The Bat that Flits (3 page)

The only trouble was that I could not think of any address.

“The Commissioner of Police, New Scotland Yard, Whitehall, S.W.I,” I told her at last. “And mark it' Urgent and Personal,' please,” I added. “You see it's about my wireless licence. Entirely slipped my memory. I so rarely listen these days.”

I don't believe that she even heard that last bit. But I had all I wanted. And, as soon as I got outside, I compared the typing on the envelope with the words on the little slip of paper. The letters were identical. There was the same half-blind “e” and the same guttered “m.” That hadn't got me very much further, however. It only showed that someone else had been using the machine. The resident Gorgonette in the private office wasn't the kind who would ever send anyone an anonymous letter.

If she had ever received one herself, I knew that the poor thing would have been filed away under “A” before it could properly have unfolded itself.

That little Cornish hell, our common room, promised to
be the best place for continuing my researches. People give themselves away more when they are relaxing.

And I wasn't sorry that I had something definite with which to occupy my mind. The first sight that met me when I went inside the common room was a pile of geographical magazines going back practically to Marco Polo—I found out afterwards that someone had carelessly failed to renew the subscription, and they stopped, too, around Drake and Frobisher. Apart from the magazines, there was a ping-pong table with some highly professional-looking, rubber-covered bats lying there all ready; a wireless, with last week's
Radio Times
lying on top of it; and a writing-table with several sheets of notepaper and no envelopes. As a studio-set for a documentary dealing with the leisure problem of the middle classes it was practically perfect.

The chairs, too, were of the type that is specially designed for common rooms. You don't see them anywhere else, and there is probably a factory somewhere with a gang of imported fakirs making them. They are all the same, these chairs; smallish with a removable spring cushion, and a back that can be adjusted to three positions. There is the upright or impossible; the middle, or merely uncomfortable; and the practically flat out, or unconscious. I set mine at uncomfortable and sat down.

The others had all come in by now. And as soon as the Phoenician flute girl had put down the coffee things with a crash that made poor Dr. Mann wonder whether the attack was coming from the east or the west, we all settled down to peaceful hive-activity.

The buzzing that night was mostly about A-bombs. Smith was saying that the New Yorkers were in a state of complete panic, and that if a fire-cracker went off in a New York subway the blast would be felt as far away as the White
House. I've forgotten exactly how he put it, but I know that it was very clever.

I was only half listening, because the other half of me was watching young Mellon's face while our friend was doing his counter-Pilgrim stuff. But Mellon had evidently encountered quite a few Dr. Smiths on this side. He was only half listening. Bent forward in his chair, he was trying to listen to the wireless as well. It was a B.B.C. variety programme that was on, and there was an expression of awed and reverent incredulity on his face. Perhaps I was wrong in thinking that the films were his alternative employment. It could have been the Diplomatic Service.

Then Kimbell made a typical Manchester contribution by saying that panic was characteristic of all unheterogeneous peoples, and promptly went back to a scrap of paper on which he had just written B—K Kt 3, or some such piece of purely inspirational gibberish.

This was Dr. Mann's big moment. He was apparently aching to add his crumb of mid-European confusion. According to him the Americans were suffering from an outsize in guilt complexes for having used the A-bomb at all.

“Plees, you cannot understand how the mind works or you would never say such foolish things,” he went on, going very white round the gills while he was speaking. “In every Western religion murder and suicide are both wrong, no? Hiroshima was not only
mass
murder”—here his stuffy little voice rose to a bleat as he uttered the word “mass”—“it was also an intense expression of the American people's own death wish.” He paused as much for breath as any other reason, and then shaking his peculiar pear-shaped head as he reflected on the lost opportunity: “It would have been better if the Hiroshima bomber had crashed and everyone in it had been drowned.”

Just as he finished, there was a slight creak on the other side of me and our resident calculator and memory-man came into play. It was evident that his reaction time was a bit slow this evening. Perhaps he needed a new dry cell or something.

