Read The Stone That Never Came Down Online
Authors: John Brunner
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General
The Stone That Never Came Down (13 page)
XV
Tonight snow in big soft pillow-down flakes was adding the latest of many layers to the winter-glaze of London’s streets. Snow, thaw, frost, sleet, frost, snow … It had been going on since November. Caught by surprise as usual, the city council had snowploughs enough only for a few crucial thoroughfares. Elsewhere they had fallen back on men with shovels and truck-loads of sand, and in minor streets not even that much effort was being made any longer. Like miniaturised geological strata, ice and sand in alternation had compacted to the level of the kerbstones or higher, embedding rubbish for fossils. No council employees had been spared to clear litter-bins since early December, and all of them had been overflowing for weeks.
Now, at the end of this narrow street–what was it called?–reddened eyes searched for, found, failed to read a name-plaque covered by a fringe of icicles–a bus had skidded and rammed a wall. White-faced, teeth chattering from shock now as well as cold, its passengers were returning to the last stop to await a replacement. Passive, he stood watching from about thirty yards’ distance.
–Fossils … Yes, this is like being a corpuscle inside a dying dinosaur. Half the street-lamps out. Cars abandoned. Buses running off the road. Not enough power to keep the underground trains on schedule. Gangrene is setting in.
At the thought of that, he reflexively touched his arm. Amazingly, though, it was healing well. It no longer hurt.
“Are you all right?” The question, kindly enough, from one of the frustrated bus-riders as he drew abreast: a man in a fur-fabric coat, worn at collar and cuffs, but still enviably warm.
“Me? Oh–yes, thanks. I’m okay.”
“You don’t look it! Standing out here in your shirt-sleeves, soaking … What you ought to do, chum, is go to St Sebastian’s. They’ll give you a cuppa and something to eat, and they may have a coat to spare.” The man hesitated as though about to venture an obscenity. “That is, unless you–uh–take drugs? They don’t let in addicts.”
With a reassuring headshake: “Thank you. I didn’t know about this. I’m pretty much a stranger in London.”
“I can hear that. Canadian, aren’t you? Well, just turn right at the end of this street, and …”
So he did, and found himself in a few minutes on the front steps of a pillared building declared by a big board to be church of saint sebastian martyr. He climbed the steps, pushed open a heavy door of dark wood on iron-strap hinges.
A high roof. Empty chairs. Air marginally warmer than outside, not much. Candles burning distant on an altar backed by a stained-glass window depicting Sebastian the Human Pincushion in all his gory. Childhood image: a fakir drawn by Ripley, with
believe it or not
great spikes through arms and calves.
He walked slowly towards the eastern end.
“Here, you! What do you think you’re doing?”
Emerging from a side-chapel, a portly florid dark-clad man, bustling and puffing with self-importance. And, taking in the shirt-sleeved soaking stubble-chinned stray: “Down the crypt, get along with you! Don’t want you up here making a mess all over the place–we got a special service in the morning, and we only just cleaned up for it!”
There were wet smears from the door to where the snow-saturated shoes had halted.
But his flow of words broke off abruptly. The newcomer had looked at him, square in the eyes.
And now said, “I fell among thieves. But I’ll let you pass by on the other side.”
He walked away.
“Now–now just a second!” the portly man gasped, and came hurrying after. “I didn’t mean to–!”
“But you did,” the stranger said, and with a burst of angry energy hauled wide the heavy door and slammed it behind him with a crash that almost deafened the Pharisee.
–Thieves? True enough.
Three of them, while he had been hiding from pursuers barely less friendly. He had heard whispered words–“Look, he has his arm in a sling!”–and imagining sympathy had let them come up to him, and when they set about him it was impossible to fight back. They took his jacket containing his billfold, gagged him, tied his hands to his ankles with the sling, left him in the cold and wet to work free if he could.
It had taken time. It had been managed.
