The Peace Machine

CHAPTER 7

Andrea Knight came slowly into the bar, her black hair caught inside the collar of her suede coat, a sling-type handbag almost trailing on the floor. Hutchman, who had arrived a little early, watched as she walked the length of the room. He asked himself what it was about her which caused the male drinkers to fall silent as she passed by. Did the slinky-slovenly gait, that chalky and pouting lower lip, suggest something to their minds? The archetypal woman of the streets, composite of Dietrich and Signoret and Hayworth? He gave up the attempted analysis as she reached his table, sat down, and shrugged off her coat without speaking.

“Good to see you.” He spoke quickly. “Glad you could come.”

“Hello, Lucas. My God, this takes me back more years than I care to remember.”

“I guess it does,” he said, wondering what she was talking about.

“Yes. Did you know the Pack Horse has been demolished to make room for a motorway?”

“No.” Hutchman felt a growing unease.

“Of course, we only had one drink there.” She smiled reproachfully.

Hutchman smiled back at her as the ground seemed to shift below his feet. The Pack Horse was a pub he had used when at university and he had vague memories of having taken girls there — around the time he met Vicky — but surely Andrea had not been one of them. And yet she must have been. It dawned on him that his years with Vicky had conditioned his very thought processes. (A full year of marital hell-heaven had passed before he had learned always to put his briefcase beside him on the front seat of the car when going home from the office. Vicky, watching like a sniper from the kitchen window, assumed if she saw him remove the case from the rear seat that he had had a passenger. And on the days when he had given a lift but forgot to mention it she spun the delicate but ever tightening webworks of questions, culminating in ghastly midnight confrontations.) He had learned to blot out other women from his memory. A new thought: Could it be that the monogamous, slightly undersexed person I always imagined myself to be is not the real Lucas Hutchman? Am I a creation of Vicky’s? And, in this revenge kick that I’m on, how big a part is played by coincidence and how big a part by subconscious motivation? I saw Andrea at the Jeavons while I was working on the machine. I read about her in the Newsletter and they say the subconscious never forgets details. Details such as the dates of her Moscow trip. Dear Jesus, could it be, could it really be, that the deadline for the operation of my sacred megalife machine was timed to bring me to this table to meet this woman?

“…quite thirsty after the walk,” Andrea was saying. “My car’s in for repairs.”

“Forgive me.” He signaled to the waiter. “What would you like to drink?”

She asked for a Pernod and sipped it appreciatively. “A girl with my socialist convictions has no right to order such an expensive drink, but I think I’ve got a capitalist stomach.”

“That reminds me.” He took the envelope from his inside pocket and handed it to her. “It’s addressed, but you’ll need to put a stamp on it for me over there. Do you mind?”

“I don’t mind.” She dropped the white rectangle into her handbag without looking at it. Her careless acceptance of the envelope pleased him, but he became worried in case she should be too casual and forget to bring it with her.

“It isn’t really vital, but it is rather important to me, personally, to have the article delivered soon,” he said.

“Don’t worry, Lucas.” She placed her hand on his reassuringly. “I’ll look after it for you.”

Her fingers were cold and he instinctively covered them with his free hand. She smiled again, looking directly into his eyes, and something threw a biological switch in his loins, producing a small but distinct thrill as if she had touched him there. Time itself seemed to distort from that moment — individual minutes were fantastically drawn out, but the hours flicked by. They had several drinks, a meal in the adjacent dining room, more drinks, then he drove her to her flat which was the top one in a four-storey building. As soon as the car had crunched to a halt in the graveled drive she swung out of it and walked to the door, searching in her handbag for a key. At the steps to the door she turned and looked back at him.

“Come on, Lucas,” she said impatiently. “It’s cold out here.”

He got out of the car and went with her into the small lobby. The elevator door was open and they walked into the aluminium box hand in hand. They kissed during the ride up and her mouth was as soft as he had thought it would be, and her thighs — closed around one of his — were as responsive as he had hoped they would be. Hutchman’s legs felt slightly shaky as he followed Andrea into her apartment which was pleasantly but sparsely furnished. It smelt faintly of apples. Just inside the door she dropped her coat on he floor and they kissed again. Her body was fuller than Vicky’s and her breasts, when he cupped them in his hands, felt heavier than Vicky’s. The automatic and unwanted comparison produced a painful churning sensation behind his eyes. He put Vicky out of his mind and drank from Andrea’s mouth.

“Do you want me, Lucas?” Her breath was warm on the roof of his mouth. “Do you really want me?”

“I really want you.”

“All right then. You wait here.” She walked into a bedroom and he waited without moving till she reappeared. She was wearing nothing but a black peep-hole brassiere, her nipples angled upward through the apertures on extruded blobs of milky flesh. Breathing noisily, Hutchman removed his own clothes, closed with Andrea, and bore her down onto a flame-coloured rug. Now, he thought, right now, my darling Vicky.

An indeterminate time went by before he made the shocking discovery that he could feel… precisely nothing. It was as if the whole region of his genitals was flooded with a deadening drug, destroying all sensation. Baffled and afraid, he waged a battle between his body and Andrea’s, surging and grasping and crushing…

“Give it up, Lucas.” Andrea’s voice reached him across interstellar distances. “It isn’t your fault.”

