Читать книгу Voice of the Conqueror - John Russell Fearn - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

Because Albert Simpkins looked a fool, everybody believed he was one. Yes, everybody. The only one who had known he was not a fool was dead, and that had been his mother. Being a quite normal woman, she knew she had not given to the world a genius, but on the other hand she had not produced a fool either. It was just a case of looks being deceptive.

Albert Simpkins was forty-five, but prematurely thinning hair made him look ten years older. He held the not too lofty position of chief projectionist in a local cinema, a posi­tion to which he clung with all his might because here, in his own little domain, he was absolute boss. At least he had reached the top as far as buildings were concerned. Here he had the chance to exercise traits of character that were normally crushed—and the boy and youth who worked with him as assistants were fairly obedient, mainly because they rather liked “Old Simmy.”

It was at home where Albert Simpkins received the biggest blows. At twenty-five he had married Emily Dawson. At that time she had been a fetching cashier with curly blonde hair and an infectious smile. Albert had then been a second projectionist, and they had walked home together. Inevit­ably, they had seen the future as all sunbeams, romance, and progress—and now, twenty years later, in the present-day hurrying scien­tific world, they found themselves very much wearied with each other, just about able to get along, and saddled with the responsibility of three daughters and a son. Yes, Albert Simpkins had a lot on his mind and little in his pocket.

“It wouldn’t be so bad, Emily,” he said one evening, when he had returned from his usual night’s work at the Premier Cinema, “if Bob could be made to cough up what rightly belongs to me. We’d have plenty then.”

“Dreams!” Emily sighed. “Like everything else you indulge in! Empty, silly dreams! Bob will never give you anything, and you know it!”

Albert was silent, realising that Emily was probably right. Bob Simpkins was Albert’s elder brother, possessed of all the terrific self-assurance that Albert completely lacked. He was a big man in the grocery distribution business somewhere in North London, and spent his time making his money, and his spare moments sneering at failures. By some kind of legal know-how that Albert had never been able to fathom, his brother had claimed all the money left in Mrs. Simpkins’ will. It had been a fair sum, for Mrs. Simpkins had had plenty at her death. The net result was that the roaring, domineering Bob had got the lot and—as usual—Albert had got nothing. Emily knew the facts, and so did the children. Because of them Albert was considered to be an even bigger fool than his appearance suggested.

“No,” Emily decided, hauling her fat back as she rolled in her chair at the supper table, “Bob will never give you a thing—unless it’s a slap on the back that will knock you silly. Sillier, that is, than you are already.”

Albert looked at her and did not like what he saw. In twenty years Emily had become gray-haired, and so fat it was difficult to tell where her head ended and her shoulders began. Of course her eyes were still blue, but this was all that remained of the once-laughing girl who had waved a torch so adroitly for the latecomers at the Premier Cinema.

As for Albert, he was pinched and pale. His lack of color was not so much due to ill health as to the constant inhala­tion of carbon fumes from the projectors. Twenty years of breathing in poison had left their mark. He looked unhappy and somewhat vacant, though actually his uncomprehending gaze was born of the fact that lie was always dreaming—dreaming of that which he had not got. Money, fame, for­tune, all the world at his feet. Yet—and here was the unusual thing—Albert believed he could have all these things if he could only pin together several really bright ideas that for years had been chasing around in his mind in dissociated form. It was just a matter of linking them up, and some day he would.

“Where are the kids?” he asked presently, apropos of nothing, and Emily yawned.

“Dick and Betty are in bed. Ethel’s not got back yet from night school, and Vera’s been out since seven with young Hal Morrison. They’re in a dancing competition or something.”

“Mmmm.” Albert finished drinking his tea. “Be a help if Hal would take Vera off our hands. One less to bother about.”

“Wouldn’t make any difference. Ethel makes enough to keep herself. If she went, we’d still be where we are now—on the edge of the rocks.”

