I hurried over to the door and opened it and was about to make off down the passage when something made me halt abruptly—a subliminal sound-effect or air-movement. I put my hand forward and the finger-tips touched an invisible barrier, hard and totally smooth, like plate-glass but without any trace of reflection. It filled the doorway. Uncertain what to do next, I turned aside, looked up and saw that somebody was sitting in the armchair on the far side of the fireplace. This person, a young man with silky fair hair and a pale face, could not (of course) have come into the room without my knowing it.
‘Very good,’ said the young man heartily. He was watching me with a faint down-turned smile. ‘A lot of people, you know, would have gone walking straight into that thing. Shows you’ve got good reflexes and all that. Now, if you’d like to sit down there, we can have a bit of a talk. Nothing too serious, I assure you.’
At the outset I had let out a girlish shriek of alarm. The alarm was sincere enough, but it immediately passed, to be replaced by an intensification of the charged-up feeling I had had the previous morning before setting off for Cambridge: nervous energy with nervousness but without nerves. Perhaps my visitor had brought this about. I came forward and seated myself in the opposite chair, looking him over. He was, or appeared to be, about twenty-eight years old, with a squarish, clean-shaven, humorous, not very trustworthy face, unabundant eyebrows and eyelashes, and good teeth. He wore a dark suit of conventional cut, silver-grey shirt, black knitted silk tie, dark-grey socks and black shoes, well polished. His speech was very fully modulated, like that of a man interested in discourse, and his accent educated, without affectations. Altogether he seemed prosperous, assured and in good physical shape, apart from his pallor.
‘Are you a messenger?’ I asked.
‘No. I decided to come, uh … in person.’
‘I see. Can I offer you a drink?’
‘Yes, thank you, I’m fully corporeal. I was going to warn you against making the mistake of supposing that I come from inside your mind, but you’ve saved me that trouble. I’ll join you in a little Scotch, if I may.’
I got out the glasses. ‘I suppose I couldn’t get into the passage because all molecular motion outside this room has stopped?’
‘Correct. We’re not subject to ordinary time in here. Makes us pretty safe from interruption.’
‘And all radiation has likewise ceased, outside?’
‘Of course. You must have noticed the way the sound packed up.’
‘Yes, I did. But in that case, why hasn’t the light packed up too, outside? And in here as well, for that matter? If all wavelengths are affected, I can’t see how the sun can get to us, any more than the sound of the tractor can. Everything would be dark.’
‘Excellent, Maurice.’ The young man laughed in what was clearly meant to be a relaxed, jovial. way, but I thought I could hear vexation in it. ‘Do you know, you’re almost the first non-scientist to spot that one? I’d forgotten you were such a man of education. Well, I thought things in general would just look better if I arranged them like this.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I said, holding up glass and water-jug and starting to pour. ‘Is this a test of some sort?’
‘Thank you, that’s fine … No, it isn’t a test. How could it be? What do you suppose would happen to you if you passed a test I’d set for you? Or failed it? You of all people know I don’t work that way.’
I moved back with the drinks and held one out. The hand that came up and took it, and the wrist and lower forearm that disappeared into the silver-grey shirt-cuff, were by no means complete, so that the fingers clicked against the glass, and at the same time I caught a whiff of that worst odour in the world, which I had not smelt since accompanying a party of Free French through the Falaise Gap in 1944. In a moment it was gone, and fingers, hand and everything else were as they had been before.
‘That was unnecessary,’ I said, sitting down again.
‘Don’t you believe it, old boy. Puts things on the right footing between us. This isn’t just a social call, you know. Cheers.’
I did not drink. ‘What is it, then?’
‘More than one thing, of course. Anyway, I like to make these trips every so often, as you’re well aware.’
‘Keeping in touch?’
‘Don’t fool about with me, Maurice,’ said the young man, with his downward smile. His eyes were a very light brown, almost the colour of his hair and his thin eyebrows. ‘You know I know everything everybody thinks.’
‘So you haven’t come because you’re particularly interested in me.’
‘No. But slightly because you’re particularly interested in me. In all my aspects. You’d agree, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’d have thought only in the one you demonstrated to me a moment ago,’ I said, drinking now.
‘I’ll be the judge of that. Whether you like it or not, and whether you’re aware of it or not, being interested in one means being interested in them all. You’re in quite a common situation, actually.’
‘Then why pick on me? What have I done?’
‘Done?’ He laughed, altogether genially this time. ‘You’re a human being, aren’t you?…Born into this world, and so forth. And what’s so terrible about my popping in to see you like this? Worse troubles at sea, you know. No, I picked on you, as you rather ungraciously put it, partly because you’re, uh …‘ He paused and rotated the ice in his drink, then went on as if starting a new sentence, in the way he had. ‘A good security risk.’
‘Drunk and seeing ghosts and half off my head. Yes.’
‘And not what anybody in their senses would take for a saint or a mystic or anything. That’s it. I have to be careful, you see.’
‘Careful? You make the rules, don’t you? You can do anything you like.’
‘Oh, you don’t understand, my dear fellow. As one might expect. It’s precisely because I make the rules that I can’t do anything I like. But let’s leave that for now. I want to talk for a moment, if I may, about this chap Underhill. Things have been getting a bit out of hand there. I want you to be very careful with him, Maurice. Very careful indeed.’
‘Steer clear of him, you mean?’
‘Certainly not,’ he said, with emphasis and, it seemed, in complete earnest. ‘Quite the contrary. He’s a dangerous man, old Underhill. Well, in a mild way. A minor threat to security. If he’s left to himself, it’ll be just that much more difficult to keep going the general impression that human life ends with the grave. A very basic rule of mine says I have to maintain that impression. Almost as basic as the one about everything having to seem as if it comes about by chance.’
‘I see that one, but you must admit that impression about the grave is comparatively recent.’
‘Nonsense. You only know what people said they believed. There’s never been any real difficulty from that direction. Now then, I want you to stand up to Underhill and, uh … Put paid to him.’
‘How?’
‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. Sorry to be a bore, but I’ll have to leave the whole thing to you. I hope you make it.’
‘Surely you know? Whether I will or not?’
The young man sighed, swallowed audibly and smoothed his fair hair. ‘No. I don’t know. I only wish I did. People think I have foreknowledge, which is a useful thing for them to think in a way, but the whole idea’s nonsense logically unless you rule out free will, and I can’t do that. They were just trying to make me out to be grander than I could possibly be, for very nice motives a lot of the time.’