Read The Stone That Never Came Down Online
Authors: John Brunner
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General
The Stone That Never Came Down (2 page)
“You can have this if you name a weapon of modern war that wasn’t invented and first used by a Christian country!”
“Oh, no!” Malcolm heard Ruth breathe at his side.
“Come on, come on!” Billy rasped. “Don’t bother going back to gunpowder. I know the Chinese got at that first. But I also know you lot were so eager to steal the credit that if you were German you were taught it was invented by
Friar
Berthold Schwartz and if you were English that it was invented by
Friar
Roger Bacon–good churchmen both!
Well?
”
“Billy!” Malcolm advanced into the hallway, careless of how cruel its ice-cold tiles were to his unshod feet.
Baring his teeth, Billy ignored him and stuffed his money back in his pocket.
“Can’t answer me, hm? Not surprising! The whole lot is yours, from the hand-grenade to the hydrogen bomb! So stop wasting my time. I have to go to work. And it wouldn’t do you any harm to work for a change, instead of sponging off the rest of us who do!”
Roughly he shouldered the leader of the godheads aside.
That was a mistake.
The man lost his footing on the steps and with a yell went sprawling down to street-level, upon which his companions retaliated.
Their crosses made admirable clubs.
II
“Good morning, milady,” said Tarquin Drew. “I trust you have heard the good news on the radio?”
“I have indeed, Tarquin,” answered Amelia, Lady Washgrave, as she entered her breakfast-room. Snow lay thick on the lawn beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, but within the air was warm and deliciously scented with Earl Grey tea.
Tarquin was her personal secretary, and she had conceived a considerable affection for him. His father, incredibly, was an uncouth charge-hand in a factory, and salted his conversation with appalling objurgations. Tarquin had managed to live all that down. Granted, some breath of scandal had attached to him at university … but “there is more joy in heaven.”
Deftly he aided her chair to adopt its correct posture beneath her decently long skirt. She was a perfect model of what, in her view, a respectable widow of forty-eight should look like. It had been at the age she herself had now attained that the late Sir George had succumbed to a heart attack precipitated, no doubt, by excessive dedication to his business interests. She had borne the loss with fortitude, perhaps not unmingled with relief.
“Would you prefer the
Times
or your correspondence first, milady?” Tarquin enquired, turning to the sideboard. And added in a regretful tone, “I’m afraid the newspaper has not-accorded the same prominence to the police’s raid as did Radio Free Enterprise.”
He displayed the headlines to prove his point; they concerned strikers in Glasgow, riots in Italy, and suchlike trivia. Lady Washgrave was unsurprised; it was notorious that the media, including even the august
Times,
were mouthpieces for the international conspiracy of corruption. She waved the paper aside and accepted an inch-thick wad of letters, most of which, she noted with approval, were from local chapters of the Campaign Against Moral Pollution–of which she was executive chairman–and bore the campaign’s symbol: a cross-hilted dagger spiking a stylised book, intended to represent morality cleansing the world of trash.
These at least could be trusted to inform her of
important
matters.
“There were also a hundred and eighty Christmas cards,” murmured Tarquin. “And–ah–some abusive items which I took the liberty of extracting. For the police.”
Lady Washgrave nodded absently, setting aside the topmost letter because, alas, it could not be relied on to generate action. It was a complaint about the theory of evolution being taught “as though it were a proven fact.” The second was a different matter, and ought to cost a teacher, perhaps some school governors and very possibly some local councillors their jobs. To think that a woman living openly in sin should be put in charge of hapless infants!
“Mark that one ‘urgent’!” she directed. And, on the point of turning to the next, a description of the behaviour of courting couples on a Gloucestershire common, she checked.
“Is there no communication from Brother Bradshaw?”
“No, milady, I’m afraid there isn’t.”
“How strange!” She drew her brows together. “The Reverend Mr Gebhart assured me that by today at latest we should be told whether he can join our New Year’s Crusade. Admittedly he’s greatly in demand, but even so … Not that I myself entirely approve of the “hard-sell’ approach, you know, but my committee did vote in favour of inviting him, and one must abide by the democratic principle, must one not?”
