The Complete Short Stories (122 page)

'In a sense, yes.'

Charles handed me the list. 'Come off it. Do you really mean that a sinister government bureau has smuggled them off, they're slaving away now on some super-weapon?'

'It's possible, but I doubt it.' I took a packet of photographs from the second folder. 'Have a look at them.'

Charles picked up the first. 'Ah, there's Georges. He looks older here, those TV cameras are certainly ageing.'

'It's not Georges Duval. It's Oblensky, the Russian boy, taken six years ago. Quite a resemblance, though.' I spread the twelve photographs on the table top. Charles moved along the half-circle, comparing the over-large eyes and bony foreheads, the same steady gaze.

'Wait a minute! Are you sure this isn't Duval?' Charles picked up Oblensky's photograph and pointed to the figure of a young man in a light grey suit standing behind some mayoral official in a Leningrad parlour. 'He was at Duval's press conference, sitting right in front of us.'

I nodded to Judy. 'You're right, Charles. And he's not only in that photo.' I pulled together the photographs of Bobby Silverberg, Herter and Martin Sherrington. In each one the same balding figure in the dove-grey suit was somewhere in the background, his over-sharp eyes avoiding the camera lens. 'No university admits to knowing him, nor do Shell, Philips, General Motors or a dozen other big international companies. Of course, there are other organizations he might be a talent scout for..

Charles had stood up, and was slowly walking around his desk. 'Such as the CIA - you think he may be recruiting talent for some top-secret Government think-thank? It's unlikely, but -'

'What about the Russians?' I cut in. 'Or the Chinese? Let's face it, eleven young men have vanished into thin air. What happened to them?'

Charles stared down at the photographs. 'The strange thing is that I vaguely recognize all these faces. Those bony skulls, and those eyes... somewhere. Look, James, we may have the makings of a new programme here. This English prodigy, Martin Sherrington, he should be easy to track down. Then the German, Herter. Find them and we may be on to something.'

***

We set off for Canterbury the next morning. The address, which I had been given by a friend who was science editor of the Daily Express, was on a housing estate behind the big General Electric radio and television plant on the edge of the city. We drove past the lines of grey-brick houses until we found the Sherringtons' at the end of a row. Rising out of the remains of a greenhouse was a huge ham operator's radio mast, its stay-wires snapped and rusting. In the eight years since his tremendous mind had revealed itself to the local grammar-school master, Martin Sherrington might have gone off to the ends of the world, to Cape Kennedy, the Urals or Peking.

In fact, not only were neither Martin nor his parents there, but it took us all of two days to find anyone who even remembered them at all. The present tenants of the house, a frayed-looking couple, had been there two years; and before them a large family of criminal inclinations who had been forced out by bailiffs and police. The headmaster of the grammar-school had retired to Scotland. Fortunately the school matron remembered Martin -'a brilliantly clever boy, we were all very proud of him. To tell the truth, though, I can't say we felt much affection for him; he didn't invite it.' She knew nothing of Mrs Sherrington, and as for the boy's father, they assumed he had died in the war.

Finally, thanks to a cashier at the accounts office of the local electric company, we found where Mrs Sherrington had moved.

As soon as I saw that pleasant white-walled villa in its prosperous suburb on the other side of Canterbury, I felt that the trail was warming. Something about the crisp gravel and large, well-trimmed garden reminded me of another house - Georges Duval's near Paris.

From the roof of my car parked next to the hedge we watched a handsome, strong-shouldered woman strolling in the rose garden.

'She's come up in the world,' I commented. 'Who pays for this pad?'

The meeting was curious. This rather homely, quietly dressed woman in her late thirties gazed at us across the silver tea-set like a tamed Mona Lisa. She told us that we had absolutely no chance of interviewing Martin on television.

'So much interest in your son was roused at the time, Mrs Sherrington. Can you tell us about his subsequent academic career? Which university did he go to?'

'His education was completed privately.' As for his present whereabouts, she believed he was now abroad, working for a large international organization whose name she was not at liberty to divulge.

