“You will be sent for in the morning. Guard, take this man away. Give him into Corporal Pitt’s keeping.”
As they came up in a business-like way to take Timberlane, Croucher coughed into a handkerchief, wiped his hand across his brown and said, “One concluding point, Timberlane. I hope friendship will originate between us, as far as that’s possible. But if you cogitate trying to escape, I had better inform you that from tomorrow new restrictive orders are in operation throughout the area in my jurisprudence. I will stamp out the spread of plague at all costs. Anybody caught trying to move from Oxford in future will be shot, no questions asked. Barriers will be erected round the city at dawn. All right, guard, remove him. And expedite me a secretary and a pot of tea immediately.”
Their quarters in the barracks consisted of one large room. It contained a wash basin, a gas ring, and two army beds with a supply of blankets. Their belongings arrived in fits and starts from a lorry downstairs. Other commandeered property arrived spasmodically, until they grew tired of the echo of army boots.
A senile guard sat on a chair in the doorway, fingering a light machine gun and staring at them with the stony curiosity of the bored.
Martha lay on one of the beds with a damp towel across her forehead. Timberlane had given her a full account of the talk with Croucher. They remained in silence, the man sitting on his bed, resting his head heavily on his elbow, sinking slowly into a sort of lethargy.
“Well, we’ve more or less got what we wanted,” Martha said. “We’re working for Croucher with a vengeance. Is he to be trusted?”
“I don’t think that’s a question you can ask. He can be trusted as far as circumstances allow. He had a way of not seeming to take in all that I was saying — as if his mind was working all the time on another problem. Perhaps I got a glimpse of that problem when he visualized a world populated by monsters. Perhaps he felt he must have someone to rule over, even if it was only a — a collection of abnormalities.”
His wife’s thoughts returned to a point they had reached earlier in the day. “Everyone is obsessed with the Accident, even if they do not show it immediately. We’re all sick with guilt. Perhaps that’s Croucher’s trouble, and he has to live with a vision of himself ruling over a twilight world of cripples and deformed creatures.”
“His grip on the present seems stronger than that would imply.”
“How strong is anyone’s grip on the present?”
“It’s a pretty fleeting grip, as the cholera reminds us, but—”
“Our society, our biosphere, has been sick for forty years now. How can the individual remain healthy in it? We may all be madder than we know.” Not liking the note in her voice, Timberlane went over and sat on the edge of her bed, saying strongly,
“Anyhow, our immediate concern is with Croucher. It will suit the DOUCH scheme if we co-operate with him, so that’s what we will do. But I still can’t see why, at a time like this, he should want to encumber himself with me.”
“I can think of a reason. He doesn’t want you. He’s after the truck. He probably thinks there is evidence in it he could use.”
He squeezed her hand. “It could be that. He might think that as we have come from London, I have recorded information he could use. Indeed I may have done. London is his best-organized enemy at present. I wonder how long they will leave the truck where it is now?”
The DOUCH(E) truck was a valuable piece of equipment. When national governments broke down, as foreseen by the Washington foundation, the trucks became in themselves small DOUCH HQ’s. They contained full recording equipment, stores, and sundry supplies; they were fully armoured; an hour’s work would convert them into tracked vehicles; they ran on the recently perfected charge-battery system, and had an emergency drive that worked on petrol or any of the current petrol substitutes. This neat packet of technology, or Timberlane’s sample of it, had been left in its garage, below the flat in Iffley Road.
“I have the keys still,” Timberlane said, “and the vehicle is shuttered down. They haven’t asked me for the keys.”
Martha’s eyes were closed. She heard him, but she was too tired to reply. “We’re well placed here to observe contemporary history,” he said. “What DOUCH did not consider was that the vehicles might be an attraction to the history-makers. Whatever happens, we must not let the truck pass out of our control.”
After a minute of silence, he added, “The vehicle must be our first concern.”
With the sudden energy of fury, she sat up on the bed. “Damn and blast the bloody vehicle!” she said. “What about me?”
She slept fitfully throughout that stuffy night in the barracks. The silence was fractured by army boots stamping across a parade ground, by shouts, by the close vibrations of a mosquito or by the surge of a Windrush coming home. Her bed rumbled like an empty stomach when she turned in it.
Night, it seemed to her, was a padded pincushion — she almost had it in her hand, so closely did its warmth match the humidity of her palm — and into it, an infinite number of pins, went the sound effects of militant humanity. But each pin pierced her as well as the cushion. Towards morning, the noises grew less frequent, though the heat bowl of the square outside remained unemptied. Then from a different quarter came the faint ring, long continued, of an alarm clock. Distantly, a cock crowed. She heard a town clock — Magdalen? — chime five. Birds quarrelled over the dawn in their guttering. Army noises slowly took over again. The clang of buckets and iron utensils from the cookhouse proclaimed that preparations for breakfast had begun. She slept, fading out on a tide of despair.
Her sleep was deep and restorative. Timberlane was sitting grey and unshaven on the edge of his bed when she awoke. A guard came in with a breakfast tray, set it down, and departed.
“How are you feeling, my love?”
“I’m better this morning, Algy. But what a noise there was in the night.”
“A lot of stretcher parties, I’m afraid,” he said, glancing out of the window. “We’re in one of the centres of infection here. I am prepared to give Croucher guarantees about my conduct if he’ll let us live away from here.”
She went over to him, cupping his stubby jaws in her hands. “You’ve come to a decision, then?”
“I had last night. We took on a job with DOUCH(E). We are after history, and history is now being made here. I think we must trust Croucher; so we remain in Cowley to co-operate with him.”
“You know I don’t question your decisions, Algy. But can we trust a man in his position?”
“Let’s just say that a man in his position does not seem to have any reason to shoot us out of hand,” he said. “Perhaps a woman looks at these things differently, but let’s not allow DOUCH to take precedence over our safety.”
“Look at it this way, Martha. In Washington we didn’t just take on obligations; we took on a way of thinking that makes sense when most human activities no longer do. That may have a lot to do with the way we have survived as a pair in London while all around us personal relationships are going to pot. We have a mission; we must serve it, or it won’t serve us.”
“You put it like that and it sounds fine. Just let’s not fall into the trap of putting ideas before people, eh?”
They turned their attention to the breakfast. It looked like soldier’s rations; because tea was scarce, there was weak beer to drink, and to eat the inevitable vitamin pills that had established themselves as a national food since domestic animals were stricken, a grainy bread, and some fillets of a brown and nameless fish. Because whales and seals had almost vanished from the sea, and freak radiation effects seemed to have encouraged the growth of plankton and minute crustacea, fish had multiplied. Many farmers in coastal areas throughout the world had been forced to take to the seas when their livestock dwindled; so there was still a strip of fish to stretch across the cracked plates of the world.