The Complete Short Stories (47 page)

As they passed the caf she was in full flight about something, and the young man cut in: 'Hold on, June, I need a rest. Let's sit down and have a drink, the procession won't reach Marble Arch for half an hour.'

'Poor old chap, am I wearing you out?' They sat at the table next to Dr Jamieson, the girl's bare arm only a few inches away, the fresh scent of her body adding itself to his other recollections. Already a whirlwind of memories reeled in his mind, her neat mobile hands, the way she held her chin and spread her flared white skirt across her thighs. 'Still, I don't really care if I miss the procession. This is my day, not his.'

The young man grinned, pretending to get up. 'Really? They've all been misinformed. Just wait here, I'll get the procession diverted.' He held her hand across the table, peered critically at the small diamond on her finger. 'Pretty feeble effort. Who bought that for you?'

The girl kissed it fondly. 'It's as big as the Ritz.' She gave a playful growl. 'H'm, what a man, I'll have to marry him one of these days. Roger, isn't it wonderful about the Prize? Three hundred pounds! You're really rich. A pity the Royal Society don't let you spend it on anything, like the Nobel Prizes. Wait till you get one of those.'

The young man smiled modestly. 'Easy darling, don't build your hopes on that.'

'But of course you will. I'm absolutely sure. After all, you've more or less discovered time travel.'

The young man drummed on the table. 'June, for heaven's sake, get this straight, I have not discovered time travel.' He lowered his voice, conscious of Dr Jamieson sitting at the next table, the only other person in the deserted street. 'People will think I'm insane if you go around saying that.'

The girl screwed up her pert nose. 'You have, though, let's face it. I know you don't like the phrase, but once you take away the algebra that's what it boils down to, doesn't it?'

The young man gazed reflectively at the table top, his face, as it grew serious, assuming massive intellectual strength. 'In so far as mathematical concepts have their analogies in the physical universe, yes - but that's an enormous caveat. And even then it's not time travel in the usual sense, though I realize the popular press won't agree when my paper in Nature comes out. Anyway, I'm not particularly interested in the time aspect. If I had thirty years to spare it might be worth pursuing, but I've got more important things to do.'

He smiled at the girl, but she leaned forward thoughtfully, taking his hands. 'Roger, I'm not so sure you're right. You say it hasn't any applications in everyday life, but scientists always think that. It's really fantastic, to be able to go backward in time. I mean - '

'Why? We're able to go forward in time now, and no one's throwing their hats in the air. The universe itself is just a time machine that from our end of the show seems to be running one way. Or mostly one way. I happened to have noticed that particles in a cyclotron sometimes move in the opposite direction, that's all, arrive at the end of their infinitesimal trips before they've started. That doesn't mean that next week we'll all be able to go back and murder our own grandfathers.'

'What would happen if you did? Seriously?'

The young man laughed. 'I don't know. Frankly, I don't like to think about it. Maybe that's the real reason why I want to keep the work on a theoretical basis. If you extend the problem to its logical conclusion my observations at Harwell must be faulty, because events in the universe obviously take place independently of time, which is just the perspective we put on them. Years from now the problem will probably be known as the Jamieson Paradox, and aspiring mathematicians will be bumping off their grandparents wholesale in the hope of disproving it. We'll have to make sure that all our grandchildren are admirals or archbishops.'

As he spoke Dr Jamieson was watching the girl, every fibre in his body strained to prevent himself from touching her on the arm and speaking to her. The pattern of freckles on her slim forearm, the creases in her dress below her shoulder blades, her minute toenails with their chipped varnish, was each an absolute revelation of his own existence.

He took off his sunglasses and for a moment he and the young man stared straight at each other. The latter seemed embarrassed, realizing the remarkable physiognomical similarity between them, the identical bone structure of their faces, and angled sweep of their foreheads. Fleetingly, Dr Jamieson smiled at him, a feeling of deep, almost paternal affection for the young man coming over him. His naive earnestness and honesty, his relaxed, gawky charm, were suddenly more important than his intellectual qualities, and Dr Jamieson knew that he felt no jealousy towards him.

He put on his glasses and looked away down the street, his resolve to carry through the next stages of his plan strengthened.

The noise from the streets beyond rose sharply, and the couple leapt to their feet.

'Come on, it's three-thirty!' the young man cried. 'They must be almost here.'

As they ran off the girl paused to straighten her sandal, looking back at the old man in dark glasses who had sat behind her. Dr Jamieson leaned forward, waiting for her to speak, one hand outstretched, but the girl merely looked away and he sank into his chair.

When they reached the first intersection he stood up and hurried back to his hotel.

