The Bat that Flits (2 page)

Then the Director got up and began shepherding me into the hall.

“Perhaps after dinner you wouldn't mind coming across to my office,” he said. “Just to attend to the security side. We've had to tighten things up a bit lately.”

The Director sounded quite apologetic as he said it. But perhaps that was only to avoid frightening the demure one. She was sitting there, still and statuesque, like an oiled Siamese. It was cream rather than security that seemed to be in her line.

I wasn't surprised, however. There had been another atom scientist arrested only yesterday. The papers had been full of it. Not that the publicity means anything. The Government rather encourages all this A-talk. It's harmless, and it keeps people's minds off other things that aren't so pleasant.

Bug-warfare, for instance.

The bedroom that had been allotted to me was in the annexe. And instinct told me that at some point in history all the others must have moved up one in an effort to get out of it. There were even signs of hasty flight in the scratches on the paint-work. The room was small, only about eight by twelve. There was a passable divan-bed, and the electric light over it was almost in the right place. Up against the opposite wall was one of those fancy bachelor-girl type wardrobes with shelves and drawers down one side, and just enough space on the other for the heavy stuff like the three-piece and the tea-gown.

The little wardrobette was pink—easily my unfavourite colour—and the wicker armchair had been bought to match it. It was a fiendish instrument that chair. If you took a hot bath and then sat down in a leisurely sort of fashion in your nothings, you got up looking like an early Christian martyr who had gone out the grid-iron way. Apart from the torture-stool, there was nothing else except the wash-basin. This was very narrow in order to conserve as much as possible of the twelve by eight, and correspondingly deep so that it was like paddling in a goldfish tank every time you went down to capture the soap.

Just to see what sort of a night I was likely to have I went over to the bed and turned down the cover. As I did so, something on the pillow caught my eye. It was a scrap of paper, with some typing on it. That struck me as odd. A pillow is such a highly personal kind of place for leaving anything. You'd have to have a simply frightful crush on
the games mistress before you'd even think of using it. But the situation wasn't half so odd as the note itself. This was typed in heavy black capitals.

And what it said was: “DON'T INTERFERE. EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL.”

The extreme punctuality with which the thick Brown Windsor was served up at dinner-time promised some rather pretty efficiency on the catering side, and we all got down to the dutiful lap-lap-lap straight away. Unfortunately, the cooking wasn't up to the time-keeping. The results that came through that hatch would have led to a rebellion in any works canteen.

I wondered why the others all seemed so cheerful in the face of the obvious rebuff of the food. And I found out later that there was a club bar—entrance fee five shillings, annual subscription half a crown, and both paid on the nail in my case—where they had all begun to unfocus a bit before coming in.

I wasn't saying very much. But I was observing hard. I still wanted to find out who had left that note for me. And I was trying hard to take in the whole lot of them, getting my social bearings, as it were. For a start, there was the inevitable refugee scientist, little Dr. Mann with his thick pebble spectacles. He sat himself next to me and tried to be pleasant. It was a rather irritating kind of pleasantness, however; the sort of pleasantness that a cat exhibits when it spends too long rubbing itself against your trouser-legs. I agreed politely that plees it was foggy again outside, no?
And then a moment later I found myself agreeing equally politely that plees it was a long way from London, no? But after that the conversation lapsed. I wasn't sorry. They're all the same, those German Ph.D.s, a sort of laboratory version of the Volkswagen. Their chief failing is that they're as industrious as indoctrinated beavers. If let, they will go on for ever taking readings and temperatures, and drawing graphs and keeping card-indexes, when an ordinary English fox terrier could tell them that it is the wrong tree altogether that they have been barking up.

The only other squeak that I had out of Dr. Mann was when the waitress, a massive village maiden as swarthy as her remote Phœnician ancestors, dropped one of the domestic-grade-porcelain-finish-export-rejects on to the stone floor. There was a loud crash, and our refuge friend gave a jump that jarred the whole table. That's another thing about refugee scientists: nerves are an occupational disease with most of them. Even in 1952 there are still plenty of sleepless nights in places like Cambridge and Princeton all because of Hitler.

