The Anti-Death League

Part Two

The Founding of the League

STRAIGHT after breakfast the next morning Willie Ayscue returned to his hut in the meadow and settled down at his piano. He always had one available, but instead of talcing the same instrument round with him wherever he went, as Leonard would presumably have done, preferred to hire locally. In his present quarters he only had room for an upright, a Bechstein, though, and one with an outstandingly good treble. Better than the average grand, he had decided.

He removed from the lid his walking-out cane, which Evans, his batman, regularly placed there when he tidied up, as if under the impression that his master was in the habit of using it to conduct invisible orchestras from the keyboard. Glancing over at his Alsatian bitch Nancy, who was watching him expectantly from her basket by the door, he raised the lid of the piano and tinkled a few notes at random. The dog made a squeaking noise, got up and came to him with a partly sideways gait, wagging her tail in an unconvinced way.

"It's all right," he said, stroking her head, "nothing's going to go wrong. It isn't going to blow up or fall on me. That noise it makes is just it singing because it's happy. It isn't angry or frightened or in pain. It's just a piano, that's all. It can't hurt me. It's nice of you to worry about me but there's no need."

Nancy gave the equivalent of a shrug and went back to her basket, casting herself down into it with a loud sigh. When he began to play she cowered a little and gave another squeak, but not much of a one.

He went slowly through the clavier part of the Roughead sonata, not looking at the quality of the music for now, only at its difficulty. After half an hour or so he relaxed, smiling, and lit a cigarette. There were a few turns and some shakes in the bass that not many amateurs could be expected to play well, but that was a detail. Within twenty miles there must be a dozen people capable of making that part sound quite good. A glance at the violin part had suggested that it would not tax his own technical abilities. He was virtually two-thirds of the way to realizing the project he had conceived in Lucy's library within five seconds of knowing what it was he had found. He would give the piece a public performance, almost certainly its first in the original form for more than a century and a half, and in so doing would have made a tiny but real contribution to the understanding of English music of the later eighteenth century. And Roughead himself would have moved a fraction nearer receiving his eventual due as one of the most attractive minor composers of his era, a man whose naivety and professionalism blended uncommonly well. Ayscue suppressed the ungrateful wish that he had discovered instead some of Roughead's church music. One or two of his extant anthems showed a depth of religious feeling not very easy to parallel outside the choral works of Mozart and Beethoven. The choir at the village church could probably be drilled into rendering one of these adequately, and the organist there was pretty competent and might be cajoled into tackling one of the Roughead sonatas or fantasias. An ecclesiastical venue for the concert would have the advantage of stressing the essential connection between music and religion, but might rule out the idea of including a couple of the secular songs that were such an immediately accessible part of Roughead's work. That vicar was a stuffy old horror. Still, if…

Ayscue pulled himself up. Before drafting the entire supporting program he had better face the question of somehow getting hold of a flutist for the trio sonata. He could count on persuading any one of three or four to come down from London, but this would diminish the local, home-made flavor he wanted to give the enterprise. Was there a brass band in the district? Any other kind of band?

Suddenly excited, he got to his feet. He was nearly sure he remembered someone saying that young Pearce played the flute in the camp jazz group. And he seemed a pleasant, obliging lad. And an interest like this would be just the thing to take his mind off Fawkes's tragic death, which, it was understood, he had not yet recovered from.

Well, no time like the present. Ayscue went to the telephone and lifted it.

"Exchange here, sir."

"Oh, is Signalman Pearce on duty?"

"No, he went off at oh-eight-hundred, sir, after the all-night shift. He'll be pounding his pillow now."

"Never mind, then."

"I could call the guard room if you like, sir, and get someone to go over to his billet."

"No, I don't want to disturb him if he's got his head down. I'll see him later. Thanks all the same."

He put the telephone down and thought for a moment. Then he took his violin out of its case and was just about to try the violin part of the sonata when Evans knocked and came in with a pair of shoes back from the camp cobbler.

"Oh, and these are for you, sir."

Both the letters Evans handed him were internal to the unit. Ayscue opened the first one, but before he had started to read Evans spoke.

"Will you be taking Nancy for her walk as usual, sir?"

"Yes, about ten-thirty, I expect."

"I thought I might give the room a real proper brush-up, like."

"Good idea."

Evans left. Ayscue looked at the letter he was holding. Clipped to it was a covering note with a rubber-stamped heading that read, From O. I/c Adm. Underneath was written in pencil, Willie: Can you cope? M.H.

The letter itself was a sheet hastily torn from a pad. On it were a few ill-written lines in green ink. Without formality the writer announced that he had recently returned to England after some years in the United States and South America, would like to address the unit on the public image of the armed forces in the countries in question and hoped to have a lecture on the subject ready "in due course." He would be writing again "before very long" and signed himself "L. S. Caton."

Ayscue smiled to himself. It was Hunter's custom to pass to him any unit correspondence received that smacked even faintly of culture. The previous week he had found himself put on the distribution list of a new Army Council Instruction on the internal painting of sleeping-huts and asked for his comments. Today's letter was less easily dealt with. As things stood, almost any diversion was to be welcomed, but this Caton's suggestion, and the manner of it, sounded peculiar. Well, nothing could be lost by trying to find out more.

He sat down at his work table and wrote briefly to the effect that the proposed lecture did not quite fall within the unit's recreational program, but that as and when further details were forthcoming an effort would be made to find a place for it. He added a covering note to Hunter reading simply, Okay? W.A. and that was that. Then he opened his second letter. It consisted of a sheet of single-spaced typescript that read,

TO A BABY BORN WITHOUT LIMBS

This is just to show you whose boss around here.

It'll keep you on your toes, so to speak,

Make you put your best foot forward, so to speak,

And give you something to turn your hand to, so to speak.

You can face up to it like a man,

Or snivvle and blubber like a baby.

That's up to you. Nothing to do with Me.

If you take it in the right spirit,

You can have a bloody marvelous life,

With the great rewards courage brings,

And the beauty of accepting your LOT.

And think how much good it'll do your Mum and Dad,

And your Grans and Gramps and the rest of the shower,

To be stopped being complacent.

Make sure they baptize you, though,

In case some murdering bastard

Decides to put you away quick,

Which would send you straight to LIMB-O, ha ha ha.

But just a word in your ear, if you've got one.

Mind you DO take this in the right spirit,

And keep a civil tongue in your head about Me.

Because if you DON'T,

I've got plenty of other stuff up My sleeve,

Such as Luekemia and polio,

(Which incidentally your welcome to any time,

Whatever spirit you take this in.)

I've given you one love-pat, right?

You don't want another.

So watch it, Jack.

There was no signature and no covering note.

Ayscue read it through three times. Then he went to his wardrobe, a standard-issue affair in imitation walnut, and took a bottle of Scotch out from among his footwear. He swallowed half a tooth-glassful neat in two goes, the first drink he had had before noon for over ten years. When he had stopped coughing he sat down again, lit a cigarette and went carefully over the physical appearance of what had been sent him.

The poem had been inexpertly typed on a sheet of the cheap lined writing-paper on sale at the canteen. The envelope, similarly typed, bore his rank, initials and name in their correct form-as they were to be seen on dozens of notice-boards and lists round the camp, and, in one corner, For the magazine. That was all there was.

It seemed important to Ayscue that he should find out who had written the poem. But for the moment he was too agitated to think coolly about this. Experience had taught him that attacks on God along these lines meant that the attacker was in urgent need of help, lest he fall into the unforgivable sin of despair. He told himself that to let his own emotions dwell on this outcome could only postpone the chance of averting it, and forced his attention on to the task of drawing deductions from the text.

He made an annotated list in his mind. Spelling excellent by modern standards but with a few illiteracies. Could indicate either a good education imperfectly absorbed or a bad one nearly transcended. "Grans and Gramps," and "quick" used as an adverb. A lower social stratum? Or suggesting that the writer was aiming at this effect in order to sound down-to-earth and non-literary? Too sophisticated an idea? Raises the question of poetic approach. Somebody unused to verse? Or somebody used to it, but deciding that the theme ruled out what was conventionally poetical? No help anywhere along these lines.

Then anonymity. Again ambiguous. And the stationery. Either somebody who…

Ayscue pulled up short. These were intellectualist evasions of the central question, which he despised himself briefly for not having at once identified, and at once answered. Who had recently had an experience which could have rendered him emotionally capable of writing that poem? Signalman Pearce.

His hand went out reflexively to the telephone, then dropped: Pearce was asleep. Well, no harm could come to him in that state. Ayscue looked at his watch. Three and a half hours at least before he could hope to get into contact with the boy. And even then how was it to be done?

After some disagreeable thought he picked up the telephone after all and asked the operator to see to it that Pearce was given a message at dinnertime to the effect that the padre would like him to come along that afternoon, if he were free, and have a chat about music. It was promised that this would be conveyed. A pity, Ayscue reflected idly as he rang off, that such a message from the padre, however unmilitary its phrasing, was a summons to the presence of an officer, and a chat with the padre, however informal, was something worse, an invasion of privacy. He had once contemplated sending the Chaplain-General a memorandum saying that military churchmen ought to serve in the ranks if they had any respect for Christian tradition and any desire to be listened to. He had been deterred by reasoning that the CG would take no notice of it, if indeed it ever reached him, and moreover that the prospect of curates in inferior uniforms peeling potatoes in the cookhouse and having sergeant's swearing-or not swearing-at them was, however strong in appeal, far too funny to be worth pursuing. And further, it occurred to him now, by trying to alleviate one problem he would be exposing another and much more dismal one. It was not as officers that he and his colleagues intruded upon the men but, by and large, as parsons. Every year, it seemed almost every month, it became harder to ask the most innocent, unloaded questions without setting off the look in the eye that said, covertly or overtly, "What's it to you?" If one were to take off one's badges of rank, that look would find words. He had joined the Army with the idea of bringing the message of Christ to those who might any day stand in special need of it. He had hoped to build something genuine and valuable on the foundation of regular spiritual communion and pastoral contact which the Army had always provided. What he had really been looking for, evidently, was a captive audience.

Self-accusation was a form of self-pity and as such to be avoided. Ayscue got up, put on his cap and made for the door. With a rolling noise midway between a growl and one of her squeaks, Nancy bounded out of her basket and followed him.

Tongue flapping, she rushed diagonally away across the meadow as if in pursuit of the most provocative cat of her life. Then, at some inaudible but equally urgent call, she thrashed and skidded to a halt on the slippery dry grass and was off again at right angles, doubling her speed with each of her first few strides and keeping her dilated light brown eye rolling at Ayscue as she crossed his path.

He took the main track that led down to the gate. The sun shone hard on the roofs of the camp buildings and the leaves of the trees, glancing off windows and the glass and metalwork of the vehicles in the transport park and stirring thick vibrant bars of heat above the roadway. A motionless veil of haze hung at the wooded horizon.

One of the D4 sentries, rounding the corner of his beat, gave Ayscue a shoddy eyes-left. He acknowledged, as usual, with his smartest salute. The man flushed and his bearing grew more soldierly for his next dozen paces. Then it relaxed again. To Ayscue the tiny incident expressed perfectly the boredom, depression and uneasiness which pervaded the camp more and more and which he had no idea how to dispel.

"Major Ayscue," he said to the corporal of the gate guard. "Oh… fornicational, intoxicational, desperational. Sorry, I was thinking about something else. I meant recreational."

He walked down the lane and reached the main highway, where Nancy was waiting for him. Man and dog stood there for half a minute while traffic rumbled and rattled its way in both directions across their front. All the drivers were in shirt-sleeves and had their windows down. They seemed united by some single purpose.

Suddenly Ayscue remembered that he had left the poem in full view on his table, where Evans, in the course of his proposed brushing-up operations, would be certain to see it. The thought of it being spelled through, wondered about, perhaps uncomprehendingly grinned and whistled over was immediately as intolerable as if he had written it himself. He turned and went back the way he had come.

Nancy had paused to investigate what might have been a molehill and Ayscue's feet made no sound on the grass of the meadow, so that his return would have taken by surprise anyone who had crept into his hut during his ten minutes' absence.

And someone had. Brian Leonard, wearing newly pressed khaki, stood leaning in a casual and stiff attitude against the wall by the window. At his side the door of the normally locked cupboard, pushed to a second earlier, swung slowly open again with a whining creak.

"Hullo, Willie," he said. "I was just going to…"

Ayscue went and shut the cupboard and locked it with his key. He stared at Leonard, whose face was shinier and sallower and darker with subcutaneous beard than he had ever seen it before. Nancy came in, halted and growled softly, but at a sign from Ayscue went to her basket, where she settled herself with a groan.

"What? What were you going to do?"

"I was… Do you mind if I sit down? Thanks. I may as well be frank with you."

"I should. I don't think you can be anything else."

"No. Well, in my capacity as Security Officer of this unit I've been conducting certain investigations."

"So I see. In a rather reckless spirit. My batman or I or anybody might have caught you at it. And I have."

"I got hold of your batman and sent him on an errand for me," said Leonard in a short burst of complacency. "And I saw you go out with your dog. One has to take chances in this job."

"I can't see why. Anyway, what did you expect to find here?"

"One often can't say in advance what one's going to find."

"Have you actually found anything that interests you in your capacity as Security Officer of this unit?"

"Not yet. I'd only just started looking."

"What made you decide to look in my room rather than anyone else's?"

"I didn't. I mean, I do spot checks of everybody's quarters on a random basis. This is just your turn."

"Oh, good. But why couldn't I have been present?"

"There wouldn't have been much sense in tipping you off I was coming."

"Wouldn't there? I thought that was your number-one principle, letting everybody know what you were up to so that you could see how they reacted."

To be thus held up to question on a phylactological point seemed to shake Leonard more than anything else so far. He said crossly, "This was different."

"Well, you'd know. I wouldn't. But I wasn't thinking in terms of tipping people off. I meant you could have come in any morning when I was here and searched the place there and then. Like that I wouldn't have had a chance to eat my instructions from Tirana."

"You're right. I never thought of that."

Ayscue's manner relaxed momentarily. "You need some leave, Brian. We all do."

"I know. Sorry to have upset you. I'm only doing my job."

"That's all right. How did you get that cupboard open, by the way?"

"I have skeleton keys," said Leonard. He did not add that he had been unable to open so much as his own dressing-table drawer by their agency, and that after having had to leave snapped-off portions of half a dozen of them in various locks round the camp he had decided to use them no more. "But they're tricky things to handle"- his voice thickened sharply as this recurred to him-"and I'd be very grateful if you'd open it again yourself."

"Hadn't you seen inside?"

"I was just that moment going to when you walked in."

"Oh. In that case there's some point in refusing to open it for you or to allow you to open it. Which I hereby do."

Leonard got up from the bed, where he had been sitting, and approached Ayscue and the cupboard. "This is a Security matter," he said, "which means it isn't your place to give or withhold permission. If I have to, I can have you put under arrest and shoot the lock off that door. I'm ordering you to open it."

"It's private, what's in there."

"If it is, the whole thing'll go no further."

After hesitating briefly, Ayscue unlocked the cupboard.

Two minutes later, Leonard was saying, "One suit, civilian, three shirts, civilian, three pairs socks, civilian, seven neckties, civilian. That seems to be the lot."

"Aren't you going to look for secret drawers and sliding panels?"

"No. You'd have known you couldn't have installed them without attracting notice. Now. Where do you go when you've got these on?"

Ayscue nearly told him to bloody well find out, but that would not have done at all. "I go into the town," he said.

"What for? Whatever the reason is it's safe with me."

"I can't tell you that."

With what seemed a great effort, Leonard said, "You must tell me, Willie."

"I wish I could. I really can't. It's a Church matter."

"Ah-will you swear by almighty God and our lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost and on your honor as an anointed priest of the Church-you are anointed, aren't you?-that whatever you get up to in town wearing those civvies it's nothing to do with Security?"

"I so swear."

"Thank Christ for that."

"Amen."

Leonard slumped back on to the bed. "That ought to hold them," he muttered. "If I had to I could take this all the way up to the CG and the Archbishop of Canterbury too. That'd hold ‘em."

"What are you waffling about, Brian?"

"Look, Willie." Leonard spoke earnestly as well as urgently. "I know you're not a spy as well as you do. But my master's a fanatic for detail, for closing every avenue and leaving no stones unturned. In my reports I've had to say I've been keeping you under surveillance. Now I can say you've solemnly sworn by God and the rest of them that you're not doing anything we ought to know about. That'll hold him. We can both forget about you. Of course, if you turned out to be a spy after all, my head would roll and so would his. But since he knows as well as you and I do that that won't happen, this'll be the end of it. I hated doing all this. I apologize most humbly."

"Don't give it another thought, my dear chap. Now if you'll excuse me…"

"Yes, I must be going."

Leonard's way to the door took him past Ayscue's work table. He gestured at it with his head.

"Funny poem or whatever it is you've got there. Who wrote it?"

"What's that got to do with you?"

"Nothing. Nothing in my capacity as Security Officer, that is. But I'm not in that capacity all the time, you know, even though you probably think I am. I can take an interest in a poem and who wrote it without thinking it's a code message from the Kremlin."

This was said reproachfully and with a flash of spectacles that could have betokened some sort of toss of the head. Ayscue found himself nearly grinning.

"Of course you can, Brian. I'm afraid I've no idea who wrote it. There's no signature or anything."

When Leonard picked up the typescript and looked at it consideringly, his mouth pushed forward, Ayscue again felt the sense of ownership, almost of authorship, that had made him interrupt his walk. He wanted to snatch the poem from the other's hand and put it somewhere out of sight.

"So I see," said Leonard. "Mind you, I can't make much head or tail of it, but it seems rather morbid to me. We all know these things happen, but there's no point in dwelling on them like this, I'd have said myself. Still. The bit that really beats me is this thing here about… Limb-o. Can you throw any light on that?"

Ayscue shook his head emphatically. "No," he said.

"Mm. He does nice punctuation, though. Well, I mustn't take up any more of your time. Thank you for putting up with me."

When he had watched Leonard march rather than walk to the edge of the meadow, his shoulders hunching and unhunching in turn as he swung his arms, Ayscue went back inside and sat down at his table. He glanced at the poem again, intending to reread it, but decided not to do so and locked it away in his cash-box. Leonard had omitted to ask to see inside this, perhaps an odd omission, certainly a fortunate one. The merest look would have nullified all Ayscue's efforts to conceal the purpose of his expeditions in mufti.