“I’ll attempt to telephone him later,” Tarquin promised.
“Yes, please do.” And, having taken a bite of the toast which was all she ever ate in the morning, Lady Washgrave sighed, gazing at the snow-covered lawn. “How beautiful it looks I” she murmured. “So–so pure … Which reminds me: you did, I trust, instruct the gardeners to drain the pipe leading to the swimming-pool?”
“Of course, milady. A little more tea?”
Detective Chief Inspector David Sawyer composed a signature block at the bottom of his report and rolled it out of the typewriter. It had been a long report. It had been a long job.
“And completely bloody useless,” he said.
On the other side of the office Sergeant Brian Epton glanced up from the charge-sheets he was compiling. “What’s useless, chief?” he demanded.
“This whole night’s work!”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Epton countered. “Eighteen arrests, and some of them people who make news by catching cold … It’s going to look good on the crime-sheet, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I admit that,” Sawyer grunted, rising and crossing the office to look out of the window. In the yard beyond was a car with a dented wing. Yesterday evening it had been driven into a protest meeting of unemployed Italian immigrant workers, and a man had been sent to hospital with two legs broken. Snow was sifting down, fine as sugar from a dredger. A shivering constable was holding a plastic sheet as a kind of awning over the head of one of the forensic people while he examined the damage to the car.
–Another pin for the map …
His eyes strayed to the wall where a visual record was kept of unsolved crimes of violence, a big red, black, or yellow pin marking the spot where the incident occurred.
Every day there seemed to be more of them. More often than not there actually were.
–And what was I doing all night? Spoiling someone’s party, that’s what.
Aloud, though, as he unhooked his coat from the stand by the door, he merely said to Epton, “See you this evening, then.”
“Yes, of course.”
High above Lambeth in his council flat, Harry Bott was woken by the sound of his children shouting in the adjacent kitchen, and his wife Vera desperately ordering them to shut up. Blearily he peered at the luminous Jesus clock beside the bed. It was just past nine, and he’d intended to lie in late today. He hadn’t come home until after 3 a.m., having spent long cold hours sitting in his car. It had not yet started to snow, but through the cloudless sky the heat of the land was being broadcast to the stars.
Still, it had all been worth it. Now he knew exactly how he was going to carry out the job he’d been planning for so long.
–Not this week, though. Not before Christmas. Directly after would be best, when trade’s at its slackest. Anyway, I’ll need help. Someone to drive, someone to stand lookout, someone to carry heavy crates.
And with the scheme he had lined up, he could rely on recruiting the best talent in the manor.
His good humour drove away his automatic intention to yell at the kids. Here in a high-rise block, when the lifts were so often out of order, where else was there for them to play when the weather was this bad except at home?
–Of course their cousins …
But he was in too good a mood even to feel his regular pang of jealousy at the luxury his brother-in-law–Vera’s brother–wallowed in, with his big house in Hampstead Garden Suburb and his two cars and the rest of it. A tickle or two like the one he was currently planning, and he might be on the way to similar prosperity.
Humming, he pulled on a dressing-gown and padded into the kitchen in search of a cup of tea.
“Here’s your dad!” Vera exclaimed. “Now you’re for it!”
Except for the baby, yelling in his crib, the children fell silent, round-eyed, and she turned from her ironing-board to confront him with tear-stains on her once-pretty face.
“I did try and keep ’em quiet, Harry, honest I did! It’s just that I feel so low. I don’t have any energy these days.” She put her hand on her belly, where three months of pregnancy were just beginning to bulge her cotton overall, and glanced at the picture of the Virgin in its place of honour as though in search of sympathy from another mother. “You know it was like this last time a baby was on the way, and the doctor did say I shouldn’t–”
“None of that dirty talk in front of the children!” Harry roared.
The first time the doorbell rang, Valentine Crawford failed to hear it. For one thing, he was trying to fix his baulky oil-heater. On being lit this morning it had uttered foul-smelling smoke, and he had had to let it cool down, take it to bits, and clean the charred wick. Actually he needed a new one, but he couldn’t afford it.
