“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…