Kitabı oku: «The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s», sayfa 3

The Impossible Smile

I

June 1st, 2020: Norwich, Capital of the British Republics. A sports car growled through the empty streets. Pouring rain was turning the evening green as the car ran slowly up the hill towards the barracks. Beside the driver a nervous man in a blue mac consulted his wrist watch every two seconds. He swallowed continually, peering out at the curtain of rain, muttering when the great barrack wall loomed into view.

The barracks, after some hasty redecoration, had been converted into a palace fortress for Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader of the State. Behind the plaster of the newly decorated rooms, a man crouched. The room was a bathroom belonging to the Leader’s suite, and the man was

armed.

For forty-two hours the armed man had waited in his two-foot-wide hiding place. He had dozed without daring to sleep, afraid of breaking through the wafer of plaster before him. He had provisions, a luminous watch – and his gun. He heard someone enter the bathroom.

Fixing his right eye to a hair-thin crack, he watched and waited. The man in the bathroom was out of his line of vision as yet; by the sound of it, he was undressing. Grinning his strange grin, the assassin twitched his leg muscles to exercise them. Soon, praise be, he’d need to move fast.

The man in the bathroom went over to the shower, presenting his bare back to the plaster wall; as he turned on the shower, he presented his profile. This was it! For this second the forty-two hours had been endured.

The assassin pushed aside the flimsy plaster and fired three times. Jim Bull, ex-spacehand, ex-firebrand, fell dead, head under the tepid spray. The water began to turn gravy-coloured as it drained away.

Still clutching his gun, the killer slid sideways in his recess to an old lift shaft. He jumped twelve feet onto a carefully planted mattress, and was on the ground floor. He flung back the folding lift door whose rusty padlock had been previously attended to, and emerged into a stone corridor at the back of the barrack block.

A soldier in shirt sleeves a few yards down the corridor turned and boggled as the killer flung open a window and jumped into the wet evening. Belatedly, the soldier called, ‘Hey!’

The killer ran round a wash-house, cursing his cramped legs, skirted the deserted cookhouse, dodged the swill bins and doubled into the closed way leading to the gym. Two sergeants were approaching him.

They stared in surprise. But the killer wore Army uniform with corporal’s stripes. He winked at them as he passed. The sergeants continued to walk slowly on.

He bolted into the open again at the gym, turned left at the NAAFI, jumped the low hedge into the officers’ quarters and swerved behind the bike shed.

Now he was in the small laundry square, the laundry standing silent at this late hour. Ahead was what was popularly known as Snoggers’ Exit, a narrow wooden gate in the high barracks wall. A sentry stood at the gate.

The fugitive stopped, took aim and, as the sentry hastily raised his light machine-gun, fired. He was running again before the sentry hit the stones. Sounds of whistles far behind spurred him on.

The wooden gate splintered and fell open, before he got to it. Outside on the hill track, the sports car stood. The driver, who had broken down the gate, was already jumping back into his seat. The nervous man in the mac held a back door open for the killer; directly he had scrambled in, the nervous man followed. The car was already on the move again.

They bucked down the track at sixty, skirting the high walls of the barracks. They slowed to turn down a slope, slipping and crashing through wet bracken, and curved among sparse trees. In a clearing they accelerated again, licked past a ruined bandstand and onto a gravelled road.

Rain was falling more heavily when, two minutes later, they swerved sharply left and climbed again. This track curved among pines and brought them suddenly into a chalk pit, once used as a small arms range.

In the middle of the range, a light passenger type spaceship waited, its single port open.

The killer broke from the car and ran across to the ship. He climbed in, ascending the narrow companionway. The pilot, swivelling in his seat, held a levelled revolver until he got a good look at the newcomer’s face; then he dropped it and turned to the controls.

‘Take off in one minute forty-five seconds,’ he said. ‘Strap yourself in quickly.’

Stratton Hall was a big, eighteenth century building a few miles from Norwich. Across the weed-infested courtyard stood a small stable. A horse and rider approached it over the hummocky turf, moving quietly through the downpour. At the stable door, the rider dismounted and led Nicky into the dry. As he did so, he broke off the mental union with the animal; instantly, the wild, wordless chiaroscuros of his vision disappeared, and he was back in his own senses.

The feeling of refreshment left Conrad Wyvern. At once, the memory of his sister’s death returned to him. He rubbed Nicky down less thoroughly than usual, watered him and turned to go.