'Not a government department, Mrs Sherrington?'

She hesitated, but only briefly. 'I am told the organization is intimately connected with various governments, but I have no real knowledge.'

Her voice was over-precise, as if she were hiding her real accent. As we left, I realized how lonely her life was; but as Judy remarked, she had probably been lonely ever since Martin Sherrington had first learned to speak.

***

Our trip to Germany was equally futile. All traces of Wolfgang Herter had vanished from the map. A few people in the small village near the Frankfurt autobahn remembered him, and the village postman said that Frau Herter had moved to Switzerland, to a lakeside villa near Lucerne. A woman of modest means and education, but the son had no doubt done very well.

I asked one or two questions.

Wolfgang's father? Frau Herter had arrived with the child just after the war; the husband had probably perished in one of the nameless prison-camps or battlegrounds of World War II.

The balding man in the light grey suit? Yes, he had definitely come to the village, helping Frau Herter arrange her departure.

'Back to London,' I said to Judy. 'This needs bigger resources than you and I have.'

As we flew back Judy said: 'One thing I don't understand. Why have the fathers always disappeared?'

'A good question. Putting it crudely, love, a unique genetic coupling produced these twelve boys. It almost looks as if someone has torn the treasure map in two and kept one half. Think of the stock bank they're building up, enough sperm on ice in a eugenic cocktail to repopulate the entire planet.'

This nightmare prospect was on my mind when I walked into Charles Whitehead's office the next morning. It was the first time I had seen Charles in his shirtsleeves. To my surprise, he brushed aside my apologies, then beckoned me to the huge spread of photographs pinned to the plaster wall behind his desk. The office was a clutter of newspaper cuttings and blown-up newsreel stills. Charles was holding a magnifying glass over a photograph of President Johnson and McNamara at a White House reception.

'While you were gone we've been carrying out our own search,' he said. 'If it's any consolation, we couldn't trace any of them at first.'

'Then you have found them? Where?'

'Here.' He gestured at the dozens of photographs. 'Right in front of our noses. We're looking at them every day.'

He pointed to a news agency photograph of a Kremlin reception for Premier Ulbricht of East Germany. Kosygin and Brezhnev were there, Soviet President Podgorny talking to the Finnish Ambassador, and a crowd of twenty party functionaries.

'Recognize anyone? Apart from Kosygin and company?'

'The usual bunch of hatchet-faced waiters these people like to surround themselves with. Wait a minute, though.'

Charles's finger had paused over a quiet-faced young man with a high dolichocephalic head, standing at Kosygin's elbow. Curiously, the Soviet Premier's face was turned towards him rather than to Brezhnev.

'Oblensky - the Russian prodigy. What's he doing with Kosygin? He looks like an interpreter.'

'Between Kosygin and Brezhnev? Hardly. I've checked with the BBC and Reuters correspondents in Moscow. They've seen him around quite a bit. He never says anything in public, but the important men always talk to him.'

I put down the photograph. 'Charles, get on to the Foreign Office and the US Embassy. It makes sense - all eleven of them are probably there, in the Soviet Union.'

'Relax. That's what we thought. But have a look at these.'

The next picture had been taken at a White House meeting between Johnson, McNamara and General Westmoreland discussing US policy in Vietnam. There were the usual aides, secretaries and Secret Service men out on the lawn. One face had been ringed, that of a man in his early thirties standing unobtrusively behind Johnson and Westmoreland.

'Warrender - the 1952 genius! He's working for the US Government.'

'More surprises.' Charles guided me around the rest of the photographs. 'You might be interested in these.'

The next showed Pope Paul on the balcony of St Peter's, making his annual 'Urbis et Orbis' - the city and the world benediction to the huge crowd in the square. Standing beside him were Cardinal Mancini, chief of the Papal Secretariat, and members of his household staff. Obliquely behind the Pope was a man of about thirty wearing what I guessed to be a Jesuit's soutane, large eyes watching Paul with a steady gaze.

