The Mind Readers (3 page)

‘I've got twenty minutes,' he observed. ‘What have you got in there that's hot?'

‘The fridge is full. It wouldn't take me a minute to heat something.'

‘Very well, smoked sprats; then I can have a scotch. Did you get any sprats?'

‘After no end of bother. The last kiln in the South is at Tosey and even they're thinking of closing now. You'll have to buy it and run a campaign to popularise them. The fish are cheap enough.'

‘Could do,' he said, and the proposition with all its pros and cons ran through his mind as visibly as if he had discussed it. He decided against and returned to immediate refreshment. ‘One scotch now and one after I've spoken to Kalek. I shall need it. Do you want to know all about this or can you pick it up as I talk?'

‘I expect I can get it,' she said from the pantry whose wide sliding-doorway brought it virtually into the room. ‘It's the leak from Godley's island, I suppose? You didn't think it was going to be serious when you came in on Tuesday.'

‘I don't now. It can be handled, of course. There is very little of this new element isolated and we're gathering in all there is as fast as we dare. However, more can always be obtained later and meanwhile we are investigating this crazy idea of Paggen Mayo's, so the big boys are entitled to ask what the hell I think I'm up to, letting some Commie spill the beans all over the foreign propaganda machine for any damned technician to read. I have to reassure them and yet point out that the danger of some success with the stuff must still persist. Then they can share my nightmares! I shall go down to the Island tomorrow and placate the Allied clients. They've been blowing off steam all day so I thought I'd have 'em all to lunch down there and let them see the personnel for themselves.'

‘You'll be able to control the invention when it comes and, if necessary, stifle it,' she said placidly.

‘Of course I shall, but only if I can keep it safe down there under my hand. That has been the intention from the beginning. It's such an amazing concept—what a secret weapon if it came off, eh? Everything is all right but the leak is a nuisance and I don't see how it happened—which is serious. Official security is completely useless. They've only just given us the all-clear after taking the place apart. It's some damned innocent. Some little head so full of wool it doesn't know it's bleating!'

His face had changed and she threw up her hands.

‘Bae! You told me to tell you when you look like that. People
don't
understand. I'll just get your food. Could you help yourself to the drink?'

‘Probably.' He was laughing at her admonition. He knew he made faces and thought it childlike and rather gay.

He went over to the ebony compendium and parted the panels to reveal a cut-glass glitter within which lit up as the shutter passed. He was relaxing visibly. His jungle fastness was warm and well stocked and very quiet, as he liked it best. When there was any noise at all he preferred it to be roaring, with himself the loudest of all, but now, in the very midst of the city, the sound-proofing was so thorough that they could have been in the depth of a forest.

His huge body was shaped like a grand piano on its tail, but his step was light and his hands sure and careful so that he took the glass from among the others without a sound. The telephone which would link him presently with the three other men, who with himself controlled directly or indirectly at least three parts of the whole of the world's communications, was an elegant crystal instrument. His sad eyes noted that it was to hand and that the extra-heavy table he liked to have beside him was waiting with a new pad on it for him to draw upon while he talked. He felt for his pen and found it ready and only then did he sigh and pour his pale drink, which was the exact colour of Merle's hair. This was, possibly, why he liked the tint and never let her change it although it no longer suited her as well as it once had done.

He sat down as she came in with the electric trolley, and looked almost domesticated waiting for his food, so that she ventured a flattery of the only kind he found amusing.

‘I know why you like these damn sprats. Because you can bite them up whole!' she said.

As in the first, the fourth of the five stirrings heralding the main movement took place in one man's mind, and again closely concerned his own dedicated labours.

