Coffin’s Dark Number. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ she would deplore it, inside it might be her last big thrill. Why shouldn’t she have it, if I could give it to her?

      ‘John’s always against publicity,’ Cy said firmly.

      ‘Maybe.’ No one knew what John thought, we only knew what he said he thought.

      ‘What do you get out of this?’ Cy said suddenly.

      I was right, then, he did want to talk.

      ‘Work. Interest. Information.’ I shrugged.

      ‘It’s not enough.’

      ‘I think it is.’

      ‘I mean to explain you. You’re young.’

      ‘Oh, you’re hard. If not on me, then on yourself. Relax. You want drums and parades and heads off all the time.’

      ‘I’m serious about it all, I admit that. If that’s a fault. I’ve got a scientific mind. You can’t do work like mine without having a scientific mind.’ I’d forgotten the work he did. Drove a van. I suppose it did need a scientific mind. ‘It worries me how unscientific some of the others are.’

      ‘It’s a subject with a lot of emotion in it,’ I reminded him. ‘You’ve got to reckon with that.’

      He still looked angry.

      ‘I reckon we take it all very calmly all things considered. That’s John Plowman.’

      ‘Oh, John.’ He bit back his words. I was junior; he wasn’t going to discuss John with me. He was naturally protocol-minded. It went with being scientific, I suppose. Scientists always think they’ve got a hot line straight through to Cod. ‘You know I was the first person in the whole group to make serious checks. The first. The others came later. And I had the first photograph.’

      Light dawned. ‘You’re jealous.’

      He flushed. ‘That’s it, that’s exactly what I’m complaining about. You just naturally think in terms of emotions.’

      ‘All right. Emotion’s out,’ I said peaceably. ‘No jealousy.’

      As we stood there talking a policeman walked by, studying us unobtrusively as he passed. Hang about the streets these days and that’s what you get. It’s been this way ever since our troubles started in this district. Particularly for men, any age group.

      ‘Good night,’ said Cy, hastily. ‘Next week then.’ He walked off.

      Cyrus’s job was not heavily intellectual and there was no doubt he resented it, even though he did say it needed a scientific mind. He sold ice-cream from a Kandy Kream Kart which he also drove. And don’t think the police hadn’t investigated him pretty thoroughly just lately. He and his van were a natural for the sort of trouble we were in. But he was clear. The van was painted fondant pink and Cy wore a blue overall. I’d often wondered why he didn’t hold down a better sort of job.

      ‘Next week,’ I called.

      The policeman watched me go into my house. He knew me all right, but that wouldn’t stop him watching me. They thought it was a local, you see. With these child crimes it’s nearly always someone the kid knows. This is what gets them off their guard. There are other factors; I’ll go into them some other time.

      The Club was in a peculiar mood this last week, and that worried me. I’m obliged to be responsive to mood. I have to see the danger signals before anyone else. Today it seemed to me these signals were being run up from certain quarters. Of course, we’d never been what I’d call a united group, each of us approaching the common aim from a different viewpoint, from Miss Jones’s open-minded optimism to John Plowman’s detached belief. In the centre were three or four members, like Esther, who were convinced that all UFOs were genuine for emotional reasons. Cy was right there. These people believed because the idea of little men flying in from space fascinated them. They were living out a fairy-story they’d read when they were kids. Oh, I knew that all right. I say nothing about Cy’s claims to scientific rationalism because I was never quite sure how far this existed.

      Esther Glasgow had objected to the report John had drafted and I had written; her friend Peter had objected to the letter I had written to a similar club in the USA. “Too cagey,” he’d called it. The secretary (technically I’m secretary of the Club, in practice I’m everything that requires pen and paper) has to be. I form the public image. We don’t want it formed in a crackpot image, do we?

      Or do we? Yes, there was no doubt where the danger was coming from. The central emotional block. And behind it I strongly suspected was Cy Read. He was jealous of John Plowman. I could see his point. After all, it was in John Plowman’s name I corresponded with our contacts across the Atlantic and it was John Plowman who organized the sky-watching routines and got first chance to prove or disprove an “incident”.

      A brief conversation with John Plowman was worrying me also. To a limited extent he made me his confidant.

      ‘Of course, one has to ask oneself about these visitors from space: what their intentions are. I’ve always assumed their interest in us was a benign one.’ He looked uneasy. ‘Just lately, I’ve wondered if we were wise to rely on this.’

      I know I didn’t answer, but I suppose he saw the look on my face.

      ‘There seems to have been a concentration of activity in this district. We seem to be a focus,’ he went on, ‘and I don’t feel the result has been towards tranquillity.’

      It certainly was not. There was a bad feeling everywhere lately, arising from the matter of the children, of course.

      ‘Indeed, I’ve been getting strong intimations that something was going to happen.’

      ‘How? Where do you read these intimations?’ I asked bluntly.

      ‘Naturally they don’t put it in the newspapers,’ he said irritably. ‘I receive it in my mind. We are to get some sort of proof. There will be a sign.’

      ‘Yes, that is quite worrying,’ I said, carefully keeping all feeling out of my voice. ‘Any details?’

      ‘Just an impression comes into my mind that it will relate to someone who thinks he can fly.’

      ‘I only know one person round here who thinks he can fly,’ I said, surprised. ‘And I thought he’d given the idea up.’

      Butty. Tom Butt. Butty (as we sometimes called him in unkind reference to his over-large buttocks) was at school with me. Spotty, dirty, fat, he had all the stigmata of the born victim, and seemed to know it too. He went out of his way to set us off. Like telling us that he dreamt he could fly. Without a doubt there was a sexual pleasure in our sport with him, just as there was in Butty’s dreams that he could fly.

      ‘I’m not happy about it all,’ observed John Plowman. ‘These ideas I get disturb me.’

      They disturbed me. Without committing myself one way or another to the behaviour of the visitors from space (which might be good or not good, we had to see), I was beginning to be anxious about our little group. Wasn’t there a strong sexual element in our preoccupation? We were a focus for something all right. I did wonder exactly what we were letting out into the world. Or stimulating.

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