Читать книгу Two in a Train and Other Stories - Warwick Deeping - Страница 19

Table of Contents

In Paris there was gloom and consternation. Not an aeroplane had returned. The death zone had swallowed them up, and mocked the world with a malignant and ominous silence.

Was humanity helpless?

It was a delegate from Manchester University, a pawky and rather reticent young man with a squint, who brought psychology to bear upon the problem.

Said the Manchester lad: “Granted that there is something inhumanly human behind this devilment—that’s to say we have to deal with a man. He is using atomic force or some sort of ray. Let us presume that he has to function, eat, sleep, remain alert. Now, an apparatus or a machine may be more or less infallible—man is not. The flesh can fail, and so can concentration. Let him stew in silence for a week.”

The French President nodded.

“You suggest—that silence might unnerve him.”

“It might fool him. Imagine a man making war on the world. Silence, solitude, a ghastly and fantastic solitude. He might go potty.”

Continental gentlemen had to have “potty” explained to them.

“Mad? But yes, we understand——”

“Surely—the creature cannot be considered sane?”

“He’s most damnably sane,” said the psychologist, “but he must have sleep. Imagine a man sitting by some apparatus, listening and watching for days and nights. He won’t stand it for ever. He’ll break down. He’ll fall asleep. He might commit suicide.”

The shrewd common sense of Manchester was accepted, and the conference at Paris decided to blockade Professor Pye with silence.

For the first twenty-four hours Professor Pye examined this silence and its various and possible implications. His enemies had been profoundly discouraged, or perhaps they were trying to fool him into over-confidence. None the less, this silence worried him; it kept him on the alert—especially so at night. It was so profound and so inhuman. It chained him to the top of the tower. He had connected flexes and ear-phones to his larger installation, and for hours he sat on the tower listening and listening—to silence. Every quarter of an hour he had to sweep the horizon with his atomic gun.

Once more the silence began to frighten him. It was as though nothingness possessed powers of attrition, like dropping water or blowing sand. There was pressure in this silence. It became almost like a heavy hand upon the top of his head, bearing more and more heavily upon his brain. The stillness was both so alive and so dead. He began to long for sound, even for some hostile sound that was human.

The landscape had become a painted scene, the sky a kind of hard blue ceiling across which artificial clouds floated. It seemed to be pressing nearer and nearer. His eyes ached. Almost, he was conscious of his tense and overstrained ear-drums. He had aged; he looked haggard and grey and dishevelled.

Three days and three nights of that silence.

His brain was beginning to manufacture sounds, and sometimes these auditory hallucinations were so real, that he would jump up and look over the parapet. Surely he had heard voices down there? Or he would switch on his gun and sweep the horizon.

He had fed in snatches and slept in snatches. He fought sleep. His desire for sleep was as terrible as the silence. It menaced him like a dark wall of water. He fought it off. It would be fatal for him to sleep for any length of time.

Why had he not thought of this before? He should have been prepared with some mechanism that would keep his gun revolving while he rested.

Why did not those fools flash him a message of surrender?

He was becoming less and less of a superman, God Pye contra Mundum, but a little dishevelled ape of a man who was beginning to chatter to himself and to react to imaginary noises.

On the third night he was convinced that he heard a dog barking outside the house. Hands’s dog—Jumbo? Had the little beast been near him all the time? But no, he had driven Hands and the dog to Guildford. Nevertheless, he rushed out in a state of strange excitement. He called; he appealed to the ghost dog in a wheedling voice.

“Hallo—doggie! Come here, good dog. Come along, old man. Nice bone for nice doggie.”

He whistled and whistled and called, but the silence was like grey rock.

He cursed—“Go to hell, you beast.”

He slammed the door and burst into sudden tears.