Locking the door of his room, Dr Jamieson quickly pulled the case from the bureau, assembled the rifle and sat down with it in front of the window. The Coronation procession was already passing, the advance files of marching soldiers and guardsmen, in their ceremonial uniforms, each led by a brass band drumming out martial airs. The crowd roared and cheered, tossing confetti and streamers into the hot sunlight.

Dr Jamieson ignored them and peered below the blind onto the pavement. Carefully he searched the throng, soon picked out the girl in the white dress tip-toeing at the back. She smiled at the people around her and wormed her way towards the front, pulling the young man by the hand. For a few minutes Dr Jamieson followed the girl's every movement, then as the first landaus of the diplomatic corps appeared he began to search the remainder of the crowd, scrutinizing each face carefully, line upon line. From his pocket he withdrew a small plastic envelope; he held it away from his face and broke the seal. There was a hiss of greenish gas and he drew out a large newspaper cutting, yellowed with age, folded to reveal a man's portrait.

Dr Jamieson propped it against the window ledge. The cutting showed a dark-jowled man of about thirty with a thin weasellike face, obviously a criminal photographed by the police. Under it was the caption: Anton Rem mers.

Dr Jamieson sat forward intently. The diplomatic corps passed in their carriages, followed by members of the government riding in open cars, waving their silk hats at the crowd. Then came more Horse Guards, and there was a tremendous roar farther down the street as the spectators near Oxford Circus saw the royal coach approaching.

Anxiously, Dr Jamieson looked at his watch. It was three forty-five, and the royal coach was due to pass the hotel in only seven minutes. Around him a tumult of noise made it difficult to concentrate, and the TV sets in the near-by rooms seemed to be at full volume.

Suddenly he clenched the window ledge.

'Remmers!' Directly below, in the entrance to a cigarette kiosk, was a sallow-faced man in a wide-brimmed green hat. He stared at the procession impassively, hands deep in the pockets of a cheap raincoat. Fumbling, Dr Jamieson raised the rifle, resting the barrel on the ledge, watching the man. He made no attempt to press forward into the crowd, and waited by the kiosk, only a few feet from a small arcade that ran back into a side street.

Dr Jamieson began to search the crowd again, the effort draining his face. A gigantic bellow from the crowd deafened him as the gold-plated royal coach hove into view behind a bobbing escort of household cavalry. He tried to see if Remmers looked around at an accomplice, but the man was motionless, hands deep in his pockets.

'Damn you!' Dr Jamieson snarled. 'Where's the other one?' Frantically he pushed away the blind, every ounce of his shrewdness and experience expended as he carried out a dozen split-second character analyses of the people below.

'There were two of them!' he shouted hoarsely to himself. 'There were two!'

Fifty yards away, the young king sat back in the golden coach, his robes a blaze of colour in the sunlight. Distracted, Dr Jamieson watched him, then realized abruptly that Remmers had moved. The man was now stepping swiftly around the edge of the crowd, darting about on his lean legs like a distraught tiger. As the crowd surged forward, he pulled a blue thermos flask from his raincoat pocket, with a quick motion unscrewed the cap. The royal coach drew abreast and Remmers transferred the thermos to his right hand, a metal plunger clearly visible in the mouth of the flask.

'Remmers had the bomb!' Dr Jamieson gasped, completely disconcerted. Remmers stepped back, extended his right hand low to the ground behind him like a grenadier and then began to throw the bomb forward with a carefully timed swing.

The rifle had been pointed at the man automatically and Dr Jamieson trained the sights on his chest and fired, just before the bomb left his hand. The discharge jolted Dr Jamieson off his feet, the impact tearing at his shoulder, the rifle jangling up into the venetian blind. Remmers slammed back crookedly into the cigarette kiosk, legs lolling, his face like a skull's. The bomb had been knocked out of his hand and was spinning straight up into the air as if tossed by a juggler. It landed on the pavement a few yards away, kicked underfoot as the crowd surged sideways after the royal coach.

Then it exploded.

There was a blinding pulse of expanding air, followed by a tremendous eruption of smoke and hurtling particles. The window facing the street dropped in a single piece and shattered on the floor at Dr Jamieson's feet, driving him back in a blast of glass and torn plastic. He fell across the chair, recovered himself as the shouts outside turned to screams, then dragged himself over to the window and stared out through the stinging air. The crowd was fanning out across the road, people running in all directions, horses rearing under their helmetless riders. Below the window twenty or thirty people lay or sat on the pavement. The royal coach, one wheel missing but otherwise intact, was being dragged away by its team of horses, guardsmen and troops encircling it. Police were swarming down the road towards the hotel, and Dr Jamieson saw someone point up to him and shout.

