‘He won’t be bored. This is a tremendous thing, David—’
Brunner cut in swiftly: ‘I really think it would not interest him.’ There was an edge on the words, a quick flick of menace that was gone in the second it was there; but clear enough for Queston to catch it. He looked up in surprise.
‘Ah well, you will have to wait, David.’ Thorp-Gudgeon was irrepressible, like a child with a pet secret. ‘But when this plan is working, Oxford will be a true national symbol of preservation. Perhaps more than that, in this disturbed world. It is time people remembered the importance of their roots.’
That was what had produced the first moment of reaction in Queston’s mind: the seed of everything that afterward became an obsession. He looked at Thorp-Gudgeon, sitting paunchy and contented in the cosy shadow of his room, and began to laugh.
‘You know, James, I really think Oxford must be the best subject for anthropological research in the world. You all worship the damn place, even those who come to it late. Talk about the emotional hold of environment—there’s a whole study to be done right here. You should have a try at it. Or perhaps I should—you’re a lot more accessible and articulate than my cave people.’
Brunner was as quick on the words as a terrier. ‘Your cave people? Who are they?’
‘It’s the project he’s been working on in Brazil,’ Thorp-Gudgeon said sulkily. He was better at expressing derision than feeling himself its object. ‘Some kind of tribal off-shoot in an obscure highland area. The University of Brasilia has been maintaining David out in the wilds to report on them, though what they hope to gain from it is beyond my comprehension.’
‘They have their problems,’ Queston said lightly.
‘Hardly the same as ours.’
Brunner was persistent. ‘I am intrigued. Tell me the analogy with Oxford. These people are one of your fossil races—very ancient?’
‘O yes,’ Queston said. He looked at Brunner’s unblinking lizard-like gaze, wondering why the architect should be so curious. ‘The point is that they’re completely tied by their location. Emotionally. You’d find nothing in them from the design point of view—they live in these highland caves without any of the adornments or excavations you get in, say, Arizona. The place is all limestone, honeycombed, and there’s no soil to speak of. They have a few goats, but mostly they live off roots and grubs. Half-starving, so the child mortality rate is enormous and their numbers are steadily dwindling. But the thing that fascinates me is that though there’s perfectly good land unoccupied within fifty miles or so, they’ve never moved, and they still won’t. They’re the prisoners of a kind of pantheism. Well, not quite that, but almost—I’ve come across nothing like it in a primitive people before. In some strange way I’ve only just begun to unravel, they seem to worship not the usual all-permeating spirit, and certainly not individual gods—but the caves themselves.’
‘Unless you are in some charming way equating the caves with the vaults of the Bodleian Library,’ Thorp-Gudgeon said sourly, ‘the analogy with Oxford seems to me obscure. Klaus, have some more port.’
‘It most certainly is not. Do you know the warmest thing you had to say to me about Mr Mandrake? You said: “He’s an Oxford man.” Implication—he belongs, therefore he understands. Well—out there these people exist under the rule of one chief, and he’s a man who belongs too. There are some caves, some of the very deepest, that only male members of the chief’s family are allowed to enter—I could never get anywhere near. They spend a lot of time there, especially at night. All part of the worship. There’s no ceremonial, no initiation, just this curious kind of communion with the caves. It seems to permeate the ruling family’s lives from birth. Not that they have much of a dynasty. When I first reached them there were only three men in the family—the chief, his brother, and his brother’s son. And a few weeks before I left, the chief and his brother were both killed by a fall of rock.’
He paused, and for a moment he did not see the glint of glass or the walls of books, with Brunner’s dark-patched face leaning forward peculiarly intent. He was back beside a fire on the scant grass of a South American hillside, near the looming dark mouth of a cave, waiting with the small lean people round him for the two men to come out of the hillside and perhaps, that time, explain to him a little of what it was that they always said and found and felt. Only, the two men had never come out. There had been a faint distant mutter, as if a wind sighed somewhere in the still night, and then the fire had suddenly flickered violently in a wave of air from the cave. And in the glow of the other small fires along the hillside, he had seen puffs of dust drift silently out from the other cave openings in the earth.
