Fool's Paradise. John Russell Fearn

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СКАЧАТЬ heat. Strange, too, for the British Isles, which had usually managed to ruin its summer with rain. Now everybody was crying out for it. Prayers in the churches, cattle nosing into iron-hard waterholes; crops yellow before their time; farmers rubbing the backs of their leathery necks and gazing up into a brazen vault from which all moisture seemed to have evaporated. It seemed that throughout the Western hemisphere one vast anticyclone existed. The summer had, so far, been the hottest in history.

      Not that Kenyon West minded. He was not thinking of the present, but of the future—of the son or daughter yet to come.

      The cloud passed. The sunlight flooded down on the world again. At the far end of the garden the trees wilted, aching, as though they found it beyond them to stand up straight in the bone-dry soil.…

      * * * * * * *

      On the following day, the commencement of a new week, Thayleen departed for the Continent and a further round of concert tours. Ken for his part was thankful for a mountain of work to keep his mind occupied. As Chief Engineer of the immense Mid-England Steel and Iron Combine, he had plenty to do. Upon him, at the moment, rested the responsibility for the cutting of a subsidiary bore to the existing Channel Tunnel, making it possible for more traffic to be handled to and from the Continent.

      Even so, he took the opportunity one evening to visit Anton Drew, his friend from college days and now the head of Bland’s Enterprises—which controlled the output of all the world’s rare drugs, medicines, chemicals, and atomic and plastic byproducts.

      Ken first tried Drew’s Surbiton apartment, and then realised he should have had more sense. Drew was a bachelor who spent every waking hour at some scientific pursuit or other—and there was no better place for this than the replete scientific laboratories where he worked. Outside interests never attracted him in the least.

      Sure enough, Ken found him in the remoter parts of the Bland laboratories, to which quarter he was directed by a night watchman, the normal staff having long since departed. Their interest in things scientific always evaporated at six o’clock.

      Not so Anton Drew. He regarded scientific pursuits as a mother does the development of her child. More often than not he even forgot to collect his salary cheque; even more often did he forget he needed a clean overall.

      When Ken came upon him, he was in the big solar observatory maintained by Bland Enterprises for the sole purpose of manufacturing solar scale maps for the world’s observatories, and cross-checking much astronomical data. In a word, the commercial genius of Mortimer Bland had turned science to account in the matter of money. He held the rights on nearly every scientific product, but it was the brains of Anton Drew that made the whole complicated scheme workable.

      “So here you are!” Ken exclaimed cordially, advancing with hand extended.

      Anton Drew did not answer. He was seated at a desk near the giant reflector, busy studying a sheet of figures. A short briar crackled in his mouth; his untidy brown hair was flung back in confusion from his wide forehead. With a smile Ken noticed that the collar of the scientist’s overall was half up and half down. For the rest he could only see the slim, wiry shoulders, hooked nose, jutting chin, and unusually large mouth.

      Then Drew looked up, and after gazing absently with pale blue eyes for nearly thirty seconds, he seemed to awaken.

      “Hello,” he greeted, and remained thoughtful.

      Ken sat down, not in the least offended. That three weeks had passed since he had last seen Drew did not signify. Drew always talked as though there had been no gap in conversation.

      “Busy?” Ken ventured.

      “Eh? Oh, busy? Yes, of course I’m busy!” Drew brooded, allowed his pipe to go out, then brooded again. “Very busy,” he resumed at last. “It’s this unusual weather.”

      “Unusual—but glorious,” Ken smiled.

      “Calm before the storm,” Drew muttered, and got to his feet.

      He was only small, spare as a youth, certainly not looking his forty-eight years.

      “You mean thunder?” Ken asked, puzzled. “Well, I suppose it will break up in that. So what?”

      Drew gave an odd glance, somehow mystifying. He made another effort to light his pipe. Propping himself against the massive eyepiece of the reflector, he scowled pensively.

      “I thought you’d like to know, Anton, that Thayleen’s expecting a youngster in the autumn,” Ken hurried on. “I’ve been holding it back. Bit of a surprise, eh?”

      Drew gazed into distance. “It must be the beginning of the hundred-year cycle,” he said.

      “What is?” Ken looked blank. “Dammit, man, listen! I said Thayleen is expecting a baby.”

      “She is?” Drew smiled briefly. “Good! Fine! Normal enough for a married couple, isn’t it? Simple biological function— Er, where was I?”

      “At the beginning of a hundred-year cycle,” Ken answered sourly. “And thanks for the congratulations!”

      Drew came to life for a moment. With an apologetic grin he lounged forward.

      “Sorry, old man—really I am.” He clapped Ken on the shoulder. “I’ve been so absorbed in this sunspot business I haven’t been able to think of much else. Of course I congratulate you, and Thayleen too. Don’t spoil the.…”

      He sucked at his pipe and continued, “This weather has something to do with sunspots. I don’t quite know what. It is rather like a man who is about to die suddenly finding himself healthier than he has ever been before. Just as though Earth, about to die, is enjoying all the calmness preceding the hell to come.”

      “What are you rambling about?” Ken demanded. Drew turned to the desk and raised six photographic plates. He handed them over and, as he looked at them Ken recognised spectro-heliograph records of the sun.

      “That’s what I’m talking about,” Drew said. “Study them.”

      “Mmmm—sunspots,” Ken said finally. “About a dozen of them, big and small. How far does that get us?”

      “They are getting bigger,” Drew said. “If you’ll look carefully, you’ll find the first plates were taken eight weeks ago. There are six plates there, taken at different times. First we see two spots—one big and one small. Then, as the weeks progress, they become more numerous; until on this last plate you will find them splotching away from the solar equator down towards its poles. That has never happened before in the sun’s history.”

      “I’m a bit hazy about this,” Ken said, “but shouldn’t an outburst of spots like this cause magnetic storms?”

      “It should, but we don’t happen to have had any in our part of the world. Sunspots are queer phenomena. Sometimes they violently upset the weather conditions and electrical equipment; at other times they create anticyclone conditions, and calm, burning weather such as we have been experiencing lately. What is somewhat terrifying—to me anyway—is that we are at one start of a hundred-year-period of sunspots. This sunspot spread may continue indefinitely.”

      Ken ventured a suggestion. “With a consequent dimming of the sun, due to so much of his face being caverned with spots? Is that it?”

      Drew СКАЧАТЬ