Текст книги "The Complete Short Stories"
Автор книги: James Graham Ballard
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Текущая страница: 73 (всего у книги 113 страниц)
At dawn, as the engines growled among the dunes, we collected the last remains of Robert Hamilton. The old man came into our cabin. As Judith watched from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel, he gave me a cardboard shoebox.
I held the box in my hands. ‘Is this all you could get?’
‘It’s all there was. Look at them, if you want.’
‘That’s all right. We’ll be leaving in half an hour.’
He shook his head. ‘Not now. They’re all around. If you move, they’ll find us.’
He waited for me to open the shoe-box, then grimaced and went out into the pale light.
We stayed for another four days, as the Army patrols searched the surrounding dunes. Day and night, the half-tracks lumbered among the wrecked cars and cabins. Once, as I watched with Quinton from a fallen water tower, a half-track and two jeeps came within four hundred yards of the basin, held back only by the stench from the settling beds and the cracked concrete causeways.
During this time, Judith sat in the cabin, the shoe-box on her lap. She said nothing to me, as if she had lost all interest in me and the salvage-filled hollow at Cape Kennedy. Mechanically, she combed her hair, making and remaking her face.
On the second day, I came in after helping Quinton bury the cabins to their windows in the sand. Judith was standing by the table.
The shoe-box was open. In the centre of the table lay a pile of charred sticks, as if she had tried to light a small fire. Then I realized what was there. As she stirred the ash with her fingers, grey flakes fell from the joints, revealing the bony points of a clutch of ribs, a right hand and shoulder blade.
She looked at me with puzzled eyes. ‘They’re black,’ she said.
Holding her in my arms, I lay with her on the bed. A loudspeaker reverberated among the dunes, fragments of the amplified commands drumming at the panes.
When they moved away, Judith said: ‘We can go now.’
‘In a little while, when it’s clear. What about these?’
‘Bury them. Anywhere, it doesn’t matter.’ She seemed calm at last, giving me a brief smile, as if to agree that this grim charade was at last over.
Yet, when I had packed the bones into the shoe-box, scraping up Robert Hamilton’s ash with a dessert spoon, she kept it with her, carrying it into the kitchen while she prepared our meals.
It was on the third day that we fell ill.
After a long, noise-filled night, I found Judith sitting in front of the mirror, combing thick clumps of hair from her scalp. Her mouth was open, as if her lips were stained with acid. As she dusted the loose hair from her lap, I was struck by the leprous whiteness of her face.
Standing up with an effort, I walked listlessly into the kitchen and stared at the saucepan of cold coffee. A sense of indefinable exhaustion had come over me, as if the bones in my body had softened and lost their rigidity. On the lapels of my jacket, loose hair lay like spinning waste.
‘Philip…’ Judith swayed towards me. ‘Do you feel – What is it?’
‘The water.’ I poured the coffee into the sink and massaged my throat. ‘It must be fouled.’
‘Can we leave?’ She put a hand up to her forehead. Her brittle nails brought down a handful of frayed ash hair. ‘Philip, for God’s sake – I’m losing all my hair!’
Neither of us was able to eat. After forcing myself through a few slices of cold meat, I went out and vomited behind the cabin.
Quinton and his men were crouched by the wall of the settling tank. As I walked towards them, steadying myself against the hull of the weather satellite, Quinton came down. When I told him that the water supplies were contaminated, he stared at me with his hard bird’s eyes.
Half an hour later, they were gone.
The next day, our last there, we were worse. Judith lay on the bed, shivering in her jacket, the shoe-box held in one hand. I spent hours searching for fresh water in the cabins. Exhausted, I could barely cross the sandy basin. The Army patrols were closer. By now, I could hear the hard gear-changes of the half-tracks. The sounds from the loudspeakers drummed like fists on my head.
Then, as I looked down at Judith from the cabin doorway, a few words stuck for a moment in my mind. contaminated area.., evacuate.., radioactive…’
I walked forward and pulled the box from Judith’s hands.
‘Philip…’ She looked up at me weakly. ‘Give it back to me.’
Her face was a puffy mask. On her wrists, white flecks were forming. Her left hand reached towards me like the claw of a cadaver.
I shook the box with blunted anger. The bones rattled inside. ‘For God’s sake, it’s this! Don’t you see – why we’re ill?’
‘Philip – where are the others? The old man. Get them to help you.’
‘They’ve gone. They went yesterday, I told you.’ I let the box fall on to the table. The lid broke off, spilling the ribs tied together like a bundle of firewood. ‘Quinton knew what was happening – why the Army is here. They’re trying to warn us.’
