The Great Wash Page 18

  “There speaks a man!” said George Oaks, digging him in the ribs, and then the train came in.

  George Oaks telephoned Ohm Robertson from the Junction. He came out of the booth rubbing his hands, and said: “Just as I said. He greeted me like a twin brother. It’s all right to come any time after half-past eleven, Ohm says—be delighted to see me. Now, there’s one of those taxi services round the corner, as I remember. Let’s go.”

  “You’re not going home to change, then?”

  “Afterwards.”

  “I suppose you really can trust Ohm Robertson, George?”

  “With my life, Albert, with my life and with yours, too.”

  “All right, then,” I said. So we found a decent old Austin at the car-hire place and were driven at a comfortable speed to Hampstead, where Ohm Robertson lived secluded in a pretty little house in a high-walled garden on the edge of the Heath.

  He listened attentively while George Oaks talked. I have never seen a living man sit so still. With his folded hands, his closed eyes, and his pale lips slightly parted in a tiny smile, Ohm Robertson looked like a man who, having achieved perfection, has died in his sleep. At last he opened his eyes and, putting on a pair of rimless spectacles, began to study the Kurt Brevis papers, and we sat for a long while without speaking. There was something so intensely concentrated in that stillness that the buzzing of a bumble-bee that blundered into the room made me duck my head with a start, as if it had been a dive-bomber. This bee passed—almost roaring, it seemed—within half an inch of Ohm Robertson’s thin white nose, but he did not stir. I heard two o’clock strike before he turned the fourth sheet.

  Then he said: “This is most interesting, Oaks. I may say, profoundly interesting. I believe that these are papers of the most vital importance. Really, you know, you ought not to have taken them. And while I wouldn’t, for any consideration, have missed this opportunity of glancing at Dr. Brevis’s maps, I must say that you were awfully indiscreet to show them to me on trust like this. How are you to know that I am not a ‘collaborator’, as I believe they call it? What leads you to assume that I am not another Kurt Brevis? For all you know I may be that very same Regent Lambert with whom this American friend of yours was supposed to make contact?”

  “But you’re not,” said George Oaks.

  “No, I am not. But what right have you to take it for granted that I am not? Really, Oaks, in taking me into your confidence in this affair you put me in a false position, and it is too bad of you. Really too bad. You must see, of course, that it is my duty to place these papers in the proper hands?”

  “Of course it is, Ohm; of course it’s your duty, and mine too. But I simply must find out what those notes really imply, and what’s their relation to those queer-looking maps, and how Kadmeel and his Sciocrats come into it. Because, don’t you see, without a man like you to give it weight, my story will be dust and ashes.”

  “In other words, nothing but a story. You are trying, you mean, to accumulate sufficient evidence to make a Case. That is so, is it not?”

  “Yes,” said George Oaks.

  “Without which evidence, your story must be dismissed as mere fantasy?”

  “That’s right. Ohm, you must help!”

  “Oh, I’ll help you, Oaks,” said Ohm Robertson, with a smile of peculiar shy tenderness. “I haven’t forgotten how you tied my puttees for me—it must be thirty-five years ago. I will do anything for you, Oaks, on condition that you promise not to sing to me, or beat tin cans with a bayonet.”

  George Oaks said: “I nearly gave you the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D.”

  “No friendship could have survived that. But to be serious, and this is very serious, I assure you: I will help you, yes, conditionally. Before I can make a positive statement as to the import of these notes I must study them very closely for several hours more. You must leave me alone to do this. If you wish, you may stay in the house, provided you keep perfectly quiet, and my housekeeper will put up a cold lunch. If you have other business, you can attend to it, and come back here in about four or five hours from now. Then I will be able to give you—roughly, of course—some idea of the meaning of these notes in relation to these maps.”

  “Reasonable enough,” said George Oaks.

  “Secondly, after I have told you as much as you can understand of what you want to know, you must not object if I insist on handing these papers, in your presence, to the proper authorities.”

  “I’m all for that,” said George Oaks, “I’d have insisted on that myself. Only I must clarify my ideas first.”