With the poem out of sight, he opened the stout manuscript notebook in which he drafted his sermons and prayer-meeting addresses. Since his ordination he had filled more than twenty such books, destroying each in turn as soon as the contents of its last page had been delivered. He had never knowingly used the same material twice.

The current page ran,

Ideas of God. Traditional see as human. Primitive, attrib own weaknesses, angry need placating, drought, sacrifice. Even Gks, altho JEsch etc., Soc, A'totle, + Parth, lech, anger, revenge, favorite (Achill). Only Xtn, father. Anthropols say origin 1) tribal authy 2) father-fig Freud 3) relic fear + man – someone makes thunder. Ok interesting, not whole story. Only Xtn God not human weakness. UK courts best, but always innocent/guilty & w. ‘Only human.' God always 100% fair, unable not. Human father v often gd, loving, no favorite, all kids same, ugly = gd-looking, when we bad = when we good. But only human, even best tired, worried, busy, just not there. Only God always there, 100% loving.

Having read through the above, Ayscue replaced his pen unopened in his pocket and shut the notebook. He went and switched on his gramophone, a table model with a plug-in second loudspeaker for stereophonic reproduction. The record he chose was the Magnificat of C. P. E. Bach. The pealing of the trumpets in the orchestral prelude drew tears to his eyes. Before the chorus had done more than enter with magnificat anima mea Dominum the telephone rang. He turned off the music and picked up the receiver.

"Ayscue here."

"Hold on, sir, call for you… You're through, madam."

"This is the secretary of the museum library," said a voice Ayscue recognized.

"Oh, good morning, and what can I do for you?"

"On the question of that manuscript you were interested in, you remember, Major? I've had a word with my chief and he says it's all right for you to have it if you make a donation to a charity of which he's the chairman. Would ten guineas be reasonable, do you think?"

"Oh yes, I think that's a very fair sum. Can I take down the address?"

"I'll give it to you when I next see you-there's no urgency. As regards the other matter you were interested in…"

"Yes?"

"As you know, my chiefs very busy these days. But he says he can give you an interview this evening if it's convenient."

"Splendid, this evening will do very well. What time shall I present myself?"

"Ten o'clock. If you arrive at exactly ten my chief will be able to fit you in without any fuss or bother. He understands completely about you not wanting to have to chat to other people in the waiting-room and so on."

"He's a very considerate man, your chief."

"Well, you know, he's had a lot of experience of people and their ways. Now, you just come to the side entrance of the museum at ten-it's very easy to find-and I'll be there myself to take you up to my chief's office."

"Right, I've got all that, thank you."

"My chief says he's very much looking forward to having a chat with you."

"Have another."

"Yes, please. It's terrific stuff. What is it?"

"It's called green Chartreuse. I'm glad you like it."

"Won't it make me tight? It tastes terrifically strong."

"What do you care? We're on the loose tonight."

When this brought only a smile by way of reply, Hunter searched his mind for things he could say. There were plenty of things he wanted to say, but they would hardly have been sayable unless Signalman Pearce had been in his arms, instead of sitting very up-right on the far side of a hotel restaurant dinner-table. This was a perennial difficulty. Only by having been to bed with somebody was it possible to attain the pitch of conversational intimacy that was needed as prelude to getting them into bed. So, at least, it often appeared to Hunter at this stage of the proceedings. From this point of view there was much to be said for the heterosexual scene, where any old gap could be effectively got over by inquiries whether anybody had ever said how beautiful the other person was, by statements about eyes being like stars, and even, perhaps best of all, by wordless and mindless graspings of the hand.

The waiter appeared before this particular gap had stretched too far. Hunter looked up at him with approval as well as relief. Although instantly recognizable as one of the boys, of the persuasion which invited pursuit rather than that which pursued, he had not once rolled either eye or hip in course of serving the meal. Such self-restraint, Hunter knew, was rare. It helped to make up for the restrained contempt and amusement in the head waiter's demeanor, and for the unmixed and unrestrained amusement of the two young businessmen and their women at the next table. Pearce had seemed not to be aware of all this, but it was Hunter's guess that he was.

"A large green Chartreuse here, please, some more coffee and the bill."

"Certainly, sir."

"What do you think of the padre, Max?" asked Pearce suddenly when the waiter had gone.

He had said "Max" and not "sir" every time since being asked to, as if it came naturally to him. Hunter did not bother to speculate how or why it should. He was just delighted.

"Old Willie Ayscue? Not a bad chap for a God-botherer."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, you know. Always suspect somebody who goes down on his knees in front of an instrument of torture, even if it is an out-of-date one. But never mind about that now. What made you think of Willie all of a sudden?"

"He asked me to go and see him this afternoon. About music, he said it was."

"Well, wasn't it really?"

"It started off with that. He showed me a piece of music he said he'd found somewhere. A classical piece, it was."

"Oh, I know. Thomas Shithead or some such name."

"Roughead, that's right. He's an old-fashioned composer. This piece of his is a trio. There's a violin in it, which the padre said he reckoned he could tackle himself. There's a piano, and he reckons there he could easily get one of the locals to do it. And then there's a flute, and he asked me if I thought I could have a go at that. He'd heard from somebody that I double on flute in the group, you see."

"That was probably me, I'm sorry to say. Anyway…"

"Well, what he's got in mind, he wants to put this piece on in a concert. I was just wondering what you thought of the idea."

Hunter refrained from answering while the waiter came back with their order and the bill. He poured the coffee efficiently and unobtrusively. Lighting a cigarette, Hunter noticed the smooth firm Une of his jaw, and vaguely contemplated a little luncheon-party à un at this table while he was still in the area. He counted out money for the bill, adding a tip that was just perceptibly more than one-eighth of the total. The waiter took this in and bowed.

"Thank you very much, sir," he said politely. "I hope everything was all right?"

Hunter gave a friendly smile. "Better than all right. You were very nice to us."

Only somebody who was watching for it would have seen the waiter's eyelid move.

"It's a pleasure, sir," he said, and went away.

"Oh yes, about Willie's concert," said Hunter. "I should say from your point of view all you needed to know was how much practice and what-not you'd have to do."

"I'd have thought you'd have been against it never mind how little practice there was to it."

"Why should I be?"

"Well, it's music, isn't it?" Pearce grinned faintly. "I'd have thought that'd be enough for you, that it's music. The first time I came and talked to you in the hospital you sounded off against music."

"So I did. What a good memory you've got."

It was unlikely, considered Hunter, that Pearce remembered that occasion as well as he did himself. He had looked up at the sound of Pearce's boots on the block floor of the ward and seen him approaching past the table with all the flowers on it, blushing a little at perhaps intruding upon an officer who had chatted to him casually two or three times only, everything about him full of sensuality, empty of lechery or coquetry. For the first time in Hunter's experience he had felt a sharp desire not to have a drink.

He went on now, "You don't want to take me too seriously about that sort of thing. Did you look at the stuff? Can you play it?"

"I don't think there's a lot to it. It looked pretty simple, what I saw of it."

There was a short struggle within Hunter between his opposition to serious music, which was perfectly sincere, and his fondness for the prospect of Pearce's developing an off-parade life into which he, Hunter, could plausibly wander from time to time. Principle lost.

"In that case why don't you have a crack at it? It might be quite fun."

"I might as well."

Pearce took a sudden swig of his Chartreuse and licked his upper lip with a darting movement of the point of his tongue. Hunter's lips opened slightly in turn.

"Anyway," said Pearce, "I told him I'd think about it, the padre, and then… Well, he started off by asking me how I was feeling these days. He meant about… you know."

"Yes."

"So I said I thought I was beginning to get over it a bit, during the days at least, but I couldn't really be sure. And he didn't say anything for a bit, but you could tell he was, you know, sympathizing. But he looked terrifically ill, Max. All haggard. Is he really ill?"

"I don't think so. He's looked like that ever since I've known him."

"I see. Anyway, then he wanted to know if what had happened had made me angry. Angry with life, sort of. I said not particularly, just sorry. Was I sure I wasn't angry with God, he said. I had to tell him I didn't believe in God, so I couldn't very well be angry with him. By this time I was wondering what it was all about. The next thing he said really floored me, though. Had I ever written any poetry. What do you think of that?"

"He must have been out of his mind is what I think of it."

"I thought the same for the moment. But then he explained that someone had sent him a poem for this magazine he's trying to run, and it had upset him a lot because it looked as if whoever wrote it was very unhappy and had it in for God, which according to him is very dangerous, so he's trying to find the author. Apparently the chap hadn't put his name on it or anything."

"Did he show you this poem? Poem, Christ. I feel rather more strongly about poetry than about music. At least with music the general sense of uneasiness and misery isn't tied down to anything. Poetry's got messages in it. You know, above love and spring and getting into a state. It says you ought to notice things."

"I don't see any harm in that."

"I do. The best way of dealing with the problem would be to send any author to prison who wrote a book that sold less than a million copies. That would put paid to most of the stuff I'm against. Anyway, it's not important enough to go on about. This poem that's got Willie all of a twitter. Did you get a look at it?"

"No, he'd got it locked away somewhere. It wouldn't really do for people to see it, he said."

Hunter laughed silently. "So presumably the editor will very much regret being unable to find a place for the contribution. Good old Willie. I never realized he was such a loyal son of the Church. I wonder he didn't burn the thing on the spot."

"No, but he really was upset, Max. He said now he knew it wasn't me who'd written it he didn't know what he was going to do about finding out who had. He was very low, honestly. You could tell."

"Well, there's no need for you to start worrying. Old Willie gets these moods. They don't necessarily mean a hell of a lot. I'll have a word with him in the morning. Quite likely he'll have forgotten all about it by then."

"I wish you would. Sorry, I'm holding you up."

"You're not in the least. Take as long as you like."

"No, I'll just…"

Half an inch of Chartreuse at once was too much for Pearce. He choked and coughed. Hunter got up and beat him heartily on the back. He saw that the four at the next table were watching, with half-smiles of different kinds but the same high level of offensive-ness. Fixing on the younger of the men, a shop-soiled faun with a small mouth, he gave him his best public-lavatory leer over Pearce's shoulder. All four heads turned away as if twitched by the same string.

Pearce gave a final gasp. "Really does the trick, doesn't it, thumping? Sorry about that."

"So I should hope. After that exhibition the least we can do is leave quietly."

They did so. Outside it was still light. Hunter explained that where they were going was only a few hundred yards away, so they might as well leave in the hotel car-park the pick-up truck in which they had driven over. The street they walked along was crowded, but on one side there was part of a canal with yards and warehouses that looked deserted. Twice Hunter's shoulder brushed Pearce's as they moved to avoid groups of passers-by.

"Here we are," said Hunter.

They went into the entrance-hall of a small block of flats dating some thirty years back. There was no lift.

On the stairs Pearce said, "Tell me again about this bloke."

"He's called Vincent Lane. About thirty. Unmarried. Friend of my brother's. In the insurance business. He spends about half his time here and half in London. I don't know who else he's asked tonight. It should be quite fun."

By this time they had reached the second floor. Hunter pressed a bell. They heard it ringing, but then nothing happened.

"Mm, this doesn't look too good," said Hunter, ringing again.

More silence. Hunter stooped down and turned back a corner of the doormat to reveal a latchkey. He opened the door of the flat with it.

"What do you think's happened?" asked Pearce.

"He may have got held up. He wouldn't mind us letting ourselves in like this. Let's see if he's left a note."

Off the tiny hall was a long, rather narrow sitting-room with faded rugs, leather armchairs and an expandable dining-table against one wall. On this table they saw a sheet of paper with typewriting on it. It read,

Sorry boys-called to London late this afternoon. Urgent (they say). Couldn't seem to get you at the camp, Max-left a message with some moron which if you're reading this you can't have got. Managed to put everybody else off. Insist you have a drink now you're here. As many as you like. Help yourselves. Feel free. Give me a ring next week, Max. Many apologies for dragging you all this way.

Then, in a shaky hand,

In haste,

Vince

Pearce gave a quick glance at Hunter, walked down the room to the window and stood looking out.

"Can I get you a drink?" said Hunter to his back.

"No thank you."

"Do you mind if I have one?"

"Of course not."

Hunter hesitated for a few seconds, then joined Pearce at the window. From here the canal was in view. There was still nobody to be seen near it. After another pause, Hunter put his hand on Pearce's nearer shoulder. He did this not because he thought this was the right moment, but because he could think of nothing else to do and nothing whatever to say. With his heart seeming to shake his whole chest, he turned slowly and put his other hand on Pearce's other shoulder, noticing the coarseness of the cloth there. Pearce's eyes were shut.

"Oh, Andy," said Hunter, calling him by this name for the first time.

He kissed Pearce gently on the cheek near the mouth and felt him grow tense. When he kissed him again, on the corner of the mouth, Pearce strained away slightly. For a moment neither moved. Then Pearce stepped back and Hunter's hands fell to his sides.

"I'm sorry, sir," said Pearce in a trembling voice. "It's not that I don't like you. I just can't do it after all. I thought I was going to be able to, if it came to it. I wanted to, at least I wanted to want to, because you've been terrifically kind to me and I like you very much. I'd have given anything to be able to."

A tear fell out of Pearce's eye.

"Perhaps I might have been able to," he went on, "if we hadn't mentioned… you know… him. Not that there was anything… He and I were friends. You know, nothing more. But it just set my thoughts going and I couldn't go on. I'm sorry."

"That's all right," said Hunter, looking out of the window. "We can't have you apologizing. It was my fault. I should have known better."

"I didn't mean to call you sir just now. It just slipped out."

"Of course, I understand."

"I've been very bad about this. Until you… until just now I was telling myself some of the time I wasn't sure what you were after. But now I know I knew all along. You've spent all this money on me and I haven't given you any return."

"Oh yes you have. It's been marvelous just talking to you. You mustn't think of it in that way. I enjoyed your company. And I've got lots of money anyhow."

"I won't tell anybody what happened."

"I know. You're a thoroughly… You wouldn't do a thing like that."

"If I'd known earlier on I wasn't going to be able to do it I'd have let you know somehow, I'd have got out of coming along here, I wouldn't have had to hurt your feelings like this."

"You haven't. Don't you worry about any of that. Signalman Pearce, your conduct has been exemplary in every particular. Your superiors have no fault to find with you. And now… let's have a drink. You can have one now, can't you?"

"Yes. Yes, Max. A drop of Scotch if there is any."

"There is. I'll be back in a second."

Out in the extensive and lofty cupboard which was the kitchen, Hunter leaned forward, put his hands on the edge of the sink, and took half a dozen deep, slow, quiet breaths. After that he mixed a very strong Scotch and water and drank it, mixed another of the same and an ordinary Scotch and water, took both glasses into the sitting-room and gave the one with the ordinary drink in it to Pearce, who had sat down on the arm of one of the leather chairs.

"Cheers," said Hunter, grinning. "Very generous with his whisky, old Vince Lane. And very discreet too. You might call him the perfect host."

'There isn't anybody called Vince Lane, is there?"

There must be somewhere, but this particular one is a child of my ever-fertile imagination. I don't think I'd like him much if he existed. He'd be the sort of chap who's always known everything he wanted to know. Good fun, but with a serious side to him. I'm glad we missed his party. There'd have been terrible people at it. Men whose personality consists of being self-assured and peevish girls with tiny chins and pearl necklaces."

"Have you never gone for girls?"

"Not very hard. I can see the point of them, though. They must make life much easier for a chap. Especially if he's got anything in the way of a sense of humor. However hilariously you may behave over a girl you always feel it could be all right for somebody else. I mean it's just that you yourself are too ugly for her or too old or too poor, too something anyway, or not something enough, and that's all that's ridiculous about the situation. Whereas consider what you're taking on when you get frightfully fond of the postman or the chap in the place where you get your hair cut or your old school chum's uncle. There's no way at all for that not to be funny, whoever's doing it. Oh, you can t help admiring someone who's prepared to do his best to heave a respectable middle-aged merchant banker in black coat and sponge-bag trousers onto his lap and ask him to run away with him. Lots of guts there."

"I can't quite see you in that position," said Pearce, smiling.

"Thank God for that. Actually one can't complain. As far as I'm concerned, not being able to keep a straight face under certain conditions does sometimes work as a restraining influence. And if you somehow never find yourself being restrained by things like prudence or propriety or conscience you need all the help you can get, believe me. Now what I suggest is this. We choke these down now as fast as we can and go back along the road to a pub I know of where there's a garden you can sit in without the management seeming to mind much. What do you think?"

"I'm for that," said Pearce, getting up briskly and draining his glass.

"Off we go, then."

At the door of the flat Pearce looked at Hunter, hesitated, and said, "Don't forget to thank your pal Vince Lane for his hospitality."

"Not on your life. I'll drop him in a bottle of champagne from both of us."

Hunter shut the door. They went down the stairs and into the street, where the pavements were less crowded than they had been fifteen minutes earlier. Two men were standing talking outside one of the sheds on the far side of the canal. Their voices, calm and businesslike, were just audible across the water.

When he and Pearce drew level with the hotel where they had dined, Hunter stopped.

"I think I must have left my lighter in here," he said. "If you could hang on a moment I'll just dash in and see."

Inside the building he went to the doorway of the restaurant and hung about. Within half a minute the waiter he was looking for came hurrying over.

"Can I help you, sir?"

"I was hoping so. I very much enjoyed my meal this evening, thanks largely to you, and I was thinking of lunching here one day later this week. On my own this time. I wondered whether you could recommend a good day."

"Now let me see, sir… Would Thursday suit you?"

"Yes, Thursday would do very well."

"The chef does a very nice steak-and-kidney pie on Thursdays which I can thoroughly recommend, sir. There's just one point, though, and that is I'd advise your coming in comparatively early, because some of the staff go off at two-thirty that afternoon. Including myself as a matter of fact."

"I see. Well, would twelve-forty-five be early enough, do you think?"

"Twelve-forty-five would be fine, sir." The waiter turned through a booking register that lay on a nearby table. "Stationed in the town, are you, sir?" he asked conversationally.

"Not exactly. I've got a flat just down the road from here."

"Very convenient, sir. Oh, what name is it, please?"