He looked down at the edge of the pavement, where a girl in a white dress was stretched on her back, her legs twisted strangely. The young man kneeling beside her, his jacket split down the centre of his back, had covered her face with his handkerchief, and a dark stain spread slowly across the tissue.

Voices rose in the corridor outside. He turned away from the window, the rifle still in his hand. On the floor at his feet, unfurled by the blast of the explosion, was the faded newspaper cutting. Numbly, his mouth slack, Dr Jamieson picked it up.

ASSASSINS ATTEMPT TO MURDER KING JAMES

Bomb Kills 27 in Oxford Street Two men shot dead by police A sentence had been ringed: '... one was Anton Remmers, a professional killer believed to have been hired by the second assassin, an older man whose bullet-ridden body the police are unable to identify...'

Fists pounded on the door. A voice shouted, then kicked at the handle. Dr Jamieson dropped the cutting, and looked down at the young man kneeling over the girl, holding her dead hands.

As the door ripped back off its hinges he knew who the second unknown assassin was, the man he had returned to kill after thirty-five years. So his attempt to alter past events had been fruitless, by coming back he had merely implicated himself in the original crime, doomed since he first analysed the cyclotron freaks to return and help to kill his young bride. If he had not shot Remmers the assassin would have lobbed the bomb into the centre of the road, and June would have lived. His whole stratagem selflessly devised for the young man's benefit, a free gift to his own younger self, had defeated itself, destroying the very person it had been intended to save.

Hoping to see her again for the last time, and warn the young man to forget her, he ran forward into the roaring police guns.

1961

Ten miles outside Alexandria he picked up the coast road that ran across the top of the continent through Tunis and Algiers to the transatlantic tunnel at Casablanca, gunned the Jaguar up to 120 and burned along through the cool night air, letting the brine-filled slipstream cut into his six-day tan. Lolling back against the headrest as the palms flicked by, he almost missed the girl in the white raincoat waving from the steps of the hotel at El Alamein, had only three hundred yards to plunge the car to a halt below the rusting neon sign.

'Tunis?' the girl called out, belting the man's raincoat around her trim waist, long black hair in a Left Bank cut over one shoulder.

'Tunis - Casablanca - Atlantic City,' Gregory shouted back, reaching across to the passenger door. She swung a yellow briefcase behind the seat, settling herself among the magazines and newspapers as they roared off. The headlamps picked out a United World cruiser parked under the palms in the entrance to the war cemetery, and involuntarily Gregory winced and floored the accelerator, eyes clamped to the rear mirror until the road was safely empty.

At 90 he slacked off and looked at the girl, abruptly felt a warning signal sound again. She seemed like any demibeatnik, with a long melancholy face and grey skin, but something about her rhythms, the slack facial tone and dead eyes and mouth, made him uneasy. Under a flap of the raincoat was a blue-striped gingham skirt, obviously part of a nurse's uniform, out of character, like the rest of her strange gear. As she slid the magazines into the dashboard locker he saw the home-made bandage around the left wrist.

She noticed him watching her and flashed a too-bright smile, then made an effort at small talk.

'Paris Vogue, Neue Frankfurter, Tel Aviv Express - you've really been moving.' She pulled a pack of Del Montes from the breast pocket of the coat, fumbled unfamiliarly with a large brass lighter. 'First Europe, then Asia, now Africa. You'll run out of continents soon.' Hesitating, she volunteered: 'Carole Sturgeon. Thanks for the lift.'

Gregory nodded, watching the bandage slide around her slim wrist. He wondered which hospital she had sneaked away from. Probably Cairo General, the old-style English uniforms were still worn there. Ten to one the briefcase was packed with some careless salesman's 289 pharmaceutical samples. 'Can I ask where you're going? This is the back end of nowhere.'

The girl shrugged. 'Just following the road. Cairo, Alex, you know - , She added: 'I went to see the pyramids.' She lay back, rolling slightly against his shoulder. 'That was wonderful. They're the oldest things on earth. Remember their boast: "Before Abraham, I was"?'

They hit a dip in the road and Gregory's licence swung out under the steering column. The girl peered down and read it. 'Do you mind? It's a long ride to Tunis. "Charles Gregory, MD - " She stopped, repeating his name to herself uncertainly.

Suddenly she remembered. 'Gregory! Dr Charles Gregory! Weren't you - Muriel Bortman, the President's daughter, she drowned herself at Key West, you were sentenced - ' She broke off, staring nervously at the windshield.

'You've got a long memory,' Gregory said quietly. 'I didn't think anyone remembered.'