And for another thing, he had the radio on. It was all he could offer Toussaint to keep him amused. He had had to turn in the TV last time the rental payments went up.
–Kind of ironical, I guess. Me, a trained TV repairman, and I don’t have a set of my own!
But he was out of work, of course. Had been since that horrible, incredible day when the boss had called him in and told him bluntly that he’d have to leave because so many women clients of the firm, on their own during the day, objected to having a black man enter their homes.
–As though I could rape them! Me, a scrawny runt of five foot four! Hell, I couldn’t screw them buckra bitches without they help me, start to finish!
He’d tried to lodge a complaint under the Race Relations Act, but nobody was paying much attention to that any more.
The radio was saying, “According to informed sources the chief constable of Glasgow will appeal for the assistance of troops if yesterday’s order by the Industrial Relations Court is not obeyed. Now in its ninth week, the strike at …”
Which was not calculated to amuse a six-year-old kid. He wound the knob around in search of music or a comedy show. Meantime the third thing which had prevented him from hearing the bell continued from the bedroom next door, a series of horrible racking coughs.
–If I knew where that she-devil was, I’d …!
But he couldn’t think of anything bad enough to do to her, the wife who had walked out on him when she grew sick of being mocked and taunted every time she went to the shops with Toussaint.
–Moral, never marry an English girl, not even if you were born on the next street from her home. It oughtn’t to make any difference. Hell, I married her because she was pretty and fun to be with and wasn’t all made of wood from the waist down like half the English girls. Right from the next damned
street!
But she turned out the same as the rest in the end.
This time the oil-heater lit cleanly and burned with a nice blue flame.
“Okay, son!” he shouted. “It’ll be warmer in a minute!”
Whereupon the bell rang a second time, and he answered cautiously, not really expecting that bastard, the local school attendance officer, who had been persecuting him these past few weeks because even with a doctor’s certificate he didn’t believe Toussaint was too sick to go out, and found Cissy Jones, bright and plump and sixteen and thoughtful, who had brought a bottle of a special cough-mixture her aunt said was very good and should be tried on Toussaint. He liked her, and even before she had measured out a spoonful of the medicine for him he had quietened, as though some of the time he were forcing himself to cough to attract attention.
–But he looks so peaky and he shakes so much …
The bell rang again, and here came the rest of them, the rest of the brothers and sisters for whom he ran an informal class in what the authorities at buckra schools didn’t want them to find out. A couple of them were playing truant, being not yet past the official leaving-age of fifteen. Some would have liked to stay on at school in spite of all, but hadn’t been allowed to. These days it was a common habit to pass over a black kid who talked back to the teachers, and slap on his record a rubber stamp saying ineducable. And half of them were glad to be out of school, but furious at being out of work as well. Altogether there were ten today.
Five minutes’ socialising, and he called for order. From a stack on the mantel Cissy distributed copies of the pamphlet issued by RBR, Radical Black Revival, which they were currently using as a textbook. The pamphlets were numbered because they were precious. One couldn’t buy them any more.
Stumbling a little, she read aloud the paragraph at which they had stopped last time.
“‘Whereas Sicilian peasants, whose brutal Mafia-dominated culture has ruined their own homeland and who have no less tenuous connection with Britain than the fact that both islands were ruled by Norman bandits some nine centuries ago, are permitted to go and come as they please, blacks from the Commonwealth to whom the British owe an incalculable debt are barred from the nation that grew fat by sucking their ancestors’ blood, or if by some miracle they do achieve entry are constantly at risk of being deported.’ ”
Valentine interrupted her with a gesture. “Now you all done like I said? You all bought different papers and marked up bits that prove the truth of what the man says there?”
They had, and one by one they read out what they had found. Brooding, he sat and tried to listen, but found he was hearing more clearly the renewed coughs of his half-white son.
