Breakthrough, p.20
Breakthrough, page 20
‘I no longer work at the University, Mr. Haverill.’
’Oh, don’t you? I didn’t know. I’m trying to get in touch with Doctor Dumpkenhoffer. You don’t happen to know—’
‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘But haven’t you any idea where he is? Did he go back to the States?’
‘He may well have done.’
‘You mean he didn’t tell you?’
‘He told me nothing.’
‘That’s strange,’ I said. ‘Do you know when he went?’
‘I don’t even know that he did go, Mr. Haverill.’
‘But he must have said something.’
‘Not to me, I’m afraid. I’m sorry I can’t help you.’
I sensed she was about to ring off. ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Peter—Mr. Klorner. Do you know where he is?’
‘In the Midlands, I believe.’
‘Do you happen to have his address?’
There was a pause. ‘Yes, I believe I might have it somewhere.’
‘Do you think you could let me have it, please? It is rather important.’
Again there was a pause, then: ‘Very well,’ she said reluctantly. ‘If you’ll hold the line I’ll see if I can find it.’
We heard the sound of her receiver being laid down and then footsteps receding. I gave Rachel an eyebrow shrug and fished a pencil out of my pocket. At last the footsteps returned. ’The address is “c/o Research Laboratories, Dyno-electron, Edgbaston, Birmingham”. I have no telephone number.’
’Thank you very much, Miss Aston. I must say I’m still very much in the dark though. I mean to say why should-?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr. Haverill, I’ve really done all I can. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said, but the line was already dead.
‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Rachel. ’Try to ring Peter Klorner?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think perhaps I’ll write. It strikes me there’s something mighty fishy in the state of Denmark.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, Miss Aston for one.’ I held up two crossed fingers. ‘She used to be just like that with Dumps.’
Rachel laughed. ‘You’re making it sound like something by Agatha Christie. Dumps probably gave her the sack for pilfering the petty cash.’
’That’s possible,’ I admitted, ‘but somehow I doubt it. Let’s hope Peter’s a bit more forthcoming.’
I wrote to him that same evening and asked him if he could give me any information that would help me to get in touch with Dumps. I explained that I had obtained his address from Miss Aston but that she had been either unwilling or unable to help. Three days later I received a brief, typewritten reply: ‘Dear Mr. Haverill, On Wednesday next I shall be passing through London on nay way to the United States. Would it be possible for you and Miss Bernstein to join me for dinner at Chez Solange? If this is acceptable I suggest we meet there at 8 p.m. Yours sincerely, P. Klorner.’ There was no reference at all to Dumps.
I showed the letter to Rachel, who said, ‘Chez Solange, eh? Good for Peter. I’ll starve myself all day,’ which was not quite the reaction I had expected.
He was waiting for us when we arrived, but with an adroitness for which I had not given him credit, he succeeded in fending off all my leading questions until the meal was finished and we were sitting over our coffee. ‘I’m glad you gave me this opportunity to square our account,’ he said. ‘It may be quite some time before we meet again.’ ‘You’re going for good?’
’For five years certainly. After that—who knows?’
‘Are you taking them the encephalo-visual converter?’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve definitely come round to the Doctor’s viewpoint on that particular matter. I expect to be working on computers chiefly.’
‘Where is he, Peter?’
Peter very carefully unwrapped three little parcels of sugar and dropped the cubes into his coffee. ‘I really have no idea at all.’
‘What!’ exclaimed Rachel. ‘You mean he isn’t in the States?’
‘Not to my knowledge, Miss Bernstein.’
‘I do wish you wouldn’t call me that,’ she said. ‘It sounds so formal.’
Peter smiled. ‘But I’m a very formal person.’
‘Peter,’ I said, ‘I can’t believe you’ve brought us along here and treated us to this magnificent meal, simply to tell us you don’t know anything about Dumps. It just doesn’t make sense.’
‘I said I didn’t know where he is,’ said Peter carefully, ‘not that I didn’t know anything about him.’