“There was an outbreak of panic in New York in 1938,” he said slowly, “when the Columbia System broadcast Orson Welles's version of
The War of the Worlds
. People really thought that the Martians had come. The trouble started in the Negro and Italian quarters.”

That was the end of the message so far as Bansted was concerned. The wheels just stopped turning as suddenly as they had started. But Kimbell was quick to snatch at the point.

“It would do,” he said approvingly. “No shared mass-unconscious.”

This immediately brought a deprecatory snort from Rogers. It was the sort of snort that was intended to indicate that no matter how popular the mass-unconscious might become in the future, Rogers himself was determined to keep right out of it.

“And no education,” he said firmly. “An educated mass would have recognised one of H. G. Wells's most popular books immediately.”

Being self-educated himself, Rogers was always very enthusiastic about education. But he seemed to have a confused idea at the back of his mind that it was H. G. Wells who had invented it. It may have had something to do with the fact that Rogers had once met H. G. at a P.E.N. Club reception. I didn't hold this against him, but what used to irritate me about Rogers was that he would go around quoting
The Outline of History
quite seriously as if it were a reference work.

Then the choir-boy, Swanton, spoke up. He was back on the original topic.

“Well, anyway,” he said, speaking in a slow rather singsong sort of drawl as though half asleep, “it won't help the Americans any having been the first to use the bomb. That was just what Russia needed. It provided her with a free field test under ideal conditions, and also demonstrated to the rest of Asia what Christian civilisation is like when put to the supreme test.”

It was at this point that young Mellon said quietly that his folks were Methodists both sides of the family, and that some Middle West Methodists had written to the President in precisely the same terms. But that did not please Swanton at all. He evidently did not like being in agreement with Methodists anywhere.

So, just to show that I was still there, I decided to butt in. I suggested—I can't remember exactly how I put it— that the A-bomb was grotesquely overrated as a weapon of warfare simply because of all the mess that had to be cleared up afterwards. And I went on to say that any intelligent generalissimo would rather occupy a perfectly intact London, with all the inhabitants either dead or dying, than have to go over the rubble with a Geiger counter to find out whether there ever had been any Houses of Parliament or whether that was just another propaganda story.

It was rather a lucky note to strike, and it acted as a Class I social catalyst. Everyone was perfectly ready to agree that the nuclear physicists were a lot of publicity-hogging queens, and that the bacteriologists were the salt of the earth.

We went on, I remember, to say that bacteriologists should be treated at least as well as Russia treats her pet novelists— free motor cars, diplomatic wives, country hideouts and all the rest of it. And in that happy mood of mutual adulation,
we broke off and played some rather self-consciously energetic ping-pong in which I was no good, and fat little Dr. Mann walked all over the lean American.

All things considered, the common room had turned out pretty much as I had expected. At least I was getting to know my playmates. Dr. Mann was a humanitarian who was in favour of bomber crashes for the general good of the race. Smith had been born about two or three Georges too late. Swanton had not seemed too downcast by the prospect of a false move on the part of Christian civilisation. And the rest might just as well have gone for a nice walk on the moors while the others were talking. Fairly average, I would have said for common-room gossip anywhere on the research side of things. And nothing firm for me to go on so far. Merely hunches.

Then, as I was getting into bed, I came on something a bit more definite. It was another of those little typewritten messages, neatly deposited in the middle of the pillow. There was the same shining emphatic blackness about the type, only this time the wording was rather more exact. “COMPARING TYPEWRITERS ISN'T GOING TO HELP YOU ANY,” it ran. “I KNOW ABOUT YOU EVEN IF YOU DON'T KNOW ME.”

I stood looking at it for some time. It was the last sentence I didn't like. Because there was always the possibility that it might have been true. And after all, we can't, every single one of us, be pure lily-white right through.

By next morning something seemed to be stirring. We heard at breakfast that the Old Man had called a special meeting for nine-thirty. And I learnt from Swanton that when that happened it usually meant that some senior Civil Servant had been having a nasty attack of panic up at the Whitehall end.

