The Stone That Never Came Down Read online

  “You might also drop a hint in the right quarter,” Kneller said, “about his inability to solve the murder of my late colleague Dr Post, which in fact was solved by the man he displaced from the investigation, David Sawyer, and–”

  “And who was so affronted by this high-handed treatment that he felt obliged to resign,” the lawyer supplied. “I heard about that, and I was shocked. Obviously Sawyer was a dedicated and gifted officer; wasn’t he also responsible for arresting that drug-peddler, Feathers? I imagine I’d have done the same in his place. Oh, I think I can say with certainty that this creeping personality-cult which over the past few years has been infecting the police, since the advent of Charkall-Phelps as Home Secretary, is at an end.”

  He gathered his papers and rose.

  “I’ll just go and see whether Gladwin is here yet. If he is, I’ll be back at once and you’ll be a free man again in a matter of minutes.”

  On came the floodlights, and the square, packed with workers returned from abroad, waved in their brilliance, like a field of grass when a breeze passes over it on a sunny day. This was where Marshal Dalessandro had drawn his support since the very beginning, in the stock populist tradition. Some of those people waiting for him tonight were former factory-hands in Birmingham, garage-attendants in Munich, night-watchmen in Lyons, dockside roustabouts in Antwerp … whose work had vanished thanks to economic forces they could not comprehend, and who had been compelled to come home trailing the dismal shreds of their vision of the Promised Land.

  Disappointment had matured into anger. They wanted a messiah at all costs, and in Dalessandro they had found one. Elsewhere and at other times the shirtless ones had turned in similar fashion to Mussolini, to Perón, to Adolf Hitler–and sometimes been gratified, often not.

  Now, when the marshal emerged, he looked pale and strained; it was known that he had been for two and a half days victim of this extraordinary sleeping-sickness one had read about. On seeing him recovered, the crowd exploded with delight.

  When, after three or four minutes, there was quiet, he approached the waiting microphones … and hesitated, looking from one side to the other of the square, with a special smile for the TV cameras. And finally seemed to brace himself, and spoke up: “My friends!”

  “Il nostro Duce!” came an answering roar.

  “My friends!” he repeated. “I have great news for you! It has come to me, as though in a vision, how we can spare our beloved land from the scourge of war!”

  There was a near-silence, in which could almost be heard the thoughts of his listeners: “But we were looking forward to that!”

  He went on doggedly. “We have the tools in our hands to make a good life for everybody. They have been ignored, they have been neglected. Those who neglected them were perhaps evil, or–more likely–they were unable to cope. Our world is so complicated, and so many decisions have to be taken, and so many people are trying to extract maximum benefit for themselves at the expense of others … But today I offer you a plan which will benefit everybody, and nobody will be deprived!”

  Half an hour later, those of the reporters who were not clapping as wildly as the crowd were saying to each other, “But why didn’t anybody think of that before? It’s obvious!”

  XXIV

  “One thing does please me immensely,” Malcolm said as he dexterously opened celebratory bottles of champagne in the small, and now crowded, living-room which Maurice Post had formerly rented. He had found on returning to London that in a final wild spasm of blind fury a godhead gang had attacked his house with fire-bombs and burned it to the ground, as though the war which had been so efficiently aborted had needed to leave some warning traces on the world. But that had been virtually the last such incident.

  “What, darling?” Ruth inquired, taking the freshly filled glasses and distributing them. It was going to be a grand party, this; perhaps never in all of history had there been so good an excuse for holding one.

  “That there’s still room for sentiment,” Malcolm said.

  “I know what you mean,” Kneller agreed. “In a sense, the whole thing began here, didn’t it? Here in Maurice’s home. It must have been here that he first realised he was being affected by VC–here that he debated with himself hour after hour trying to work out whether his views concerning the fate in store for the world were justified, or illusory–here that he took the crucial decision to try it on himself, to be a guinea-pig on behalf of mankind.”

