The Peace Machine

CHAPTER 1

Hutchman lifted the squared sheet from his desk, looked at it, and felt something very strange happen to his face.

Starting at the hairline, an icy sensation moved downward in a slow wave over his forehead, cheeks, and chin. The skin in the region of the wave prickled painfully as he felt each pore open and close in an insubstantial progression, like wind patterns on a field of grain. He put a hand to his forehead and found it slippery, dewed with chill perspiration.

A cold sweat, he thought, his shocked mind seizing gratefully on the irrelevant. You really can break into a cold sweat — and I thought it was just a figure of speech.

He mopped his face and then stood up, feeling strangely weak. The squared sheet on the desk reflected sunlight up at him, seeming to glow malevolently. He stared at the close-packed strings of figures he had put there, and his consciousness ricocheted away from what they represented. What unimpressive handwriting! In some places the figures are three, four times bigger than in others. Surely that must show lack of character.

Vague colours — mauve and saffron — drifted beyond the frosted-glass partition which separated him from his secretary. He snatched the rectangle of paper and crammed it into his jacket pocket, but the area of colour was moving toward the corridor, not coming his way. Hutchman opened the connecting door and peered through at Muriel Burnley. She had the cautious, prissy face of a village postmistress, and an incongruously voluptuous figure which was nothing but a source of embarrassment to her.

“Are you going out?” Hutchman said the first words that came into his head, meanwhile looking unhappily around her office which was too small, and choked with olive-green filing cabinets. The travel posters and plants with which Muriel had decorated it served only to increase the atmosphere of claustrophobia. She glanced with resentful perplexity at her right hand on the knob of the outer door, at the coffee cup and foil-wrapped chocolate bar in her left hand, and at the clock which registered 10:30 — the time at which she always took her break with another secretary along the corridor. She did not speak.

“I just wanted to know if Don’s in this morning,” Hutchman extemporized. Don Spain was a cost accountant who had the office on the opposite side of Muriel’s and shared her services.

“Him!” Muriel’s face was scornful behind the tinted prescription lenses — the exact colour of antique-brown glass — which screened her eyes from the world. “He won’t be in for another half-hour — this is Thursday.”

“What happens on Thursday?”

“This is the day he works at his other job.” Muriel spoke with heavy patience.

“Oh!” Hutchman recalled that Spain made up the payroll for a small bakery on the far side of town as a sideline and usually handed his work in on Thursdays. Having outside employment was, as Muriel frequently pointed out, a breach of company regulations, but the main cause of her anger was that Spain often gave her letters to type on behalf of the bakery. “All right, then. You run along and have your coffee.”

“I was going to,” Muriel assured him, closing the door firmly behind her.

Hutchman went back into his own office and took the sheet of figures from his pocket. He held it by one corner above the metal waste bin and ignited it with his bulky desk cigarette lighter. The paper had begun to burn reluctantly, with a surprising amount of acrid smoke, when the door to Muriel’s office was opened. Shades of gray moved on the frosted glass, the blurred mask of a face looking his way. Hutchman dropped the paper, stamped it out, and crammed it back into his pocket in one frantic movement. A second later Spain looked into the office, grinning his conspiratorial grin.

“Ho there, Hutch,” he said huskily, “How’re you getting on?”

“Not bad.” Hutchman was flustered and aware he was showing it. “Not badly, I mean.”

Spain’s grin widened as he sensed he was on to something. He was a short, balding, untidy man with slate-gray jowls and an almost pathological desire to know everything possible about the private lives of his colleagues. His preference was for material of a scandalous nature, but failing that any kind of information was almost equally acceptable. Over the years Hutchman had developed a fascinated dread of the little man and his patient, ferretting methods.

“Anybody asking about me this morning?” Spain came right into the office.

“Not that I know of. You’re safe for another week.”

Spain recognized the gibe about his outside work and his eyes locked knowingly with Hutchman’s for an instant. Suddenly Hutchman felt contaminated, wished he had not made the reference which somehow had associated him with Spain’s activities.

