Ossian's Ride (2 page)

“Within a short time, I.C.E. was producing an amazing range of valuable chemicals, ostensibly from turf as raw material, although whether this was really so is open to doubt. At British chemical concerns there were many red faces, I understand, during this phase in the history of I.C.E. Still no one thought anything really remarkable was happening. All was to be explained in terms of the ingenuity of a few really clever fellows, fellows who intended to acquire for themselves a large slice of cake, and who were very sensibly cutting it outside the taxation laws of the United Kingdom.

“Profits increased rapidly. The Irish were regretting the terms of their agreement, when I.C.E. acquired enormous local good will by voluntarily paying to the government the sum of two million pounds. This was in the fourth year, just before the coup on which the real basis of their expansion was founded.”

“You mean the contraceptive pill,” I remarked.

“Yes, the contraceptive pill. Just what the world’s population problem needed. Sales were vast beyond precedent. By the end of the eighth year the capital resources of I.C.E. exceeded the thousand million mark.”

“I’ve never understood how it came about that the Church didn’t stop it. The contraceptive business, I mean.”

“Ridicule, my boy. If I may parody the poet Schiller: Against laughter even the Hierarchy fights in vain. Think of it, contraceptives from turf! For decades the Church had fulminated against their use, while all the time, outside every cottage, there’d been piled a whole mountain of the stuff!

“As a matter of some interest, and as an indication of the perversity of mankind, the birth rate in Ireland has actually risen since the use of contraceptives became widespread there. Pour me another cup.”

Parsonage swallowed the coffee at a gulp, and went on with his lecture.

“Where were we? Still six years in the past. From every point of view this was the critical stage in the development of I.C.E. The emphasis began to change from chemistry to physics. Unobtrusively, physicists and mathematicians were offered attractive positions and the number who accepted the flattering offers was not insubstantial. The volume of scientific immigrants has steadily increased and is still increasing.”

“Doesn’t this immigration give an ideal opportunity for finding out what’s going on? By sending in a few of your own fellows I mean.”

“You might well think so. Most of what little we know has come that way, but our efforts seem to disappear like rain in a desert. These people are devilishly clever. They’ve made very few mistakes. They seem to know just who they can trust and who they can’t.

“Six years ago I.C.E. began importing metals. As I was saying, this coincided with a marked shift from the chemical to the physical side, all of which culminated a little more than a year ago in a chain of commercially working thermonuclear reactors.”

I whistled in astonishment. Research in the thermonuclear field is of course a largely classified subject, so I had no precise knowledge of how things were going here in Britain, or in the United States or elsewhere. But it was an open secret that the whole business was turning out to be a pretty sticky proposition.

“How should this be possible?” I said.

Parsonage flung down his pipe with a flourish. There was a shower of sparks which I made haste to quench. “Now we come to the kernel of the whole infernal business. How was it possible? That’s just what I want you to find out!” He glared at me with a fierce intensity.

“Mark my words carefully. It isn’t at all that I want you to find out the technical solution of the thermonuclear business. If you do find out, well and good, but on no account must that be your main aim.”

“I see through a glass darkly,” I managed to interject. Parsonage fairly danced as he stood in front of me.

“See here—a man has one thousand pounds. By playing the stock markets he becomes a millionaire within five years. Don’t laugh, it can be done, if you can forecast correctly just what is going to happen. That’s what I.C.E. has done! See how they built this reactor! No extensive preliminary research, just a systematic manufacture of all the relevant components. Sherwood, my boy, this is the crux of the affair. How did they know beforehand so unerringly just what they were going to do? That’s what I want you to find out. Don’t worry your head about technical details, about secret agents, about anything other than the principle of the thing. How do they
know?”

At last I had a glimpse of what Papa Percy was driving at.

“But why me?”

“Why not?”

As I pondered this impossible reply, he went on. “What qualifications are needed, you’ve got.”

Something was wrong with the grammar.

“Just as a baby picks up his mother tongue, so a young man of your age picks up information. You are highly trained in the right sort of thinking. This is a logical problem, not one of scientific or engineering detail.”

He tapped the map. “The scene is set in wild country. You’re a country lad; a townsman might find himself in trouble over there. What else?” As I pondered things, he stuffed great fingerfuls of tobacco into his pipe. In spite of a riotous confusion of expression, Parsonage had driven home his point.

“So what you want is the logical taproot ...” I got no further.

“Right—right—right, ad infinitum! The taproot is what I want, the power source, the driving force. Now you have it, my boy. Don’t imagine this to be one of your academic exercises. Five years ago it was an academic exercise. We could have moved our troops into Ireland then. We could have taken I.C.E. slowly apart, piece by piece. But we can’t do that today, nor can the Americans or the Russkoes.”

“I can’t see why not, if you really don’t mind being drastic.”

“Think, young feller. Use your sconce-piece. When you find someone far ahead of you in one line of business, you can bet a king’s ransom to a tin of fishing bait that he will also be ahead of you in other lines, avenues, byways, conduits or what you will. If I.C.E. can make a thermonuclear reactor they can make an I.C.B.M. If they can make a contraceptive pill, they can make a pill that would make us all die of laughter.”

Parsonage stood before the map, legs apart, defying all laws relating to the smokeless zone.

“We can smuggle you into Ireland through the usual pipeline, or you may prefer to travel more openly. That’s for you to decide. Go away for a couple of days, think about it. Need any money?”

I nodded, so he offered me a bundle of notes.

“Not so much, only about fifteen pounds. I’m not going to make myself conspicuous. I might as well begin straightaway.”

There was one question I would have liked to ask, but my nerve failed. I had always understood that the main danger to an agent comes from his own people. I feared that Parsonage and his pipe might explode if I were to ask him if this were really so.

