Vaneglory

by George Turner

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Beloved Son told how the world was given atomic power and chose the atom bomb, was given the key to genetic miracles and chose biological warfare. The world was lucky the first time; enough of it remained for salvaging in a few decades. It was simply unfortunate that in those difficult years a new menace arose-the offer of dreams-come-true in this world, here and now. There was a price of course. What World Council could not realize-and did not properly query-was the immensity of the price, but the offer was one nobody in his right mind could refuse. Or could he? Psychiatrist James Lindley recognized the danger of dealing with the Devil but fanatical Police Controller Parker saw it as the Gift of God; Angus, whose name and face changed as often as his coat, saw it as a fine game to be played, while Commissioner Ferendija saw it as an exercise in pragmatism-and Security Tech Sanders lost everything he believed in as the welter of guilt and disillusionment swallowed him whole. Under the pressure of decision the cracks showed in the highest echelons of the proud Ethical Culture. Is there a benefit so great that, if the price were the end of homo sapiens, we would pay it? George Turner's Beloved Son was the first volume in what is now recognized as on of the outstanding science fiction achievements of the past decade. Vaneglory is its successor; and, though completely self-contained, it develops with gripping imaginative brilliance the characters and situations already established in Beloved Son.

Release date: January 15, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

The transit house was only another nondescript city dwelling, deliberately so. They used it only for convenience, mostly during personality changes.

This afternoon two of them were there. Plus, of course, Willie tap-tapping in the cellar. They sat in the half-furnished parlour with the table and a manila folder between them.

The older man, who might have been forty, asked, “What do you do with him all day?”

“Prepare his meals. Refuse to answer questions. Make ‘orrible threatening faces—like this—when he gets insistent.”

“Relax! The wind might change. How does he react to menaces from a man six inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter?”

“Four inches and twenty pounds!” said the small man. “And don’t forget I’m dynamite, I am!”

“Ho-hum, you’re not bad, but is he incapable?”

The small man, who was perhaps five feet four, said seriously, “He isn’t, but I know what this is all about while he hasn’t a clue, and that undercuts his morale—what I’ve left him of it.”

“You say he hasn’t a clue, Giles, but he must know who we are and what we want and why.”

Giles hesitated, leaving something unsaid. “I’m not allowed to question him. I got well carpeted for playing games with him at the pub.”

“I heard; it wasn’t bright of you. What does he do all day?”

Giles raised a finger for quiet, and faintly from the cellar came the staccato of the typewriter. “All day? Biography for a daily more hypothetical posterity?”

“Writing down what’s happened to him. Looking for a pattern, to work out what and why.”

“You believe that? All right, you believe it. Do you read the stuff?”

“Of course. I let him have the machine to see what he might come up with. When I took the first pages away he was mad angry, then he cooled off and started making a carbon for me! And, Bjorn, I’m not getting a damned clue out of it.”

“ ‘Bjorn’ was the Norway job. I’m Alastair here, Scottish accent and all when I’m at the shipyard.”

Giles was interested. “I don’t know yet what you’re doing here; the shipyards closed down years ago.”

“You’ve been away too long. A few workshops and dry docks waited for a miracle to reopen them, and along came the miracle, the monopole drive! Rocket propulsion obsolete overnight, star ships on the way! Mankind really in the sky and one beautiful, huge, orbital laboratory-factory being put together in the perfect place—a shipyard. Three hundred metres of precision engineering, to lift into space under her own power! Think of the fortunes it cost to build that Barnard’s Star abortion in orbit! The thing’s two years on her way and already a technical revolution out of date; she was the first but that’s all she was. And when Pride O’ Clyde lifts—these bloody Scots lay it on thick, don’t they?—I’ll be aboard as Chief Engineer.”

Giles was no longer interested, “It isn’t space ships the world needs.”

“But we who have the genes need this one. We need to know what space will do to us, or perhaps for us. That will be my real job aboard, guinea-pigging for The Company.”

“Company of bastards!”

The vehemence was unexpected, but Giles had always been an emotional problem. Alastair played it lightly. “Bitter, Giles? Seen too much too often? Weltschmerz?”

“No.” He gestured at the floor. “Him.” The typewriter muttered in its prison.

“Willy? For sanity’s sake, Giles!”

“What we’re doing to him is barbarous.”

“Barbarous!”

“Don’t waste outrage on me, Alastair. He had an accident, a car smash, three years ago, two years before I latched on to him. He’s amnesiac.”