‘Well, when did you last see him?’ I asked.
’On December 26th. Eleven thirty-five a.m.’
‘Where?’ demanded Rachel.
‘In the Department.’
‘What was he doing?’
Peter sighed. ‘I’m not handling this very well, am I? I’m afraid my difficulty lies in the fact that I’m not a person who finds it easy to come to terms with the seemingly inexplicable.’
‘I know just what you mean,’ I said. ‘Last year I fought that particular battle a hundred times over.’
‘Yes, I suppose you must have done,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t really make it any easier for me though.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘why don’t you just tell us what you saw, and leave us to draw our own conclusions, if any?’
He frowned. ‘But it wasn’t what I saw,’ he corrected, ‘so much as what I didn’t see.’
‘Well, start at the beginning,’ said Rachel sensibly, ‘and go as far as you can.’
‘Very well, Miss—Rachel. After you and Mr. Haverill had left us to return to Wales the Doctor and I decided to see whether we couldn’t make something of that last tape of yours. Theoretically we should have been able to play it back through the screen in the normal way and simply reproduce what we had already seen. In practice, however, we discovered this was impossible. For some reason the impulse patterns refused to resolve.
‘We must have spent close on twelve hours trying out different combinations, but without any success at all. Then the Doctor hit upon the idea of tapping some of the stored charge in the torus and using this to supplement the original impulse we had on the tape. We made the necessary alterations and tried again, but, frankly, we might as well not have bothered.
‘By this time, I confess, I was getting more than a trifle fed up. “Look here,” I said, “short of sticking our own heads where hers was and playing it back through ourselves there’s damn all else we can do.” It didn’t for an instant occur to me that he might take me seriously, but that’s precisely what he did do. And nothing I could say would dissuade him.
Frankly, he had become completely obsessed with that tape and with whatever it was he thought it contained.
‘When I arrived at the Department on Boxing Day morning I found he’d been working all night on the new link-up and had it practically completed. I told him in so many words that I thought he was crazy and that he’d end up by killing himself. His answer was to produce a letter he’d written out completely absolving me from any responsibility should some mishap occur. He had even gone to the trouble of getting his signature witnessed by a couple of porters. Short of walking out on him there and then, there was nothing else I could do. And even if I had walked out, I knew he’d simply go ahead on his own, anyway.
‘Still I insisted on double-checking every circuit he’d wired up, hoping, I suppose, to delay matters until I’d managed to talk some sense into him. I pointed out that the superimposition of encephalic patterns upon already existing ones was a field in which neither of us had had sufficient experience to justify the risk he was taking. I might just as well have been talking to the torus. All he did was to quote some philosopher who, he said, had proved conclusively that it was justifiable to risk everything one had when more than everything was at stake. In short, I was wasting my breath.
‘When I couldn’t hold things up any longer and he was just starting to buckle on the helmet I heard the phone ringing in the office. I seized on this as a last-minute reprieve and trotted off to answer it. The call was from Miss Aston, who wanted to know why we were still working. I kept her talking, expecting the Doctor to come in at any moment and ask what was holding me up; in fact, I’d decided to go on keeping her there until he did, when I heard the muffled sound of a big blow-out along in the testing room.
‘Curiously enough my immediate reaction was pure relief; I assumed that something had gone wrong with one of the circuits. I put down the phone, trotted along the passage and pushed open the door. The place was in darkness and the light switch was dead. I called his name and got no answer, so I clambered over to the windows and released the blinds. The place was in a hell of a mess, but it looked much worse than it was. The screen was knocked over, the trolley was lying on its side and one of the benches had been shoved a couple of feet to one side—and those benches weigh a good few hundredweight apiece. It was while I was looking at that that I found the helmet. The Doctor wasn’t there.
‘I went out into the corridor and called his name again. Then I went and tried the door of the toilet. It was open and there was no sign of him. It seemed unlikely that he would have gone out without telling me, but just to make sure, I went down to the second-floor landing and then stuck my head out of the window. Not a soul to be seen anywhere. I shrugged, went back into the testing room and began hunting about to find the cause of the blow-out. I pulled up the rest of the blinds, straightened up the screen and sniffed around the circuit cabinets. As far as I could see, they were all in perfect order.