We were nine all told at that table, and it's easiest to follow the company clockwise. Next to Dr. Mann was Kimbell. He was a rather dreary Manchester product, with a lot of uncombed black hair like wire-wool and an almost imbecilely intense expression. At this moment, he looked as though he were trying to mesmerise his fish pie. Kimbell was the chess player of the camp, I discovered. He was always going away by himself into the corner with little pieces of paper about white to play and do something clearly impossible in three. His chief joy was chess by correspondence—I think that the rough and tumble of an actual encounter across the board was a bit too much for him. His nails were bitten abnormally short even for a research-worker,
and seen from any angle, he looked about twice as foreign as Dr. Mann.

Next to Kimbell was a thin, yellow-faced youth who might have been a choir-boy who had been letting himself go after Lent. He looked as though he needed a whole string of early nights and no singing practice to put him right again, and I saw that when he raised a spoonful of food to his lips his hand always trembled. Swanton was what the lad was called. And, after Dr. Mann, it was Swanton who was the first to remember his manners and make me one of the family circle by talking to me.

“Excuse me,” he said in his rather sweet treble, “but you're not a policeman by any chance, are you?”

I shook my head.

“Not any longer,” I said, dropping my voice almost to a whisper so that he had to lean right across the table to hear what I was saying. “It was something to do with the Commissioner's daughter. It never got into the papers.”

I don't think that my reply altogether satisfied him. But at least he changed the subject.

“Been in this racket long?” he asked.

“Only since I was unfrocked,” I answered, still in the same half-whisper.

Everything was about all square from there onwards. He hadn't discovered anything about me. But I had picked up quite a lot about him. I had learnt for a start that he was interested both in me and in policemen. He could have been the one who had typed the note. But after another look at him I decided against it. He didn't look strong enough to type.

I couldn't see Swanton's neighbour very well because he sat upright on his chair and didn't sprawl about like the rest of us. Rogers, or something of the sort, the name seemed
to be—the introductions had all been made in a quick mumble, English-fashion—and he was older and decidedly more formal than the rest of us. Rather like a respectable colonel already within arm's reach of his bowler. I found out later that he was a considerably stepped-up lab. boy. He knew his stuff all right. But he had never taken his degree, and he was very sensitive about it. In consequence, he went about with a distinct air of strain as though he were travelling on the railway without a ticket.

At the head of the table—I gathered that there was no particular seniority involved, and I came to occupy the place myself sometimes—was a plump, pink, baldish young man with very small teeth and protruding eyes, who looked rather like a baby trying to get windies up. Smith was the best that he had been able to manage by way of a surname, and he was putting in some pretty serious eating, fairly wolfing down the fish pie as though it were strawberries and cream. He was just back from the other side where he had been delivering some lectures. The real purpose of his visit, so far as I could gather from what he was saying, had been to show the North American barbarians what two millennia of European breeding can eventually do for the human race.

On his left was one of the barbarians themselves. Ulysses Z. Mellon the name was. He was tall, dark, aquiline, and with hair
en brosse
like a doorstep shoe-cleaner. If he hadn't been in the research line he looked as though he would probably have been in films. His clothes gave the impression of having just come back from the valet, and there was that indefinable air of distinction that advertisements for aftershave lotions are always trying so hard to isolate.

Alongside young Mellon sat Bansted, also a clearly recognisable research type. He was a statistician who rather
fancied himself as an administrator. He wore a toothbrush moustache and a little dolly-size bow-tie, and looked every bit as much a dare-devil as a provincial bank manager. He was really just a steady, reliable calculating machine that might have been turned out by Remington. But according to gossip he had a heart somewhere, and it was already broken. He had expected to be made the Big No. 1 White Chief of the Bodmin Station, and he was a disappointed man. Rifle shooting was his only hobby. And I gathered that once a year he showed up and did some rather spectacular work at Bisley.

