An Uncivilised Election Read online

  “At this stage the unit can be injured by impact and by fire, and would be dangerous if it was damaged,” Travaritch said. “When it’s at this stage you have to be very careful with it. Do you understand?”

  Ronn moistened his lips.

  “Believe me I understand.”

  “Don’t make any mistakes; they could be fatal,” said Travaritch. “Each of the controls has to be operated at this stage – and it is operated by a built-in electronics system. At this stage you press each control – a disk, as you see, not a switch because of the amount of space switches would take up. The essence of it is simplicity and compactness. Watch.”

  A fly buzzed onto his glasses and settled; he brushed it off impatiently, then poised that broken nail over the disks.

  “They are marked – 1, 2,3 and 4. You press them in that order.”

  Ronn began, “Are you sure—” and broke off.

  “If there were any danger now I wouldn’t be doing this, would I?” asked Travaritch. “But if your foreign friends have any sense they will wear protective clothing when they are taking this to pieces – but of course they will. Who are they? – Russian?”

  “How does it work?” asked Ronn.

  Travaritch shrugged. “Suit yourself what you tell me,” he said. “Press in the order, 1, 2, 3 and 4. Now the inner protective lid will rise.”

  It did, and inside the inner shell of the container was a small instrument which looked rather like an electric motor, with a cylindrical body and flywheels at one end.

  “Now we are down to the pile itself,” said Travaritch, moistening his lips. “I invented this, you know. But for me it would be years before any such thing was available. It can be used to generate power in factories and workshops, for the heating of blocks of flats, for almost any purpose. It will create enough electricity to light a small town, and a dozen of these could provide all the power required for a city of a hundred thousand people. Its potential value is enormous. When it is perfected it will solve the power problems of the world.”

  Ronn echoed in a hard voice, “Perfected?”

  “There are refinements to be made yet,” explained Travaritch. “It is not yet absolutely foolproof, but I told you that. If this were to be used without effective precautions, such as being in its insulating case or under other insulated conditions, the radiation from it would cause all the ill-effects which we fear from fallout, plus the immediate danger from exposure to a concentrated radiation.” He pointed to another disk on one side of the outer cover of the little motor. “When the unit is connected – and the installation is quite costly – this outlet controls the power. It is really worked on principles very similar to those of the atomic-powered submarines, but is so much smaller. Aircraft will soon be powered by even smaller units, and—”

  “Tell me about that outlet,” said Ronn.

  The forefinger hovered.

  “That outlet must be sealed off, but the seal has to be broken in order to connect it to the installation. It is sealed now. It can be unsealed by electronic waves or by electric shock – much the same way as in electrical shock therapy – or by a severe blow. That is what makes it dangerous, and why you must handle it carefully. Once both containers are secured nothing can damage this or unseal it – nothing at all. It is dangerous only when it is opened for use. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will close it, and open it again,” said Travaritch.

  Ronn kept clenching his teeth as he watched, and his jaws hurt. Travaritch went through all the processes again, and at last turned to Ronn.

  “Try it.”

  For a few seconds Ronn hesitated, fully aware that Travaritch was grinning at him derisively. He placed his forefinger upon the outer disk and forced himself not to jump when the lid began to lift. He touched the inner disks, 1, 2, 3 and 4, and that lid rose also. He moistened his lips when he saw the unit inside, so neat and compact, metallic grey in colour. Then he closed the inner container and the outer one. When he had finished he wiped sweat off his forehead.

  “Now tell me it isn’t worth fifty thousand pounds,” said Travaritch. “You ought to get a million for it.”

  “You forget something,” said Ronn.

  “Do I?”

  “I’m not going to sell it.”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “I’ve told you from the beginning why I want it,” Ronn said. “It isn’t to sell to Russia or to anyone else. If that’s ever going to be manufactured in big quantities and sold, it’s going to be in England. I’m no traitor.”

  Travaritch said in a husky voice, “You mean you’re serious about using this for your Battle Committee?”

  “Dead serious.”

  “I can’t believe—”

  “You don’t have to believe me,” Ronn said. “All the same, I’m going to use this to show its power. I’m going to give them a demonstration of the danger of nuclear weapons – I’m going to make the police, the politicians, and the press realize what it feels like to know that I can press a button and spread disaster. They won’t dare to touch me. They will be too terrified. The newspapers will have the biggest story of their lives, and the whole world will read about it. That is the only way they will ever come to their senses. But I’m going to make absolutely sure that the police can’t find out before I’m ready to use it. Do you think they’re looking for you yet?”

  “Of course they are. I’ve been here over a week.”

  “Nothing has appeared in the newspapers,” remarked Ronn. “The authorities won’t want to admit that another nuclear scientist has sold out. You wouldn’t have worried if I’d been Khrushchev or Mao himself, would you?”

  “It makes no difference,” Travaritch said. “The Atomic Research Commission pays me a miserly three thousand pounds a year, for work like that. They’re so mean they can’t think in terms of real money. If they paid—”

  He broke off.

  “That’s real money,” Ronn said, lifting several wads of the five-pound notes. “As much as you would get in eight years – if you were going to live eight years.” As he finished he drew a knife out of the case – out of that fortune – and the blade glistened.