He had ridden bare-back from East Hingham, as always. As always, he had taken the overland route, avoiding roads, so that Nicky could go unshod. He himself went with no shoes or weapon, and a piece of rope securing his trousers. The Flyspies which covered the country were good at detecting metal, and Wyvern kept his journeys to East Hingham as secret as possible.

It was eleven o’clock, Treble Summertime, as he peered out of the stable, and already growing dark. The rain fell steadily; the harvests would be ruined, turning sour on the stalk. Squinting up at the west gable of the house, Wyvern could see the Flyspy attached to the Hall resting in its recharge cradle, its double vane idle. Even as he looked, the rotors moved and it climbed pot-bellied out of its metal nest, circling the building like a tired barn-owl after mice.

The Flyspies were one of the few new inventions of the ill-financed Republics. At that, thought Wyvern, they weren’t much good. Certainly, they detected any moving metal, but that was something easily circumvented, as he had proved, to his own satisfaction. Their television eye was poor – useless in this light – and he walked over to the rear of the Hall with no effort at concealment, although the machine hovered fairly near.

He slipped quietly in and went up what had been the servants’ staircase to his own rooms to change his clothes. As he did so, he chewed over the evening’s events.

The disused railway station at East Hingham had established itself as a Black Market. You could buy anything there from a box of safety matches (for ten shillings) to a ticket on a moon-bound ship (no upper price limit). Wyvern’s sister Lucie was one of the organisers. Surreptitiously, the place thrived; the Republic, desperately short of manpower after the Fourth War, left it unmolested.

But when Wyvern had got there this evening, the station was a shambles.

He found an old woman dying in the ticket office. As he gave her a drink of water, she rendered him a broken account of the raid.

‘They – Our Leader’s soldiers – drove down in trucks,’ she said. ‘They surrounded the place. Anyone who ran out got shot. Then they came in – very rough! Interrogated us – asked us all questions, you know. I was only after a blanket, if I could get one. I thought it might be cheaper at this time of year.’

‘What about Lucie?’

‘Your sister was rounded up with the other organisers, sir. They were cross-questioned too, and stood against the far wall. Later, they were hustled out, into a lorry, I think. But she passed a note to someone. It must have been for you.’

‘Who did she pass it to?’ Wyvern asked urgently.

‘A little more water, please. It was to … I can’t think … It was to Birdie Byers, who kept the post office – when there was a post. But I think he was shot. We was all shot, sir. Oh – if you’d seen … They weren’t meant to shoot. The officer called out to stop. But they were young chaps – crazy. Crazy! All crazy. I’ll never forget …’

She interrupted herself with a burst of coughing, which turned to weeping. Five minutes later she was mercifully dead.

Wyvern searched grimly for Byers, the old postmaster. He found him at last some yards down the railway line in the direction of Stratton. The old man lay dead, face down in a clump of docks. In his hand was clutched a note. It read: CON – THEY ARE AFTER TELEPATHS FOR BIG BERT. YOU MUST LEAVE. LOVE EVER, LUCE.

Conrad crushed it, tears in his eyes, knowing he would never see his sister again.

The message was fairly clear to him. Big Bert was Bert the Brain, the giant electronic computer situated in the British Republics Sector on the Moon. He could guess why Our Beloved Leader and his gang of thugs should want a telepath for it: he had heard the state secrets which turned into ugly public rumours …

The message told Wyvern something else. It told him that his sister remembered he had the freak power. When they were small children together he had once revealed the secret to her. The indescribable blending of egos had terrified them both; Wyvern never repeated the experiment, and neither of them ever referred to it again. Yet she had not forgotten.

And when Jim Bull’s Gestapo got to work on her – would she not, perhaps under narcotics, give up her secret? If she did so, Wyvern would be a doomed man.

Lucie was right: he must go. But where? America, now more rigidly isolationist than ever before, licking its terrible internal wounds? Russia, where rumour said anarchy prevailed? The new state of Indasia, hostile to the rest of the world? Turkey, the crackpot state which had risen by virtue of the general collapse? The still-warring African republics?

