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« on: December 25, 2023, 10:35:42 am » |
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IT occurred to Mr. Campion, who had remained at his point of vantage, that defeat had the interesting effect on Lord Ludor of increasing his humanity while reducing his size. The rueful smile and faintly soiled or, at least, homely appearance of the resigned loser had settled over him, and the change in the atmosphere was considerable.
Those who had trembled were now aggrieved, and on all sides people were unfreezing into recognizable personalities as they took sly digs at him, presumably to make sure he was not dying.
“I hadn’t a clue,” he said to the blond secretary, who now looked bigger and as if she could take care of herself. “And even you have no idea how damn witty that is! Take a note: Pa Paling goes in the black book.”
She looked startled. “Won’t that upset . . .?”
“Of course it will. It’ll kick over a dozen applecarts, but it’s necessary. I never want to hear his blasted lisp or see his face again. Also the name Clew is a dirty word in all companies, all departments.”
“Very well, but I did, tell you.”
“I shall remember it.” He was almost enjoying himself and had even loosened his tie and let his great neck free: this was the Ludor of twenty years before, when setbacks had been more common. “Where’s Vaughan-Jenner?”
“Here, sir.” Drasil alone was more wary than he would have been earlier, recognizing the animal as more dangerous than before, and the older man cocked an eye at him. In the normal way he might have growled at the elegant but extreme clothes, but now he decided against personal comment. Instead he said: “Go and get it into Professor Tabard’s head that I apologize. Lay it on as thick as you like, but see he accepts it.”
The young man gaped at him, but the quick blood, which had risen to his face, receded as he laughed.
“I can try.”
Ludor’s deep round eyes met his own gloomily.
“Keep at it. Don’t give in. Tell him my latest information is that Lord Feste is in the U.S.A. now. On Sunday he was invested with some sort of honorary degree in the University of Boomville and must have spoken with Rafael, who is always in close touch with him, before attending the ceremony. God knows who he’s told, so that explains the cable.”
“I understand.”
“Tell Tabard that Mayo must be replaced instantly and that the new man must be properly paid this time. Contact the Godley London office direct about that---Mr. McBain. I don’t know how much Feste slipped Mayo.”
“Forgive me!” The blonde was emerging as a power before their eyes. She murmured her objection, but it was evident that it was a real one.
“I do know!” He shouted the refutal. “The cable mentioned Tabard’s team specifically. These things that someone is trying on the children and for which Mayo has already been killed may not have been actually made by him here, but they must have been made by somebody from his information. Vaughan-Jenner?”
“I’m still here.”
“Soothe Tabard. Make him look in. Is there television over there?”
“The latest; he looks in all the time.”
“Good God! Why?”
“He likes it. He’ll probably have heard the announcement.”
“Sit and watch it with him. I want his reaction. It’s on QTV, Feste’s own company. Seven o’clock. You’ll have to get a move on.”
From the projection box Mr. Campion and Luke watched the jaunty figure slide under them out of sight, pausing only to give them a discreet thumbs-up sign as he passed. The superintendent shook his cropped head.
“I can’t see anyone looking forward to it,” he said gloomily. “To me it’s such a ghastly idea---much worse than the end of the world. In fact, it will be the end of my world when it gets going. Think what it’ll mean. New hypocrisies, new manners, new moralities, new sales methods, new relationships, new----”
“World,” said Mr. Campion. “Let’s face it---and, meanwhile, using the older methods of detection, Charles, what in the name of sanity do you imagine has actually happened?”
“Search me,” said the superintendent, and had no time to amplify the statement. The door to the iron staircase had opened a few inches, and the chairman of Advance Wires now eased himself in. He had a small tape machine with him and put it on top of the locker.
“Message just come through, Bert,” he said. “Your missis. Our chaps had been called off the rectory and were going to pack up when they got this on the beam from the sitting-room window. They thought it might be of interest, so they relayed it direct, and Feeoh sends it up to you with his compliments. She’s got a tongue when she’s roused, hasn’t she?”
He set the little spools in motion, and after a moment of husky anticipation Amanda’s beautiful voice cut into the room, with a biting intensity in her diction which was startling even to her husband. Her communication was made in the form of a statement delivered without pause or, apparently, intake of breath:
Lady Amanda Campion presents her compliments to the army of clumsy invertebrates who have had the impudence to bug her uncle’s residence for the past thirty-six hours and would like to inform them that communications with Edward Longfox have been always maintained, despite the inconvenience to his friends and family, who have been compelled to take avoiding action. Now that the necessity for secrecy no longer exists, she would like to advise the plump youth in the cloth boots, and those assisting him, to look in at a program on QTV at seven o’clock this evening. She mentions this because she feels that technicians who have managed to overlook the fact that the elderly lady living next door to the rectory---and visiting it continuously with more clean surplices than any clergyman could possibly use in a month of purification services, is also on the telephone---are quite capable of missing an announcement about the young man they are seeking that was made on the public broadcasting service over half an hour ago. Good night.