III
Brother Bradshaw was in California. His home overlooked a magnificent vista, clear down a long valley, over the silvery mist shrouding Los Angeles, and out to sea. It had been bought before his conversion, when he was one of the world’s highest-paid TV stars. If anything, he was handsomer now than he had been at the height of his career; a touch of grey at his temples added distinction, and a little more weight conveyed an impression of trustworthy maturity.
In the old days, the wall of this huge room, which currently was decorated with pictures of him chatting to the Pope, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, and a great many Just Plain Folks who had Seen the Light because of him, had been covered with a montage of photos showing him in very different postures and many fewer clothes.
“But I don’t want to go to England!” he kept insisting, in a voice which annoyance had heightened from its usual resonant baritone towards a querulous tenor. “Don’t I have enough to do over here? What with nearly three hundred murders in Greater Los Angeles last month–”
“But this invitation is personal from Lady Washgrave,” Don Gebhart insisted. He had said it all before, but he had been a professional evangelist himself until he took over the management of Brother–formerly Bob–Bradshaw, so he was well used to saying the same thing over and over with equal conviction every time. “You know how much weight she swings. Her Campaign Against Moral Pollution has a hundred fifty local chapters. A cabinet minister regularly speaks at her meetings, this guy Charkall-Phelps. And she’s batting one-oh-oh in her drive to clean up literature and TV. It’s three years since she last had an obscenity verdict overturned on appeal. Nobody monkeys with Lady Washgrave!”
“I know!” Bradshaw barked. “I
know
!”
“So why won’t you accept?” Gebhart pressed.
Bradshaw didn’t answer.
“Listen, Bob,” Gebhart said at last. “You never knew me to give you bum advice, did you? Well, what I’m saying is this. You join in her New Year’s Crusade, and you’ll be on the map for good and all. It would make you–well, it would make you the Billy Graham of the nineteen-eighties!”
More silence. Eventually, with dreadful reluctance, Bradshaw sketched a nod.
“Great!” Gebhart exclaimed. “I’ll call her right away–I guess the time is okay in England now–and explain how you want to spend Christmas with your folks, of course, but you’ll be right there on December twenty-eighth ready to join in her grand crusade!”
“Damn,” muttered Lance-Corporal Dennis Stevens after they had toured the block for the third time. “Nothing else for it, then. You’ll have to double-park while I go in alone.”
“What else have I been telling you for the past half-hour?” his driver sighed. “Look, lance, the busies aren’t going to give
us
a ticket, are they?”
“I suppose not,” Stevens admitted, reaching into the back seat of the olive-drab Army car for the cardboard roll containing the posters he was scheduled to deliver at this particular Employment Exchange. How to explain the reason for his unwillingness to enter by himself?
In fact it was very simple. He knew this drab, forbidding building. It was right on his own home patch. He couldn’t count how many hours he had wasted waiting here for the chance of work that never materialised, or to claim from grudging clerks the benefit money due to him by law.
So he might very well run into some of his mates here.
And while there was a lot to be said for joining the Army in times of high unemployment–security, technical training, the chance of travel, plenty of sport, and all the rest of it, which had tempted him when he grew bored beyond endurance and certainly had been provided as promised–if it were true, as the headlines on today’s
Daily Mirror
claimed, that they were going to send troops to Glasgow and drive the men who’d been on strike these past nine weeks back to work at gunpoint … Well, those old mates of his weren’t likely to make a soldier very welcome, were they?
“Get a move on, lance!” the driver pleaded.
“Okay, okay!” Tucking the cardboard tube under his arm like a swagger-stick, he crossed the sidewalk with affected boldness, thinking about what the papers had said.
–Never paid too much attention to that old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud I have for a father. But I do believe he’s right to say the power to strike is precious. What else are working folk to do if they can’t get a decent wage? Bloody fools in Parliament! What do they want, another Ireland on their hands?
As it turned out, he’d worried needlessly; the only person who recognised him was the clerk who had to sign for the recruiting posters, and he offered congratulations on putting up a stripe, having done some Army time himself.
–Thank goodness!
