The Unbegotten (13 page)

They seemed to be in the lift for an age, but at last it stopped and the Z5 agent slipped off the glasses so that Maddern was able to see. He was in a wide passage with tall glass windows on one side, a wall with doors at twenty feet intervals on the other. As Maddern's eyes grew accustomed to the light after the sunglasses, he was able to see everything clearly.

Beyond the glass walls was a huge Operations Room, with a control panel which looked as large as any used in the Space Control Rooms at Houston. A dozen men were at the controls, only here and there a woman. Red dots appeared on the control board time and time again, then vanished, then came back.

Suddenly, Maddern heard Palfrey's voice, just by his side.

‘Each red dot represents a new area which we think is like yours in Middlecombe, Reggie. They're coming in so fast from all over the world that the Operations Room can hardly keep pace.' Palfrey paused. Maddern glanced up at his stern, bleak face as he went on in a brisker tone, ‘Well, you need a change. Look after Dr. Maddern, Ron, will you?'

A youngish woman came up, very nice-looking, with a trim if rather full figure. She gave Maddern a smile and held out her hand.

‘I'm Joyce Morgan,' she said. ‘Let me show you where to go.'

She touched his hand, and Maddern felt as if an electric shock ran through him.

 

 

Palfrey, deeply preoccupied, desperately troubled, saw Joyce as she came up to Maddern, saw her momentary pause before, making an obvious effort, she held out her hand. And he saw the way Maddern started, saw the expression on his face change remarkably. It was as if all feeling had been drawn out of him in a kind of surprise at this encounter. He looked so bedraggled in his wet clothes, his hair plastered over his head, that there was nothing at all prepossessing about him.

Yet it was as if two people who had not seen each other for a long span of years had come face to face without the slightest warning.

‘Fifteen minutes, at most,' Palfrey said.

‘All right,' Joyce responded.

She took Maddern's arm, as if to help him along.

Ron Wordsworth, the agent who had brought Maddern from the Thames, looked at Palfrey in startled surprise.

‘Not often Joyce is so pleased to see a fellow human being from the outer world!' The moment the words were out Wordsworth looked embarrassed and apologetic. At first Palfrey did not understand why, but suddenly he understood. His mood relaxed, and he said lightly, ‘She doesn't get out and about enough.'

‘You can say that again,' agreed Wordsworth.

Palfrey went past the huge operations room towards his own apartment, on the same floor. Like Joyce, he spent a great deal of time here, hundreds of feet below the surface of the Earth, safe from all known forms of attack, and his apartment had every kind of facility, including a small kitchen where he could prepare a meal, or Joyce and he could prepare one and spend the evening together, watching a film, or listening to music which suited their mood of the moment, or reading. Most of the people who knew them assumed that Joyce was Palfrey's mistress, and there was no doubt at all that she had for many years been deeply in love with him. Dedicated to him as well as dedicated to Z5, she spent practically all of her life down here, though even the best simulated above-ground conditions were not a substitute for the real thing.

Palfrey, on edge since the newscast, more and more on edge as reports came flashing in, sat back in a deep armchair in a room part office, part living-room. By day, one wall rolled back so that he appeared to be looking at a sunlit garden, or if he so wished, a wind and rainswept one, but at night there was the moon and the stars for company. Joyce had a smaller, similar apartment, nearby.

He felt less oppressed than he had all day, and believed this was largely due to the report from Maddern. He switched on the tape recorder and listened again. Such phrases as ‘the Upper Slopes' and ‘the Summit of Perfection', the talk of ‘perfect, ageless people who lived in their hearts and their minds more than in their bodies' were clear indications of another civilisation.

But where was it? In this world or beyond?

His brighter mood was also partly due to Joyce and the obvious lift of her heart. He thought again of the change in Joyce in the past few weeks – she was as attentive as ever but at times he suspected that she was trying to establish a new relationship – that she had given up hope of their living together and was seeing themselves more in terms of brother and sister.

He had
never
seen her face light up as it had when she had set eyes on Reggie Maddern.

There was a faint buzz and a green light showed in a panel by the side of his desk. He pressed a button on the side of the chair.

‘Yes?'

‘There are nineteen sheep station areas and two small towns, one in Queensland and one in Western Australia, where there are no reported pregnancies. One group of sheep stations is attended by the Flying Doctor service, and they have just been comparing notes.'

