Froomb! Read online

  “When did it change, this virtuosity?”

  “Didn’t change, so much as broadened. When he stood for Parliament he began to look at science from the humanitarian standpoint. From then on, as he got on in politics, he started opposing developments he believed were detrimental to normal life.”

  “He hasn’t got far.” Lorrellmore’s lip curled as he thought of Flightend.

  “What’s one man against so many? He’s done a lot of good.”

  “You’d say his whole heart was behind everything he did?”

  “For sure.” Keeping drank deep.

  “Has he ever engaged on private ventures?”

  “Oh yes. It’s believed his father’s money—it was split between the brothers—mostly went on scientific equipment. The rest went on alimony. Silly ass let her divorce him. Typical generosity. I—”

  “Do you know anything about his private experiments?”

  “He shields everything behind this satirical front. You can’t get by to find out anything important. You have to go round the outside.”

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  “But no one else would know?”

  “Not if he didn’t want them to, that’s for sure. He knows about security. He knows more than most about most things.”

  “Yet lately he’s been taking stronger stands against new developments.”

  “Only those he believes are wrong. He crusades, but it brings notice to the dangers of these things.”

  “Not always.”

  “He can’t thumb everything.”

  “Is there anything back in his early life that could clue up with private experiments?” Lorrellmore added slowly, “Experimenting with death, for instance.”

  There was a silence.

  Keeping put down his tankard.

  “That’s a funny kind of thing to experiment with,” he said. “When he crusades to protect life.”

  “I was thinking in terms of killing someone and retaining a radio hold on their brains, creating a kind of space travel.”

  Keeping picked up his pot again and drank.

  “Well, could be. I don’t know how far they’ve got with that sort of thing.”

  “Is there any evidence that he ever tried any such thing

  before?”

  Keeping stared at Lorrellmore, then put down his tankard once more. This time he got off the table.

  “I don’t know what you’re after, Lorrellmore,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette, “but I don’t like the smell of it. Packard is to me a great man. That’s it. That’s what I’m sending up. If you want to downgrade him, you’ve got to grow a lot.”

  He lit a cigarette and sat down at his typewriter. Lorrellmore put down his unfinished drink and went.

  The trouble with Packard, he realized, was that he was the kind who gathered worshipers in his turnups and you couldn’t argue with fanatics.

  Keeping got up and began searching through some of the scientific magazines, blinking through the smoke rising from his dangling cigarette. Now and again he brushed ash off a reference book with the side of his hand. Often he straightened, tried to remember, then bent and referred to some other publication. Somewhere in the back of his head a bell was ringing. Suddenly it gave an echo. He shoveled through the mass of papers, books, magazines, and dug out

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  a five-year-old copy of The Saturday Evening Post. There Packard’s heavy, thoughtful face pondered something out of camera range. Facing the full-page picture the headline, Theory of the Death-Change: Packard Talks to James Murchison.

  “They say,” Murchison introduced, “that you can tell a man’s trade by the way he talks. David Packard defies this rule. It seems he deliberately avoids using scientific terminology, yet with such practiced ease that it is not till afterward that one realizes the lack. One of his favorite usages .. .” Keeping’s finger traced down the columns, over the pages, on down to the lines:

  “But this theory, Professor, would, if I may say, have to start with a conclusion?”

  “Exactly. You would have to kill a man before you could begin the exploration.”

  “Law is against Science there. But take the case of a person knowing they are going to die?”

  “No one knows they are going to die. It is a state of mind that changes normal thinking, and any form of distortion in the human range of thinking would make the experiment useless. Like a dentist using a distorting mirror.”

  “You must have a mental normalcy?”

  “You are taking such a risk in the first place, you want to make sure it has every chance of succeeding.”

  “Do you think it will ever be accomplished, this seach for the future?”

  “Who am I to say?”

  Keeping drank more beer.

  “But if he meant to do it, he would have told the Post,” he muttered. All the same, he rang two science correspondents on the Sunday papers. They had not heard of any such experiment, though naturally, they would like to have done.

  “If only it had been some ordinary person, someone that nobody would notice—” said Ann.

  “I keep telling you what I’ve told you all along,” said Packard slowly. “We had to have someone with above average intelligence, above average experience, above average sense of humor, character, perspicacity, with the true sense of a gambler—not for money but for life. We needed someone

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  extraordinary and we got him. He agreed, don’t forget.”

  “No, what I mean is if it was somebody unknown, just another Missing Person like you have thousands of every year,” she said. “But Brunt! He’s been on front pages for ten years. Only a week ago he was there, coming back from that Amazon expedition. ‘Broke again!’ he said and everybody cheered from sympathy. ‘Froombl’ he said on television and everybody screamed with laughter. Now they’re all beginning to say, ‘Where did he go this time?’ And we’re the only ones who know. I wish it had been somebody ordinary!”

  Packard looked up, suddenly sharp.

  “You’re not fond of this fellow, are you?” he said, suspicion sharpening his eyes to brilliants.