"Lane. Captain Vincent Lane."

"Thank you, Captain Lane. I'll look forward to seeing you on Thursday, then. Good night, sir."

"Good night."

"Ah, now here's an interesting case which will round off our tour in an appropriate fashion."

Dr. Best took Leonard fraternally by the arm and led him down the steps in front of the main entrance of the mental hospital to where a man of about fifty was sitting in a slumped position on the mossy stone surround of the ornamental pond. Nearby stood a wheeled invalid-chair. The sunlight was very strong.

"This man is called Underwood," said the doctor cheerfully. "Insult him."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You heard what I said. Insult him. Call him names. Abuse him. His hearing, by the way, is as good as yours or mine. Go on, Captain Leonard."

Leonard swallowed and coughed. "You swine," he said indistinctly to the man.

"Oh, you can do better than that. Be offensive. Imagine that he's your lifelong enemy and you now have him helpless in your grasp without fear of retaliation. You hate him deeply. Try again."

"You revolting… sod. You unpleasant idiot. I hate you. You're the most, uh…"

"No, no, no. Hopeless. Now listen to me."

Dr. Best faced the seated figure, which had not so much as blinked since their arrival, and crouched forward slightly.

"Underwood?" His voice was soft and level. "You can hear me. I know that and you know I know. Now, how would you like me to bring you a nice boy? A nice boy with beautiful fair hair and lovely pink cheeks? So that you could undress him and play with him and do all the things you've always wanted to do? You'd like that, wouldn't you? Yes. What would you do to him first? Perhaps you'd-"

"Stop that," said Leonard. "You've gone far enough. Leave him alone, poor devil."

"Captain, you're reacting quite inappropriately. This is a scientific experiment. I'm asking for your co-operation. I was indicating to you the lines on which you should proceed. I want you to accuse this subject of what in your view is the most heinous and disgraceful crime in the world. By so doing you'll have the opportunity of adding to knowledge."

Leonard calmed down and thought for a moment. Then he said in measured tones, "You traitor. You renegade. You Communist spy."

While Underwood still took no notice, psychiatrist and Security man looked each other over carefully. Dr. Best smiled. Leonard frowned. Each glanced away and back at the same instant. At last the doctor's manner grew professional again.

"Complete withdrawal. He's unreachable by any normal stimulus. Now let me show you a characteristic of this condition that may be new to you."

Underwood's arms were hanging loosely by his sides. Dr. Best took one of them by the wrist and lifted it until it was nearly horizontal, then turned the hand palm upwards. When he released the arm it stayed in the same position, as if the man were begging or testing for rain. Then the doctor raised one of Underwood's legs so that its heel was about eighteen inches off the ground. It too stayed where it was when released.

"This characteristic is known as waxy flexibility, found in cases of total withdrawal. A notable feature is that the subject will sustain the postures in which he has been placed long after a normal person would be forced by intense physical pain to adopt a more restful posture."

"What a terrible thing."

"Not at all. It makes him portable. He can be brought down here and enjoy the sun. Or rather his skin can benefit from exposure to its rays. A more satisfactory state of affairs than lying permanently on his back."

Dr. Best turned away and made as if to resume walking.

"You're not going to leave him like that, are you?" asked Leonard incredulously.

"I told you his reactions aren't those of a normal person."

"But good God…"

"Oh, very well."

With ill grace the doctor put Underwood back as he had been. Watching this, Leonard suddenly caught sight of the lion-like figure in the center of the pond. He screwed up his eyes against the sun.

"What on earth is that thing?"

"Oh, our mascot." The doctor seemed gratified. "That was done by one of our paranoiacs, as occupational therapy originally. It worked very well from that point of view, in the sense that as soon as he'd finished it his personality suffered rapid and complete disintegration. We couldn't allow him anywhere near a chisel now. Well, I got the idea of having the carving set up where everybody could see it. There was a poor copy of a Romanesque statue there originally, some nymph or other, a piece of sentimental trash quite frankly. This thing is much more… arresting. And useful. We get quite a lot of people in here of whose condition one could say little more with any certainty than that they are mad, in a generic, undifferentiated sort of way-screaming and weeping and so on. Then, perhaps overnight, such a case will issue in a fully crystallized, distinctive, autonomous psychosis-anything from suicide attempts to unsocial behavior with excrement. I've been interested to note how often, in this asylum, progressants of this type have indicated the experience of seeing our mascot as the one which triggered off their psychic shift. There was even one fascinating case last year of a woman who believed she had counterfeited violent mania in order to be confined in one of the closed wards and thus escape the sight of our mascot, which, as you'll have noticed, lies unavoidably in the path of anybody entering or leaving the main building. A delusion, of course-she was as mad as a hatter-but a significant one.

"Long before the human mind became an object of scientific study it was recognized that abnormal mental states were highly communicable, not to say contagious, and I've often admired the instinctive good sense of those early practitioners who, without any body of theory to assist them, knew empirically that, by throwing together raving lunatics and those who were merely disturbed-as in Bedlam and other such mad-houses-they were encouraging the latter type of patient to make his psychic shift and bring the real nature of his illness into the open. This communicability is, as I say, notorious; but I don't think it's ever been adequately noted before that this can work via an outward symbol or artefact, so that state-of-mind produces object which in turn produces state-of-mind. There are obvious analogies here with aesthetic theory, in particular with Eliot's notion of the objective correlative."

Dr. Best had evidently ceased to notice that it was Leonard he was talking to. The sunlight was reflected from his spectacles in such a way that they seemed to flash and glisten with the disinterested love of his profession. Now, however, as the two men strolled past the water-tower towards the entrance to his quarters, the doctor paused in his discourse and glanced briefly at his companion.

"I noted just now," he said, "that when I invited you to accuse the man Underwood of the deadliest crime you could think of, you chose to accuse him of being a Communist spy. Why was that, Captain Leonard?"

"Because it is the deadliest crime I can think of. What other reason could I have?"

The doctor beamed. "Deadlier than murder?"

"Of course. A successful spy is far more destructive than even a mass murderer."

"Oh, do you think so? More repulsive, too? More horrifying?"

"You didn't ask me for that. Anyway, why did you choose to accuse him of those disgusting things, or at least of wanting to do them?"

"Because my experience tells me that such accusations are the likeliest to produce a reaction in withdrawn subjects."

"He didn't react, though, did he?"

"No. I wasn't expecting him to. But you did."

"Good God, that was just because I thought you were being unkind to the poor swine."

"Weren't you being unkind by accusing him of what according to you is the worst crime in the world?"

"That was different, doctor. I knew he couldn't be a spy, but he might quite conceivably have had some sort of hankering after the things you mentioned to him."

"Ah. You knew he couldn't be a spy, and yet you accused him of being one. Why?"

Leonard hesitated. "It's the sort of accusation a lot of people might resent even if it was utterly untrue."

"Or is this accusation the one you instinctively bring against people whatever the circumstances and whatever your reason tells you about its inapplicability? Aren't you perhaps in danger of seeing spies everywhere?"

"In the circumstances," said Leonard with more than his habitual urgency, looking hard at Dr. Best, "it's necessary that I do see spies everywhere."

This came just as the doctor was stepping aside to allow Leonard to precede him through the outside door of the staff block. He looked as if he had found himself stepping aside further than he had intended, perhaps at a convulsion of laughter.

"You really are a character, Captain Leonard, I do declare," he said. "Really quite a card in your way. Now, if you'd like to leave your things here… That's right, come along."

Leonard arranged his cap and cane on a hallstand that sheltered an immense golf-bag. Then he followed Dr. Best into what might have been the board room of a small but prosperous private company. There was shoulder-high oak paneling and the ceiling was buttressed in the same wood. On a handsome Jacobean sideboard was ranged a double row of bottles and cut-glass decanters and what looked like a silver-plated ice-bucket. Some elaborate lilies in elaborate bowls gave off a thick and rather nasty scent.

Two men in their thirties wearing dark suits and silk ties with transverse stripes came forward at their entry. One was very tall and very thin with ears at right angles to his skull. The other was just a man.

"Captain Leonard, may I introduce my assistants? Dr. Minshull"-the very tall one-"and Mr. Mann"-the one who was just a man.

Leonard shook hands with each in turn. Minshull kept his gaze level, so that it went over the top of Leonard's head. Mann smiled and nodded.

"Now," said Dr. Best, "what's it to be? Sherry or Martini?"

"Sherry, please," said Leonard.

"Manzanilla, fino or amontillado?"

"Amontillado, please."

"Pedro Domecq or Harvey's?"

"Harvey's, please."

"A lot or a little?"

"A little, please."

Dr. Best gave Leonard what was certainly a little, reaching as it did less than halfway up a cylindrical glass with a bore of about an inch. He gave himself what was presumably a lot, something like two-thirds of a tumbler. He looked at the glasses in the hands of Minshull and Mann, each of which held some liquor, and said he saw that they were all right.

"Did you enjoy your tour, Captain Leonard?" asked Mann pleasantly.

"It was most interesting."

A high, dry, crooning laugh broke from Minshull and went on for some seconds.

"Are you perhaps professionally concerned in these matters?" continued Mann, raising his voice slightly. "I know the Army's very high-powered these days on psychological warfare and so forth."

Leonard made his prepared reply to this question, which for the last hour and a half he had been vainly expecting Dr. Best to ask. "I am involved to some extent. We take an interest in probing the minds of prisoners and safeguarding our own people against it. But my main job is Security. I expect you've heard there are some rather secret goings-on over at the camp. I'm responsible for seeing that the wrong people don't get to hear about them."

"And who would those wrong people be, Captain?" asked Dr. Best.

"Ultimately, of course, the Russian or Chinese Communists."

"Not immediately. That's to say you don't believe there are actual Russians and Chinese hanging about the place in disguise."

"No, I don't. But I know there's at least one enemy agent in the area."

"And what sort of person might he be, do you suppose?"

"He might well be highly respectable," said Leonard. "Somebody widely known and accepted in the neighborhood. Holding the sort of position that enables him to move about freely and talk to anyone he may come across. Perhaps with a profession that enables him to ask all sorts of questions without arousing suspicion."

"Somebody like me, do you mean?"

"Yes. He might easily be somebody very like you."

There was a loud sucking sound as Minshull drained his glass. Dr. Best turned to him and Mann, rubbing his hands together excitedly.

"Isn't that wonderful, gentlemen? Isn't that wonderful?"

"I don't see anything very wonderful about it, sir," said Mann. "Captain Leonard's reasoning strikes me as perfectly sound, speaking as a complete layman in his field. And even if we failed to follow his argument, we'd have to give him credit for knowing what he's about."

Dr. Best grew rigid. "Haven't I always been good to you, Mann?" he asked.

"I don't know what you mean, sir."

"Don't you think that, if you were being rational, you'd admit that the presence of a guest makes this an unsuitable moment to start uncovering your hidden aggressions?"

"I wasn't being aggressive, I assure you. I was simply giving an opinion."

"We won't pursue the matter for the time being. Let's just say that it's surprising to find somebody of your qualifications evidently failing to identify one of the best-known types of proemial persecution-fantasy."

"But, Dr. Best," said Mann, flushing, "Captain Leonard is a Security officer. It's his business to look for spies. And who's behaving unsuitably in front of a guest now, may I ask?"

This defiance did not act as Leonard had expected and increase Dr. Best's annoyance. Instead, he turned to Minshull and said in a jesting tone,

"Abercrombie and Kraft, July 1963."

Minshull gave another laugh, this time with a keening rather than a crooning effect. Leonard looked wordlessly at Mann, whose flush had deepened.

"A well-known paper on the effects observable when a subject's fantasies seem to be confirmed by something in his experience," said Mann. "As when, let's say, a man with a neurotic fear of being poisoned by his wife finds real arsenic in his soup."

"You mean he thinks I'm mad," murmured Leonard.

"Loosely, yes." Mann glanced over to where Dr. Best was talking up into Minshull's face. "But he's always… But you don't have to put up with this, you know. Say the word and I'll take you out to a pub."

"Thank you, but I'll have to stay now. What we've just had isn't an unfamiliar line of defense, you know. Discrediting the motive of inquiry is always preferable to answering it."

Mann drew in his breath slowly. Then he said, "You mean you think he's a spy?"

"There are strong grounds for not ruling out the possibility. You said yourself you thought that was reasonable."

"I merely said your theory of the-"

The rest of Mann's remark was drowned in the pealing of a large brass hand-bell at the hand of Dr. Best, who spread his arms and urged the other three towards a table laid for lunch in the window alcove. Leonard found himself placed with his back to the window. He was thus in a good position to take in fully the entrance a moment later of two tall girls, a fair-haired one in a skin-tight suit of black leather and a dark one wearing a similar garment in white. The former approached and set down on its stand a silver ice-bucket with an open bottle of wine in it, the latter handed round plates of smoked salmon.

"They must find it very hot in those clothes," said Leonard when the girls had retired. "Especially this weather."

"Oh yes, they do, very," said Dr. Best, evidently pleased that this substantial point had been grasped. "They're always complaining. May I pour you some hock?"

"Why do they wear it, then? Thank you."

"They asked to, and I saw no reason against it. Quite the contrary, in fact. It was perhaps something of a coincidence that their respective fantasies proved to be reconcilable in such totally complementary forms. At any rate, I took advantage of the situation to test the possibility that the opportunity to act out a fantasy without social or other penalty might not bring about an alleviation of the condition giving rise to the fantasy, or at least make them happier."

"And has it?"

"No," said Dr. Best. "But the clinical implications are of interest. Minshull here is writing up the experiment. This is a rather amiable wine, don't you agree? It's a 1963 Dürkheimer Schenkenböhl. I prefer to drink it when it's young and fresh."

When the girls returned at the summons of the hand-bell, they brought a 1959 Château La Bridane and a saddle of lamb with French beans and new potatoes. The blonde moved round to Leonard and poured him claret. A stitch or two had given in the seam at her hip, revealing a small patch of bare skin amidst the black leather. He felt proud of himself for noticing this, and grateful to Lucy for giving him back the capacity, on the decline in him over the last few years, for noticing it and things like it. In itself it could mean no more than that the blonde, and by inference her companion too, had found a simple way of not adding to the heat engendered by unventilated outer garments of leather. But it produced in him a firm resolve to ring Lucy up at the first opportunity and arrange to visit her. That, however, must wait. For the moment the matter to concentrate on was that of introducing plausibly the information he had come here to divulge.

He held back until Mann asked him a casual question about the amount of co-operation Security officers commonly got from those in their charge. Leonard made sure Dr. Best was listening before he said,

"I've always found people very understanding. Especially when it comes to rising to any sort of occasion. For instance, on Friday the unit's putting on something called Exercise Nabob. It's not really an exercise in the full sense, not much more than a demonstration and practice in the use of certain new weapons, but it does entail cordoning off part of a valley and denying access and observation. That's a mere matter of mechanics-the tricky and bothersome part is setting up search procedures and snap checks to make sure nobody walks off with some vital… piece of wherewithal in his pocket, or a miniature camera full of film. When you start organizing that sort of thing, you might expect to find yourself coming up against the old Army mentality, red tape and obstructionism and all that. Not a bit of it. All possible facilities were immediately placed at my disposal. The Commanding Officer issued an order that any officer or other rank who failed to accept my recommendations on the spot would be responsible to him personally. The Adjutant himself accompanied me on my various rounds and visits whenever his other duties allowed. The officer in charge of-"

Dr. Best interrupted this recital, which had been designed merely to put a bit of circumstantial flesh on the bare bones of the central facts Leonard wanted to convey. "It must be agreeable to find oneself the center of so much attention."

"Oh, I don't know. You just take it as part of the job."

"You must enjoy giving instructions to colonels and such and seeing them rushing off to carry them out."

"That's where the regulations are so helpful. In Security matters the normal gradations of rank don't-"

"Would you say that the prime satisfaction of your post was the sense of sitting at the middle of a vast web or machine and manipulating people by pressing buttons?"

Aware now of where this was tending, Leonard drew in a lot of breath to pronounce a negative, but was again interrupted, this time by the radio-alarm buzzer on his wrist. He jumped to his feet. "I'm wanted on the wireless," he said, and hurried from the room, hearing Minshull's laugh behind him as he shut the door.

After a fifty-yard trot in the sun across the car-park, he was sweating rather and peering through misted glasses as he fumbled through his keys. At this moment a man in denim overalls came out from behind a bush and sidled up to him, spade in hand.

"Acting on your instructions, I-"

"Hold it, you fool," snapped Leonard. "Get back out of sight."

The man retreated. Inside the car, Leonard switched the set on and sat chafing, unable to think, while he waited for it to warm up. When the loudspeaker began to hiss and crackle he went over to Send and spoke into the microphone.

"Hullo, Control, hullo, Control. Padlock listening. Over."

Preceded by a couple of seconds of carrier wave, Ross-Donaldson's voice, sounding harsh and boxy, issued from the loudspeaker.

"Hullo, Padlock. Sunray Minor here. Something… well, something has come up you ought to know about. Over."

"Is it urgent?" Leonard waited, then added peevishly, "Over."

"I don't see how it can be, and it probably isn't a Padlock matter at all, but if it is it may be important. That's as much as I can tell you. Over."

"Will return at once. Over."

"Roger. Out."

Leonard switched off and got out of the car. Sweat was running down his face. He walked in a meditative manner towards the shrubbery from which the man with the spade had emerged.

"Have you anything to report?"

There was a rustle and the snapping of a twig. "No, sir," said a voice.

"Then watch harder. And you ought to know better than to approach me in the open like that. Stick to the telephone arrangement."

"Sorry, sir."

"I should hope so too."

A minute later, Leonard was making his excuses and shaking hands with the three psychiatrists. Drs. Best and Minshull seemed in high spirits, Mann a little subdued. Leonard returned to his car and drove furiously back to camp. He had not enjoyed the tour of the hospital or the lunch-party. Both had done something to strengthen his suspicions of Dr. Best, but without furnishing evidence of the kind he could put in his report. Then there had been the ineptitude of the pretended gardener. The installation of such an agent was required by the regulations covering cases of this kind. Leonard would much rather have done without him, preferring to wait until Dr. Best could be moved up from a green suspect to a blue suspect and so merit having his telephone tapped. But regulations were regulations, which was a pity. This particular set of them, not for the first time in Leonard's experience, was bringing about an impasse whereby the evidence necessary to prove a man guilty was unobtainable except by methods that were only to be used on men already proved guilty by other methods. A lecturer on one of the courses attended by Leonard had cited such situations as reflecting the immature, unfinished state of applied phylactology. Half an accreted tradition given the force of law, half an exact science, it afforded germane analogies (the lecturer had explained) with the condition of Greek medicine prior to the emergence of Hippocrates. To find this view supported by events, or as now by non-events, was depressing. Leonard rallied a little, however, at the thought that he had at any rate managed to set his trap for Dr. Best with about the right mixture, he felt, of emphasis and unobtrusiveness.

