Element 79 (17 page)

The three, Jennifer, Mike Johnson, and Blanche White discussed this new turn of events. Then Jennifer said, “How soon d’you think we ought to go?”

“Right away. There’s no point in delay, best to get it over with.”

“Mike, I’d rather like to have one of Arthur’s business partners there. So we can talk to him afterwards, in case it happens to be Arthur. I think I’ll call Tony. Suppose you get the car ready.”

Jennifer went off to make the telephone call.

Jonathan Adams walked out of the spacious lounge and out of the front door of The Gables. Hadley ran after him shouting, “Where the hell are you going?”

“The morgue. This will give us a chance to find out what’s really under that sheet. We’ll have to hurry if we’re to get there in time. Maybe you don’t want to come?”

But Hadley decided he would come. Then he wanted to know why they must walk, why they couldn’t ride in the car “Try it if you like, but I think you’ll find there’s no contact.”

On the way into the city, Adams remarked, “I believe I’ve got it straight at last. One of us is going to be under that sheet, dead. The other is going to be found wandering around the countryside, alive.”

“I don’t bloody well understand.”

“I think it isn’t decided yet, whether it’s to be you or me.”

How d’you mean?”

“It’s going to depend on what they want.”

“Who?”

“All of them, of course, when they get there, to the morgue.”

The walk into the city went by very quickly, faster than Hadley could ever remember it. Hadley wasn’t quite sure of exactly which building the morgue was in. But he knew the right street, so they simply waited for Jennifer, Mike Johnson and Blanche White to arrive and followed after them. A police constable escorted the party into a waiting room, where they found the sergeant again. Another man, whom Adams recognized as Jerome Renfrew, was also there. The sergeant made the introductions and then said, “I’ve had a telephone message from Sir Anthony Brown. He says he’ll be here in a few moments. We’ll wait for him if you’re agreeable.”

True to his word, Sir Anthony appeared at about nine-thirty a.m. He was well-tailored, spruce, very nearly in complete contrast to Hadley in every respect.

The sergeant accompanied them into the morgue. Adams heard the clack-clack of their shoes on the hard floor. He expected it would all be over in a flash. The sheet would be whipped away, the decision would irretrievably be made, life or death for him—and death or life for Hadley. No doubt this was what really took place. No doubt the sheet was indeed whipped quickly away. Yet this was not the way it appeared to Adams or to Hadley. The action seemed to stop, as if all the world had stopped, as if an infinity of time was available for past actions to be considered and for human problems to be thought through.

There were five of them: Sir Anthony Brown, Jerome Renfrew, Jennifer Hadley, Mike Johnson, and Blanche White. Adams saw there must be a decision. Surely it must be a vote, nothing else was possible, for there could hardly be unanimity among these five—unanimity as to who they wanted dead and who they wanted alive. Adams was worried he would never know how each person voted. They would hardly speak their innermost thoughts aloud. Then, to his astonishment, he found he could hear those thoughts, he could hear them as each of the five came in turn to a decision. Hadley could hear them, too. Hadley knew what the real issue was now, it all showed in the strained, terrified look on his face.

Sir Anthony Brown was the first. To him there was no issue: “I’ll be ruined if it’s Hadley. The bastard has spread everything too thin, we’re at full stretch. Perhaps Hadley could pull us through, with all his contacts. I’m certain I can’t. Please to God it isn’t Hadley.”

Score: Hadley 1, Adams 0.

Hadley bellowed at the top of his voice. “Good old yellow-bellied Tony. He knows on which side
his
bread’s buttered.”

Then Jerome Renfrew came up: “I wonder who’ll get Adams’ chair if it’s him. Of course, I can’t hope it’s Adams, not because of his chair. I believe Hadley has a rather unsavory reputation, with young girls of Sally’s age. I can’t say I
hope
it’s Hadley, but of course I’d prefer it to be Hadley.”

Score: Hadley 1, Adams 1.

“Bugger,” yelled Hadley, sweat on his face now. “One thing I’ll promise you, you bloody fancy-panty, that daughter of yours, that Sally, I’ll have her on her back if it costs me a million quid.”

The real drama started with Jennifer Hadley: “God, what a relief it would be to have him gone, to be free from such a lousy bully.”