Wyvern toweled himself down, thinking hard. Telepaths were as rare as total eclipses; no doubt the State would like the aid of one. Wyvern had willingly revealed his wild talent to no human but Lucie. He kept it shut away in a tight compartment. For if he tried to ‘read people’s minds’ (as popular parlance inexactly put it), the people would be instantly as aware of his mental presence as if he were shouting. And although his power was of limited range, it flowed out in all directions, so that he was unable to confine it quietly to one desired receiver.

The power had been erratic throughout childhood; with puberty it had come into real being. But Wyvern kept it locked away during the hopeless years of war and devastation. Only occasionally, as with Nicky, had he ventured to use it, and then with a feeling of guilt, as if he had an unearned gift.

Of course, there had been the man in London … Wyvern had been on leave just before the capital was obliterated. A drunk had barged into him down Praed Street. In a moment of anger, the drunk’s mind had opened: the two stood locked in that overpowering union – and then both shut off abruptly. Yet Wyvern knew if he ever met that man again, the recognition would be mutual.

Most of Praed Street must have sensed that strange meeting; but then a crickeytip droned overhead, and everything else was forgotten in a general dive for shelter.

Still bothered by that memory. Wyvern hung his damp clothes over a line and began to dry his hair.

There was a loud rapping at his door. For a moment he had forgotten he was not alone in Stratton Hall. Instinctively he tensed, then relaxed. Not so soon …

‘Come in,’ he said.

It was Plunkett, one of his pupils on the course he ran here.

‘Sir, come into the rec, quick!’ Plunkett said. ‘They’ve just announced it on the telly – OBL’s had his chips!’

OBL was an irreverent way of referring to Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader.

Wyvern followed the youngster downstairs at a run. His government job was to teach relays of twelve young men the essentials of his own invention, cruxtistics, the science of three-di mathematical aerial lodgements, first established in space and later adapted to stratospheric fighting. He enjoyed the task, even if it was for a loathed régime, for the squads of eager young men, changing every five weeks, brought life to the decaying house, with its peeling paint and its two ancient servants.

It had been Plunkett, for instance, who had invented the Flyspy-baiter. He had trapped birds and tied tinfoil to their legs; when released, they had flown off and attracted the miniature gyro after them, televising frantically and signalling to HQ for help.

Plunkett led the way to the rec room. The other eleven youths were clustered round the ill-coloured tellyscreen. They called excitedly to their instructor.

On the screen, men marching. Wyvern found time to wonder how often he had seen almost identical shots – how often, over years and years of war, armistice and betrayed peace; it seemed a miracle there were still men to march. These now, lean and shabby, paraded beneath the angular front of the capital’s city hall, with its asymmetrical clock tower.

‘Our on-the-spot newsreel shows you crack troops pouring into the capital for the funeral of Our Beloved Leader, to be held tomorrow. The assassin is expected to be apprehended at any minute; there is nobody in the whole Republic who would not gladly be his executioner!’

The metallic voice stopped. There were more scenes from other parts of the inhabitable country: York, Glasgow, Hull. Shouting, marching, shows of mourning, the dipping of banners.

‘And now we give you a personal message from Colonel H,’ the unseen commentator said. ‘Friends, Colonel H! – Head of the New Police, Chief Nursemaid of State, Our Late Beloved Leader’s Closest Friend!’

Colonel H lowered into the cameras. Aping the old Prussian style, his hair was clipped to a short stubble, so that it looked now as if it stood on end with his fury. His features were small, almost pinched, their niggardliness emphasised by two heavy bars of dark eyebrow and a protruding jaw. He was less popular generally than Jim Bull but more feared.

‘Republicans!’ he began, as one who should say ‘curs’, ‘Our Beloved Leader has been killed – raped of his life by bloody brutes. We have all lost a friend! We have all lost our best friend! By allowing him to die we have betrayed him and his high ideals. We must suffer! We must scourge ourselves! We shall suffer – and we shall be scourged! We have been too easy, and the time for easiness is not yet, not while there are still maniacs among us.

‘I shall take over temporary leadership until a new Beloved Leader is elected by republican methods. I mean to make tight the chinks in our security curtain. The way will be hard, republicans, but I know you will suffer gladly for the sake of truth.

‘Meanwhile, it makes me happy to announce that the two murderers of Our Late Beloved Leader have just been apprehended by our splendid New Police. Here they are for you all to view – and loathe. Their punishment will be announced later.’

The scowling visage faded.