“What’s the smell in here?” Spain’s face appeared concerned. “Something on fire?”

“The waste bin was smouldering. I threw a butt into it.”

Spain’s eyes shone with gleeful disbelief. “Did you, Hutch? Did you? You might have burned the whole factory down.”

Hutchman shrugged, picked up a file from his desk, and began studying its contents. It was a summary of performance data from a test firing of a pair of Jack-and-Jill missiles. He had already abstracted as much information as he required from it, but he hoped Spain would take the hint and leave.

“Were you watching television last night?” Spain said, his throaty voice slurring with pleasure.

“Can’t remember.” Hutchman shuffled graph papers determinedly.

“Did you see that blond bit on the Mort Walters show? The one that’s supposed to be a singer?”

“No.” Hutchman was fairly sure he had seen the girl in question, but he had no desire to get involved in a conversation — in any case, his viewing time had been brief. He had glanced up from a book and noticed an unusually pneumatic female figure on the screen, then Vicky had walked into the room and switched the set off. Accusation and disgust had spread like Arctic ice across her features. He had waited all evening for an explosion, but this time she seemed to be burning on a slow fuse.

“Singer!” Spain said indignantly. “It isn’t hard to see how she got on that show. I thought those balloons of hers were going to come right out every time she took a breath.”

What’s going on here? Hutchman thought.That’s exactly what Vicky said last night. What are they getting steamed up about? And why do they get at me about it? I’ve never exercised the droit du casting director.

“…makes me laugh is all the fuss about too much violence on television,” Spain was saying. “They never stop to think about what seeing all these half-naked women does to a kid’s mind.”

“Probably makes them think about sex,” Hutchman said stonily.

“Of course it does!” Spain was triumphant. “What did I tell you?”

Hutchman closed his eyes. This… this thing standing before me is an adult member of the so-called human race. God help us. Now is the time for all good parties to come to the aid of the men. Vicky gets jealous of electron patterns on a cathode-ray tube. Spain prefers to see shadows of the Cambodian war — those tortured women holding dead babies with the blue-rimmed bullet holes in their downy skulls. But would this charred sheet of paper in my pocket really change anything? I CAN MAKE NEUTRONS DANCE TO A NEW TUNE — but what about the chorea which affects humanity?

“…all at it, all those whores you see on the box are at it. All on the game. I wish I’d been born a woman, that’s all I can say. I’d have made a fortune.” Spain gave a throaty laugh.

Hutchman opened his eyes. “Not from me, you wouldn’t.”

“Am I not your type, Hutch? Not intellectual enough?”

Hutchman glanced at the large varnished pebble he used for a paperweight and imagined smashing Spain’s head with it Plea: justifiable insecticide. “Get out of my office, Don — I have work to do.”

Spain sniffed, producing a glutinous click in the back of his nose, and went through into the connecting office, closing the door behind him. The gray abstract of his figure on the frosted glass hovered in the region of Muriel’s desk for a few minutes, accompanied by the sound of drawers being opened and papers riffled, then faded as he moved into his own room. Hutchman watched the pantomime with increasing self-disgust for the way in which he had never once come right out and told Spain what he thought of him. I can make neutrons dance to a new tune, but I shrink from telling a human tick to fasten onto someone else. He took a bulky file marked “secret” from the secure drawer of his desk and tried to concentrate on the project which was paying his salary.

Jack was a fairly conventional ground-to-air missile employing the simplest possible guidance-and-control system, that of radio command from the firing station. It was, in fact, a modification of an earlier Westfield defensive missile which had suffered from an ailment common to its breed — loss of control sensitivity as the distance between it and the launcher/control console complex increased. Westfield had conceived the idea of transferring part of the guidance-and-control system to a second missile — Jill — fired a fraction of a second later, which would follow Jack and relay data on its position relative to a moving target. The system was an attempt to preserve the simplicity of command-link guidance and yet obtain the accuracy of a fully automated targetseeking device. If it worked it would have a respectable range, high reliability, and low unit cost. As a senior mathematician with Westfield, Hutchman was ehgaged on rationalizing the maths, paring down the variables to a point where Jack and Jill could be directed by something not very different from a conventional firecontrol computer.

