The Peace Machine

CHAPTER 10

The whole broad back of the country lay before him, daunting in its size, complexity, and possibilities of danger. He had been accustomed to thinking of Britain as a cosy little island, a crowded patch of grass which scarcely afforded a jetliner space to trim for level flight before it was time for it to nestle down again. Now, suddenly, the land was huge and misty, crawling with menace, magnified in inverse proportion to the number of human beings to whom he could turn for help.

Hutchman drove steadily, aware of the consequences of a speeding offence or even the slightest accident. He watched the mirror more than usual, cursing the other cars which hung near his offside rear wheel, bristling with kinetic energy, always about to overtake yet paradoxically frozen in formation with him. Other drivers, secure and separated in their own little Einsteinian systems of relative movement, met his eyes with mild curiosity until he put on his Polaroids, investing the windscreen with a pattern of oily blue squares. He crossed the Thames at Henley and drove northwest in the direction of Oxford, stopping at isolated mailboxes to post small bundles of his envelopes.

By midday Hutchman was deep in the Tolkein-land of the Cotswolds, swishing through villages of honey-coloured stone which seemed to have grown by some natural process rather than artifice. Domesticated valleys shone in pale tints beneath veils of white mist. He surveyed the countryside in detached gloom, his brain seething with regrets and reconsiderations, until the mention of his name on a newscast brought him back to the minuteby-minute business of living. The car radio crackled as he turned up the volume, causing him to lose part of the item.

“…intensive police activity centered on the house in Moore’s Road, Camburn, where two men died yesterday, one of them as a result of a fall from an upper window, the other shot dead when the biology lecturer Andrea Knight was abducted from her apartment by three armed men. The man who fell to his death was Mr. A ubrey Welland, a schoolteacher, of 209 Ridge Road, Upton Green; and the man who was shot during the gangsterstyle abduction was fifty-nine-years-old Mr. Richard Thomas Bilson, of38 Moore’s Road, Cam burn, who was passing by at the time and is understood to have tried to prevent the three men from pushing Miss Knight into a car. The police have no known clues as to the present whereabouts of Miss Knight, but both she and Welland were members of the Communist Party, and it is thought that her disappearance may have some political motivation.

“Latest development in the case is that thirty-nine-years-old Mr. Lucas Hutchman, of Priory Hill, Crymchurch, a mat hematiclan with the guided-weapons firm of Westfield’s, is being sought by the police, who believe he can materially assist with their inquiries. Hutchman was taken to Crymchurch police station last night, but disappeared this morning. He is described as six-feet tall, black-haired, slim-built, clean-shaven, wearing gray slacks anda brown-suede jacket. He is thought to be driving apale-blue Ford Sierra, registration number B836 SMN. Anybody seeing this car or a man answering to Hutchman ‘s description should contact their nearest police station immediately…

“Reports of a serious fire on board the orbiting laboratory have been denied by…”

Hutchman turned the radio down until it was producing background noise. His first thought was that somebody had beenfast. Scarcely three hours had elapsed since he had walked out of Crymchurch police station, which indicated that the police had not waited for reporters to uncover the facts but had gone to the BBC and enlisted their aid. He did not know much about police procedures, but memory told him that outright appeals on the public broadcasting system were fairly rare events. The signs were that Crombie-Carson, or somebody above him, had an idea that something really big was taking place. Hutchman glanced in his mirror. There was a car a short distance behind, belatedly rising and sinking on the irregularities of the hedge-lined road. Was that silvery flash an aerial? Had the driver been listening to the same newscast? Would he recall the description of the car if he overtook? Hutchman depressed the accelerator instinctively and pulled ahead until the following vehicle was lost from view, but then found himself drawing closer to another car. He fell back a little and tried to think constructively.

The main reason he needed transport of his own was so that he could diffuse his mailings over a wide area, and do it quickly. All the envelopes had to be in the mails before the last collection of the day. Once that was done he could abandon the car — except that it might be found almost immediately, giving the police an accurate pointer to his location. His best solution seemed to be to examine the main points of the broadcast description and decide which of them really were invariants…

Reaching the outskirts of Cheltenham he parked the car in a quiet avenue and, leaving his jacket in it, took a bus into the center of the town. Sitting on the upper deck he took the roll of notes from his pocket and counted it. The total was £338, which was more than enough to take care of his needs until D-Day. On descending from the bus in the unfamiliar shopping center he found himself shivering in the sharp November air, and decided that walking about in slacks and a worsted sweater could make him too conspicuous. He went into an outfitter’s and bought a zippered gray jacket. In a nearby general store he acquired a battery-powered electric razor and while trying it out trimmed his stubble into the beginnings of a signoral beard. It was only three days old, but the blackness and thickness of the growth made it acceptable as a beard which would register as part of his appearance.

Feeling more secure, Hutchman found an auto-accessory shop which supplied reflective number plates on a while-you-wait basis. He composed an unremarkable license number, ordered two new plates bearing it, and — after a five-minute delay during which the digits were bonded to the base — emerged in chilly sunlight with his purchase under his arm.

