Mandrake (9 page)

He ranged through the fields; sheep grazed unheeding, and wheat and barley stood in neat bales where the harvesters had been, but he saw no man or woman at all. He called and whistled until he reached the wood two miles away; the air was heavy and silent in there, under the trees, and he felt a sense of intrusion, as if he were interrupting some particular private mood of the place. Then he found the dog.

It was a rustle in the undergrowth first that drew him, in the ferns and brambles catching at his legs. He moved towards it, calling, and then leapt back as something shot out almost from under his feet. He glimpsed grey-brown fur through the leaves, and as the animal streaked across an open space he saw that it was a gigantic cat, wild or turned wild; the long teeth glinted in a snarl as it passed.

He saw the blood on the leaves, and then the dog. Ferns and branches had been trampled for yards around by the fight. And the dog lay with her eyes slashed blind and her throat torn out, teeth bared in a futile frozen defiance that seemed to Queston devastatingly pathetic. Recently she had been wandering farther from the cottage, alone, out of her element, drawn by some instinct beyond his control. This time she had wandered too far.

He knew, without reason, that he must take the body back. The dog had been killed by something more than the wild. The body was not yet stiff, and he hauled it on to his back; the forelegs over one shoulder, the back legs over the other. It was astonishingly heavy, and smothered his shoulders with blood and dirt; dead, its musty animal smell was almost overpowering. Queston struggled grimly back through the fields, his gun under one arm.

It was dusk when he reached the cottage. Again he had passed no one on the way, but now he saw a strange car standing beside his own. He paused. The car was dark and sleek as his Lagonda; there was no one inside. He looked at the cottage, dark in the growing shadows, but he could hear nothing but the noises of the night, loud and jeering. He moved forward again.

‘Good evening, Mr Queston,’ a voice said, from the shadows.

He stopped abruptly. The fur of the dog’s forelegs rasped against his cheek. In the darkness of the cottage doorway the small red eye of a cigarette glowed. Then below it suddenly a brighter eye; Queston blinked as the beam of a powerful torch blazed out and flicked up from his feet to his head. He heard the man gasp. ‘Are you hurt?’

He recognized the voice then. The man from the Ministry. The man with the questions and the form.

‘I’m all right.’ He put the gun down, then knelt to drop the dead dog, stiffened now into an arch. He pushed silently past the man into the cottage, and groped for the lamp. As he carried it flickering to the table, he caught sight of himself in the mirror over the sink. Dark blood smothered his jacket and one side of his face; his hair stood out ruffled and wild, and the shadows deepened the lines round his mouth. It was like glimpsing the face of a stranger: a hostile outcast, enclosed in fear. No wonder the man had been startled.

‘My dog. It was killed in a fight.’ Making no attempt to clean himself, he stood looking coldly across the room.

The man nodded; Queston thought he smiled. ‘It should have been sent back where it belonged.’ He stepped forward into the yellow light of the lamp, unfastening his briefcase. ‘I am sorry to call so late. I came yesterday, but you were not here.’ The words were a question. Queston did not answer. The man glanced at him sharply, and his voice changed. He laid a long envelope on the table. ‘I am afraid you have not cooperated with us, Mr Queston. This is an eviction order. You must be out of this house within seven days.’

Queston stared at him. ‘But that’s ridiculous. I am the legal tenant.’

‘I am afraid we can overrule the law.’

‘Overrule—who do you think you are, for God’s sake?’

The man said, smugly: ‘The Ministry of Planning…’

‘Suppose I refuse to go?’

‘I don’t advise that. I don’t advise that at all, Mr Queston. It would make things very—complicated.’

Queston sat down wearily. ‘Would you mind giving me one good reason why your blasted Ministry should want me out of here, when I’ve been left alone for two peaceful years?’

‘Ah,’ the man said. ‘Those two years. I told you before, you have been out of touch. The situation has grown without your noticing.’

‘What situation?’

‘The situation demands now that men should be together.’ He was reciting a lesson. ‘That men should be where their roots are.’

‘What situation?’

The man picked up his briefcase. ‘Since you claim to belong nowhere, arrangements have been made for Winchester to take you. You might be said to qualify. You spent holidays there when you were small. You developed an affection.’