  Alarm sounded shrill in Travaritch’s voice. “What do you mean? What—”

  Ronn said, “You’ve just told me what I’ve been afraid of, that you can’t be trusted not to sell your knowledge to some other country. I’m going to make sure you can’t.”

  Travaritch made a wild swing at the knife, missed, struck at the reactor, touched it but did not make it fall.

  “I’ll never sell it to anyone, this is all I want! I swear it!”

  Ronn lunged forward with the knife.

  Ronn wiped the handle of the knife clean. He had touched nothing else except the “typewriter” and the suitcase, and he carried them both out toward the car. In a field a long way off a combine harvester was working. Along the narrow lane a labrador retriever with a glossy black coat sniffed the hedge. Ronn put the two cases in the back of the car and then started off for London. He left the car in an Islington side street, went by bus to Baker Street, and took a taxi to Paddington. He felt quite sure that he had not been seen or followed. He left the reactor unit in the left-luggage office, in its black leather case, and carried away the suitcase containing the money. He went in another taxi to Amanda Tenby’s bank, and took the money in.

  The bank manager, already puzzled by the large amount of cash which his client was drawing, was even more puzzled when Ronn said: “Miss Tenby intended to use this for the campaign, but she finds that it won’t be necessary now – we have enough funds. Will you have it counted, and credit it to her account, please?”

  “By all means,” the bank manager said.

  Ronn left the bank twenty minutes later, took another taxi to Highgate and the garage where he had left his car.

  “It wasn’t the distributor head, it was the pump,” the foreman told him. “I fitted a new one. Was that all right?”

&
nbsp; “Yes, thanks,” said Ronn. He paid the bill in cash, had the car filled up with petrol, and drove round to Braine Street, where a uniformed constable nodded and smiled. Lady Wallis opened the door. She looked as mild and gentle as ever.

  “Is everything all right?” she demanded.

  “Yes,” said Ronn. “I’ve got it. Tell Amanda I’m going to see her right away, will you?”

  “Yes, yes, I will, Daniel. Oh, how wonderful!” She flung her arms round him and hugged him. Drawing back, she went on excitedly: “And it’s going to be the biggest, the very biggest demonstration we have ever had. There’ll be a hundred thousand people there at least, I’m sure.”

  “You were a thousand times right,” breathed Amanda.

  Her soft, supple body was wondrously a woman’s.

  Passion and ecstasy, born in their certainty of the coming triumph, seemed to create a whole new world.

  Afterwards, as she lay and looked at him, and he sat over her, leaning on one elbow, playing with the unexpected firmness of her breast, he said: “I won’t see you again until tonight, my darling. You be at the demonstration. I’ll be there at nine o’clock exactly. I’ll have it with me. It will be interesting to see how the police will behave when they know that if I press a button I can destroy half London, won’t it?”

  17: Loss and Discovery

  Gideon saw the way Kate looked at him, and guessed how much she wished that he would talk, and wondered whether he was making a mistake, whether he ought to confide in her a little. The thought was hardly in his mind before he drove it out. They were in the kitchen, having breakfast. The meal was later than usual because he had been up half the night, part of the time at the Yard and part at Harwell. Now he pushed his chair back, went to her, slid his big hands to her breast, and said: “It’ll work out, darling. Don’t worry.”

  “You’re worried,” she said simply.

  “It’ll pass.”

  “I’ve never seen you so—so down.”

  “I must put on a better show in future.”

  “George.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it to do with the election?”

  “No,” said Gideon, quite positively. “It will all come out in the wash, Kate. Don’t worry about it too much.” He gave her a squeeze, and straightened up. “I must get along. There’s another conference with Scott-Marie at eleven.”

  It’s now half past nine.

  “Is there any hope at all of your getting back early tonight?”

  “I’ll try. Any special reason?”

  “Yes, in a way,” said Kate. “It’s election day at the school, and Malcolm will be dying to tell you all about it. It was Eve of Poll yesterday, and he was so disappointed that you weren’t back. He knows you can’t help it, of course, but—”

  “Doesn’t alter the fact,” Gideon said. “If I can possibly be here, I will. Don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t.” He moved to the door as the telephone bell rang. It should not have made him start, but it did. Kate was frowning with anxiety when he stepped into the hall to answer. “Gideon.” He listened, and then drew in his breath sharply. “Yes, all right. I’m on my way.”

  He rang off, and walked toward the front door, and his wife knew that in those few seconds he had actually forgotten her, the telephone call had affected him so much. She felt that if he walked out without turning round, she would scream.

  He turned round. She went to him. He kissed her cheek lightly, but suddenly she put her arms round him in an embrace which drew their bodies close, and which told him how deep her tension was.

  He went off …

  He was at the Yard twenty-five minutes later, went straight to his office and found Ripple there with Lemaitre. Lemaitre now knew the essentials of the Travaritch situation; it would have been impossible to keep it from him. Ripple was looking flabby and miserable. Gideon could almost hear Lemaitre on the telephone, saying: “Ripple says there’s a new development which makes things even worse.”

