Surely he was not going to dream that dream again? It took him a great deal longer than usual to get to sleep. Each time he had felt himself dropping off the voice he had thrust out of his mind began sounding there again and he had had to force himself into wakefulness to dispel it.
Yet at last he did get off. Only to be woken by the clatter of the alarm with all that sequence of events doubly clear in his head. In sleep the voice had led him along the same path again, in every appalling detail.
He did not cut himself shaving. But at breakfast he found himself putting a strange proposition to his Mousie.
“Dear, I’ve been thinking,” he said.
He had not. He had not had the faintest notion of what he was about to say until he had begun to speak.
“Dear, I’ve been thinking. Perhaps when it comes to our holiday we ought to give Bournemouth a miss this year and instead...”
He paused. It was a monstrous idea that had come to him.
“Well, what about us taking a trip up to Scotland? To Deeside? We could look at some properties. Spy out the lie of the land.”
Mousie’s granite face broke into one of its rare smiles. It was as if the sun had glinted out in her native Aberdeen and the grey old buildings had suddenly sparkled with a hundred thousand little points of light.
“Oh, Thomas,” she said.
The rest of breakfast passed without her mentioning that, undabbed by cottonwool now, he ought to invite the Watsons. And she did not even telephone during the course of the day, though she was always a great one for ringing with little reminders. It was something that deeply embarrassed him, though he had never spoken of it.
But his day was not happy. Every time he had occasion to use the computer the thought of that twice repeated dream came crowding back to him. And with it came the sombre realization that he had actually begun, as if he were delicately dipping a toe into cold water, to consider the possibility of carrying out the plan. Why else, he asked himself, had he made that suggestion to Mousie? At his present salary and with his actual prospects he would never be able to afford the sort of house Mousie wanted in the area he had proposed going to. What had entered into him? What was happening?
That night as he dropped his head on to his pillow he was not in the least surprised to find himself recalling the voice of the tempter. He almost welcomed it, and fell asleep as quickly as ever he had.
And dreamt the dream once more, heard once again that curious name Zygo, was instructed in the way this last place in the computer’s series could be used for his gain.
Buffeted to and fro in the crowded tube train on his way to the office next morning, he somehow found that he had decided that he was going to set up the Zygo operation. Of course, he told himself, there was no question of opening a bank account in the name of a non-existent commission agent called Zygo so as to draw out any actual cash. He was just going to see if the whole complex routine he now knew so well worked.
Perhaps it wouldn’t. Perhaps it was “all a dream.” And, even if he did succeed in transferring all those few, scarcely wanted pennies into the Zygo slot, well, without a bank to put the money into he would not truly have stolen anything.
It worked all right. Just before the end of the day he requested from the computer, to which he had devoted a quiet half-hour almost as soon as he had got in, the figure for the balance in the last place in the sales-commission series. And up it came. A hundred and fifty-seven pounds, forty pence. It was no fortune. But it had shown that the scheme worked. And, unless at the first opportunity he undid that careful half-hour’s work of the morning, with each day that passed a similar sum would accrue to the Zygo account.
On his way home, walking from the station, Thomas Henniker found he was calculating how many working-days would be needed to put into the Zygo account an amount large enough to acquire for his Mousie her dream house. He worked out that, as it so happened, the period would take him neatly to the date at the end of the following year when he could take an early retirement.
It was a very different situation from wondering, as he had been accustomed to do, whether the firm would allow him to soldier on past the usual retirement age in the hope, probably vain, that in that way he might accumulate enough at last to buy some sort of a house just outside Aberdeen.
He gave himself a little shake. Of course, there could be no question of an early retirement.
But, when he reached home and Mousie began at once to talk about their Deeside holiday, he came out, chirpy as a parrot, with a broad hint that his investments, in reality pitifully small and painfully cautious, had been doing surprisingly well and that an early retirement was something they might well be thinking about.
Mousie made no further reference to entertaining the Watsons either that evening or in the days that followed. And at night Thomas did not in his sleep hear again the wheezing, insistent voice.
He did not need to. He had begun to accumulate his retirement fund. Somehow he had crossed his Rubicon while he was, so to speak, looking over his shoulder at the distant view. Only occasionally, as the weeks went by, did he find it necessary to comfort himself with the thought that he had not yet opened a bank account in the name of Zygo and that theoretically Maggesson’s Mail Order had not yet been robbed.
September came, and with it his holiday. (He always took this late since he felt it only fair to let members of the staff with children, though junior to him, have July and August.) Up and down the length of Deeside he and Mousie roamed, looking at every house on the market.
In the end they found a place that seemed ideal. It had been empty for a good while and they were told there was no hurry to put down the fairly large deposit required.
That night in bed Mousie recited her verse of the Canadian Boat Song, but with a triumphant rather than a keening note in her voice. First thing next morning Thomas slipped away “for a walk” and drew out a good sum from his own bank account and in a different bank opened an account in the name of John Zygo. He thought, as he signed the necessary forms, that John sounded a good honest forename.
Back at work, at the very first opportunity he requested from the computer the balance in the last in the series of sales-commission accounts. He had not made such a request after his first confirmatory one, but now he wanted to know just how much there was in the Zygo account that by writing one single cheque he could get into his hands. He imagined that, in fact, it would be about a quarter of the total needed for the house, quite enough to cover the deposit.
In moments the figure he wanted appeared.
He looked at it in astonishment, blinked, looked again, felt an overwhelming sense of puzzlement blossom in his head like a cloud of exploding dust.
The figure was only three hundred and twenty-four pounds, twenty pence.
It could not be right. Feverishly, with sweat-slippery fingers, he requested the information again. And got the same answer. Had the computer made a mistake? But computers never make mistakes. There is only human error.
He found it so difficult to concentrate when he got back to his desk that, after two more vain visits to the computer console, he went to Mr. Watson and said he felt indisposed and wanted to go home.
Walking slowly to the tube and on the train and walking slowly from the station, Thomas battered at his brain to seek some explanation of what had gone wrong. He could think of nothing. He had faithfully carried out the directions the mouth-organ voice had given him in those three successive dreams. He could not have forgotten a single detail. He was not accustomed to making mistakes. Never in all the years he had been with the firm, even when he had just been a youngster, had anyone ever found an error in his work.