“But I don’t understand,” he said numbly. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Sexual hypesthesia,” she replied, not unkindly. “Kraft-Ebbing devotes a whole chapter to it.”

He shook his head. “But I’m always all right with…”

“With your wife?”

“Oh, Christ!” Hutchman pressed his hands to his temples as the pain in his head became intolerable. What have you done to me, Vicky?

Andrea stood up, walked to the door where her suede coat was lying, and put it on. “I’ve had a very pleasant evening, Lucas, but I have an awful lot to do tomorrow and I must get to bed. Do you mind?”

“Of course not,” he mumbled with senseless formality. As he struggled into his clothes he tried to think of something intelligent and unconcerned to say, and finally came out with, “I hope you have good flying weather tomorrow.”

Her face betrayed no emotion. “I hope so too.”

“Good night, Lucas.” She closed the door quietly. The elevator was still at the landing and he rode down in it, staring at his reflection in the scratched aluminium.

Incredibly, after all that had happened, it was only a little after midnight when he got home, and Vicky was still up. The comfortable old skirt and cardigan she was wearing suggested to him that she had not been out and that no stranger had been in the house during his absence. She was watching the late movie on television and as usual the colour control was turned down too far, producing a faded picture. He adjusted the colour and sat down tiredly without speaking.

“Where have you been this evening, Lucas?”

“Out drinking.”

He waited for her to contradict him, directly or by inference, but she said, “You shouldn’t drink a lot. It doesn’t agree with you.”

“It agrees with me better than some things.”

She turned to face him, and spoke hesitantly. “I get the impression that… all this has really hurt you, Lucas, and it surprises me. Did you not understand what you were letting yourself in for?”

Hutchman stared at his wife. He had always loved her most when she wore the sort of friendly, familiar clothes she had on now. Her face was grave and beautiful in the subdued orange light, imbued with the power to make him whole again. He thought of his first batch of envelopes, sorted and separated now, speeding on the first stages of the journeys from which no power of his could bring them back.

“Go to hell, you,” he said thickly and walked out of the room.

Early next morning Hutchman drove east almost as far as Maidstone and dispatched another sheaf of envelopes. The weather was sunny and relatively warm. He got back to the house to find Vicky and David having a late breakfast. The boy was eating cereal and trying to do arithmetic problems at the same time.

“Dad,” he shouted accusingly. “Why do sums have to have hundreds, tens, and units? Why couldn’t it all be units? That way there’d be no carrying to do.”

“It wouldn’t work very well, son. But why are you doing homework on a Sunday morning?”

David shrugged. “The teacher hates me.”

“That’s not true, David,” Vicky put in.

“Then why does she give me more sums than the other boys?”

“To help you.” Vicky glanced up at Hutchman appealingly. He took David’s book and pencil, jotted down the answers to the remaining problems, and handed it back to the boy.

“Thanks, Dad.” David looked at him in wonderment, then darted out of the kitchen whooping with glee.

“Why did you do that?” Vicky lifted the coffeepot, poured an extra cup, and pushed it across the table to Hutchman. “You’ve always said that sort of thing didn’t help him.”

“We seemed to be immortal in those days.”

“Meaning?’

“Perhaps there isn’t enough time to do everything slowly and properly.”

Vicky pressed her hand to her throat. “I’ve been watching you, Lucas. You don’t act like a man who’s been…” She sighed. “What would you say if I told you I hadn’t been unfaithful in the clinical sense of the word?”

“I’d say what you’ve said to me several hundred times in the past — that doing it in the mind is just as bad.”

“But what if it was nauseating to my mind, and I only — “

“What are you trying to do to me?” he demanded harshly, pressing the knuckles of one hand to his lips in case they should tremble. After all that’s happened, he wondered in panic, am I going to fall? Can the lady dissolve her homunculus in acid and recreate him at will?

“Lucas, have you been unfaithful to me?” Her face was that of a priestess.

“No.”

“Then what has all this been about?”

Hutchman, standing with the coffee cup in his hands, felt his knees begin to orbit in minute circles which threatened to become larger and bring him down. A fearsome shift took place in his mind. Why do I need the machine? The spread of the information is all that matters. World-wide knowledge of how to build the antibomb machine would, by itself, make the possession of any nuclear device too risky. Even if the machine were destroyed my envelopes could still go out as a didactic hoax. Better still, I could open all the remaining envelopes and remove the letter — and just send the information. And without the hardware I could be safe. They need never find me…

He became aware that the telephone was ringing. Vicky halfrose from the table, but he waved her back, hurried impatiently into the hall, and lifted the instrument, cutting it short in the middle of a peal.

“Hutchman speaking.”

“Good morning, Lucas.” The woman’s voice seemed to speak to him from another existence, something completely alien and irrelevant to Hutchman as he was on that bright Sunday morning. It took a genuine mental effort for him to identify the speaker as Andrea Knight.

“Hello,” he said uneasily. “I thought you’d have been at Gat wick by this time.”

“That was the original plan, but I’ve been transferred to a later flight.”