Professor Wilfred Kneller stood gazing down from the window of his office at the sluggish traffic in the street below. He was director of the Gull-Grant Research Institute, which occupied the top floor of a four-storey block on the eastern edge of Soho, premises donated by its founder, who had been a tobacco millionaire with a guilty conscience.
At the time of his appointment eight years ago this had been a lively district, maintaining Soho’s long-standing reputation as a centre of night-life–and, of course, prostitution. The recession, however, had taken its toll, and from here he could count half a dozen “to let” signs without craning his neck, testimony to the bankruptcy of restaurants, clubs, and borderline pornography shops.
–How tilings have changed!
Moreover, during the night, a team of godhead flyposters had been by, and every wall and window in sight was decorated with stickers repeating their current slogan: put christ back in your christmas!
–That is, apart from the windows that they smashed … I wonder how many proprietors went broke because they couldn’t afford to insure their plate-glass after the godheads moved in.
“Morning, Wilfred,” a voice said from behind him.
“Morning,” he grunted in reply. He knew without looking that the speaker was Dr Arthur Randolph, a portly man in his forties–ten years his junior–who, like himself, had been with the Institute since its foundation and who headed one of the two departments it was divided into. Officially his was called Biological, while his colleague Maurice Post’s was Organochemical; in practice, particularly since the inception of the VG project, they worked in double harness, sharing funds, lab facilities, and even staff.
–Natural enough. How could you draw a line between living and nonliving where VC is involved?
“Admiring the street decorations, are you?” Randolph went on, walking across the room to join him. “Makes me think of something Maurice once said to me. Maybe to you too, of course.”
“What?”
“Oh, he was wondering what society would have been like if we’d socialised cannabis instead of dangerous drugs like alcohol and religion.” Randolph chuckled.
Kneller echoed him, but the sound rang hollow, and after a pause Randolph added, “I–uh–I don’t suppose there’s been any news of him, has there?”
Kneller shook his head. “Arthur, I really do feel we should notify the police, you know. After all, he’s been missing since Monday, without a word of explanation or apology.”
“I told you before,” Randolph said. “If you do that, you risk losing him completely. I can’t imagine him being overjoyed, can you, if the police come hunting for him and all he’s done is go off quietly by himself to think for a while?”
“You’ve said that before,” Kneller countered stubbornly. “The more time goes by, the less I believe you. It simply isn’t
like
Maurice to vanish this way. And nobody knows what’s become of him. His landlady hasn’t seen hide or hair of him, he hasn’t been in touch with his sister at Folkestone, nor with any of his professional colleagues–I mean apart from us. And he doesn’t seem to have any private friends to speak of, and he doesn’t belong to a church, and … I don’t see any alternative, really I don’t.” He tugged at his beard. It was grizzled, and out of style now that razor-sales were back to their previous peak, and several people had said it made him look older than his years. But he had worn it since his mid-twenties, and did not feel inclined to abandon it after more than a quarter-century.
Turning to his desk and gesturing for Randolph to sit down, he pursued, “Tell me candidly, Arthur. Has Maurice done or said anything recently to indicate he might have been–well–overworking?”
With a wave of his hand to acknowledge the tactful equivalent of “had a nervous breakdown”, Randolph answered, “I wouldn’t have said so. He’s always been a funny sort of person, like most confirmed bachelors: a bit irritable, a bit unpredictable … Of course, lately he has been very upset about the state of the world. But isn’t everybody who bothers to pay attention?”
Kneller gave a wry grimace at that. “I know what you mean! Every damned day the news seems to get worse, doesn’t it? You saw that they found a poor devil of a Pakistani beaten to death in a park in Birmingham?”
“I did indeed. And what’s more I noticed it in the ‘News in Brief’ column. We’re in a hell of a mess, aren’t we, when something like that doesn’t make headlines on the front page? But it’s not the crimes of violence that scare me. I mean, not the small crimes of violence. I’m worried about the big ones. The kind that could stem from this crisis in Italy, for example.”
Kneller shrugged. “What do you expect in a country where it’s practically a matter of honour to lie about your income and avoid paying tax? Small wonder they’re going broke!”