Thos laughed softly. “Class,” he said. “I like to hear it. I thought I’d pass it on to you and not the company, though. The kid was gettin’ on the blower to the old girl next door all the time, eh? And she was slippin’ notes in to the others with the washin’. Very deceitful people are nowadays, aren’t they? You wouldn’t have got church people behaving like that when I was a nipper.”
Luke sighed. “They know about the program at the rectory, anyway,” he remarked. “They’ll all be sitting round the kitchen table looking at the Talismans’ set. I wish I was there. I hate this place!”
“It’s the muffle,” said Thos with unexpected sympathy. “It weighs on you if you’re not used to it. Why don’t you stretch your legs outside for a bit?” He was winking at Mr. Campion as he made the suggestion, and as soon as they were left alone together he came closer to him with dreadful confiding.
“What’s the form?” he inquired anxiously. “I’ve told the Spark you’re the only one to trust. You’re an ole friend. Right out of the flaming past, I said! . . . Bert will give us the office of works, I told him. And you will, won’t you, mate? How bad is it?”
Mr. Campion was perfectly genuine in saying that he did not understand him, and Thos sat perched on the locker, his incredible nose actually twitching and his red-rimmed eyes anxious.
“Be a sport,” he said. “It’ll be ‘curtains,’ will it?”
It took the thin man some seconds to realize that he was being asked if the Ludor empire was in danger of foundering. Then the spectacle of the original rat getting ready to “shoulder its parrot and make for the boats” was too much for him and he began to laugh.
“No,” he said, “of course not. This thing hasn’t begun. I should think you’ve got another fifty years before your divorce service is even touched.”
Thos took this suggestion with unexpected seriousness. “My Gawd! It could make a right mess of divorce,” he said, and added, “as we know it. I think you’re right. It’ll certainly take a bit of time, which is one comfort.” He nodded toward Lord Ludor. “That ole article might get round to stopping it. What do you think?”
Mr. Campion did not want to depress him further and so said nothing, and he continued to wheedle: “I wouldn’t blame him, and nor would a great many other matchoor people. It’s not reely a nice idea, is it? Private thoughts and all that? I was sorry for that pore little kid who was feeling soft about his horse. Suppose they put it down by law?”
“I feel certain they will.”
“Reely?”
Mr. Campion put a hand on the thin shoulder; the man actually had mouse bones. “Be your age, Thos,” he said kindly. “Good heavens, is this it?”
As Luke came chasing up from the marsh, every monitor in the place, including one in the projection room, sprang to life, and for a moment or so the tail end of one of those rather frightening advertisements which suggest that the entire population has developed a Lady Macbeth psychosis urged the hardened company to get itself, its children and its linen “cleaner than you realize.”
Then there was a pause, a moment of shooting lights, and finally, to the strains of “Land of Our Fathers,” QTV’s nightly program, with Giles Jury in the chair, came into view. In the past Mr. Campion had often found it difficult to believe his own eyes when watching on television the devitalized ghosts of people he knew, but tonight the medium seemed to have a dreadful intimacy. He was vividly aware, for instance, that Jury, an urbane young man rather larger than life, must have insisted on trying the device himself, probably much earlier in the day. It said a great deal for his technique that the only visible effect upon him was a streak of pathos in his inhuman smile.
On his left sat old Peggie Braithwaite, wonderfully at ease from the crown of his shining head to the middle button of his waistcoat and doubtless below, if one could have seen any more. Leonard Rafael, dark, nervous and not as impressive as he would be the moment he opened his mouth, sat on the other side of Jury with Edward between them. The child was either perched on a pile of books or two feet taller than when last observed, and he looked tired. No one had told him not to scratch, and the heat of the lights was clearly considerable, but he seemed determined to see the thing through despite a chronic itch. His flaming hair looked as dark as Rafael’s, but his eyes remained chill and intelligent.
The fifth member of the group was a complete stranger. He was a bony young man who looked like a worried white bull terrier and wore “short back and sides” but a deal of hair on top, which misled one into thinking that the person he reminded one of so vividly was not present. It was only when he was introduced as Mr. Reginald P. Yates Braithwaite, editor of the Daily Paper’s distinguished contemporary weekly journal, The Boy’s Technician, that the penny began to drop at all.