He parked his car in its allotted space and crossed the drive to the Orderly Room. The sergeant there jumped to his feet and asked him to go straight into the inner office. He did so and saluted Ross-Donaldson smartly.

"I'm sorry to have dragged you away from your luncheon-party, Leonard, and you may be sorry too when you know more. My sergeant brought me this. He'd found it pinned to the recreational notice-board outside the canteen. Since then another copy's been found among the periodicals in the Sergeants' Mess. I've got a squad out now, seeing if they can turn up any more."

He passed Leonard a sheet of Service stationery. It was a smudged but legible carbon typescript that read,

THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE

incorporating Human Beings Anonymous

It has been decided to form a branch of the above organization in this Unit. We want you to join us if you agree with our attitude. There is no other qualification for becoming a Member, no entrance fee or subscription, and any activities you may see fit to carry out on behalf of the League are entirely up to you. You will not be given orders of any kind.

We think that the attitude of the League is sufficiently expressed in its name, but should you be in any doubt we invite you to consider carefully the three following cases, all taken from newspaper items of the last few years.

Case No. 1: A woman of about 30 years old was dishing up the family supper. She took a potato out of the dish and popped it in her mouth. It lodged in her throat and she died of asphixiation then and there, in front of her husband and 3 young children who were present at the time.

Case No. 2: A house was set on fire by lightning. A woman of about 25 threw her 18-month-old son down to neighbors standing on the pavement, but they failed to catch him and he was killed. She jumped and her fall was broken, but she lost the baby she was pregnant with.

Case No. 3: A boy of 15 had been blind since birth. He was operated on and his sight was given him. 5 days later he caught a little-known virus infection (nothing to do with the operation) and was dead in 24 hours.

If you are against what happened on these occasions, you are fully qualified to join the League. We invite you to attend an inaugeral meeting in the Camp Theater at 1900 hrs this coming Thursday.

Please tell everybody you can about the League and the time and place of the meeting. This notice is not likely to stay where it is for very long.

Issued by the Commitee, 6 HQ Adm Bn Branch, Anti-Death League

Leonard was bewildered. He felt dimly that Security was involved here in some way, but could not have said in what way. His manuals were silent on situations like this, if indeed there were any other situations like this. He could think of nothing to say.

No such difficulty beset Ross-Donaldson. "A little bit out of the usual run, isn't it?" he said. "Even so, as I told you on the R/T, it doesn't seem a very pressing issue. I doubt whether I'd have had you buzzed if it had been left to me, but fortunately I was relieved of the onus of thought by the existence of your standing order about always letting you know at once of anything with any conceivable Security connection. I've a feeling you should redraft that, by the way. I spent several minutes after I talked to you trying to think of something of which it could validly be said that a Security connection was beyond the power of the human mind to conceive, and failed to come up with a single one. I got pretty close after a bit when I started wondering how an orderly reporting sick with toothache could have a Security bearing, but then I realized he might have a microfilm in his mouth for the dentist to take out and send to Peking. That rather discouraged me, getting as warm as that and then ignominiously failing. Of course, empirical semantics teaches us what ‘conceivable' is intended to convey, but we should always strive for intensified precision. I won't ask you to work out a synonym now, however. Come in."

A corporal entered, saluted, and handed over two more copies of the notice.

"Where did you find these?"

"One in the OR's latrine, sir. The other pinned to a tree by the sleeping-huts."

"Right. Have you covered the whole area yet?"

"No, sir, we're still working on it."

"Do that. If one more of these comes to light after you've completed your search, I'll have you and all the other NCOs in the party up in front of the Colonel and I promise you I'll do my best to see you lose your stripes. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Off you go."

The corporal saluted and left with enough of a clatter to bring Leonard halfway out of his daze.

"You were a bit hard on him, weren't you?" he said. "Why all the flap? One copy of this thing is all we need."

Ross-Donaldson had spoken to the corporal in his customary level tone. Now he stood up, his plump face flushed.

"It may be all you need," he said very sharply. "As far as I as Adjutant of this unit am concerned, need doesn't come into it. If it's possible to catch this man, which I doubt, I'm going to do it. And I'll make sure he goes to military prison. You can talk to him there if you want to."

"There's no point in getting hot under the collar about it."

"There's every point. This is an abnormal happening and there's no knowing where it may lead. A secret project like ours has got to keep all parts of its environment under control at all times. We can't afford to have fanatics or lunatics or jokers round the place."

"I realize that, of course."

"I hope you do. It's our job to be pro-death, Leonard, and don't you forget it."

"Sixteen and nine, seventeen, seventeen and six, one pound. Thank you, sir."

"Thank you, my dear."

The man pocketed his change and went away with the drinks he had bought. Churchill, perched on a stool at the bar with a large gin and ginger beer before him, looked carefully at Catharine.

"Are you sure you'd rather do it like this?" he asked.

"Quite sure."

"All right, then. Why did he marry you?"

"I think it must just have been that he wanted to be married. All his friends were, you see, the people he'd been in the Army with and so on. He never liked the idea of looking different."

"When did you find that out?"

"I suppose I started realizing it after about two years. But it took a long time to dawn on me properly. I was very ignorant in those days. I was only nineteen, but I'd had so much sex already then that I thought I knew all about it. I thought I couldn't not know all about it. What I didn't know was what it was for. I was like someone who knows exactly how a railway engine's put together, and who can put his finger immediately on any part you care to name with his eyes shut, but who it's never occurred to that the point of the bloody thing is that it pulls trains. You do see what I mean, don't you? So I wasn't getting a great deal out of it at that stage, early on. That didn't worry me much, though. I thought that perhaps the people who said they got a lot out of it were natural exaggerators, or else that I was somebody it didn't happen to appeal to an awful lot. I thought that getting married and being with someone all the time would make it better. So you see I was to blame too for things going wrong."

She was speaking quietly and calmly, but Churchill felt she should not go too far with her story too fast. "Have a drink," he said. "You'll be wanting to wet your whistle with all this chattering you're doing."

"Very kind of you, sir, just a half of bitter if I may."

While she drew the beer, Churchill glanced round the bar. At this hour, shortly before closing-time in the middle of a week-day, the place was almost empty. Neither the red-faced man who had bought drinks a little earlier, nor his closely similar friend, nor the three younger men who might have been students on vacation, showed any interest in Catharine or himself. Eames, the landlord, had explained that it was a point of etiquette with many drinkers to leave a barmaid and her steady escort undisturbed as far as possible. "If she's on her own she's likely to be considered fair game," he had added, "which is where you may get trouble. So I'm most happy that Mrs. Casement should have taken a fancy to someone nice and quiet like yourself, Mr. Churchill."

At times like this, and even more when he was in bed with Catharine, it often seemed to Churchill that the whole thing would go on forever. He knew that, through no fault of either of them, it could not. But he was getting very good at paying no attention to this a lot of the time. He smiled at her when she stared at him as she drank.

"That'll be one and a penny."

"Oh, sorry. Wasn't it better at all when you got married?"

She rang up the money carefully.

"Oh yes. By the standards I had then it was marvelous. Not having to worry about it ending, and him not going away all the time. But after a bit it was no better than what had gone before. Especially sex. Sex was what you did in bed, and eating was what you did at table, and plays were what happened in theaters and so on. You know-'I think we've just got time for a quick one/ Now you could make that funny and lovely, darling. But you ought to have heard the wonderful statesmanlike calculatingness he used to say it with. I think… I think… if we're reasonably quick… His favorite moment for that was just before the evening drink or going out. He liked to get it out of the way, he said, so that he could look forward to settling down undisturbed to a good night's rest. So then I had a couple of lovers and he was very good about it. I don't know whether I'm saying that sarcastically or not. As long as I was happy, he said."

"What about kids?"

"He was rather the same about them. If I wanted them then it was all right by him. So I didn't have any."

"I don't quite see that."

"It's like sex, James. It's no good if one of you just has no particular objection. I reckon that sort of thing undermines at least as many women as sex not being all right. Anyway… then Casement turned up. Can I have a cigarette?"

He gave her one and lit it.

"Casement's line straight away was wanting me to let him take me away from all this. What there was of this, he meant. He was marvelous at first. My best before you. So then we got married. We were back in England by this time. I'd lived with him for about eight months and thought I knew him."

One of the students now came to the bar and ordered three halves of bitter. She served him before going on.

"The moment we got married he started being different. I don't like that, James, people being different all of a sudden. About three nights a week he'd get angry with me, usually when we'd had people to dinner or been out somewhere and he'd had some drinks. He'd wait until we were getting ready for bed, and then he'd bring up something I'd said or done during the evening which had made him angry. It didn't matter much what. If I'd said I liked one of his friends, it proved I was a bitch because it meant I wanted to go to bed with him. And if I hadn't liked one of his friends, then that made me a bitch too because I was fed up because the chap hadn't made a pass at me. And so on. The next stage was him hitting me. Mainly punches in the stomach and slaps in the face. He was very careful not to bruise me where it showed. Then I'd cry, of course, and then he'd cry too and start comforting me, and then he'd end up by fucking me. Then he'd be perfectly cordial and nice until the next time."

She had said this as quietly as ever, but faster, and with an occasional quick deep breath between sentences. Churchill watched her. He thought she had better tell him everything now she had started.

"I kept trying to leave him, but he kept coming and bringing me back. He was good at that. He was so charming that nobody believed what I told them about him. I could hardly believe it myself when it wasn't happening. And I tried lawyers, but cruelty's very difficult to prove, and he always let up as soon as anything like that was in the wind. He stopped altogether when I had my sister to stay, so she went off thinking I was a hysterical liar. Then something happened that showed me what it was all about. I could have realized before, if I'd taken it in properly, that he almost never fucked me except after he'd been hitting me."

Catharine's shoulders were hunched. She pushed her hand towards Churchill along the top of the counter. He took it and squeezed it.

"I had terrible toothache and the dentist couldn't see me straight away and I was lying on my bed groaning, and when I went out to go to the bathroom there was Casement on the landing playing with himself because I'd been groaning. So he hit me worse than he'd ever done before and sort of raped me on the landing. After that I stopped being able to deal with my life at all, any of it."

"Where is he now?" said Churchill quickly.

"Oh, he's off. He won't come near me now, not even near enough to have a divorce. Me going mad would be sure to come out and that would be very disgraceful. I think he's feeling a bit ashamed of himself, too. He's a very moral, respectable man."

"Oh, for Christ's sake."

She sighed very deeply, then smiled. "You see? It was very nearly all right, telling you that. Not even very depressing. It'll have gone altogether soon. But listen, I meant what I said about Casement being moral and everything. That was the whole trouble with him. If he'd said, ‘Look, ducks, here's this whip. I'm going to give you a bloody good belting with it if you don't mind, because that's what I like doing. No hard feelings, eh? Then we'll make love and I'll take you out somewhere nice for dinner,' if he'd said that, well, I'd have known where I was. I might even have co-operated. But that would never have done for Casement. That would have been immoral, you see. He had to have a reason. It took me about three months to work that out and when I had I started getting better straight away."

Churchill leaned over the bar and kissed her.

"You won't be different all of a sudden, will you?" she asked.

"Of course I won't."

"My God, what's the time? Last orders, gentlemen," she called. "Last orders, please."

"Was he religious?"

"Well, there was just a touch of that, I suppose. He didn't go to church, but he was always saying how grateful he was for his Nonconformist upbringing. He was very responsible in lots of ways. Good about money, paying bills as soon as they came in, not driving when he was drunk, saying he was bored by all the filth on the stage and in the cinema, all that kind of thing. Yes, sir, the same again?"

She started serving the last drinks. Churchill went round the lounge collecting the used glasses and ashtrays. Then he got a damp sponge from the sink behind the bar and cleaned up the tables. While he was drying the washed glasses Eames came in from the saloon.

"Everything shipshape here as usual? That's the way. Well, if you ever get sacked from the Army, Mr. Churchill, there's a job waiting for you here as potboy. I was just wondering if I could tempt you two to a little cold beef and pickles in my parlor before you go off. No? Well, in that case I won't keep you. See you this evening."

Churchill reflected momentarily on Eames and his offer as he stood outside in the sunshine and waited for Catharine to join him. The landlord was undoubtedly a nice enough man, but he could hardly be such a wonderful man as he, Churchill, had just caught himself supposing, and after only two large gins too, and gins blotted up in about twenty ham sandwiches at that. The same sort of thing had happened the previous evening when, without any gins inside him at all, he had suddenly been attacked by the wish that it was Brian Leonard's birthday so that he could give him a present. He jumped now to the conclusion that there must be less love than there ought to be in a world where so many people went on being nasty to and bored by one another. How many people had the good-nature to love everybody without loving somebody first?

Catharine came out of the pub. She looked so beautiful in her white dress and white shoes and white hair-band that Churchill had an instant of sincere puzzlement at the way the passers-by went on passing by, the farmer climbing into his estate wagon over the road failed to reverse the direction of his climb and come pounding across to cast himself at her feet, the man laying slates on the roof of the barber's shop managed to stay aloft. Churchill put his arms round Catharine and kissed her.

"Sorry," he said when he let her go.

"That's all right."

"I won't do it again."

"Oh yes you will. You are to."

The scene was roughly unchanged. A middle-aged woman wearing a hairnet had looked over her shoulder at them, and the farmer paused inquiringly in the act of switching on his ignition. Nothing else. They don't know what it is they're looking at, thought Churchill.

He and Catharine went round the corner into the yard and got into the jeep he had brought. It belonged to the dispatch-rider section, whose sergeant had turned out on investigation to be very fond of whisky and by nature inclined to return favors. The weather was so fine that Churchill had removed the overhead canopy and windshield. They took the road that led towards Lucy's house. The rush of air was cool to the skin. It reminded him of how Catharine's upper arm felt when he put his hand or cheek against it.

Soon after they reached the beginning of the wooded, hilly region he found a place where the jeep could be parked off the road. They climbed between the wires of a fence and descended a gentle slope where the turf was thin and in places broken by the roots of the trees that grew there. This made the ground awkward for someone wearing high heels, and he took Catharine's hand. On the farther side of the miniature valley the grass was thicker and the going easier, but he still kept hold of her hand. He watched how she moved her body as she walked, out of the corners of his eyes because if she knew she was being watched she did things just as beautifully but in a slightly different way. In a minute or two he would let her know he was looking and try her like that.

They reached the top of the short rise, where the trees grew closer together. He admired their olive-green polished trunks. It seemed that they did not drop dead wood at all freely and that this small upland was regularly scoured by the wind, because the ground was as clear of debris as if it had been swept that morning. Fifty yards ahead there was a false horixon. Churchill wondered what was beyond it. As they went in that direction, moving in and out of patches of shade between strides, they heard the sound of water.

In half a minute they were standing at the top of a cliff perhaps twenty feet high. At its base were irregular heaps of boulders and smaller stones, some of which had found their way to the banks and bed of a stream that might have been a couple of feet deep in wintertime, but was reduced now to inches. The rest of the view was made up of trees, younger ones near at hand, taller ones with spreading foliage farther off, the whole belt stretching for a mile or more. They walked along the edge of the cliff and soon found a way down, the rocky course of a dried-up tributary of the stream.

"This is going to be hard on your shoes," said Churchill. "I'd better carry you."

"But I'm so heavy. I'm heavier than I look. Or perhaps I look heavy. Anyway I am heavy."

"But I'm very strong, you see."

He picked her up and carried her the necessary twenty yards with little difficulty and no stumbling, setting her down on a patch of coarse grass beside the stream.

"My God, you are strong. That was big James all right."

"You enjoyed it, didn't you?"

"Mm, you bet. It gave me a sexual thrill."

"What doesn't nowadays?"

"You may well ask."

A jump that was little more than an extra long stride took them to the far bank. A faintly marked path led upstream and they took it. After a while it curved aside and led across a corner of the woods. Away from the water the sound of insects and the beating of birds' wings could be heard. Churchill took Catharine's hand as they walked and looked at her and past her together, so that girl, trees and stream formed a unity. She turned her head and looked at him. He knew for certain that in some way this moment had become inevitable ever since that other moment the afternoon he first saw her when he had looked at a patch of country similar to this one and thought of her. He felt his heart lift. This had never happened to him before, and he was surprised at how physical the sensation was. He was filled with joy.

"I could never love anyone else in the way I love you," he said, stopping and drawing her to a stop.

"Of course you couldn't."

"Even if you were to suddenly vanish altogether."

"I'm not going to, though. I haven't done any loving before worth talking about."

"Everything's all right now, isn't it?"

"Yes, that's exactly what's all right," she said. "Everything."

"I suppose I might get thumped on the head some day and lose my memory, or go completely senile, but that's the only kind of thing that would make me forget this afternoon."

"I'd remind you in any case."

They walked on. The path curved back towards the stream, then into the woods again deeper than before. The shadows under the trees were very strong. When they drew level with a grassy bank a few yards from the path in the opposite direction to the stream, Churchill halted again.

"This looks like a good place to sit down," he said.

"I don't want to presume, but do you mean sit down or lie down?"

"It's funny you should say that, because it was lying down I had in mind."

"In that case I think it would be easier for everybody if I took off my dress. Is that all right?"

"Yes."

When she had hung her dress on a bush and kicked off her shoes, he ran his hand up her bare arm, finding it faintly warm between wrist and elbow, cool above the elbow like the flow of air during their drive, fully warm at the shoulder.

"The grass feels marvelous under your bare feet."

"I dare say it does, but I can't really see there being any bare feet as far as I'm concerned. I'd have all that shoelace and sock business to contend with. We oughtn't really to take very long."

"Well, your jacket can come off, anyway."