Albert muttered something to himself and got to his feet. He wandered about the untidy little kitchen for a moment or two, then selected one of the dozens of scientific magazines lying in a haphazard pile in a corner and sat in the worn armchair to read. Emily’s blue eyes followed his movements and her cushiony lips compressed.

“That’s what I complain about with you, Albert. When you haven’t your job to do, you waste your time instead of improving it! Most men, when the day’s work is done, spend their time thinking up ways to get more money and improve the lot of themselves and their families. But not you! Oh, no! You have to read all this scientific trash—day in, night out. Every spare moment! What good does it do you?”

Albert turned the worn magazine pages slowly but did not look up. “It never hurts to improve the mind, Emmy. I don’t get much chance to relax, remember. Matinees and evening shows swallow up a lot of time, and on my day off, I’ve things to do—tidying the garden, titivating the house, and so on. ’Sides, I like reading about scientific things when we live in a scientific age. Won’t be long now the way rocketry is progressing before travel into space becomes an everyday thing.”

“I’m not interested in reaching the moon! I’m only inter­ested that you should better things. You’ve got to forty-five and haven’t done it yet. Doesn’t leave much time, you know. Dreams! Always dreams!”

“Uh-huh,” Albert sighed. “Pretty well all I have left these days, Emmy.… Yet, you know,” he continued, his eyes brightening a little, “there’s one dream which I believe I shall one day make come true. And if I do I’ll be—”

“Oh, such rubbish!” Emily surged to her feet, disgusted, her immense bosom flopping. “It’s a waste of time talking to you. Here, give me a hand with these crocks and leave that scientific rubbish until later. It’ll keep.”

Uncomplaining, Albert tossed the magazine down upon its battered companions and struggled out of the armchair. Thereafter, in pensive silence, he helped his ample spouse with the washing-up, and such was the scientific slant in his mentality he actually seemed to find something intriguing in the way the soapsuds exploded on her fleshy forearms as she savagely swabbed the plates and cups.

“If you’d get an automatic washer instead of dreaming, we’d be better off!” she commented acidly. “I’m getting past doing all the washing, cleaning, pot washing, iron­ing, and chores ad infinitum. Sometimes I wonder why I ever quit working as a cashier. Might even go back to it. They take ’em at forty-five even now. Some cinemas prefer them. You’re not prone to goings-on in the dark when you’re forty-five.”

“Know something, Emmy? Those suds explode on your skin because of the air pressure inside being greater than that outside. A simple scientific fact, and yet it has interest.”

“Has it?” Emily stared at her wet forearms. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Just thinking out loud. The idea I have chasing around in my mind hasn’t anything to do with soapsuds, but the basic principle is just as simple.”

This time Emily did not say anything. She was accustomed to Albert talking in this vague fashion, and since none of his theories seemed to crystallize into anything, she considered them beneath her notice.

“I suppose,” she resumed presently, as the washing-up came to an end, “that you propose to end your days at the Premier, if the management tolerate you that long?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Depends how much I learn. It can be quite interesting in a projection room, Emmy. The scien­tific side of it fascinates me, particularly the interpretation of sound by light through the transparent track on the side of the film. Then again, the three-dimensional illusion is one of the big—”

“You missed this cup and saucer,” Emily interrupted, and brought the conversation to a close.

And it remained at a close until bedtime. Ethel and Vera came home in the interval, but had little to say to their father as once more he browsed through his scientific magazine and took not the least notice of their teenage vaporings. It was not that he had no interest in his daughters—he was merely dominated by the theories that wove constantly through his mind.

“The main thing wrong with this world, Emmy,” he said, when he and his wife had at last retired, “is that there’s too much selfishness. Too much greed. Take Bob, for example. If he were not so greedy he—”

“He knows how to take care of himself anyway, and that’s more than you can do!”

The blow went fully home, and Albert subsided, but long after his wife had fallen asleep he still remained awake, staring at the ceiling vaguely patterned from the street light outside the house. It was in the quiet of the night, when he lay like this, no longer in fear of derision or interruption, that his thoughts had a chance to link up all the scattered theories he had been gathering for so long a time. And he felt that if only he could perhaps.… Then he was asleep, to awaken again to the drabness of the autumn morning.