The proceedings opened with a roll on the drums. Giles Jury excelled himself. His authority had never appeared less bombastic or more impressive, and his relaxed manner was just sufficiently tensed to let one know that he felt it was a truly great occasion.
“One often hears that history is being made,” he said pleasantly, “but tonight, you know, I really think it’s true. Lord Feste, who is the president of QTV as well as the sole owner of the Daily Paper, has decided that we shall have the privilege of bringing this news to you instead of saving it until tomorrow morning, when the newspaper would have had it as an exclusive item. He has done this because he feels---and I think we shall all agree with him when we see the magnitude of the break-through---that this is something far above the petty rivalries of news services. This is something which belongs to us all.
“The subject is extrasensory perception, and it is because of something amazing which has just happened in that field that this program has changed the whole of its schedules and that later on tonight, after the news, you will be hearing from a number of the leading brains in this country, whose names will be announced later. The interest in extrasensory perception has increased enormously in recent years, but from time immemorial men, and even more often women, have sought to communicate with each other by the power of thought alone. I shall not attempt to explain any of this but will lose no time in introducing those sitting round this table, who have so much to tell you: Mr. Leonard Rafael, editor of the Daily Paper, Mr. William Pegg Braithwaite, the well-known writer and broadcaster and scientific correspondent of the Daily Paper; his late brother’s son, Mr. Reginald Yates Braithwaite, editor of The Boy’s Technician; and Edward Longfox, of whom we shall all be hearing more later on.
“Peggie, can you tell us first, please, exactly what extrasensory perception is and then, from your own knowledge, what it is that has just so amazingly occurred?”
The old journalist seized the ball with the safe hands of a cricketer, and when his familiar voice, husky and squeaky by turns, first sounded that evening in three-quarters of the living rooms in the land the actual moment of break-through occurred. The crust cracked and the first shoot of the new seedling---strange, awful, but wonderfully exciting---appeared to view.
“Extrasensory perception is a thumping bad term,” said Peggie. “Or I think so. The thing we’re talking about tonight is the communication between minds, animal or human, when no known mechanism is employed. We’ve all heard of it; we’ve all met it at some time or other---or something suspiciously like it. Some of us don’t like the idea and some of us like it too much and let it make monkeys of us. However, today I can tell you that all that uncertainty is a thing of the past. The young man who has had so much to do with this discovery---for that is what it is; I can’t call it anything else---is here with us now. But, first of all, I am going to tell you how I came into the story.”
He cleared his throat and got down to it.
“In the early hours of last Sunday morning I was roused from my bed by two young men. There they are: Edward Longfox, son of that brilliant young scientist so tragically lost to us in the Arctic only a few years ago, and Reggie Braithwaite, son of my elder brother Yates, who edited The Yorkshire Stagecoach until his death last year. Reggie has a very fine paper of his own to look after, and he knows my interest in it, but I was a little surprised to find him calling on me with one of his contributors at two a.m. on a Sunday morning! ‘Why boy,’ I said, ‘are you out of your mind?’ In a moment or so I began to think so, for he told me the most extraordinary story of scientific discovery I had ever heard. While I was still staring at him, wondering if I should send for an ambulance, Edward Longfox placed something in my hand. It was this.”
He held out a nest of blunt fingers, and the camera rushed up to it so that for a moment the silver cylinder on a pristine square of adhesive bandage lay glistening, and many times its actual size, in the lights. Old Peggie replaced the exhibit in a splendid snuffbox. He was a connoisseur of antique silver and was suspected of never missing a chance of displaying a piece lest it might lead him to another. Watching him, both Mr. Campion and Luke were amused.
“I was in pyjamas and my throat was bare,” he continued, setting the box on the table. “So when they told me to fix this instrument over my jugular I did so, still thinking I was taking part in some sort of hoax. The next moment---my goodness! I was halfway across the room. This is true!” I cried. “My God, they have done it!” He shook his head, and the lights winked on its shining dome. “It was a very frightening experience,” he announced solemnly. “I knew that all over the world Bolitho in America, Broberg in Sweden, Fischer in Western Germany, Tsybukin and Dyudya in Soviet Russia, Dutruch in France and our own Professor Tabard on his island on the East Coast, to name but a few, have each been creeping closer and closer to the wonderful door of the mind which this little key has suddenly unlocked.” He paused, and his sharp little eyes peered knowingly at his audience as if he knew each one of them. “Don’t ring us up; the door isn’t open yet. These instruments are not available, and for the sake of you all I’m glad they are not. To try one in its present stage of development is a mind-shattering experience which could be very dangerous. Great new discoveries and their techniques are not perfected overnight. This will take time. However, the initial step has been made.”