Instantly, Hadley was on his knees, whining, “No, Jenny, no, don’t go against me. I’ll give you anything, Mike Johnson, if you like. You can have him every night, every day, if you want. In Christ’s name, don’t kill me, Jenny.”

Quite unaffected by this outburst, Jennifer Hadley went on: “I wonder if Tony’s right. He told me on the phone this morning, the business is certain to go to pieces without Arthur. I haven’t any real property of my own. I’ll get a share in Arthur’s estate, of course, but that wouldn’t be much good if the estate went bankrupt. I suppose I might even be responsible for the debts. I couldn’t face being penniless, not with three young children. The divorce we were talking about this morning really looks much much safer. I’d be just as free from Arthur that way. Of course, it’s pretty rotten to prefer it to be some innocent man instead of Arthur, but nobody could blame me for preferring it not to be my husband.”

Score: Hadley 2, Adams 1.

Then Mike Johnson: “It seems pretty awful to think this way, but if it’s Hadley, I’ll get Jenny, I’ll get everything, the lot. Not that I don’t enjoy sleeping with her, just for its own sake. But after all, she is a few years older than me. And I’d have to put up with Hadley’s children. I wouldn’t like ’em to take after the father, especially the boy. So it’s pretty fair, to get some compensation. Of course, there’s the divorce, but that’s really very chancey. Hadley will do his best to buy off the White girl. So the divorce might not work. This way it’s one hundred percent certain. Besides, I’m sick to the back teeth with Hadley’s foul mouth and temper.”

Score: Hadley 2, Adams 2.

At this, Hadley broke into a hysterical frenzy, perspiration streaming down his face and his body. His shirt showed a dozen or more large wet patches. Jonathan Adams spoke for the first time, “Can you not be quiet, man, even when you are but a hairsbreadth from death?”

It all depended on Blanche White, the girl Hadley treated with such callous disregard. She had stood there longer than any of the others, turning things over and over in her mind. She knew nothing of Adams. It never occurred to her that she was deciding between Hadley and a man of quite an opposite temper, that Adams would hardly have dared to ask her to go out with him, that if he had—if by some miracle Adams had conquered his shyness and had done to her what Hadley had done—Adams would have stood by her fully and completely. She knew nothing of this, she knew only of her own plight: “If he’s dead, there can’t be a divorce. So his wife won’t need me. She’ll have lots, of course, because she’s his wife. But she won’t help me, she’ll just laugh and say I was a fool, the same as he did. He wouldn’t help me much, but he’d see I was all right. That’s what he said, he’d see I was all right. He’ll help me because it’s his kid, that’s why. Oh, God, I hope it’s not him.”

Score: Hadley 3, Adams 2.

The sergeant whipped away the sheet from the corpse. The bruised body of Jonathan Adams lay there on the slab. During the mid-morning, Arthur Hadley was found wandering in fields about two miles from the place of the accident. Reconstruction showed Adams to have taken the full force of the collision, coming in as he did from behind. Hadley was hit hard, but with the protection of the steering wheel in front and of the bulk of a heavy car behind, he suffered only comparatively minor injuries. After a couple of days, his memory returned to the point when he had left Blanche White, out at his special place in the country. He was never able to recover anything further than this.

Superficially, it might seem from the geometry of the accident as if it must inevitably have been Adams who was killed, Hadley who survived. This simple-minded interpretation takes no account of the possibility that Adams might have cut his car still further in on the near side. Had he done so, the two cars would have locked together, spun off the road, and come to rest as the front of Hadley’s car crashed against a tree. The decision rested on Adams, on his split-second reaction to Hadley’s car blundering in front of him. Now, Adams’ split-second reaction depended on electronic neurological activity in his brain, which in the last analysis turned on a single quantum event, on whether the event took place or not. Until the winding sheet was whipped away from the body in the morgue, the wave function representing the event was still in what physicists call a “mixed state.” Let it be added, for the sake of the smart physicist, that a clue to the solution of the deepest problem of theoretical physics—the condensation of the Schroedinger wave function—is to be found in the manner in which our jury of five arrived at their decision.