And, moneyless, he had gone exploring. Strange to this city, having visited it before but only on the luxury level, he had walked mile after freezing mile, staring in dismay–at lines of grey-faced housewives waiting for loaves a penny cheaper here than across the street; at children hobbling bandy-legged with rickets out of snow-white school playgrounds; at others who had scratched their scalps raw for the lice that infested them; at able-bodied men in groups of six or eight at street-corners, hands deep in pockets, shoulders hunched, coatless and down-at-heel, while sleet and scraps of litter blew around their legs.
At a Rolls-Royce whose indecent half-nude mascot had been replaced by a crucifix.
He had slept where tiredness overcame him, under the arches of an incomplete elevated road; it carried no traffic, so he was quiet there. On either side houses stood vacant, windows smashed and doors nailed or padlocked, signs warning that they were patrolled by guard-dogs. Curiously, he had not been cold, though his only covering had been a couple of sacks. But he ought to have eaten something. He could feel that he ought. That was a novel sensation, known as hunger. In thirty-four years he had scarcely missed a meal; there was always food in his world, at fixed times. Now, he realised, he was burning vast amounts of energy to keep warm. His muscles, his very bones were complaining, and he had had to draw his belt in a full inch.
Around the side of the church a sign said refuge and pointed down a flight of icy steps to the crypt. He descended, found a door, on pushing it open was assailed by the smell of old clothes, steaming tea, stale bread. In a dour line fifty men and women as shabby as himself and even grimier were awaiting sweet tea in enamel mugs, bread-rolls smeared with margarine, and the chance to sit down on benches already fully occupied, so that a young man in a black front and clerical collar was walking around saying, “If you’ve finished,
would
you make room for others, please?”
A man responded, near the door, letting fall a copy of
The Right Way,
the monthly journal published by the Campaign Against Moral Pollution. It must have passed through several hands, being torn and tea-stained. Seeing it would be long before he reached the head of the line, the new arrival picked it up and glanced through it. He had seen it before. Lady Washgrave had sent a copy to his home in California. The main feature was an article by the Right Honourable Henry Charkall-Phelps, PC, MP, fulminating against the decline in educational standards he claimed had overtaken Britain.
A paragraph containing a name leapt to his eye.
We would do better to copy the example of the government of Greece, cradle of Western culture. A godless and immoral corrupter of the young, like that so-called “teacher” Malcolm Fry whose foul influence fortunately came to light thanks to the selfless dedication of members of our Campaign …
“So if you wouldn’t mind moving on–? Hey, I say! I didn’t mean you, I meant people who’ve already been served!”
But the door was swinging shut.
It was seldom that Billy Cohen felt the need to patronise a gay club or gay bar. There were few of them left in London anyway; the palmy days of ten years ago when he had finally come to terms with his own nature and decided not to be ashamed of his inclinations had faded into wistful memory under the battering of the Puritan backlash. No question of legislation was involved–that remained theoretically very liberal. Just as passing laws had not stopped people drinking under Prohibition, though, it had not affected the fury of the bigots who, perhaps, were afraid of admitting to the same impulse in themselves. Bands of vigilantes patrolled Hampstead Heath and Wimbledon Common with dogs and water-pistols full of indelible dye; sometimes a young man was found dead with a cross carved on his forehead, though admittedly that had only happened three times in the three years since he moved to Britain permanently, thinking it less risky than New York on the basis of half a dozen short visits.
One after another, however, gay clubs and gay pubs were having their liquor-licences withdrawn on specious grounds, in every case as the result of a well-organised, well-financed campaign of local agitation. So few were left.
Tonight he felt for once that he must be in company where he could relax. Ruth had been given notice to quit the Civil Service, a terrible blow in these times of high unemployment, and–
–How can she have been so
cruel?
He had finished helping Malcolm to clean up the wreck of Mary’s room, the quiet devout girl lodging next to him who barely exchanged helloes in the morning before vanishing to work. She had become, without warning, hysterical, and had screamed that she could no longer live in the same house with a man who shamelessly kept a mistress, and boasted moreover that it had been she who informed on Ruth to her department’s chief. And smashed the windows, and the mirror, and the lamps, and the china hand-basin, and stormed out calling down fire and brimstone.
