Mr. Behrens adjusted his glasses, aligned his left foot against the telltale, raised the heavy brass dart until it was level with his eye and flipped it. As it left his hand the door of the public bar of the Lamb opened and a man came in.
Mr. Behrens’ opponents said, “Double four. Nice shot.”
The newcomer said, “Good God, if it isn’t Mr. Behrens.”
Mr. Behrens came out of the trance which affects a dart player trying for his final double, blinked and said, “I’ve got a feeling I ought to know your face.”
“No reason you should,” said the newcomer. He was a man in his early forties with hair already thinning and greying, a long thick nose and shrewd brown eyes. “When you last saw me I was fifteen and spotty.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Mr. Behrens. “Wait a minute. Talbot. No. Tabor.”
“Right, sir. Alan Tabor. And I hope I didn’t put you off your throw.”
“Not half you didn’t,” said his opponent. “If a bomb went off in the next room, he’d still get his double four.”
He put down the half pint of beer which was his tribute to Mr. Behrens’ skill. He didn’t really feel sour about it. But he was the local champion and for a week now he had been trying, with little success, to win a beer from Mr. Behrens. “I must be off. See you this evening, I hope.”
“You shall have your revenge this evening,” said Mr. Behrens. And then to Tabor, “Have you come in here for a drink, or to eat? If you’re going to have lunch, perhaps you’d care to join me? Or you may have people with you? I take it you’re motoring.”
“I’m alone,” said Tabor. “I’d love to have lunch with you. And I haven’t a car, I walked.”
“Then you must have walked a long way,” said Mr. Behrens. “Because there are few lonelier pubs in England than this one. That’s one of the things I like about it.”
“I come out here quite a lot from Ravenshoe,” said Tabor. “It’s a bit bleak now in winter. But you ought to see it in spring and summer.”
“I’ve seen it in spring and in summer,” said Mr. Behrens. “I’m one of Ruby’s most regular customers. Isn’t that right, Ruby?”
“That’s right,” said Ruby. “Spring and autumn. Like the rates. What’ll it be? There’s hot steak-and-kidney pie or cold beef.”
Resident guests were a rare occurrence at the Lamb, so Mr. Behrens and Mr. Tabor had the coffee room to themselves.
“You’re at the refinery, of course,” said Mr. Behrens. “When you mentioned Ravenshoe the penny ought to have dropped. After I had failed to teach you the rudiments of Latin, you went off and specialised in science, didn’t you? And got a science scholarship at Oxford?”
“They didn’t call it a scholarship,” said Tabor. There was an edge of bitterness in his voice, “Words like ‘scholarship’ are reserved for respectable subjects like Latin and Greek. But it came to the same thing – other people paid for my education. The odd thing was that the further I got, the more money people seemed willing to splash out.”
“Invest,” said Mr. Behrens with a crinkled smile. “Invest. Where did you go after Oxford?”
“Back to Leipzig. After that I was going to Moscow – but fate willed otherwise.”
“Of course. That would have been 1939. A pity.”
Mr. Behrens toyed with the idea of asking him what he had done during the war, but decided that it might be tactless. Instead he said, “I’ve always heard that Ravenshoe was an interesting place. You produce more than oil and petrol, don’t you?”
“Oil and petrol are almost a side line. We sell enough to pay our overhead. I suppose you wouldn’t care to look over it? You were always rather scornful of science, as I remember.”
“That was when I was twenty-five and you were seventeen,” said Mr. Behrens. “Our respective outlooks may have developed in the interim.”
“It really is rather a wonderful place,” said Tabor. “We can turn out end products which even five years ago no one would have associated with crude oil. Plastics, nylon stockings, paint, explosives.”
“I am prepared to admit,” said Mr. Behrens, “that modern science is capable of almost anything. But it has not turned out anything quite like Ruby’s, or her mother’s, steak-and-kidney pie.”
He regarded with a shade more than avuncular approval the trim but well-developed figure of the eighteen-year-old daughter of the house, who was approaching them with a loaded and steaming tray.
“That’s the Primary Distillation Unit,” said Tabor, pointing to something which looked like a church tower under repair. “We could climb the scaffolding if you want, but you won’t see any more from the top. The temperature’s kept constant at one thousand degrees – that’s nothing out of the way, of course, but it’s quite hot as refining processes go.”