  “Very good. Leave me alone now, and come back later, and I believe I’ll have everything clear for you,” said Ohm Robertson. “Now please excuse me.”

  As I closed the door of the study behind me, I saw him turning the papers with his left hand while his right hand groped for a pencil, and then we were on the gravelled drive again, walking back to the road. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said George Oaks, with a sigh of pleasure.

  “But where?”

  “We’ll know by tonight. Let’s go to my place now, so I can change.” We walked over the Heath towards the station. He led me by a tortuous little path to a copse of silver birches, where he stopped and pointed to a little hollow. “On this spot, nearly forty years ago, I fell in love,” he said, “with a girl I met near The Spaniards. She was in service in that big red house right over there—dusky, vivid, Albert. She hung upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. I peeled her an orange and quoted poetry. When I got around to ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ she said: ‘—Or shall I bring the garden in to you? No, thank you very much! Does your mother know you’re out, you and your oranges?’—and so passed out of my life. I tried to explain that oranges were the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, but she asked me if I had swallowed a dictionary. I saw her walking along The Spaniards the following Sunday arm-in-arm with a Guardsman. I wrote a poem about it, the words of which I have completely forgotten. . . . Come on!”

  We took the Underground to Earl’s Court, where he occupied the top floor of a sad-looking villa. His sitting-room, at the best of times, was like a junk stall in the Caledonian Market. Now, it seemed, he had taken up hydroponics and was making a television set. Dense vegetation struggled for light out of an immense trough of sand into which some colourless liquid dripped through glass tubes connected to great bottles clamped on iron stands. In the heart of this little jungle I could see two or three ripening tomatoes. The television set was already six feet high and eight feet wide; he told me that it was scarcely started yet, and that when it was finished it would revolutionise the industry, provided it worked. He led me into the bedroom and made me sit in a deep arm-chair of odd design.

  “Try it,” he said, “it’s a special kind of chair, an American idea. Old Waters of the Chicago Post-Express had it sent all the way from New York. Touch that lever at the side, and the chair adjusts itself exactly to your every movement, thus prolonging your life seven years at the very least. Waters only sat in it once, and it threw him and dislocated his shoulder. It’s a perfectly good chair, provided you keep perfectly still and keep your hands away from the controls; otherwise it’ll break your bloody neck.” Thereupon I touched the lever and the chair became perfectly flat, like an operating table, so that I cried out in alarm. “You see? Have a drink, while I change my shirt.”

  He opened the door of his wardrobe with a jerk, and a French steel helmet fell from an upper shelf and clanged on the floor. “Winston Churchill tried this one on for size,” he explained, brushing it with his sleeve before putting it back. He threw on to the bed a rakish-looking green shirt, which, he said, had belonged to Ernie Pyle. “I shall wear Monty Cello’s tie for luck,” he said, pulling it out of his pocket, and taking down a light-brown suit. “Now this suit of clothes, Albert, is something out of the ordinary. I designed i
t myself in 1941, when there was going to be an invasion, and you never could tell when a suit like this might come in handy. Bumfitte of Stratton Street broke down and cried like a child, practically, when he cut this coat according to my instructions. It’s all pockets, like a conjurer’s coat—you could hide anything in this, from a live rabbit to a portable radio transmitter. And every button, Albert, is a little receptacle, a tiny watertight box. A twist, and they open—a twist, and they close. Clever, eh?”

  “Not so dazzling,” I said; “the parachuters had tiny compasses and what not, disguised as fly-buttons.”

  “I know. I introduced the idea. I thought I told you. There’s a compass just here,” said George Oaks, buttoning his trousers, “and here, a piece of the finest spring steel converted into quite an efficient little hack-saw . . . and here, en cas de soif, a couple of cyanide pills——”

  “—Good God!”

  “Well, you never could tell, don’t you see. If one got caught it would never have done to be in a position where one might be forced to give information . . . And here, right on top, is another little gadget. This isn’t a button at all, strictly speaking. It’s a capsule. I made it out of a bit of one of those rubbery plastic bottles. It contains a lump of metallic potassium sealed in kerosene.”

  “What on earth for?” I asked.