Last of all there was the lady of the party, Dr. Hilda Sargent. She wasn't a regular diner-in, it seemed, and lived somewhere out at St. Clynt's at the Vicarage. But to-night she had stayed on at the Institute to finish off something. She was a tall girl with red-gold hair and a good profile, and I was glad that she had stayed. By the end of dinner I had already outlined about half a dozen different ways of reforming my whole moral character so as to be able to climb up on to the red-gold girl's plane of things. The only trouble was that it looked as though it might be a bit lonely up there.

Because so far she didn't appear to have noticed me.

As soon as dinner was over I went back up to my room. It was quieter than most places for thinking in, and I wanted to sit back and go over my fellow diners one by one. But by then I had something else to think about. My advance luggage had arrived, and somebody had been through it before me. Everything was more or less as I had left it, and so far as I could see there was nothing missing. But it had definitely been tampered with. The toothpaste that I had shoved in on top of the shirts just before banging the lid
shut was now where it should have been inside the little sponge-bag.

That was queer attention number two. On the whole, life in the Bodmin Institute promised to be livelier than I had anticipated. I'd certainly never had anyone who cared so much about me before.

Either that, or I'd been mistaken for somebody else.

I woke next day with my mind fresh and unclouded. Somebody who didn't know anything about it once said that a clear conscience is nature's quickest route to a good night's rest. That may have been true in the Middle Ages. Since then, Science has found a quicker one. It's called dormital, and I had taken half a grain before turning in.

But there was one person who was up before me. I saw him, a walking advertisement for tweeds, go striding across the lawn while I was shaving. He looked like a spaniel after its monthly condition powder.

And it wasn't all dormital with me either. This morning I had a special reason for waking up so promptly. I wanted to get on with things. The first thing that I wanted to do was to track down the typewriter on which the “don't interfere” note had been hammered out. “Find the machine on which the message was typed, and you will have found the typist who typed the message,” I kept telling myself, thereby making a howler in elementary logic which would have sent the late Dr. Bradley reeling.

All the same, admitting that the major premise was false,
my deductive method from there on was pretty clear. I argued it out nursery fashion. “Where there is a Director, there is bound to be a Director's secretary,” I reasoned. “And where there is a Director's secretary, there is bound to be a typewriter.” It seemed simpler to start that way than to begin searching round for midget portables concealed under loose floor-boards.

What's more, I hit the bull's-eye first time. The room marked “Office Private” had someone already seated at the typewriter when I came in. She was a thin-lipped, frowning sort of woman rather like a disgruntled cloak-room attendant. The only thing she had was a typewriter.

Because it was our first meeting, I used my special voice, the plummy slightly husky one.

“Good morning,” I said. “I'm afraid you don't know me. I'm the new man, Hudson, and you now have the advantage of me.”

I was smiling at her by now; smiling really hard.

“Morning.”

The smile that bounced back was all teeth and nothing else, so I decided to cut things short.

“I just dropped in to hand over my ration book,” I explained.

The teeth were covered up again by now, and only a pair of very tight-looking lips remained.

“Housekeeper second door along,” the reply came back by return. “She'll attend to you.”

I had got as far as the door by now, and the Director's secretary was bashing out her stuff again as though she were riveting. Then I stopped.

“Oh, there is just one other little thing,” I said.

“Yes?”

“I wonder if I might use your typewriter just for a
minute?” I asked. “For an envelope, you know. It's my handwriting. You've no idea the trouble it gives to postmen.”

“What address?”

As she was speaking, the secretary had jerked her own top-and-two-carbons out of the Underwood, and slotted an Institute envelope into its place. It was pretty deft, that operation. And I remembered reading somewhere that all acquired skill is an attempt to compensate for natural deficiencies.