“Oh!” Hutchman tried to understand why she had rung him. To gloat? To try to make him feel worse by pretending to try to make him feel better?

“Lucas, I’d like to see you today. Can you come round to my flat?”

“Sorry,” he said coldly. “I don’t see any point…”

“It’s about the envelope you gave me to post for you.”

“Well?” He suddenly found difficulty in breathing.

“I opened it.”

“You what?”

“It occurred to me that I should know what I was carrying into Moscow. After all, I’m a practicing socialist, and if the article was intended for publication anyway…”

“You’re a socialist?” he asked faintly.

“Yes. 1 told you that last night.”

“So you did.” He recalled Andrea saying as much, but then it had seemed unimportant. He took a deep breath. “Well, what did you think of my little hoax? Childish, isn’t it?”

There was a long pause. “Not very childish, Lucas, no.”

“But I assure you…”

“I showed the papers to a friend and he didn’t laugh much, either.”

“You’d no right to do that.” He made a feeble attempt at blustering.

“And you’d no right to involve me in something like this. Would you like to come round here and discuss the matter?”

“Just try stopping me.” He threw the phone down and strode into the kitchen. “Something has come up on the Jack-and-Jill program. I have to go out for an hour.”

Vicky looked concerned. “On Sunday? Is it serious?”

“Not serious — just urgent. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“All right. Lucas.” She smiled tremulously, in a way that hurt him to see. “We have to sit down together and talk.”

“I know.” He ran out to his car, broadsided it out onto the road in a turn which sent gravel hissing through the shrubbery like grapeshot, and accelerated fiercely in the direction of Camburn. The traffic was light — with a scattering of people on their way for a pre-lunch drink — and he made good time, the concentration on fast motoring relieving him of the necessity to plan his immediate actions. When he reached the apartment block where Andrea lived it looked unfamiliar in the lemoncoloured sunlight. He stopped the car and glanced up at the top floor. There was nobody at the windows of her flat. He walked quickly to the elevator and rode up in it, staring distastefully at the aluminium walls which in their distorted reflections seemed to store visual records of the previous night’s madness. He thumbed Andrea’s doorbell, still without taking time to think of what he might say or do. She opened the door within seconds. Her dusky face, with its pouting lower lip, was immobile as she stood aside to let him enter.

“Listen, Andrea,” he said. “Let’s get all the nonsense over with quickly. Give me back my papers and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

“I want you to meet Aubrey Welland,” she replied tonelessly.

“Good morning, Mr. Hutchman.” A stocky, bespectacled young man, with a square-jawed face and the look of a rugby-playing schoolteacher, emerged from the kitchen. He was wearing a red tie and in the lapel of his tweed jacket was a small, brass hammer-and-sickle badge. He nodded when he saw the direction of Hutchman’s gaze. “Yes, I’m a member of the Party. Have you never seen one before?”

“I didn’t come here to play games.” Hutchman was depressingly aware that he sounded like a retired major. “You have some papers belonging to me, and I want them back.”

Welland appeared to consider the request for a moment. “Comrade Knight tells me you are a professional mathematician with a special knowledge of nuclear physics.”

Hutchman glanced at Andrea, who eyed him bleakly, and he realized he was getting nowhere by standing on his dignity. “That’s correct. Look, I tried to play a very childish practical joke and now I realize just how stupid it was. Can’t we — “

“I’m a mathematician myself,” Welland interrupted. “Not in your league, of course, but I think I have some appreciation of genuine creative maths.”

“If you had, you’d recognize an outright spoof when you saw one.” An idea formed in the back of Hutchman’s mind. “Didn’t you notice the anomaly in the way I handled the Legendre functions?” He smiled condescendingly, and waited.

“No.” Welland lost a little of his composure. He reached into his inside pocket, then changed his mind, and withdrew his hand — but not before Hutchman had glimpsed and identified the corner of a white envelope. “I’m going to take some convincing about that.”

Hutchman shrugged. “Let me convince you, then. Where are the papers?”

“I’ll keep the papers,” Welland snapped.

“All right.” Hutchman smiled again. “If you want to make a fool of yourself with your Party bosses, go ahead. To me it’s all part of the joke.” He half-turned away, then sprang at Welland, throwing the other man’s jacket open with his left hand and grasping the envelope with his right. Welland gasped and clamped his hands over Hutchman’s wrists. Hutchman exerted all the power of his bowtoughened muscles, Welland’s grip weakened, and the envelope fluttered to the floor. Welland snarled and tried to drag him away from it and they went on a grotesque waltz across the room. The edge of a long coffee table hit the back of Hutchman’s legs and to prevent himself going down he stepped up onto it, bringing Welland with him. Welland raised his knee and Hutchman, trying to protect his groin, flung the other man sideways. Too late, he realized, they were close to the window. There was an explosive bursting of glass, and suddenly the cool November air was streaming into the room. The lacy material clogged around Hutchman’s fingers and mouth as he looked downwards through angular petals of glass. People were running into the forecourt, and a woman was screaming. Hutchman saw why.

Welland had landed on a cast-iron railing and, even from a height of four storeys, it was obvious that he was dead.