‘I see,' Palfrey replied, gruffly. ‘What is the grand total of affected areas?'

‘One thousand and seventeen, sir, all rural, covering a total population of about three and a quarter million people,' the man reported.

 

One thousand and seventeen areas were affected. My God! The plague was everywhere.

Three quarters of a million women at least must be affected.

All his anxiety, his disquiet, his fears, came back until his mind was in turmoil.

One thousand and seventeen . . .

 

Joyce was a long time bringing Maddern in – perhaps fifteen minutes hadn't been long enough for him to have a bath and to get into a change of clothes. Palfrey, in this fresh mood of anxiety, veered his thoughts towards another aspect of the situation: the Press Release. Where had it come from? Obviously from someone who knew the truth, but not one of the Master's men; he had been desperately anxious to keep the facts secret. Palfrey had little doubt that they had been waiting until there was a
fait accompli
: a worldwide situation against which there could be no defence. As it was, over a period of a few months in a thousand and seventeen different parts of the world, no woman had conceived.

But not a single report suggested that there had been continence; there was not the slightest hint of impotence among the men in the areas affected, according to test cases checked by general medical practitioners. The sex life of husbands and wives appeared to have been normal.

Who had released that report?

Very few people had the knowledge, of course. But several had, in Middlecombe – King, the Superintendent of Police, many of the council, Maddern.

Maddern . . .

Palfrey leaned over to a small, mobile filing cabinet and took out the file on Maddern. Since Palfrey had heard of the phenomenon he had had all the doctors screened, and although a few of them did not stand up well to the screening, Maddern did. He led a celibate life, too. Now and again he would go to the city and spend a few hours with a prostitute, but he had no regular association with any woman. His patients and his friends had implicit faith and trust in him. His hobbies were simple – reading, gardening, driving. He dabbled a little in archaeology but for the most part was dedicated to his work.

A flash thought passed through Palfrey's mind: dedicated, as Joyce was dedicated?

The thought faded.

Since the television broadcast, Palfrey had detailed agents and consulted the Special Branch of the C.I.D. to investigate the source of the leakage. Early reports had proved that it had not been sent out by the South West Press Agency but the Agency's paper had been used. That suggested someone in the Middlecombe area.

Maddern?

Or Simister? Or any one of the doctors who had been at that conference? How little had been known when he had first gone to Middlecombe!

He put Maddern's file aside, noticing that it had been prepared by Joyce, and pushed the cabinet away as there came a tap at the door. Joyce came in with Maddern, and Palfrey was startled. Maddern was dressed in a suit which could have been made for him, was freshly shaven, his rather rebellious hair was fluffy and attractive after the ducking.

‘I lent him my hair-dryer,' Joyce explained lightly. ‘I hope we haven't been too long.' She was flushed. Her grey eyes were very bright, and her pleasant features, unusually reserved in repose, were lit up by some inner fire he had never seen in her before. It was almost as if she were suddenly happy.
Happy
! Could they possibly know each other? Could strangers, meeting, have such an effect on one another? If she and Maddern were old friends, why hadn't she told him so?

Joyce and Maddern together . . . Good Lord! Joyce
Morgan
and Reginald
Maddern.
Oh, it was fanciful but there was a curious similarity of sound in the names.

All this passed through his mind as he said, ‘Glad you took enough time—What will you have to drink, Reggie?—Are you sure—Coffee, then.'

‘I've ordered some,' said Joyce.

‘Good. Very good.' Palfrey was undoubtedly non-plussed by his own thoughts but he quickly disciplined himself. ‘I've seen a report of the attack on the helicopter,' he went on. ‘And on your flight. A small, rocket-shaped aircraft got on your tail just west of Bath and followed you all the way. The same aircraft attacked you and then went off in an almost vertical path at very high speed.'

Maddern, sitting in a small armchair, said, ‘You had me followed?'

‘Of course.'

‘Could the attack have been stopped?' Maddern demanded quite sharply.

‘I don't see how it could,' Palfrey began.

Maddern, speaking with a new kind of authority, asked as sharply, ‘You mean you wanted to have the other aircraft shadowed so much that you took a chance on it attacking the helicopter?'

‘That's it,' admitted Palfrey.

‘The pilot died,' stated Maddern, flatly.

They sat in silence for a few moments, and Palfrey had a strange feeling that Joyce had ranged herself with Maddern. Physically, she was closer to the other man and was watching him, Palfrey.
Could
there be a slightly hostile expression in her eyes? Could she be disapproving of what he had done?