‘I don’t want to live in Winchester.’

‘You can’t live here.’

‘Why not?’

The man paused inside the door. The light still fell on his body, and the hand clasping its briefcase like a talisman, but his face was in shadow. The voice was soft now, its accent pronounced. An actor in rehearsal, dark-suited, in a yokel part. An oaf, acting authority. Queston’s tired mind fidgeted to and fro, half-listening, incredulous. The voice said, ‘The van will come in a few days for your furniture, you must be ready, you must realize that the Ministry works for the greatest good.’ Out of the shadows: ‘You will find it best not to argue.’

But he only properly heard the last words.

‘Remember your dog.’

He was beginning to understand. He wondered what had lit the fuse. Radiation, perhaps. Or just the possibility of worse than that; the possibility that would never die away, because men were as they were. Frightened, clinging to their own. O, it was radiation that had done it, as a symbol of all the rest. From war, or simply from tests, it hardly mattered. The astronauts? Irrelevant. That did not directly affect the earth—

He felt immensely tired; bored, bored with it all, with centuries of weariness. He looked, in that unsleeping night, at his gun. Why not? The same result would come in the end; it was inevitable now, wished on him even in his isolation by all the rest of them, in their clinging and suspicion and fear. No part for him to play now; no part worth playing. Fie had written the book; that had gone out of him. There was nothing and no one else. The light was gone.

Then he heard a rat squeal outside, and realized what it had found. In quick revulsion he put away the gun, took a shovel and went outside and buried the dog. Light beamed out of the window to divide the dark, and he heard the muffled clatter as moths hurled themselves against the bright glass.

When he had trodden down the earth and put back the last turf he knew, obscurely, that it was too late. Betrayed of detachment by an animal. Now he would have to go on.

He drove, in the morning, to Winchester. He wanted to make sure. As he came to the city limits two men flagged him down beside a black car parked at the kerb. One was a police sergeant, the other a man in a dark suit. There was nothing distinctive about those dark suits, yet already they were unmistakable. The man crossed to the Lagonda and flashed an imposing identity card briefly through the window.

‘Spot check, sir. Sorry to trouble you.’

‘Yes,’ Queston said.

‘Can you tell me where you’re from, sir?’

‘Hookpit.’ That was the village: his nearest label.

‘O yes, that’s all right. And what you’ll be doing in Winchester?’

‘I have to go to the Ministry of Planning office.’

The man drew back, his Hampshire drawl suddenly respectful. ‘O, I see, sir, yes. Sorry to trouble you. You’ll get straight through to the castle on this road. Thank you, sir.’

‘Thank you.’ Queston nodded curtly, and let in the clutch.

He drove on, smiling slightly, to the street that wound uphill to the grey castle walls, and in through the archway where the familiar ludicrous insignia
‘m.o.p.’
hung emblazoned in place of the county arms. A man in Ministry uniform sprang to attention as he passed. Clearly there were advantages in driving a sleek black car.

He found a bland youth in an outer office.

‘My name is David Queston. I live at Rose Cottage, outside Hookpit.’

‘Yes, sir? ’ The boy was calm and dark. Queston was beginning to loathe the accent.

‘I want to know the meaning of this.’ He slapped the eviction order down on the desk.

The boy opened it and read, unhurriedly. He looked up. ‘It seems straightforward enough.’

‘Of course it’s straightforward, my child. I don’t want it spelled out. I want a reason for it. And not from you.’

The boy flushed. ‘I’ll see if the clerk—’

‘I don’t want to see any bloody clerk,’ Queston shouted, in a rage he did not feel. ‘I want whoever’s in charge here. The—’ he groped for a likely word ‘—the regional controller.’

The boy disappeared; there was much muttering. Then with silent ceremony a man in uniform led Queston through narrow passages to a pair of great doors. He leant forward dramatically from the hips, and flung them open.

Queston was in a lofty, echoing hall with thick wooden beams spanning the roof. He saw, hanging on the far wall, the painted wooden circle that was Winchester’s Table of King Arthur, and remembered his first sight of that spurious piece of enchantment when he was a boy. He remembered the hall from those days, too, splendid and mysterious; it had been the seat of the county assize court. It was not a courtroom now. The floor was wide and empty, with only a row of chairs lining each wall; and dominating the space, under the hanging Round Table, a massive square desk where a man sat alone.