Malcolm had taken it all philosophically enough. Even so …
–I’m going to ask Kneller if I can be a VC guinea-pig too. Mal’s been transformed. He’s suddenly confident. He breathes the impression that he’s going to do something big, very soon. What? And will he get the chance? All this talk of war …
He shivered as he walked, not from cold. It was dreadfully convincing, that war idea, the way Malcolm argued it. Dalessandro’s general strike had succeeded fantastically; the entire country had been brought to a halt for a full day. Now he was in the open, addressing public meetings where the response was as frenzied as in the time of Mussolini, whom he often invoked. If he took over, he promised, he would pull Italy out of the Common Market, reimpose high tariffs, close the frontiers to competing foreign goods … And the other countries in the Market wouldn’t stand for it.
If war did follow, what could hinder it? He knew a little history; knew that in 1914 the international labour movement so many people had relied on to prevent open conflict had crumpled like wet paper under a wave of crazy nationalism; knew there had been self-sealing fuel-tanks marked “Made in USA” in the Messerschmitt 110 which Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland, epitaph on the aspirations of those who had struggled to stop the Nazis. And knew above all that the guilty had more often gone free than been condemned.
This time, there was no massive antiwar movement at all. The superpowers might even be glad of a European conflict to distract their people from local problems: in America, the black ghettos were exploding in winter instead of summer, measure of the desperate frenzy the workless underprivileged were feeling, while it was on the cards that the U.S.S.R. was about to reap the harvest of decades of bureaucratic inefficiency, commit troops ignominiously within its own borders as formerly in Budapest, Prague, East Berlin … and as another power had been compelled to do in Belfast a few years ago, in Glasgow recently.
Once you had been shown the path of the powder-train, it was hard not to believe that a spark would sooner or later light it.
Here he was, though, at his destination: a club of which he was not a member but where he could rely on finding an acquaintance willing to invite him in. It was a basement in a narrow alley to the north of Oxford Street whose manager by dint of incredible ingenuity had kept one step ahead of the Campaign Against Moral Pollution’s attempts to close him down. He complied scrupulously with fire regulations; liquor laws, hygiene laws, never allowed noisy music to leak out that might cause neighbours to complain.
And never never advertised except on the grapevine.
As Billy had hoped, several friends of his were present, and one of them promptly signed him in as a guest. Relaxing, accepting the offer of a drink, he joined in the normal small-talk of the day: theatre-gossip, scandal, wishful thinking …
Almost an hour had gone by before there was an interruption. A loud bumping noise was heard from the front entrance: something heavy falling down the flight of steps that led to it. The duty barman and two customers hurried to see what had happened, and found the door jammed by the–the whatever. Their best efforts could not force it back more than three or four inches.
Alarm spread like a cold wind. The customers fell silent. One drew back a curtain and peered through a window.
“Godheads!” he screamed at the shrill top of his voice.
“What?”–from a dozen throats. And someone said, “Back way, quickly!”
At which same moment came a noise of hammering.
Billy was among those who reached the fire emergency exit first. Just in time to recognise the stench of kerosene being poured under the door–to lean against it with insane force and find that the nails newly driven into a bar across it were going to hold …
And a fiery cross came smashing through the window.
XVI
Braking his car outside number 25 Chater Street, Kneller muttered, “I never thought the day would come when I had to steal from my own labs!” Automatically he patted the bulge in his pocket where he carried a precious test-tube well protected with plastic foam and cotton-wool.
“I don’t imagine Maurice did, either,” Randolph said greyly. “After what Gifford let slip, though … Isn’t it incredible? It’s the kind of thing you read about in other countries, and smugly believe could never happen here.”
“Exactly,” Kneller said, locking the car. “And– Oh, we must have timed it perfectly. Isn’t that Chief Inspector Sawyer?” He pointed at a dark-coated man favouring one foot as he climbed Malcolm’s steps.
“So it is. Fantastic how he deduced what had happened to him, isn’t it? And to think we had his name right in front of us and didn’t make the connection!”
“Well, when he phoned he said he never uses the double-barrelled version … Ah, there’s Malcolm opening the door. Come on.”