He raked open one of the boiler-plate hatches and Mr. Behrens peered into an antechamber of the inferno. Gas, distilled from the oil, was carried around through pipes and ignited in a brick-kiln oven. The flames glowed white at the centre of the heat, tawny-red and orange around the outer edges. The roaring was still in his ears as he moved away.
“So you don’t call that hot?” he said.
“Chemically, no. We can produce ten times that heat. But, as a matter of fact, in a lot of ways it’s too hot. You see – look here, how much of this are you really understanding?”
“I’m with you so far, I think,” said Mr. Behrens. “You heat up the crude oil and distill off different products with different boiling points. Gas at the top, then petrol, after that paraffin and diesel – and asphalt at the bottom. And the whole process is commonly known as ‘cracking.’ Right?”
“Correct,” said Tabor. “But the trouble is that you can do a lot of harm to the crude oil if you have to heat it as high as one thousand degrees centigrade. On the other hand – it won’t crack at less.”
Mr. Behrens said, though whether jocularly or not it was hard to detect, “The Nazis had just the same problem, I believe. When interrogating prisoners, I mean. With some of them they had to use so much force to crack them that the prisoner disintegrated in the process.”
They were walking away from the distillation unit toward an affair shaped like a lopsided hourglass, with trimmings. Tabor checked for a moment in his stride, looked sideways at Mr. Behrens and said, with a shade of hesitancy in his voice, “That’s an odd analogy.”
They walked for a few steps in silence, and Tabor added, “Chemically, we overcome the difficulty in rather an ingenious way. We mix a catalyst with the fuel – usually china clay – then the mixture can be cracked at much lower temperatures. That’s the machine that does it”
Mr. Behrens stared at the squat apparatus. It had, he thought, an evil look. “I’ve heard oil-men talk about a ‘cat cracker,’” he said. “I’d no idea that was what it was.”
“There’s not a lot to see,” said Tabor. “No moving parts. No action. No excitement. It’s rather an efficient piece of apparatus, all the same.”
“It has a sort of feminine, yet feline, look about it, hasn’t it?” said Mr. Behrens. “I wasn’t only referring to its shape – although there’s something in that too. I meant its general appearance of dangerous docility. One has the feeling that inside those deceptive curves, processes of unsuspected ferocity are taking place.”
“You’re an odd chap,” said Tabor. But there was an undercurrent of affection in his voice.
“I should never have made a scientist,” agreed Mr. Behrens. “I am far too fanciful.”
A week later, Mr. Behrens and Mr. Tabor both happened to go up to London. Mr. Behrens went by train. He had an appointment with his bank manager. Tabor went by car. He also had an appointment.
Tabor parked his car in a side street near Paddington Station, walked back down the Harrow Road and turned into Saint Mary’s Terrace. This runs up to the canal, sometimes hopefully referred to as London’s Little Venice; on this bleak winter’s day, Saint Mary’s Terrace was an empty stretch of road beside a dirty reach of water.
There was only one human being in sight. He was a huge man, further enlarged by a tent-like overcoat, with a red face and a corona of white hair which ruffled in the breeze. Tabor hurried toward him, both hands outstretched. The big man awaited him impassively.
“Paulus!”
“My dear Alan.”
They shook hands warmly, Tabor looking into the older man’s eyes as if there was some reassurance he hoped to find there.
“I remember this place from my youth in London,” said Professor Paulus Mann, “When I suggested meeting you here, I visualised us sitting side by side on a bench watching the ducks in the canal, and the pretty barges going up and down. I had forgotten the time of year and the weather.”
“There’s a pub down there,” said Tabor. “Or there was ten years ago. They used to have an open fire in the saloon bar too.”
“Splendid,” said the professor. “We will sit all afternoon and talk.”
“Not in an English pub, you won’t,” said Tabor.
At about the same moment, Mr. Behrens was seated in the private office of Mr. Fortescue, the manager of the Westminster branch of the London and Home Counties Bank. The room was, in Mr. Behrens’ considered opinion, one of the most appalling in London. It seemed to have been designed by a sanitary engineer, being panelled – if such was the correct word – in three shades of brown porcelain. An elaborate chandelier sprouted from a coffee-coloured porcelain rosette; flowers in golden porcelain patterned the walls; and an enormous chocolate-coloured porcelain over-mantel lowered above a tiny fire.