Before Giles Jury could stop him, he swung round on the editor of The Boy’s Technician. “Reggie, you told me just now that our young friend had an apt simile of his own?”
The sudden catch offered him almost upset the younger Braithwaite, who fumbled, disclosing a delightful Jacques Tati personality. His mouth split into a huge puplike smile, revealing widely spaced teeth and a boy’s sense of humour. “He said we’d got the point of the pocketknife through the top of the condensed-milk can,” he gasped.
Edward studied his nails, but his lip curled faintly, and Mr. Campion suspected that he had thought it pretty good himself.
After this flagrant piece of unscripted nepotism, Giles Jury intervened, more in sorrow than in anger.
“Then you got on the telephone, I believe, Mr. Pegg Braithwaite?” he prompted firmly.
“Naturally.” Peggie had the grace to look guilty. “I obeyed my first instinct. I contacted my editor. There he is: Mr. Rafael.”
The editor of the Daily Paper, who had been sitting like a log, woke up, uncrossed his legs, hitched his chair toward the microphone and went smoothly into action like some great motor-car starting up.
He had a very ordinary voice and a very ordinary face, but he pulled the whole circle into a bunch, including without effort all those sitting round at home. “When I heard him on my bedside telephone I thought Peggie was overdoing it,” he said, smiling at everybody confidentially. “But he convinced me, and we all went down to the Paper office in Fleet Street, where I summoned a staff and we did a few preliminary experiments. As soon as I was convinced that we were indeed faced by a genuine break-through and not a mere invention, I contacted Lord Feste, who was in America. As you know, their time is some hours behind our own, and he was just going to bed, but on hearing my news he too became excited, and after a brief conference I found myself fully empowered to embark on the program we had hammered out.”
He broke off to speak directly to Giles Jury, who was fidgeting. “Oh, I’m leaning right across the table, am I? I’m so sorry. This thing is so exciting I get carried away completely. Well now, I’m sorry for that. The first thing I wanted to know was the thing which you all want to know now. How in the wide world did this astonishing thing come about? What led up to it? Whose were the brains behind it? The man who could tell me was there, waiting---Mr. Reginald Yates Braithwaite.”
He nodded to the young man but did not relinquish the microphone: Reggie Braithwaite was not his nephew. “As you have heard, he is the editor of a successful boys’ paper owned by the Thousand and One Nights Press, another company of which Lord Feste is chairman. Mr. Braithwaite is in the habit of publishing letters from correspondents---a bright and popular feature which, in his journal, takes an unusual position on the first inside page. Seven weeks ago he received a letter which so pleased him that he decided to publish it at once, giving it the lead position and a headline. Perhaps not altogether unfortunately, The Boy’s Technician is six whole weeks in print and that letter will not appear until tomorrow morning. However, I have here an advance copy of the paper and now, with the editor’s permission, I propose to read it to you.” He put on a pair of spectacles which were almost horse-blinkers and took up a very slim, very new-looking paper-covered magazine.
“This is the headline given to the letter by Mr. Braithwaite: ‘Seven Pounds for Your Thoughts but Worth It, says Edward.’ And this is the letter. I have seldom read a more meat-filled document, and I hope you will give it the attention it deserves. Here it is:”
Sir,
It may not be generally known that it is now quite possible to pick up the thoughts of other people in signals which are strong enough for the weakest of intellects to detect.
The study of ESP has become respectable now, whereas in the past, when it was called telepathy, it was not. Yet it is only very recently, and at this school, that the scientific instrument which makes reception absolutely foolproof---except for those who are too old---has been made to function.
A group of boys, all connected with science in some form, have banded together to do this in the following way:
(1) It was discovered by research that the new element nipponanium was the vital ingredient in any such instrument. Note: nipponanium, as you are probably aware, was not known before, since there was none on earth until some was produced and discovered in some radioactive carbon taken out of a dead reactor.
(2) The same researcher also discovered that the “Iris Transistor Semi-Silent,” which is made by the Nomoto Company of Japan, had already incorporated a minute quantity of this new substance in its amplifying element. It was the company’s belief that the sound volume could be made less penetrating in this way while the tone remained true and audible, thereby making the transistor sets suitable for school dormitories, etc., where quiet reception is so important.
