The Bat that Flits Read online

  I’d pulled over on to the grass verge in anticipation of this moment, and my cigarette case was open before I had begun speaking. “Shall we smoke a cigarette before we go on?” I asked.

  It didn’t help me much, however.

  “I don’t smoke, thank you,” she said. “But why don’t you have one?”

  That wasn’t quite the same thing. If only one person smokes there is the rather oriental flavour of a hashish addict holding up the caravan.

  “Been walking far?” I asked her.

  “Only just up to the Tor and back.”

  “I love walking,” I lied to her. “I’m crazy about it.”

  “Have you done much of it?”

  I shook my head sadly.

  “Too lonely,” I said. “No one to talk to.”

  There was no response. So I tried again.

  “How do you like it down here?” I asked.

  She paused.

  “I think the work’s important, don’t you?

  “Terribly,” I said.

  She was speaking like the lady member of a B.B.C. Forum by now, and there was the distinctive ring of the house captain and senior prefect in her voice as she was talking.

  “There are plenty of other things that I’d rather be doing,” she went on; “but now isn’t the time for them, that’s all.”

  “The very reason why I came here myself,” I told her. “Couldn’t have put it better, if I’d tried.”

  Out there in the wind my cigarette was smoking faster than I liked. I wanted this conversation to go on for a long time yet. So I kept up the flow of small-talk.

  “I’ve been noticing you in the common room,” I said. “You don’t say much while the others are talking, do you? Is that because they bore you?”

  “Some of them do,” she said. “All Commies are very much the same.”

  “Meaning Kimbell and his boy-friend.”

  “And Dr. Mann,” she said quickly. “He’s just as bad really. When he first arrived he was always trying to get me to sign Peace Petitions, and that sort of thing. He’ll be on to you next.”

  “He has been,” I said.

  “Well, you be careful,” Hilda replied very seriously. “It’s not for us to judge him, because he may be perfectly sincere. We can’t expect to have the monopoly of good faith on our side. On the other hand, if we really believe in anything ourselves we’ve got to fight for it. And, if the Communists are wrong, any Peace Petitions that they get up are likely to be wrong, too.”

  My cigarette was finished by now. And to tell the truth, I hadn’t been enjoying myself. The whole conversation was just a bit more rarefied than I had expected, and I felt rather like a rock-climber who has got up all right but can’t find his way down again. Another ten minutes or so, and I should be calling out for the oxygen pack.

  So this time I tried another approach altogether. It was not startlingly original. But I had reason to be grateful to it because it had helped me out often enough in the past.

  “Do you mind if I call you Hilda?” I asked.

  The question seemed to surprise her. Genuinely did surprise her, I think.

  “Why ever should I mind?” she asked. “We’re all working together on the same job, aren’t we?”

  I didn’t want to fall into the trap and begin answering questions the way our great doctor always did, so I said nothing. I just sat there looking at her. And, speaking as one who has put some serious research into the matter, I would say that she had the best cheek-bones and eyelashes that I have ever seen on a girl. They took me right back to my schooldays when I used to go to sleep thinking of Norma Shearer.

  I knew that so long as I had her near me and could see her and speak to her there was one side of me that I needn’t worry about. Sublimation is what the psychologists call the state. That is how I was feeling at that moment, and that is what makes it so damn silly that I should suddenly have turned to her, and said: “May I kiss you?”

  I knew perfectly well as soon as I’d said it that I’d done the wrong thing. And I had the uncomfortable feeling that Hilda was going to do the right one. She did.

  “Better not,” she told me quite nicely. “We’ve got to go on working alongside each other and I’m sure we want to avoid a lot of awkward complications. So perhaps we ought to be getting back, don’t you think?”

  It occurred to me afterwards that perhaps it hadn’t really been so bad for her as I thought at the time. After all, a girl as good looking as Hilda must have been through the same routine several times before. And I don’t believe that a woman is ever anything but secretly pleased by the fact that someone has wanted to kiss her. But, at any rate, I felt flat enough at the time.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. “I can’t think what came over me.”

  We drove back to the Institute in the best tradition of English silence and, when we got there, I was so distant I said: “Allow me,” when I gave her my hand to help her out.

  As it happened, young Mellon was just returning from somewhere at the time, and I noticed the respectful expression on his face when he saw the two of us together. I rather think that he must have made one or two tries himself in the same direction when he first arrived here.

  And I didn’t need anyone to tell me that he must have failed, too.

  Chapter VIII

  1

  But, Even if Hilda had shown willing, there still wouldn’t have been much time for fancy motoring. That was because young Mellon had been doing better than ever on de-sporulation. And someone else had been doing even better than young Mellon. That someone else was Gillett. And as the work proceeded he gradually emerged as senior midwife. Despite all indications to the contrary, there must have been something or other propping up that profile from behind. And the fact that Bodmin was able to confirm a new, streamlined birth process for B. anthracis was really Gillett’s own personal triumph.

  He was certainly the Institute’s blue-eyed boy when the Old Man called us all together. And Gillett knew it. He was therefore careful to keep his profile turned towards us throughout. That may have been because he suspected that, full-face, the old hatchet stock came out a bit too strongly.