A moment later, in the hallway, Malcolm was saying, “So you’re the mysterious ‘David Eric Jarman-Sawyer’, are you?”
“I still don’t know how you worked that out,” Sawyer parried.
“We have a list,” Malcolm murmured.
“Of people affected by VC, you mean? I’d like to see it!”
“So you shall. But wait a moment. There’s someone in the living-room you ought to meet.”
Puzzled, they followed him, and found Ruth–red-eyed as though she had been weeping–silently serving soup and bread to a lean man with a stubble of new beard seated at the breakfast-counter. Sawyer stopped dead.
“Brother Bradshaw!” he burst out.
“In person,” Malcolm said, while Bradshaw set about the food as though he hadn’t eaten in weeks and Ruth retired quietly to the far end of the room, where the TV with its sound low was showing a series of riots: Glasgow, Detroit, Tbilisi, Milan, in swift succession. “He found his way here for such a ridiculous reason, I can’t help wondering whether VC may not be infinitely more powerful than we imagine. He spotted an article by Charkall-Phelps in
The Right Way
which called me a corrupter of youth, and having met Charkall-Phelps decided that anyone he hates as much as he hates me must be a decent type.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Bradshaw said, his mouth full of bread. “I went looking for refuge in a church, and a pompous guy ordered me out because I was dirtying the floor, and I kind of pulled the complete Jesus act on him, which blew his mind into tiny pieces. While my own mind was still running on the parable of the Good Samaritan–I’d told him I fell among thieves–I spotted Malcolm’s name, like he said. Not for the first time, because they sent that issue of the magazine to help persuade me to join their Crusade. Being reminded of it, being here in a strange country where I know almost nobody, I thought, well, who is my neighbour? More likely him than these Pharisees and Sadducees! So I went looking for a phone-directory, and … here I am.” He renewed his attack on the soup.
“Bless you, Charkall-Phelps,” Malcolm murmured. “Do sit down, all of you–use the bed if there’s nowhere else. Ruth dear, what about some wine for …? Sorry.” Turning to fetch a bottle and glasses himself. Over his shoulder: “I’m afraid Ruth got sacked today. Thanks to a bitch who was lodging here that I’m glad to see the back of … Oh, Chief Inspector, you wanted to see our list. I’ll give it to you.”
Sawyer said, “About to be ex-chief inspector. I’ve put in my resignation.” And without bothering to explain, seized the computer print-out.
“Bott! That’s Harry Bott! No wonder he was able to shop so many villains to me! And … Incredible. I know them all.”
“Crawford?” Malcolm rapped, distributing glasses of wine to Kneller and Randolph.
“Yes, he’s been in trouble with the school attendance officer. Runs a black power study-group that keeps kids away from regular schooling. I can give you his address if you like.”
“And Stevens too? Just by reputation?”
“No, personally. I arrested him when he was about seventeen. He was running with a gang of bloody-minded yobboes. Got probation. But he’s dead now, you know.”
“What?”
“Yes, they cancelled the deserter’s warrant they had out for him this afternoon. It’ll be in the news tonight, I expect.” Vaguely waving at the TV. “You know he walked out of hospital with his wounds unhealed? Well, he caught an antibiotic-resistant infection and it gangrened. When they found him he was delirious with toxaemia. Not a hope of saving his life.”
He checked. “You heard that? I said ‘delirious with toxaemia’! A week or two ago I’d have had to look that up in the dictionary!”
“Typical,” Kneller said after a brief hesitation.
“How can you be sure? Don’t answer that. I know this VC stuff can produce amazing effects. Now I’ve met Mr Fry, for example, I recall an assault case involving a Mr Cohen of this address which should have led, but didn’t, to a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, and happened the day after Dr Post was killed and furthermore on blood-donation day at the Lister Clinic. Mr Fry, were you the man Post showed off his pills to?”
“Yes.”
“And you took one, and gave blood …?
I
see! So everybody who has VC caught it the way Harry and I did, through plasma?”