Nor did I tell him that it had been my dearest wish to get a chance to visit Ireland. I had been pondering precisely the question of whether my funds would run to such a trip when his first letter arrived.

Nor did I tell him that besides buying a few necessary articles, I also contrived with his fifteen pounds to take out the brunette from his office twice.

I caught the 3 P.M. express from Paddington to Fishguard deliberately with only a minute or two to spare, as a precipitate young student might be expected to do. There was a vacant center seat in one of the compartments, so I heaved my rucksack onto the rack and settled down, ostensibly to read the
Times.
Behind its welcome shield I reflected on the situation.

It had been an obvious decision to try to enter Ireland in the most open possible manner. If I failed I could always fall back on Parsonage’s “pipe line.” If I succeeded I could go about my business with less possibility of interference from Irish counterespionage. This suggested the reflection that although still in England, the affair had already begun. For the Irish must certainly have men on the train, men who would watch and talk with the passengers, men who were trained to separate sheep from goats, which isn’t after all a difficult matter. The slightest false move now could lead to disaster a few hours later when I should have run the gantlet of Irish immigration.

The visa was my chief worry. It took three months to get a genuine visa, always supposing that one were granted at all. I had been in favor of waiting, but Parsonage would hear none of it, insisting that within an hour he could supply a forgery that was entirely indistinguishable from the genuine article. No doubt this was true, but I was less sanguine about Papa Percy’s ability to conjure my name at a few days’ notice into the lists possessed by the immigration officials. Unless this documentary sleight of hand had been well and truly executed, I was going to be in the soup all right. The argument that had appeared so convincing in the shelter of Parsonage’s room now seemed rather threadbare.

“Even if you were to wait, there is no guarantee that you would get a visa, and even if you got a visa, there is still no guarantee that you would ever get into Ireland,” he had argued. “Very wisely, the Irish are managing the whole visa business with an assumed air of incredible inefficiency. This allows them to turn down, and turn out, anyone they please. It dissuades the genuine traveler and makes difficult any diplomatic protest from our side.”

This was the first of my two worries. Money was the second. Since Irish currency is now as “hard” as it is possible for any currency to be, I was obliged to ration myself to the very moderate official allowance. I might of course have risked carrying more, but if I were searched the game would instantly have reached an ignominious end, for any British traveler with more than the allowance of his own government in his pocket would instantly come under the gravest suspicion.

Parsonage had brushed the matter aside by insisting that, once in Ireland, I could pick up as much money as I wanted from an agent in Dublin, to wit a Mr. Seamus Colquhoun, who lived at an address in Marrowbone Lane. This arrangement was probably perfectly in order, but I had a strong feeling that the more I could keep away from such people the better I would be pleased.

These reflections seemed to about exhaust the potentialities of the
Times,
so I started a paperback written by an angry young author who had gone down from Cambridge a few years earlier, I am sorry to say from my own college. It was tough going, but I stuck determinedly at the task until the train reached Cardiff.

After Cardiff, I made my way to the lavatory at the near end of the compartment. It was locked. A voice in my ear remarked, “Funny, it’s been locked every time I’ve come past, ever since we left Reading.”

It was a ticket collector, or rather (for precision’s sake) it was an individual in ticket collector’s uniform. He banged hard on the lavatory door and shouted, “Hi, inside!” When after a couple of minutes of shouting and banging there was no reply, he remarked in what I took to be a commendably casual tone, “I think we’d better have that there door open.”

With a tool from his pocket, the like of which I hadn’t seen before, he shot back the bolt, opened the door, glanced inside and said in a slightly puzzled manner, “Bloody silly trick. There’s nobody in. Can’t say I see how the door got fastened.

“Ah, well, sir, it’s free now,” he added.

He was right; there was nobody inside. But it needed only the briefest scrutiny to see that something was very wrong, or more accurately that something had been very wrong. For here and there dark blotches were spattered over the interior of the place. I touched one, and my hand came away sticky and red.

“There’s been some serious trouble,” I said as I stepped back into the corridor. The ticket collector had evidently gone into the next compartment, so I crossed quickly through the connecting door. A glance down the corridor showed that in the odd second or two the fellow had vanished. My instinct was to follow quickly, but reason insisted that it was best to think first.

There must be an explanation of why the ticket collector had opened the lavatory door, of why he had disappeared. I glanced down at my trousers and cursed aloud as I saw I must have brushed against one of the dark patches. Damn it, must I go bloodstained through the trickiest part of the whole business?

My first thought was to change into walking shorts. I had deliberately not dressed in outdoor clothes and boots, feeling that it would be wrong to overemphasize the student-hikes attitude. Now I would have no choice, it seemed. In a few strides I was back at my compartment. There were still three men in it (two people had left the train at Cardiff), but my rucksack had gone.

It is said that a dying man can review his past life in a second or two. Balderdash of course, but it is surprising how fast one can think when the occasion warrants. The thought exploded in my head that at all costs I must behave as an innocent young student would behave. In short I must raise the devil of a shindy. Scarcely checking my speed I opened the compartment door, looked up at the rack and said in the most surprised tone I could muster, “What’s happened to my rucksack?”

Two of the men, ages perhaps thirty to thirty-five, were drowsing or pretending to drowse. The third fellow was much older, maybe fifty-five. At my question he put down a book, looked me over with questioning blue eyes and said in pronouncedly Irish speech, “But you fetched it yourself, not a moment ago.”

“I did no such thing! Surely you must have seen someone come in and take it?”

“Certainly someone came in. My attention was on my book here, so I naturally took the person to be yourself. He was of about your height and coloring.”

“You’d better find the guard,” remarked one of the younger men.

“I’ll find the guard and the police at the next stop.”

The fellow was of course right, I should go at once and find the guard. But at all costs I must first have time to think.