Alastair’s eyebrows rose, but not with sympathy. “Tough titty, as they say.”

“Whatever he did, he doesn’t know it. He’s newborn. He shouldn’t suffer for what somebody by the same name did.”

Alastair thought before he spoke. “You can’t afford revisionism.”

“Revis—Commie lingo! Shit’s what that is! The Company are bastards and I am human after all.”

“Are you? And after all what? Well, perhaps you are and perhaps you aren’t, but don’t prattle about it to the old man. He’ll strangle you on your own guts.”

Giles said sullenly, “It’s a sense of justice with me.” He pushed at the folder. “Try reading the first pages.”

Alastair riffled the sheets. “Writes a lot, doesn’t he?” He glanced more keenly at Giles. “Is this what you got me here for?”

“I wanted a friend to read it. We used to be friends.”

“How could we not be?”

It was a careless, meaningless response. Giles knew he should not have used the word. Company relationships did not accommodate easily to emotional concepts. As Alastair began to read Giles thought, We’ve become The Company again, and when that happens we cease to be people.

WILL’S TYPESCRIPT: There are a chair and a table and a bed and a miserable forty-watt globe to make up the lack of a window.

There is also Giles bringing food twice a day—reasonable food in a starving world—and making faces when I pump him but answering nothing. At first the grimaces were unnerving, for there is real ferocity in this little man, but a sense of humour undid him. He began improving the performance, producing something new each time, and by the third day we both knew it for a game.

(Alastair’s mind twitched disgust. For sanity’s sake, Giles! A bloody game?)

I could laugh if I didn’t hate his guts and fear his powers.

He brings the Scotsman and I read it from front to back; its restrained language strives to put at arm’s length the darkening chronicle of world decay. Energy crisis: the oil shortage forecast twenty years ago is a reality still unprepared for, the building of nuclear plants is impeded by the oil shortage, and our braggart Australian solar assemblies are too slow in production (thanks to greedy unions and incompetent government) to benefit even ourselves. War and threats of war: little wars smoking and the big, big war ready to rumble, with everybody veiling threats at peace talks and nobody with nerve to throw the first punch. Food crisis: the Far East starving to death under the frightened eyes of a once-gluttonous West now unable to feed half its own people, despair at mutated crops with built-in toxicity, a pointing of fingers at countries like Australia where the wheat and rice still grow, and a questioning of how they escape while other nations die.

Terrifying, but remote to a man staring at the four walls of a cellar.

On the fourth morning—this morning—he brought the type-writer and some quarto. I wouldn’t let him see me ecstatic at the gift of something to do, so I thanked him with spite. “What should I write? My diary of the subterranean social whirl?”

For once he did not offer a gargoyle mask but looked as if he would like to say a word, even a friendly word, but could not. And went silently away.

Forbidden to speak to me? That would be pretty strange after all the formidable chatter that went on before he trapped me in his damned damp dungeon.

Forbidden by whom?

(The typing broke off and was resumed on a fresh page.)

At breakfast (godawful Scotch porridge—parritch!—with the tribal flavouring of salt because sugar cane is another of the crops mutating themselves into sludge) he picked up the sheets I typed yesterday and before I could protest took them away.

Why should he—or anybody—be interested?

An hour later, in an unscheduled visit, he brought carbon paper. For once he unbuttoned a little, proffered the sheets and grinned—and fleetingly my stomach turned over as once again he looked for a swift second the spitting image of Angus.

So I have a public! But nothing happens down here; I haven’t even Bruce’s spider to weave cheap philosophy.

“Meditation in a Glasgow Rat Pit, by a Trapped Rat”?

But why should I write for you, Giles, when I can write for me? Intensive recall may provide clues I have missed.

So …

It was at Glasgow Central that I realized something inexplicably wrong in my behaviour. Something subliminal was rising and insisting and my spirits were troubled as I trudged down that grey station. (That was a fortnight ago. The Scotsman reports, still with demented dignity, that Britain’s trains no longer run. What’s it like out there, Giles, with paralysis setting in?)

I looked around for the ramp down to Union Street—and can pinpoint that as the moment of the onset of psychic cold.

I had never been in Britain before, let alone Glasgow; I had no more knowledge of Union Street than of the lunar mountains; I hadn’t consciously realized that the station is elevated above street level …

I am trying to recover the sudden consciousness of what had been only a twinge in the back of my mind—that I didn’t know what I was doing in Glasgow or why I had left Australia.