  Ripple said glumly, “Hallo, George.”

  “Half a minute,” Gideon said. He hung his hat on a peg and rounded the desk. “What’s in, apart from this, Lem?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle, except—”

  “George!” protested Ripple. “There’s nothing half as important as this. Everything else can wait.”

  “In a minute. Except what, Lem?”

  “Parsons says he needs ten minutes with you.”

  “Tell him to come along at a quarter to eleven. I can give him the ten minutes then, no more.” Gideon sat down. “Take a pew,” he said to Ripple, and his right hand slid into his pocket for the comfort of the smooth, shiny bowl of his pipe. “Even worse, you say?”

  “Much worse,” said Ripple. “Not—not from our angle, perhaps – this isn’t something they’ll say is our fault. But it’s bad. They’ve just reported that one of those portable units is missing along with Travaritch.”

  “Just reported? Why, it’s a week since he disappeared!”

  “Just reported to us might be better,” said Ripple. “From what I can gather, the loss wasn’t discovered right away. Travaritch was assembling one of these things with some other chaps. One has been on sick leave, another on holiday. It’s just like these bigheads not to be sure how far the experiments had gone or how many models they’d finished. There were five, anyhow. Now there are four. Travaritch must have smuggled the fifth out.” Ripple sat with his chin on his chest – three chins, framing his face, making him look like a despondent Buddha. “Once they knew it was gone, they told the director and, once he was sure, he wanted to tell the Prime Minister, but the Prime Minister was in Berlin. They pussied around with it from minister to minister, waiting for the Prime Minister to approve that we should be told. The theory is that when we find Travaritch we’ll find the pile itself, and we couldn’t be looking harder for Travaritch.”

  Gideon said, “Fair enough, I suppose.” He felt very, very old. “A whole atomic unit missing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not just microfilm or documents.”

  “No.”

  “My God.” It was a cry of despair.

  “I know how you feel,” said Ripple. “Well, that’s it. I’ve told the Old Man. You won’t be even a split second late, will you?” Ripple really meant: Need you see Parsons?

  “I won’t be late,” Gideon promised.

  Ripple went out, the seat of his brown trousers baggy and shiny. Lemaitre, who could never be in deep gloom for long, looked at Gideon with an eyebrow raised and a half grin on his face.

  “Looks like an elephant who’s lost his memory, doesn’t he?”

  Gideon actually laughed.

  He glanced through the reports on his desk perfunctorily, yet sufficiently to convince himself that Lemaitre was right and that nothing else of real importance had come in. Three more candidates had been robbed the night before, and that racket was assuming the proportions of a major scandal which could do the Yard a lot of harm. There was a long report from Parsons about the situation he was so anxious to talk about, and Gideon did not have time to read it carefully. There was a note in Lemaitre’s very fine handwriting, pinned to the outside of the file on the Quack case. It read: Dr. Fairweather now out of danger. So the young fool Wilcox wouldn’t be charged with murder, and he could think himself lucky. The harshness of Gideon’s reaction was partly due to the overriding anxiety. He kept thinking: A whole unit smuggled out. There would be some kind of excuse for its being possible – there always was. On top of the file from the Cornish skeleton case was a note:

  Skeleton now believed to be that of a Mrs. Myrtle Brown, of Penzance, who disappeared at the same time as her husband seven years ago.

  Gideon made a note: Is Curson looking for husband?

  There was a tap at the door, and Parsons came in.

  “Morning, George. Glad you could spare a minute.”

  “Wish I could spare an hour,” said Gideon. “Things are going all right, aren’t they?”


  “As far as I can see, yes,” said Parsons, almost reluctantly. “I’ve only got one real worry. Shall I run through the odds and ends first?”

  “We’ve nine minutes left.”

  “Quatrain’s four candidates outside London are all withdrawing, but Quatrain himself is going through with his campaign. There’s guts for you. There isn’t any reason now to think that the burglaries at the candidates’ homes are political. There have been twenty-one altogether, and nine Conservatives, six Liberal, five Labour, and one Independent have been the victims. All fairly well-off, too. The biggest loss was Talmad’s, Quatrain’s opponent, but he can afford it.”

  “How much?”

  “Several hundred in cash – election fighting fund contributions. He hadn’t checked it and says he just hasn’t had time to take it to the bank – and about a thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery, a camera and some binoculars. We’re putting a call out for stolen cameras and binoculars – we know the most likely places to find them. There have been no major disturbances at meetings. Now and again the Battle Committee boys get really vicious with a candidate they don’t like, but there’s no violence, no breaches of the peace. Just questions – and the door-to-door canvassing.”

  “By the F.F.P. people?”

  “Yes.”

  “What angle?”

  “The horror of what it would be like if a bomb did go off. They reduce it to personal terms – what it would do to you. On the face of that it’s no more than the Civil Defence people keep saying, when they’re trying to strengthen local units, but the F.F.P. people are really hammering it home. I’ve talked to most of the divisional chaps and twenty provincial chief constables, and there’s a fairly general agreement.”

  “What is it?” Gideon glanced at his watch: there were four minutes to go.