  She flushed slightly.

  “Oh David!” she said. “You know better than that!”

  “Do I?” said Packard.

  “For goodness’ sake!” she said angrily.

  Packard turned briskly and went through the padded steel door into the room of the computers and the idly rolling tapes. The air trembled with the humming. Packard went down the narrow avenue between tall steel cabinets that hummed with false life, and came to the corner of the room where the chair stood in a crystal case, its wires, tubes, coils and other attachments trailing off it like snakes wriggling away to the deeper shadows on the floor. Beyond the chair six green cathode ray tubes flickered and dizzed without making any sense. Packard watched them, then read the metering dials, turned and watched the rolling vision and sound tapes, still spinning and catching nothing but the fuzz and dizz on the tubes.

  Packard’s hopes died again, like a stone falling into liquid mud. He stared at the empty chair with brilliant animosity.

  “For Heaven’s sake, what went wrong?” he shouted.

  He turned sharply and saw Ann close behind him.

  “Bring him back now, David,” she said urgently. “Just see if you can. If you can, then you can try again another time.”

  “No,” he said.

  “David—”

  “No! I won’t!”

  “But you don’t even know what’s happened to him!”

  “I do,” he said. “But I can’t tell until he comes back

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  whether 'I’ve made the greatest double strike in science or not.”

  “What double strike?”

  “I wanted to send him to Heaven or whatever lies beyond us,” Packard said, his resilience bringing his spirits up again like fiery rockets. “I meant his soul, like a dead man’s. But he’s gone complete. He’s van
ished. That could mean that I have hit on the one thing we’ve been dreaming of for years —the transport of material matter by radio. Do you see?”

  “David! Do you really think that’s true?”

  “Yes. There is every possibility now.”

  Deep in her she feared his boyish changes of mood, for she knew the way he could make excuses to soothe alarm.

  “Prove it now, David!” she said urgently. “Bring him back and see if you’re right!”

  “You double-crossing bitch,” he said, and laughed. “No! I’m going through with this, no matter what. I’ve spent thirty years of my spare life, and a good deal of my main life on this channel and I’m not going to be scared off it now. All the calculations showed he must have twenty-four hours. That’s based on every known case of reanimation—”

  “Where there was a body,” she said.

  “Will you—?”

  As he began, the telephone buzzed smoothly! She turned and unhooked it from a cabinet side.

  “Dr. Packard’s office.”

  He watched, the tension growing in him as he heard a small voice clacking at the distant end. She covered the microphone.

  “Superintendent Hoskins,” she said quietly, her eyes too bright for normality. “Shall he come up?”

  “Of course!” Packard shouted. “Send him in, the bluenosed truffle rooter. I’ll see him in the office.”

  He marched away along the electronic corridor, quick and afraid. She spoke, hung up the phone and hurried after him, wanting to comfort and knowing she would be pricked in return.

  In the office Packard sat at his desk and pulled a lot of papers out of the drawers and sloshed them generously about the desk top. Then he put on heavy spectacles, pulled four pens from his breast pocket and showered them on the papers, finally taking up one.

  When Hoskins came in, Packard frowned over his papers

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  and signaled to a chair without looking up, his lips moving in angry concentration.

  “I’m sorry to butt in,” said Hoskins, and getting no answer relapsed into unhappy contemplation of tousled Packard’s crown.

  As she went out, Ann sighed helplessly. There he was, working everybody up again. No wonder they all gunned for him, when he liked them best lined up on his kebab stick.

  In her own office she took up her handbag and looked at herself in its mirror.

  “Froomb, oh, God!” she said. “It’s been froomb ever since he really got going on this wretched business. Why? What for? Who wants to find Heaven when it’s somewhere else?”

  Peter alternated between shouting questions like a toy machine gun and relapsing into a smooth, sophisticated irony. John began to notice his variations of temper matched his intake of handfuls of pills.

  Or were they sweets?

  “But aren’t you surprised to be here?” Peter asked.

  John was wondering why this interrogation was taking so long. The file marked “Brunt” still lay in front of Peter, unopened. The Puritan girl had come and gone several times, apparently to verify her first impression that John was really there. Unless she was some kind of brain-watcher, interested only in certain phases of the questioning.

  “No,” said John, “because there were so many possibilities. There have been such a lot of theories as to where Heaven is, you see. Some said it was way out beyond the stars, and that the whole universe is just the atom formation of a man’s boot heel and Heaven is in his toe, or up his artery somewhere, or in his belly. Then there are those who say it’s on a distant star, or hanging about in space, a spiritual universe within a physical one. Then others say it lies within the man, in his head or his feet or his bowels, and you have to look inward for it. Then others say it is to be found in

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  acts, or a convulsion or an orgasm, in a sudden increase in rate of sensation.

  “But then you have the Time Belt theory, and this seems to be the truth about it. People have said for centuries that our world, the one we see and feel, is merely one band of sensations which gives the human being the illusion of being solid and alive.