Think of spending eight weeks securing passport and visa and battling for a seat on what turned out to be one of the last planes to leave Australia (the Scotsman says my whole country is now grounded for lack of fuel), touching down in London to go straight to Euston and book for Glasgow, and leaving the train in a strange city—to realize that you can’t account rationally for your presence or for anything you have done in the past two months.

I am amnesiac, Giles. Waking, three years ago, without a past was a terror that could be understood and dealt with; I read books about it and came to terms. There is no coming to terms with the knowledge of having, zombie fashion, carried out a series of actions leading from nothing to nothing. And of never once having questioned the lack of meaning.

Try to imagine effect without cause. That is what I faced, in a strange country, with the centre of my mind a gulf of unreason into which I might topple and never reach bottom.

Mind dealt with it as a mind always does this side insanity: Lot of nonsense … momentary hiatus … tired and need a meal … It’s a mighty machine, the mind; with that scatter of small thoughts it covered over a gap the size of my whole private universe and made it possible for me to carry on.

I lifted my bag, walked down to Union Street, then to Gallowgate Street, and found something familiar about Glasgow. This could have been a shopping centre in one of the more crowded Melbourne suburbs—medium-rise buildings, plate glass, shoppers, the rising grubbiness of a city when the overnight clean-up is wearing off. But not the musty grubbiness that stank when petrol was available and cars ran.

I walked east without questioning why I should prefer one direction to another—a mental placidity had set in—until I came to the Trongate and recognized at once the old tower straddling the footpath. “Tron” meant, in the old dialect, a market, so this had been …

The cold returned, and the terror of not knowing.

Had Angus, talking of Glasgow, told me of the Trongate? Had there been a photograph? He had spoken so much of “hame”.

It was not good enough. I dropped the bag and leaned against the nearest wall, wits scattering.

And there, a fantasy unleashed, was Angus, leaning against a pillar of the Trongate and grinning at me.

But Angus was home, at his flat in Melbourne.

It was night there, and he in bed.

The gulf in my mind opened to swallow me.

On the edge of panic I saw that this was not Angus or even someone much like him. There was a vague resemblance; repressed fright and confusion had done the rest. He spoke to me. (If it had been with Angus’s voice it might have broken me in pieces.)

How were you there, Giles, and just then? And waiting for me.

How?

Who are you, Giles, and what do you want with me?

WILL’S TYPESCRIPT: One day I’ll be free of your cellar, Giles, and I’ll hunt you down as sure as humanity’s middle name is cruelty. I’m human, after all.

(Alastair glanced up, caught Giles’s eye, and laughed.)

Do you know that when I saw you I nearly cried out, Angus! For God’s sake, Angus!

You are both short and slender in the legs and muscular over thin bones, broadfaced under hair with a shallow wave and blue-eyed in a complexion that demands brown. It sounds definitive but in fact could fit a hundred men with no two alike.

You asked, “Air y’ lost, mon?” in an accent as thick as your damned parritch, and I probably sounded like an idiot as I lied, “No, but I’m looking for a hotel.”

“There’s ainly yin in this pairt o’ Gallowgate. Gang a wee bit back an’ y’ll find it on the ither side, Aussie.”

That straightened me a little; I’ve always counted my accent fairly neutral. “Am I that obvious?”

You grinned with that slight baring of teeth I have become used to; there should be a doggy growl with it. You said, with that fine contempt the Brits shower on tourists while they scramble for their money, “Tae them wi’ ears tae hear.”

(I’m trying to render your speech, but of course it can’t be done. I can reproduce dialect, syntax and elisions but not even Shavian phonetics could put on paper that underlying burr, like soft gears meshing, that makes you sound the sweet bloke you assuredly are not.)

As you spoke you held my eyes with a deliberation a fraction too blatant. I had a queer double feeling about that: that I should resent provocative staring but did not. Then you said, with insulting indifference, “Gang y’r way, laddie; it’s the Rab Roy y’r seeking.”

I had thought the Scots talked like that only in comic novels but, by God, you actually do. But what matters is that I crossed the road and looked for the Rob Roy. (It was what vaguely I had been seeking. Had Angus mentioned it? I can’t remember.)

I wondered later about your stare. Hypnotism? But the hypnotized victim is not aware of the transition of states. There’s more in it than meets the eye (joke?). Something had been done to me and I didn’t mind. That’s the point—that my brain noted the fact, and didn’t mind.

(“It was a risk.”