’Then it occurred to me to check the tape. I discovered that about two and a half minutes had been run off before the power had cut. I glanced over the control panel and noticed that the main switch hadn’t been tripped. Finally, I decided to repair the fuses and try to find out what had gone wrong. I still assumed that the Doctor would be breezing in with an explanation at any minute.
’As soon as I had the juice flowing again I was able to make a detailed check of each circuit. To my surprise, I soon found that everything was in perfect order, with the sole exception of the torus. It didn’t take me long to discover that its charge had leaked. As far as I could see, there was only one possible point of escape for that charge, and that was through the helmet. I picked it up, examined it carefully and then noticed that the buckles were still fastened. For some reason the possible significance of those buckles didn’t strike me till long afterwards.
‘I hung around the Department till lunchtime, waiting for him to put in an appearance, then I locked up and took myself off. I came back at about half past two, tidied up a *t>5 bit generally and rang Miss Aston again to find out if he’d been in touch with her. Finally, I made a few calls round about to try and pick him up at his flat or one of the other blocks. When I’d drawn blank everywhere I began to wonder whether he might not have lost his memory and just wandered off. I’d heard of such things happening, but I’d never had any experience of them myself, and, frankly, the idea seemed a bit ridiculous. Anyway, I was damned if I was going to make a fool of myself. In the end I scribbled a note to him which I left with the porter of the Staff residential block and then I went home.
‘It wasn’t till about a week later that it suddenly dawned on me that I was engaged under a short-term contract which was due for renewal on January 8th. I immediately tried to phone through to the Doctor and, of course, got nowhere. Miss Aston had still heard nothing. But unless I got hold of him, and quickly, it meant I was going to be out of a job. To cover myself I got in touch with a chap I knew at Dyno-electron and arranged to get taken on there if I hadn’t heard anything by the 8th.
‘Well, as you’ll have gathered, I didn’t hear, and I still haven’t. My last Hampton cheque came through on February 8th, and I found myself back in industry again. But by then my appetite had been spoiled. I started looking around for something more congenial, and the result is that I’m now on my way again.’
He drained his cup, set it back on its saucer and blinked across at us. ‘Has that answered your question?’
‘But where is he?’ demanded Rachel. ‘He must be somewhere.’
Peter spread his hands. ’Frankly, your guess is as good as mine—if not better.’
‘What did you mean, Peter,’ I asked, ‘when you said that your finding the helmet still buckled was significant?’
‘I trust I qualified “significant”,’ he said and gave me one of his carefully measured little smiles. ‘All I intended to convey was that it seemed odd to me to go to all the trouble of buckling up the straps if one has to go through all the labour of unbuckling them again before one can put the helmet on. Certainly I’d never known him do it before. There just wouldn’t have been any point.’
‘You mean you think he was wearing it and then—well, vanished or something?’
‘I simply have no explanation at all, other than those I’ve already offered you. Frankly, loss of memory seems the best bet to me. It strikes me that superimposing someone else’s brain patterns on your own would be as good a way as any other of achieving instant amnesia—and probably better than most.’
‘But surely you would have seen him,’ said Rachel. ‘After all, you rushed into the room as soon as you heard the bang.’
’True, but you must remember that the explosion—if it was one—might easily have occurred later. I was out of the testing room for a good twenty minutes and not more than two and a half minutes had been run off the tape. If he’d blacked out and simply wandered off leaving the works running he could have been clear long before I started to look for him.’
‘Hasn’t anyone been to the police?’ I asked.
‘Miss Aston. They made a note of his particulars and said they’d circularize the information, but apparently people disappear without a trace every day of the week. I hadn’t realized it was quite such a common occurrence.’
‘What happened to the tape?’ asked Rachel.