In front of the fire stood an old, plain, brown desk, and on the desk stood a photograph of Mrs. Fortescue in Court dress, and two telephones, neither of which was connected with a public line. Mr. Behrens had once heard Mr. Fortescue keep the Home Secretary waiting on one while he spoke to the Foreign Secretary on the other.
Fortescue now placed the tips of his fingers together in a manner much approved by bank managers of the old school, and said, “It’s an extremely delicate situation. You do see that, don’t you?”
“Oh, I do,” said Mr. Behrens.
“It is not a case in which direct or forceful methods are likely to achieve anything but disaster. It is not a problem which would appeal to Mr. Calder. That is why we have turned to you.”
Mr. Behrens was not sure whether to take this as a compliment or not. He contented himself with merely saying, “Yes.”
“Was Tabor at all suspicious?”
“I don’t think so. No. Fortunately he recognised me first. That was a great help. He was in my class at Leipzig High School in 1934. I taught him Latin actually. Not science.”
“And he would find out, if he chose to inquire, that you were an habitue of the Lamb.”
“I have been using it for over a year. And so, incidentally, has he. We might have met at any time. It just happened to be last Saturday.”
“We can only hope,” said Mr. Fortescue, “that we are not too late.”
There was a touch of genuine sadness in his voice.
“Professor Mann is in London. He arrived last night. Tabor motored up to town this morning. I have no doubt they are deep in talk now, even as we are.”
“Did you have the professor followed?” asked Mr. Behrens.
“Certainly not,” said Mr. Fortescue. “Certainly not. As I told you, this situation is extremely delicate. There is, on the face of it, nothing at all – apart, one would hope, from a certain natural patriotism – to prevent Tabor leaving this country and working for our enemies. We are not at war. And Tabor is not in government employment. Nor is he subject to the Official Secrets Act. Even his patriotism might work either way. His mother was English, but his father was German.”
“But he is too good a scientist for us to lose him.”
Mr. Fortescue was not a man given to extravagant statement. So when he said, “He is one of the ablest scientists in the world,” the words conveyed more to Mr. Behrens than an elaborate eulogy.
“He has specialised in cosmoelectronics, which is the electronics of the universe. It is a study which bears the same relationship to electronics as electronics does to old-fashioned electricity. It is almost more a logic than a science. There are no blueprints. The handful of men whose minds are capable of understanding and studying it make up their own rules, draw their own charts and speak their own language.”
“And Professor Paulus Mann is one of them?”
“He was a pioneer. Tabor studied under him at Leipzig. I do not suppose that the professor would claim to be in the front rank now. Nevertheless it was a very astute move sending him over here. Tabor will listen to him if he will listen to no one else.”
“I remember Tabor at school,” said Mr. Behrens. “A very withdrawn boy. I used to imagine that he was bullied, but in retrospect I doubt it. He was too self-contained to make a good subject for bullies. A natural enemy of the establishment. Do you think we have any chance of keeping him?”
“By force, no chance at all. If we keep him, it will have to be by conviction.”
“Are you suggesting,” said Mr. Behrens, “that I should corner the poor young man and lecture him on the Western way of life?”
“It may come to that,” said Mr. Fortescue seriously. “Much will depend on what success Professor Mann is having with him now. I must ask you to stay within reach of a telephone for a while.”
On his way out Mr. Behrens paused for a moment in the anteroom to admire the Landseer painting which hung on the wall. It was an allegorical study showing Thrift conducting a tug of war with Extravagance. Thrift seemed to be winning, but only just.
It was almost exactly three weeks later, at four o’clock in the afternoon, that the call came.
“He has thrown up his job at the refinery,” said the thin voice of Mr. Fortescue. “He did not even offer notice. He told them he was going, and he simply walked out.”
“That’s bad. Where is he now?”
“He’s taken his stuff out to that public house – the one you mentioned.”
“The Lamb. Yes. Is there any reason to think that he’s actually contemplating leaving the country?”