'Of course I remember.' She spoke in a whisper. 'They were mad what they did to you.' For the next few minutes she gushed out a long farrago of sympathy, interspersed with disjointed details from her own life. Gregory tried not to listen, clenching the wheel until his knuckles whitened, deliberately forgetting everything as fast as she reminded him.

There was a pause, as he felt it coming, the way it invariably did. 'Tell me, doctor, I hope you forgive me asking, but since the Mental Freedom laws it's difficult to get help, one's got to be so careful - you too, of course...' She laughed uneasily. 'What I really mean is - '

Her edginess drained power from Gregory. '-you need psychiatric assistance,' he cut in, pushing the Jaguar up to 95, eyes swinging to the rear mirror again. The road was dead, palms receding endlessly into the night.

The girl choked on her cigarette, the stub between her fingers a damp mess. 'Well, not me,' she said lamely. 'A close friend of mine. She really needs help, believe me, doctor. Her whole feeling for life is gone, nothing seems to mean anything to her any more.'

Brutally, he said: 'Tell her to look at the pyramids.'

But the girl missed the irony, said quickly: 'Oh, she has. I just left her in Cairo. I promised I'd try to find someone for her.' She turned to examine Gregory, put a hand up to her hair. In the blue desert light she reminded him of the madonnas he had seen in the Louvre two days after his release, when he had run from the filthy prison searching for the most beautiful things in the world, the solemn-faced more-than-beautiful 13-year-olds who had posed for Leonardo and the Bellini brothers. 'I thought perhaps you might know someone He gripped himself and shook his head. 'I don't. For the last three years I've been out of touch. Anyway, it's against the MF laws. Do you know what would happen if they caught me giving psychiatric treatment?'

Numbly the girl stared ahead at the road. Gregory flipped away his cigarette, pressing down on the accelerator as the last three years crowded back, memories he had hoped to repress on his 10,000-mile drive... three years at the prison farm near Marseilles, treating scrofulous farm-workers and sailors in the dispensary, even squeezing in a little illicit depth analysis for the corporal of police who couldn't satisfy his wife, three embittered years to accept that he would never practise again the one craft in which he was fully himself. Trick-cyclist or assuager of discontents, whatever his title, the psychiatrist had now passed into history, joining the necromancers, sorcerers and other practitioners of the black sciences.

The Mental Freedom legislation enacted ten years earlier by the ultraconservative UW government had banned the profession outright and enshrined the individual's freedom to be insane if he wanted to, provided he paid the full civil consequences for any infringements of the law. That was the catch, the hidden object of the MF laws. What had begun as a popular reaction against 'subliminal living' and the uncontrolled extension of techniques of mass manipulation for political and economic ends had quickly developed into a systematic attack on the psychological sciences. Overpermissive courts of law with their condoning of delinquency, pseudo-enlightened penal reformers, 'Victims of society', the psychologist and his patient all came under fierce attack. Discharging their self-hate and anxiety onto a convenient scapegoat, the new rulers, and the great majority electing them, outlawed all forms of psychic control, from the innocent market survey to lobotomy. The mentally ill were on their own, spared pity and consideration, made to pay to the hilt for their failings. The sacred cow of the community was the psychotic, free to wander where he wanted, drooling on the doorsteps, sleeping on sidewalks, and woe betide anyone who tried to help him.

Gregory had made that mistake. Escaping to Europe, first home of psychiatry, in the hope of finding a more tolerant climate, he set up a secret clinic in Paris with six other migr analysts. For five years they worked undetected, until one of Gregory's patients, a tall ungainly girl with a psychogenic stutter, was revealed to be Muriel Bortman, daughter of the UW President-General. The analysis had failed tragically when the clinic was raided; after her death a lavish show trial (making endless play of electric shock apparatus, movies of insulin coma and the testimony of countless paranoids rounded up in the alleyways) had concluded in a three-year sentence.

Now at last he was out, his savings invested in the Jaguar, fleeing Europe and his memories of the prison for the empty highways of North Africa. He didn't want any more trouble.

'I'd like to help,' he told the girl. 'But the risks are too high. All your friend can do is try to come to terms with herself.'

The girl chewed her lip fretfully. 'I don't think she can. Thanks, anyway, doctor.'

***

For three hours they sat back silently in the speeding car, until the lights of Tobruk came up ahead, the long curve of the harbour.

'It's 2 A.M.,' Gregory said. 'There's a motel here. I'll pick you up in the morning.'

After they had gone to their rooms he sneaked back to the registry, booked himself into a new chalet. He fell asleep as Carole Sturgeon wandered forlornly up and down the verandas, whispering out his name.