  “Well, at the time, it occurred to me that it might come in handy as a delayed-action incendiary bomb. You know what potassium is. It decomposes water so fast that it catches fire while floating on the surface in a molten blob, and when it catches fire, Albert, it goes off with a hell of a crack. Burns with a bright violet flame. Deadly stuff, properly applied. Get the idea? Pull off the button, pierce the capsule, put it in a wet place, and get the hell out. The water gets in as the kerosene comes out, and whammy! . . . Oh, you can laugh, Albert, but I was in deadly earnest at the time.”

  “I wasn’t laughing at that,” I said, “only it seems so damned silly now, walking about with cyanide and incendiary bombs in your pants——” and then I remembered that deadly cosh in my inside breast pocket, and stopped abruptly.

  He was quick to observe the involuntary movement of my hand. “What have you got there?” he asked, and pulled open my coat. “A handy little thing,” he said, testing the spring of the cosh and balancing it. “But you want to rub a little oil into it now and again, to preserve the leather.” Then he began to laugh at me, and I laughed with him. On the face of it, it really did seem absurd. But he became serious again in a few seconds, and unlocked a drawer. “Shall I . . . ?” he said, taking out a small automatic pistol. “Yes, I think I will.” He looked to the magazine, snapped a cartridge into the breech, secured the safety-catch, and put the pistol in his hip pocket. “One never knows; it might turn out to be one of those nights. You need a gun just about once in a lifetime, and a certain pricking in my thumbs tells me this might be that once. Now let’s enjoy a quiet drink. But first of all, get out of that chair. You make me nervous. I have the hang of the thing.”

  We changed seats. George Oaks sat, with easy grace—and the American chair jerked into a sprawling W. He kicked himself free and sat on a footstool. “Not four o’clock yet,” he said. “Plenty of time for a little rest and a bit of a walk.”

  “I don’t feel much like walking,” I said.

  “Neither do I, Albert, but we’ll walk and like it. Why? Because it’s a horse to a hen that both Halfacre and Chatterton will have been watching the house since this morning. We will walk, therefore, in order to be followed, and when we decide to ride we will take a bus.”

  “Are you sure we weren’t followed this morning?”

  “Positive. I know when I’m trailed, and I’m sure we weren’t. And I’m equally sure that we will be this evening. So take it easy, and leave the rest to me . . . Oh yes—would you like to make a small bet? A pound to a penny, if and when the rough stuff starts you’ll quite forget to use that cosh.”

  “It’s a bet.”

  We left the flat at a quarter past five and walked languidly to the Robin Hood for sandwiches and beer. We stayed a quarter of an hour and then went on, more briskly. George Oaks set the pace. “Everything’s in order,” he muttered, “we’re being followed, but by policemen only, I should say. Rather odd, that. But maybe Chatterton’s men are following the policemen.”

  Part Eight

  Ohm Robertson was resting in a great green leather easy-chair, drinking some pink-frothed, milky chocolate-coloured vitamin stuff out of a long tumbler—Vitfu, according to the label on the jar at his right hand—and a very old woman in black dress and a white apron was kneeling before him, coaxing his feet into wrinkled brown slippers. “Do stop it, Herbage,” he said, and the old woman withdrew with a self-satisfied curtsey, saying: “Mind you drink it all up, Master Ohm.”

  “Herbage is a treasure,” he said, when she was gone. “She was my nursemaid when she was only seventeen years old, about sixty years ago. She insists on my drinking this filthy concoction every evening. She read about it in Tit-Bits in 1899; Vitfu is short for ‘Vital Food’—it is made of inferior powdered skim-milk, malt and cola nuts, to which she adds glucose, cream, and new-laid eggs. It tastes like glue, but I daren’t refuse it. I shan’t offer you any, but if you’d like something else to drink, look on that laboratory table in the corner, and you’ll find a large blue fluted bottle with a red poison label: it contains cognac. I keep it like that because Herbage won’t allow alcohol in the house, but she’d die rather than touch a bottle or a sheet of paper in my rooms. The Wurtz-flask on the stand with about two hundred c.c. of colourless liquid in it contains Hollands gin. Take a couple of beakers, and help yourselves. Have no fear; outside of Herbage’s medicine chest, there has been nothing noxious in the house for forty years, to my certain knowledge . . . Only rinse the beakers when you have done with them and put them back in the rack or I shall never hear the end of it. . . . No, I won’t join you; Herbage makes me take a glass of her Blackberry Cordial in the evening, and that is quite enough for me—it is strong enough to fell an ox, and she says it is good for the chest. . . . Now!”