“No direct evidence. But Professor Mann is flying back to Düsseldorf on Monday. And he has booked two seats.”
“If Tabor is at the Lamb,” said Mr. Behrens, looking out of the window at the snow, which had started to fall again, “he might not get to London Airport all that easily on Monday.”
“We can’t rely on his being snow-bound. You’ll have to go over and talk to him.”
Mr. Behrens had received some steep instruction from Mr. Fortescue from time to time, but this seemed to him to be nearly the steepest. He opened his mouth to protest, but shut it again. All the objections which were occurring to him would already have occurred to all superiors. If this really was the only possible course, slight though the chance of success might be, it would have to be pursued to the end.
He said, “I shall have to tell some story to account for my arrival.”
“Tell no story at all. Explain exactly who you are, and what you are doing.”
“You think that is wise?”
“Certainly. The other side are not fools. They will have warned him against you already.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Behrens. “Very well. I’ll see what I can do.”
His aunt, with whom he shared the Old Rectory at Lamperdown, said crossly, “You can’t be thinking of going out in weather like this.”
“The call of duty,” said Mr. Behrens. “One of my pupils in difficulties.”
“Fiddlesticks,” said the old lady, who was no fool. “It’s one of your jobs. I suppose Mr. Calder’s in it with you. And that dog of his.”
“No,” said Mr. Behrens sadly. “I fear this is something I have to do on my own.”
It was not a pleasant drive. As dusk fell, the snow thickened, crusting the windshield and collecting on the blades of the wiper. After a few miles Mr. Behrens had to stop his car and get out with a cloth to clear away the accumulation. On the first occasion he was incautious enough to do this on a slight upgradient, and found when he tried to restart that his wheels were unable to grip the road, which had frozen under fresh-fallen snow. He succeeded eventually in sliding backward onto a level patch, and finally got going with a wild scurry. After that, he chose his stopping places more carefully.
It was nearly eight o’clock when he saw the welcoming lights of the Lamb. The last hour had been a nightmare of crawling along frozen humpbacked roads which dropped on either side into black ditches. There was nothing amiss with Mr. Behrens’ nerves, and he had unexpected reserves of stamina in his thin body, but he could not refrain from a sigh of relief as he climbed out of the driving seat.
Ruby was in the empty public bar, polishing glasses. “Not that we’ll get any customers on a night like this,” she said. “We got your telephone message. I put a hot bottle in your bed.”
“Good girl,” said Mr. Behrens. “Is Mr. Tabor here?”
“He’s in the coffee room. I told him you were coming.”
“Did he seem to be surprised?”
“No. He said he’d been expecting you’d be over.”
“I’ll join him in a moment. And make us up a good fire. We may be sitting up late tonight. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
For a moment Ruby’s brown eyes rested on him shrewdly. He wondered if she had any idea what was going on. Tabor had been alone in the place for some days, and a man who is unhappy and undecided would confide in any sympathetic listener.
“Don’t you go keeping him up late,” said Ruby. “He’s got a lot on his mind.”
“So have I,” said Mr. Behrens sadly. “So have I.”
“Can you honestly, and in all conscience,” said Tabor, “give me a single reason why I shouldn’t go?”
Mr. Behrens got up, selected three more lumps of coal from the nearly empty scuttle and placed them on the fire.
“I’ve spent the best part of four hours giving you reasons,” he said. He had forced himself to keep any traces of weariness, any touch of exasperation, out of his voice. The fact that Tabor had been willing to argue at all must in itself be a hopeful sign. His mind was not yet closed.
“And what do they amount to? That the world is divided into two halves, the West and the East. The rights and the wrongs. The Goods and the Bads – like a film.”
“It’s not quite as simple as that—”
“You’re arguing a prepared case, like a barrister who’s been briefed. I accept that you’ve got your job to do – you’re acting on orders. You’ve been very frank with me about that. But it doesn’t make your case any stronger.”
“If I didn’t believe what I’ve been telling you,” said Mr. Behrens flatly, “I shouldn’t have bothered to come out on a night like this.”
