Читать книгу Two in a Train and Other Stories - Warwick Deeping - Страница 12

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Professor Pye left his car parked at the bottom of the lane and walked along the high road to observe in a proper scientific spirit the results of his experiment. There was still a considerable crowd here, and both the crowd and the traffic were being controlled by the police. Professor Pye wormed his way as far as the nearest policeman, but when he attempted to pass the officer he was ordered back. There were some twenty tenantless cars along that section of road. Police, ambulance men and volunteers had had to extract the dead motorists and lay them on the grass beside the road. Some of the bodies were still there.

It was a shocked, sober, quiet crowd. The whole business was a mystery, and Professor Pye was able to savour the elements of the sensation he had produced. He was not shocked by the tragedy. He was immensely curious as to the lethal effects of the On-force on the human body.

He listened to two men talking, educated men.

“It couldn’t have been carbon monoxide. How could it have been?”

“Well—what else? People just dead in their cars. The doctors tried artificial respiration.”

“No use. Something extraordinarily sinister and strange. Apparently, there was no explosion of any kind, nothing to be seen or heard. Just as though poison gas had been released.”

“Could there have been anything in one of those first cars?”

“What’s the idea?”

“I’m not a chemist, but supposing one of those cars had contained a carboy of some chemical that vaporized easily, and the gas was lethal?”

“It’s possible—I suppose.”

“People just collapsed where they sat or stood. Something very potent and deadly.”

“Anyhow it’s pretty ghastly.”

Someone was shouting in the field above the road, a farm hand who had come to collect those cows for milking, and had found them dead. The hedge happened to be a high one, and no one in the road had seen those dead beasts. The farm hand ran down to the hedge and shouted to one of the policeman.

“Hi—come and look, all our cows dead!”

People scrambled up the bank and tried to peer through the hedge. The driver of a van found a gate and climbed over it. The crowd followed him, and suddenly some premonition warned Professor Pye of possible complications. He hurried back to his car, drove it up and into the garage, and locking all doors, ascended to the top of the tower.

He crouched and looked over the parapet. The lower field was stippled with human figures. He saw faces turned towards the house on the hill. Someone was pointing, and sweeping an arm as though to indicate the direction and drift of a gas cloud. People were arguing.

“If you take that house on the hill, and these dead cows and the road—they line up, so to speak. What is that place up there?”

Someone pointed to the live cows in the upper field.

“What about those beasts? If your gas idea——”

“I’m thinking of that affair in Belgium when people were gassed by the emanations from a factory.”

“But that was foggy weather. Besides, who would emit a lethal gas on the top of the downs?”

“Yes, but supposing someone was experimenting? A heavy gas would roll downhill on a still day like this.”

“But, my dear sir—those other cows there are none the worse.”

“That’s so. Anyway it’s a pretty ghastly puzzle.”

“The autopsies on those poor devils ought to show something.”

“I suppose so.”

Professor Pye was thinking rapidly and logically, and for the first time his demonic egotism was tinged with fear. He had let death loose. He had stirred up the social hive, and these angry insects would be buzzing hither and thither seeking—what? No, the simile of the hive and the insect swarm did not apply. He and mankind were at war, and man was a creature of intelligence who could think, reflect and explore. His wits were at war with the wits of mankind.

At any moment he might have that crowd pouring up the hill to investigate. His experiment went to prove that for some unexplained reason his On-force did not exert its effect until it had travelled four hundred yards. If those people advanced into the non-lethal zone he and his discovery would be at their mercy.

His ruthlessness was reinforced by fear. After all—this was war, Alfred Pye contra Mundum. Was he—the new Jove—to flinch with the lightning in his hand? He stood up. He trained the atomic gun on the people in the field He opened the diaphragm and switched on the current. With a kind of cold and frozen glee he saw that death was there—painless, sudden death.

For some minutes a kind of frenzy possessed him. The gun was mounted on a ball and socket joint and roller bearings and could be slewed in any direction. He swung it south, west, north, east, keeping the hypothetical range low. He would create about him a circle of silence and security. He would efface any near possible interference. He must have time to think, time to act.

Was he aware of the silence that fell upon all that part of Surrey, such a silence as had not been known since the glaciers of the ice age piled up their deposits of gravel and sand? Motor-cars, suddenly released from control, ran on till they ended in hedges or ditches. Guildford High Street with its chaos of cars and of shoppers was a place where people seemed to have fallen asleep in cars and on pavements. At the foot of the steep hill runaway motors had piled themselves. Shop assistants lay dead behind their counters. There was not a sound to be heard, save perhaps the ticking of hundreds of clocks. Even the dogs and the cats and the birds were dead. At Newlands Corner the turf was covered with the figures of men, women and children who seemed to sleep. Spectral trains ran for a while past signal boxes and through stations where life had ceased. In a thicket a quarter-mile from the white house two lovers lay dead in each other’s arms.

Professor Pye walked down to the field where the dead lay. There was no anguish here, no distortion, merely the semblance of sleep. It would appear that the On-force acted upon the central nervous system, producing shock and syncope. The human heart ceased beating.

Professor Pye looked at the first dead in the war between a mad scientist and humanity. Almost, he felt kindly towards these victims. Had not they helped to prove his power?

Moreover, might he not be regarded as a beneficent being? He could give peace and sudden painless oblivion to a world of disease, and futile little strivings, discontents, poverty, bitternesses. The class war, votes, the dole, demos stupid and arrogant, politicians orating, the sensational puerilities of the press! He could put an end to all this. He could cleanse the earth, efface all the fools and mental deficients, and leaving perhaps a hardy remnant in some corner of Canada or Japan, renew the human experiment on scientific lines. He, Professor Pye, would be its god, and dictator.

Returning, he crossed the upper field where those live cows were still grazing. One of the beasts raised a head and stared at him with large, liquid eyes.

Professor Pye raised a hand as though blessing the beast.

“Behold your god, my dear. You shall be retained in his service.”

His madness had reached its zenith. It transcended even a great man’s folly. It was egotism that forgot both the bull and the cowherd. Who would milk those beasts? Or—did Professor Pye propose to live in a desert on wild apples and honey? But even the bees were dead. The only survivals were the trees and the grasses and all green things, and certain low forms of life whose central nervous system was not sufficiently sensitive to be shocked by the On-force.