Kneller drew a deep breath. “That list isn’t complete any longer. Dr Post had it. I have it. Dr Randolph has it. We carried out tests, and they proved positive.”
“Anybody else–?” Sawyer began, and was interrupted by a sudden sob from Ruth, who, unnoticed, had buried her face in her hands.
In astonishment Malcolm turned, poised to hurry over and comfort her … and halted, staring. He said faintly, “Wilfred, it just hit me. I asked about supportive media for VC.”
“Yes, and I have news for you on that front. Arthur and I think we’ve come up with a medium superior to what Maurice designed, and so simple you can literally cook it on a kitchen stove. It’s a breakthrough like using brewer’s wastes to grow
penicillium notatum
–”
“Shut up!” Malcolm ordered, clenching his fists. “
Saliva?
”
And at that moment the doorbell rang.
“I’ll go,” Ruth said, wearily rising. “It’s Dr Campbell. I recognise his walk, even though I’ve met him exactly twice. Yes, Malcolm. That must be how it happened, through kissing you– No, don’t touch me! I’m still shaking deep inside. I only realised today, and I feel so …”
The words trailed away in her wake.
And a moment later Hector rushed into the room, waving a sheet of paper. “Malcolm–Wilfred–listen to this! Hello!” On realising other people were present. “Chief Inspector! What in …? Never mind, listen to what I have here. It’s Ministry of Health Procedural Directive eighty-oblique-oh-five, and it instructs hospitals to double the payment to blood-donors and stockpile the maximum quantity of plasma!”
Kneller’s jaw dropped. But before anyone could speak Ruth clicked shut the door, having regained her composure, and said in a near-normal voice, “I’m sorry to be such a fool. It’s just that coming on top of everything else it was a hell of a shock. Not so bad as what you went through, Malcolm, because my case must be more like Wilfred and Arthur’s. I suppose I’ve been sleeping half an hour longer per night … But the tension! Oh, it’s dreadful!”
“I don’t understand!” Hector cried.
“It would appear,” Kneller said harshly, “that VC
is
loose in the world. Running wild, the way we suspected. But … Bluntly, the question is: wild
enough?
”
Bradshaw spoke up unexpectedly. “I think we should hold a council of war. I mean that literally. I only heard about this VC stuff when I met Malcolm tonight, but–well, I’ve been through what it can do to a man, and it’s fantastic.”
All eyes turned on him as he left the breakfast-counter and came to join them.
“I don’t imagine any of you have been aboard a nuclear submarine equipped with MIRV-Poseidons?” he went on. “I have. A college friend of mine captains one, and invited me to preside at her launching, and later when she was commissioned took me to sea to witness a full-dress rehearsal for hostilities. At the time I was thrilled, of course. I didn’t realise what I was watching: proof that there are people in the world willing and able to destroy mankind.”
There followed a chill pause, almost total but for the very faint sound from the TV.
Bradshaw glanced at Kneller. “I know what you mean when you ask ‘wild enough?’ In my case, and I hope this is some reassurance to you, ma’am”–with a glance at Ruth–“VC has done a lot of good. Mr Sawyer, I gather you are, or were, a detective?”
Sawyer nodded.
“Can you imagine what it’s been like for me, wearing one of the best-known faces on earth, to remain anonymous when everybody and his uncle was hunting for me? I did it. I was never much good as an actor–I traded on my looks–but I was trained by one of the finest coaches in Hollywood, and things he taught me years ago have come real in my mind. I swear I could meet my wife on the sidewalk and she wouldn’t give me a second glance.”
“You’ve had no undesirable side-effects?” Kneller demanded.
“Sure I have.” Bradshaw grimaced. “It’s no fun to discover that you’ve let other people do your thinking for you all your life, is it? Me, I’ve always leaned on a psychological crutch: in school and college, then the Army, then with the agent who got me my part in
Gunslinger,
then the church … But I finally learned how to stand up and think for myself.”
Sawyer was very pale. He said, “Isn’t it hell? I … Oh, I have at least three murders on my conscience. Killings I had the data to prevent, only I didn’t work out in time what was going on.”