“All right,” said Tabor. “I take that back. I’ll accept that you, personally, believe what you’re saying. But that’s because you’ve been conditioned to believe it. Very few people in the West are capable of thinking internationally any more. But if you could only get outside your traditional English skin for a moment, shake off the moss, clear away the cobwebs, you’d see what everyone else has been seeing for a long time now – that you’re finished. You’re dying on your feet. Every symptom of degeneracy is there. Softness, selfishness, fear. The sort of softness that’s bringing up a whole generation to think that it can do what it likes, without facing unpleasant consequences. For God’s sake, what sort of mess do you think they’ll make of the world after an education like that!”
He paused as if inviting comment, but Mr. Behrens found nothing to say. He wasn’t particularly hopeful himself of the generation which was growing up around him.
“And for selfishness – read your newspaper. Fatuous go-slow strikes, when now’s the moment, if ever, to be going fast. Mad industrial disputes, which not only do neither side any good, but which both sides know in advance will do nothing but harm. Do you think they’re working according to the rule in China today?”
“I think they probably are,” said Mr. Behrens. “Only it happens to be rather a different sort of rule.”
Tabor ignored this. His knuckles showed white as he gripped the arms of the chair.
“And fear,” he said. “The smell of fear is everywhere. It rises like the steam off their backs, where they squat in the rain in Trafalgar Square. Squat like aborigines, rocking and moaning, in front of some juju they are trying to propitiate.”
Mr. Behrens thought, he’s arguing with himself. And the real trouble is, he doesn’t know whether he wants to win or lose. Half of him’s on my side. One good pull, and I’ll have him.
He said, “Aren’t you overlooking one thing? And isn’t it the one thing that matters? I’ll take your own example. I haven’t much to say for the way we bring up children. We used to be a lot too strict with them, and nowadays we’re a great deal too easy. We’re about due for a swing of the pendulum in the other direction. But as for strikes and antinuclear demonstrations – we could, in theory, stop them if we wanted to. The Executive has the power. It could break strikes with troops and break up demonstrations with mounted policemen. But in practice, it can’t and it doesn’t, because we value freedom above expediency. It’s taken us four hundred years to get there, and I’m not prepared to abandon the position just because another country has tried a new system and found that it paid quick dividends.”
“Freedom,” said Tabor. “You’re prepared to accept inefficiency, selfishness, slackness, lack of purpose, timidity and greed – provided you have on the other side of the scales a fictitious thing called freedom.”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Behrens. “And it isn’t fictitious. If you’d ever lived in a police state, you’d know that.”
“What do you mean by a police state?”
Mr. Behrens was desperately tired. But he could feel that Tabor was even more tired. If he had not been, he would not perhaps have presented him with such an opening.
“In Belgrade last year,” Behrens said, “a meeting was called. Not a political meeting. The question to be discussed was the formation of a new national theatre. The government objected. They did not ban the meeting; they simply gave it out that they did not approve. Some hundreds of people came. Many because they had not heard of the ban. Some from idle curiosity, or even by mistake, because they happened to be passing and stopped to listen. As soon as the meeting started, the police blocked all exits. No one was allowed to leave until his name and address had been taken and confirmed. For some days nothing happened. Then the police visited every house on the list – every house – there were hundreds, so it took time – and broke every window in every house. No one of course dared to stop them, but one or two people did ask them why they were doing it, and the police said, ‘You make trouble for us, we make trouble for you.’ It was mid-winter, so it wasn’t amusing. That’s what I mean by a police state.”
There was a long silence. Then Tabor said, “That’s just a story you’ve heard. It may not be true.”
“I assure you it is true,” said Mr. Behrens. “I was at the meeting myself.”
Tabor started to pace up and down the room. Mr. Behrens said to himself, “I believe that’s fixed him.”
It was at this moment that he heard the telephone ringing out in the hall. Such was his preoccupation that it could have been ringing for some time. Tabor seemed to be unconscious of it, too.
The ringing stopped. There was a pause. Then the door opened and Ruby came in. She was wearing a quilted dressing gown and a grey woollen scarf around her neck, on which her tousled head rested like a single cut flower. She looked indignant.
“If you’re going to sit up nattering till three in the morning you might take your own telephone calls.”
They both stared at her. Mr. Behrens had the irrelevant thought that when girls displayed their figures they often looked absurd. It was when they hid them that they always became attractive.