A sharp pang of hunger startled him, then he remembered that his last food had been taken with Andrea, back in another existence. The thought of a hot meal in a restaurant was tempting but he could not spare the time. He bought a plastic shopping bag and partially filled it with six aerosol cans of black automobile paint and a bottle of thinners. These he obtained in small lots in three different shops to avoid giving any perceptive sales assistant the idea that he was going to paint a complete car. Topping the bag up with cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and cans of stout — the odd craving of the previous night had not entirely left him — he caught a bus back out of town along the same road.

Disembarking from the bus he approached his car warily. The whole expedition had taken little more than an hour, but there had been plenty of time for the car to have been observed and reported. When satisfied there was no unusual activity in the area he got into the driving seat and drove eastward into the hills, looking for a quiet spot in which he could work without attracting any attention. Nearly thirty minutes had passed before he found a suitably secluded lane. It led toward a disused farm building and was well screened with hawthorns. He parked out of sight of the main road and at once went to work with the aerosols, spraying the paint on in great cloudy swathes. To do the job properly he should have masked the glass and chrome before starting, but he contented himself by cleaning them with a handkerchief soaked in thinners each time a wisp of paint went astray. By spraying thinly and not being too particular about details he transformed his pale blue car into a black car in less than twenty minutes. He threw the empty aerosols into the ditch, took a screwdriver from the car’s tool kit and changed the number plates, throwing the old plates into the boot.

As soon as the job was finished his hunger returned in full strength. He ate his sandwiches quickly, washing them down with mouthfuls of Guinness, and reversed the car up to the road. Resisting the urge to travel faster to make up for lost time, he drove at a conservative speed, never exceeding a hundred kilometers an hour. Villages and towns ghosted past, and by dusk the character of the countryside was changing. The buildings were of darker stone and the vegetation of a deeper green, mistfed, nourished by the soot-ridden atmosphere which had once existed in the industrial north and had left its legacy of enriched soil.

Hutchman began stopping briefly in large towns and mailing bunches of envelopes at central post offices to cut out one stage of the collection process. He reached Stockport early in the eve ning, posted the last of the envelopes — and discovered that the itinerant mission, with its series of short-term goals, had been the only thing that was holding him together. There was nothing for him to do now but wait until it was time to return south to Hastings for his rendezvous with the megalives machine. With the hiatus in the demand for physical activity came a rush of sadness and self-pity. The weather was still cold and dry, so he walked down to the blackly flowing Mersey and tried to arrange his thoughts. Emotional tensions were building up inside him, the sort of tensions which he had always understood could be relieved by crying the way a woman does when a situation becomes too much for her.

Why not do it, then? The thought was strange and repugnant, but he was on his own now, relieved from society’s constraints, and if weeping like a child would ease the strangling torment in his thorax… He sat down guiltily on a wood-slatted seat on the edge of a small green, rested his head on his hands, and tried to cry.

Vicky, he thought, and his mouth slowly dragged itself out of shape. Unrelated image-shards swirled in his mind as his nostalgia for the life he had discarded became unbearable: Vicky’s smile of pleasure as he agreed to make love her way and let her bestride him; the smell of pine needles and mince pies at Christmas; the coolness of a freshly laundered shirt; walking into the toilet immediately after David and finding it not flushed, with his son’s small stools (studded with the chewing gum he insisted on swallowing) floating in the bowl; going shopping for trivia with Vicky on a summer morning and the both of them getting tipsy before lunch without having bought any of the items they went out to get; glowing pictures in the gloom — a line from Sassoon, but relevant enough to be appropriate — and friendly books that hold me late; looking out at his archery butt on a morning when the dew had dulled the grass, making it visually inert, as though seen through polarized glass…

But his mouth remained frozen in the original contortion. His pain grew more intense, yet the tears refused to come.

Finally, swearing bitterly and feeling cheated, Hutchman got to his feet and walked back to his car through black streets which were battlegrounds for tides of cold air. The familiar smell and feel of the car was momentarily comforting. He filled the tank at a self-service station and made a conscious effort to be more constructive in his thinking — the episode by the river had been distressing and futile. The last of the envelopes, including those bound for destinations in Britain, had been mailed and tomorrow they would be read by people in high places. There could be a short delay while qualified men were verifying the pages of maths, and while physicists were confirming that the cestron laser in the specification could be built, but at some time tomorrow the word was going to go out. The message was going to be simple: Find Lucas Hutchman and, if he has a machine, obliterate both the man and his works.

In the few relatively secure hours that were left to him, Hutchman had to find a good hole and crawl into it. A first consideration was that it would be a mistake to remain in Stockport, which was at the warmest end of the postal spoor he had created. The hunters would be informed that an antibomb machine would not be readily portable and could infer that, if it really existed, it was likely to be hidden somewhere in the south and not too far from Hutchman’s home. They could also reason that, having traced a line toward the north of England, their quarry would be likely to double back, both to put them off the scent and to get closer to the hidden machine. That being the case, Hutchman decided on the strength of this pseudo-data, he would continue northward.