On the screen, a bullet-riddled sports car lay overturned near a roadside garage. A motley crowd of soldiers and civilians jostled round it. An officer stood on top of a tank, bellowing his lungs out through a megaphone. Nobody paid him any attention. It was pouring with grey rain.

The camera panned between the crowd. Two terrified men stood against the overturned car. One, the driver, silently hugged a shattered arm; the other, a small fellow in a blue mac, stood to attention and wept.

‘These are the blood-crazed, reactionary killers!’ screamed the commentator.

‘Crikey!’ Plunkett exclaimed, ‘they don’t look capable of passing dud cheques!’

‘Stand by for shots from the British Republics Sector of the Moon!’ the commentator said.

The familiar domes like great cloches faded in. Utilitarian architecture, ventilation towers, mobs of people surging back and forth, waving sticks, shaking fists.

‘These true republicans demonstrate their loyalty to the new Leader, Colonel H,’ cried the commentator. ‘They savagely mourn the grave loss of Our Late Beloved Leader!’

‘They don’t, you know,’ a youngster of Wyvern’s party exclaimed. ‘I reckon they are rioting!’

It certainly looked as if that was the case. The colony had scant respect for any Earth authority, but Jim Bull had been an old spacer, and as such his word had always carried some weight. The sound track was cut in, and the viewers heard an ugly roaring. And then, for Wyvern, the miracle happened. The camera swooped into close-up, facing a swirling knot of people. In the background, a girl passed, taking no notice of the agitators.

And her thoughts came over clearly to Wyvern!

She was a telepath! He glanced quickly at the other twelve viewers, but they obviously noticed nothing. Somehow, over the ether, her thoughts had been filtered out for all but another telepath: and her thoughts were in turmoil.

Wyvern watched her almost incredulously, his eyes strained to the reproduction of her figure. And she was thinking, in profound anxiety, ‘Got to follow him. 108, JJ Lane: that’s his destination. Heavens, I’m sending – must stop!’

That was all; but with the thought ‘I’ came, vaguely, her name: Eileen something – Eileen South, it had seemed to Wyvern.

She ceased sending. In a moment, she disappeared behind a pillar. The camera lost her. Wyvern forced himself to begin breathing again.

Who the ‘him’ was Eileen South had to follow, he could not grasp; but floating behind the pronoun had been another phrase in her mind; ‘the impossible smile’.

Of one thing he was sure. He had to get to Luna – he had to find Eileen South; she was his kind.

II

Around the factories and the quaint housing estates – dating back to the fifties of the previous century and already in decay – which fringed the capital of the Republic, a clutter of prefabricated buildings had gathered like rubbish along the high tide mark of a beach. Refugees and traders from London and the shattered Midlands accumulated here in all the disorder of an oriental bazaar.

It was to this region that Wyvern drove in his shooting brake the next morning. He had a small collections of canvases under his arm – a Dufy, two Paul Nashes and a Sutherland, the last of his father’s fine collection. Wyvern knew of no other way to raise the required money for a lunar ticket quickly. In this quarter, they bought anything – at their own price.

After half an hour, Wyvern emerged with five thousand, five hundred pounds in greasy tenners; it was about a half of what the Dufy alone was worth. But it bought a ticket on the moonship Aqualung, leaving at midday the next day.

That gave him twenty-four-hours to wait. He just hoped he would still be at liberty when the time came. But the officials at Thorpe spaceport had seemed casual enough: his passport had been checked, his papers examined, and not a word said. He drove home in a state of modest triumph.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, soon after he had got back to Stratton, he was arrested by the New Police.

At four-thirty, after a bumpy lorry-ride which he spent handcuffed to the frame of the lorry, he found himself back in Norwich again.

The New Police had taken over a big department store on one corner of the market square; it swarmed with activity. Still handcuffed, Wyvern was taken through a side door up to the second floor and left with a Captain Runton, who nodded to him in abstracted fashion and continued to direct some builders working there.

This floor was still being converted to police use. Once, it had been a spacious restaurant; now, flimsy partitions were transforming it into a nest of tiny offices.

‘Let’s see, what are you here for?’ the Captain asked Wyvern mildly.

‘It’s no good asking me: I don’t know,’ Wyvern said, truthfully.

‘You don’t what?’

‘Know, I don’t know,’ Wyvern said.

‘Sorry, there’s so much banging here! You have to watch these fellows or they down tools. I think they suspect they are not going to get paid for this job.’