  He settled his feet more comfortably on the plump plush-covered pouffe. “Let us take these things in their proper order. First of all, these notes of Dr. Brevis.”

  “You checked them?” asked George Oaks.

  “I did. A most extraordinary brain, Oaks, transcendentally brilliant. I have no hesitation in saying that even Fuchs must have deferred to Brevis as his master.”

  “You know Fuchs?” asked George Oaks.

  “Oh yes, necessarily so. You see, if there are, say, only three men in the world who speak your language, you will tend to seek them out, impelled by an urge to make yourself understood—driven by loneliness, you might almost say. Fuchs corresponded with me out of loneliness.”

  George Oaks said: “And you, Ohm? You were never lonely?”

  “No, I have always been a perfectly happy man. Apart from my work, everything else always seemed so silly. . . . But you want to know, first of all, the import of Brevis’s notes.

  “Briefly, he has worked out, in a series of equations, the mathematical possibilities of developing the most highly fissionable isotope—which he calls a megatope—of Silicon. And in the second set of equations he has developed the critical mass. Does this convey anything to you?”

  I shook my head. George Oaks said: “In other words, Kurt Brevis has demonstrated that one can convert Si28 into Si32—which is impossible!”

  Ohm Robertson said: “It was hitherto undemonstrable, never impossible. Brevis has demonstrated that it is possible.”

  “Then God help us!” cried George Oaks.

  Ohm Robertson shrugged loosely, pursing his thin lips and raising his eyebrows. Then he looked at me and, in the indulgent manner of a policeman giving a complicated street-direction to a bewildered foreigner in a great city, he said:
“Mr. Kemp, you must know a little something of the nature of an atom. An atom consists of a nucleus around which travels a certain number of electrons. The nucleus and the electrons are kept in cohesion because the nucleus is charged with positive electricity and the electrons with negative electricity. One atom differs from another—and therefore substance differs from substance—in accordance with the number of electrons held to their orbits by the nucleus. The stability of a substance, therefore, is dependent upon the constancy of the electron to its orbit around its nucleus in every atom of that substance. Hence, to unbalance an atom is tantamount to unbalancing the whole of a tiny solar system. Imagine, for example, that the density of the sun were suddenly enormously increased—hundreds of worlds would come to an abrupt end, would they not? Now, what we call ‘atomic energy’ is dependent upon an increase of density of the nucleus of an atom, so that, in point of fact, an infinitesimal universe rushes in upon its centre and blasts itself back to pure Energy in a flash.

  “Now, take a stable atom—a respectably balanced atom with a certain number of electrons, and out of this make another atom with the same number of electrons, but a different nucleus, and you have an isotope. This isotope is active, unstable—in other words, frightfully explosive, for Nature abhors unbalance, and will not for long permit a state of unbalance to exist. She will let it shatter itself to bits, tear itself to pieces, disintegrate. Do you see?”

  I nodded, and I heard George Oaks whisper: “Shatter it to bits, and then remould it nearer to her heart’s desire.”

  Ohm Robertson proceeded: “Your atomic energy scientists have evolved a method of making isotopes of thorium and uranium by giving the atoms of these metals heavier nuclei, thereby making them unstable. They have achieved this by means of particle accelerators—as, say, the Cyclotron, in which atoms are whirled about by magnetic force until they achieve an astronomical speed, whereupon, being released into an immense tube, they lose some of their electrons. The atoms, thus unbalanced, become unstable. Again, this has been done in the ‘atomic pile’, as it is called, by a chemical process. In this case, they distil from huge quantities of thorium- and uranium-bearing ore microscopic quantities of the active isotopes which, of course, are unstable.