‘What do you mean?’ Judith sat up, the focus of her eyes sustained only by a continuous effort. ‘Don’t let them take Robert. Bury him here somewhere. We’ll come back later.’
‘Judith!’ I bent over the bed and shouted hoarsely at her. ‘Don’t you realize – there was a bomb on board! Robert Hamilton was carrying an atomic weapon!’ I pulled back the curtains from the window. ‘My God, what a joke. For twenty years, I put up with him because I couldn’t ever be really sure..
‘Philip…’
‘Don’t worry, I used him – thinking about him was the only thing that kept us going. And all the time, he was waiting up there to pay us back!’
There was a rumble of exhaust outside. A half-track with red crosses on its doors and hood had reached the edge of the basin. Two men in vinyl suits jumped down, counters raised in front of them.
‘Judith, before we go, tell me… I never asked you—’ Judith was sitting up, touching the hair on her pillow. One half of her scalp was almost bald. She stared at her weak hands with their silvering skin. On her face was an expression I had never seen before, the dumb anger of betrayal.
As she looked at me, and at the bones scattered across the table, I knew my answer.
1968
The Comsat Angels
When I first heard about the assignment, in the summer of 1968, I did my best to turn it down. Charles Whitehead, producer of BBC TV’s science programme Horizon, asked me to fly over to France with him and record a press conference being held by a fourteen-year-old child prodigy, Georges Duval, who was attracting attention in the Paris newspapers. The film would form part of Horizon’s new series, which I was scripting, ‘The Expanding Mind’, about the role of communications satellites and data-processing devices in the so-called information explosion. What annoyed me was this insertion of irrelevant and sensational material into an otherwise serious programme.
‘Charles, you’ll destroy the whole thing,’ I protested across his desk that morning. ‘These child prodigies are all the same. Either they simply have some freak talent or they’re being manipulated by ambitious parents. Do you honestly believe this boy is a genius?’
‘He might be, James. Who can say?’ Charles waved a plump hand at the contact prints of orbiting satellites pinned to the walls. ‘We’re doing a programme about advanced communications systems – if they have any justification at all, it’s that they bring rare talents like this one to light.’
‘Rubbish – these prodigies have been exposed time and again. They bear the same relation to true genius that a crosschannel swimmer does to a lunar astronaut.’
In the end, despite my protests, Charles won me over, but I was still sceptical when we flew to Orly Airport the next morning. Every two or three years there were reports of some newly discovered child genius. The pattern was always the same: the prodigy had mastered chess at the age of three, Sanskrit and calculus at six, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity at twelve. The universities and conservatories of America and Europe opened their doors.
For some reason, though, nothing ever came of these precocious talents. Once the parents, or an unscrupulous commercial sponsor, had squeezed the last drop of publicity out of the child, his so-called genius seemed to evaporate and he vanished into oblivion.
‘Do you remember Minou Drouet?’ I asked Charles as we drove from Orly. ‘A child prodigy of a few years back. Cocteau read her poems and said, "Every child is a genius except Minou Drouet."
‘James, relax… Like all scientists, you can’t bear anything that challenges your own prejudices. Let’s wait until we see him. He might surprise us.’
He certainly did, though not as we expected.
Georges Duval lived with his widowed mother in the small town of Montereau, on the Seine thirty miles south of Paris. As we drove across the cobbled square past the faded police prefecture, it seemed an unlikely birthplace for another Darwin, Freud or Curie. However, the Duvals’ house was an expensively built white-walled villa overlooking a placid arm of the river. A well-tended lawn ran down to a vista of swans and water-meadows.
Parked in the drive was the location truck of the film unit we had hired, and next to it a radio van from RadioTelevision-Franaise and a Mercedes with a Paris-Match sticker across the rear window. Sound cables ran across the gravel into a kitchen window. A sharp-faced maid led us without ado towards the press conference. In the lounge, four rows of gilt chairs brought in from the Hotel de Ville faced a mahogany table by the windows. Here a dozen cameramen were photographing Madame Duval, a handsome woman of thirty-five with calm grey eyes, arms circumspectly folded below two strands of pearls. A trio of solemn-faced men in formal suits protected her from the technicians setting up microphones and trailing their cables under the table.