While the Waterside D.D.I. was regretting, Canon Avril meditating and Lord Ludor machinating, down in the centre of Fleet Street the office of Lord Feste's journal
The Daily Paper
had begun to stir. It was the youngest in spirit of all the ‘mornings' and it had scooped the best publicity of its career on the day when it had first announced its impudent title to a string of established rivals. They had attempted to restrain it by due process of law but without avail, and it had never lost the initial lead. Just now its imposing building was beginning to vibrate as the staff came streaming back to whip up the nightly fit of excitement in which it was ‘put to bed.'

As yet, the two editorial mezzanine floors were comparatively quiet and W. Pegg Braithwaite, working snugly in his sacred corner, was almost as peacefully comfortable as was decent in that bedlam of an office. If it had not been for the twitter from the John Aubrey Column cubicle which separated him from Features, he might have thought he was in his cubby-hole at home overlooking the river at Chiswick.

‘Peggie' was one of the first journalists to popularise Science without insulting it and was by now a considerable figure in both fierce worlds. His other claim to rarity was that he was one of the very few men who had worked for Lord Feste continuously ever since they had both arrived in London in the same month many years before. The chief attribute they shared was an essential youthfulness, epitomised by that naïve and obstinate faith in the invincible might of the pen which is both the strength of Fleet Street and its Achilles' heel.

Compared with everybody else in the building Peggie was practically secure; he had a name and a following and a private reference library on his own subject kept safe from rivals in his own bald head. The chatter from next door came from two less happily placed people. The male voice, which belonged to the compiler of the column, was verging on the shrill as the nightly dilemma over the lead story became acute. The scout, a woman, was working hard. Her drawl, which Peggie had known when it was pure south London, was now very Mayfair and it jarred upon him most unreasonably; he himself became more Yorkshire the longer he stayed in the South.

‘Journalists may be unimportant but Giles Sanderton was Business Editor. It really was quite a funeral,' she was saying.

‘Who cares? We are playing the whole thing down. We can use your little bit about Edith Lady Trier being in black down to her pearls, but that will be all. There's to be a par in the news.'

‘But why for Heaven's sake? Sanderton worked for Lord Feste, he held a very trusted and influential position on a leading newspaper, his death was tragically sudden and there were more names at his funeral than we tagged on to the Howard first night yesterday. . . .'

‘Dearest girl . . .' the man was talking through his teeth and old Peggie teetered softly to himself as he did when the nerves of younger people showed through. ‘Just take my word for it.
I do not want to irritate the Owner.
I can't and won't put it clearer.'

‘Really?' She was on to it like a terrier. Peggie had to hand it to her. ‘And he used to be the Old Man's white-headed boy! What was it? “The wrong associates”, as they say?'

‘I don't know and I don't want to know. Fortunately he's dead so nobody need know anything. Drop it. Now then, what else have we got? My God, this is thin!'

‘There's the dress show and the wedding,' she said obediently. ‘I shall have to fall back on my teashop.'

‘Who? Oh, that old pansy teashop keeper you're always quoting. You eat there, don't you?'

‘I have my coffee and croissant there in the mornings instead of breakfast, he's so near my flat. You can sneer at him if you like but it was my dear Mr Witty and his “pussums” who gave us the first whisper of the Coalhouse divorce.'

‘Too clinical, my dear.' The other voice dropped easily into the revived twenties vernacular. ‘Well, what had he got this morning?'

‘Let me see, not a lot, but there might be something in it, if it was properly investigated. He was all on about a libel case pending between two masters—or a master and an examiner—in one of the public schools. The boys come home tomorrow for half term and he was going to hear more from one of the matrons and tell me. Shall we 'phone the School?'

‘No. That's not
us.
That'll be a news story. We couldn't touch that.'

‘Oh, it's nothing unpleasant. Neither Mr Witty nor his beautiful white cat would soil their claws with common dirt. You don't know Mr Witty. He calls his teashop the Milestone and he's always toying with the idea of changing his name to Whittington. . . . I think he sees himself as a principal boy! This is all about cheating in exams.'

‘Is it? Well, there's nothing there for us. Give me that corny Talking Tiger story news turned in.'

