'Now, Mr Watson, did you receive any impressions that would support such a view?'
I shook my head. 'Right out of my field, sir. Surely the report on the specimen ought to help there?'
'I have a copy of that all jargon to me, but our advisers tell me that everything in it is so qualified and cautious as to be practically useless except in so far as it shows that it is strange enough to baffle the experts.'
'Perhaps I'm being stupid,' Phyllis put in, 'but does it really matter a lot? From a practical point of view, I mean? The things have to be tackled the same way whether they are really living or pseudo-living, surely?'
'That's true enough,' the Admiral agreed. 'All the same, a speculation of that kind, if unsupported, has the effect of putting the whole report in a dubious light.'
We went on talking for a while, but little more of importance emerged, and shortly afterwards we were ushered from the presence.
'Oh oh oh!' said Phyllis painedly, as we got outside. 'I've a good mind to go straight round and shake Dr Bocker. He promised me. he wouldn't say anything yet about that "pseudo" business. He's just a kind of natural-born enfant terrible, it'd do him good to be shaken. Just wait till I get him alone.'
'It does weaken his whole case,' Captain Winters agreed.
'Weaken it! Somebody is going to hand this to the newspapers. They play it up hard as another Bockerism, the whole thing will become just a stunt and that will put all the sensible people against whatever he says. And just as he was beginning to live some of the other things down, tool Oh, let's go and have dinner before I get out of hand.'
A bad week followed. Those papers that had already adopted The Beholder's scornful attitude to coastal preparations pounced upon the pseudo-biotic suggestions with glee. Writers of editorials filled their pens with sarcasm, a squad of scientists who had trounced Bocker before was now marched out again to grind him still smaller. Almost every cartoonist discovered simultaneously why his favourite political butts had somehow never seemed quite human.
The other part of the Press, already advocating effective coastal defences, let its imagination go on the subject of pseudo-living structures that might yet be created, and demanded still better defence against the horrific possibilities thought up by its staffs.
Then the sponsor informed EBC that his fellow directors considered that their product's reputation would suffer by being associated with this new wave of notoriety and controversy that had arisen around Dr Bocker, and proposed to cancel arrangements. Departmental Heads in EBC began to tear their hair. Time-salesmen put up the old line about any kind of publicity being good publicity. The sponsor talked about dignity, and also the risk that purchase of the product might be regarded as tacit endorsement of the Bocker theory, which, he feared, might have the effect of promoting sales-resistance in the upper income brackets. EBC parried with the observation that buildup publicity had already tied the names of Bocker and the product together in the public mind. Nothing would be gained from reining-in in midstream, so the firm ought to go ahead and get the best of its money's worth.
The sponsor said that his firm had attempted to make a serious contribution to knowledge and public safety by promoting a scientific expedition, not a vulgar stunt. Just the night before, for instance, one of EBC's own comedians had suggested that pseudo-life might explain a long-standing mystery concerning his mother-in-law, and if this kind of thing was going to be allowed, etc etc EBC promised that it would not contaminate their air in future, and pointed out that if the series on the expedition were dropped after the promises that had been made, a great many consumers in all income-brackets were likely to feel that the sponsor's firm was unreliable
Members of the BBC displayed an infuriatingly courteous sympathy to any members of our staff whom they chanced to meet.
People kept on popping their heads into the room where I was trying to work, and giving me the latest from the front; usually advising me to omit or include this or that aspect according to the way the battle was going at the moment. Through everything ran a nervous realization that the arch-rivals might come out with an eye-witness at any moment and ruin our thunder the courteousness seemed suspiciously urbane. After a couple of days of the atmosphere there I decided to stay at home and do the work there.
But there was still the telephone bringing suggestions and swift changes of policy. We did our best. We wrote and rewrote, trying to satisfy all parties. Two or three hurried conferences with Bocker himself were explosive. He spent most of the time threatening to throw the whole thing up because EBC too obviously would not trust him near alive microphone, and was insisting on recordings.
At last, however, the scripts were finished. We were too tired of them to argue any more. When the first of them did get on the air at last, it sounded to us like something misplaced from Mummy's Angel's Half-Hour. We packed hurriedly and departed blasphemously for the peace and seclusion of Cornwall.
The first noticeable thing as we approached Rose Cottage, 268.6 miles this time, was an innovation.
'Good heavens!' I said. 'We've got a perfectly good one indoors. If I am expected to come and sit out in a draught there just because a lot of your compost-minded friends '
'That,' Phyllis told me, coldly, 'is an arbour.'
I looked at it more carefully. The architecture was unusual. One wall gave an impression of leaning a little.
'Why do we want an arbour?' I inquired.
'Well, one of us might like to work there on a warm day. It keeps the wind off, and stops papers blowing about.'
'Oh,' I said.
With a defensive note, she added:
'After all, when one is bricklaying one has to build something.'
Logical enough, I supposed, but there was a haunting feeling that it did not start from quite the right premiss. I assured her that as arbours went, it was a very nice arbour. I had just not been expecting an arbour, that was all.
'It was not a kind conclusion to jump to,' she said, huffily.
There are times when I wonder whether the two of us are quite as well en rapport as I like to hope. The use of the word 'kind', for instance, in the circumstances But I was able to assure her that I thought it very clever of her: and I did; I don't suppose I myself could have got one brick to stick to another.
It was a relief to be back. Hard to believe that such a place as Escondida existed at all. Still harder to believe in sea-tanks and giant coelenterates, pseudo or not. Yet, somehow, I did not find myself able to relax as I had hoped.
On the first morning Phyllis dug out the fragments of the frequently neglected novel and took them off, with a faintly defiant air, to the arbour. I pottered about, wondering why the sense of peace wasn't seeping in upon me quite as I had hoped. The Cornish sea still lapped immemorially at the rocks. It could thunder, it could menace, it could wreck good ships when it had a mind to; but these were old, natural hazards. They made places like Escondida seem frivolous, even in conception; such places belonged to a different world, one where it was not altogether surprising that freakish things should happen. But Cornwall was not frivolous. It was real and solid. The centuries passed over it unsensationally. The waves gnawed steadily at it, but slowly. When the sea killed its inhabitants it was because they had challenged it: not because it challenged them. It was hard indeed to imagine our home sea spawning such morbid novelties as had slid up the Caribbean beaches of Escondida. Bocker seemed, in recollection, like an impish sprite who had had a power of hallucination. Out of his range, the world was a more sober, better-ordered place. At least, so it appeared for the moment, though the extent to which it was not was increasingly borne in upon me during the next few days as I emerged from our particular concern to take a more general look at it.