The Bat that Flits Read online

  There was one man whom I hadn’t met before. And it turned out to be the early riser. Michael Gillett his name was, and he sat himself down beside the demure one as to the manner born. He had a good clean profile, sharply cut without being too pointed. I found out afterwards that he was a ski-er. When he wasn’t working at the bench he spent all his time in Switzerland. I don’t wonder. That profile was just made for a ski-cap.

  On the whole, I was rather pleased to see him there because he came as England’s answer to the American. So long as we could produce sufficient Michael Gilletts I didn’t grudge them their aristocratic film diplomats like Ulysses Z. Mellon. The only thing that I wondered was how long a man with Gillett’s profile intended to remain on research work. I formed the distinct impression, possibly wrongly, that if the right opportunity came along he would be perfectly ready to switch over to the sales side and embrace Big Business with one feverish ecstatic hug.

  Then the Old Man came in and we all folded our hands in our laps. The Old Man himself wasn’t by any means too bad. Largely, I suspect, because I was a new boy, he began by reminding everyone that we were an anti-bacteriological institute and not one of the real joy-through-glanders kind; and when he had got to the end of that bit, Dr. Mann looked as though he could have kissed him.

  Even so the nature of the work was naturally pretty much the same either way. It went something like this. Some ingenious fellow in a research institute in Prague or Warsaw or Tashkent would discover, or think that he had discovered, a new means of disseminating B. typhosus or B. pestis. And some equally ingenious fellow in our M.I would get on to it. Then, after a certain amount of preliminary sifting, mostly by people who didn’t know an autoclave from a Buchner’s tube, the papers would be sent down to Bodmin. After that, we would go into recess for a month or so, and finally we would report back either “Could be,” or “Bodmin say Tashkent all screwy-screwy.” If it was “Could be” all the dope would then be passed over to the fumigation squad —the Anti-Bacteriological Device Unit was the official title —who kept their D.D.T. and Flit sprays somewhere up in a sister institute near Worcester. And if it was “screwy-screwy” we would just begin again on something else.

  By now the Old Man had reached the bit we had all been waiting for. And here he did allow himself one of the routine numbers out of the effects book. Or perhaps he was just being careful. Taking out his key-ring, he selected the Chubb and went across to the safe in the corner. Then he went through the usual business of opening up the Chinese envelopes with the separate tags, TOP PRIORITY, SECRET, ONLY TO BE OPENED BY . . . attached to each one of them. He was painfully slow about it, and his eyebrows seemed to be getting in the way more than usual. But he got down at last to the typewritten part, and began to read. Then we had our surprise. Because it was our old friend, B. anthracis, that it turned out to be. And that, let me tell you, came as a bit of an anticlimax. Because we had all been expecting a virus—probably one of the unfilterable ones—and B. anthracis is not much above first-year standard.

  All the same, the M.I. report said that They, the Other Chaps, had worked out a new air-delivery scheme for B. anthracis, which was apparently giving a lot of pleasure at the far end; and that meant that we would have to look into it.

  What was more interesting from our point of view, however, was the fact that the report went on to say that the same mysterious, everlasting They had got several stages ahead of us in the preparation of the L-substance that is used in all laboratories for putting up the birth-rate in the germ kingdom. And that really did make us prick our ears up.

  I suppose that everyone knows something of the speed with which bacilli multiply. From baby to grandfather within the hour is how the more popular text-books describe the process. And that begins to mean something when you start off with several million babies in the first crèche. Because their children are having children while the old folks, the founder members of the colony, the original Pilgrim Fathers, are still lusty with the powers of increase themselves.

  So if there was anything in the new L-substance—or, rather M-substance as it was referred to, just to remind us that They were supposed to be one jump ahead—there would be immediate high jinks up at the Worcester depot. Instead of sitting round doing nothing as we always pictured them, they would have to begin stockpiling penicillin and Chloromycetin and all the rest of it. Also, before they were through, somebody would probably have to go round all the seaside resorts buying up the donkeys because the best anti-anthrax serum, Sclavo’s serum, is obtained from immunised mokes. . . .

  The Old Man was putting the things back into their various envelopes when he paused.

  “We are rather short-handed to get everything done in the time,” he said speaking almost apologetically as though we were all down there simply for the week-end, and were suddenly being asked to peel the potatoes or do the washing up. “We’ll have to drop everything else, but that can’t be helped. And”—here there was that same apologetic note again—“no visitors until we’re through, please.” He paused. “In fact, I’ve asked for all passes to be cancelled,” he added. “The department attaches the greatest possible importance to this particular piece of research and is sending an additional security man down here while we’re working on it.”

  I was sitting next to Dr. Mann while the Director was speaking. And, when he came to the word “Security,” I saw the little German’s clasped hands suddenly tighten as if he were trying to crush something together inside them. Then with a sigh, the sort of sound that a tired child makes just when it is falling off to sleep, he relaxed again.

  This rather annoyed me. Because the very last thing I wanted was to begin getting interested in Dr. Mann.