  The Old Man weighed in straight away. He crossed over to the safe, fiddled with his keys and finally produced a test-tube rack with the tubes all nicely stoppered down with cotton-wool and sealed off with metholin.

  “This is what we might call our Exhibit A,” he said proudly. “So far as we know these are the only anthrax cultures grown with the aid of M-substance in the country. Their multiplication rate is something between five and six times above normal. They may be the only cultures of that kind in the world. We don’t know. And it is no part of our duty to find out. We are merely scientific workers.”

  The “merely” really meant that he could not think of any higher occupation for Man. And, with that, he put the rack down on the table in front of us, and then turned to face his audience again.

  “And now I’m sure you’d all like Dr. Gillett to say a few words,” he remarked sweetly.

  We all clapped politely. Then we sat back for Gillett to give us his electoral address. And I must say that he did it beautifully. Almost too beautifully. First he thanked the demure one for the part that she had played in it, and there would have been tears in our eyes if he had lingered for a moment longer on the theme of love-in-harness. Next he paid a tribute to Dr. Mann which was probably perfectly justified. He thanked Rogers, the ex-lab. boy, and brought in Bansted in the same breath. He mentioned Hilda, who murmured: “No, that’s too much.” He even went out of his way to salute Kimbell and Swanton, which you could see upset them because they both loathed him. He referred to young Mellon. And he offered me a personal crumb of his admiration—for not having dropped something that he had once handed me, I think it was. Then he looked very carefully round the room, and said: “I don’t think I’ve left out anyone, have I?”

  He had. He had left out the great Dr. Smith, and the omission was obvious and deliber
ate. I felt rather inclined to admire him for it. Or at least I might have admired him if I had liked him better. But, at any rate, it didn’t surprise me. All research workers above a certain level are a pretty jealous lot of queens. And just to make sure that he wasn’t given time to correct himself in case the omission had been accidental. I started up the clapping.

  That was the end of the prayer meeting. The Old Man put the test-tube rack back into the safe, locked it carefully and restored the key to his key-ring.

  Dr. Mann simply sat there staring at the door of the safe long after the key had been put away again. He reminded me of a picture in the old nursery at home of a hungry schoolboy sitting outside the larder door.

  2

  Elevenses that morning were rather more lively than usual. I wished afterwards that I could have kept a recording of the whole conversation because there were one or two rather useful pointers left carelessly lying around amid the general litter. I was the first to arrive. And I had my own good reason for that. It was simply an attempt to get to my coffee while it was still in the black state. The Phoenician had a healthy country girl’s prejudice against black coffee, and at eleven hundred hours precisely she used to go up and down the line with her milk jug like someone doing the honours in a dairy show. When I snatched my cup away from her I saw the expression in her eyes of brute nature stupefied: it was as though a favourite bull-calf had just told its mother that it had gone on to the water-waggon.

  Then Dr. Mann came in. He did not look well. I had noticed that earlier. There was a sort of frozen waxiness to his complexion, and his eyes were staring. I think that he was already saying something when he came into the room. And if he was, he must have been talking to himself because there was certainly no one else there. As soon as he saw me he came over, and all that I got was the tail-end of something.

  “ . . . it must not happen. It must not happen,” he said slowly and with increasing emphasis. “There must surely be some way of stopping it, no?”

  “Only by taking the milk jug right away from her,” I told him.

  Dr. Mann did not seem to have heard me, however. Or, if he had heard, he had not understood.

  “It is not even sufficient to think that the Russians possess it also,” he said. “They do not know the extent of our knowledge. Therefore, they may be tempted to think of us as ignorant. And, if they do think so, they may be tempted to make use of this weapon believing us to be unprepared, no?”

  “That would seem to be about the general picture,” I agreed with him.

  “But that is what must not happen,” he said again. “And there is only one way of stopping it. Only one.”

  “Which way’s that?” I asked.

  The strain of telling me was almost too much for him. He was trembling as he stood there, and he was shaking his little egg-shaped head so violently from side to side that I knew that the chick was due to be delivered almost any moment now. But when it came it had a rather old-world appearance. It was Easter-all-the-year-round for that kind of chick.

  “By publishing our results internationally,” he said.

  “Then there would be no more danger from it. International results would neutralise themselves. There would be no more spying, no more counter-spying, no more fear in the minds of men. It would be the end of war if results were published.

  “But suppose the other fellow was a bit absent-minded and forgot?” I asked.

  “The choice,” said Dr. Mann solemnly, “is between possible failure and inevitable disaster. I would sacrifice my life to see it happen.”

  “I get your point,” I told him. “But I still don’t think that it would be a good risk on Lloyd’s.”

  “Lloyd’s, plees?” he asked.

  I did not enlighten him. I must have taken part in precisely that conversation at least a couple of hundred times before. And when I had been younger I had, God forgive me, started about half of them. In fact, it is the basic attitude of every serious scientist, this sharing of results. There is also a higher mystique to it. Pure knowledge knowing boundaries of neither race nor creed, and that sort of thing. And Dr. Mann was just getting ready for that part.