So to the usual routine—the hurried breakfast, then out to the Premier Cinema with its dank morning coldness and smell of amyl-acetate. His two assistants were already at work re-spooling film from the previous night’s performance. They greeted Albert perfunctorily as he arrived, but he took little notice of them. Instead he set to work with a newly pur­chased writing-pad and left the bulk of the projection room cleaning routine to the two boys. What he was doing he would not say, but from what the boys could see he appeared to be immersed in mathematics.

During the matinee that day he had to give his attention whether he wanted to or not, and again at the evening per­formance. But when the evening show was over, he made no attempt—as he usually did—to don his hat and overcoat. Instead he lingered around the winding-room with its smell of dead carbon fumes.

“Not coming, Simmy?” asked the youth who was second projectionist.

“Later.” Albert’s look was faraway. “I want to check the new program which came in this morning. We’re showing it the day after tomorrow, and I can’t entirely trust it to you lads.”

“Oh!” The boys glanced at one another, puzzled. This was the first time Albert had ever doubted their proficiency.

“Not that I’m thinking you don’t know your jobs,” Albert amended, “but we’re having the mayor or some local bigwig coming on Saturday night, and any mistakes would be fatal. See you in the morning.”

“Okay, Simmy.”

“Night, Simmy.”

To the manager Albert gave the same story, but since Albert had been in the cinema for twenty years there seemed no reason to question his purpose. In any case he had his own key. So Albert was finally left to his own devices.

It was well after half-past one in the small hours when at last he left the cinema and went home through the silent streets. He knew Emily would not be concerned by his non­-arrival home, for very frequently he ran a midnight matinee to correct some imperfection in a program to be shown the following day. Nor was his guess wrong. Emily was snoring soundly when at last, after a cold supper, he got to bed—and the next morning did not even trouble to ask what had delayed him.

But even Emily began to wonder a little when Albert did not come home until the small hours for a whole fortnight. She knew midnight matinees could not explain this, and her mind began to stray towards the possibility of a meek-and-mild Albert leading a double life.

Emily was not the only one who wondered. The manager of the cinema wondered too, and since he was in command he wasted no time in getting at the truth. So, after his fort­night of mysterious nocturnal activity Albert found himself summoned to the manager’s office.

“Just checking up on something, Albert.” The manager was breezily friendly as usual. “What’s the idea of staying behind until the small hours every night for the last two weeks? Can’t be program trouble, surely?”

Albert hesitated, clearly a little startled. “Who says I’ve stayed behind?”

“Nobody. It just happens that the policeman on the beat around this cinema calls back his headquarters from the police phone on the corner around one-thirty, and each night he has noticed a figure answering your description leaving the cinema. He reported it to me, wondering if all was well. Be you, of course?”

“Yes,” Albert agreed absently. “Yes, it was.”

“Well? Why do you do it? Don’t love the place that much after twenty years, surely?”

“No. As a matter of fact I’ve been checking over the pro­jectors. They need a routine once-over now and again.”

“Why? We have a service engineer for that!” Suspicion was slowly forming on the manager’s face, and his smile had gone.

Albert was silent; then suddenly he seemed to come to a decision. “I spent the time reading,” he said quickly. “It was the only way in which I could read in peace. At home I have a somewhat talkative wife and four children, and when a man wants to study things out he—”

“Look, Albert!” The manager’s voice was curt. “I’m not interested in your domestic life, but I am interested in the electricity bill for this cinema, and so are the owners to whom I’m responsible. You’ve no right to burn up light in the projection room for the purpose of reading until the small hours of the morning. See it doesn’t happen again, and we’ll say no more about it.”

“Well—all right,” Albert muttered, and with that took his departure.