“No. I can’t have him totally at ease; there has to be an edge of unrest I can sharpen and direct if need be. That’s a big part of manipulation, the setting up of balances. His ‘mental quiet’ is only a lid over the archetypal traits the operator works on.”

“Mental judo?”

“In a way. You use the man’s own mind against him.”)

Everything in romantic Caledonia is named for Scott or Burns, an olde worlde touch for tourists, done on the understanding that any non-Scot is too bloody ignorant to have heard of more than Sir Wa’ter, Rabbie and the Hieland fling. Still, the Rob Roy turned out to be pleasant and quiet.

And suddenly I had nothing to do.

So I did what everyone does in another country: I went out and walked and gawped and saw practically nothing I couldn’t have seen at home. I had forgotten that the kilt is not everyday wear south of the Highlands and felt cheated that the folk in the streets could as well have been the people next door in Melbourne. You Scots should be lined up and shot for all those technicolourful travel brochures.

At some stage I wandered round the back of the City Chambers and came unintentionally into George Square. Hear Angus, being homesick: “You must hear ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’ ’ sung by ten thoosand people in George Square at Hogmanay! It’s rousin’!” I’ll bet it is. Not even for Angus would I listen to that stale whiff of Harry Lauder from ten thousand drunks while the New Year dissolves in slush underfoot.

However, I recognized the white marble cenotaph he was so proud of and the Scott column sitting like an expensive factory chimney in the middle of the square.

Think I’m bitching, Giles? I feel entitled to it.

All right, then—George Square is a pleasant place. What’s more, I had a tiny adventure there. Perhaps I should keep it to myself. Or might it have significance enough to unlock your mousetrap mouth for a round buccaneering oath?

I met a girl there. For a passing moment I met a girl.

I walked down the grass bank into the centre where the seats are, under the perimeter of trees. And there was a real tam-o’-shanter on a pensioner type sunning himself in that pale glow you Scots call daylight! Planted for the tourist trade in case it recovers?

I watched a girl come round from the other side of the Scott column—a good-looking girl, twentyish, quietly dressed but immediately memorable for the beautiful swan throat of some modern Annie Laurie and huge, gentle blue eyes. I stared, and why not?

She returned the stare with the faintest of smiles, with not a hint of a come-on in it, then spoke and reduced me to bumbling.

“A tourist in Glasgow! I thought they kept you all in ferry boats on Loch Lomond.”

She robbed it of insult by being so honestly and good-humouredly amused, but “tourist” made the Polaroid on my shoulder swell to the size of a suitcase and tied my tongue in knots. When the poor thing had loosened itself I muttered that I was in Glasgow because an Australian friend had been born here. It was my first thought and seemed vaguely true.

“Australia?” There was a spark of special attention in her voice, a connection made in her mind. “A good land to escape to.” Which was a curious thing to say when you think about it. “What’s the lucky man’s name?”

“Angus.”

“Just Angus?”

“Maxwell.”

“Ah.” It meant something to her; she studied me with a closeness which had nothing to do with my status as eligible male. “When you see him,” she said, “remember me to him.”

Perhaps it was some Scottish in-joke, but she sounded genuine.

“What name shall I tell him?”

She hesitated. “Jeanie Deans.”

So it was a joke. “Come off it, love. Even an ignorant colonial knows the heroine of Midlothian.”

She nodded, not smiling. “She walked the length of Britain in bare feet, seeking mercy and justice. Tell him that, too.”

She gave me no time for questions. She simply went away.

It was queer, queer.

Has it meaning, Giles? Did you know about it?

Then it was ten to six and—unwarned but unsurprised—I knew what I was to do. There’s no point in belabouring irrationality; it was built into my mental scene.

So I went back to the Rob Roy where, on the dot of six o’clock opening, the bar was filling, though beer production had ceased with the curtailing of transport to deliver it. Hotels were serving from surprising stocks of wines and spirits, but even at their extortionate prices the supply must have been measured in days.

I risked my accent on a nip of Scotch and got it—for two pounds. That’s the sort of thing that signals the closeness of the breakdown point. I’m seeing it in retrospect; at the time I didn’t believe more than any other that the utter collapse of our way of life was not only possible but inevitable—and only days away.

Turning from the bar I nearly dropped my glass when I looked straight into Angus’s eyes. No mistaking the high cheekbones and the unusually thick and corded veins binding slender wrists to talons of hands.

Yet he stared through me, not seeing me, and smiled greeting to someone beyond. And it was not Angus’s smile.