"Yes. There's no point in your going on just wearing those, is there?"

"I suppose not."

"This is quite good grass," he said a moment later, stroking it, "but the earth underneath feels pretty solid. I'm afraid your shoulders and so on are going to go through it a bit."

"There's a way round that."

"Is there? Oh yes. Oh, yes."

They kept their eyes on each other. He watched the steady change in her expression as it grew wilder and at the same time more serene, more longing and more contented. At first he thought she was becoming less human, less the person who was Catharine, but then he saw that she was really more human, more Catharine than ever.

When they were lying side by side he slid his arm under her neck and round her shoulders and put his hand on her breast.

After a moment he said, "There's a lump here, I think. Yes. You feel."

"Oh yes. What do you think it is?"

"Well, it's only very small. It's probably just a little cyst. I used to get them in the lobes of my ears when I was at school."

"I suppose I'd better get it seen to."

"I think it might be as well, yes. As soon as you can."

They got dressed and prepared to move off.

"Let's go back now," said Churchill. "I'm going to get hold of a doctor and arrange for him to see you in the morning. We want to have that cyst cut out before it gets any bigger. I neglected the ones I had at school and they were a hell of a bore. I don't like making a fuss, but I'm the one who's looking after you now."

"I suppose you'll be going along, will you, Brian?" asked Colonel White. "Fellow might turn out to be this famous spy of yours, eh?"

"I doubt it, sir," said Leonard. "I think we're dealing with a lunatic."

"Of course. Of course we are. I went over that notice thing rather carefully and had a good think about it. Chap seems to regard himself as unique. As if he's the only one who's ever noticed that decent people sometimes come to sticky ends. Or that all ends are sticky if you look at it in one way. Necessary, though. Anyway, there's precious little that's crazier than imagining you're on a private line to the truth. What about you, Willie?"

"You mean am I going to turn up at this meeting affair, sir? Yes, I think I might as well."

"I think so, too. Rather comes into your field, doesn't it? Good deal of dissatisfaction with the grand design rolling about in our friend's noddle. Have to see if you can't straighten him out."

"Yes, there is that," said Ayscue.

"You surely do not seriously imagine that this man will appear?" asked Major Venables, slowly waving the spent match that had just lit his cigar. "Or, more likely, men. To me, this farce has every appearance of having been contrived over pints of small beer in the White Hart by a group of clowns suffering from underwork."

Hunter had been ordering drinks from a Mess waiter. He now said, "In that case, part of the joke would be to see how many people fell for it and who they were. He, or they, would have to be frightfully aesthetic about things to stay away. I'm going along, anyhow. I scent fun of some kind."

"You have curious notions of fun," said Venables. "And not you alone. At the last Mess night I witnessed five grown men, three of them of SI rating and thus bearing a certain load of responsibility, climbing about this room on the furniture in an attempt, so it was represented to me, to make a complete circuit without putting foot to ground. It was strenuous, it was ungraceful, it was noisy, it was distracting, it was pointless."

"No harm in that," said the Colonel. "In its being pointless. It's a tradition."

"And then last night I endured part of a sort of collective recitation, or chant, involving words of infantile near-obscenity delivered with great emphasis and killing slowness. Sister's… my sister's… up my sister's… pudding up my sister's… black pudding up my sister's… strong black pudding… And so on. The proceeding seemed to me to be indefensible."

Ayscue laughed. "That's rather heavy, isn't it? I'd have thought it was a very innocent way for young men to let off steam."

"The steam you refer to is accumulated largely in the process of becoming drunk," said Venables in his groaning way. "Which process has evidently become as much a part of unit routine as guard-mounting or vehicle maintenance. The whole situation in this place is beginning to disquiet me. Boredom is giving place to group hysteria."

"You're exaggerating," said Ayscue firmly. "The people here are working under a considerable strain. In the circumstances they like to forget themselves when they're off duty. I think everybody's bearing up wonderfully."

"Well spoken, Willie," said the Colonel.

With an emphatic, reinforcing nod at Venables, Ayscue picked up the glass of whisky that had just arrived for him. There was pink gin for the Colonel, sherry for Leonard, bitters and soda for Hunter. Venables picked up the remaining glass.

"Wait a moment," Hunter said to him, "didn't you ask for French vermouth?"

"I did. What of it?"

"Well, what you've got"-Hunter bent and sniffed-"is Italian vermouth. I'll tell-"

"Indeed? It will do very well, thank you."

"But they're utterly different drinks." Hunter sounded rather shocked.

"Without doubt. I take no note of such matters."

"Well, you ought to. Don't you agree, chaps? Oughtn't he to take note of such matters as the difference between French and Italian vermouth?"

Ayscue nodded again, hardly less emphatically than before.. Leonard looked blank. "Up to him," said the Colonel.

"Je n'en vois pas la nécessité," groaned Venables. "What, to resume, is this considerable strain you refer to? I feel myself under none, yet I bear the greater part of the responsibility for the success or failure of Operation Apollo in its entirety. The officers under instruction are each partly responsible for the success or failure of one-twelfth part of that Operation. Yet they, together with others who are not privy to anything of much importance, are held to be showing the effects of considerable strain. How can they be?"

"It was you who were saying a moment ago that we were all on the verge of mass hysteria," said Leonard.

"Hysteria of this sort need not be, and in the present case demonstrably is not, the result of strain. Unless, which you well may, you count as a strain the experience of depending on the conversational and other social resources of one's fellows when none has any to speak of, as here."

"How do you manage, then?" persisted Leonard.

Hunter and Ayscue exchanged a grin.

"I depend on nobody."

"Well, that clears that up," said the Colonel. "I think, chaps, if we're going to this do we'd better knock these back and be getting along. Did you arrange about dinner, Max?"

"Yes, sir, I've put it back to eight o'clock. That ought to allow time for a full-dress meeting with election of officials and proposals for additions to the library. The people who aren't coming will just have to put in an extra half-hour's drinking, I'm afraid."

"Right, then. I take it you won't be accompanying us, my dear fellow?" asked the Colonel, using his usual vocative for Venables, whose lack of Christian name, like other things about him, made standard Mess informality a little more difficult.

Venables removed and looked at his cigar before answering. "I will," he said. "I have just sufficient curiosity to satisfy myself that, in accordance with my prediction, the authors of this tomfoolery will not show themselves."

"Wouldn't you be prepared to take our word for that, if that's the conclusion we all come to?" asked Leonard.

"No."

Colonel White, Leonard and Venables left together. Hunter and Ayscue followed. Out in the evening sunshine they took the cinder path that led round and up towards the camp theater.

"How did your evening with young Pearce go?"

"Oh, it was very enjoyable in some ways."

"But not in the way that was intended to be the most important way?"

"Unfortunately not. However, the evening was far from wasted. We were served at dinner by the most charming and understanding waiter. I drove over and lunched there today under his auspices, and then he spent most of the afternoon under mine."

"Good show."

Hunter frowned and stroked his mustache. "I hardly like bringing this up, Willie, but why don't you disapprove of me?"

"Oh, good God, Max, surely you know me better than to have to ask that. I disapprove of as little as possible on principle. I want to encourage people to go in the direction I think is best for them, not tell them they're too disgusting to deserve to be able to make a start. So I can't oblige you with any disapproval. Why are you so keen to get it, anyway?"

"My dear, I don't think this line of talk suits you at all. Still, if you insist… Tell me, Major Ayscue, what makes you think I want to earn your disapproval?"

"The first chance you got you told me you were a practicing homo and went into quite a bit of detail. In the White Hart, with James and Moti. You remember."

"Just. Perhaps I did blab a bit, but I was pissed at the time."

"You were pissed all the time in those days. It didn't make you blab to the Colonel or Brian Leonard as far as I know. I got the impression you were trying to pick a fight with me, Max."

"I told you I was pissed. Look, what's all this about?"

"Admit you've got it in for the Church."

"Oh, I see, I see. You're probing about that bloody poem, aren't you?"

"Who told you about that?"

"Andy did."

Ayscue nodded. "Oh. Yes. You know, at one time I thought it was possible he'd written the poem."

"Did you?"

"I don't think so any more. But he did seem to have the strongest motive."

"How do you mean?"

"For heaven's sake, Max. Fawkes was Pearce's friend and Fawkes died."

"Oh yes, of course, sorry."

"Still, he seems to be pretty well back on an even keel now, don't you agree?"

"Mm. Steady as a rock."

"I'd like to think I've helped him a bit there by getting him interested in this Roughead sonata thing."

"Oh, you've got him interested in that, have you? Well done."

"We've had a few practices. For an amateur, you know, he's remarkably good technically. There's a lot of talent there, Max."

"Yes, I thought so, too."

They fell silent and entered the theater. This was no more than an oversized hut with a low stage at one end. The weekly cinema show took place in it, and it had also been used for a concert organized by the Sergeants' Mess, two thinly attended lectures arranged by Ays-cue, and a couple of morale-building harangues by the Colonel. No play had been presented here during the unit's tenancy of the camp, but for a moment Hunter wondered whether some ambitiously unextravagant production might not be impending, or even in progress. The blinds had not been rolled up after Sunday's film, and the screen was still in position. On and near the stage a number of uniformed figures, under strong illumination, were sauntering or standing about. As he and Hunter made their way up the aisle, Ayscue said,

"I've got a feeling we may be going to meet the author of that poem quite soon."

"Why should you feel that?"

"He's obviously the same as this Anti-Death League character."

"This is all rather too deep for me, I'm happy to say."

Ross-Donaldson held the stage. Plump but elegant, his face at least as expressionless as ever, his hands clasped behind his back, he strolled to and fro in a measured way, glancing every so often towards the door. Near the back wall there stood two members of the main camp guard in the at-ease position. Both men were armed, and both looked rather self-conscious. Venables, Leonard and Colonel White were grouped round a battered piano beside the stage, the first two staring into space in different directions, the Colonel in the act of settling himself in the only nearby chair with a large album of community songs which he had presumably found on the spot. He was quietly humming a tune.

In the audience, six or seven men were sitting in ones and twos. Hunter picked out Ayscue's batman, Evans, and then, in the front row, Naidu chatting to a sergeant.

"Fancy seeing you here, Moti."

"Good evening, gentlemen." Naidu got up and swept a mock bow. "And to what do we owe this pleasure?"

"Vulgar curiosity," said Hunter, nodding to the sergeant. "The best kind, in fact. That's on my part. Willie seems to think he may have a professional interest in this League business. Or at least the Colonel thinks so. Or said he thought so. But what about you, Moti? Your attendance at this sort of caper is far more extraordinary."

"Oh, no. I'm Orderly Officer today."

"And it's part of your rounds to look in at all meetings convened by anonymous fanatics. Quite so. Brian thinks of everything, doesn't he?"

"Max, you're incorrigible. The truth is far simpler. The Orderly Sergeant here and I have survived the grim rigors of guard-mounting, and we're now on our way to the next port of call in our laid-down duties. We decided to dodge in here and lie doggo for a while before having to endure being asked to give a ruling on the edibility or otherwise of the meat pies now being consumed in the canteen. So we're here for utilitarian reasons. But what of all these others?"

Hunter ran his eye over the small remainder of the audience. "I don't know anything special about any of these chaps," he said. "As regards the officers, it's mostly official interest, I suppose." He lowered his voice. "You know, if Alastair really wants to catch this anti-death merchant he's going a funny way about it. If I were he, the merchant I mean, I'd have been standing about outside for a good half-hour, reading the notices on the board and taking careful heed of anyone coming in here. I think the sight of the Adjutant arriving with a couple of armed men would discourage me from putting in an appearance myself. Alastair ought to have given him time to come on the scene first. We might as well go back to the Mess."

"Let's give it a few more minutes," said Ayscue.

"Actually," said Naidu, "I did notice a couple of guards outside, at a respectful distance from the entrance. No doubt they're keeping an eye on anybody who may be keeping an eye, as it were, on the place. Let me ask you," he went on without perceptible quickening of interest, "what you take the culprit's motive to be. What has he in mind, would you say?"

Naidu's inquiring glance embraced the Orderly Sergeant, who moved up and joined the group.

"Ah, you get your crackpots in any shower, sir," he said. "Pacifists and Communists and vegetarians and the rest of them. We had a brotherly-love king down the depot when I was there. Nasty piece of work he was. He never washed, either. Led us no end of a dance before we got him down-graded psychopathic and discharged him."

"Is this man who may still favor us with his presence a brotherly-love king?" asked Naidu in the same tone as before. "I'm merely asking for information, you understand."

"I think perhaps he is, in a tortuous and tortured sort of way," said Ayscue. "And that's what makes it so sad. There's a genuine sympathy and love for humanity working away there somewhere."

Hunter lit a cigarette. "How dull," he said.

"To me it's unmistakable."

"Ah, they're all the same, sir. Just calling attention to themselves. You know, like children. Showing off. Cutting a dash, like."

"Why are we all whispering as if we were in church?" asked Hunter. "Oh well, never mind. I see your batman is in attendance, Willie. Does that mean he's President of the League, do you think, or did you ask him along in case you needed a shoeshine all of a sudden?"

"You decide that for yourself, old boy. As far as I'm concerned it's about as likely that I told Evans to come while I was having a heroin bout as that he could be mixed up in any enterprise that involves reading and writing."

"A little harsh, I think. And he's reading now. That's a magazine he's got there."

"You know what I mean."

Naidu looked at his watch. Ross-Donaldson made the same movement, turned in his walk and came forward to the front of the stage.

"May I have your attention, please?" he said. "I'd like everybody up there who isn't present either on duty or as an official observer."

"What are we present as, Willie?"

"Shut up, Max, and sit still."

After some hesitation and shuffling of feet, five men moved up the aisle and formed into a rough line along the stage. The Colonel, Venables and Leonard moved in the other direction and took seats in the front row.

"Stand easy, everybody," said Ross-Donaldson, then continued in his flattest voice, "Are any of you men connected in any way with the Anti-Death League?"

There was silence, during which a lance-corporal at the end of the line consulted the others by eye. Finally he came to attention.

"No, sir," he said.

"Stand easy, corporal. I'd like to hear from each of you in turn."

Ross-Donaldson, hands behind back, walked up and down the line a couple of times and gazed at one man after another. Coming to a halt, he suddenly said,

"You."

"Sir."

"Are you connected with the Anti-Death League?"

"No, sir."

"Or with Human Beings Anonymous?"

"No, sir."

Pausing at every turn, Ross-Donaldson asked the others the same question. They all answered no. At the end of this there was another and longer pause, and at the end of that Ross-Donaldson, facing the lance-corporal, spoke suddenly again.

"What do you think about death?"

"Death, sir?"

"Yes, death. What do you think about it?"

"I never think about it, sir."

"Never?"

"No, sir."

"Right. Next. What do you think about death?"

"It's nothing to do with me, sir."

"In that case why are you here?"

"No reason in particular, sir. My mate and I thought there might be going to be some kind of show, so we turned up on the off-chance."

"I see. Next. What do you think about death?"

"It's something we've got to think about, sir. It's a big problem. I've got a few ideas on the subject, nothing very original, I'm afraid. I came along to see whether it was intended to hold some kind of debate on the topic, some sort of profitable exchange of views that might help to clear up the question."

"But you didn't put up those notices?"

"Oh no, sir. They didn't express my feelings about the matter at all."

"Right. Next. What do you think about death?"

"It's a terrible thing, sir. Terrible. A scourge, that's what it is. Millions of people every year. And nothing's being done about it. I thought perhaps somebody was starting to at last, sir, so naturally I decided to attend, to hear what the person had in mind. But it looks as if I'm wasting my time, doesn't it, sir?"

"Yes. Next. What do you think about death?"

The next and last man in the line was Evans. He rubbed the side of his face, grinning, before he answered.

"Well, sir," he said, "I don't want to strike the wrong note or offend anybody's susceptibilities, but on the whole I'm rather in favor of it, actually. It strikes me there's a lot of people about who could do with a dose of that kind of thing. A notoriously underrated way of solving the world's problems, to my mind. Because, after all, what does it mean? Mere cessation of consciousness, as I understand it. Which most of us could do with anyway. And then there'd be a better kind of life for the rest of us. If any. That was why I joined the Army, as a matter of fact. And they put me on polishing shoes and pressing trousers-no disrespect to you, Major Ayscue, I assure you. Whereas what I was after was killing people, you see."

Evans started laughing. The other men joined in and stood in more relaxed attitudes. Ross-Donaldson went on walking to and fro.

"Remarkable," said Naidu to Hunter in a low voice. "An extraordinary performance. I owe so much of what I am to your country that it ill becomes me even to seem to criticize. But this is a reversion to the primitive, my dear Max. Progress should at least bring it about that one manages not to fall back to the first notions. This amazing show. Thank you for having civilized us in the past; I must now take leave to say I don't understand you any more, however, much as I should like to. Are you ready, Sergeant?"

The Orderly Sergeant got to his feet. At the same moment Ross-Donaldson halted and said, more quietly than before,

"Thank you all very much for answering my questions. You may go now."

The scene broke up. The guards asked permission to smoke and were granted it. Hunter and Ayscue went forward onto the stage and joined Ross-Donaldson, who stood as if awaiting congratulations for his performance.,

"Great fun, Alastair," said Hunter. "In a rather limited way."

"Thank you. I'm satisfied now that we shall hear no more of this matter."

"Oh, don't say that, I should hate to think you were right."

Hunter turned to Leonard, who had just come over.

"What do you say, Brian? Has the League packed up, do you think?"

"I wish I did. This is very frightening. The whole situation has changed in the last fifteen minutes."

"What, because five yobs say they're nothing to do with it and are obviously telling the truth?"

"No. The sinister thing is the non-appearance of whoever put up those notices."

"I don't follow you."

"Can I talk to you about it for a moment? Will you excuse us?"

Ayscue and Ross-Donaldson said they would, and Leonard drew Hunter aside.

"Well?"

"Until just now there were two important alternatives as to what was in the mind of… X. Either the thing was some sort of joke, or there was something behind it. Now I remember you telling me once that there was no hard-and-fast division between jokes and being serious, but in a case like-"

"I was joking when I told you that, dear boy. You shouldn't have taken me seriously."