But the odd thing was that he did not keep his word. That night he stayed again until the small hours—indeed, until five in the morning, having nailed a cardboard poster of a famous film star over the winding-room window to prevent the light being seen from outside. Then towards dawn, red-eyed and weary, he crawled home for a few hours’ sleep, and at break­fast found Emily staring at him with naked questions spark­ing in her eyes.

“You’re up to something!” she declared, handing across the grilled bacon.

“Oh, let me alone,” Albert growled, leaden from continu­ous night work and—had anybody else known it—intensely close and concentrated work.

“I won’t let you alone! For over a fortnight you’ve never come home until early morning. This time it was half-past five! I know because I was awake.”

“Turned into a burglar, pop?” asked the youngest daughter, and then shrieked with merriment.

“You’ve got to be tough to burgle,” Ethel commented, shaking her head. “Doesn’t fit dad at all!”

Albert got to his feet abruptly, his face flushed and his eyes hard. For an instant it looked as if he were going to blow his whole family wide open for the first time in his life; then he thought better of it, and without a word left the room and slammed the door.

Ten minutes later he entered the cinema, nodded moodily to the cleaner-cum-commissionaire, and then found the manager right in front of him. The manager’s face was grim and unsmiling as he nodded towards his office.

“Sorry, Albert,” he said quietly, following Albert in and closing the door. “The owners don’t like the way you’ve been behaving. I had to report your late hours to them to explain the use of extra electricity, and I told them you wouldn’t do it again. But you did, and left later—or earlier—than ever! Five o’clock! One of the owners had a man posted to watch.…”

Albert was silent.

“It’s a pity,” the manager said, sighing. “After twenty years of good service. You’ve got to go, though. Don’t blame me—I’m only doing as I’m told. Here are your insur­ance cards.”

Albert took them and smiled wryly. “Fired, you mean?”

“As from now. Wages up to date and a week ahead. Why the devil you were such a chump I’ll never understand.”

“No, you’ll never understand,” Albert admitted vaguely, pushing the cards in his pocket. “Doesn’t matter much, any­way. I’ve finished what I had to do, which was why I stayed extra late last night.”

“Your reading, you mean?”

“Uh-huh; might as well call it that. Anyway, don’t worry over me. Twenty years in one place is too long anyhow. Wish the staff the best of luck for me, will you?’

The manager nodded slowly, surprise obvious on his round face. He watched Albert leave the office, entirely pre­occupied, and the door closed. Still in the same lost frame of mind Albert returned home—and Emily gazed at him as though he were a visitor from Mars.

“You! At this hour! What’s the matter? Feeling ill?”

“No; quite well. Better than I’ve felt for twenty years. Did you never accomplish something, Emmy, just in time before the fall of the axe?”

“Eh?”

Albert sighed and relaxed in the armchair. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I can understand that you’re at home when you ought to be at work. What’s wrong?”

“I got fired. Working too late and burning too much light. Doesn’t matter. The firm can afford it, and I can’t. Besides, I had everything I needed there, and I haven’t here.”

“Fired, did you say?” Emily gave a start. “Great heavens, you’ve lost your job after twenty years? What did you do?”

“I just told you. But don’t let it worry you. I’ll take a day or two off and then get another job of a totally different type. Something scientific after my own heart.”

Emily looked as though she would open the floodgates, but she did not. She knew, too, that she ought to feel fearful for the future, but here again her emotions did not register that way. Albert was looking mysteriously confident and certainly not like a man who has lost a job and has no other in sight.

It did indeed take him a fortnight to discover a fresh situation—a lowly one indeed—as a cleaner in a laboratory devoted to electronics. Emily could not appreciate that it was the electronics that appealed to Albert, not the humdrum procedure of mopping floors and dusting endless shelves.

The laboratory was one of fifty scattered up and down Britain under the new Science and Electronics legisla­tion, by which all scientists of all European countries were teamed together to pool their knowledge. Every branch of science was included under the new law, but chiefly experimental work in electronics, guided missiles, and tests of interplanetary space were being carried out—this latter by means of high altitude rockets loaded with instruments.