You, Giles, of course. That illusion twice in a few hours … I turned my back, needing a moment for mental balance, and it gave you the chance to do the unforgivable, to speak from behind me, directly into my ear—with Angus’s voice.

“So you foond the Rab Roy, Aussie.”

I turned very slowly, taking hold of my mind, but my inclination was to cut and run and it must have showed.

You said, but in your own voice, “Y’ll no’ mind me speakin’ tae y’? A stranger needs acquaintance in a strange land.”

Because I didn’t see yet that this was cat-and-mouse and because my mind played the usual trick of deciding that the fault must lie with itself, I said, “I mistook you for somebody else, somebody who couldn’t possibly be here.”

You shrugged, “Lookalike’s no’ sae oncommon.”

“Same size and shape and both Scots, but that’s all. You don’t look alike.”

You raised your glass and said as if it were a toast, “Then let’s hope he’s a freend an’ no’ an enemy.”

It was a damned peculiar thing to say but, perhaps out of bewilderment, I answered with one of those confidences you give only to the chance-met stranger who will never reappear to confront you with it.

I said, “He’s the dearest friend I ever had.”

It rocked you, Giles. Whatever you had expected, it was not that. For an instant you lost control of your game. Then you nodded as though some unspoken question had been answered and asked, “A freendship o’ great trust?”

“Absolute.” And with the word the first doubt of Angus entered my mind. Angus had gone to great lengths to establish that trust, almost courting me to turn instinctive liking into a bond of affection. And had succeeded.

“Why then,” you said, “haud tae it; a mon needs such.”

My disgraceful little doubt ran back into darkness; what link could Angus have with this reptilian little man?

You asked idly (save that nothing you said or did was idle), “An’ what’s the wee freend’s name?”

“Angus.”

“That’s guid Scottish. I’m Giles.”

I did not name myself in return; that may have been a last subconscious caution before all caution became useless. I said, “And that isn’t good Scottish.”

“Y’ say no’? Well, we hae Saint Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh. Will y’ say that’s no’ Scottish?”

I could have said, Giles is an English saint, a ring-in, but you went on prying. “An’ what brings y’ tae Scotland?”

I was calming down. (Did you arrange that in some fashion that evades me?) I said, making it a good-humoured throwaway, “I don’t know what brings me. I got my passport and took the first available plane, just like that.”

You disagreed with the arrogance of a Scot taking no bloody nonsense from a tourist. “It wasna like that. There’s no peradventures; there’s ainly reasons.”

The cold closed in again. “Peradventures” was an Angus word and one that he always used a little wrongly, as if it meant meaningless actions, which is not quite correct. You also used it that little bit wrongly, Giles.

(“Giles, Giles!”

“Laugh, you bastard. So I’m not perfect.”

Alastair raised eyes to heaven. “I have lived to hear him admit it! Thank you, God.”)

I suppose I was fighting back (against what?) when I asked sarcastically, “Predestination, you think?”

“Naething sae extreme. A kind o’ detairminism, mair like. Perhaps the wee Angus influenced y’r will wi’ hints an’ bits o’ memories an’ sich.”

A jigsaw fell into pattern. He had pushed, feeding flashes of history and snippets of folk oddity and moments of lyric memory, creating my desire to see, to make the leap across the world. My silly tongue yammered, “He did talk a lot. Burns and Bruce and Wallace. Fingal’s Cave and Lochleven Castle in the lake and Rob Roy’s hideout on Loch Lomond. And the Gow Chrom of old Perth—”

“Ay, romance, romance! An’ recited ‘Lochinvar’, nae doot, an’ told how Birnam Wood sneaked up on Dunsinane, or—” I can’t forget the change in you here, from mockery to outright venom “—or gied y’ a snatch o’ Dunbar.”

“He’s not classical; he wouldn’t know Dunbar.”

“No’ even Timor mortis conturbat me?”

With that doomladen line you settled solidly into the shape of an enemy, and one who gave not a damn that I knew it.

(“What was the point of the Dunbar line? What was gained?”

“Nothing.” He admitted unwillingly, “I was angry and confused. Something he said.”

“What?”

“It’s there to be seen. But I feel The Company has lost the capacity to see some things.”

Alastair thought for a long moment before he continued reading.)

You said, practically laughing at me, “An’ noo y’d better come wi’ me. I hae room an’ bed for y’.”

I can call up courage for most situations but I’ll look for a way out of one that makes no sense. I said, “You’re out of your mind,” and pushed past as if you were one of those clowns the world’s bars are full of. But you grabbed my wrist and I hesitated because only a fool makes a scene where he doesn’t know the local conventions.