"Let's go into that another time, if you don't mind. I was going to say that it made sense to take these two alternatives about X in turn. All right, he's joking, or fooling or whatever you want to call it. He wants to cause a stir. Bother the authorities. Get me and Alastair and the Colonel worried. Well, I heard what you said to Venables earlier on about that. You were right and he was wrong. If it was any conceivable sort of joke X would show up to see how it went over, even if there were fifty armed guards round the place. A man who could turn out all those notices and post them round the camp without being discovered would have the wit to bluff his way through the sort of nothing-to-go-on questioning he'd come up against. But he doesn't turn up. So he isn't joking. Or, if you like, the posting of the notices was an end in itself. In other words they weren't really notices at all. They were copies of a manifesto."

Behind them, they heard Venables do his talking-without-words laugh. He and the Colonel were making for the door. He stopped laughing long enough to say to them,

"You see? A fiasco. The case of the absent pranksters."

Then he went on laughing and followed the Colonel. Ross-Donaldson and Ayscue were also on the move. Hunter and Leonard went back down the aisle. Leonard turned off the lights. Outdoors again, the two headed back towards the Mess.

"Well, you see where we've got to if I'm right," pursued Leonard. "X is making a protest. A protest about what? About the infliction of death on the innocent."

"I thought it was the infliction of death on anybody that was getting him into a state."

"All right, on anybody, then. And this is a military unit that exists for combatant purposes, i.e. the infliction of death."

"Not only that, Brian. The infliction of lots and lots of lovely death. The unusually efficient infliction thereof."

"You're not shaking me. I don't see why you or anyone else not in the secret shouldn't have got that far. Yes. Correct. So we're dealing with someone who knows what Operation Apollo's about and has become distressed enough at that knowledge to protest in a very eccentric way. Now can you see why I'm frightened?"

"You're wondering what he's going to do next."

"Wondering pretty hard, yes. If he runs loose with some of the equipment we've got here I can't foresee the consequences. Or rather I can."

"There's none missing, is there?"

"Not yet," said Leonard.

"But that wouldn't fit in, would it, if he's against death? He'd be more likely to try to destroy it."

"That's another danger. But we don't know what he'll do. We can't assume he'll stay logical. If he does, his classic course would be to let the enemy know what he knows. Which gives me the equivalent of two spies to take care of instead of one."

"Mm. I suppose X can't be your original spy. Calling attention to himself like this. He couldn't be sure you wouldn't trace the typewriter he did the notice on."

"Not quite." Leonard looked gloomy. "I've established three facts. It isn't any of the machines officially in the camp. There are scores of thousands of this particular kind in the country. And none was sold to a stranger by any of the shops in the town over the relevant period. X must have gone farther afield. I can't see myself ever finding out any more that way."

"Really?"

They walked into the cobbled hall of the Mess. The Colonel's voice was audible from the ante-room, calling for drink.

"Would you like to come up to my room for a bit?" said Leonard. "There's some time to go before dinner."

"Fine, yes."

Deering was in Leonard's room, standing by the window smoking. He glanced over his shoulder casually as the door opened, then came to what he seemed to think was attention at the sight of Hunter.

"Evening, sir."

"Good evening, Deering. I shan't be wanting you now."

"I just came along on the off-chance you might need me for something."

"Thank you, but, as I said, there isn't anything."

"Okay, then. Anybody turn up at that meeting?"

"Nobody to speak of, no."

"Bloody fool."

"Who are you talking about, Deering?"

"Fellow who wrote that perishing notice. Barmy. Off his rocker. Round the bend on a one-way ticket. By the way, nobody was talking about the business round the place. It took me all my time finding anyone who'd even heard about it."

"I see. That's all, Deering, thank you."

"Good night, sir."

Hunter had been examining Leonard's picture of the five antique Sailors. When the door was closing behind Deering he turned round and smiled.

"I rather like the look of these chaps. Where did you get hold of it?"

"They are quite fun, aren't they? Oh, I got to know a few of the Sailors at their Mess and they more or less insisted I borrow it."

"Nice of them to be so free with their regimental relics. I say, Brian, what a horrid little man that batman of yours is."

"I don't care for him much either, but he's very useful for letting me know about camp rumors and so on."

"How disagreeable. I hope there aren't any rumors about me."

"If I ever heard anything to your discredit it would go no further, and I should tell Deering that there was no truth in it."

"You do what you can, don't you, Brian?"

Hunter sat down in a chintz-covered armchair and Leonard on a leather hard chair.

"I was a bit puzzled," said Hunter, "at what you said about the typewriter business being a blind alley. Aren't you going to search the camp?"

"I shall have to eventually, but it won't do any good. X isn't the kind of man to leave evidence like that under his bed. The likeliest place, I would say, would be in a plastic bag under a bush somewhere. No fingerprints. There are lots of other things I shan't be able to avoid doing if the worst comes to the worst, like getting hold of every typewriter salesman within a hundred miles and putting the whole unit on an identity parade. That's a desperate measure, though."

"It sounds like it, certainly. Have you anything else to go on?"

"I'm still trying to sort it out in my mind. As I see it, the most disturbing thing is that X must be one of the S1 officers. Nobody in the mental condition we've been talking about is going to be fit to carry out his part in Operation Apollo."

"How damaging would that be?"

"I can't answer that, but it would be damaging. I'll have to start going over each of their files again to see if I can turn up some hint of instability. It's hardly possible I'll find anything after the screening they all went through in the first place. I'll have to watch them all, too, and hope to spot something that way. Do you think it could be Churchill?"

Hunter made a wincing sound. "Why him?"

"He was looking very odd when I ran into him this morning. Sort of jittery. I've always thought he was a sensitive sort of lad."

"I haven't seen him all day. Look, I know him pretty well. Would you like me to talk to him? I won't give anything away, I promise."

"I'd be glad if you would, Max. And if you notice anything that might be relevant to this X business do let me know. I need help, and I know I can rely on you. I'm very grateful to you for putting me on to Dr. Best."

"Think nothing of it. How's that going, by the way?"

"Slow but sure. I hope. I still need a piece of solid evidence, but I'm convinced he's my man. He's… I just know he is. He must have a contact in the camp somewhere, but for the time being I'm concentrating on him, Best. I'm expecting results in the next day or two."

"Good. Brian, going back a bit, why are you so sure that X wasn't in the reading room this evening?"

"Because the only S1 officer present was Venables, and he's lived with Operation Apollo longer than anybody. In a sense it was his idea. I can't see him changing his mind about it now."

"Or about anything. No, I see. There's one other point occurs to me, if you don't mind my…"

"Go ahead. This is good for me. I don't get enough constructive criticism."

"I only wondered. If Best has got a contact in the camp, as you say, wouldn't it have been possible for him to have written those notices and had them smuggled in and posted round the place?"

"No. That's to say he couldn't have written the notices."

"Why not?"

"He's not against death, you see. Shall we go down to dinner now?"

Lucy tapped quietly at the door of Catharine's bedroom.

Churchill's voice called, "Come in."

He was sitting up in bed reading a paperback novel. Catharine was asleep.

"James, are you all right?"

"Yes, of course. Why?"

"You looked sort of startled. James, your nice friend Max Hunter is here. He says he'd like to talk to you. He was terrifically emphatic that it was nothing urgent and could perfectly well keep till the morning, but since he was here he just thought he might as well pass the word."

Churchill got out of bed, put on a dressing-gown and slippers and followed Lucy out. She led him into her bedroom.

"Is she all right?" she asked.

"Yes. I made her take a sleeping-pill."

"Have you taken one?"

"No, I don't like them. Where can I find Max?"

"I'm afraid I've put him in the library. It's rather nasty in there, but there are two almost possible chairs, and at least you won't have my dentist friend and his friends breathing down your neck. They seem to be very thick on the ground tonight for some reason."

"Anybody I know, apart from Max?"

"There's your other nice friend, Captain Leonard. Brian, I mean. He won't go. He sort of keeps getting on the end of the queue again. Then I was half expecting Alastair, but it's getting a bit late for him now. Those are the only ones you know, I think. We may as well go down."

They left the bedroom and moved along the passage.

"In fact," Lucy went on, "there are two of them in the drawing-room I don't know myself. They're somebody's friends, I gather. It's funny how the hot weather seems to bring them out."

As they started descending the stairs, Churchill's eye was caught by the figure of the girl on the tapestry that hung there. There was something unnatural in its posture, a stiffness he had not noticed before. He saw too that parts of its dress were slightly discolored, presumably by damp.

"Oh well, I suppose I'd better get ready for Brian," said Lucy. "His turn seems to come round quicker and quicker. You know, I wish he wouldn't go on so. I mean talking. But you can't help liking him, can you?"

"No. Thanks, Lucy. May see you later."

"Now mind you don't sit up chatting all night."

Until this evening Churchill had only seen the library by day. Most of it was in semi-darkness now, so that the books filling its walls looked even more unreadable. They had been crammed on the shelves anyhow, some in horizontal piles, others with their spines facing inwards. Among their bindings an antiquated dull red was most prominent. They gave off a strong whiff of other people's boredom. Here and there, mostly on the floor, were busts of varying sizes. Churchill had looked them over one afternoon and had come to the conclusion that, whatever connection with literature any given one of the men represented might or might not have had, all of them were certainly dead.

An intense light, given as it proved by a bare bulb in a brass lamp, came from a shallow alcove in one corner of the room. Here Hunter was sitting by a bulky davenport in an attitude suggesting that he had that moment turned aside from some mighty creative task. Nothing else gave this impression. Apart from the lamp, the objects before him consisted only of a foot-high doll in tattered clothes that had a national or peasant air, a French sailor in molder-ing papier-mâche under a glass dome, most of an ormolu clock, and a glass of liquor. He waved Churchill to a dining chair with burst seat-padding like the one on which he sat.

"Make yourself at home if you can," he said. "This may help."

He handed over the glass, which contained a very strong whisky and water. Churchill drank a third of it in one.

"How long have you been sitting here?"

"Not more than twenty minutes. I haven't been idle, however. I've been pushing ahead with my smoking like billy-ho. Two Gauloises one after the other, just like that. Have one."

"Thank you. I'm sorry I kept you waiting."

"I expect Lucy did most of that. She's got a heavy backlog to work through tonight. So heavy I had to come out. A discussion on the shortcomings of Britain's youth seemed to be getting under way. Not that it's very nice in here, I must admit. Erudition in the raw."

"Has Lucy worked through you yet?"

"Oh yes, I'm no problem. But it seemed rather early to be off home, so I thought if you weren't asleep I might get hold of you for a few minutes' chatter."

Churchill drank again. "I'm glad you did. Well, what's the news?"

"Nothing out of the way. The Anti-Death League held its inaugural meeting and nobody turned up. At least, quite a few people turned up, but none of them seemed to want to join the League. And the founder, or X, or whatever one's supposed to call him, didn't surface either. What we got was a series of anti-climaxes, good in themselves but not at all encouraging. I felt very let down, I can tell you. Poor old Brian Leonard felt a good deal worse than that. He brought all his phylactological expertise to bear and came up with the conclusion that X isn't the spy he's been after all these weeks, but another chap altogether. I couldn't follow half of it. Still, I do remember him saying he thought X must be half off his rocker and might do anything at any time, which was awfully frightening, he thought. I didn't think so. It cheered me up no end, after the way the meeting flopped. Then it crossed Brian's mind that you might be X."

Churchill started violently. "Why me?"

"It was all complicated in the extreme, as I said. He was pretty well convinced, evidently, that X must be one of the S1 people. The way he saw it, X has been sent all dithery by the notion of having to knock off so many chaps in Operation Apollo, and this League business is his method of dithering about it in public, so to speak. A bit fanciful, perhaps, but you know these technical wizards. Nowadays they take the whole human mind and heart as their special field."

"I see why Brian thinks X is likely to be in S1, but not why he thinks it's me in particular. Why does he?"

"Well…" Hunter made a quick but awkward gesture with his hand. "Old Brian is a divine creature, but not greatly gifted in ordinary observation. He ran into you this morning, he said, and thought you looked odd in some way. Jittery was the word he used. I decided you must have had a hangover, but I didn't like to tell him that. He's such an idealist, isn't he?"

"Yes," said Churchill, finishing his whisky. "But whatever he is he wasn't far off the mark this time. I did feel jittery. I still do."

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

"Yes."

"You shall. But not without an essential preliminary. Give me that glass. No, on second thoughts there's a more intelligent way. I'll be back in a minute."

The moment he was alone, Churchill got up and walked up and down the floor of the library, looking about for some object on which to fasten his attention. He had not yet found one when Hunter reappeared, carrying with some ingenuity but some strain a nearly full bottle of whisky, a milk-jug containing water, a pudding-basin with ice-cubes and a soup-spoon in it, and an empty glass. He set these down on the davenport, wincing a little with effort and concentration, and swiftly mixed two drinks.

"There," he said. "The securing of supplies is the first object of the administrative services."

"Why are you drinking too?"

"I just fancied one. No, it's really that I've been getting less and less out of watching other people drinking. And quite right too. Voyeurism is damaging to self-respect. What's bothering you?"

"Is that why you wanted to talk to me, so that you could ask me that?"

"Oh, no. Not altogether by any means. I've had what for me has been an unusually successful and varied sexual day, and that sort of thing always tends to loosen my tongue. Plus the lack of anything approaching ordinary humanity in the drawing-room, apart from Brian, and I've had plenty of him this evening already."

"I see. Anyway, I'm glad you asked me. To start with, I'm not X."

"No."

"But I see his point so clearly that I might easily have been him if I'd thought of it. I used not to be particularly against death, especially not for people who were trying to kill me or who'd got to the point of being able to kill lots of my friends and fellow-countrymen unless they were stopped. So when I was picked for Operation Apollo originally I didn't object. Rather the opposite if anything, because in this case the people who were going to be stopped really needed very much to be stopped. Then, after we'd had the geographical and strategical picture filled in for us, we were told how it was proposed to stop these people. That part of it worried me a bit, and I started drinking more than I usually do. At that stage what I didn't like was this method they've been explaining to us and training us in for stopping the enemy. It isn't so much a new method as a new twist on an old one. The point of it is the way it kills people. I can't go into it, but you can take it from me that it's objectionable. I still wouldn't have backed out of Apollo, though, even if I'd been able to (which wouldn't have been particularly easy), because it somehow didn't matter much that I was going to do something I objected to, because I didn't matter much.

"Then I met Catharine and it started to matter very much what I did and what I didn't do. I started to matter. So it got harder to go on agreeing to take part in Apollo. It wouldn't have been so bad if I'd been able to discuss the whole business with some of the other chaps who're being trained. But it turned out that was no good. They all said of course they agreed it was a terrible thing we were being got ready to do, but it was necessary and it was orders. I thought at first they said that because they were stupid or unfeeling or both. Then I realized there was no way of knowing whether they meant what they said or not, because we were talking about death, you see. As soon as you get on to that, people stop coming clean about what they feel, even if they're the sort of people who wouldn't hesitate to tell you all you wanted to know about their sex life and so on. So there was no help that way.

"Then something else happened. Catharine has a lump in her left breast which may turn out to be cancer. I've been so frightened about that I've hardly known what to do. And I don't know how frightened she is because she doesn't say and I can't ask her. Until this came up I knew her better than anyone in the world. I knew everything she was thinking. Now I don't any more. Because death has come up. I've been thinking about this. It hasn't been as difficult as you might imagine. The alternative of thinking about it is to panic, and I can't do that.

"At first I just got angry at the way good things are vulnerable to bad things, but bad things aren't vulnerable to good. You know: all the way up from toothache being more powerful than an orgasm. But I soon moved beyond that. I decided I was slightly more frightened than I had reason to be, while there was still nothing definite about Catharine's condition. I felt as if I knew she was going to turn out to have cancer and would die of it. That didn't take long to disentangle, either. I'd had the dispatch-rider and Fawkes at the back of my mind. So I was being superstitious, and having worked that out I could go back to feeling very shocked and concerned and apprehensive instead of full of dread. But I didn't. I worked on that. You don't have to believe in God or fate or the hidden powers of the mind to believe that there are such things as runs of bad luck. Well, I found that bad luck didn't quite cover what I felt was happening, and not altogether because it's a rather pale sort of phrase for the occasion. Something out of the tactical mumbo-jumbo they keep throwing at us fitted the situation better, I thought. You've probably heard of these things they call lethal nodes. You don't have battles or fronts any more, you have small key areas it's death to enter. Well, we're in a lethal node now, only it's one that works in time instead of space. A bit of life it's death to enter. The beginning, the edge of the node was when that motorcycle thing happened. Fawkes was further in. This looks like being near the center. We'll know it's passing over when somebody else goes, somebody we know as little as we knew that dispatch-rider. That'll be the farther edge. I know all this sounds a bit mad. I'm sorry.

"The background to the whole business is Operation Apollo. That's like the theater of war in which this is one operation. Well, what am I going to do about it? Now that I know more about death than I used to, you'd think I'd have to make up my mind that it's something nobody could deserve, however it was administered. That would mean having to opt out of the Operation, and that would mean all sorts of stuff, up to and including court-martial and imprisonment and perhaps being quietly knocked off by Brian Leonard's friends for knowing too much to be allowed to turn pacifist. I think I could take most of that if I had to. But I don't suppose I'll bother to go that far. I'll probably just follow the line of least resistance. If Catharine's going to die it'll never matter again what I do."

"When will you know about her?"

"The day after tomorrow. They're doing a probe on her in the morning and then it'll take them twenty-four hours to run tests on what they find. It sounds as though time has become tremendously important. Especially since they told us yesterday that Apollo's been brought forward two weeks. You'd think that would really shake us all up, wouldn't you? It would have me, in any other conceivable similar situation. But it hasn't at all. In comparison. It's always the comparison that counts. Like, you know, unless you pay a debt by the end of the week you go to prison. Very bad. Only today your son had a road accident. You see, Max, I'd desert now if I could stay with her, but they wouldn't let me."

Hunter gave out cigarettes and refilled both glasses.

"I understand what you mean about lethal nodes," he said when he was sitting down again, "though I don't say I agree with it. Where I can't follow you is on this point about Apollo being the background to it. I don't think there's an analogy there. You may feel there's a connection, you may have had your attention drawn to death in the first place by way of Apollo, but that's different. What is obvious is that part of your feeling jittery comes from it. Not a very large part, perhaps, but at least you can do something about it straight away. The rest of it has got to wait for thirty-six hours or so."