Already, fifteen minutes before Georges Duval appeared, I felt there was something bogus about the atmosphere. The three dark-suited men – the Director of Studies at the Sorbonne, a senior bureaucrat from the French Ministry of Education, and a representative of the Institut Pascal, a centre of advanced study – gave the conference an overstuffed air only slightly eased by the presence of the local mayor, a homely figure in a shiny suit, and the boy’s schoolmaster, a lantern-jawed man hunched around his pipe.
Needless to say, when Georges Duval arrived, he was a total disappointment. Accompanied by a young priest, the family counsellor, he took his seat behind the table, bowing to the three officials and giving his mother a dutiful buss on the cheek. As the lights came on and the cameras began to turn, his eyes stared down at us without embarrassment.
Georges Duval was then fourteen, a slim-shouldered boy small for his age, self-composed in a grey flannel suit. His face was pale and anaemic, hair plastered down to hide his huge bony forehead. He kept his hands in his pockets, concealing his over-large wrists. What struck me immediately was the lack of any emotion or expression on his face, as if he had left his mind in the next room, hard at work on some intricate problem.
Professor Leroux of the Sorbonne opened the press conference. Georges had first come to light when he had taken his mathematics degree at thirteen, the youngest since Descartes. Leroux described Georges’s career: reading at the age of two, by nine he had passed his full matriculation exam – usually taken at fifteen or sixteen. As a vacation hobby he had mastered English and German, by eleven had passed the diploma of the Paris Conservatoire in music theory, by twelve was working for his degree. He had shown a precocious interest in molecular biology, and already corresponded with biochemists at Harvard and Cambridge.
While this familiar catalogue was being unfolded, Georges’s eyes, below that large carapace of a skull, showed not a glimmer of emotion. Now and then he glanced at a balding young man in a soft grey suit sitting by himself in the front row. At the time I thought he was Georges’s elder brother – he had the same high bony temples and closed face. Later, however, I discovered that he had a very different role.
Questions were invited for Georges. These followed the usual pattern – what did he think of Vietnam, the space-race, the psychedelic scene, miniskirts, girls, Brigitte Bardot? In short, not a question of a serious nature. Georges answered in good humour, stating that outside his studies he had no worthwhile opinions. His voice was firm and reasonably modest, but he looked more and more bored by the conference, and as soon as it broke up, he joined the young man in the front row. Together they left the room, the same abstracted look on their faces that one sees in the insane, as if crossing our own universe at a slight angle.
While we made our way out, I talked to the other journalists. Georges’s father had been an assembly worker at the Renault plant in Paris; neither he nor Madame Duval was in the least educated, and the house, into which the widow and son had moved only two months earlier, was paid for by a large research foundation. Evidently there were unseen powers standing guard over Georges Duval. He apparently never played with the boys from the town.
As we drove away, Charles Whitehead said slyly: ‘I notice you didn’t ask any questions yourself.’
‘The whole thing was a complete set-up. We might as well have been interviewing De Gaulle.’
‘Perhaps we were.’
‘You think the General may be behind all this?’
‘It’s possible. Let’s face it, if the boy is outstanding, it makes it more difficult for him to go off and work for Du Pont or IBM.’
‘But is he? He was intelligent, of course, but all the same, I’ll bet you that three years from now no one will even remember him.’
After we returned to London my curiosity came back a little. In the Air France bus to the TV Centre at White City I scanned the children on the pavement. Without a doubt none of them had the maturity and intelligence of Georges Duval. Two mornings later, when I found myself still thinking about Georges, I went up to the research library.
As I turned through the clippings, going back twenty years, I made an interesting discovery. Starting in 1948, I found that a major news story about a child prodigy came up once every two years. The last celebrity had been Bobby Silverberg, a fifteen-year-old from Tampa, Florida. The photographs in the Look, Paris-Match and Oggi profiles might have been taken of Georges Duval. Apart from the American setting, every ingredient was the same: the press conference, TV cameras, presiding officials, the high-school principal, doting mother – and the young genius himself, this time with a crew-cut and nothing to hide that high bony skull. There were two college degrees already passed, postgraduate fellowships offered by MIT, Princeton and CalTech.
And then what?
‘That was nearly three years ago,’ I said to Judy Walsh, my secretary. ‘What’s he doing now?’
She flicked through the index cards, then shook her head. ‘Nothing. I suppose he’s taking another degree at a university somewhere.’
‘He’s already got two degrees. By now he should have come up with a faster-than-light drive or a method of synthesizing life.’
‘He’s only seventeen. Wait until he’s a little older.’
‘Older? You’ve given me an idea. Let’s go back to the beginning – 1948.’