  But by now we had been joined by the two King Street emigrés. And the level of the conversation took a sharp slant downwards.

  “ . . . there is only one country in the world in which such knowledge would be really safe,” Kimbell was saying. “And that’s the . . . ”

  “U.S.S.R.,” Swanton put in almost automatically.

  These two boys had done their double act for so long that I had begun to doubt whether they ever knew exactly which had said what in their particular line of cross-talk.

  “Imagine a weapon like this in Truman’s hands,” Kimbell went on, without even noticing that he had been interrupted. “Can you see a free Europe if he possessed it? It all fits so perfectly into the old peace-through-fear formula.”

  Rogers, meanwhile, had gone one better. He had Bansted with him, and the pair of them were extraordinarily reminiscent of my old employer.

  “And in time of peace just think of the commercial possibilities,” he pointed out. “There’d be tremendous possibilities in all sorts of fields for the first firm that gets working on it.”

  There was a lot more from him in the same vein, and you could watch the mind of the ex-lab. boy working. I think that he was already seeing himself as the head of a retail chemists’ chain with branches in all seaside towns, complete with tearooms and lending libraries in every one of them.

  But it was left to the great Dr. Smith to score the absolute top-high somewhere down at the wrong end of the scale.

  “Always assuming that there is something in it, and, personally, I am expressing no opinions either way”—he could really hardly have said less after the way in which Gillett had snubbed him—“let us only pray that we keep it to ourselves. I have reason, good reason, to believe that the Americans are only passing on a fraction of the atomic knowledge that they possess. If we can offer a threat every bit as terrible as theirs, we may be able to sit down at Lake Success as equal partners, and not as poor relations.”

  This was Hilda’s turn.

  “Hear, hear,” she said, looking more pre-Raphaelite than ever. “Only we should use it as a bargaining instrument rather than as a threat. We must always remember that the alliance of the English-speaking peoples is the most important thing in the long run. It’s simply that we mustn’t let the Americans trample on us.” When she had finished, I made a vow that as soon as we were married—and I made my mind up on that point—I would get her interested in bee-keeping or babies or something, and off international politics altogether. That is, if I was in time.

  The way she was heading, she was due for the British Information Services to fix her up for a trans-Atlantic coast-to-coast goodwill mission tour almost any moment now.

  Chapter IX

  It was the Old Man’s idea that we should all take a short breather. And from my point of view, I knew at once that it would be fatal. With a nature like mine that has a spot of mildew somewhere near the centre there is only one thing that has ever really suited it—and that is a job of work that doesn’t allow of any let-up.

  A sudden compulsory half-hol. in the middle of term was easily the worst of all. I could feel my defences going down like cardboard as I read the Old Man’s release note. In a queer way that rather worries me on these occasions, while one half of me was thinking hard of madder music and stronger wine, the other half kept saying: “Achtung! Achtung! Hier ist alles verboten.” What’s more, there was the complete me, the real me, asking myself in a dopey, helpless sort of fashion which me was going to come out on top. And from long and intimate acquaintance with such situations I would confidently have said that it was evens.

  If you have finally decided to paint the town red there are better places than Bodmin to choose for doing it. The whole of Cornwall for that matter is pretty much of a write-off. You need somewhere with plenty of pubs, and a bit of life goi
ng on before you get there.

  I consulted my A.A. map, and the nearest that I could get to the prescription was Plymouth. Sailors on leave appear to have quite a lot in common with me when I’m in one of my problem-child moods, and we rub along rather nicely together. Plymouth, then, was the answer. And, as soon as I had decided, I changed into my check sports shirt as more in keeping with what lay before me. I’d bought a rather nice check cap in Jermyn Street to go with the sports shirt, and out came that, too. It was all rather childish and silly. But one part of me has always insisted on the dressing-up process.

  It was a nice little run in the car, and I did it in twelve minutes under schedule, which meant some pretty mean driving on the way. This did not surprise me. It was the mean me who was at the wheel that afternoon. And I was able to get everything worked out in my mind while the West Country kept up a fairly steady sixty past the side panels. The plan that I evolved was simple and self-explanatory. It was to start high and work downwards. The object was to get full value for money and avoid all unpleasantnesses. If I were to start trying to get back into the Grand or the Royal or the Palace in the state in which I intended to be later on that evening I should probably be chucked out. And I’m bad at being chucked out of anywhere.

  It was six o’clock when I arrived in Plymouth, and I went straight to what appeared to be the best hotel that the Luftwaffe had left standing. The saloon, marked ‘Residents Only,’ was a comfortable spot with a good fire, and I knocked back three doubles at a speed that made the barman first of all look respectful, and then anxious. But he need not have worried. All that I had got out of it was a new sense of inner power and well-being. And euphoria always suits me.

  Then I remembered my car. There were two reasons against leaving it in the street outside the hotel. The first was that I still didn’t know exactly how the evening was going to plan out, and I didn’t want to run the risk of having to leave it there with the lights on all night. And the second was that I had just noticed that the licence was a shade off-colour and on the overdue side. So I tipped the porter and arranged with him for me to leave it round the back where I could get it if I wanted it. That is, if I could still drive.