After breakfast he came back from the sea, found a big United World cruiser in the court, orderlies carrying a stretcher out to an ambulance.

A tall Libyan police colonel was leaning against the Jaguar, drumming his leather baton on the windscreen.

'Ah, Dr Gregory. Good morning.' He pointed his baton at the ambulance. 'A profound tragedy, such a beautiful American girl.'

Gregory rooted his feet in the grey sand, with an effort restrained himself from running over to the ambulance and pulling back the sheet. Fortunately the colonel's uniform and thousands of morning and evening cell inspections kept him safely to attention.

'I'm Gregory, yes.' The dust thickened in his throat. 'Is she dead?'

The colonel stroked his neck with the baton. 'Ear to ear. She must have found an old razor blade in the bathroom. About 3 o'clock this morning.' He headed towards Gregory's chalet, gesturing with the baton. Gregory followed him into the half light, stood tentatively by the bed.

'I was asleep then. The clerk will vouch for that.'

'Naturally.' The colonel gazed down at Gregory's possessions spread out across the bedcover, idly poked the black medical bag.

'She asked you for assistance, doctor? With her personal problems?'

'Not directly. She hinted at it, though. She sounded a little mixed up.'

'Poor child.' The colonel lowered his head sympathetically. 'Her father is a first secretary at the Cairo Embassy, something of an autocrat. You Americans are very stern with your children, doctor. A firm hand, yes, but understanding costs nothing. Don't you agree? She was frightened of him, escaped from the American Hospital. My task is to provide an explanation for the authorities. If I had an idea of what was really worrying her... no doubt you helped her as best you could?'

Gregory shook his head. 'I gave her no help at all, colonel. In fact, I refused to discuss her problems altogether.' He smiled flatly at the colonel. 'I wouldn't make the same mistake twice, would I?'

The colonel studied Gregory thoughtfully. 'Sensible of you, doctor. But you surprise me. Surely the members of your profession regard themselves as a special calling, answerable to a higher authority. Are these ideals so easy to cast off?'

'I've had a lot of practice.' Gregory began to pack away his things on the bed, bowed to the colonel as he saluted and made his way out into the court.

***

Half an hour later he was on the Benghasi road, holding the Jaguar at 100, working off his tension and anger in a savage burst of speed. Free for only ten days, already he had got himself involved again, gone through all the agony of having to refuse help to someone desperately needing it, his hands itching to administer relief to the child but held back by the insane penalties. It wasn't only the lunatic legislation but the people enforcing it who ought to be swept away - Bortman and his fellow oligarchs.

He grimaced at the thought of the cold dead-faced Bortman, addressing the World Senate at Lake Success, arguing for increased penalties for the criminal psychopath. The man had stepped straight out of the 14th-century Inquisition, his bureaucratic puritanism masking two real obsessions: dirt and death. Any sane society would have locked Bortman up for ever, or given him a complete brain-lift. Indirectly Bortman was as responsible for the death of Carole Sturgeon as he would have been had he personally handed the razor blade to her.

After Libya, Tunis. He blazed steadily along the coast road, the sea like a molten mirror on the right, avoiding the big towns where possible. Fortunately they weren't so bad as the European cities, psychotics loitering like stray dogs in the uptown parks, wise enough not to shop-lift or cause trouble, but a petty nuisance on the caf terraces, knocking on hotel doors at all hours of the night.

At Algiers he spent three days at the Hilton, having a new engine fitted to the car, and hunted up Philip Kalundborg, an old Toronto colleague now working in a WHO children's hospital.

Over their third carafe of burgundy Gregory told him about Carole Sturgeon.

'It's absurd, but I feel guilty about her. Suicide is a highly suggestive act, I reminded her of Muriel Bortman's death. Damn it, Philip, I could have given her the sort of general advice any sensible layman would have offered.'

'Dangerous. Of course you were right,' Philip assured him. 'After the last three years who could argue otherwise?'

Gregory looked out across the terrace at the traffic whirling over the neon-lit cobbles. Beggars sat at their pitches along the sidewalk, whining for sous.

'Philip, you don't know what it's like in Europe now. At least 5 per cent are probably in need of institutional care. Believe me, I'm frightened to go to America. In New York alone they're jumping from the roofs at the rate of ten a day. The world's turning into a madhouse, one half of society gloating righteously over the torments of the other. Most people don't realize which side of the bars they are. It's easier for you. Here the traditions are different.'

Kalundborg nodded. 'True. In the villages up-country it's been standard practice for centuries to blind schizophrenics and exhibit them in a cage.