“Yes, sir. He never talked about it and I don’t even know the names of the others who went. I assumed it was on some kind of classified work, what with Harlech being so close to the missile ranges at Aberporth and Ty Croes.”
“Quite right,” Garnett said with a knowing briskness he did not feel. He went back into the glass box of the office, noting that Elkin’s limbs had been straightened.
The doctor stood up. “I’ll have to get him to hospital. His pulse, respiration, temperature and blood pressure are near enough normal, but he’s far down in coma. It’s as though his brain had been switched off. Did you … ?”
“Come to my office later,” Garnett interrupted. “I must go.”
He walked quickly back to the Technical Block, feeling the now-familiar exhaustion begin to grow in him like a leaden core. Back in his office he rang for Miss Fleet and she came in with notebook and pen, exuding normalcy.
“Since I’ve been in hospital,” he said, ‘has the company established an office or booked any kind of accommodation for special courses in or near Harlech?”
“You mean, where the Men come from?”
He nodded.
“Of course not, Mr. Garnett.” She dismissed the subject as being ridiculous and got down to the business of the day. “I’ve left a list of people who rang while you were out, and Mr. Moller called in from Photographic for a second.”
“Very well,” he said tiredly, reaching for his pipe. “That’s all.” As he loaded the bowl with moist yellow strands Garnett tentatively identified the emotion causing the fluttering hollowness in his chest—it was the beginnings of fear. His momentary glimpse of the other organisation hidden inside his own works had shown it to be disturbingly large, and he had a conviction Elkin’s sudden paralysis had merely been the first flexing of its muscles. Tackling Elkin direct had been not exactly a mistake—he searched for a suitable word—it had been a non-cybernetic move. The specific application of cybernetics to aircraft production control was a subject on which Garnett had written a book years before the T.6 had claimed his life, and now one of the opening paragraphs was assuming a new and nightmarish appearance of relevance to the present situation.
“An aircraft factory is a machine for producing aeroplanes and it may be disastrous to attempt to improve production by piecemeal tinkering with individual departments—one must seek out in all its ramifications, and destroy, the machine for stopping the production of aeroplanes, which lurks like a parasite within the organisation.”
Approaching Elkin had been the equivalent of tinkering with an individual department, but a good cyberneticist never grabbed a tiger by the tail, not without simultaneously taking a powerful grip of its other extremities. Garnett took a clean sheet of graph paper and began to draw a block diagram of the other organisation as he saw it. In the top square he put Ian Dermott’s name; in the bottom one Victor Elkin’s; in between he put question marks in departments he believed must be involved. It occurred to him that, except for the photograph, he had nothing to show but a very personal kind of evidence, which made the photograph an object of some value. He picked it up and scanned it closely.
An impossibly long time dragged by before his heart resumed beating.
The beauty queen still smiled beneath the picture’s glazed surface, but none of the men behind her were carrying anything!
The obvious conclusion, the one every sane person in the world would agree on, was that Garnett had made a stupid mistake. After all, he had returned to work too soon and had been under a considerable strain. Garnett smiled wryly, almost grateful that all traces of doubt were eliminated. He took his pen, drew a new off-shoot to his diagram, and in it printed, “C. R. Moller, Chief Photographer.” Re-lighting his pipe he pulled the comforting smoke deep into his body. Chris Moller, the cadaverous ex-R.A.F. cameraman, must have realised his mistake and substituted a picture taken a few seconds earlier or later than the vital one. Again, it was hardly first-class evidence but it was good enough for Garnett. There were quite a few question marks on his diagram which had to be replaced with names, but when he finally had those identities the parasite—the machine for secretly producing aircraft parts nobody would ever buy—was going to find itself in trouble. I may be small, Garnett thought in an illogical surge of confidence, but I’ve never met anybody big enough to step on me. Impelled by the freshly released adrenalin in his blood he stood up, limped ferociously around the office, then calmed down enough to decide what he ought to do. It seemed fairly obvious.
“Next on the menu,” he muttered, ‘is a trip to Harlech.”
He picked up the televu on his private line and punched the number of the Carvill Clinic. As he waited for them to find Janice Villiers he felt the bright bubble of confidence begin to tremble. Since leaving the clinic he had had two rather unsatisfactory dinner dates with her, and a third which had been a downright fiasco. Right from the start she had talked freely about her affairs, (“Not love affairs, Tony—the qualification always sounds so excusatory!”), and the effect had been to throw him into a rage which cumulatively became uncontrollable. And yet, because he had deliberately entered her world and not she his, he had been unable to express his anger honestly and in the end had resorted to a vicious attack on her odd, epigrammatic mode of conversation.
“Talking to you,” he had said coldly, in the middle of a discourse on the incongruity of an infinitely small present sandwiched between an infinitely large past and a similar future, ‘is like standing by while somebody tears off every day on one of those ghastly calendars.” She had given him a level stare, displaying the deviation in her eye, and had smiled knowingly but sadly. After that there had been nothing—Garnett felt he had slammed a door.
“Hello, Jan.” He tried to sound casual as Janice’s face suddenly glowed in the depths of the little screen.
“Hello, Tony. How are you?”
“Quite well. I’ve been drinking my milk regularly. It … it does seem to help the nerves.” He wondered if she would find that acceptable.
“Apologies hurt me too,” she said with one of her white, perfect smiles. “What is it, Tony?”
“I’ve got to drive down to Wales tomorrow. I’ll be coming back over the weekend sometime. I wondered if you would go with me.” He waited, realising his attempt to sound like a different person had flopped, but she was kind and answered quickly, agreeing to go. When the arrangements were made and the connection broken, Garnett sat staring across his expanse of gooseberry-coloured carpet which was silvered in places by footprints. He was elated but his pleasure was tempered by the discovery of how deeply he was involved with Janice Villiers, the black-haired stranger who was two dismaying inches taller than he. On the surface he was planning a casual ‘affair’ but there was one disturbing fact the significance of which, even with his sketchy acquaintance with Freud, was obvious.
Ten minutes before, he had decided, with all the trappings of cold logic, that the next step ought to be the trip to Harlech—but this was not the case! There were half a dozen avenues of investigation open to him right here in the Pryce-Garnett works, any one of which could yield valuable information. It was not too late to call off the journey, and yet he knew he was going to go.
Hormones, he decided comfortably, are lousy cyberneticists.
Driving fast in Garnett’s superb, though oversized car, was a little like flying in an under-the-radar jet, and in normal circumstances he would have annihilated the distance from Coventry to Harlech in a very short time. But with the black-clad girl coiled like a whip on the seat beside him the journey was too pleasant not to prolong. He drove north to Rhyl then followed the coast road south against a sea whose clean blue horizon caused him a near-physical pain by its demands for emotional responses the adult Garnett had almost lost. He breathed deeply, trying to fill himself with the bright pastel colours of the morning air.