He said: ‘After that only the boy was left, and they made him chief. He’s very young, only about twelve, but there was no question. He rules without any kind of regent. The point for them is, you see, not just that he’s his father’s son—but that he’s the only one left with this kind of psychic communion with the caves.’ He grinned at Thorp-Gudgeon, suddenly feeling self-conscious at the monopolizing sound of his own voice. ‘See, James? He’s an Oxford man.’
Thorp-Gudgeon gave his shrill jay’s cackle of laughter, and wagged a finger as if at a child. Queston remembered from years before how quickly, almost hysterically, his fits of peevishness had unaccountably come and gone.
‘David, your feet have left the ground. It’s long past time you came back to teaching.’
‘You are going back there? ’ Brunner said. His thick voice was excited, and Queston realized with a shock of something between alarm and distaste how intently the light eyes had been staring at him as he had talked. Now the man said again, urgently, ‘You are going back to Brazil?’
‘Yes, I am. Next week.’
‘You must meet the Minister before you go.’
Everything seemed to come back to the one request. Queston said easily: ‘O really, I’m not a very political animal, Mr Brunner. James will tell you, I tend to be—disengaged. It’s kind of you, but I think not.’
Brunner said: ‘It is important.’ There was a Teutonic brusqueness in his manner that made the words into a command; suddenly irritated, Queston stood up.
‘I must let you two talk your committee business, it’s getting late. Glad to have met you, Mr Brunner. I hope the town and country planning goes on well.’
Standing to shake hands, Brunner had said curtly: ‘Good-bye,’ with resentment and a residue of determination behind the strange face; and Thorp-Gudgeon came with Queston to the bottom of his staircase.
‘We’re having lunch tomorrow, before you go back?’
‘Fine,’ Queston said. ‘But spare me the man from the Ministry this time, will you?’
‘O,’ Thorp-Gudgeon said mildly, ‘don’t judge us too hastily. I think you’ll find, David, that this is only a beginning.’
When Queston glanced back from the edge of the quadrangle, he was still standing there watching him: a small, paunchy, somehow secretive figure half in shadow underneath the pointed arch. Then in the same moment he moved swiftly backwards, and disappeared.
Queston walked back to his hotel with a nebulous feeling of disquiet. Perhaps it was no more than the unfamiliarity of finding a politician’s orderly aims applying themselves to the University of Oxford’s charmingly disarrayed mind. Odd to find someone like James Thorp-Gudgeon mixed up in planning committees—furthering the ambitions of the obviously publicity-conscious Mandrake. The Oxford man: the guardian of the place… he felt his mind drifting back to the Amerindians of the caves.
All around him the streets were deserted, the shop-fronts silent and dark. Oxford was asleep; enclosed, obedient. Under the lamps the pavements stretched before him yellow and empty; but the lamplight seemed dim. At the end of Broad Street he grew aware of a dark mass in the middle of the road, blotting out the great wrought-iron gates of Trinity; he crossed the road to look.
There were two machines, ancient and clumsy, great metal trolls looming out of the night. He recog
nized the arms they reached down towards the road; the enclosed spray, for forcing out fire. He had seen them before, used to destroy an old surface before a new one was laid.
The road felt unfamiliar and lumpy beneath his feet; he looked down. It was some seconds before he realized that the lumps were stones, set in deliberate order. The last relic of medieval Oxford, removed fifteen years ago to smoothe the way for the cars. The cobbles of Broad Street were being laid again.
‘Evening, sir,’ said a deep voice at his side. He saw the blue uniform half-consciously with his nearer eye; in any case, only a policeman would have a voice like one of these machines.
‘Ridiculous,’ Queston said irritably. ‘They might as well go the whole hog, and make it a beaten earth track.’
‘I don’t agree with you there,’ the policeman said amiably. ‘The Middle Ages, that’s the time we want. Oxford was strongest then.’