She had often disagreed, over the years.

She had disagreed today, feeling that the truth should be told; had Maddern really believed that, too?

‘Yes,' Palfrey said at last. ‘The pilot was killed. You could have been, too. Every time I go outside this dungeon I am in acute danger. If one thinks in terms of the death of individuals in this business, one would go mad. We have a bigger, a much bigger problem on our hands than we dreamt, and we have to try to solve it. If we die in the attempt—' He shrugged, smiling faintly. He put his right hand to his hair, but withdrew it quickly. Sometimes he became acutely conscious of this mannerism and determined to check it, but he never succeeded in checking it for long. ‘I asked you to come because I wanted you to know how far we've got. We've seen these capsules or rockets several times, now. Those we've captured have caught fire and been burnt right out. But reports keep coming in. I wanted to show you these headquarters to make you understand how fully we are equipped. To let you see and if necessary tell the Master about our strength and the fact that we now know that over a thousand areas are affected. Until you'd seen these headquarters you couldn't have talked with any authority to the Master.' He paused, only to go on, ‘Has Joyce told you how widespread this is?'

‘No,' interposed Joyce, quickly. ‘Only that it's much worse than we'd thought.'

‘Over a thousand places are affected,' Palfrey repeated. ‘At the last count, one thousand and seventeen. And so far, there's not the slightest indication how the affected areas were selected or how the effect was confined within certain boundaries.'

He stopped.

Gradually, an expression akin to horror crept into Maddern's eyes. Joyce was startled but not shocked, but as the significance of Palfrey's words struck home, Maddern
was
shocked . . . appalled.

They were sitting silently when an elderly woman came in with coffee, chocolate and plain biscuits, cream and sugar. She put the tray on to a table by Joyce's side and went out. Neither Joyce nor Maddern appeared to notice it.

Slowly, Maddern asked, ‘Are they evenly distributed?'

‘There have been none reported from Moscow or any of the iron curtain countries,' Palfrey answered. ‘Otherwise, they are pretty evenly distributed.'

‘So they—they can contaminate
any
area?' Maddern remarked huskily.

‘Yes. Undoubtedly a point they will rub in when they start talking terms,' Palfrey said. ‘Reggie, the rocket or capsule which followed you was the first one we've seen in flight. Once we knew what it was, we had to try to follow it, no matter what the risk.' When Maddern simply nodded, Palfrey went on, ‘Will you tell me again what Azran said?'

After a pause, Maddern repeated the story virtually word for word. Palfrey, the words of the tape recorder fresh in his mind, knew that there was little more than difference of emphasis and of phrase in the recital. Maddern didn't repeat it as if he had learned the words off by heart; just as if it were recollection.

‘And you think we should let Azran go,' Palfrey said.

‘Sap, it goes without saying,' interpolated Joyce.

‘I certainly do,' replied Maddern.

‘And you don't think she should be followed?'

‘I feel even more sure of that, after the helicopter incident,' answered Maddern. ‘Whoever followed would be observed. It would be a waste of time to try to prevent that. Whereas if Azran could talk to the man called the Master she might persuade him that everyone working against him isn't necessarily a mortal enemy. And if she could persuade him to let
me
go to see him—'

‘Would you still go?'

‘Of course I would!'

‘Not forgetting what little chance there would be of coming back?'

‘You should know that wouldn't affect me,' said Maddern, irritably. ‘Palfrey, the main question is whether you will let Azran go without having her followed. I don't want to hear all that nonsense about a great responsibility to mankind. Any word given under pressure can be broken at will. I—' He broke off, as if searching for a phrase, and then clapped his hands together with a loud sound as he went on, ‘I've a strong feeling that she's
honest.
That she has a sense of integrity as simple as a child's. That if I were to make her a promise, and broke it, she would never forgive me. And I've a feeling, also, that she's a friend.'

Then, he turned to Joyce and said one of the strangest things Palfrey had ever heard, and at this moment, totally unexpected.

‘It's much the same as I feel with Joyce, here. I'd never met her until today, knew nothing about her, didn't know she existed, but I feel that I've known her all my life and can trust her absolutely. Nothing would make me let her down, nothing would persuade me to let Azran down. If I promised she wouldn't be followed but couldn't be sure because of you, I'd tell her so.'