A swinging plank narrowly missed his ear. He ducked under a partition frame.

‘Now,’ he shouted, above a fresh outburst of hammering. ‘We’ve found in practice that the quickest thing for everyone is for you to confess at once, without mucking about.’

‘Confess what?’

‘The crime.’

‘What crime?’

‘What what? Oh, what crime? Why man, the crime for which you were brought here.’

‘You’ll have to tell me what it is first,’ Wyvern said grimly.

‘Oh hell, I suppose I’ll have to take you down and look at your bloody papers,’ Captain Runton said sourly. ‘It won’t pay you to be unco-operative, you know.’

He bellowed to the workmen to keep hard at it and led the way to a lift. They descended to the basement and Runton pushed Wyvern into his room; cocking his leg up on the edge of a desk, Runton read carefully through the ill-typed report someone had left on his pad.

Wyvern looked round. Tarnished mirrors greeted him, and glass-fronted cupboards with cracked glass, containing cardboard boxes and big rubber bouncing balls for children. He saw little wooden spades, yachting caps, a dusty poster saying ‘The Glorious Norfolk Broads’. Nothing very frightening: he wondered why he felt frightened.

The captain of police was looking at him.

‘So you’re Conrad Wyvern, one of the inventors of cruxtistics?’ he said.

‘Is that why I’ve been arrested?’

Runton went and sat heavily down in the room’s only chair. His behind was running to fat and his hair thinning. It was a wonder how he did it on the lean rations. No doubt he had lost his family and spent long evenings feeling sorry for himself, drinking. He looked the typical man of his age: comfortless, unlovable.

‘Why do you suddenly want to go to the Moon, Mr Wyvern?’ he asked.

‘There’s nothing sudden about it,’ Wyvern said. ‘I’ve been planning this trip for some time.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh – a change.’

‘A change from what?’

‘From routine.’

‘You don’t like routine?’

‘Yes, but I just want a change.’

‘You realise you do an important job, Mr Wyvern?’

‘Of course. I thought a change –’

‘The government doesn’t like to lose its important men.’

‘I booked return, didn’t I? I’ll be back in four days, before the next course starts at Stratton.’

‘The government doesn’t like to lose its important men even for four days.’

‘It’s getting choosy, isn’t it?’ Wyvern asked. He could feel his temper rising.

‘These are bad days, Mr Wyvern.’

‘Need we make them worse?’

‘You can still hear that bloody banging, even from here.’ Runton sighed deeply. He picked up the phone.

‘The palace,’ he said, not without a trace of irony. After a pause, he said, ‘Get me Colonel H.’ After another pause, ‘I’m Captain Runton, late of Leicester; he’ll remember.’ Later, ‘Yes, I’ll settle for his secretary.’

Finally he was put through.

‘Hello? Captain Runton here … Good. Look, we have Conrad Wyvern here … Yes, that’s him. He is being rather impolite in answer to polite questions … Yes … May I bring him over to you? … Well, for one thing, we have the decorators in here, making a lot of noise, and for another I hoped I might perhaps have the great pleasure of – er, possibly meeting Colonel H again … Oh yes, yes, I’m sure he must be … Yes, well another thing was, I hear you have a marvellous new Inquisitor up there, eh? … No, oh no, sir, that was a mild joke merely. I’m sorry. I naturally meant Questioner … Thank you.’

Runton hung up, puffing out his cheeks. Somebody at the other end of the line evidently did not love him.

‘Come on, Wyvern,’ he said heavily. ‘We’re going over to see the big chiefs at the barracks.’

It took ten minutes to drive, in a commandeered Post Office van, up to the barracks where Our Beloved Leader had been shot. It took a further twenty to get inside, by which time Captain Runton was more nervous than his captive.

Aside from his own preoccupations, Wyvern was intrigued by the Captain. The man was plainly using him as an excuse to ingratiate himself with the powers-that-be. He seemed to have nothing specific against Wyvern; the mere fact that Wyvern was someone of importance made him worth hanging on to. All of which might be very well for Runton, but was uncomfortable for Wyvern.

And now, no doubt, Runton was reflecting that if he had come on a wild-goose chase he would get, not congratulations, but a kick in the well-padded seat of his pants. And that would make him unscrupulous about getting something pinned on Wyvern. Just what would happen seemed suddenly in the hands of chance; one thing Wyvern sincerely hoped: that the State’s inter-departmental communications were poor, and that these people did not know his sister had been arrested at East Hingham.