“That’s only the half of it. When the Italians signed the Treaty of Rome they expected to be a net food-exporting country. Within a few years they’d become net importers. So of course they’re being bled white by the subsidies given to inefficient farmers in other countries. So are we, come to that. If they do decide to try and pull Italy out of the Common Market, close their frontiers and reimpose protective tariffs … Well, the Treaty of Rome is meant to be irrevocable, isn’t it?”
“Was it Maurice who sold that line of argument to you?” Kneller demanded.
Randolph looked faintly surprised. “Come to think of it, it must have been. A week or two ago. Why, was he talking about it to you?”
“He did say something about the Third World War being more likely to start that way than by a clash between East and West, or rich and poor. But that’s not quite the point. I recall you as having been a fervent pro-Market man ever since we first met.”
“Well, I still am!” Randolph declared with a hint of belligerence. “But if the system is this badly mismanaged … I do have to confess, though, that the way Maurice put his case made me see things in a different light. But why are you making such a meal of this? That’s always been Maurice’s special talent: shedding a different light on things.”
“I’m not sure,” Kneller admitted. “It’s just that at the edge of my mind there’s something … No, I can’t pin it down.”
“Well, if you really are worried about Maurice,” Randolph said, “there’s one thing you could do. You’re wrong to say we don’t know about any of his private friends. Surely his GP is a friend, too. Weren’t they at school together?”
Kneller snapped his fingers. “Yes, of course! I should have thought of that before. Isn’t his name … Hamilton? No, Campbell, that’s it. And his address is bound to be on Maurice’s file. I’ll send for it.”
Hand outstretched towards his desk intercom, he checked. “Arthur, this will probably sound ridiculous, but … Look, describe to me what, in your view, Maurice expects VC to do if and when we decide it’s safe to administer it to a human subject.”
“What?” Randolph stared blankly at him. “Why, you know as well as I do.”
“I think I do.” Kneller was suddenly very grave. “The stuff’s volatile, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course. Or rather, not the stuff itself, but. the supportive medium we keep it in. Why?”
“Would it be possible to determine whether there’s been a stock loss?”
“A stock loss?” Randolph echoed in perplexity. “Lord, on the molecular level? The quantities we’re working with are so damned small! Not a chance.”
“Very well, then. Who issues test-samples to the lab technicians and the postgrads–you or Maurice?”
“Maurice. Nine times out of ten at any rate.”
“In other words, he’s the person who most often opens the sealed vats.” Kneller leaned forward earnestly. “And could not the hoped-for effect of VC be described as enabling one to cast fresh light on every single kind of subject?”
There was dead silence for a moment. Randolph turned pale.
“If you mean what I think you mean–”
“You know damned well what I mean!”
“Then you had better get hold of his doctor. Right away!”
Down a half-deserted side-street in Kentish Town marched a pair of godheads, one a few years older than the other.
“Come to Jesus! Come and be saved!”
It was a good area to pick up converts, this, especially in winter. The original inhabitants had been cleared out to make room for a motorway which in fact had not been extended this far. Consequently many of the houses were intact except that their doors had been nailed up and their windows were blocked with corrugated iron and neglect had dug holes in every other roof.
Down-and-outs congregated here now, some of them former residents driven to despair because they had not been rehoused, some simply unemployed, some outright social misfits like meths-drinkers and even a few of the remaining hard-drug addicts. Only four or five sources of illegal supply survived in London, and one of those was a little north of here, a mile or two.
All of a sudden the younger of the godheads gave a stifled cry, and his companion hastened to see what he had found.
Poking out from behind a stub of wall, partly covered by the snow, which was still sifting down although more lightly than an hour before, yet absolutely unmistakable: a pair of human legs.
“What–what shall we do?” the younger godhead whimpered, having to lean on his plastic cross for support. “Should we tell the police?”
The older considered for a moment, and pronounced, “No, I don’t think so. Aren’t we told to let the dead bury their dead? And the last thing we want is to get mixed up in a police investigation. It would seriously hamper our work.”