Judy handed me the bundle of clippings. Life magazine had picked up the story of Gunther Bergman, the first postwar prodigy, a seventeenyear-old Swedish youth whose pale, over-large eyes stared out from the photographs. An unusual feature was the presence at the graduation ceremony at Uppsala University of three representatives from the Nobel Foundation. Perhaps because he was older than Silverberg and Georges Duval, his intellectual achievements seemed prodigious. The degree he was collecting was his third; already he had done original research in radioastronomy, helping to identify the unusual radio-sources that a decade later were termed ‘quasars’.
‘A spectacular career in astronomy seems guaranteed. It should be easy to track him down. He’ll be, what?, thirtyseven now, professor at least, well on his way to a Nobel Prize.’
We searched through the professional directories, telephoned Greenwich Observatory and the London Secretariat of the World Astronomical Federation.
No one had heard of Gunther Bergman.
‘Right, where is he?’ I asked Judy when we had exhausted all lines of inquiry. ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s twenty years; he should be world-famous by now.’
‘Perhaps he’s dead.’
‘That’s possible.’ I gazed down pensively at Judy’s quizzical face. ‘Put in a call to the Nobel Foundation. In fact, clear your desk and get all the international directories we can up here. We’re going to make the Comsats sing.’
Three weeks later, when I carried my bulky briefcase into Charles Whitehead’s office, there was an electric spring in my step.
Charles eyed me warily over his glasses. ‘James, I hear you’ve been hard on the trail of our missing geniuses. What have you got?’
‘A new programme.’
‘New? We’ve already got Georges Duval listed in Radio Times.’
‘For how long?’ I pulled a chair up to his desk and opened my briefcase, then spread the dozen files in front of him. ‘Let me put you in the picture. Judy and I have been back to 1948. In those twenty years there have been eleven cases of so-called geniuses. Georges Duval is the twelfth.’
I placed the list in front of him.
1948 Gunther Bergman (Uppsala, Sweden) 1950 Jaako Litmanen (Vaasa, Finland) 1952 John Warrender (Kansas City, USA) 1953 Arturo Bandini (Bologna, Italy) 1955 Gesai Ray (Calcutta, India) 1957 Giuliano Caldare (Palermo, Sicily) 1958 Wolfgang Herter (Cologne, Germany) 1960 Martin Sherrington (Canterbury, England) 1962 Josef Oblensky (Leningrad, USSR) 1964 Yen Hsi Shan (Wuhan, China) 1965 Robert Silvetherg (Tampa, USA) 1968 Georges Duval (Montereau, France)
Charles studied the list, now and then patting his forehead with a floral handkerchief. ‘Frankly, apart from Georges Duval, the names mean absolutely nothing.’
‘Isn’t that strange? There’s enough talent there to win all the Nobel Prizes three times over.’
‘Have you tried to trace them?’
I let out a cry of pain. Even the placid Judy gave a despairing shudder. ‘Have we tried? My God, we’ve done nothing else. Charles, apart from checking a hundred directories and registers, we’ve contacted the original magazines and news agencies, checked with the universities that originally offered them scholarships, talked on the overseas lines to the BBC reporters in New York, Delhi and Moscow.’
‘And? What do they know about them?’
‘Nothing. A complete blank.’
Charles shook his head doggedly. ‘They must be somewhere. What about the universities they were supposed to go to?’
‘Nothing there, either. It’s a curious thing, but not one of them actually went on to a university. We’ve contacted the senates of nearly fifty universities. Not a mention of them. They took external degrees while still at school, but after that they severed all connections with the academic world.’
Charles sat forward over the list, holding it like a portion of some treasure map. ‘James, it looks as if you’re going to win your bet. Somehow they all petered out in late adolescence. A sudden flaring of intelligence backed by prodigious memory, not matched by any real creative spark… that’s it, I suppose – none of them was a genius.’
‘As a matter of fact, I think they all were.’ Before he could stop me I went on. ‘Forget that for the moment. Whether or not they had genius is irrelevant. Certainly they had intellects vastly beyond the average, IQs of two hundred, enormous scholastic talents in a wide range of subjects. They had a sudden burst of fame and exposure and—’
‘They vanished into thin air. What are you suggesting – some kind of conspiracy?’
‘In a sense, yes.’
Charles handed me the list. ‘Come off it. Do you really mean that a sinister government bureau has smuggled them off, they’re slaving away now on some super-weapon?’
‘It’s possible, but I doubt it.’ I took a packet of photographs from the second folder. ‘Have a look at them.’
Charles picked up the first. ‘Ah, there’s Georges. He looks older here, those TV cameras are certainly ageing.’