He seemed eager for conversation. He fell into heavy step with Queston along the pavement away from the Broad.
‘The Romans laid tessellated streets,’ Queston said faintly. If lunatic intellectuals operated the law, no wonder Oxford was running mad.
The policeman discoursed for fifty yards on Oxford’s return to her former self. He quoted Anthony a Wood. He mentioned that grass had been seen growing in a corner of the High Street. ‘A fellow from the Daily Express noticed that. There’ve been some excellent articles in the papers. The Observer were the best, they sent an Oxford man—’ His voice had the soft burr of Oxfordshire, deep and slow. He said: ‘You’ll be a stranger here, sir.’
Queston was irritable still. ‘I know Oxford well.’
‘Will you be staying long?’
‘Only till tomorrow, I’m afraid.’
They turned the corner into Beaumont Street. ‘We don’t see so many visitors here these days,’ the policeman said. ‘You can almost spot the strange faces. It’s a look they have.’ Queston said: ‘I am taking this strange face to bed. I leave you to your beat, constable. Good night.’
The policeman saluted him gravely, and he went up the steps into his hotel. It was not until he was half-undressed that he realized he had been neatly escorted home.
‘Do come and sit down, Dr Queston,’ said Mandrake. He slipped quickly sideways to the seat next to the fuselage wall, leaving its twin empty. ‘I’m so grateful for the chance to meet you.’
Warily, Queston sat down. He was remembering the snatches of news and reports about Britain, and Mandrake’s progress there, that had filtered through to his indifferent ears during the last few years. The range had been remarkably wide. Oxford, and others, transformed more or less into walled cities. Checks put on all countryside building, and a great resurgence of stress on farming, home-production of food. Something about a reshuffling of population, something to do with the regional councils… but it was all too vague in his mind. When he was away on the other side of the world, Britain became always a very small and distant place; and in these days you heard little or nothing of her at all in international news. There was nothing but the tense up-and-down war of nerves between the Big Three: the Sino-Soviet-American meetings that seemed never to accomplish anything but raising the entire world to a fever-pitch of fear, and then dropping it to cold mistrust again.
‘You have been working in New York? ’ Mandrake said. His voice was soft, with the slight affectation of Oxford vowels; the setting of the plane’s head-rests made it difficult for Queston to look at his face. Instead he found himself studying the hands clasped loosely on Mandrake’s knee: smooth, white, competent hands, with long square-tipped fingers.
‘No, I just called in to see my publishers. I’m on my way back from South America.’
‘Ah yes. The Brazilian project. I remember Klaus Brunner mentioning it to me.’
‘You have a long memory,’ Queston said. ‘I met Mr Brunner once casually, three years ago.’ He was beginning to have an uncomfortable feeling of having been an object of research. But whose research? Mandrake’s? And why?
‘You have always done very interesting work on the relations between men and their environments,’ Mandrake said. ‘I have all your books. Sometimes I think our minds work along very similar lines. After all, I deal with much the same kind of material, in a different way.’ He half-turned in his seat so that he was looking Queston full in the face; there was a startling youthfulness about him, a smoothness round the eyes and mouth, and a suspiciously deliberate boyish wedge of dark hair loose over the forehead. He added, reproachfully, ‘I did suggest once that you should consider working with me, if you remember.’
Queston remembered. A letter had come on Ministry of Town and Country Planning paper only a few days after he had met Brunner in Oxford. He had torn it up, not even bothering to reply, and had put it completely out of his mind until now.
He said lightly: ‘I don’t think I should have been your cup of tea.’ Then, trying to change what was beginning to seem a familiar line: ‘I saw you had some trouble at the airport. Who was the man who took a pot at you?’
Among the entourage the blunt words went home: the back of Brunner’s head jerked sharply in the seat in front of him, and across the aisle he saw two nameless aides glance warningly across. But Mandrake simply raised one smooth hand and let it fall again. ‘The ordinary risk of the public man. There’s always some opponent unbalanced enough to go to an extreme. I don’t know what was up with this one—we shall find out, in due course. These people are rarely good shots, fortunately.’ He smiled easily at Queston. ‘I believe there are rather more of them in South America.’
