“That’s the first thought that popped into your mind, is it?”
Spain shrugged and continued to grin. “It isn’t like you to work late, Hutch, and you’ve been acting a bit strange all day. Those symptoms are all part of the Batterbee syndrome. You remember Batterbee, don’t you?”
Hutchman nodded as his dread of Spain returned in full force. Batterbee had been a senior project engineer, much celebrated in Westfield lore, who had lost his job through being caught flagrante delicto with his secretary on the office carpet while supposed to be working overtime. Spain never tired of retelling the Story.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Hutchman said. He picked up his pencil and made a show of jotting figures on his notepad, but Spain stayed around for a further fifteen minutes discussing office politics. By the time he left Hutchman’s ability to concentrate had been seriously impaired and he had begun to feel tired. He forced himself to work on, intending to have the schematics worked out before going to bed so that in the morning he could concentrate on the problems of buying hardware. It was past nine when he crammed all the paperwork into his briefcase and went out into the darkness. The soft, thick October air was filled with the smell of decaying chestnut leaves and a brilliant planet shone low in the western sky, like a coachlamp. He breathed deeply while walking to his car — inhale for four paces, hold for four paces, exhale for four paces — and waved goodnight to the officer in the security kiosk at the main gate. It was a pleasant night, providing one didn’t think too deeply about man-made suns in brief blossom over defenseless cities.
The Home Counties evening traffic was at its incredible worst and at one point, where he should have made a right turn onto the Crymchurch road, he had to turn left and make a twenty-minute detour with the result that he did not reach home until well past ten o’clock. The house was ablaze with light behind its screen of poplars, as though a party were in progress, but there was utter silence when he went in through the side door from the carport. He found Vicky scanning a magazine in the lounge and one glance at her white, set face reminded him that he had omitted to telephone and let her know he would be late. A standard lamp close behind her chair cast a cone of apricot-coloured light in which the magazine’s turning pages flared briefly.
“Sorry,” he said, setting his briefcase on a chair. “I was working late at the office.”
Vicky flipped two pages before replying “Is that what you call it?”
“I do call working, working; late, late; and the office, the office,” Hutchman said tartly. “Which particular word are you having difficulty with?”
Vicky nodded silently, continuing to flick through the magazine. This was the phase of an argument in which Hutchman usually did well because his wife disdained word-spinning. Later on, when the rapiers were broken and the cudgels came out, she would gain the upper hand, but it would be the small hours of the morning before that stage was reached, and there would be very little sleep for either of them. The prospect of another tortured night filled Hutchman with helpless anger.
He stood in front of Vicky and addressed the top of her head. “Listen, Vicky, you don’t really think I’ve been with another woman, do you?”
She tilted her gaze to meet his, a look of polite surprise on the small desperate face. “I didn’t mention another woman, Lucas. Why did you?”
“Because you were about to.”
“Don’t let your conscience put words into my mouth.” Vicky reached the end of the magazine, turned it over, and began flicking pages at precisely the same rate as before.
“I haven’t got a conscience.”
“I know that. What’s her name, Lucas? Was it Maudie Werner?”
“Who’s Maudie Werner, for God’s sake?”
“The new… tart in data processing.”
Hutchman blinked incredulously. “Look, I work in Westfield’s and I don’t know this person — how can you possibly know her?”
“You must be very slow, Lucas,” Vicky said. “Or you’re pretending to be. I was talking to Mrs. Dunwoody last week and she told me the word went round the firm about Maudie Werner the day she arrived.”
Hutchman turned without speaking and went into the kitchen, the struggle to control his nerves making the act of walking seem difficult. He took some cold chicken and a carton of Russian salad from the refrigerator and put them on a plate.
It’s happened again, he thought. Like telepathy. Spain’s mind and Vicky’s working in exactly the same way, on exactly the same subterranean level. He salted the chicken, took a fork from a drawer, and went back into the lounge.
“Tell me, Vicky,” he said, “am I some kind of a sexual simpleton? When I leave a room do the men and women in it leap at each other and frig like rabbits till they hear me returning?”
“What are you talking about?”
“About the impression I sometimes get from you and one or two other people.”
“And you,” Vicky said scathingly, “try to tell me that I’m crazy!”
Even when his wife had finally gone to sleep, Hutchman lay in the darkness for a long time listening to the invisible tides of night air flow around and through the house. His mind was racing, taking fragments of the day — glossy catalogues heavy with a smell like that of fresh paint, the complex schematics drawn by hand, Spain’s blurred face staring, the evening news of mobilizations and fleet movements, Vicky’s neurotic jealousy — assembling them in fantastic composites of foreboding which dissolved and reformed into new patterns of menace. Sleep came suddenly, bringing with it another dream, in which he was shopping in a supermarket. A frozen-food bin was close by and two women were examining its contents.
“I like this new idea,” one of them said. She reached into the bin and lifted out a white spiky object, like a skinless and terribly misshapen fish. It had two sad gray eyes. “It’s the latest thing in food preservation. They give it a pseudo-life which maintains it in perfect condition till its ready for the pan.”
The other woman looked alarmed. “Isn’t that cruel?”
“No. It has no soul, and it feels no pain.” To prove her point, she began snapping off the white fleshy extrusions and dropping them into her basket. Hutchman backed away from the scene in horror, because, although the fish-thing lay motionless and allowed itself to be demolished, its eyes were fixed on his — calmly, sadly, reproachfully.
CHAPTER 4
October — the entire span of which was occupied by the building of the machine — was a difficult road, in Hutchman’s mind. It was a road measured by double-sided milestones showing both the decreasing distance to the project’s completion and the everwidening gulf over which he and Vicky viewed each other.
One of the first had been the day on which he had acquired the praseodymium crystal and enough of the green isotope to produce the necessary fifty milligrams of cestron in a reasonable time. He had gone straight from work to the refectory at the Jeavons and eaten a quick snack, avoiding conversation with others even though he had a feeling that a dark-haired woman several tables away had been known to him in the past. That night he had worked later than usual to set up the gas-collecting system, and on reaching home had found himself locked out.
This can’t be happening to me! Hutchman shook his head in disbelief, but his key was unable to turn the lock of the front door and the side entrance was securely bolted against him. He paused, staring down at his silhouette on the moonlit path, one part of his mind sliding into irrelevant thoughts as to why the shadow cast by the moon made his head seem smaller than in the shadow cast by a streetlighi. The house was dark and silent, robbed of its familiarity by circumstance. It suddenly came to him what a shocking thing it would be if he, Lucas Hutchman, were forced to stay outside all night. Even more appalling was the discovery of how effective the childishness of one adult can be against the reasonableness of another. He tried all the windows in vain then returned to the main bedroom window and began tapping the glass. As the minutes went by with no response his self-control began to fail and he drove his fist harder and harder, hoping the pane would shatter.