  2

  Personally, I am allergic to all security regulations. They bring out the absolute worst in me. One of the reasons I chose Bodmin was because I wanted to be away from people. But the moment I heard that visitors’ passes were cancelled, I was wondering how I could get Cousin Chloe and Aunt Hetty over for the week-end simply to show them round the works.

  We all said as much over morning coffee afterwards. And Swanton even went a bit further. His was a bad case of allergy, and he talked a lot about secret police, microphones hidden behind pictures of the Coronation, and letters being read by ultra-violet light behind the counter in the little local post office.

  “If we had any real guts, which we haven’t,” he went on, “we’d go along to the Old Man now and say that if They” —it was a different They this time, but apparently every bit as sinister—“send someone down here to spy on us, we quit.”

  “I don’t see why. It seems a perfectly natural precaution to me.” It was the great Dr. Smith, our ambassador at large, who was speaking. “If there are people here,” he went on, “who can’t see the significance of what they are doing, they ought to be moved on before they constitute a public danger.”

  This was Kimbell’s opening. He had a natural habit of hanging round the outsides of conversations like a hyena, and then suddenly bolting in as soon as the blood was flowing.

  “Also sprach Zarathustra,” he remarked. “If you want a tame Dick on the premises you are welcome. You may be one yourself, for that matter.” He paused and negligently flicked his cigarette ash half into his own coffee and half into mine. Then, like a modern Madame Récamier finding someone in her salon who had been left too long out of the conversation, he pointed his grubby, nicotine-stained forefinger at me, and said: “Or Hudson could be the new security officer. It would be rather nice timing, and calculated to allay suspicion.”

  That seemed fair enough to me, so I decided to buy it.

  “As the old Persian proverb says,” I replied, making it up hard as I went along: “‘Beware the shepherd who first points out the thief.’” And for good measure I added: “Up in Uzbechistan where my people come from we say the same thing only differently: ‘The unfaithful wife is she who praises chastity the loudest.’ The phrasing is slightly different, but the meaning
is clearly very much the same.”

  It was while Kimbell was working that one out that I got up. As a matter of fact, I was rather busy. So I simply edged Kimbell’s match-box gently into the centre of a pool of milk that the Phoenician had spilt on the table top, and left them to it.

  I had a feeling that the red-gold girl was deliberately keeping out of the conversation. If so, that was another distinct alpha in her favour.

  Chapter V

  1

  During the next week there was enough overtime done inside the Bodmin Institute to bleach the hair of any good Trade Union secretary. We started early, and we left off when our eyes got too gummy to look through a mike. Just that. I even forgot about my mystery notes.

  In a sense, it made it much easier that it was anthrax we were working on. He is a great favourite among beginners, is B. anthracis, because he is hardier and stands up to rough treatment better than most of his kind. And that is really the crux of the matter in bacteriological warfare—not which germs our human brother, the enemy, can deliver without catching something nasty himself, but the condition of the poor little germs by the time they have been let loose. It is the extremes of temperature that are the trouble. Because when germs get their feet cold they don’t necessarily die, but they aren’t up to any very serious work next morning— they have become attenuated, as we call it; and overheat them, and they’ve had it.

  Anyhow, B. anthracis has always shown itself more willing than most. It belongs to the spore group which, being translated, means every-germ-its-own-air-raid-shelter. For when this particular bacillus finds life a bit inhospitable, it gathers its own protoplasm together in a little ball— B. anthracis is a big sturdy fellow about seven thousandths of a millimetre long—and proceeds to put on armour for the winter. The only thing that B. anthracis does like is a breath or two of fresh air. And even then it can get along with the window shut—which is what is meant when the bacteriologist calls him a facultative anaerobe.

  But even with all the help that B. anthracis could give us, we weren’t making very much progress. Because it was round about this time that little things began to go wrong.

  There is no lab. on earth where a clamp doesn’t come off some time or other, or a piece of tubing break at one of the S-bends. But we had more than that to contend with. First, the thermostat on the main incubator packed up twice in a week. Then the cotton-wool that should have come straight out of the steriliser for stoppering the Pasteur pipettes was found to be supporting as many foreign strains as a camp of displaced persons. And finally the centrifuge went funny on us. That was too much, and the feeling gradually developed that it was more than the law of averages that we were fighting. It was Bodmin United versus the Gremlins by now.

  I take it that everyone knows what a centrifuge is. But for the very young I will just rough in the outline. It is really no more than a wheel with little slots inside, into which test tubes can be fitted. You fix the test tube in place, press the button, and the wheel spins away at anything up to 5,000 r.p.m. Then while you are finishing a cigarette or putting in a ’phone call, the centrifuge has done your straining for you and the solids in the test tube solution have been slung right down to the bottom. It is our schooldays’ friend centrifugal force that has done it, the same old faithful that tips you over into the far ditch if you try taking a corner a bit too fast.

  Now 5,000 is quite a lot of revolutions. And, like juggling, it is all a matter of balance. A centrifuge is built to something a bit better than cart-wheel standards. It is real precision engineering, in fact. And before sticking in a test tube on one side and so upsetting the bearings you always weigh up a dummy and mount it opposite. There’s nothing to it really, and accidents to centrifuges are in the low order of things that have built up the big fortunes in insurance. That was what made the behaviour of the Bodmin centrifuge so distinctly rummy.