The work was of minimal interest to him — being a far cry from the formalism of quantum mechanics — but the Westfield plant was close to Vicky’s hometown. She refused to consider moving to London, or Cambridge (there had been a good offer from Brock at the Cavendish), or any other center where he could have followed his own star; and he was too committed to their marriage to think about separating. Consequently he worked on the mathematics of many-particle systems in his spare time, more for relaxation than anything else. Relaxation! The thoughts he had been trying to suppress twisted upward from a lower level of his mind.

Our own government, the Russians, the Americans, the Chinese, the French — any and all of them would snuff me out in a second if they knew what is in my pocket. I can make neutrons dance to a new tune!

Shivering slightly, he picked up a pencil and began work, but concentration was difficult. After a futile hour he phoned the chief photographer and arranged a showing of all recent film on the Jack-and-Jill test firings.

In the cool anonymous darkness of the small theater scenes of water and grainy blue sky filled his eyes, became the only reality, making him feel disembodied. The dark smears of the missiles hovered and trembled and swooped, exhausting clouds of hydraulic fluid into the air at every turn, until their motors flared out and they dropped into the sea, slowly, swinging below the orange mushrooms of their recovery chutes. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill…

“They’ll never be operational,” a voice said in his ear. It was that of Boyd Crangle, assistant chief of preliminary design, who had come into the room unnoticed by Hutchman. Crangle had been opposed to the Jack-and-Jill project from its inception.

“Think not?”

“Not a chance,” Crangle said with crisp confidence. “All the aluminium we use in this country’s aerospace industry — it ends up being melted down and made into garbage cans because our aircraft and missiles are obsolescent before they get into the air. That’s what you and I help to produce, Hutch. Garbage cans. It would be much better, more honest, and probably more profitable if we cut out the intermediate stage and went into full-scale manufacture of garbage cans.”

“Or ploughshares.”

“Or what?”

“The things we ought to beat our swords into.”

“Very profound, Hutch.” Crangle sighed heavily. “It’s almost lunchtime — let’s go out to the Duke and have a pint.”

“No thanks, Boyd. I’m going home for lunch, taking half a day off.” Hutchman was mildly surprised by his own words, but realized he really did need to get away for a few hours on his own and face the fact that the equations he had written on a single scrap of paper could make him the most important man in the world. There were decisions to be made.

The drive to Crymchurch took less than half an hour on clear, almost-empty roads which looked slightly unfamiliar through being seen at an unfamiliar time of day. It was a fresh October afternoon and the air which lapped at the open windows of the car was cool. Turning into the avenue where he lived, Hutchman was suddenly struck by the fact that autumn had arrived — the sidewalks were covered with leaves, gold and copper coins strewn by extravagant beeches. September gets away every year, he thought. The favourite month always runs through my fingers before I realize it’s begun.

He parked outside the long, low house which had been a wedding present from Vicky’s father. Her car was missing from the garage which probably meant she was shopping in the town before picking up David at school. He had deliberately avoided calling her to say he would be home. When Vicky was working up to an emotional explosion it was very difficult for Hutchman to think constructively about anything, and this afternoon he wanted his mind to be cold and dark as an ancient wine cellar. Even as he let himself into the house the thought of his wife triggered a spray of memory shards, fragments of the past stained with the discordant hues of old angers and half-forgotten disappointments. (The time she had found Muriel’s home-telephone number in his pocket and convinced herself he was having an affair: I’ll kill you, Luke — steak knife’s serrated edge suddenly pressed into his neck, her eyes inhuman as pebbles — I know what’s going on between you and that fat tart, and I’m not going to let you get away with it… another occasion: a computer Operator had haemorrhaged in the office and he had driven her home — Why did she come to you? You helped her to get rid of something!… a receding series of mirrored bitternesses: How dare you suggest there’s anything wrong with my mind! Is a woman insane if she doesn’t want a filthy disease brought into the house, to her and her child? David’s eyes beseeching him, lenses of tears: Are you and Mum going to separate, Dad? Don’t leave. I’ll do without pocket money. I’ll never wet my pants again.)