He drove up to Manchester, skirted it on the ring road, and went off on a northwesterly tangent with a vague idea of trying to reach the Cumbrian lake district that night. But other considerations began to weigh on his mind. The lake district was a very long way from Hastings and it was the type of area, especially at this time of year, where the authorities would have little difficulty in controlling the exit points. It would be better to lose himself in a population center and — if he did not want to arrive conspicuously in the dead of night — to pick one fairly near at hand. He pulled off the highway and consulted a road map.

The nearest town of any size was Bolton which, to Hutchman’s mind, was the epitome of the traditionally humdrum life of provincial England. Its name produced no overtones, Freudian or otherwise, associated with Crombie-Carson’s “typical spy fantasy”, which made it a good choice from Hutchman’s point of view. And there was the fact that, to the best of his knowledge, not one person he knew lived there — the hunters would be likely to concentrate on areas where Hutchman was known to have friends to which he might turn for help.

With his decision made, he got onto the Salford-Bolton road and drove with the maximum concentration on his surroundings which was becoming a habit. The easiest course would be to check in at a hotel, but presumably that would almost be the most dangerous. He needed to drop completely out of sight. Reaching Bolton, he cruised slowly until he found himself in one of the twilight areas, common to all cities and towns, where large shabby houses fought a losing battle with decay, receiving minimal aid from owners who rented out single rooms. He parked in a street of nervously rustling elms, took his empty suitcase and walked until he saw a house with a card which said “Bed Breakfast” hanging from the catch of a downstairs window.

The woman who answered the doorbell was in her late forties and heavy-bosomed, wearing a pink see-through blouse which covered a complexity of silk straps. Her blonde hair was elaborately piled up above a large-chinned face. A pale-faced boy of seven or eight, wearing striped pajamas, stood close to her with his arms around her thighs.

“Good evening,” Hutchman said uncertainly. “I’m looking for accommodation, and I saw your sign…”

“Oh, yes?” The woman sounded surprised to hear that she had a sign. The boy eyed Hutchman warily from the folds of her skirt.

“Have you any rooms to let?” Hutchman looked beyond her into the dimly-lit hall, with its brown linoleum and dark stairway ascending into alien upper reaches of the house, and wished he could go home.

“We have a room, but my husband usually attends to the letting and he isn’t here right now.”

“That’s all right,” Hutchman said with relief. “I’ll try elsewhere.”

“I think it should be all right, though. Mr. Atwood will be home shortly.” She stood aside and gestured for him to enter. Hutchman went in. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet and there was a strong smell of floral air freshener.

“How long did you want to stay?” Mrs. Atwood asked.

“Until… .” Hutchman checked himself. “A couple of weeks or so.” He went upstairs to view the room which, predictably, was on the top floor. It was small but clean, and the bed had two mattresses, which suggested it could be comfortable if a trifle high. He inquired and found that he could have full board, consisting of three meals a day, and that Mrs. Atwood would take care of his laundry for a small extra charge. “This looks fine,” he said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “I’ll take the room.”

“I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable here.” Mrs. Atwood touched her hair. “All my boys are very comfortable.”

Hutchman smiled. “I’ll bring up my case.”

There was a sound outside on the landing, and the small boy came into the room carrying Hutchman’s case.

“Geoffrey! You shouldn’t have… .” Mrs. Atwood turned to Hutchman. “He isn’t very well, you know. Asthma.”

“It’s empty,” Geoffrey asserted, nonchalantly swinging the case into the bed. “I can carry an empty case all right, Mum.”

“Ah” Hutchman met Mrs. Atwood’s eyes. “It isn’t completely empty, but most of my stuff is down in the car.”

She nodded. “Do you mind paying something in advance?”

“Of course not.” Hutchman separated three five-pound notes from the roll without taking it out of his pocket and handed them to her. As soon as she had gone he locked the door, noting with surprise that the key was bent. It was a slim, uncomplicated affair with a long shaft which in the region of the bend had a bluish tinge as though the metal had been heated and bent on purpose. Shaking his head in bafflement, Hutchman threw his jacket on the bed and walked around the little room, fighting off the homesickness which had begun to grip him again. He opened the room’s only window with difficulty and put his head out. The night air was raw, making him dizzy, producing a sensation curiously similar to that in a dream of flying. His head seemed to be dissociated from his body, hovering high in the darkness close to unfamiliar arrangements of gutters and pipes, slates and sills. All around and below him lighted windows glowed, some with drawn blinds or curtains, others affording glimpses into appalling, meaningless rooms. This physical situation — his head drifting disembodied and unseen, close to the walls of a canyon of nightmare — was no stranger than the matrix of horror his life had become. He knelt that way for a long time, until the cold had eaten into his bones and he was shivering violently, then closed the window and went to bed.

The room was to be his home for the next week, and already he wondered how he could possibly survive.