  “He had guts,” Cissy said. She was sitting in a nearby chair with Toussaint perched on her knee. The boy was looking very annoyed. He had insisted on trying the champagne for himself, and concluded it was a confidence trick.

  “More guts than most,” Valentine said with a nod. “A real hero, that guy.” And, having sampled the glass of champagne Ruth handed to him, interrupted himself to say, “Hey, that’s delicious!”

  “I was just going to say the same,” David Sawyer chimed in. “I never used to take seriously all the fine phrases the experts used about wine. A pint of keg has always been my regular tipple. But since catching VC I’ve developed quite a palate, and this is a marvellous drink.”

  “I can see one person who disagrees with you,” Ruth murmured dryly. “I’ll get Toussaint some apple-juice. Won’t be a moment.” She vanished in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Heroes!” Valentine said, reverting to his former point. “I don’t see how they got away with it for so long, giving phony examples to kids–people who like held the bridge, or went on fighting with one arm and one eye. Me, I’d have been turned on more by the kind of people Cissy says you used to talk about in class, Malcolm. Doctors who gave themselves VD and yellow fever in the hope of finding a permanent cure.”

  “Well, it’s taken us a while to learn to ride the dog,” Malcolm said. “Let alone figure out how to teach it to ride the lizard.”

  Drawing the cork on another bottle, he added to himself, with a quizzical cock of one eyebrow, “Never could pour champagne without spilling it before I got VC … Val, you look kind of blank. You weren’t at the council meeting at my old place when I used that metaphor.”

  “No, but I think I caught on anyway,” Valentine said. “Not the kind of thing you’d chance across in my line–after all, I never got into psychology much, learned more about electronics and then later went for politics and economics … But I guess you’re referring to three levels in the brain.”

  “Mm-hm. The trammels left over from earlier stages of evolution.”

  “Makes sense,” Valentine said. “And that’s what’s going to change the world, isn’t it? Catching on quick! Used to be that if you wanted to make somebody see things your way, you had to argue and persuade and hammer away. After VC–well, Wilfred and Arthur could tell you how to make the substrate they’d invented, and you could tell me, and the first time I tried it I got it right.” He grinned broadly. “No sweat!”

  “Before VC,” Cissy put in, “you couldn’t boil a potato!”

  Joining the group with his glass empty and holding it up for replenishment, Bradshaw said, “What I think is going to change the world is our long overdue acceptance of the true nature of freedom. First you do what has to be done, and only then what you feel like doing. Ever since we evolved to consciousness we’ve been doing what we feel like doing and constantly losing our tempers when what ought to have been done because it had to be done interfered. I was talking to Hector just now”–pointing to the other end of the room, where Hector was leafing through a book found in Maurice’s library–“about his patients, and he says he can see the impact of VC already. Because people now describe their symptoms more accurately he’s treating twice as many of them in the same period of time and probably more effectively too.”

  “Delete that ‘probably’,” Hector said in a voice just loud enough to cut through the general chatter, continuing to flip through the book that had caught his eye … or rather, read it. For someone who had taken VC, as he had done a week ago, a single g
lance per page was enough.

  –Something to do with being properly prepared psychologically. The sooner we can make the news of what’s going on public, the better.

  Malcolm sipped his champagne and over the glass gave Ruth a broad grin.

  “There’s one thing I can’t reconcile myself to,” she said. “Dalessandro being regarded as a great man. He’s nothing but–but an arrogant dictator!”

  “Oh, I think you do him an injustice,” Malcolm murmured. “He was at least a patriot, genuinely concerned about the mess his country had been allowed to drift into, even though he was no better qualified to put it right than the people he was so rude about … that is, until Bob issued him a dose of VC. After which anyone who’d taken the trouble to keep reasonably well informed could have seen what was wrong with the EEC setup. He merely happened to be the first who was able to suggest improvements knowing that other people would listen because they’d just realised that they were likely to be blown up if they didn’t.”

