Willett’s pace slowed even further and a cool breeze seemed to touch his brow as his memory stirred again, projecting an image of the past on to the screen of the present. On his doctor’s advice he had quit smoking more than ten years earlier, but he kept a large, urn-shaped lighter of solid silver on a bookcase in the living room. It contained neither batteries nor fuel, and was preserved purely as an ornament.
One Sunday afternoon, the summer before last, Willett had been tending the potted begonias on the rear patio while his wife entertained her mother and three sisters to tea. He had glanced in through the window just in time to see Anne—second youngest of the sisters—go to the bookcase, pick up the lighter and ignite her cigarette with it. Puzzled, because he did not think Muriel would have had the lighter serviced, he had gone into the house and examined it—and had found it still without batteries or fuel. When asked what he was doing Willett had related what he had seen through the window. For a moment Anne had seemed flustered, but Gina Sturmey had chimed in at that point with a scornful laugh, saying that Anne had already been smoking when she had casually picked up the lighter. Anne had quickly agreed with her.
Willett had not dared contradict the women when the facts were so plainly against him, but the image of Anne drawing flame from the lighter had always remained sharp in his mind, an irritating anomaly, a thorn in the flesh of reason and logic. And now, suddenly, a pattern was emerging—because the incident with the refrigerator was exactly the same kind of phenomenon.
Gina Sturmey and her daughters were witches who could make defunct machines operate as though they were in perfect condition!
“I’ve gone crazy,” Willett announced to the empty street. “I’m worse than old Hank ever was!”
Paradoxically, the realisation of just how far he had strayed beyond the bounds of rationality served to ease his mind. He was an engineer, and he knew that he lived in an ordered universe, and the conclusion he had reached about his in-laws was an example of what could come from abandoning strict causality. Witches, indeed! Giving a self-deprecating snort, Willett tried to summon up some reserves of steadiness and commonsense. All right, so his wife had damaged the car and there was something he did not understand about an old refrigerator—was that sufficient reason to go round the twist or have a heart attack?
Besides, his theory about the Sturmey witches failed the most basic test in that it did not accommodate all the facts. Even if he discarded the antique notion of witchcraft and enlisted the aid of modern jargon terms like “psi powers”, he had not explained why Gina and her brood were so spectacularly inept when it came to machinery or anything technical. If they had a natural or supernatural ability to impress their will directly on machines, they ought to display an effortless mastery of all such objects. Or should they? Would that not be giving the game away?
Willett snorted again in the scented darkness as he entered the spirit of the mental game he had just discovered. No thinker liked to abandon a neat theory without a struggle, and here was an intellectual challenge—reconcile the Sturmeys’ covert affinity with machines and their overt lack of such affinity.
There was a contradiction there, but did it really exist? Did it baulk in his mind because he was making the mistake of thinking as a man who had always been fascinated by engineering? His wife in particular seemed to have an antipathy towards all things mechanical, but what if that was according them too much importance in her scheme of things? She would not hate anything she saw as insignificant—she would simply regard it with disdain. All the Sturmeys could be the same. When it was necessary or convenient they might cause a broken machine to do their bidding, by one means or another, but for the sake of a quiet life they would not flaunt their power in the faces of their husbands and the world at large. The poor male spouses, exemplified by Willett, clinging to their cherished illusions of superiority, might not be able to stand it if all their hard-won understanding of torque and templates, degaussing and differentials amounted to nothing beside their wives’ instinctive and casual mechanical wizardry.
That’s not bad, Willett told himself, nodding in satisfaction. Perhaps I should take up writing fantasy stories as a hobby. I wouldn’t mind seeing my name on one of those paperbacks in Smith’s (comparable to Tolkien at his best), but the theory is still incomplete.
All right, let us suppose that the Sturmeys are modern witches, psi superwomen, and want to be discreet about it—why do they deem it necessary to go so far in the opposite direction and appear to be technological dunces? Take Muriel as an example. If she wants to learn to drive why doesn’t she do so with remarkable competence, rather than put on a show of being so monumentally inept?
“I’m surprised you even bother to ask that question, old son,” said the ghost of Hank Beveridge, conjured up and made almost tangible by the vividness of Willett’s memory. “You’ve become redundant. Perhaps it’s because Muriel would like to go with the others on that winter cruise, but—whatever the reason—she has decided you’re for the high jump. It’s the insurance policy time. I warned you about the driving lessons, old son. The ultimate weapon! She’s killing you by making you kill yourself …”
“Cobblers,” Willett muttered, disappointed by his failure to build a satisfactory armature of logic to support the witch theory at his first attempt. There was no time for a second try because the game was over—he was coming within sight of his own house and the glimmer of the garage lights was a reminder of what was waiting for him there.
In spite of all his sensible resolutions, he was unable to prevent an anxious quickening of his pace over the last hundred yards and was breathing heavily by the time he entered the driveway. Muriel was waiting under the porch light. She had changed her clothes and was now wearing a grey pullover, grey tweed skirt and low-heeled shoes.
That must be her I’ve-just-crashed-the-car outfit, Willett thought bitterly, wondering how his wife could concern herself with her appearance at a time of crisis. He nodded with grave courtesy as he passed her, calculating that a show of forbearance would increase her burden of guilt, and went into the garage. An involuntary moan escaped his lips as he saw that the lathe had not only been knocked over—it had been driven against the wall so hard that several breeze-blocks had been displaced outwards. The rear end of the car had been crunched into an expensive new free-form shape and the hatchback window, miraculously intact, was lying on the floor beside it. Willett’s lower lip began to tremble while he was surveying the full extent of the catastrophe, but he brought it under control as Muriel entered the garage and came to his side.
“Thanks a lot,” he said. “This is a nice little home-coming present.”
“Don’t be sarcastic with me, Willett Morris,” she snapped. “It was all the fault of your stupid old car.”
“Are you going to persist with this crap about the car going faster when you pressed the brake?”
“That’s what happened. It must be something to do with a…” Muriel paused, rummaging through her small vocabulary of engineering terms. “…a linkage.”