  It was on Monday that one of ours started to go wrong. The first tube disintegrated at somewhere round the 3,000 mark. And when the casing had been cleaned up and enough glass powder to make even a Borgia feel squeamish had been washed down the sink, the same thing happened again. And again.

  It was after the third disruption that Gillett came over. In happier circumstances and without his qualifications he would have made the ideal works manager. He had a way of standing, with his shoulders very square and his hands in the pockets of his jacket, that would have given just the right note of confidence in any workshop bay. His profile, too, was at its absolute best when the forehead wore a slight frown. And there was a kind of Troop Leader efficiency about him that made the rest of us all look like very junior Wolf Cubs. While we were still saying, “My, my,” Gillett was getting down to work inside the case.

  “It’s no good going on fooling with the damned thing,” he said bitterly when he stepped back. “The Old Man will have to ’phone up the M. of S. for a new centrifuge. We can’t do a bloody thing with this one.”

  As he said it, he slammed the tin lid back into position with the kind of noise that an angry cook makes when the soup has boiled over.

  “It’s the sheer waste of time that gets me,” he said angrily. “It’s like trying to do serious work on a desert island.”

  But by then the idea had begun to get around that people in general, and possibly one person in particular at our end, weren’t very anxious to see us getting on any faster.

  2

  I’m often surprised by how much I notice about other people, and then find that I have missed something that a woman would have spotted immediately.

  For example, I knew that on top of everything else that was going on, Kimbell had just started another correspondence game with someone living in Vienna and after a sleepless night of agony and indecision had just made his second move.

  I knew that Rogers was having trouble with his teeth and in consequence could hardly wait for Mondays, the fish-pie day, to come round again.

  As for Bansted, he was still evidently after a No. 1 job somewhere, and was hard at work pulling the wires. Twice during the past week I had seen him shut up in the telephone booth in the front hall, and the length of time that he was in there without talking suggested that he was trying to get on to something long-distance—though come to think of it, everything was long-distance from Bodmin.

  Swanton, I knew too, was in the middle of some quasi-professional dust-up connected with the Scientific Association for International Co-operation. He was one of the joint secretaries of the thing, and there was a public row going on about his opposite number. Someone had called the poor chap a fellow traveller, and Swanton was urging him to bring a libel action—though whether it was because the remark cast doubt on his hundred per cent loyalty or on his hundred per cent Communism I wasn’t quite sure.

  As for young Mellon, I had found that in addition to the gift of youth everlasting he possessed the secret of sex inexhaustible—which may have been what Goethe was really getting at. By now he had the resources of the whole Cornish countryside, north and south coasts alike, planned out in his mind as neatly as an ordnance survey map. Shut him up in a dark room alone and he could have filled in the iso-blondes from memory.

  I had also got to know quite a lot about little Dr. Mann. He had a load on his mind, and was in the uncomfortable position of never knowing for certain that the load had not been removed rather suddenly. By this I mean that his people were living in Berlin—Russian sector. There was a mother and a grandmother and some other sort of female relative—a sister, I think. The poor fellow was always in a terrible state of nerves about them, and kept making up little parcels to help to keep them going. He sent bars of chocolate, toothpaste, even old shirts of his own that he had finished with. A parcel of miscellaneous rubbish of one kind or another went off almost every week, and about once a month he showed happy because one of them had arrived. His one hope—and it looked a forlorn one—was to get a U.S. visa somehow, and cart the whole lot off to Manhattan. He had told me so half a dozen times at least.<
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  So I hadn’t exactly been going about with my eyes shut. But what I didn’t know was that Gillett and the demure one had just got themselves engaged to each other.

  Even then, there was quite a lot about Gillett’s love life that I didn’t know about. And I found out the other half, or rather a part of it, entirely by accident. Things had eased off a bit in the labs. And there always comes a point when about the best piece of research that anyone can undertake is to go down to the local and try to analyse the brew du pays.

  The trouble with me was that the red-gold girl had upset my whole metabolism. I was therefore in one of those states of deferred activity, quietly sporulating in one of those unspeakable chairs in the common room. It was position number three that I had chosen, the Unconscious. And because of the draught, I had picked on the chair that was right up in the alcove, practically under the darts board.

  Before I had been there for five minutes the door opened and someone else came in. That annoyed me because I didn’t want to be disturbed. But a moment later I was not so sure. I was aware of some sort of high-frequency emanation that told me that the presence was a sympathetic one. And in the whole Bodmin colony that could mean only one thing. It meant that the red-gold girl was in the room with me. I was just preparing to come out of my corner all male and ruffled and tweedy when the door handle began turning again.

  This time it was Gillett who came in. From where I was reclining I could just see a thin section of the doorway. And I noticed with real admiration how well Gillett was wearing his profile this evening. It was in particularly fine shape, and I think that he must have been honing or polishing it. Then the side wall of my little corner shut him off from me abruptly, and I heard the red-gold girl say “Oh.”