Saturn Over the Water (28 page)

Then I had to explain about poor Rother all over again, and tell Joe what Rother had told me about him.

‘Then you know some of it,’ Joe said when I’d finished. ‘They were introducing these new drugs into my food of course. But what helped to break me down was the fact that things were happening that
couldn
’
t
be happening, unless everything I’d believed was wrong. This is what really shook me. You see, I bought a very sensitive microphone from a drunken young radio man called Freece – ’

I had to interrupt him. ‘I know you did, Joe. He told me about it. You used it to listen in to some very high-powered private talk, didn’t you? Isn’t that how you came to remember those names on that last page of the letter you sent from Osparas to Isabel? Your famous list – that’s how I’ve always thought of it – the only key there was to this Wavy Eight mystery. My God – that list – I had to learn it by heart – and if you knew the number of times I’ve turned it over in my mind – wondering what the devil it all meant! Sorry, Joe. Go on.’

‘Rother told me I had to finish the letter at once,’ said Joe. ‘So then I put down all I could remember. But what happened originally was this. Just after I bought that special F.B.I. type of listening-set from Freece, Steglitz came from Australia, von Emmerick from Osparas, evidently for an important meeting. Remember I was already very suspicious. Just as Semple had been, and Rother and Barsac. We all felt there was something queer going on behind this Arnaldos Institute. Now I don’t know if you remember, Tim, but there was a big tree overlooking the balcony in Arnaldos’s house. I climbed that tree while they were having dinner, then fixed that pointing mike so that it could easily pick up anything that was said out on the balcony. They began talking out there after dinner, and I heard everything. But don’t forget, Tim, that after that, and before I partly recovered at Osparas, able at least to write a letter at last, I’d been given the treatment. They were very clever. Not too much at a time – in your food – and every dose you took made it easier for them to give you the next. I don’t even remember being taken from the Institute to Osparas. So although I was all right when I was listening in to that talk on the balcony, I forgot most of it afterwards – just remembered the names of people and places you saw on that page I wrote. But there’s one thing I
do
remember, Tim.’ He stopped to give me an appealing look again. ‘The most important voice I heard – the one that said something about the old astrologer on the mountain – didn’t seem to belong to anybody there. It was just a voice. I’ll admit I couldn’t see properly, up that tree, but I could place all the other voices, knew who was talking. But not this voice, the one they had to listen to. It might have been coming to them through some sort of radio – but that’s not the impression I had. And this is one of the things that began to pull me apart, Tim. Things were happening that
couldn
’
t
happen, not in the world I understood. That wouldn’t worry you – ’

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘I’m just a painter, Joe. I’m one of the woolly-minded, I am. As far as I know, we live in a very large, complicated and mysterious universe – and this world’s part of it – so I’m not prepared to say what can happen and what can’t. It’s extraordinary that men have been able to make H-bombs. It’s even more extraordinary that they should
want
to. So what goes on? I don’t pretend to know.’

Then we had company, which was reasonable enough, because all my explaining had taken some time, and Mrs Delor couldn’t be kept any longer out of her own sitting-room. We’d already switched one light on, but now she switched on the rest of them and drew the curtains. We were going to eat soon, she said. Barsac came in with the Polish woman Joe had mentioned, Mrs Baro. She was a tiny woman, white-haired, fragile, with a beak of a nose and staring bright round eyes – a bird type if there ever was one. She had a very thick foreign accent and wasn’t easy to understand, and the only way of suggesting her talk that wouldn’t be tedious is to put it in short disconnected phrases.

As soon as I’d been introduced, she laid a delicate claw on my right wrist and looked clean through me. ‘You worry. Someone you love. A girl.’

‘Yes, Mrs Baro, she ought to be here and she isn’t.’ Then I wondered, for the first time, why Rosalia hadn’t thought of telephoning.

‘No, no, no,’ said Mrs Baro, still touching my wrist and looking through me. ‘No telephone here.’ Evidently a thought-reader too.

‘My husband refused to have one here in the bungalow,’ said Mrs Delor smiling. ‘So he would not be tempted to do business.’

‘The girl,’ said Mrs Baro, ‘has many different strong feelings. She speaks on telephone. A long way. Much business. Also she thinks of you. She is in love.’ She let go of my wrist, sat down and closed her eyes. ‘I see later. No more now.’ Then apparently she wasn’t with us.

‘Look here, Tim,’ said Joe, coming closer. ‘This is Rosalia Arnaldos, isn’t it? Are you sure you can trust her?’