  “What’s more it’s a beautifully logical scheme,” Sawyer put in. “One suspects that his military training contributed to it. Right, Bob?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Bradshaw said. “Malcolm is glad there’s still room for sentiment in the world, and so am I. I’m glad that people like my friend who commands a Poseidon sub haven’t entirely wasted their lives. Principles of strategy don’t have to apply to warfare alone; they can be generalised, and Dalessandro has demonstrated the fact. Any competent officer could explain that if you want a body of men to behave well, you can be tough with them, but you must never under any circumstances be unfair or inconsistent. That’s been the bane of our system, hasn’t it? So few people rolling in more luxury than they knew what to do with, so many sweating their guts out and never earning a decent living … Thanks, of course, to the contradictory teachings of my former faith.”

  “I was brought up a Christian,” Cissy said. “Spelt K-I-L-L-J-O-Y. My mam still is one. When I said I was going to quit the church because of what I’d learned from Val about the history of slavery, I thought she was going to kill me!” She laughed nervously. But obviously that was not a joke.

  “Yes, I predict that disillusionment is going to reach landslide proportions,” Bradshaw said. “You see the Moral Polluters only quarter-filled Wembley Stadium for the climax of the New Year’s Crusade? They were expecting ninety per cent capacity. Amelia Washgrave told me so herself.”

  “That’s a reformed character, if you like,” Cissy said. “And to think Toussaint and I did it when we took her those candies …!

  “She’s recanted,” Malcolm said. “But the one I’m waiting for is Charkall-Phelps. Maybe he never grew a conscience at all. Maybe he stifled it with his greed for power … That’s a question for your theological chums, though, Bob.” He hesitated. “By the way, you must be relieved that the part of your life you spent studying the subject can’t be regarded as a total waste.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that” Kneller said. “Bob, how do you feel?”

  “No, it wasn’t wasted. Nothing’s wasted. Nothing ever need be wasted, either past or future. Not now.” Bradshaw sipped his wine. “You see … Well, we’ve been talking in metaphors about human personality, so I see no reason not to do the same about human community. I’d term the religious phase of our social evolution an adolescent phase, the logical sequel to the puerile phase in which, as we know, primitive people were unaware of the forces affecting their lives. Like children able to observe, and sometimes imitate, but never grasp the motives behind, the actions of their elders.”

  “To be followed by an adult stage?” Randolph suggested cynically.

  “Well, at least an age in which we can begin to make up our own minds,” Bradshaw said. “Free of the pubertal conflict between what we’ve been told is right and what our innate urges drive us to do. Time after time whole societies have become criminally insane, haven’t they? Nazi Germany, New England at the time of the witch-hunts, countless others. But VC is going to change all that.”

  Ruth said with a visible shiver, “Is there anything it isn’t going to change?”

  “Nothing,” Malcolm said positively. “Knowing what I used to know, I’d have guessed that its effects would take a long, long time to filter from the private to the public level. I’d have been overlooking something transcendentally obvious.”

  “One man in the right place at the right time,” Kneller offered.

  “Precisely. Maurice Post above all. Dalessandro too, in his way–after Bob’s neat coup at the church in Arcovado.”

  “You mean the sewer bit?” Bradshaw chuckled. “I spotted that the moment I stepped off the train!”

  “So you should add one thing in the right place at the right time,” Randolph said.

  “And our definition of ‘right’ has been revolutionised,” Malcolm said, nodding. “A priori I’d have expected the relatively minor consequences, like greater empathy, greater sociability, touching the public scale only indirectly, for example by reducing racial tension.” With a glance at Valentine and Cissy, “The sort of thing you told me happened to that sergeant in Glasgow, Val.”

  “Whereas what happened to his officer,” Valentine said, “Lieutenant Cordery, who never actually came to my tea-van but always had his cuppa fetched for him, was far more significant. Seems that of all the things that could have happened to a soldier under his command nothing could have shaken him more than castration. Even before he caught VC what happened to poor Corporal Stevens caused him to start thinking through what he’d been told and comparing it with his actual experience. You know he’s joined up with the strikers? He signed a communiqué on their behalf today.”

