Froomb! Page 5

  “Why did you want to find Heaven? Why didn’t you wait?”

  “Packard had this idea, and it appealed to me. I mean, I’ve been everywhere else, and I thought this would be

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  different. Well, it is and it isn’t—I think I’m still suffering from shock.”

  He watched her, busy with the files.

  “Where is this?” he asked suddenly.

  “It’s where you think it is,” she said.

  “Heaven?”

  “That, and Reality.”

  “It’s called that?”

  “Why not?” She was wondering now, but not about his question, he felt; but about him.

  “The words don’t connect,” he said.

  “But they do. What was your idea of Heaven?”

  “I don’t really know. Something better than we had.”

  “Well, that’s right.” She started to put files away, suddenly turning from him in rather a curious way. Almost as if she had abruptly tired of the conversation.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Margaret.” She frowned into the file drawer as if to hide some emotion, a smile, perhaps.

  He went closer to her.

  “You’re very pretty,” he said, wondering. “I didn’t think of pretty girls in Heaven. I thought all the angels were male.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose subconsciously I was taking the temptation out of Heaven. It would be so difficult to sit around in splendor and not start sidling up to a pretty girl. And that just wouldn’t fit. It would start everything all over again, though why that should be wrong I don’t know either.”

  He watched her trim figure and pretty face. The reaction in him was sharper, deeper, more exciting than when he had been alive. Like the colors of things; they seemed more brilliant, richer, so that he could see all the colors making up the one. Perhaps death concentrated pleasure, feeling, sensual awareness. He wanted to kiss her and forced himself to look the other way.

  It was too soon. He felt it might shock her, and there was no justification except that she was pretty and roused him.

  Or perhaps it was a test.

  He tried to put out of his mind thought of tests and temptations.

  “I wonder what it’s like here?” he said.

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  “Don’t yon realize this is a temporary place?” she asked sharply. “You expect to be recalled.”

  “I was hoping that I would be recalled,” he said.

  “You will be.” She was firm and sharp, belying her soft eyes. “Everyone is recalled from here.” She took out another file from the drawer, carried it to a small desk and sat down.

  An odd sense of frustration surged through him.

  “Why don’t you look at me?” he said suddenly, and catching her shoulders turned her to face him. “Are you one like me? You must have been one once, weren’t you? Is there something wrong with me? Is it because I—I agreed to be killed? Is it?”

  She just stood there looking at him, and he found himself looking at her, his feeling of angry frustration changing abruptly.

  “But I react as if I’m alive!” he said.

  He kissed her. Her lips clung, first with hunger, then with a kind of desperation. Her body pressed against his, moving with the strange passion as of something new, or long forgotten.

  Suddenly she turned her head, her eyes fixed upon something behind him. He let her go, turned and saw Peter standing by the open door, looking at him with bright, dark eyes. Peter was smiling in a harsh kind of way.

  “You can go through,” he said.

  “George will take you,” Peter said, watching him intently.

  “Thank you,” John said, catching his breath. He went to the door as Peter stood aside to let him through. Then John turned to signal farewell to the girl.

  She had gone. He felt surprised and empty, left in midgesture, foolish, not sure how to end it. He looked at Peter’s dark, almost burning eyes, and let his hand fall. His smile went. He had a sudden fear of Peter. For a moment he could not place it: then he had the strange feeling that Peter was a woman.

  He went out of the hut bewildered. George was waiting. As they joined and began to walk away down the winding road, he felt that Peter was watching from behind. The idea that Peter was a woman made him more uneasy still.

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  “And what?” asked Packard, putting his pen down and

  looking up at last.

  “We are making investigations into the causes of three thousand deaths, now certainly attributed to the use of an insecticide called Flightend,” said Hoskins, quietly. “Investigation has proved beyond doubt that this spray, which is being used for crop-spraying and domestic clearance, is a virulent poison.”

  Cold shock sent ice-water shooting in Packard’s veins. He fought not to show it, but began to flush from reaction.

  “Of course it’s a poison,” said Packard. “How else can you kill insects?”

  ‘This kills animals and people,” said Hoskins, with the same quietness. “It seems that the chemical manufacturers put up samples to your department some time ago, and permission was granted to market it.”

  Packard could not warm up the chill in him. So many of these new dopes came along to be tested. He never saw them. They just went down to a department, which handed it to another, and so to another, and so it would have descended ad infinitum, except that before that infinity arrived some shelf, representing Limbo, got in the way. The Flightend test sample was probably still there, on the shelf with its report.

  Packard sat back in his chair.

  “How many dead, you say?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Three thousand, one hundred and nineteen so far,” said Hoskins referring to some notes he had brought. “Over two hundred herds of cattle have perished, and it seems that anyone touching the dead bodies can also be affected by the toxic element.”

  Bloody windbag, Packard thought, frowning gravely.

  “I have not heard anything of this,” he said.

  “The press has had D-notices clapped on it,” said Hoskins. “We have tried to stop the sale, impound the supplies at shops and wholesalers. The manufacturers however, say you have given clearance to it and therefore they refused to stop selling the stuff.”