‘Yes, Joe. So turn it up.’ I scowled at him.

‘If she is in love with him,’ said Mrs Delor cheerfully, ‘then of course he can trust her. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand women, Mr Farne.’

‘I don’t understand women,’ said Joe. ‘I’m beginning to wonder what I
do
understand. I don’t live in a reasonable world any longer.’

‘We never did,’ said Barsac, in his deep melancholy voice. ‘We only thought we did, Joe. Oh – and here is something. You remember Mrs Baro saw all those flames – a great fire? Listen to this, Bedford. We have just heard this news on the radio. Yesterday the Steglitz place at Charoke was almost totally destroyed by fire. Nobody was killed, the radio told us, but all the valuable equipment and research records have gone. Ah – what a loss,’ he added grimly, ‘to Australian salesmanship and personnel management! That poor good man – Dr Steglitz!’

‘I think Mitchell must have done that,’ I said. ‘He told me he couldn’t leave with us because there was something he had to do. I think he stayed just long enough to set the place on fire. By the way, who
is
Mitchell? He gave Rosalia your telephone number, Barsac. How did he get in touch with you?’

‘One day he came to the lab,’ said Barsac. ‘Then we spent an evening together. I thought he was one of them. But that did not matter. They have secrets to hide from me. I have no secrets to hide from them. I could not lose. But then the third time we met he told me he was working against them though of course they think he is in their service. But
who
he is –
what
he is – I cannot tell you. And Mrs Baro cannot tell you. She cannot
see
him.’

‘I think he does not allow,’ said Mrs Baro calmly. ‘Like the old astrologer. The one who goes to the mountain. He too does not allow.’

‘We must eat something now,’ said Mrs Delor, getting up. ‘Please come to the other room. Everything is ready.’

It was a very small dining-room, with nothing modern or
boutique
-style about it. The walls were dark crimson, the furniture sombre and heavy. It was stuffy, a bit smelly. The old provincial bourgeois element in the Delors had been let loose in here. We seemed a rum little gang round that table – the Baro bird, plump smiling Mrs Delor, Barsac with his sunken eyes and vast cheek-bones, Joe’s rather wooden square face and indignant English eyes, me too whatever I looked like – dipping into the rich soup and helping ourselves to the heavily-garlicked salad, all the while trying to disentangle our ideas about a secret world conspiracy that might change all human history. I was visited again by the queer feeling I’d had while staring out of the window earlier, that a corner had been turned leading away from familiar reality, that another dimension was being quietly added, that the incredible, the inexplicable, the miraculous, were moving in on us.

All four of them knew more about this queer side of the whole affair than I did. Even Joe wasn’t too far behind the other three, though he still appeared to be apologetic about it, as if he thought his old colleagues in Cambridge might learn how unsound he’d become. It was Joe who answered a question of mine about the Wavy Eight symbol. At last I learnt what it signified. ‘The Eight stands for Saturn, Tim. Eight is Saturn’s number. And the wavy line is water.’

‘Saturn over the water,’ I said slowly, tasting it. ‘Good. I’m tired of calling ’em Wavy Eights. Always sounded like some new women’s naval corps. As far as I’m concerned, they’re Saturnians from now on. But what does it mean, Joe?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it doesn’t mean anything really. Just some sort of secret society badge.’

This wasn’t good enough for Barsac. He seemed to be replying for Mrs Baro and his sister too. ‘Joe my friend, you made this mistake at the Institute. What you were not told at Cambridge does not exist. You cannot begin again making this mistake. Saturn means something. The water it is above must mean something. Did the Christian cross mean nothing? Was it only a badge? To these men perhaps Saturn over the water takes the place of the cross. Mrs Baro believes they do not act simply for themselves. I think this may be true. They may have masters – ’

‘I’m sure they have.’ And I told them how Steglitz, swelling and glowing with a sense of power, had been so strangely silenced. Then I went on: ‘This is what we know now. At least what I know, from what I’ve learnt myself, from what Steglitz said earlier, that night, from what Rosalia was told by her grandfather. These Saturn types believe our whole civilisation has gone wrong. So they want it to destroy itself. They want total war – nuclear, biological, the works. It’s their plan that explains what’s been so puzzling – that while everybody talks about peace, this total war comes nearer and nearer. The Saturnians see to that. They use all kinds of methods. They control some key people. I know they use individual and mass hypnotic techniques, subliminal messages in films, drugs they make themselves, and all the usual propaganda channels. Whenever possible, though, they don’t bring new forces into play but simply direct forces that already exist – ’

‘Tim, I never expected to hear you talking like this,’ cried Joe. ‘You’ll be an intellectual soon. But I’d like an example of this directing of existing forces.’