Peter reached down for his briefcase. ‘I’ve got it here with me as a matter of fact. I asked Miss Aston to send it on to me. I thought you might like it.’
‘Me!’ cried Rachel. ‘What on earth would I do with it?’
’Oh, well, in that case, if you’re agreeable I might as well keep it. Who knows, one of these days I may get round to analysing it myself.’
‘Be sure and let us know if you succeed,’ I said.
We said goodLbye at the entrance to Leicester Square Underground. Peter, formal to the last, insisted on shaking hands. ‘May I take this opportunity of offering you my 207 warmest congratulations?’ he said. ‘I hope you will both be very happy.’
’Thank you,’ I said. ‘And good luck.’
He bobbed a little bow, turned, and walked away into Coventry Street and out of our lives.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Rachel and I were married in Norwich at the end of July. She had previously talked me into signing on with her in one of the International students’ archaeological parties that was setting out for Persia. In this way, she insisted, we would see a part of the world we’d never be likely to see otherwise, and would also get a honeymoon on the cheap. It was not until we were on board the chartered plane and actually in the air that she thought fit to inform me that we were going to work on and around the so-called ’Temple of Hyphasis’. ‘I thought you might get cold feet, darling,’ she explained. ‘You aren’t angry with me, are you?’
‘I daresay I ought to be,’ I replied, ‘and before it’s over I probably will be. But at this very moment, to be quite honest, I’m intrigued.’
’Is that all?’ she moaned. ‘I’m thrilled to bits.’
‘I’ll remind you of that when you find a rattlesnake curled up in your sleeping-bag,’ I said. ‘Along with me, I mean.’
We reached Teheran at some improbable hour around two in the morning and, sticky with sleep, all trailed off in search of the train that was to take us the five hundred odd miles up to Mashhad. At Mashhad we were herded into army lorries and jolted in convoy for five excruciatingly uncomfortable, dusty hours up into the northern mountains on the Turkestan border. Finally, an hour before sunset, and three days after leaving England, we reached the tented camp which was the recently established headquarters of the expedition.
It was a truly paradisial spot. One of the Persian students told us that the site had first been detected during an aerial mapping survey. It was easy to understand how it could have remained undiscovered for so long. Until the Army had blasted out the road three years before, the valley had been virtually inaccessible, and even the ubiquitous goat-209 herds had apparently given it the go by on account of its reputation for being ‘djinni’—a ‘bad’ place. From an aesthetic point of view a less appropriate epithet would have been hard to find. The air was as warm and sweet as new bread; birds sang in every bush and tree; and the sound of tinkling water was everywhere in our ears.
Rachel and I deposited our gear in one of the tents and set off to explore. ‘Do you feel as if you’ve been here before?’ she asked.
‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘I rather wish I had though.’
We met a group of other young people making their way back to the camp. They called greetings to us in French and told us that supper would be ready in an hour. ‘Plenty of time to get there and back,’ said Rachel. ‘Come on.’
’The chap who made that drawing for The Telegraph must have had more than his fair share of imagination,’ I observed. ‘I can’t see a single trace of a pillar.’
‘It doesn’t seem very like I’d imagined it either,’ she agreed. ‘But isn’t it heavenly?’
As we made our way up the valley one or two vague similarities did become apparent—notably the low saddle of ground which joined the hills on either side. Rachel scrambled on ahead of me up the stony slope and stood, silhouetted against the violet evening sky, gazing downwards while the dying breeze teased out stray strands of her dark hair.
‘How’s the amphitheatre?’ I called.
But she was rapt in a dream and did not reply. I made my way up to her and looked down. I suppose I had been half-expecting to see tier upon tier of marble seats gashed by avenues of bone-white steps which plunged down towards the mysterious rostrum of the high altar. Perhaps those things were there, buried somewhere under the spiky grass and the thorns and the flowering shrubs, but I could not see them. And yet the place held me, as it held Rachel, like a dream, by reason of its own forlorn, neglected beauty. I watched the butterflies, brilliant as autumn leaves, flickering and planing over the hollow, and I put my arm round