‘One of my best reasons for keeping away from politics.’ Mandrake laughed. It was a high-pitched, almost foolish laugh, but increasingly, talking to him, Queston could feel a strength of character which seemed to have no connexion with the young face, or the direct manner. This is a man, he thought to himself, who keeps his mind hidden; and who has a lot to hide. Or is the greatest secret that he hides the absence of any real strength?
Mandrake began asking him questions about his work. At first he thought it simply an examination of the thought-processes of an anthropologist, by a man seeking always to learn from the minds of other men; but gradually he became less sure. The Minister fired at him detailed questions on obscure points of social behaviour described in books or papers he had written years before; either he had a real and searching interest in Queston’s not always orthodox ideas, or someone had prepared him some extremely efficient homework at high speed. But how could anyone have known that they were going to meet that day…?
‘The business of emotional attachment to place outweighing even basic human needs—’ Mandrake was saying, alert and absorbed. ‘You went back to Brazil, I believe, to continue some work that Klaus told me about. Naturally, with the situation in Britain as it is at the moment, this is a subject of some concern to me. Tell me, Queston, what conclusions have you come to about the people of your caves?’
How could he have known? Why should Brunner have remembered? To cover his astonishment, Queston said lightly: ‘I don’t really know much about the situation in Britain at the moment. Has it changed much?’
Mandrake’s eyes flickered. ‘A little. But your cave people—’
Unobtrusively Queston took a long slow breath, and held it for a little while. The one thing he did not want to look at again; the one memory that he had been running away from, because always since it had happened it had brought ideas singing into his mind that he knew were very nearly insane: one chance encounter with a planning-happy politician had to plunge a probe deep into the one vulnerable spot. It was his own fault, of course. Whenever he broke his own iron rule of solitude, something went wrong for him. He should have waited until he had done the writing. Now, because he had once incautiously quoted the beginning of the story, years before, the indiscretion was whipping back into his face to flay him with the implications of the story’s end. Was it possible, now, to tell the bare facts, without being led on into the nightm
are of deduction that for months had been haunting him?
Perhaps. He said, silently cursing Mandrake’s interest: ‘You’d better draw your own conclusions. They may not be the same as mine.’
From Oxford, that time, he had gone back to London, and from London straight back to Brazil. But there the Brazilian government, who paid his salary, had detained him in the capital as adviser to a long United Nations study, and he had not been free for the long journey back to the highlands for more than two years.
By air and land the way back to the caves in the hills took him almost three weeks. Intermittently his mind had been playing on the small strange tribe he had grown to know there, and their curious worship of the land; he was eager to get back. At the end of the last day’s journey, where the trees ended and the land began to rise, he left his men to pitch camp in a clearing and went on alone up the trail to get a glimpse of the hills.
Somehow he sensed a difference in the place, but at first he could not understand what it was. The night was almost down, after the swift sunset, and he was tired and not properly alert. But there was something about the familiar hillside that arrested his attention… then he realized what it was. He could not see a single point of light anywhere. He paused half-way up the slope, looking up at the rising mass of the range, darker than the darkening sky. There was no sign of the fires which always burnt outside the caves. Puzzled, he went back to the camp.
When daylight came, the morning puzzled him still more. There was no sign of life anywhere; no smoke, no human movement or sound. His own men were muttering, restless, and again he went up alone. When he climbed to the settlement, he realized in sudden alarm what it was that had disturbed him in the appearance of the place. The hillside had changed. Nowhere was its shape the same as it had been before; some cave entrances were widened by jagged cracks, others blocked, and the great fissures gaped black and menacing here and there in the ground.
He found the dappled circles of dead, cold fires, and a few scattered mats, tools, spears. But of the people he had left two years before he found no trace at all.