‘It’s not Georges Duval. It’s Oblensky, the Russian boy, taken six years ago. Quite a resemblance, though.’ I spread the twelve photographs on the table top. Charles moved along the half-circle, comparing the over-large eyes and bony foreheads, the same steady gaze.
‘Wait a minute! Are you sure this isn’t Duval?’ Charles picked up Oblensky’s photograph and pointed to the figure of a young man in a light grey suit standing behind some mayoral official in a Leningrad parlour. ‘He was at Duval’s press conference, sitting right in front of us.’
I nodded to Judy. ‘You’re right, Charles. And he’s not only in that photo.’ I pulled together the photographs of Bobby Silverberg, Herter and Martin Sherrington. In each one the same balding figure in the dove-grey suit was somewhere in the background, his over-sharp eyes avoiding the camera lens. ‘No university admits to knowing him, nor do Shell, Philips, General Motors or a dozen other big international companies. Of course, there are other organizations he might be a talent scout for..
Charles had stood up, and was slowly walking around his desk. ‘Such as the CIA – you think he may be recruiting talent for some top-secret Government think-thank? It’s unlikely, but -’
‘What about the Russians?’ I cut in. ‘Or the Chinese? Let’s face it, eleven young men have vanished into thin air. What happened to them?’
Charles stared down at the photographs. ‘The strange thing is that I vaguely recognize all these faces. Those bony skulls, and those eyes… somewhere. Look, James, we may have the makings of a new programme here. This English prodigy, Martin Sherrington, he should be easy to track down. Then the German, Herter. Find them and we may be on to something.’
* * *
We set off for Canterbury the next morning. The address, which I had been given by a friend who was science editor of the Daily Express, was on a housing estate behind the big General Electric radio and television plant on the edge of the city. We drove past the lines of grey-brick houses until we found the Sherringtons’ at the end of a row. Rising out of the remains of a greenhouse was a huge ham operator’s radio mast, its stay-wires snapped and rusting. In the eight years since his tremendous mind had revealed itself to the local grammar-school master, Martin Sherrington might have gone off to the ends of the world, to Cape Kennedy, the Urals or Peking.
In fact, not only were neither Martin nor his parents there, but it took us all of two days to find anyone who even remembered them at all. The present tenants of the house, a frayed-looking couple, had been there two years; and before them a large family of criminal inclinations who had been forced out by bailiffs and police. The headmaster of the grammar-school had retired to Scotland. Fortunately the school matron remembered Martin – ‘a brilliantly clever boy, we were all very proud of him. To tell the truth, though, I can’t say we felt much affection for him; he didn’t invite it.’ She knew nothing of Mrs Sherrington, and as for the boy’s father, they assumed he had died in the war.
Finally, thanks to a cashier at the accounts office of the local electric company, we found where Mrs Sherrington had moved.
As soon as I saw that pleasant white-walled villa in its prosperous suburb on the other side of Canterbury, I felt that the trail was warming. Something about the crisp gravel and large, well-trimmed garden reminded me of another house – Georges Duval’s near Paris.
From the roof of my car parked next to the hedge we watched a handsome, strong-shouldered woman strolling in the rose garden.
‘She’s come up in the world,’ I commented. ‘Who pays for this pad?’
The meeting was curious. This rather homely, quietly dressed woman in her late thirties gazed at us across the silver tea-set like a tamed Mona Lisa. She told us that we had absolutely no chance of interviewing Martin on television.
‘So much interest in your son was roused at the time, Mrs Sherrington. Can you tell us about his subsequent academic career? Which university did he go to?’
‘His education was completed privately.’ As for his present whereabouts, she believed he was now abroad, working for a large international organization whose name she was not at liberty to divulge.
‘Not a government department, Mrs Sherrington?’
She hesitated, but only briefly. ‘I am told the organization is intimately connected with various governments, but I have no real knowledge.’
Her voice was over-precise, as if she were hiding her real accent. As we left, I realized how lonely her life was; but as Judy remarked, she had probably been lonely ever since Martin Sherrington had first learned to speak.
* * *
Our trip to Germany was equally futile. All traces of Wolfgang Herter had vanished from the map. A few people in the small village near the Frankfurt autobahn remembered him, and the village postman said that Frau Herter had moved to Switzerland, to a lakeside villa near Lucerne. A woman of modest means and education, but the son had no doubt done very well.
I asked one or two questions.
Wolfgang’s father? Frau Herter had arrived with the child just after the war; the husband had probably perished in one of the nameless prison-camps or battlegrounds of World War II.