‘All right, Joe. Here’s a small example, but I think it’s typical of their methods. They want me out of the way, not poking around here. So what do they do? Hire some toughs to kidnap me or bump me off? No, that’s not their style. They get me in wrong with the Security people and, through them, with the police, then these fatheads do their work for them. So I’m on the run – and it’s all legal – ’

‘It is the same with me of course,’ said Barsac. ‘I am now a Communist, it seems, even though there is no proof I ever attended a Communist Party meeting in my life. But continue please, Bedford. They are hoping to bring about total war – to make a thousand million imbeciles destroy one another – ’

‘Wiping out practically the whole Northern Hemisphere. They haven’t to do it. It’s done for them. Then they can start again, another civilisation, on different lines altogether, here in the Southern Hemisphere. Well, we know all that now. We also know – at least I do and I hope you do – that what we’ve found so far – at Uramba and Osparas and Charoke – ’

‘Which is finished, don’t forget,’ Barsac broke in. ‘Their time is running out – as I told the beautiful sad countess – ’

‘I say, what we’ve found so far are only a few links in a great chain. How big it is – how far its other links go – we don’t know, and it’s anybody’s guess. And of course we don’t know – I certainly don’t – who or what, if anything, is behind all this. What about these masters of theirs – if they exist?’

I looked round the table. Mrs Baro now spoke very quickly and in a low voice to Barsac and Mrs Delor in French.

‘You didn’t understand?’ Barsac said to Joe and me. ‘Mrs Baro feels now she may be able to
see
something. So we go and sit quietly in the other room – and wait. I think this may be of the greatest importance.’

We went into the sitting-room and kept quiet and waited. Only one light was left on. It looked like one of those low-tone Victorian pictures of people listening to music. But having nothing else to do, of course I wondered and worried about Rosalia harder than ever. Sometimes I asked her angrily what the hell she thought she was doing. Sometimes I crept up to a hospital bed to hear her whisper my name for the last time. And I must admit that once or twice I wondered if she’d had enough of me already and had just cleared off without a word, back to the Rosalia Arnaldos I’d watched being temperamental, spoilt, bitchy, at Uramba. But only once or twice, just for half a minute perhaps out of fifteen. And fifteen minutes is a long time to sit around in a dim light, not daring to speak, just waiting for something to happen. I began to tell myself that Mrs Baro had better be good when she did start.

Then she started. She didn’t go off into a trance or tell us some Red Indian was helping on the other side or anything of that sort. She just began rattling off brief descriptions of what she was seeing, and a lot of it meant nothing to me, though it may have done to the others. But when she held my wrist again, she gave me a nasty shock. ‘A woman thinks of you. So now I see her. She is in hospital. She is terribly injured. I think she is dying – ’

‘Rosalia? For God’s sake – ’

‘No, no. Not the dark younger one I saw before – the one who is in love with you. Another – older. She is not thinking about you now. I don’t see her. Now I see this one I saw before. Rosalia, is it? She is driving a car. Many other cars. She is tired. She is in danger now. Because of some change she is in danger. Not from driving the car – no. There are men. I cannot see them but I know they are there. They wish to take her away from you. She is now very important to these men. She does not know of this danger. But she feels it. She is very tired, poor girl. But she must drive and drive. I am sorry. I cannot see her now.’

Well, all this stuff, which went on much longer and was more broken up and harder to understand in the original, left me wondering and worrying harder than ever. Where was she? What was she up to? Why was she so tired now? But, as I’ve suggested before somewhere, there’s no point in going through a long list of questions if there isn’t an answer to a single one of them.

Then Barsac said that before Mrs Baro felt she’d have to stop, we ought to work all together to do something about this ‘old man on the mountain’. So we all sat close, all joining hands. I was on one side of Mrs Baro, Barsac was on the other, with Mrs Delor and Joe of course sitting between us. I don’t know what the others felt, but I felt a fool. I didn’t look at Joe, and thought myself lucky to be holding Mrs Delor’s plump cool hand and not his sweaty meaty paw. I didn’t know – and nobody ever told me afterwards – what magic we were supposed to be working. But it worked.