Hutchman put the past aside with an effort. In the coolness of the kitchen he hesitated for a moment then decided he could do without eating. He went into the bedroom, changed his business clothes for slacks and a close-fitting shirt, and took his archery equipment from a closet. The lustrous laminated woods of the bow were glass-smooth to his touch. He carried the gear out to the back of the house, wrestled the heavy target of coiled-straw rope out of the toolshed and set it on its tripod. The original garden had not been long enough to accommodate a hundred-yard green, so he had bought an extra piece of ground and removed part of the old hedge. With the target in place, he began the soothing near-Zen ritual of the shooting — placing the silver studs in the turf to mark the positions of his feet, stringing and adjusting the bow, checking the six arrows for straightness, arranging them in the ground quiver. The first arrow he fired ascended cleanly, flashed sunlight once at the top of its trajectory, and dwindled from sight. A moment later he heard it strike with a firm note which told him it was close to center. His binoculars confirmed that the shaft was in the blue at about seven o’clock.

Pleased at having judged the effect of the humidity on the bow’s cast so closely, he fired two more sighting-in arrows, making fine adjustments on the windage and elevation screws of the bowsight. He retrieved the arrows and settled in to shoot a York Round, meticulously filling in the points scored in his record book. As the round progressed one part of his mind became utterly absorbed in the struggle for perfection, and another turned to the question of how well qualified Lucas Hutchman was to play the role of God.

On the technical level the situation was diamond-sharp, uncomplicated. He was in a position to translate the figures scribbled on his charred sheet into physical reality. Doing so would necessitate several weeks’ work on thousands of pounds’ worth of electrical and electronic components, and the result would be a small, rather unimpressive machine.

But it would be a machine which, if switched on, would almost instantaneously detonate every nuclear device on Earth.

It would be an antibomb machine.

An antiwar machine.

An instrument for converting megadeaths into megalives.

The realization that a neutron resonator could be built had come to Hutchman one calm Sunday morning almost a year earlier. He had been testing some ideas concerned with the solution of the many-particle time-independent Schrodinger equation when — quite suddenly, by a trick of conceptual parallax — he saw deeper than ever before into the mathematical forest which screens reality from reason. A tree lane seemed to open in the thickets of Hermite polynomials, eigenvectors, and Legendre functions; and shimmering at its farthest end, for a brief second, was the antibomb machine. The path closed again almost at once, but Hutchman’s flying pencil was recording enough of the landmarks, the philosophical map references, to enable him to find his way back again at a later date.

Accompanying the flash of inspiration was a semimystical feeling that he had been chosen, that he was the vehicle for another’s ideas. He had read about the phenomenon of the sense of givenness which often accompanies breakthroughs in human thought, but the feeling was soon obscured considerations of the social and professional implications. Like the minor poet who produced a single, never-to-be-repeated classic, like a forgotten artist who has created one deathless canvas — Lucas Hutchman, an unimportant mathematician, could make an indelible mark on history. If he dared.

The year had not been one of steady progress. There was one period when it seemed that the energy levels involved in producing self-propagating neutron resonance would demand several times the planet’s electrical power output, but the obstacle had proved illusory. The machine would, in fact, be adequately supplied by a portable powerpack, its signals relaying themselves endlessly from neutron to neutron, harmlessly and imperceptibly except where they encountered concentrations close to critical mass. Then there had come a point where he dreamed that the necessary energy levels were so low that a circuit diagram might become the actual machine, powered by minute electrical currents induced in the pencil lines by stray magnetic fields. Or could it be, he wondered in the vision, that merely visualizing the completed circuitry would build an effective analog of the machine in my brain cells? Then would mind find its true ascendancy over matter — one dispassionate intellectual thrust and every nuclear stockpile in the world would consume its masters…

But that danger faded too; the maths was complete, and now Hutchman was face-to-face with the realization that he wanted nothing to do with his own creation.