In the sequel, Hadley just managed to keep his businesses on an even keel. Jennifer tried unsuccessfully for a divorce. Hadley paid Blanche White well enough for the girl to keep her mouth shut. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to pay out, and it wouldn’t be the last. What the hell did it matter, really, a few quid? Mike Johnson was sent as manager of the new business at Sheffield. This more or less terminated his affair with Jennifer, although there were rare meetings between them which sputtered on for a year or two.

During the final scene in the morgue, it had at last become clear to Adams, a gentle, rather brave man, exactly where his life had gone wrong. Adams was a man who felt commitments so deeply that he hesitated to make any at all. It was because he felt even a mild commitment to a woman implied a complete commitment that he had remained a bachelor. Just because he felt he must give a great deal if he gave at all, life had passed him by. He was without connections anywhere, if one excepts the trivia of everyday life in his Oxford College.

Hadley was the exact opposite. He accepted the deepest of commitments and then gave little when he should have given much. But Hadley did give a little, which was why, goat and lousy bully that he was, the vote fell to him.

It may be thought the vote an unfair one, taken in Hadley’s territory. But Adams had no territory for the vote to be taken in. Moreover, Adams started with a vote in hand, since it was hardly conceivable for Renfrew to make his choice in any other way. Adams only needed to split Hadley’s territory down the middle to give himself a three-to-two victory. Everyone in Hadley’s territory voted sharply in their own self-interest. Only Renfrew’s vote was altruistic, for in truth Renfrew was himself a strong candidate for Adams’ chair.

In one of his finest passages, Rabelais advises us all to become debtors. As the debtor grows older, the whole world wishes him well, the great man points out, for only if the debtor stays alive can his creditors have any hope of recovering their lendings. As a rich man grows older, the world gathers around, waiting for him to die, as a group of vultures might gather to plan the distribution of his flesh before the last breath was out of his body. The same truth applies more deeply than even Rabelais saw. It applies at the deepest levels of emotion. Adams was the creditor, Hadley the debtor.

Angus Carruthers was a wayward, impish genius. Genius is not the same thing as high ability. Men of great talent commonly spread their efforts, often very effectively, over a wide front. The true genius devotes the whole of his skill, his energies, his intelligence, to a particular objective, which he pursues unrelentingly.

Early in life, Carruthers became skeptical of human superiority over other animals. Already in his early teens, he understood exactly where the difference lies—it lies in the ability of humans to pool their knowledge through speech, in the ability through speech to educate the young. The challenging problem to his keen mind was to find a system of communication every bit as powerful as language that could be made available to others of the higher animals. The basic idea was not original, it was the determination to carry the idea through to its conclusion that was new. Carruthers pursued his objective inflexibly down the years.

Gussie had no patience with people who talked and chattered to animals. If animals had the capacity to understand language, wouldn’t they have done it already, he said, thousands of years ago? Talk was utterly and completely pointless. You were just damned stupid if you thought you were going to teach English to your pet dog or cat. The thing to do was to understand the world from the point of view of the dog or cat. Once you’d got yourself into
their
system, it would be time enough to think about trying to get them into
your
system.

Gussie had no close friends. I suppose I was about as near to being a friend as anyone, yet even I would see him only perhaps once in six months. There was always something refreshingly different when you happened to run into him. He might have grown a black spade beard, or he might just have had a crewcut. He might be wearing a flowing cape, or he might be neatly tailored in a Bond Street suit. He always trusted me well enough to show off his latest experiments. At the least they were remarkable, at the best they went far beyond anything I had heard of, or read about. To my repeated suggestions that he simply must “publish,” he always responded with a long, wheezy laugh. To me it seemed just plain common sense to publish, if only to raise money for the experiments, but Gussie obviously didn’t see it this way. How he managed for money I could never discover. I supposed him to have a private income, which was very likely correct.

One day I received a note asking me to proceed to such-and-such an address, sometime near four p.m. on a certain Saturday. There was nothing unusual in my receiving a note, for Carruthers had got in touch with me several times before in this way. It was the address which came as the surprise, a house in a Croydon suburb. On previous occasions, I had always gone out to some decrepit barn of a place in remotest Hertfordshire. The idea of Gussie in Croydon somehow didn’t fit. I was sufficiently intrigued to put off a previous appointment and to hie myself along at the appropriate hour.