  “Other worlds exist with him, at the same time, in the same place, but possibly of different ages. It is as if a man is a radio set. The air is filled with a thousand talking channels all the time, but the set can only tune in to one. That one gives the sensation of reality. But another set gets a similar reality from a different channel, in a different language. So there exist these time belts of life all running together, and reality, or the semblance of it, comes to a man in one channel only. He becomes like a dust speck in a light ray, suddenly being seen for an instant, then dying when the light passes.”

  Peter shifted in his chair.

  “You have made some study of this,” he said.

  “No. It’s sort of general knowledge.”

  “And you think that is the answer to your knowing this part of the world?” Peter said.

  “I did know it,” said John firmly. “But I don’t know it now. It seems to me that somebody was right in saying that Heaven was here, with us, all round us, but it was waiting for us in another time channel, in time a way ahead of where we are—or were.”

  Peter took another palmful of pills, or sweets. They made him momentarily expansive.

  “There’s something in what you say,” he said. “I’ve forgotten a lot of these old theories. None of them were exactly right. Man is like that, don’t you think? He never finds out anything, but only thinks he has. Or do you feel that Man is advancing in any direction?”

  “Yes,” John said. “I am convinced he is advancing backward.”

  “Why?”

  “Because in a million years all his endeavors have been directed into saving his muscles, and none at all into helping his spiritual existence. There is no more spiritual awareness now than there was a million years ago. But in saving his body labor he has created more fears than his troglodyte

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  forebears ever dreamed of. He has rotted himself with ease and replaced labor and courage with an inexplicable fear of himself.”

  “Have you always thought that?” Peter said.

  John was surprised.

  “I suppose I have,” he said blankly.

  Now the girl came in again.

  “Does he believe in God?” she asked Peter.

  “Do you?” said Peter, watching him suspiciously.

  “I believe in an Existence,” John said.

  “Have you always?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it’s true?”

  “Where am I now, then?”

  “Tell me what happened when you died.”

  “I was sinking down a dark well, and the hole at the top was just a shrinking point of light. I knew I was dying and I didn’t want to. I had the wish to go back to life, but I didn’t fight for it because I knew it wasn’t any good. I had no strength, no limbs to fight with. I was being wrapped in a cocoon of darkness that would never be unwrapped again. I didn’t feel anything. There was nothing to feel. And then even the shrinking spot of light was gone, and I didn’t feel anything at all. Then everything stopped.”

  The girl leaned over Peter’s shoulder.

  “And then what?” she asked, staring hypnotically.

  “Some time must have passed,” John said. “I wasn’t conscious of it, but I have that feeling now. Then I was sitting in the wild hedge by the road—the road back to Bath, I think it must have been. It was just like waking up from a dream and not remembering what it was about. Then 1 remembered Packard had killed me, and 1 knew that this must be a part of the journey.”

  “Were you surprised?” the girl asked. “Or frightened?”

  “I don’t know whether it was surprise or a disappointment,” John said. “I always had the idea that if I did come to I would find myself among the stars, not in the weeds and decay of the place where my life started. How has it got like this—? . . . But I suppose the rot
is always there, on another channel. The whole of the man’s life is there all the time; past, present, future—all there all the time, but you just can’t see ahead or even properly back.” He paused. “Is this Heaven?”

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  “It is Hereafter,” said Peter, and suddenly he laughed. “The difference is up to you!”

  The girl was staring at him with a strange steadfastness from beyond Peter’s shoulder. John watched her with burning surprise—then looked quickly back to Peter.

  Peter was watching steadily, a palmful of pills ready to slam into his mouth.

  “I shall have to consult the office,” said Peter, and made a sign to George.

  George came forward and tapped the traveler on the shoulder. John got up and followed the girl through the door she had used for her movements to and fro. George came as far as the door, then slammed it behind John, who turned and looked at the panels as if surprised at their blankness.

  “I can’t get used to the way people behave,” he said, turning to the girl. “It’s different. It’s odd. But then, I suppose it would be.”

  It was a kind of rest room, with easy chairs and a bed for night duty.

  “It’s funny everything being so solid and ordinary,” he said.

  “Is it?” She watched him intently, and he sensed some kind of speculation in her look.

  “You realize it’s only a holiday, don’t you?” she said suddenly.

  “Do you mean we go back after a while? Reincarnation?” he said uneasily, then laughed. “What a waste for Packard if in the end I turn up as his favorite pooch!”

  She shrugged as if she could not quite understand it.

  “Well, you have a sense of humor,” she said drily. “Don’t you care what happens to you?”

  “Of course I do,” he protested. “But there’s no sense in being serious about it. After all, it’s only me and I’ve been a froomball all my life.”

  “A froomball?”

  “Yes. It’s a popular catchword just now—or then, I should say,” he said, and chuckled again. “I can’t get used to whether I’m here or there or what tense it is if I am—You see, it’s even too confusing to put.”