Voice from another dimension, intruding: You’ve fired six dozen arrows at a hundred yards for a total of 402 points. The neutron resonator is the ultimate defense. That’s your highest score ever for the range. And in the context of nuclear warfare the ultimate defense can be regarded as the ultimate weapon. Keep this up and you’ll top the thousand for the round. If I breathe a word of this to the Ministry of Defence I’ll sink without a trace, into one of those discreet establishments in the heart of “The Avengers” country. You’ve been chasing that thousand a long time, Hutch — four years or more. And what about Vicky? She’d go mad. And David? Pull up the studs, and ground quiver, and move down to eighty yards — and keep cool. The balance of nuclear power does exist, after all — who could shoulder the responsibility of disrupting it? It’s been forty-three years since World War Two, and it’s becoming obvious that nobody’s actually going to use the bomb. In any case, didn ‘t the Japanese who were incinerated by napalm outnumber those unfortunates at H and N? Raise the sight to the eighty-yard mark, nock the arrow, relax and breathe, draw easily, keep your left elbow out, kiss the string, watch your draw length, bowlimb vertical, ring sight centred on the gold, hold it, hold it, hold it…

“Why aren’t you at the office, Luke?” Vicky’s voice sounded only inches behind him.

Hutchman watched his arrow go wide, hit the target close to the rim, and almost pass clear through the less tightly packed straw.

“I didn’t hear you arrive,” he said evenly. He turned and examined her face, aware she had startled him deliberately but wanting to find out if she was issuing a forthright challenge or was simulating innocence. Her rust-coloured eyes met his at once, like electrical contacts finding sockets, an interface of hostility.

All right, he thought. “Why did you sneak up on me like that? You ruined a shot.”

She shrugged, wide clavicles seen with da Vincian clarity in the tawny skin of her shoulders. “You can play archery all evening.”

“One doesn’t play archery — how many times have I… ?”

He steadied his temper. Misuse of the word was one of her oldest tricks. “What do you want, Vicky?”

“I want to know why you’re not at the office this afternoon.” She examined the skin of her upper arms critically as she spoke, frowning at the summer’s fading tan which even yet was deeper than the amber of her sleeveless dress, face darkened with shadows of the introspective and secret alarms that beautiful women sometimes appear to feel when looking at their own bodies. “I suppose I’m entitled to hear.”

“I couldn’t take it this afternoon.” I can make neutrons dance to a new tune. “All right?”

“How nice for you.” Disapproval registered briefly on the smooth-planed face, like smoke passing across the sun. “I wish I could stop work when I feel like it.”

“You’re in a better position — you only start when you feel like it.”

“Funny man! Have you had lunch?”

“I’m not hungry. I’ll stay here and finish this round.” Hutchman wished desperately liat Vicky would leave. In spite of the wasted shot he could still break the four-figure barrier provided he could shut out the universe, treat every arrow as though it were the last. The air was immobile, the sun burned steadily on the ringed target, and suddenly he understood that the eighty yards of lawn were an unimportant consideration. There came a vast certitude that he could feather the next arrow in the exact geometrical center of the gold and clip its fletching with the others — if he could be left in peace.

“I see. You want to go into one of your trances. Who will you imagine you’re with — Trisha Garland?”

“Trisha Garland?” A bright-red serpent of irritation stirred in the pool of his mind, clouding the waters. “Who the hell’s Trisha Garland?”

“As if you didn’t know!”

“I’ve no idea who the lady is.”

“Lady! That’s good, calling that one a lady — that bedwarmer who can’t sing a note and wouldn’t know a lady if she saw one.”