"What do you suggest I do about Apollo?"

"It's nothing to do with Catharine or Fawkes or the dispatch-rider. It's detachable, so detach it. Tell me about it."

"Why? What good would that do?"

"There's no guarantee, of course, but I might be able to help you to feel better about some of it, less guilty and so on. It's worth a try."

"I can't do it. I promised not to tell anybody."

"Break your promise. If you can seriously go on about deserting and being court-martialed and the rest of it, you've got beyond that sort of promise. I shan't tell anybody else. You trust me, don't you?"

"Yes." Churchill swallowed whisky. "But supposing I told you and then found it didn't help?"

"Then you're no worse off, are you?"

"A lot of lives are involved."

"That makes it particularly important for me to keep my mouth shut, but I was going to do that anyway. You don't think I'm a spy, do you?"

"No."

"Then tell me."

Churchill told him.

By first light on the morning of Exercise Nabob a cordon of troops was in position along the perimeter of an area in the hills amounting to something over two square miles. Official signs diverting all civilian traffic had been set up on the relevant roads the previous evening. At 0800 hours a convoy of vehicles made its way out of the camp and headed for the cordoned area. It included two lorry-loads of infantry in full battle-order and two armored carriers containing machine-gun crews and their weapons. An RAF helicopter flew at fifty feet above the head of the column while another shuttled back and forth along the route. A sweep program had been arranged for the duration of the exercise to ensure continuous observation of the ground.

On arrival at the assembly point, the machine-guns were unloaded and set up on tripods so as to command the main approaches. The infantrymen took up defensive positions round the rim of the slight depression in which the exercise proper was to take place.

"I trust you've remembered to order the light cruiser squadron to prepare to receive cavalry, Brian," said Hunter.

"It's all very well for you to laugh," said Leonard, doing so himself. He was in unusually high spirits, as if feeling that this was his day. "I can assure you that none of this is unnecessary."

"Do you really think there's the slightest possibility of armed attack? Attack by whom, anyway? Perhaps war was declared while we were on our way up here."

"I'd know about it if it had been. No, any form of physical intervention is in the highest degree unlikely-as things are. This show of preparedness has done a good deal to make it so."

"You mean unless we'd rendered ourselves capable of delivering a million rounds a minute at any intruder we'd have had a Red Chinese parachute company on our necks? I think I see."

"Stranger things have happened."

"Very few. What precautions have you taken against high-altitude photography? It's a good day for it."

They looked up into the cloudless, deep blue sky. One of the helicopters was rattling along almost overhead with its curious not-quite-head-foremost aerial gait. The two men were standing at the comer of a rough square of level grass where the transport had been parked. Nearby, the main stores vehicle was being unloaded under the supervision of Ross-Donaldson and a sergeant-major. A number of long narrow wooden boxes, about five feet by nine inches by six inches, were being carefully handed down from the interior of the truck and piled side by side on the turf. Now and then Hunter glanced interestedly over at this proceeding.

Leonard was saying something about conditions actually being unfavorable to air observation of the secret material and activity about to be exposed. These were on too small a scale physically, he explained, to be meaningful if photographed at normal spy-plane height with even the most mature apparatus known to be available. To fly at the comparatively low altitude demanded, in the present absence of cloud-cover, would be to approach maximal risk-potential. The equations and curves prepared in advance at the direction of Leonard's masters, which seemed to have taken into account a meteorological spectrum ranging from the existing bright sunshine to unforeseen solar eclipse, gave the probability of unauthorized penetration of the air-space above Exercise Nabob as approximately two centicents, or 0.02 of 1 per cent. These two chances in ten thousand were being taken care of by a system of coastal watch and patrol which Leonard did not see fit to go into at the present time.

By the end of his exposition three more officers had approached. They were Major Venables and two taciturn captains called O'Neill and Isaacs who had arrived at the unit two days previously. The pair had spent most of the intervening period in the Exercise area accompanied by a large working-party.

"Are you happy, Leonard?" asked Venables. "I use the ridiculous but serviceable locution. Your emotional welfare is no concern of mine."

"I understand, sir. Yes, my preparations are complete. I suggest you conduct your preliminaries now and go ahead in your own time with final briefing."

"I can find no objection to that."

"How long will you need?"

Venables looked at O'Neill, who said, "Fifteen minutes should do it."

"See to it, then," said Venables.

O'Neill and his companion moved off towards the stores vehicle.

"Would anybody mind if I watched this part, Brian?" asked Hunter.

Leonard hesitated. "No," he said finally. "Mere acquaintance with externals isn't inappropriate for an officer of your Security rating… That's if you approve, sir."

"Who, I?" Venables seemed astonished. "I have no grounds for disapproval. Hunter may do as he pleases, short of inconveniencing me."

"Okay, then, Max. See you later."

The two captains had already begun their preliminaries when Hunter reached them. A party under a sergeant was carrying the boxes from their stack by the lorry over to a small but substantial earth and concrete bunker built during the past couple of days. It lay just short of the crest of a minor slope. From it, Hunter found he had an unimpeded view of half a mile or more across the floor of the valley. He caught a wink of metal up near the skyline as somebody in the defense detachment shifted his position. From near at hand he heard a fluctuating roar and a grinding of tracks from the small obsolete-looking tank that had come from a nearby armored training unit to join the convoy earlier that morning, incidentally imposing a twenty-minute delay in starting. Now the tank began to move slowly away round the inner edge of the depression.

With a certain amount of ceremony, the locking bolts on one of the boxes were pulled aside and the lid raised. Inside, resting between padded clips, lay an object roughly resembling an elongated golf-bag in webbing with brass studs. At this point Isaacs stepped forward, opened this container and drew out a rifle with an unusually extended barrel, a conical projection at the muzzle, a small bipod forward of the point of balance and a drum-type magazine to the right of the breech. He laid the weapon down on one of several piles of sacking arranged along the parapet of the bunker. Meanwhile another box had been opened under the direction of O'Neill, and within a couple of minutes five rifles of the type described were lying on the parapet.

"Ammunition," said O'Neill sharply.

Isaacs moved to a metal box with a double stripe of red and yellow round it. He tore off the Ministry of Defence seal on its fastening and opened it, revealing a row of elongated cartridges with red-painted cases. Inside the lid was printed in red, Danger- Atomics-Arm by pressing base and giving half-turn to right-Not to be distributed except on the orders of an officer. While O'Neill watched, Isaacs took five rounds out of the box and carefully laid one down beside each of the rifles.

Just then Hunter caught sight of Churchill standing with a couple of other officers by the line of vehicles. He walked over and Churchill came forward to meet him.

"Quite a show they've evidently got lined up for us," said Churchill. His eyes were half closed, as if the sunlight were too strong for them.

"I'm surprised they haven't brought Willie Ayscue along to bless the proceedings. Are you actually going to fire one of those things?"

"I may and I may not. We're going to sort of draw lots for it."

"Why isn't everybody taking a turn?"

"I don't know. It could easily be a benign growth, not cancer at all. I hope it is. I wish I hadn't let her talk me out of being with her this morning. I should have insisted." Churchill spoke flatly.

"Why did she talk you out of it?"

"I don't know. I think it's just part of the way everybody's tacitly agreed to behave as if there's nothing much at stake. But I don't know."

"I see. When will you hear what they've found?"

"Any moment now. Lucy's going to telephone to the Command Post and they'll get on to Brian over the radio link. He set up the whole thing."

"I see. I hope-"

"Assemble for briefing, please," said Venables's amplified voice on a loud-hailer. "All S1 officers to the firing-point for briefing."

"That's me," said Churchill. "Max, if the message comes through while I'm down there would you take it? I've arranged it with Brian. They'll say they're calling Blacksmith, which is my code-name, and then they'll just say ‘Good news' or ‘Bad news.' "

"I'll do that, of course."

"Thanks. I'd like you to be the one to tell me. But of course it might not come until they've finished briefing. I'll go over to Brian's car as soon as they have. See you."

Churchill went off after his companions. Colonel White got out of his car, where he had been sitting reading what looked like some learned journal ever since arriving at the assembly point, and limped off briskly in the same direction. Ross-Donaldson appeared and joined him. Hunter returned to where he had left Leonard, who at that moment ran the few yards to his car, got in and slammed the door. The window was open, however, and Hunter arrived in time to hear him say excitedly,

"Padlock here. Over."

"Man in civilian clothes sighted approaching southeast corner," said a voice over the loud-speaker. "I've got the glasses on him but I can't tell whether it's Optimus or not. Could be. He's coming slow and cautious, trying to keep concealed as much as possible. No doubt about it, he's seen us and reckons we haven't seen him. Over."

"You keep it that way," said Leonard, picking up a mapcase and a chinagraph pencil. "Give map-reference of his present location and estimate his general direction. Over."

Letters and figures followed. Leonard marked a cross in red on the talc over his map and an arrow pointing northwest. Then he studied the map for a moment and said,

"He seems to be making for that re-entrant or gully that runs into the ridge about eighty yards northeast of you. Do you agree? Over."

"Could be, sir. Yes, there's fairish cover for him most of the way there and the gully itself's pretty well wooded. Yes, he's moving that way now. Oh, and I'm pretty sure it is Optimus. Over."

"Good, splendid. Right, sergeant-major. Instruct your men on both sides of the gully to move away from it when the man approaches. Gradually, mind. Nothing obvious. Check back to me when you've done that. Over."

"Roger, Padlock. Out."

Leonard looked up, sweat glittering among the thin hair on the top of his head. "Looks as if we've got him," he said.

"Optimus equals Best." Hunter too seemed excited. "What a scholar you are, Brian. How do your fellows know what he looks like? Did you send them all on a tour of the hospital?"

"I had him photographed. Without his knowing it, of course."

"Marvelous. And what's in store for him now?"

"When he's through the cordon I shall let him find his way along here. The defense detachments have orders to show themselves as much as possible. Then, as soon as I find out what route he's taking, I'll get them to withdraw laterally, like the cordon just now, and presumably he'll arrive somewhere up there"-Leonard gestured at the skyline with his head-"and start taking photographs."

"And then you grab him."

"No, we want him to pass on the stuff so that we can grab the people on his line of communication as well. I'm putting him under continuous surveillance. He'll be allowed to leave the area in the same way as he entered it. With one of my men in close attendance."

Hunter shook his head admiringly. "Very neat. And frightfully energetic. All this show just put on for Best's benefit."

"It's not just for his benefit at all," said Leonard emphatically. "I don't know what gave you that idea. It's a vitally important piece of training."

"Oh, of course. I was really only thinking what an efficient spy-trap it is."

"Actually," and here Leonard's voice grew as confidential as it ever did, "it isn't really training in the strict sense. More of a demonstration. These fellows all know their business backwards. But it's felt that seeing this thing in action will be psychologically beneficial. It'll make them believe in it, give them confidence, stop them thinking exclusively in terms of theory."

"Good idea."

The loudspeaker came to life. "Hallo, Padlock. Are you receiving me? Over."

"Padlock listening. Over."

"Civilian now approaching mouth of gully. Definitely identifiable as Optimus. Men on both sides of gully moving off as ordered. Over."

Hunter did not wait to hear Leonard's reply. He strolled over towards the bunker, where the briefing was evidently about to begin. His expression was puzzled.

"This is Captain O'Neill," said Venables without preamble. "You may have met him. He will tell you what it is necessary for you to know about this device."

With that, Venables sat down on the grass. O'Neill came forward holding one of the rifles by the stock.

"This, gentlemen, is the NHW-17," he said. "Now I know you're all fully trained in the tactical handling of nuclear hand-weapons, their mode of operation, special problems of supply and so on. But you'll forgive me if I just run over a few salient points. The first thing to remember is that this is an ordinary rifle that uses extraordinary ammunition, and that even the ammunition's ordinary enough until it arrives at its target. You'll see that it resembles an ordinary rather old-fashioned Service rifle with a few luxuries thrown in: bipod for greater steadiness, lengthened barrel for increased accuracy, flash eliminator for concealment. Ordinary magazine and bolt action." He demonstrated this. "You'll get a chance to practice that later on, using dummy rounds. Now as to the serious ammunition, the punch is.085 T, which as you know is jargon for eighty-five thousandths of a metric ton of TNT, or simply eighty-five kilograms. Nothing very much, you may say. Certainly it's a mere teaspoonful compared with what some of the NTWs can deliver. The purpose of this weapon, though, involves not the size of the punch but the rapidity and selectivity with which it can be delivered. A platoon equipped with the NHW-17 combines the mobility and ground-covering capacity of an infantryman with the firepower of something like three field batteries of artillery. Ideal for a war of movement over difficult terrain.

"The other technical consideration is that of fall-out. This in my hand is a very clean bullet indeed, to a revolutionary degree, in fact. We'll be taking all precautions today, of course, but you can rest assured that residual radioactivity is negligible. If it weren't for the heat factor, which I'll go into in a minute, ground cleared by the NHW-17 could be occupied virtually at once. There are special circumstances, however, in which the use of an altogether different type of bullet will be advantageous. For obvious reasons we shan't be firing this type today, here in the middle of the English countryside. But consider the case of an enemy center of population within reach of airborne approach. You can see the implications there."

At this point, Hunter heard Leonard calling his name from where he had left him. He turned at once and hurried to the car.

"Blacksmith," said Leonard.

"Have they passed the message yet?"

"I'll tell them to now."

Leonard said into his hand-microphone, "Hullo, Control. Pass your message. Over."

"Hullo, Padlock," said a voice Hunter recognized as that of one of the regular Command Post operators. "Message begins. Bad news. I say again, bad news. Message ends. Over."

"Thank you, Control. Message received and understood. Out."

Beyond the frying noise from the loudspeaker Hunter could hear O'Neill going on with his briefing, but too far off for words to be distinguishable. Then the clatter of a helicopter passing above the firing-point cut out all other sound. Hunter and Leonard looked away from each other as they waited for it to recede. It had become a faint murmur before either spoke.

"What a terrible thing," said Leonard at last. "That poor girl. And James not able to be with her."

"I know. It's an unpleasant situation."

"Of course, there is a lot they can do these days. You've got quite a good chance if you catch it early on like this."

"Yes, there is that."

"When are you going to tell him?"

"I'll wait till I see a moment."

"I don't envy you, Max, having to do that. What on earth is there to say in this sort of situation? One feels so helpless."

"One does indeed."

"Hullo, Padlock," came from the loudspeaker. "Charlie here. Over."

"Padlock listening. Over."

"Optimus now inside cordon, still proceeding roughly northwest. He'll be out of sight in a minute or two. Any further instructions? Over."

"No, that's fine. Keep him under observation as long as you can. Report his position when you finally lose contact. You can give your men a breather now. You've all done extremely well. Over."

"Roger. Thank you, sir. Out."

"Hullo, Fox. Hullo, Fox. Have you understood Charlie's information? Over."

"Hullo, Padlock. Yes, Charlie's information received and understood. Over."

"Very good. Keep strict watch for approach of Optimus and report as soon as sighted. Over."

"Roger. Out."

During this, Hunter had been leaning against the doorpost of the vehicle drinking from his water-container, which did not contain only water. He picked out Churchill from the group of S1 officers sitting in a semicircle on the grass by the bunker, and stared at the back of his neck for some time. Then he settled down in a comfortable hollow in the ground a few yards away and took a paperback novel from his haversack. He had difficulty in finding his place in this and in remembering the main trend of the plot. Finally he started again at the beginning, but after a few minutes put the book aside and picked up his water-container. He sat in the hollow slowly drinking this down and smoking while O'Neill talked on and Leonard kept quiet in his car.

Eventually the briefing ended and Isaacs went through some weapon drill with one of the rifles. Hunter took some of this in, but soon began to feel drowsy. He had not time to fall asleep, however, when the group at the bunker began to break up. He got to his feet.

Churchill saw him at once and the two hurried towards each other.

"It's come, has it?"

"Yes," said Hunter. "Bad news."

Churchill's mouth opened a little and closed again. "I see."

"Would you like a drink?"

"Yes."

He took the container from Hunter and drank what was there.

"Thanks."

"What are you going to do now?"

"I'm going to see the Colonel and ask for a short pass on compassionate grounds. I told him a bit about this yesterday. Will you drive me to Lucy's?"

"Of course."

"I'll see you at your jeep in a few minutes."

As Hunter moved away, Leonard turned in the seat of his car and caught his eye.

"How's he taking it?"

"I don't know," said Hunter. "I can't tell."

"I'm sure he's a good brave lad. It'll bring out the best in him."

"I expect so. I hope it brings out the best in her too."

"Hullo, Padlock. Fox calling. No sign of Optimus. I say again, no sign of Optimus. Over."

"Hullo, Fox," said Leonard into his microphone. "Roger. Out."

He looked up, knuckling the sweat off his dark upper lip. His earlier animation had departed.

"I can't think where he's got to," he said accusingly. "Has he stopped for a kip or what? The defense detachment ought to have spotted him fifteen or twenty minutes ago."

"Don't worry, he'll turn up. I'll see you later."

"Hullo, George," Leonard was saying as Hunter left him.

"I'm sorry I've been so long, Max," said Churchill when he appeared. "I had to clear this with Venables as well. I've got until oh-nine-hundred hours tomorrow."

"Good."

Hunter reversed his jeep out of the line of vehicles and they moved slowly down the rough track up which the convoy had crawled a couple of hours earlier. At first the soil was covered only in thin grass, with outcroppings of grey rock here and there, but presently ferns and low bushes appeared, and by the time they had joined a metaled road, a single carriageway with passing places, they were in wooded country. The greens of the foliage were very brilliant and the undergrowth dense for England. At one point a small stream ran down among rocks. Churchill looked out of the window at it and said,

"I knew this was going to happen."

"No you didn't, James. You thought it might happen and now it has. It's nothing to do with anything else that's happened. The fact that you know about some things can't cause other things to happen. Don't make patterns out of coincidences. All pattern-making is bad."

"The other night you said you agreed with me. About the node."

"I said I saw what you meant. I didn't want to argue with you then. I don't now, either. I just think that reading significances into things makes them worse, not better."

"I'd sooner do that than concentrate on… And I'm not creating a pattern, I'm recognizing the pattern that's been there all along. The over-all pattern. It's an evil one. It's got death in it, you see."