Content in his corner, Peggie continued to doctor the article he was vetting for one of his young relatives who edited a technical journal round the corner at the ‘Thousand and One Nights' Press.

The Braithwaites were a family of journalists as closely knit as any of the country's nuclei of born tradesmen; weavers, coachbuilders, masons or smiths. These were the families who had formed the Guilds and later inspired the birth of the trade unions. Powerful, obstinate, skilful men, they served their masters and earned their money but their greatest loyalty was always to the craft itself. Although Peggie was deep in his task he spared a secret grin at the inefficiency of the two next door. Gossip! They didn't recognise gossip when they heard it. The school they were talking about was St Josephus, the preparatory side of Totham, and whatever the facts of the pending libel action it was a twopenny-ha'penny tale compared with the real story which had involved that establishment earlier in the week when
Panda,
the propaganda journal of the Eastern Powers, had trotted out one of their periodic fairy tales. This one had been too wild even for the news boys and Peggie himself had been able to inform the Editor of
The Daily Paper,
that volatile demon Rafael, that there was nothing in it. They had both regretted it, despite their headshaking; but it really was no good; they had had to agree that even the incredible Ludor would hardly stand for that little item. Peggie just had to laugh whenever he thought of it. ‘Guinea-pig public schoolboys'! The oriental propagandist was a performer on his own! Even Lord Feste himself, in the old days when his name had been Phil Jones, had not been quite in their class. Peggie dismissed the chatterers next door. They bored him and he closed his ears in the way he was trained to, finished his little job for the ‘young 'un', and inserted a fresh sheet in his typewriter. Then he hitched his sleeves and settled down to the one utterly important task in his universe, the composition of his own authoritative Saturday Piece.

The fifth tremor round the rising bud was in its own way the most momentous of all and yet it was no more than a reckless impulse in a young man who never appeared in the story again.

For him it was a moment which he remembered with horror all his life, the instant when he decided to take a risk without knowing the form.

While Peggie was in his corner, listening to the gossips, four floors above him young Peter Clew, who until the day before had been a very successful accountant and who was now the new Business Editor of
The Daily Paper
in the place of the late Mr Sanderton, stood regarding his new array of telephones. There were four of them and, scarcely aware of extending his neck, he made there and then a mental note to drop that celebrated ‘fixer', ‘Pa' Paling, forthwith.

The man had been most useful in putting him forward for this wonderful post which had been thrust into his hands like a gift from the gods, but Mr Clew felt in his sophisticated young bones that the fellow was not very
safe
.

He decided, therefore, that he would telephone him at home late on Saturday night and make an excuse to pass up the round of golf on the links at Hollowhill which had been so carefully arranged between them for Sunday morning. On the whole, he thought it would be better to meet Lord Ludor in some other way, at some other time. ‘Pa' Paling might be a little sore but even so Peter Clew thought he could risk that. What was one enemy when one was as powerful as this oneself? A faint doubt assailed him but the sight of the telephones stiffened him; he sighed, and his mind closed with a snap.

Although he learned afterwards that at that moment he had flung his business career over a cliff, what he never knew was that he had also implemented one of those extraordinary little chances which have such disproportionate consequences in the history of mankind.

These five small indications appeared on the Thursday, and the pressure from below, at the centre, became evident on the Friday morning. Properly enough, it was most noticeable at Messrs. Godley's island research station.

THE BEDROOM HALF
of the converted Army hut had been done over at intervals, all the time they had been there, which was almost eighteen months, but it still looked very like the bedroom end of a converted Army hut. Helena Ferris, who was sitting at her dressing table touching her newly-tinted lips with a tissue, caught a fresh aspect of the irons in the roof through the looking glass.

‘Martin. Suppose we hung a lot of cheap stage-jewellery, pearls and gold chains and coloured glass diamonds, from those things, do you think it would suggest a goldrush-town bar on the movies?' she enquired.