  “And a very reasonable set of proposals it contains,” Hector said, joining them for the regular reason, an empty glass. “I hope it’s going to succeed. I was so afraid I’d live to see my home town turn into a smoking pile of rubble like Belfast!”

  “It would have done,” Malcolm said, poising the bottle. “Not to mention London, Paris, Rome, New York, Moscow … Enjoying yourself, by the way?”

  “I was never at a party I enjoyed more,” Hector said with feeling. “Incidentally, I can name one thing that VC won’t change in a hurry.”

  “Hmm?” Malcolm blinked at him. “It’s revolutionising politics, economics and the arts; it’s abolishing warfare; it’s caused a painful reassessment of our attitudes to race and reproduction … Ah. You mean parties. And by extension the use of soft drugs.”

  “They’ll last for a good few generations, at any rate,” Hector said. “Hasn’t part of our problem always been that while we could conceive ideal societies in imagination we’ve been surrounded by proof that we didn’t inhabit a rationally organised world? Well, that’ll change in the end, but probably not for a century.”

  “I don’t know,” Kneller objected. “This conference that’s been called to rethink the Common Market and its relationship with poor countries from the bottom up: I’m sure it’ll be the first such conference to produce concrete results.”

  “And the law’s certain to be reviewed,” Sawyer said. “The whole clumsy top-heavy system which has made it a dinosaur in most people’s eyes, an anonymous impersonal expensive barrier between themselves and justice!”

  “Granted, granted,” Hector said. “What’s more the politicians who got to the top by graft and glibness won’t be able to fool people as they used to, and into the bargain they may grow consciences that wouldn’t let them try! But when it comes to reforming the life-style of more than three thousand million people, all suddenly more individual than ever before … I No, we’re going to have to digest our heritage of irrationality, and that will be a very slow process.”

  With deliberate noisiness he gulped the rest of his wine and added, “Which means that we’ll be swinking Posts for the foreseeable future.”

  “And vast,” Malcolm said.

  “Naturally!”

  “Hmm! How interesting! It’s started already, h
asn’t it? The change in language, I mean. Words are condensing. Were you aware, as a matter of curiosity, what you said just now?”

  “Me?” Hector put his hand on his chest. “I … Oh, yes. I get it. No, I wasn’t aware at the moment I said it that I’d packed swinking for Post and drinking a toast together. But … Well, did anyone miss the point?”

  “Not except for Toussaint, I imagine,” Malcolm murmured. “Who would hardly have read any Middle English, at his age … It’s happened to me once or twice, too. It feels from the inside a bit like stammering in reverse. It’s the listener who’s slow to react, not the speaker. But we’ll adjust. When I think how much more action we shall be able to cram into a given time, how much more communication into fewer words … It’s going to be a fascinating world. Painful, but the pains will be growing-pains. He among us who was within sight posted the first stone and it won’t come down.”

  As he spoke, everybody’s attention had fixed on him, and now everybody laughed except Toussaint, who looked puzzled, and–to Malcolm’s surprise–Kneller, who said, “What?”

  “You don’t get the reference? Ah, perhaps you never took an interest in folk-tales.”

  “No, I have to admit I never did.”

  “You should know this one. After all, you’re among the handful of people who have stoned the entire world. It’s my favourite Jack the Giant Killer story. Jack left home to seek his fortune carrying nothing but a bag, a cheese his mother had made, and a bird he had caught. On his way he met a giant. The giant swore to gobble him up if he couldn’t match him in a trial of strength, and first he picked up a rock and crushed it so hard that water oozed out. So Jack squeezed the cheese and the whey ran out. Then the giant threw a stone clear out of sight, and it was a long, long time before it fell back. So Jack pretended the bird was a pebble, and of course it flew away. His stone never came down.