“It’s for you,” she said to Tabor. “Someone from London.”
Tabor followed her out into the hall. Mr. Behrens put the last of the coal onto the fire and tried to shake off a sense of impending disaster.
It was a long five minutes before Tabor came back into the room. When he did so, Mr. Behrens knew before he even opened his mouth, that something of decisive importance had happened.
Tabor said, “This evening your police, your trustworthy, nonpolitical, judicially controlled police, arrested Professor Mann on a trumped-up charge of smuggling. He’s in a cell in Cannon Row police station now.”
Mr. Behrens could think of nothing to say.
“It looks as if I shall have a busy day tomorrow. I’m going to bed.” Tabor went out again, shutting the door quietly but firmly behind him.
Mr. Behrens sat for a long time by the dying fire. He had no idea how it had been worked, but it seemed to him that the opposition was still a step ahead of them.
Presently, he heard the sound which he had been unconsciously waiting for. The telephone was ringing. It was Mr. Fortescue.
“Has Tabor heard the news?”
“About Professor Mann? Yes.”
“Somebody telephoned him?”
“About half an hour ago. It came at a most unfortunate moment.”
“It was a clever piece of timing,” said Mr. Fortescue. He sounded as if he were discussing the French defence to an attack on the Queen’s rook side.
“It was certainly effective,” said Mr. Behrens. “How did they do it?”
“Someone from their embassy telephoned Scotland Yard and told them that Professor Mann had offered one of their embassy servants eight ounces of cocaine, for payment in dollars. And that he was leaving England by air tomorrow. They had to do something, of course. The professor was uncooperative. I believe he spat in the superintendent’s eye. So they pulled him in. He’ll be released first thing tomorrow morning – with an apology, of course.”
“I’m afraid the harm will have been done,” said Mr. Behrens. He was tired, more tired than he could ever remember feeling in his life before, and something of this must have reached Mr. Fortescue.
“I am sure you have done all that anyone could have done,” he said and then, as if embarrassed by this unusual display of sentiment, rang off.
Mr. Behrens crept upstairs to bed. There were only two guest rooms. He had to pass Tabor’s door to get to his own. The door was ajar, and Mr. Behrens could not help seeing, in the bright moonlight which was streaming through the window, that Tabor’s bed was empty and unused.
“He can’t have gone already,” he thought. “Or if he has, he won’t get very far in this snow.”
But he was too tired to worry any further about it. He fell into bed and to sleep. . .
When Mr. Behrens woke next morning the sun was shining. He crept out of bed and hobbled to the window. He felt as stiff as if the long struggle he had engaged in the night before had been physical.
Outside he looked at a white world. Five miles away the Ravenshoe Refinery stood out black and sharp against the snowy hillside. He could even see, in clear silhouette, the curious outline of the catalytic cracker. It seemed to be grinning at him.
As he turned away, there was a knock at the door. Behrens snatched up a dressing gown and shouted, “Come in.”
It was Ruby.
“It’s nearly ten o’clock,” she said. “Dad sent me up to see if you wanted any breakfast.”
“I’ll be down in five minutes,” said Mr. Behrens. “Is Mr. Tabor up yet?”
When Ruby failed to answer, Mr. Behrens looked up and saw that her face was scarlet.
He said, “I’m afraid we sat up very late last night. I’m sorry if we kept you up as well.”
Ruby sat down on the bed and started to cry, softly, Mr. Behrens, being a sensible man, said nothing. He sat down beside her, and put his arms around her.
“Extraordinary,” said Mr. Fortescue.
“It was the catalytic process,” said Mr. Behrens. “Tabor explained it all to me that day at the refinery. A substance will stand up to any amount of heat and pressure by itself. But add one simple outside ingredient and it will dissolve at once. In an oil refinery, I understand, the thing they use is china clay.”
“And in this case, it was Ruby.”
“She’s a very nice girl,” said Mr. Behrens. “They’re getting married next week, and I’ve promised to be best man. He’s taking back his job at the refinery until he can get some research work.”
“And he’s entirely changed his mind about leaving us?”
“Oh, entirely. Ruby doesn’t approve of Europe.”
“I see,” said Mr. Fortescue.