The balding man in the light grey suit? Yes, he had definitely come to the village, helping Frau Herter arrange her departure.
‘Back to London,’ I said to Judy. ‘This needs bigger resources than you and I have.’
As we flew back Judy said: ‘One thing I don’t understand. Why have the fathers always disappeared?’
‘A good question. Putting it crudely, love, a unique genetic coupling produced these twelve boys. It almost looks as if someone has torn the treasure map in two and kept one half. Think of the stock bank they’re building up, enough sperm on ice in a eugenic cocktail to repopulate the entire planet.’
This nightmare prospect was on my mind when I walked into Charles Whitehead’s office the next morning. It was the first time I had seen Charles in his shirtsleeves. To my surprise, he brushed aside my apologies, then beckoned me to the huge spread of photographs pinned to the plaster wall behind his desk. The office was a clutter of newspaper cuttings and blown-up newsreel stills. Charles was holding a magnifying glass over a photograph of President Johnson and McNamara at a White House reception.
‘While you were gone we’ve been carrying out our own search,’ he said. ‘If it’s any consolation, we couldn’t trace any of them at first.’
‘Then you have found them? Where?’
‘Here.’ He gestured at the dozens of photographs. ‘Right in front of our noses. We’re looking at them every day.’
He pointed to a news agency photograph of a Kremlin reception for Premier Ulbricht of East Germany. Kosygin and Brezhnev were there, Soviet President Podgorny talking to the Finnish Ambassador, and a crowd of twenty party functionaries.
‘Recognize anyone? Apart from Kosygin and company?’
‘The usual bunch of hatchet-faced waiters these people like to surround themselves with. Wait a minute, though.’
Charles’s finger had paused over a quiet-faced young man with a high dolichocephalic head, standing at Kosygin’s elbow. Curiously, the Soviet Premier’s face was turned towards him rather than to Brezhnev.
‘Oblensky – the Russian prodigy. What’s he doing with Kosygin? He looks like an interpreter.’
‘Between Kosygin and Brezhnev? Hardly. I’ve checked with the BBC and Reuters correspondents in Moscow. They’ve seen him around quite a bit. He never says anything in public, but the important men always talk to him.’
I put down the photograph. ‘Charles, get on to the Foreign Office and the US Embassy. It makes sense – all eleven of them are probably there, in the Soviet Union.’
‘Relax. That’s what we thought. But have a look at these.’
The next picture had been taken at a White House meeting between Johnson, McNamara and General Westmoreland discussing US policy in Vietnam. There were the usual aides, secretaries and Secret Service men out on the lawn. One face had been ringed, that of a man in his early thirties standing unobtrusively behind Johnson and Westmoreland.
‘Warrender – the 1952 genius! He’s working for the US Government.’
‘More surprises.’ Charles guided me around the rest of the photographs. ‘You might be interested in these.’
The next showed Pope Paul on the balcony of St Peter’s, making his annual ‘Urbis et Orbis’ – the city and the world benediction to the huge crowd in the square. Standing beside him were Cardinal Mancini, chief of the Papal Secretariat, and members of his household staff. Obliquely behind the Pope was a man of about thirty wearing what I guessed to be a Jesuit’s soutane, large eyes watching Paul with a steady gaze.
‘Bandini, Arturo Bandini,’ I commented, recognizing the face. ‘Oggi did a series of features on him. He’s moved high in the papal hierarchy.’
‘There are few closer to Ii Papa, or better loved.’
After that came a photograph of U Thant, taken at a UN Security Council meeting during the Cuban missile crisis. Sitting behind the Secretary General was a pale-skinned young Brahmin with a fine mouth and eyes – Gesai Ray, the high-caste Indian who was the only well-born prodigy I had come across.
‘Ray is now even higher up on U Thant’s staff,’ Charles added. ‘There’s one interesting photograph of him and Warrender together during the Cuban crisis. Warrender was then on JFK’s staff.’ He went on casually: ‘The year after Oblensky reached the Kremlin, Khrushchev was sacked.’
‘So they’re in contact? I’m beginning to realize what the MoscowWashington hot line is really for.’
Charles handed me another still. ‘Here’s an old friend of yours – our own Martin Sherrington. He’s on Professor Lovell’s staff at the Jodrell Bank Radio-Observatory. One of the very few not to go into government or big business.’
‘Big science, though.’ I stared at the quiet, intense face of the elusive Sherrington, aware that someone at Jodrell Bank had deliberately put me off.
