Fifth Planet Read online

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘We’re having another conference. I’ll probably be away about five days. And I was wondering if you’d like to make a trip up to Town.’

  That was the last thing she’d been expecting. With a wary flash she came back at him, ‘How much? How much can I spend?’

  Hugh knew that a few days in London, spent in the intimate company of some new boy-friend, was exactly what Cathy had been scheming towards. By offering her the trip on a plate he’d forced her back on to her final line of defence - money. He smiled wryly.

  ‘I’m overdrawn at the bank. And I’m not paid till the end of June. If you look up at the top of the paper you’ll see that it is still only the middle of May.’

  ‘Bob Shaw doesn’t have any difficulty about money,’ returned Cathy with the merest twitch of her nose, ‘and he’s only a rag-bag of a fellow, as you always say.’

  Hugh snorted, ‘Property development. Property development in Slough.’

  ‘Well, why not?’

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  ‘I’m not putting my slender resources into any development in Slough, even if the Americans are taking to the place.’

  Elbow on table, Cathy cupped her chin in her right hand, ‘You could do something better, couldn’t you?’

  Hugh smiled now. ‘It is my job to do something better.’ He paused for a moment. Then shot it straight out, ‘Well, who is it this time?’

  She looked blankly across the table, the soul of innocence. ‘What do you mean ?’

  ‘You know damned well what I mean. Who is it?’

  Cathy giggled, ‘I thought it was a mouse. It turned out to be a tiger.’

  ‘Stop being absurd.’ '

  ‘I’m not being absurd.’

  Hugh put his second boiled egg into the cup and absently began to crack the top.

  Cathy now had the bit between her teeth. ‘I don’t ask you who you sleep with when you’re away.’ She smiled broadly, and Hugh felt the old, but still sharp, pangs of jealousy.

  ‘I don’t sleep with anybody,’ he exploded.

  ‘Don’t you, darling? Well if you did I wouldn’t want to know about it.’

  Cathy leant back in her chair so that her hair fell backwards, as if to suggest that the subject was closed.

  ‘Ypu know perfectly well we’re not talking about me.’ ‘No? If I should sleep with another man, what does it matter to you, so long as you don’t know about it.’

  ‘Of course it matters.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it affects both of us.’

  Cathy pondered this for a moment. Then wrinkling her face to show that she was making a serious effort she said, ‘If you don’t know about it, it can’t affect you, can it ? If it was to affect me, then it would be wrong. But I don’t allow it to affect me, do I ?’

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  With a vicious stab of his spoon, Hugh sliced the top off the egg. It was hard-boiled.

  ‘It’s hard-boiled,’ he yapped.

  Cathy looked down at the egg as if she had never seen one before. ‘You’re always maiking a fuss about things that don’t matter.’

  ‘But the first one,’ he nittered, pointing to the bits of shell on his plate, ‘the first one was soft-boiled. It was so soft- boiled that if I’d held it up the whole egg would have run out.’

  Cathy stretched herself lazily, ‘Just like the two of us, dear. You hard-boiled, me soft-boiled.’

  Fuming helplessly, Hugh jumped up from the table. He stalked from the breakfast-room to his study, stuffed a pile of papers which he had been reading the previous evening into his brief-case, walked back to the kitchen, and shouted, “Those eggs are substandard.’ Then he stormed out of the house, thinking that, in an age of female emancipation, the arguments of patriarchy were no match for those of matriarchy.

  When he had gone, Cathy took on an air of set purpose. She went to the telephone, dialled, and got a wrong number. Deciding that she was using the wrong code, she consulted a small red notebook. Very deliberately, reading the numbers as if they were some strange hieroglyphs, she tried again. A voice answered.

  ‘Will you put me through to Mike Fawsett, please?’

  There were two ways of going between the Conways’ house in the sleepy village of Alderbourne and the Helios Project Centre at Harwell, the site of which had been a nuclear research establishment in the dim distant days. There was the super-S highway, or the winding, tree-shaded lane that had not changed much since the eighteenth century. In fact, the whole English countryside had not altered much since the eighteenth century. In the last hundred years the population of the British Isles had risen from fifty to seventy

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  millions, but the increase in building had been almost entirely in the cities. In spite of their growth, the cities hadn’t managed to achieve quite the same sprawling, amorphous character as had their American counterparts; Los Angeles had now stretched out as far as Albuquerque, which perhaps explained why Americans were favourably disposed towards a property development in Slough.