"You mustn't talk like that. The whole thing is totally random. All chance. Nothing and nobody behind it or in it or anywhere at all."

"I know there's nobody there. But there are such things as patterns, even when we know nobody willed them. Runs of bad luck, as I said. And a system that runs itself is still a system. You don't have to believe in a weather god to find a climate unbearable."

"Your job is to find a way of making this bearable. Never mind about whether it ought to be bearable."

"Yes, I'm going to try. I don't want to talk any more now."

When they arrived, Lucy came out of the drawing-room and kissed them both. She had been crying.

"How is she?" asked Churchill.

"She's taking it very well. At least I think she is. She hasn't said anything. She's lying down at the moment."

"Right. Thanks for the lift, Max."

When Churchill had gone, Lucy said, "Come and have a drink."

"Thank you, I do rather fancy one."

They sat down side by side on a couch in the drawing-room. Hunter had never seen the place before when it was not littered with bottles of gin, bottles of tonic, bowls of melting ice and overflowing ashtrays. With the sunlight slanting in and the furniture in slightly unfamiliar positions, the room looked as if it had turned over a new leaf. In view of what had happened, perhaps this might turn out to be so.

"How bad is the news? Are there any details?"

"It's cancer." Lucy spoke more hoarsely than usual. "That's as much as they say they know. She's to go in tomorrow to be operated on and to have treatment."

"Good. They're getting on with it, then."

"Max, what causes these things?"

"Nobody knows. There are plenty of theories."

"Can it be caused by what happens to you? You know, the kind of life you have?"

"That's probably one of the theories."

"She told me last night she thought it might be, if she turned out to have it, perhaps it was because of her life before she met James, and he came along just too late. Wouldn't that be awful?"

Her eyes filled with tears. Hunter put his arm round her.

"No more awful than what we know has happened," he said.

"Why did it have to happen to her?"

"It happens to bad people too. It's pure luck of the draw, love."

"What sort of chance do you think she's got?"

"Oh, pretty good, I should say, where she's got it. They can…"

"Yes. Can you stay to lunch?"

"I'd like to, but I'll have to go back to this absurd exercise they're having. It'll be finished by this evening. I'll come over then if I can."

"Do try. Nobody else is coming."

They had another drink, in almost total silence, and then Hunter said he must go. With Lucy's permission he refilled most of his water-container from a nearby bottle and topped it up with a little water. He was going to turn down her offer of an unopened half-bottle in addition when he found that jettisoning his luncheon rations-sandwiches of smoked salmon and of chicken liver pâté- made just the right-shaped space in his haversack. On his way out he stopped at the foot of the stairs and listened. He could hear nothing.

When he was still three or four miles short of the assembly point on his way back, a monstrous vibrating clamor filled his ears and seemed to make his jeep tremble in sympathy. He looked out and up and saw that one of the helicopters was matching his speed and course at treetop height. After half a minute or so, its crew presumably satisfied by a close inspection of the white cross painted on the hood-an emblem common to all vehicles on the exercise- the machine sheered off.

A little later, Hunter caught up with a file of men in battle order trudging ill-naturedly along the side of the road. He pulled up alongside the NCO at their head.

"What's going on, Sergeant?"

"Don't know, sir. Sergeant-major got a message over the walkie-talkie… Okay, lads, take it easy a minute."

Muttering, the men sat down on the verge or leaned against the grassy bank beyond it. It was clear that they had done a lot of swearing up until the moment of Hunter's arrival, and would do more as soon as he was gone, at the latest.

"But what's it all about?"

"Don't know, sir. We've got a rendezvous fixed somewhere in this wood along here. The sergeant-major said something about carrying out a sweep of the area. Looks like it'll take us all day, sir."

"Whose orders are these?"

"Captain Leonard's, sir."

The muttering swelled. Phrases became distinguishable.

"I see. Well, I'll make sure there's a hot meal laid on for everybody as soon as they get back to camp."

"Thanks very much, sir."

As Hunter drove on, his eyes, which had become rather glazed over in the preceding hour or two, brightened again. When he had put a few bends between himself and the party on foot, he stopped again and drank from his water-container. At the junction with the track that led up to the assembly point he was waved down by a corporal standing on the verge.

"You'd better not go all the way up, sir. They're shooting one of those things off in a minute. Everybody who's not officially allowed in the bunker has got to keep this side of the ridge."

"Thank you, I'll manage."

Hunter took the jeep another couple of hundred yards until he reached a point where, by engaging four-wheel drive, he was able to move it off the track. He got out and clambered up between bushes to the lip of the depression in which the bunker lay. It was in fact almost immediately below him and quite near enough for him to make out Venables and Isaacs standing together at one end. The tank Hunter had noticed earlier was to be seen at the far end of the valley, presumably unoccupied.

In the bunker, matters seemed to be coming to a head. An officer stood on the fire-step in the aiming position. O'Neill appeared and took up a position beside him. Everybody became quite still. After some consideration, Hunter dropped down behind a hummock and peered over the top of it. A moment later he heard O'Neill's voice, high-pitched and clear.

"Fire."

There was the sharp knocking bang of an ordinary rifle cartridge, and then what might almost have been a small piece of the sun came into being across the valley where the tank was. During the instant it was there, everything in that direction went vague and overcast. A bolster of warmish air struck Hunter quite hard in the face. Finally a very low-pitched tearing noise, like a short extract from a peal of thunder, pressed against his ears, and a balloon of dark grey smoke expanded rapidly outwards and upwards from the target area.

Voices could be heard from the bunker. The officer who had fired ejected the spent round from the breech of his rifle. O'Neill started lecturing again. Hunter watched the smoke for a minute or two, during which time it grew only slightly thinner. Nothing of any substance seemed about to happen next. After his years of training, Hunter was able to recognize without difficulty the opening moments of one of those long delays, rendered absolutely featureless by the impossibility of forecasting how as well as when they will end, which make up so much of Service life. He waited until the smoke had cleared enough to give him a view of the blackish and reddish patch of earth where the tank had been, folded and furrowed as if an oversized plow with a very blunt colter had been briefly at it. Then he went back down the ridge and got into his jeep and drove it to the assembly point.

Here there was a scene of some animation. One party of men under a sergeant was arriving, another leaving. The morale of both parties seemed closely similar to that of the one Hunter had met on the road. Two walkie-talkie sets were in simultaneous operation; a third was being dismembered by a couple of signalers. A motorcyclist was trying to start his machine. Somebody was backing his jeep out of the line of transport, hooting at a group who stood in his path. A helicopter rose from behind the ridge, where it had presumably been sheltering while the shot was taken, and began to approach. Another appeared farther off.

At the center of all this was Leonard, sweating a great deal, talking to two NCOs in alternation, walking jerkily from one of the functioning walkie-talkies to the other, finally running to his car and shouting into his microphone.

When the helicopters had landed and things were a little calmer, Hunter went up to Ross-Donaldson, who looked interested but not involved.

"Whence all the panic?"

"It's an obvious case of group emotion and the force of the example of authority working in push-pull. The Services afford an almost uniquely favorable environment for this effect. Evidently, it's by no means confined to our own era. There's been a series on historic paraneurotic débâcles in the Military Quarterly, beginning with the failure of that Athenian night-operation on the heights above Syracuse."

Hunter lit a cigarette. "What went wrong this time?"

"Leonard was expecting this Best person to arrive in the vicinity for purposes of espionage, supposedly. I expect you know about that."

"I did hear something, yes."

"Everybody seems to have done. Well, Best hasn't arrived. According to Leonard he should have been spotted something like two hours ago. So he's got to be found, it appears. For which purpose men are being taken out of the cordon and the defense detachment and grouped for a sweep. A simple enough concept, you'd have thought, but unexpectedly intractable in practice."

"I see he's getting the whirlybirds on to it," said Hunter, nodding in the direction of Leonard, who was talking and gesticulating to the helicopter pilots.

"Quite useless. Over most of the exercise area the cover's good enough for even an inexperienced solitary man to hide from the air. The only exception is this valley-which incidentally looks like an infilled glacial lake, wouldn't you agree?-and its immediate approaches, and if he'd got so far he'd have been picked up by ground observation. Would you care for a hand of piquet?"

"Very much."

They went over to Ross-Donaldson's jeep, which proved to be carrying a number of supernumerary stores. Within a short time two folding chairs in moss-colored canvas and unvarnished wood, a small card-table and a green and white golfing umbrella with an extending shaft had been unloaded and erected. They took their seats. Ross-Donaldson brought out two new packs of cards from his haversack and unsealed them.

"This is nice," said Hunter.

"I'm glad you like it. Champagne?"

"Thank you."

At a nod from his master, Ross-Donaldson's batman went and fetched from the jeep a metal cylinder about the size of an eight-inch naval shell, and two silver tankards. The cylinder turned out to be a thermos container and to have in it a very well-chilled magnum of Krug 1955. This was opened and poured.

"Mm," said Ross-Donaldson, sipping. "Perhaps a little too cold."

"It seems just right to me."

"Well, the situation will improve if we merely replace the lid lightly on it instead of clamping it down. Shall we just play a short game and then see how matters stand? I shouldn't like to predict how long it'll take Leonard and his comitadji to carry out their evolutions. Cut."

"They've only got a bit over a mile to walk once they start, haven't they? It shouldn't take them all night. What do you think, a florin a point?"

"Right. It's rather broken country, though, and he hasn't really got enough men for the job, so he'll have to zig-zag them. Leaving one."

"If you ask me," said Hunter abstractedly, "Best has slipped back through the cordon. Or if he hasn't already, he won't have much trouble doing it now, with the cordon thinned down to give Leonard his sweep party. Point of five."

"Not good. My feeling exactly. Do you think this Best really is a spy? You know him better than anybody, I suppose."

"Tierce to a knave. I simply couldn't say. Brian certainly seems to think so."

"Not good. How much is that worth, in your view?"

Hunter hesitated. "Oh, quite a lot. He strikes me as pretty competent."

"I've known you to treat him as if you thought he was a bit of a joke."

"Only as a man. I don't expect a Security officer to make much of a score as regards ordinary intelligence and so on."

"Don't you? I see. What else have you got?"

"Sorry. Three knaves. But I don't know much about Security."

"Do you think most people around the place look on Leonard as pretty competent?"

"As far as I know, yes. What do you feel about him in that way?"

Another rifle-shot and summarized thunderclap made Hunter start violently, though without causing him to spill his drink. Ross-Donaldson remained unmoved.

"Have some more champagne," he said when Hunter had recovered himself. "Now where were we? Not good."

"Oh dear. And now I suppose I've got to lead."

At the end of the short game Hunter was just over four hundred points down.

"I don't believe you know the odds properly," said Ross-Donaldson. "And your memory, if I may say so, is appalling."

"A great advantage in most of the dealings of life, though not, admittedly, at piquet. Shall we go on?"

Ross-Donaldson took a Service notebook from his top jacket pocket. That makes just… three hundred and forty-eight pounds eleven shillings you owe me so far this month. I think I'll stroll over and see if anything's happening. Help yourself while I'm gone."

The sun, the champagne, and the contents of his water-container had made Hunter agreeably muzzy. The game had bored him, though not actively. He wished he had made it a hundred pounds a point instead of a florin. Even that, however, might not have sharpened his interest by anything like one hundred thousand per cent. Pouring more champagne, he decided that life was divided into wishing something was at stake when nothing was and wishing nothing was when something was.

A quarter of an hour went by in this sort of way. Then Ross-Donaldson came back.

"No result as yet," he said. "They've finished one sweep and have started another at right angles to the first. Two more helicopters have arrived. There's an argument raging over the air because the pilots won't go as low as Leonard wants them to."

"Where is he?"

"Out in the field at the head of his troops."

"You know," said Hunter thoughtfully, "if Best is hiding there'd be one very effective way of bringing him into the open."

"Going round firing off those rifles, you mean. That might blow him up instead."

"Not firing them. Brandishing them. Shaping up to fire them."

"There's something about that idea that doesn't feel right."

"What's wrong with it?"

"I don't know. It just doesn't feel right."

"It would have the merit of putting those bloody guns to some use."

Ross-Donaldson looked severe. "They've been put to use already," he said.

"Have they? Two practice shots? It's a funny sort of exercise, this."

"They're studying effect. There's nothing special to learn about the actual firing. What matters is what happens at the far end."

"That's where Venables comes in, I suppose."

"Shall we have another game? I think we've got time."

"All right. I mean he didn't come in at all at the briefing. Venables didn't."

"That was mere technics. He's a technologies man."

"Cut."

"Have some more champagne."

In the second game Hunter did much better, being taken down for only a trifle over fifteen pounds. By the time Ross-Donaldson had finished writing in his notebook a runner had arrived with the message that the exercise had been completed. He had no information about the success or failure of Leonard's search.

"But we'd have heard soon enough if he'd caught him."

"Agreed. I must go and supervise the loading. And there are warning notices to be posted round the target area."

"What for? I thought the stuff was supposed to be more or less non-radioactive."

"Regulations, Hunter. Thank you very much for the game. You really should set about training that memory of yours. It can be done, you know."

"I dare say it can. I'll take you on at backgammon later."

While the stores were being loaded, Leonard's car came bumping up the track and stopped near Hunter. Its owner got out slowly. There was a tear in his trousers large enough to show a knee smeared with dirt and a little dried blood, and his shirt was stained with dried sweat. He looked silently at Hunter.

"Don't worry, Brian. You've got enough on him now, haven't you?"

"Not for an arrest. Only to make him a red suspect."

"Well, that sounds pretty good."

"Not good enough. You don't happen to know if there's any sherry anywhere, do you?"

"Not for certain, but I very much doubt if there's any within reach. Try some of this."

Hunter offered his water-container.

"What is it?"

"Never mind what it is. It's very good for you and that's all you need to know."

"Mm. Thanks." Leonard drank. "My God, I hope it is good for me."

"What's happened to Best, do you think?"

"Don't ask me. He must have gone to ground somewhere and then got out somehow."

"I see. But he can't have walked all the way here from the asylum, can he? He must have driven part of the way. Why don't you put a watch on his car?"

"I would if I knew where it was. I've left a section out looking for it. I had a man detailed to follow him on a scooter, but the scooter had a flat tire. I shall get a rocket from my master for that."

"Make sure you accelerate it when you pass it on. Well, well. You don't strike it very lucky, do you, Brian?"

"Things are bound to turn my way soon. I just know they will."

Eventually the convoy was ready. After an unaccountable delay of unexpectedly short duration it moved off. Hunter was driving behind the second of the two lorries full of infantrymen that enclosed the stores vehicle. At his side was the quartermaster-sergeant who worked under him. They had reached the point where the track joined the road and traveled a few hundred yards more when the lorry in front stopped suddenly. Hunter pulled up. After a few moments he heard shouting somewhere ahead.

"More fun and games," said the QMS.

"Let's see what's up. Come on, Q."

The deep ditch on one side of the road and the bank on the other made it difficult to get round the lorry. When they managed it, they saw the stores vehicle leaning slightly over to one side with one front wheel overhanging the ditch and considerable flames coming out of its engine, the cover of which was raised. Half a dozen men ran about in the roadway calling to one another.

"Shut the bloody lid."

"Bugger's stuck."

"Where's that bloody fire-extinguisher?"

"Bugger's stuck."

"Get the major out before she goes up."

"Bugger won't move."

The QMS turned and hurried towards the lorry behind. Hunter went to the cab of the burning vehicle, where Venables was sitting in the passenger's seat reading a sheaf of typescript.

"I think I must advise you to vacate your seat, Major. This truck is on fire."

"So I see. But there are present a more than adequate number of persons well qualified to deal with the matter. Let them extinguish the flames."

"The windshield may shatter at any moment. You'd do better out here in the road."

"I am unable to leave. The door on this side is jammed against the hedge."

"Come out this way. Get a move on, Major."

"My name is Venables. Oh, very well."

By the time Hunter had got Venables out of the cab Leonard had appeared. Making his way to the scene must have cost him some effort. A button had come off his jacket and there was a fresh scratch on his cheek. He too had begun shouting.

"Get the stores off quick. Everybody on it. Unload the stores."

The lane was now jammed with soldiery, but some response to Leonard's order was soon made. Two men let down the tailboard and began shifting the arms and ammunition, much less gently than at the original unloading that morning. The fire itself, though now firmly established in the fore part of the vehicle, attracted less interest. Two rifles and a box of ammunition were in the roadway before the QMS could push his way through with a fire-extinguisher and start playing it on the flames. They died down reluctantly at first, then, when a driver ran up and applied a second extinguisher, were rapidly quenched. A murmur of relief arose. At that moment Hunter, who had been gazing into the thick woods bordering the road, grabbed Leonard's arm.

"Brian-look. There. Did you see him?"

"Who? Where?"

"Best. By that tree with the ivy on it. He turned and ran when he saw me looking at him. I'm almost sure it was him."

Leonard did not hesitate. He pulled a whistle from his pocket at the end of its lanyard and blew a great blast. Silence fell at once.

"Optimus is in this wood," he yelled. "I want him caught. Everybody on it. Move. At the double. I want the wood swept from end to end. Get going, everybody. And I mean everybody. Drivers, batmen, the lot. I said move."

When the first group of men, swearing unfeignedly, had jumped the ditch and begun pushing through the undergrowth, Leonard turned to the QMS.

"Well done, Q. Now I want you to go and take my car and drive up to the rest of the convoy and say what's happened. They're probably only a few hundred yards ahead. Report to the Adjutant. Quick about it."

"Right, sir."

The QMS departed. Leonard leaped the ditch and crashed and shouted his way out of sight. Hunter looked round for Venables, who proved to be sitting in the remains of the cab of the vehicle reading his typescript. He looked up uninterestedly as Hunter crossed in front of him and entered the wood in his turn.

After half an hour or so Hunter decided he had had enough of dirtying his uniform and being bitten by insects. His head was aching. He had seen no sign of Best, nor even of Leonard. The only people he had found in the wood were two infantrymen having a quiet smoke in the middle of a particularly dense thicket. These he pretended not to have seen. He took his time about returning to the road.

Within another half-hour Leonard and his men had returned empty-handed, the stores had been reloaded and a tow fixed up for the stores vehicle, and the convoy was on the move again.

Dr. Best watched it go.