Queston marched forward, and he was half-way across the floor before he looked at the man. A figure rising to its feet, holding out its hand: ‘Ah, Dr Queston, it has been a long time. I was hoping you would come.’

It was Brunner.

Queston stood still. Of course.

He said the first thing that came into his head. ‘But you aren’t a Hampshire man.’

Brunner seemed pleased. ‘Nor an Englishman. An outsider. Like yourself. But are the leaders not always those who can step outside? In objectivity lies power, Dr Queston. Do come and sit down.’ As Queston ignored his outstretched hand, he smiled tolerantly and turned the gesture into a graceful indication of a chair.

‘We’ve nothing to talk about. I came on a simple errand. I have a cottage—’

‘You
had
a cottage.’ Brunner’s emphasis was slight, but prompt. The years had hardly changed him at all. He was thicker set, his face older; but the same inscrutable swarthiness was there, the same jerky, brooding manner. Strained a little now, as he smiled carefully to win friendliness.

‘I see.’

‘You do not see at all. Come now, you astonish me. Your remoteness is almost unique, but even you must not regard the Ministry as hostile. There was a stupid man sent to see you, that was a blunder for which I apologize. Our officials must be local men, and sometimes the material is not good… but you must forgive us, and forget it. You are too valuable a man to be treated without consideration.’

‘And this? ’ Queston held up the eviction papers.

‘We need you working with us,’ Brunner said, still smiling.

‘Anywhere you like, but with us. Not on your own. After all, a long time ago you told me yourself, David—we are such old acquaintances, I may call you David, may I not?’

‘You may not,’ Queston said.

The dark face flickered, but the voice was still controlled.

‘I beg your pardon. But you remember talking—that day in Oxford, and in the aircraft.’

‘I remember. And I failed to see then, and I fail to see now, what possible link there is between my work and what you are doing.’

‘You have made the link very obvious yourself,’ Brunner moved back behind his great desk, and opened a noiseless drawer. ‘In this.’ He held up a heavy bundle of paper, and in a flaring shock of disbelief Queston recognized the wrapping. It was the manuscript of his book.

‘Where the devil did you get that?’

‘You went to London recently and—lost it, I believe. If you go back to your cottage you will find the duplicate missing as well, and the rough notes. They should take some time to re-write. Ah—no, I am afraid I must keep it.’ As Queston reached out, he dropped the manuscript back into the drawer and slid it shut.

‘You have no right—’ Queston began angrily. He clenched his fists, and stopped. He said, more levelly: ‘Brunner, this is important. Give me that manuscript.’

‘Certainly it is important.’

‘Damn it,’ Queston said in a kind of anguish, ‘you can’t steal all that work. You used to call yourself a scholar, you must know what it means.’

‘Part of your soul,’ Brunner said softly, gazing at him.

‘Like a child, wrenched out of you. But more than that, O much more, because every ounce of its spirit and every inch of its body you made yourself, with infinite labour. Your own creation. Your tiny stake in the future. Isn’t that it? ’ It was cat-like, coolly sadistic. Queston swore startlingly at him, and he smiled. ‘Listen to me, my friend. We are not unreasonable. You must realize that we can never allow you to publish a book like this. I reported long ago that you were on the track, but even the Minister and I had no idea what you would produce. This could do great harm.’

‘Then I’m right?’

‘In your fantastic conclusions? Of course not.’ Brunner flushed. ‘Try to understand, you fool. The public consciousness is a stupid, malleable, plastic thing, and we have learned—Mandrake has learned—the secret of making it take a chosen form. The only hope for peace, for the whole human episode, is to keep it in that form. Contented in that form. Man bound to place. And you? You have hit upon the method, though not our secret of making it work, and written what might be a handbook of our ideas. But instead of attributing them to us, you create this absurd fantasy about the earth itself. If that idea in all the reasoned form you give it were allowed to spread… there would be an intellectual uneasiness first, and then very soon there would be panic.’

‘Panic may soon be what we need.’

Brunner said patiently: ‘That would destroy everything we are doing.’