Hutchman almost gaped — his wife must be referring to the singer he had glimpsed on television the previous evening — then a bitter fury engulfed him. You’re sick, he raged inwardly. You’re so sick that just being near you is making me sick. Aloud he said, calmly: “The last thing I want out here is somebody singing while I shoot.”

“Oh, you do know who I mean.” Vicky’s face was triumphant beneath its massive helm of copper hair. “Why did you pretend you didn’t know her?”

“Vicky.” Hutchman turned his back on her. “Please put the lid back on the cesspit you have for a mind — then go away from me before I drive one of these arrows through your head.”

He nocked another arrow, drew, and aimed at the target. Its shimmering concentricities seemed very distant across an ocean of malicious air currents. He fired and knew he had plucked the string instead of achieving a clean release, even before the bow gave a discordant, disappointed twang, even before he saw the arrow fly too high and pass over the target. The single ugly word he spat out failed to relieve the tensions racking his body, and he began unbuckling his leather armguard, pulling savagely at the straps.

“I’m sorry, darling.” Vicky sounded contrite, like a child, as her arms came snaking round him from behind. “I can’t help it if I’m jealous of you.”

“Jealous!” Hutchman gave a shaky laugh, making the shocked discovery that he was close to tears. “If you found me kissing another woman and didn’t like it, that would be jealousy. But when you build up fantasies about people you see on the box, torture yourself, and take it out on me — that’s something else.”

“I love you so much I don’t want you even to see another woman.” Vicky’s right hand slipped downward, purposefully, from his waist to his groin, and at the same instant he became aware of the pressure of her breasts in the small of his back. She rested her head between his shoulder blades. “David isn’t home from school yet.”

I’m a fool if I fall for this so easily, he told himself; but at the same time he kept thinking about the rare event of the house being empty and available for unrestrained love-making, which was what she had been suggesting. She loved him so much she didn’t want him even to look at another woman — put that way, under these circumstances, it sounded almost reasonable. With Vicky’s tight belly thrust determinedly against his buttocks, he could almost convince himself it was his own fault for inspiring such devouring passion in her. He turned and allowed himself to be kissed, planning to cheat, to give his body and withhold his mind, but as they walked back to the house he realized he had been beaten once again. After eight years of marriage, her attraction for him had increased to the point where he could not even imagine having a sexual relationship with another woman.

“It’s a hell of a handicap to be naturally monogamous,” he grumbled, setting his equipment down outside the rear door. “I get taken advantage of.”

“Poor thing.” Vicky walked into the kitchen ahead of him and began to undress as soon as he had closed the door. He followed her to their bedroom, shedding his own clothes as he went. As they lay together he slid his hands under her and clamped one on each shoulder, then secured her feet by pressing upwards on the soles with his insteps, immobilizing his wife in the physical analog of the mental curbs he had never been able to place on her. And when it was all over he lay dreamily beside her, completely without triste, hovering deliciously between sleep and wakefulness. The world outside was the world he had known as a boy lying in bed late on a summer’s morning, listening to the quiet sanity of barely heard garden conversations, milk bottles clashing in the street, the measured stroke of a hand-operated lawnmower in the distance. He felt secure. The bomb, the whole nuclear doom concept, was outdated, a little old-fashioned, along with John Foster Dulles and Senator McCarthy, ten-inch television sets and razoredge Triumph cars, the New Look, and the white gulls of flying boats over The Solent. We passed a vital milestone back in July ‘66 — the month in which the interval between World War One and World War Two separated us from V-J Day. Looking at it dispassionately, from the historical pinnacle of 1988, one can ‘t even imagine them dropping the bomb. …

Hutchman was roused by a hammering on the front door, and guessed that his son had arrived home from school. He threw on some clothes, leaving Vicky dozing in bed, and hurried to the door. David crowded in past him wordlessly — brown hair tousled, scented with October air — dropped his schoolbag with a leathery thud and clink of buckles, and vanished into the toilet without closing the door. His disappearance was followed by the sound of churning water and exaggerated sighs of relief. Still suffused with relaxed optimism, Hutchman grinned as he picked up the schoolbag and put it in a closet. There are levels of reality, he thought, and this one is just as valid as any other. Perhaps Vicky is right — perhaps the greatest and most dangerous mistake an inhabitant of the global village can make is to start feeling responsible for his neighbours ten thousand miles away. No nervous system yet evolved can cope with the guilts of others.

