Not After Midnight & Other Stories

I looked up. Mac was watching me from the doorway. The dog was with him.

Cerberus is restless,' he said. 'He keeps padding backwards and forwards in my room. He won't let me sleep.'

'Mac,' I said, 'I've played that recording again. There's something wrong.'

He came and stood beside me. 'What do you mean, something wrong? The recording doesn't affect the issue. Look at the screen. The signal's steady. The experiment has been a hundred per cent successful. We've done what we set out to do. The energy is there.'

'I know it's there,' I replied, 'but is that all?'

I set the recording in motion once again. Together we listened to the child's gasp, and the words 'Let go… let go…'

'Mac,' I said, 'when the child said that, Ken was already dead. Therefore, there could be no further communication between them.'

'Well?'

'How then, after death, can she still identify herself with his personality-a personality that says "Let go… let go…" unless

'Unless what?'

'Unless something has happened that we know to be impossible, and what we can see, imprisoned on the screen, is the essence of Ken himself?'

He stared at me, unbelieving, and together we looked once more at the signal, which suddenly took on new meaning, new significance, and as it did so became the expression of our dawning sense of anguish and fear.

'Mac,' I said, 'what have we done?'

Mrs Janus telephoned in the morning to say that Niki had woken up and was acting strangely. She kept throwing herself backwards and forwards. Mrs Janus had tried to quieten her, but nothing she said did any good. No, she had no temperature, she was not feverish. It was this queer rocking movement all the time. She would not eat any breakfast, she would not speak. Could Mac put through the call signal? It might quieten her.

Janus had answered the phone, and we were in the dining-room when he brought us his wife's message. Robbie got up and went to the telephone. He came back again almost immediately.

'I'll go over,' he said. 'What happened yesterday-I should never have allowed it.'

'You knew the risk,' answered Mac. 'We've all known the risk from the very start. You always assured me it would do no harm.'

'I was wrong,' said Robbie. 'Oh, not about the experiment… God knows you've done what you wanted to do, and it didn't affect poor Ken one way or the other. He's out of it all now. But I was wrong to let that child become involved.'

'We shouldn't have succeeded without her,' replied Mac. Robbie went out and we heard him start up the car. Mac and I walked along to the control room. Janus and Robbie had been there before us, and had taken Ken's body away. The room was stripped once more to the essentials of normal routine, with one exception. Charon 3, the storage unit, still functioned as it had done the previous day and through the night, the signal keeping up its steady rise and fall. I found myself glancing at it almost furtively, in the irrational hope that it would cease.

Presently the telephone buzzed, and I answered it. It was Robbie.

'I think we ought to get the child away,' he said at once. 'It looks like catatonic schizophrenia, and whether she becomes violent or not Mrs J. can't cope with it. If Mac will say the word, I could take her up myself to the psychiatric ward at Guy's.'

I beckoned to Mac, explaining the situation. He took the receiver from me.

'Look, Robbie,' he said, 'I'm prepared to take the risk of putting Niki under control. It may work, or it may not.'

The argument continued. I could tell from Mac's gesture of frustration that Robbie would not play. He was surely right. Some irreparable damage might have been done to the child's mind already. Yet, if Robbie did take her up to the hospital, what possible explanation could he give?

Mac waved me over to replace him at the telephone.

'Tell Robbie to stand by,' he said.

I was his subordinate, and could not stop him. He went to the transmitter on Charon 2 and set the control. The call signal was in operation. I lifted the receiver and gave Robbie Mac's message. Then I waited.

I heard Robbie shout to Mrs Janus, 'What's the matter?'- then the sound of the receiver being dropped.

Nothing for a moment or two but distant voices, Mrs Janus, I think, pleading, and then an appeal to Robbie, 'Please, let her try…'

Mac went over to Charon 1 and made some adjustments. Then he waved to me to bring the telephone as near to him as it would go, and reached out for the receiver.

'Niki; he said, 'do you hear me? It's Mac.'

I stood beside him, to catch the whisper from the receiver. 'Yes, Mac.'

She sounded bewildered, even frightened.

'Tell me what's wrong, Niki.'

She began to whimper. 'I don't know. There's a clock ticking somewhere. I don't like it.'

'Where's the clock, Niki?'

She did not answer. Mac repeated his question. I could hear Robbie protest. He must have been standing beside her.

'It's all round,' she said at last. 'It's ticking in my head. Penny doesn't like it either.'

Penny. Who was Penny? Then I remembered. The dead twin.

'Why doesn't Penny like it?'

This was intolerable. Robbie was right. Mac should not put the child through this ordeal. I shook my head at him. He took no notice, but once again repeated his question. I could hear the child burst into tears.

'Penny… is …' she sobbed, 'Penny… Ken.'

Instantly Mac switched to the recorded voice of Charon 1 giving the order on yesterday's programme: 'Stay with Ken. Tell us what happens.'

The child gave a piercing cry, and she must have fallen, because I heard Robbie and Mrs Janus exclaim and the telephone crash.

Mac and I looked at the screen. The rhythm was getting faster, the signal moving in quick jerks. Robbie, at his end, picked up the receiver.

'You'll kill her, Mac,' he called. 'For Christ's sake…' 'What's she doing?' asked Mac.

'The same as yesterday,' called Robbie. 'Backwards, forwards, rocking all the time. She's suffocating. Wait…'

Once again he must have let the receiver go. Mac switched back to the call signal. The pulsing on the screen was steadying. Then, after a long interval, Robbie's voice came through again.

'She wants to speak,' he said.

There was a pause. The child's voice, expressionless and dull, said, 'Let them go.'

'Are you all right now, Niki?' asked Mac.

'Let them go,' she repeated.

Mac deliberately hung up. Together we watched the signal resume its normal speed.

'Well?' I said. 'What does it prove?'

He looked suddenly old, and immeasurably tired, but there was an expression in his eyes that I had never seen before; a curious, baffled incredulity. It was as though everything he possessed, senses, body, brain, protested and denied the thoughts within.

'It could mean you were right,' he said. 'It could mean survival of intelligence after the body's death. It could mean we've broken through.'

The thought, staggering in its implications, turned us both dumb. Mac recovered first. He went and stood beside Charon 3, his gaze fixed upon the picture.

'You saw it change when the child was speaking,' he said. But Niki by herself could not have caused the variation. The power came from Ken's Force Six, and from the dead twin's too. The power is capable of transmission through Niki, but through no one else. Don't you see…' He broke off, and swung round to face me, a new excitement dawning. 'Niki is the only link. We must get her here, programme Charon, and put further questions to her. If we really have got intelligence plus power under control…'

'Mac,' I interrupted, 'do you want to kill that child, or, worse, condemn her to a mental institution?'

In desperation he looked once more towards the screen. 'I've got to know, Steve,' he said. I’ve got to find out. If intelligence survives, if Force Six can triumph over matter, then it's not just one man who has beaten death but all mankind from the beginning of time. Immortality in some form or other becomes a certainty, the whole meaning of life on earth is changed.'