That question at least was partly answered when they were finally allowed out of the guard room, and Runton grumbled, ‘There’s a lot of reorganisation needed here – everyone lives in watertight compartments. No government department knows what the next one is up to. You can’t get anything done.’

The barracks swarmed with soldiers and police. Tanks were drawn up in the old drill square.

‘I’d better take your handcuffs off,’ Runton said. ‘They look a bit ostentatious in here. And for God’s sake don’t try anything, or I’ll shoot you down and swear blind you were OBL’s murderer.’

‘I thought they’d already caught the killers?’ Wyvern asked, mildly surprised.

‘Hold your tongue while you’ve got the chance,’ Runton said in a sharp burst of savagery.

They passed together into the main building, where an armed guard met them and escorted them upstairs. The armed guard met them and escorted them upstairs. The guards’ hobnails clattered loudly up the stone steps. A clock at the top said nearly six. ‘Eighteen hours before my ship goes,’ Wyvern thought grimly.

They were pushed through a door on which, in still wet paint, was the legend ‘Col. H & Sec.’ Inside, the first thing that caught Wyvern’s eye was the pot of white paint itself. It stood nearly empty on a desk, the brush in it. Someone had been doing over the window casement with it, and the room stank of paint.

‘Same old Republication muddle,’ Wyvern thought, but the man in the room, Colonel H’s secretary, gave him other ideas.

The secretary was a man in his late fifties, as thin and neat as a picked chicken bone. His uniform was spotless, his white hair impeccably parted. His eyes were fish cold.

‘Oh – er, we’ve an appointment with Colonel H,’ said Runton, plainly distressed at lack of clue to rank on the secretary’s uniform.

‘Are you Conrad Wyvern?’ the secretary asked Wyvern.

‘I am.’

‘You have an appointment with Colonel H,’ the secretary said. ‘Thank you for bringing him, Captain. Have you his report there? Thank you, splendid. We will keep you no longer.’

He accepted the report and waited for Runton to shamble backwards out of the room, without once removing his gaze from Wyvern. The latter, to his chagrin, found himself fidgeting and looking down. He decided to defend by attack.

‘I am hoping to receive an official apology for the way I’ve been treated,’ he said. ‘I was handcuffed and brought here on the very flimsiest of pretexts.’

‘Our junior officers make up in enthusiasm what they lack in manners,’ the secretary said.

‘Is that supposed to be an apology?’

The secretary stood up.

‘No, it damn well isn’t,’ he said. ‘The State does not apologise. We brought you here to cross-examine you, not kiss you better. The Republic is in its early days – we can’t afford to be sentimental. Don’t you know, the road to success is paved with bruised egos like yours. If you feel badly about all this, it’s obviously because you are out of sympathy with us. Why are you out of sympathy with us, Wyvern?’

‘I don’t think –’ Wyvern said, then lapsed into silence. It was hardly an answerable question.

‘You are an important man, Wyvern – or you could be. You should be a member of the Party, Wyvern. Why aren’t you a member of the Party, Wyvern?’ He used the name as if it were a dirty word.

‘I’m busy – teaching your young men.’

‘And?’

‘Well, it’s a full-time job.’

‘You get four or five days break between each course, don’t you?’

‘I have to organise things – administration, rations …’

‘Oh? But it has to wait if you fancy a flip to Luna, eh?’

‘Can you tell me how long it will be before the Colonel is ready to see me?’ Wyvern asked pointedly. ‘Perhaps you would care to continue painting your office?’

The secretary reached out and struck him across the cheek. Then he turned, going by a side door into the adjoining room. It slammed behind him, hard.

By now, Wyvern was slightly rattled; he even contemplated stepping into the corridor and trying to make a break for it. But a slight scrape of an army boot and a mutter of conversation outside the room told him the corridor was guarded.

Devoutly, Wyvern wished he could use his hidden power to find just what these people intended of him; but that was impossible; he could no more commune with this secretary without his being aware of it than he could dance with him.

The secretary returned accompanying a sturdy man with wide shoulders and small features. He looked more plebeian in the flesh than over TV, but was unmistakably Colonel H. He held a juicy pat of butter in one hand and ate it with a teaspoon.