Anyhow, I felt strong enough to face it. And, outside a gipsy orchestra, you couldn't have seen a finer body of men than the research staff of the Bodmin Institute as we all filed into the Director's room. There was perhaps just a suggestion of the hairdresser's assistant about some of us because we were all wearing our white overalls. And when the demure one came in and joined us she looked like something that had drifted over from the embalming counter.

There was one man whom I hadn't met before. And it turned out to be the early riser. Michael Gillett his name was, and he sat himself down beside the demure one as to the manner born. He had a good clean profile, sharply cut without being too pointed. I found out afterwards that he was a ski-er. When he wasn't working at the bench he spent all his time in Switzerland. I don't wonder. That profile was just made for a ski-cap.

On the whole, I was rather pleased to see him there because he came as England's answer to the American. So long as we could produce sufficient Michael Gilletts I didn't grudge them their aristocratic film diplomats like Ulysses Z. Mellon. The only thing that I wondered was how long a
man with Gillett's profile intended to remain on research work. I formed the distinct impression, possibly wrongly, that if the right opportunity came along he would be perfectly ready to switch over to the sales side and embrace Big Business with one feverish ecstatic hug.

Then the Old Man came in and we all folded our hands in our laps. The Old Man himself wasn't by any means too bad. Largely, I suspect, because I was a new boy, he began by reminding everyone that we were an
anti
-bacteriological institute and not one of the real joy-through-glanders kind; and when he had got to the end of that bit, Dr. Mann looked as though he could have kissed him.

Even so the nature of the work was naturally pretty much the same either way. It went something like this. Some ingenious fellow in a research institute in Prague or Warsaw or Tashkent would discover, or think that he had discovered, a new means of disseminating
B. typhosus
or
B. pestis
. And some equally ingenious fellow in our M.I would get on to it. Then, after a certain amount of preliminary sifting, mostly by people who didn't know an autoclave from a Buchner's tube, the papers would be sent down to Bodmin. After that, we would go into recess for a month or so, and finally we would report back either “Could be,” or “Bodmin say Tashkent all screwy-screwy.” If it was “Could be” all the dope would then be passed over to the fumigation squad —the Anti-Bacteriological Device Unit was the official title —who kept their D.D.T. and Flit sprays somewhere up in a sister institute near Worcester. And if it was “screwy-screwy” we would just begin again on something else.

By now the Old Man had reached the bit we had all been waiting for. And here he did allow himself one of the routine numbers out of the effects book. Or perhaps he was just being careful. Taking out his key-ring, he selected the
Chubb and went across to the safe in the corner. Then he went through the usual business of opening up the Chinese envelopes with the separate tags, TOP PRIORITY, SECRET, ONLY TO BE OPENED BY . . . attached to each one of them. He was painfully slow about it, and his eyebrows seemed to be getting in the way more than usual. But he got down at last to the typewritten part, and began to read. Then we had our surprise. Because it was our old friend,
B. anthracis
, that it turned out to be. And that, let me tell you, came as a bit of an anticlimax. Because we had all been expecting a virus—probably one of the unfilterable ones—and
B. anthracis
is not much above first-year standard.

All the same, the M.I. report said that They, the Other Chaps, had worked out a new air-delivery scheme for
B. anthracis
, which was apparently giving a lot of pleasure at the far end; and that meant that we would have to look into it.

What was more interesting from our point of view, however, was the fact that the report went on to say that the same mysterious, everlasting They had got several stages ahead of us in the preparation of the L-substance that is used in all laboratories for putting up the birth-rate in the germ kingdom. And that really did make us prick our ears up.

I suppose that everyone knows something of the speed with which bacilli multiply. From baby to grandfather within the hour is how the more popular text-books describe the process. And that begins to mean something when you start off with several million babies in the first crèche. Because their children are having children while the old folks, the founder members of the colony, the original Pilgrim Fathers, are still lusty with the powers of increase themselves.