(3) From another source (also Japanese) it was learned that the “Iris Semi-Silent” had gone out of production because the sound results were not much good and difficulties were experienced by the manufacturer since the work-people handling the nipponanium showed signs of a mystery neurosis and would not touch it after a bit. (These would all be adults, I expect.)
(4) Realizing I would have to act quickly, as more “Iris Transistors” might not come over to England, I approached my friend Henri Rubari, who put up the money (in the end) to buy no less than four of these sets, which are obtainable only from Messrs. Blank, Blank & Blank, of Blank in Holborn, who are the sole importers.
Rafael paused and removed his spectacles. “The suppression of the name of the firm was made in compliance with a house rule of the Thousand and One Nights Press, but the Daily Paper ascertained the facts and has taken appropriate action,” he said without a tremor, and, resuming his black-sided goggles, went smoothly on.
These sets cost no less than seven pounds each, and so we began with one only, which Henri Rubari donated free because of his faith in the idea---which, I would like to say, I appreciate. Armed with it, and with the information which my researcher had given me, I set to work, helped by the rest of my team.
(5) Since it was realized that the human body itself would naturally have to take the place of the rest of the transistor set, including its battery, my first task was to find the correct point of contact. Really exhaustive experiments were made by us all with at first most disappointingly slight results. However, as I believe is usual in these major discoveries, success occurred by means of a sort of accident. It was found that most people got their best results when an amplifier was stuck across the main artery in their necks, and various adhesives were tried. (It was very easy to be silly over this, and a lot of time was wasted.) Finally I decided that an ordinary piece of surgical plaster was the most practical as well as being the least noticeable, and one day, when our precious amplifier had been returned to me in a slightly damaged condition, I rolled it in the zinc adhesive, really just hoping to keep the thing together. My spirits certainly were at a low ebb. Then, like a thunderbolt! Victory!
I could not put it on until the next evening because of boxing practice, so it had some hours to soak. It was also very hot weather, which probably helped, but this is still subject to investigation and must be tested again and again.
At any rate, as soon as I put it in position and settled down in peace to make my mind the necessary blank, I got, among a lot of confusing other material, a definite, recognizable, clear flash from Rubari, who was down in the Dayroom. It was about fishing, which I am not interested in. He was tying flies and getting exasperated as people do. I was able to check with him at once, and then he checked me. I was annoyed with him for doubting my word, and he received what I thought about that, but not quite the message I sent. After that, work went on with great seriousness and the other transistors were purchased. Unfortunately the shop would not sell the amplifiers separately.
(6) I do not want to make any claim for the zinc until proper chemical and, I hope, radiation tests have been made. Without proper laboratory facilities, which I hope to get in France through a friend of Rubari’s whom we have got interested, it is not possible to tell how such a trace of zinc would affect the minute amount of nipponanium contained in one small amplifier or how it could get at it. Query: Is it a question not of chemistry but of radiation? When one thinks how a trace of germanium too small even to be detected chemically can affect the atomic pattern of aluminum, one cannot but wonder.
(7) I wish to say that I am publishing this interesting news now, before it leaks out any further, for a good reason. In our tests on this instrument we have naturally picked up many outside thoughts, mostly from strangers or people known only slightly. Some of these have been about ESP and even our own part in it, and some have been against and even dangerous, and so I have decided not to wait but to take action now. My father, who was a very famous man, told me when I was quite young that an invention belongs to the country of its inventor but that a break-through belongs to the world. Having thought it out very carefully, I have decided that this is a break-through. So the world must take it and get on with it as fast as possible, for it is not a thing for one lot of people to know more about than another if it is not to add to their serious irritations instead of clearing them up. I also feel that it will give men and boys in science a great deal of work of a useful kind and so lessen their interest in explosions and a blasted world and all that waffle. Once this is in general use, no one could even think of pressing a button for a bomb without those affected being warned. But I must repeat that there is a lot to be done before that happy day. Sending is erratic and receiving is not yet really practical by adults, which is greatly against it at present.
(8) The only thing I would like to ask for myself is that the amplifier, when it is perfected, shall be called “Longfox’s Instant Gen” after my father. Also, my researcher belongs to the famous Blank team, and he says, quite rightly, that the credit for the first idea of the nipponanium’s being useful must go to them.
I send this to The Boy’s Technician because I think it is a very good paper which should be in most homes.
Yours very truly,
Edward Longfox
(Aged 12)
P.S.: I spoke this letter onto tape and Rubari’s mother’s secretary typed it for us.
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