  Packard picked up a telephone and called Ann. Then he sat back again.

  “I suppose they can’t stop selling,” he said. “There’s too much money involved. That’s what they always say.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Hoskins, “but we’ve got to stop it. If we

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  get a straight ban from you we can stop it, but otherwise it goes on selling. You know we have had this trouble before, but not quite on this scale.”

  “I can’t see a stop doing much good,” Packard said. “These poor devils are dead and there’s nothing can be done about them. But Flightend has been distributed all over the country, abroad, too. This needs more than a stop notice. You’ll have to get every police force to sit on supplies till we can find out what’s happened. As it’s local up there, it could be a freak result due to local conditions. But we can’t risk that being the case.”

  “We’ve alerted all forces. It needs your okay to sit on supplies.”

  “This was obviously going to happen someday,” Packard said. “Why now, so violently? And all in one area? It shows how much we don’t know about these bloody things . . . Poor devils. It’s like a war. They didn’t know what it was about . . . All in one locality!” He went to the window. “Back in 1964 a ban was slapped on certain substances used as pesticides then. These newer replacements were thought to be fairly safe.”

  Packard got up and began to pace.

  “Are you sure these deaths are due to this stuff?” he asked sharply. “It couldn’t be an epidemic?”

  “Sir, that explanation was used last time that outbreak of stomach poisoning came after the water additi
ve, you remember, the anti-cancer thing, whatever it was. A lot of people died then, you remember. They put it down to colic, flyblown colic. That brought this other stuff on the market, and now we’ve got all these people dead.”

  “When did this happen that I haven’t heard?”

  “During the last few hours,” said Hoskins. “It’s doing the job very suddenly. Sort of flooded us. Signals are coming in all the time now.”

  “Oh Christ,” said Packard. “There’s always some bloody thing, isn’t there?”

  The telphone rang. Packard answered, then punctuated some prolonged metallic chatter with short, terse affirmatives. As he replaced the phone, a young man in a white coat entered, carrying a file.

  “A chemist called Svensen did the tests,” he said. “Just the usual thing. Rats, you know.”

  “What happened to the rats?” asked Packard.

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  “It seems they died,” said the young man. “But as Svensen understood it was only to be used on insects, he passed the stuff for public sale, and advised a warning on the cans that the preparation was poisonous.”

  “I’ve seen that,” said Hoskins. “I had to put on reading glasses to read what it said.”

  “It’s bad publicity to scrawl skull and crossbones warnings all over it,” said the young man shortly. “People get frightened to have the stuff in their homes. That cuts sales immensely. There is a very large percentage of public money invested in this by a particular manufacturing combine. The Board of Trade is always very anxious to let that combine operate with the minimum of drag. Otherwise cobalt warheads might be held up.”

  “Could you get us a total ban on the stuff without delay, Professor?” Hoskins said, ignoring the implication. “I’m afraid that otherwise it’s going to be very serious.”

  Packard touched the phone, and untouched it again. He dismissed the young man.

  “It’s going to be very difficult,” he said. “I shouldn’t do it on my own. Ministers should be consulted. After all, the amount of money involved in this product could run into millions. That’s what they’ll say to me. Somebody might also say ‘You don’t have to eat toadstools. You have the choice.’ . . . Three thousand!”

  Hoskins was a keen fly fisherman, a hobby which had given him a slight nervous movement of the wrist, as if eternally casting a fly. When a problem bothered him he relaxed by thinking of himself standing in the bright effervescent stream, casting up the water, tempting no trout and solemnly, pleasantly casting again. The thought always made his wrist twitch faster. It did now as he watched Packard.

  He paced up and down quickly.

  “They won’t do it for me, Hoskins,” he said, stopping. “They don’t like me. And they’ll keep pressing the point that my department passed the stuff, anyway. I tell you what. I’ll cancel the certificate without consultation. I shall probably be strung up in the market place, but I’ll do that.” He picked up the phone again.

  Hoskins watched him without showing any emotion. His acute brain wondered why he had been suddenly pushed on to this mass poisoning job. It wasn’t his line. It was just a

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  cover for the Other Thing, Hoskins supposed. After all, three thousand people wasn’t very much, when they were trying to get millions of the undernourished to use contraceptives. And in the old wars they’d kill a hundred thousand off in a morning, just blowing up trees. Or burned them alive in the streets, with the old fire bombs.

  Hoskins shifted in his seat. Often he thought how curious it was that with all kinds of mass slaughter an accepted thing, his own career had been mainly concerned with tracking down some mutt who had, probably justifiably, killed another mutt. It was a good publicity for the Law, of course, but Hoskins had never been able to take the rest of it very seriously. It was just a game of wits.

  He watched Packard anxiously telephoning, and wondered what would be the best gambit with which to check the restless scientist.

  Packard put the phone down, turned and rested his buttocks against the desk edge as he eyed Hoskins sharply. Hoskins looked back with the glass eyes of long training. “It’ll be sent up,” said Packard. “The banning chit.”

  “Do you know John Brunt?” Hoskins asked casually. He offered cigarettes.

  Packard took one before he said, “Yes.”

