Andrea stood up, walked to the door where her suede coat was lying, and put it on. “I’ve had a very pleasant evening, Lucas, but I have an awful lot to do tomorrow and I must get to bed. Do you mind?”
“Of course not,” he mumbled with senseless formality. As he struggled into his clothes he tried to think of something intelligent and unconcerned to say, and finally came out with, “I hope you have good flying weather tomorrow.”
Her face betrayed no emotion. “I hope so too.”
“Good night, Lucas.” She closed the door quietly. The elevator was still at the landing and he rode down in it, staring at his reflection in the scratched aluminium.
Incredibly, after all that had happened, it was only a little after midnight when he got home, and Vicky was still up. The comfortable old skirt and cardigan she was wearing suggested to him that she had not been out and that no stranger had been in the house during his absence. She was watching the late movie on television and as usual the colour control was turned down too far, producing a faded picture. He adjusted the colour and sat down tiredly without speaking.
“Where have you been this evening, Lucas?”
“Out drinking.”
He waited for her to contradict him, directly or by inference, but she said, “You shouldn’t drink a lot. It doesn’t agree with you.”
“It agrees with me better than some things.”
She turned to face him, and spoke hesitantly. “I get the impression that… all this has really hurt you, Lucas, and it surprises me. Did you not understand what you were letting yourself in for?”
Hutchman stared at his wife. He had always loved her most when she wore the sort of friendly, familiar clothes she had on now. Her face was grave and beautiful in the subdued orange light, imbued with the power to make him whole again. He thought of his first batch of envelopes, sorted and separated now, speeding on the first stages of the journeys from which no power of his could bring them back.
“Go to hell, you,” he said thickly and walked out of the room.
Early next morning Hutchman drove east almost as far as Maidstone and dispatched another sheaf of envelopes. The weather was sunny and relatively warm. He got back to the house to find Vicky and David having a late breakfast. The boy was eating cereal and trying to do arithmetic problems at the same time.
“Dad,” he shouted accusingly. “Why do sums have to have hundreds, tens, and units? Why couldn’t it all be units? That way there’d be no carrying to do.”
“It wouldn’t work very well, son. But why are you doing homework on a Sunday morning?”
David shrugged. “The teacher hates me.”
“That’s not true, David,” Vicky put in.
“Then why does she give me more sums than the other boys?”
“To help you.” Vicky glanced up at Hutchman appealingly. He took David’s book and pencil, jotted down the answers to the remaining problems, and handed it back to the boy.
“Thanks, Dad.” David looked at him in wonderment, then darted out of the kitchen whooping with glee.
“Why did you do that?” Vicky lifted the coffeepot, poured an extra cup, and pushed it across the table to Hutchman. “You’ve always said that sort of thing didn’t help him.”
“We seemed to be immortal in those days.”
“Meaning?’
“Perhaps there isn’t enough time to do everything slowly and properly.”
Vicky pressed her hand to her throat. “I’ve been watching you, Lucas. You don’t act like a man who’s been…” She sighed. “What would you say if I told you I hadn’t been unfaithful in the clinical sense of the word?”
“I’d say what you’ve said to me several hundred times in the past — that doing it in the mind is just as bad.”
“But what if it was nauseating to my mind, and I only — “
“What are you trying to do to me?” he demanded harshly, pressing the knuckles of one hand to his lips in case they should tremble. After all that’s happened, he wondered in panic, am I going to fall? Can the lady dissolve her homunculus in acid and recreate him at will?
“Lucas, have you been unfaithful to me?” Her face was that of a priestess.
“No.”
“Then what has all this been about?”
Hutchman, standing with the coffee cup in his hands, felt his knees begin to orbit in minute circles which threatened to become larger and bring him down. A fearsome shift took place in his mind. Why do I need the machine? The spread of the information is all that matters. World-wide knowledge of how to build the antibomb machine would, by itself, make the possession of any nuclear device too risky. Even if the machine were destroyed my envelopes could still go out as a didactic hoax. Better still, I could open all the remaining envelopes and remove the letter — and just send the information. And without the hardware I could be safe. They need never find me…
He became aware that the telephone was ringing. Vicky halfrose from the table, but he waved her back, hurried impatiently into the hall, and lifted the instrument, cutting it short in the middle of a peal.
“Hutchman speaking.”
“Good morning, Lucas.” The woman’s voice seemed to speak to him from another existence, something completely alien and irrelevant to Hutchman as he was on that bright Sunday morning. It took a genuine mental effort for him to identify the speaker as Andrea Knight.
“Hello,” he said uneasily. “I thought you’d have been at Gat wick by this time.”
“That was the original plan, but I’ve been transferred to a later flight.”
“Oh!” Hutchman tried to understand why she had rung him. To gloat? To try to make him feel worse by pretending to try to make him feel better?
“Lucas, I’d like to see you today. Can you come round to my flat?”
“Sorry,” he said coldly. “I don’t see any point…”
“It’s about the envelope you gave me to post for you.”
“Well?” He suddenly found difficulty in breathing.
“I opened it.”
“You what?”
“It occurred to me that I should know what I was carrying into Moscow. After all, I’m a practicing socialist, and if the article was intended for publication anyway…”
“You’re a socialist?” he asked faintly.
“Yes. 1 told you that last night.”
“So you did.” He recalled Andrea saying as much, but then it had seemed unimportant. He took a deep breath. “Well, what did you think of my little hoax? Childish, isn’t it?”
There was a long pause. “Not very childish, Lucas, no.”
“But I assure you…”
“I showed the papers to a friend and he didn’t laugh much, either.”
“You’d no right to do that.” He made a feeble attempt at blustering.
“And you’d no right to involve me in something like this. Would you like to come round here and discuss the matter?”
“Just try stopping me.” He threw the phone down and strode into the kitchen. “Something has come up on the Jack-and-Jill program. I have to go out for an hour.”
Vicky looked concerned. “On Sunday? Is it serious?”
“Not serious — just urgent. I’ll be back in an hour.”
“All right. Lucas.” She smiled tremulously, in a way that hurt him to see. “We have to sit down together and talk.”
“I know.” He ran out to his car, broadsided it out onto the road in a turn which sent gravel hissing through the shrubbery like grapeshot, and accelerated fiercely in the direction of Camburn. The traffic was light — with a scattering of people on their way for a pre-lunch drink — and he made good time, the concentration on fast motoring relieving him of the necessity to plan his immediate actions. When he reached the apartment block where Andrea lived it looked unfamiliar in the lemoncoloured sunlight. He stopped the car and glanced up at the top floor. There was nobody at the windows of her flat. He walked quickly to the elevator and rode up in it, staring distastefully at the aluminium walls which in their distorted reflections seemed to store visual records of the previous night’s madness. He thumbed Andrea’s doorbell, still without taking time to think of what he might say or do. She opened the door within seconds. Her dusky face, with its pouting lower lip, was immobile as she stood aside to let him enter.