'Bandini, Arturo Bandini,' I commented, recognizing the face. 'Oggi did a series of features on him. He's moved high in the papal hierarchy.'

'There are few closer to Ii Papa, or better loved.'

After that came a photograph of U Thant, taken at a UN Security Council meeting during the Cuban missile crisis. Sitting behind the Secretary General was a pale-skinned young Brahmin with a fine mouth and eyes - Gesai Ray, the high-caste Indian who was the only well-born prodigy I had come across.

'Ray is now even higher up on U Thant's staff,' Charles added. 'There's one interesting photograph of him and Warrender together during the Cuban crisis. Warrender was then on JFK's staff.' He went on casually: 'The year after Oblensky reached the Kremlin, Khrushchev was sacked.'

'So they're in contact? I'm beginning to realize what the MoscowWashington hot line is really for.'

Charles handed me another still. 'Here's an old friend of yours - our own Martin Sherrington. He's on Professor Lovell's staff at the Jodrell Bank Radio-Observatory. One of the very few not to go into government or big business.'

'Big science, though.' I stared at the quiet, intense face of the elusive Sherrington, aware that someone at Jodrell Bank had deliberately put me off.

'Like Gunther Bergman - he moved to the United States fifteen years ago from Sweden, is now very high up in the NASA command chain. Yen Hsi Shan is the youngest, barely seventeen, but have a look at this.'

The photograph showed Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai on the reviewing platform in Peking during the cultural revolution, an immense concourse of teenagers passing below, all holding copies of Mao's Thoughts and chanting out slogans. Standing between Mao and Chou was a boy with a fist in the air who was the chief Red Guard.

'Yen Hsi Shan. He's started early,' Charles said. 'One or two of the others we haven't been able to trace as yet, though we hear Herter is with the giant Zurich-Hamburg banking trust. Jaako Litmanen, the Finnish prodigy, is rumoured to be working for the Soviet space programme.'

'Well, one has to admit it,' I commented, 'they've certainly all made good.'

'Not all.' Charles showed me the last picture, of the Sicilian genius Giuliano Caldare. 'One of them made bad. Caldare emigrated to the United States in 1960, is now in the inner circle of the Cosa Nostra, a coming talent from all one hears.'

I sat down at Charles's desk. 'Right, but what does this prove? It may look like a conspiracy, but given their talents one would expect them to rise in the world.'

'That's putting it mildly. Good God, this bunch only has to take one step forward and they'll be running the entire show.'

'A valid point.' I opened Charles's note-pad. 'We'll revise the programme - agreed? We start off with the Georges Duval conference, follow up with our own discoveries of where the others are, splice in old newsreel material, interviews with the mothers - it'll make quite a programme.'

Or so we hoped.

Needless to say, the programme was never started. Two days later, when I was still organizing the newsreel material, word came down from the head of features that the project was to be shelved. We tried to argue, but the decision was absolute.

Shortly after, my contract with Horizon was ended, and I was given the job of doing a new children's series about great inventors. Charles was shunted to 'International Golf'. Of course, it was obvious to both of us that we had come too close for someone's comfort, but there was little we could do about it. Three months later, I made a trip to Jodrell Bank radio-observatory with a party of scientific journalists and had a glimpse of Martin Sherrington, a tall, finely featured man watching with his hard gaze as Professor Lovell held his press conference.

During the next months I carefully followed the newspapers and TV newscasts. If there was a conspiracy of some kind, what were they planning? Here they were, sitting behind the world's great men, hands ready to take the levers of power. But a global dictatorship sounded unlikely. Two of them at least seemed opposed to established authority. Apart from Caldare in the Cosa Nostra, Georges Duval put his musical talents to spectacular use, becoming within less than a year the greatest of the French 'Ye-Ye' singers, eclipsing the Beatles as a leader of the psychedelic youth generation. In the forefront of the world protest movement, he was hated by the police of a dozen countries but idolized by teenagers from Bangkok to Mexico City.