Sweat stood out on his face. “I thought until today I was getting my chance to make amends, thanks to VC. I’ve been assembling a dossier on a property developer who used frighteners to evict people illegally from their homes, and made a fortune as a result. He’s out of reach, but the money is still around, and it’s an old principle of common law that a criminal shall not profit by his crime. But today I was called to the Home Office and told that if I persist I can look forward to a faked medical discharge. He didn’t just break the law, that bastard, he smashed it and danced on the bits! And because the Home Secretary is a friend of the person who inherited … Well, that’s why I’ve sent in my resignation. I’m sick of it all.”
“I imagine you’re talking about Sir George Washgrave,” Malcolm said.
Sawyer blinked. “You don’t sound very surprised!”
“Should I be? I taught some of the kids whose families he evicted from buildings near here.” Malcolm turned to a chair, kicked it around as though it had injured him, and sat down, reaching to take Ruth’s hand. But she avoided him.
“I know people like that in the States,” Bradshaw said. “Bleed the poor in slum tenements, salve their consciences with gifts to charity … But–Mr Campbell! Or is it Doctor?”
Hector, who had been more and more at a loss as the conversation developed, said mechanically, “Doctor.”
“I take it you think this directive about stockpiling plasma is a precaution against war?”
“Uh … Well, I can’t be sure. It just seems likely.”
“It’s more than likely,” Kneller said. “As some of you know, our Institute is plagued with government investigators evaluating VC. In charge of them is a smooth devil named Gifford. Something he said today, in a fit of bad temper, scared Arthur and me out of our wits.”
“He accused us both of being traitors,” Randolph said. “Hampering him when, if it weren’t for him and the other people who are loyal to Charkall-Phelps, nobody would be taking any steps to help Britain survive the coming war.”
“He said that, in so many words?” Malcolm took a pace forward, and the others gasped in dismay.
“In so many words,” Kneller confirmed.
“That figures,” Bradshaw said. “World War Three is going to start in Europe, same as the other two did. I believe I can tell you why. I–uh–I did take a degree in theology, you know. I’m not just an unqualified self-appointed evangelist. I mean I wasn’t. That’s behind me. Same as with everything else in my life, though, I approached what I learned with eyes and ears half-closed. It’s only now I realise how dangerous and destructive Christian culture has become. If there was ever any love in it, it’s been bled out. Three major religions preach Holy War: Shinto, Islam, and Christianity. Christianity is the only one hypocritical enough simultaneously to enjoin its followers to turn the other cheek and suffer fools gladly and the rest of it. Look at the record. Germany was a Christian country almost exactly one hundred times as long as it was Nazi. Did the Nazis undo in twelve years all the church had done in twelve centuries? No, they built on it. Hitler was a baptised Catholic and never excommunicated. When he was enlisting the support of the bishops in 1933 he promised to do nothing to the Jews that the church had not done already, and kept his promise. Which is why the clergy turned over their parish records so that converts with Jewish ancestry could be identified and killed.”
“That’s not fair!” Ruth burst out. “They weren’t all–”
“For every Niemöller,” Bradshaw snapped, “there were a thousand who collaborated. And even Niemöller was an ex-U-boat captain, a willing professional murderer!”
“I–uh–I’d forgotten,” Ruth muttered, and added almost inaudibly, “But I can’t forget anything any more …”
“Did Gifford say”–from Malcolm–“the people at your lab are personally loyal to Charkall-Phelps?”
“Yes, he did,” Kneller sighed. “It’s of a piece with his career in politics, I suppose: business background, safe seat, Home Office within ten years where he can control the police … I was saying to Arthur as we arrived, the kind of thing you imagine can’t happen here. Plus an enormous populist movement handed to him on a plate, the Moral Pollution Campaign whose members are desperately seeking a scapegoat for what’s actually due to government incompetence, like high prices and bad housing and unemployment. I suspect he’s after a monopoly of VC. It would be the very thing he needs to secure personal supreme power in the chaos caused by the coming war.”
“Which, we are agreed, will be triggered off in Italy,” Randolph said, and added dryly, “Capital–Rome!”