“Y’ll come, Willie,” you said, “an’ y’ll be looked after.”

I had not told my name, and nobody but Angus ever called me Willie. Always Will or Bill.

You meant to break my nerve and you did; I went for the door, shoving my way through protests. I looked back to see you following me unhurriedly, on your face a look of derision which gave sudden way to a blaze of anger so intense as to raise the sweat on me.

I think then that I broke blindly for the door. I know I stumbled on the footpath, fell full length to skin hands and elbows and turn a wrist in white pain, and came to my knees gasping and shaking like some drunk overcome in the public street. There may have been passers-by but I was in no condition to notice anything more than that it was you who helped me to my feet, making friendly noises and taking the opportunity to twist my head so that you could look directly into my eyes.

“Y’ must come hame, Willie,” you said, for the benefit I suppose of onlookers, then snarled in my ear with no trace of Scotland in your English, “You’ve been babied enough. Now you’ll do what you’re told, Will Santley, under full control. Won’t you?”

And of course I did, with outward calm, with on the surface of my mind a total trust in you. Also in my mind, deep down, a conflict twitching at my brain but refusing to be recognized.

I acted willingly but against my deeper will, docilely carrying on while a stifled part of me lodged useless and unintelligible objection. I recall vividly the walk from the Rob Roy to this cellar, my mind seizing avidly on surfaces, with everything inward suppressed.

Is this what is meant by “full control”?

We walked by way of the Clyde embankment and then through Glasgow Green. You talked the whole time. (Part of the mental misdirection process?) We covered a mile or more before we crossed a bridge out of the park to a run-down suburb. And finally we entered this house and came down the stairs.

You said, “Sleep, Willie,” and shut the door. And I slept.

The thing that puzzles me and disturbs me most, a fortnight later, is the moment of inexplicable angry hatred on your face as you followed me from the bar.

Alastair threw down the typescript. “A bungle, Giles, on the grand scale. You’re slipping. You said you were angry but this reads more like uncontrolled spite.”

“I’m as good as ever I was. I was under pressure of guilt.” Looking mulishly down at his hands, he did not see Alastair’s raised eyebrows. “That’s how guilt works; you take out your pain on the one betrayed, flog his stupidity to excuse your own double dealing. But it doesn’t help.”

Alastair understood that very well; importantly, Giles also understood it well enough to exercise self-control. The Company could not at this juncture rise to the extreme co-operative effort required for major rehandling of a member’s psychological lesions. When the Santley affair was over, yes; they could not afford the loss of the unmatchable talent of a venomously revengeful Giles. Meanwhile …

“If it did, still you overreached yourself badly. Did Ancient Lights wring you out like a rag?”

“He was mild. I was lucky.”

Damned lucky; he had escaped with little more than cautioning.

The old man had begun with the usual performance which should be comedy but never was.

“Which are you? Why are you here? What do you want?”

Memory, not senility, was the problem.

“I am Giles. Also Angus. You sent for me.”

“Why? What have you done?”

“That has been reported to you.” Consensus was that he be encouraged to use his memory, to force it until it disgorged.

“Aaaah.” That was petulance at the prodding. For years they had urged him to submit to memory clearance but the old autocrat had used his prestige to argue the necessity of mental continuity. Indeed he had vast experience and factual knowledge, but Giles did not concede him so superior an intellect.

Silence dragged; the old devil would finish in a tantrum. Giles offered a small assistance. “You will have had the observer’s report.” (That so important an operation would be quietly monitored had gone clean out of his angry mind in the hotel.) “I came as soon as I had him settled.”

Ancient Lights (and who had concocted that suitable but ridiculous name?) could conjure recollection of his earliest life in stupefying detail but new material needed time to take hold.

“Aaaah!” The same exhalation, but charged with success. “Your handling from Melbourne to Scotland was faultless.” First, Giles thought, the good news. “So why did you frighten seven devils out of him in that bar? His subconscious is now fully aware of being manoeuvred; any intrusion of paradox could break him. We don’t want a schizophrenic unable to tell fact from nightmare or a catatonic to be excavated with psychological tools. Your usefulness is at test. Why did you do it?”

He had been prepared for summary discipline, not a searching out of motives. He said drearily, “He shamed me and I lost my temper.”

“Shamed? Temper? Arrogance! You are a servant, a man under authority.”

When reference to the King James version appeared it was as well to take care; when surrogate God sat in judgement (though they were atheist to th. . .