“Dad?” David’s smile was ludicrous because of its ragged emerging teeth. “Are we going to the stock-car racing tonight?”

“I don’t know, son. It’s a little late in the year — the evenings are cold out at the track.”

“Can’t we wear overcoats, and eat hot dogs and things like that to keep warm?”

“You know something? You’re right! Let’s do that.” Hutchman watched the slow spread of pleasure across the boy’s face. Decision made and ratified, he thought. The neutrons can wait for another dancing master. Now stir the fire and close the shutters fast… He went into the bedroom and roused Vicky. “Get up, woman. David and I want an early dinner — we’re going to the stock-car racing.”

Vicky straightened, pulled the white linen sheet tight around herself, and lay perfectly still, hipless as an Egyptian mummy. “I’m not moving till you tell me you love me.”

Hutchman crossed to the bed. “I do love you.”

“And you’ll never look at anyone else?”

“I’ll never look at anyone else.”

Vicky smiled languorously. “Come back to bed.”

Hutchman shook his head. “David’s home.”

“Well, he has to learn the facts of life sometime.”

“I know, but I don’t want him writing an essay about us for the school. I’ve been branded as a drunkard since the one he did last month, and I’ll be expelled from the PTA if word gets around that I’m a sex maniac.”

“Oh, well.” Vicky sat up and rubbed her eyes. “I think I’ll go to the stock-car racing with you.”

“But you don’t enjoy it.”

“I think I’ll enjoy it tonight.”

Suspecting that Vicky was trying to atone for the scene in the garden, but gratified nonetheless, Hutchman left the room. He spent an hour in his study tidying up loose ends of correspondence. When he judged dinner was almost ready he went into the lounge and mixed a long and rather weak whisky and soda. David was at the television set, working with the channel-selector buttons. Hutchman sat down and took a sip from his glass, allowing himself to relax as the greens of the poplars outside darkened slightly in preparation for evening. The sky beyond the trees was filled with dimension after dimension of tumbled clouds, kingdoms of pink coral, receding toward infinity.

“Bloody hell,” David muttered, punching noisily at the channel selectors.

“Take it easy,” Hutchman said tolerantly. “You’re going to wreck the set altogether. What’s, the trouble?”

“I turned on ‘Grange Hill’, and all I got was that.” David’s face was scornful as he indicated the blank, gently flickering screen.

“Well you’ve got lines on the screen so they must be broadcasting a carrier wave — perhaps you’re too early.”

“I’m not. It’s always on at this time.”

Hutchman set his drink aside and went to the set. He was reaching for the fine-tuning control when the face of a news reporter appeared abruptly on the screen. The man’s eyes were grave as he read from a single sheet of paper.

“At approximately five o’clock this afternoon a nuclear device was exploded over the city of Damascus, capital of Syria. The force of the explosion was, according to preliminary estimates, approximately six megatons. The entire city is reported to be a mass of flame, and it is believed that the majority of Damascus’s population of 550,000 have lost their lives in the holocaust.

“There is, as yet, no indication as to whether the explosion was the result of an accident or an act of aggression, but an emergency meeting of the Cabinet has been called at Westminster, and the Security Council of the United Nations will meet shortly in New York.

“This channel has suspended its regular programs, but stay tuned for further bulletins, which will be broadcast as soon as reports are received.” The face faded quickly.

As he knelt before the blank, faintly hissing screen, Hutchman felt the newly familiar sensation of cold perspiration breaking out on his forehead.