  “Some relative is raising a honk for him,” said Hoskins. “Do you happen to have seen him lately? He mentioned he was going to see you, but knowing him, his relative says he could have meant anything by that.”

  “He’s a friend of mine,” Packard said, staring eye for eye. “I was thinking of using him for an expedition, but I’m still tapping the Treasury for funds. I don’t think it’ll come off, with the miserable pod we’ve got in charge. He balks me. Everything I want, he balks. You must have heard. We’re together like bucks in the rutting season. Locked. His name’s not really Softing, you know. It’s Sodfarthing, corrupted.” Hoskins laughed. “Has Brunt mentioned where he might be?”

  “You can expect Brunt to be anywhere,” said Packard. “From Pole to Pole, girl to girl. The only time to be sure of him is when he’s actually walking in over your front mat.” “Seems he went to his bank and then fell down a draingrating or worse,” said Hoskins comfortably.

  “Or he got an idea for another flip,” said Packard. “He’s an international grasshopper. You can’t hold him.”

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  “No.” Hoskins looked at his watch. “Can I use your phone when that chit comes up?”

  “Of course.”

  “I can’t imagine how you keep command of all the things you have to pass,” said Hoskins, with faint admiration in his voice.

  “I don’t,” said Packard. “I keep command of a few commanders and they keep command of sub-commanders. In the end everyone is commanded. I know the mass of figures; B stroke forty-seven. That kind of thing. That gives me his position in the works, whether split pin or oil drip, and then if I want his name there’s a book with it all in, kept up to date every morning. Who’s sick, who’s run out and so on.”

  “I don’t wonder that people like Brunt try to get away from it,” said Hoskins.

  “Names will soon disappear,” Packard said, pacing again. “Already the Post Office has put through the use of code numbers for names and addresses. Mrs. Smith of the Acacias, Tooting, SW7 is now reborn as SPA 509/725/SW7. You can’t stop progress, no matter how you dislike it. . . Who is fussing about Brunt, you say?”

  “An aunt,” said Hoskins. “Caroline Brunt.”

  “Oh, that’s the one with all the money,” said Packard. “He told me. She financed a lot of his expeditions, but in the end she gave in.”

  “Her advisers gave in,” said Hoskins. “But she is a Brunt. She has got rid of the advisers and wants her nephew again. Reading between the lines I’d say he’ll get her bounty. She’s very fond of him. That’s why she’s eager to get hold of him and make a transfer before the tax man comes round the coffin.”

  “I’ll let you know when Brunt turns up,” said Packard.

  “You think he’ll come to see you—when he gets back?”

  “We have been discussing a new expedition, as I told you,” said Packard. “He is sure to come back to discuss the details.”

  “What is this expedition?” Hoskins asked. “Might that give a clue to where he went?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” said Packard, and smiled. “It concerned space travel.”

  “Oh,” said Hoskins mildly disappointed. He moved his wrist again. “Rockets?”

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  “Old stuff,” said Packard. “We’ve got too many overshoots hunting around the sky already, out of fuel and only able to call for help over the sun-driven radio till they starve. You get nowhere like that. No, this is another system. Quite secret. I couldn’t discuss it yet as it isn’t by any means sure.”

  “Do you think Brunt will accept?”

  “He will. Don’t worry.”

&nb
sp; “It must be holding you up, his disappearing like this,” Hoskins said, and looked at his watch.

  “The chit will be up in a minute,” said Packard irritably. He had a sudden, icy vision of hundreds more people dying by gripe while they waited for the typists to turn out the freezer scroll.

  “Has he got any special place he’s likely to gravitate to?” Hoskins said, almost idly. “Brunt, I mean.”

  “Anywhere,” said Packard, waving his hands. “Unpredictable.”

  “When did you say he was here?”

  “I didn’t say.” Packard was offhand, trying to rid his mind of increasing death. “He came in some time this morning. He comes, he goes, just the way he wants.”

  “Did you make an arrangement to see him again?” Hoskins asked.

  “Yes,” said Packard suddenly concentrating. “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  “Oh good,” Hoskins said.

  A young man came in, dark, thick-lensed, alert, and of a singular briskness. He was a Time Sponge, his appointment being to interview visiting nuisances and gradually absorb their complaint and time until they should feel their wastage hardly worth-while.

  “What are you doing here?” Packard shouted.

  “Are you quite sure about this cutting back on the license?” said the young man earnestly. “According to the file there is a considerable financial interest in this flotation—”

  “Out!” said Packard vehemently, “and bring that bloody chit in now!”

  “There are a number of parties—” said the young man, his interest increasing as if someone turned an intensity knob in his back. “And I feel sure that we—”

  “Bring it!” said Packard, and turned his back.

  Hoskins felt a faint surprise as he saw the intense young

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  man turn and go out without further agrument. He watched

  Packard with a new angle to his interest. When the missive came at last, Hoskins felt a vague disappointment.

  When Hoskins had gone, Ann came in again.

  “For goodness sake be careful, David!” she cried.

  Packard slid his desk panel aside and took out a bottle of Scotch and a glass.

  “Three thousand people have been murdered by Flightend,” he said, pouring.