s knee to regain his attention. “Do you know what you discovered?”
“I saw some things which looked like ghosts.” Snook had just made the more immediate discovery that, in moody relaxation. Prudence Devonald’s profile inspired in him an obscure anguish which had to do with the transience of beauty, of life itself. It was his first conscious experience of the kind, and it was not entirely welcome.
“What you saw,” Ambrose said, “were the inhabitants of another universe.”
It took a few seconds for the words to come to a sharp focus in Snook’s mind, then he began to ask questions. Twenty minutes later he leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and realised he had forgotten about his drink. He sipped from the glass again, trying to accustom himself to the idea that he was sitting at the crossroads of two worlds. Once more, within the space of a single hour, he was being forced to think in new categories, to make room in his life for new concepts.
“The way you put it,” he said to Ambrose, “I have to believe you—but what happens next?”
Ambrose’s voice developed a firmness which had not been there earlier. “I should have thought the next step was quite obvious. We have to make contact with these beings—find a way of talking to them.”
Chapter Seven
The news that Ambrose wanted to begin observations that very night did not bother Snook—his own imagination had been fired by what he had heard—but he was irritated by the practical consequences.
Ambrose’s theory confirmed that the ghostly appearances would not start until near dawn, although they would gradually start earlier and finish later each day. The road from Kisumu to the mine was long and difficult, especially for someone who was unfamiliar with it, and Snook had felt obliged to invite Ambrose to stay the night at his bungalow. This was going to involve Snook being in continuous proximity to the other man for the best part of a day and a night, and his nature rebelled against the imposition. The fact that Prudence had invited herself along, clad in a Paris designer’s impression of a safari suit, had not made things any better.
After the friction of their initial meeting she had treated him with impersonal politeness, and he was responding in kind, but all the while he was intensely aware of her presence. It was an odd radar-like, three-dimensional kind of perception which meant that even when he was not looking at Prudence he knew exactly where she was and what she was doing. This invasion of his mind was troublesome and disturbing, and when he found that it extended to minutiae like the design of her jacket buttons and the pattern of stitching in her boots his sense of aggravation increased. He slumped in the spacious darkness of the rear seat of the car Ambrose had rented that afternoon and thought nostalgically about other girls he had known. There had, for instance, been Eva—the German interpreter in Malaq—who understood the principle of sexual quid pro quo. That had been less than three years earlier, but Snook was annoyed to find he could no longer remember Eva’s face.
“…have to give the planet a name,” Ambrose was saying in the front seat. “It has always been, literally, an underworld, but it doesn’t seem right to call it Hades.”
“Gehenna would be worse,” Prudence replied. “And there’s Tartarus, but I think that was even further down than Hades.”
“It hardly fits, under the circumstances. From what Gil says about the levels in the mine, the antineutrino world will have completely emerged from the Earth in about seventy years.” Ambrose swerved to avoid a pothole and roadside trees were momentarily doused with light from the headlamps. “That’s if it continues separating at the same rate, of course. We don’t know for sure that it will.”
“I’ve got it!” Prudence moved closer to Ambrose, and Snook—watchful in his dark isolation—knew she had clutched his arm. “Avernus!”
“Avernus? Never heard of it.”
“All I know is that it was another one of those mythological underworlds, but it’s much more euphonious than Hades. Don’t you think it sounds quite pastoral?”
“Could be,” Ambrose said. “Right! You’ve just christened your first planet.”
“Do I get to break a bottle of champagne over it? I’ve always wanted to do that.”
Ambrose laughed appreciatively and Snook’s gloom deepened. The situation at the mine was tense and dangerous, one in which he felt the need to have the big battalions behind him, and he was heading back into it accompanied by what seemed to be the world’s last example of the squire-scientist and his new girl friend. There was also die possibility of having to listen to their small-talk right through the night, a prospect he found unbearable. Snook began to whistle, quite loudly, choosing an old standard he had always liked for its sadness, Plaisir d’amour. Prudence allowed him to complete only a few bars then leaned forward and switched on the radio. The strains of a heavily orchestrated version of the same song filled the car.