Wormold called Lopez from the shop. He handed him twenty-five pesos. He said, ‘This is your first month’s pay in advance.’ He knew Lopez too well to expect any gratitude for the extra five pesos, but all the same he was a little taken aback when Lopez said, ‘Thirty pesos would be a living wage.’ ‘What do you mean, a living wage? The agency pays you very well as it is.’
‘This will mean a great deal of work,’ Lopez said.
‘It will, will it? What work?’
‘Personal service.’
‘What personal service?’
‘It must obviously be a great deal of work or you wouldn’t pay me twenty-five pesos.’ He had never been able to get the better of Lopez in a financial argument.
‘I want you to bring me an Atomic Pile from the shop,’ Wormold said.
‘We have only one in the store.’
‘I want it up here.’
Lopez sighed. ‘Is that a personal service?’
‘Yes.’
When he was alone Wormold unscrewed the cleaner into its various parts. Then he sat down at his desk and began to make a series of careful drawings. As he sat back and contemplated his sketches of the sprayer detached from the hose handle of the cleaner, the needle-jet, the nozzle and the telescopic tube, he wondered: Am I perhaps going too far? He realized that he had forgotten to indicate the scale. He ruled a line and numbered it off: one inch representing three feet. Then for better measure he drew a little man two inches high below the nozzle. He dressed him neatly in a dark suit, and gave him a bowler hat and an umbrella.
When Milly came home that evening he was still busy, writing his first report with a large map of Cuba spread over his desk. ‘What are you doing, Father?’
‘I am taking the first step in a new career.’
She looked over his shoulder. ‘Are you becoming a writer?’
‘Yes, an imaginative writer.’
‘Will that earn you a lot of money?’
‘A moderate income, Milly, if I set my mind to it and write regularly. I plan to compose an essay like this every Saturday evening.’ ‘Will you be famous?’
‘I doubt it. Unlike most writers I shall give all the credit to my ghosts.’
‘Ghosts?’
‘That’s what they call those who do the real work while the author takes the pay. In my case I shall do the real work and it will be the ghosts who take the credit.’
‘But you’ll have the pay?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Then can I buy a pair of spurs?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Are you feeling all right, Father?’
‘I never felt better. What a great sense of release you must have experienced when you set fire to Thomas Earl Parkman, junior.’ ‘Why do you go on bringing that up, Father? It was years ago.’
‘Because I admire you for it. Can’t you do it again?’
‘Of course not. I’m too old. Besides, there are no boys in the senior school. Father, one other thing. Could I buy a hunting flask?’ ‘Anything you like. Oh, wait. What are you going to put in it?’
‘Lemonade.’
‘Be a good girl and fetch me a new sheet of paper. Engineer Cifuentes is a man of many words.’
‘Had a good flight?’ the Chief asked.
‘A bit bumpy over the Azores,’ Hawthorne said. On this occasion he had not had time to change from his pale grey tropical suit; the summons had come to him urgently in Kingston and a car had met him at London Airport. He sat as close to the steam radiator as he could, but sometimes he couldn’t help a shiver.
‘What’s that odd flower you’re wearing?’
Hawthorne had quite forgotten it. He put his hand up to his lapel. ‘It looks as though it had once been an orchid,’ the Chief said with disapproval.
‘Pan American gave it us with our dinner last night,’ Hawthorne explained. He took out the limp mauve rag and put it in the ashtray. ‘With your dinner? What an odd thing to do,’ the Chief said. ‘It can hardly have improved the meal. Personally I detest orchids. Decadent things. There was someone, wasn’t there, who wore green ones?’ ‘I only put it in my button-hole so as to clear the dinner-tray. There was so little room what with the hot cakes and champagne and the sweet salad and the tomato soup and the chicken Maryland and ice-cream.. ‘What a terrible mixture. You should travel B. O. A. C.’
‘You didn’t give me enough time, sir, to get a booking.’ ‘Well, the matter is rather urgent. You know our man in Havana has been turning out some pretty disquieting stuff lately.’
‘He’s a good man,’ Hawthorne said.
‘I don’t deny it. I wish we had more like him. What I can’t understand is how the Americans have not tumbled to anything there.’ ‘Have you asked them, sir?’
‘Of course not. I don’t trust their discretion.’
‘Perhaps they don’t trust ours.’
The Chief said, ‘Those drawings -did you examine them?’
‘I’m not very knowledgeable that way, sir. I sent them straight on.’
‘Well, take a good look at them now.’
The Chief spread the drawings over his desk. Hawthorne reluctantly left the radiator and was immediately shaken by a shiver. ‘Anything the matter?’
‘The temperature was ninety-two yesterday in Kingston.’ ‘Your blood’s getting thin. A spell of cold will do you good. What do you think of them?’
Hawthorne stared at the drawings. They reminded him of -something. He was touched, he didn’t know why, by an odd uneasiness. ‘You remember the reports that came with them,’ the Chief said. ‘The source was stroke three. Who is he?’
‘I think that would be Engineer Cifuentes, sir.’
‘Well, even he was mystified. With all his technical knowledge. These machines were being transported by lorry from the army headquarters at Bayamo to the edge of the forest. Then mules took over. General direction those unexplained concrete platforms.’
‘What does the Air Ministry say, sir?’
‘They are worried, very worried. Interested too, of course.’
‘What about the atomic research people?’
‘We haven’t shown them the drawings yet. You know what those fellows are like. They’ll criticize points of detail, say the whole thing is unreliable, that the tube is out of proportion or points the wrong way. You can’t expect an agent working from memory to get every detail right. I want photographs, Hawthorne.’
‘That’s asking a lot, sir.’
‘We have got to have them. At any risk. Do you know what Savage said to me? I can tell you, it gave me a very nasty nightmare. He said that one of the drawings reminded him of a giant vacuum cleaner.’
‘A vacuum cleaner!’ Hawthorne bent down and examined the drawings again, and the cold struck him once more.
‘Makes you shiver, doesn’t it?’
‘But that’s impossible, sir.’ He felt as though he were pleading for his own career, ‘It couldn’t be a vacuum cleaner, sir. Not a vacuum cleaner.’
‘Fiendish, isn’t it?’ the Chief said. ‘The ingenuity, the simplicity,
the devilish imagination of the thing.’ He removed his black monocle and his baby-blue eye caught the light and made it jig on the wall over the radiator. ‘See this one here six times the height of a man. Like a gigantic spray. And this -what does this remind you of?’
Hawthorne said unhappily. ‘A two-way nozzle.’
‘What’s a two-way nozzle?’
‘You sometimes find them with a vacuum cleaner.’
‘Vacuum cleaner again. Hawthorne, I believe we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.’ ‘Is that desirable, sir?’
‘Of course it’s desirable. Nobody worries about conventional weapons.’
‘What have you in mind, sir?’
‘I’m no scientist,’ the Chief said, ‘but look at this great tank. It must stand nearly as high as the forest-trees. A huge gaping mouth at the top, and this pipe-line the man’s only indicated it. For all we know, it may extend for miles -from the mountain to the sea perhaps. You know the Russians are said to be working on some idea something to do with the power of the sun, sea-evaporation. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I do know this thing is Big. Tell our man we must have photographs.’