  Hugh decided that he was too furious to risk driving along the highway and took the country road. The' may hedges were in blossom, and it was all quietly beautiful as he followed the ridge of the Downs. By this route he came into the Helios Centre from above. On impulse he parked the car and got out to stretch his legs. Then, squatting on the grass, he gazed down on the Centre, the Centre where the decisions affecting man’s greatest adventure would be made. He sighed softly as he contrasted the grandeur of the world of ideas with his own petty domestic squabblings. The buildings below shone brightly in the sun, reflecting gold mixed with opalescent blues.

  Ten minutes more brought him to the parking-lot, the one sordid spot in the Centre. Five minutes’ walk, and he entered a long, curving, strip-like building, made of glass and metal. The staircase had the sweep and magnificence of an eighteenth-century manor house. His feet made no sound as he walked up the steps. A light ahead beckoned him as he strolled, silently, down a long, curving corridor. Turning off the corridor, he went into a room that almost defies description. It was not small, but neither was it very large. It was not barely furnished or decorated, but it would be difficult to say just what materials had been used in order to set it out. It was entirely silent to the tread, as had been the corridor and the staircase, but it was not entirely silent. There was a faint hum of electric motors. There was a magnificent old table in the centre. But the dignified effect was spoilt by a dozen or more absurd pads of white paper spaced at regular intervals around it. This was the Committee Room.

  By this time all important decisions affecting the structure

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  of human society were taken in committee. Everybody knew that the system was wrong, but by now no one had the power to stop it. No committee was willing to vote to destroy itself. In the early days a few men had found themselves, more or less by chance, to be possessors of the power to persuade their colleagues — they were natural intellectual salesmen. And like good salesmen, who can dispose of anything under the sun, they could get their way on any matter, however absurd. What had begun as a purely amateur sport had gradually developed into stark professionalism. Nowadays one did not become a good committee man by chance. One became a good committee man by sheer unremitting effort in which every working moment was spent in planning and scheming how to operate. But not all committee men were good. There had to be some who were bad, simply because some members had to possess an adequate knowledge of the essential facts. It was by now quite impossible both to be a good committee man and to know anything. The trouble, of course, was that those who knew what they were talking about never got their own way, although supporters of the system claimed that this was a good thing.

  Hugh was one of the first to arrive. He busied himself in a futile, unprofessional way
with his papers. Even though there was something he wanted from this particular meeting, his mind wandered from the business in hand. He jerked his thoughts back from Cathy. He must try to remember that only one other member of the Committee would be British. He must try to remember the motives and opinions of the other members, to put himself inside their skins. Above all, he must try to make use of the complex of emotions that had led to the Helios Centre being built in Britain.

  The common man of the twentieth century would have been surprised to have learnt just how far the trends of his own day had been carried through into the twenty-first century, just how far the logic of ideas had been pressed. The development of the deterrent is, of course, an outstanding example. To our innocent ancestors, civil defence meant

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  exactly what it said, defence to protect the civil population, to protect the man in the street. To us now, this is an outrageously archaic notion. In fact, two-thirds of the way through the twentieth century, a few perceptive pioneers had already realized that civil defence was to become the outstanding weapon of aggression. With ruthlessly effective civil defence a nation could afford nuclear war - almost. And if the other side couldn’t afford it at all, you could bully him just as much as you pleased. So what started as the sole concern of the individual became a matter of major national policy, in America, in Europe, in Russia, and China. Refusal to take part in effective civil defence programmes became a treasonable crime. It seems laughable now to think that at one time civil defence consisted merely of building a shelter in one’s own garden. As we all know, effective defence lies in evacuating whole cities at a moment’s notice, in fact at the very worst and most inconvenient moments. And, of course, one cannot be said to be prepared to do this unless one actually does it. Remorselessly. This means that the times of evacuation cannot be announced beforehand, it is the essence of the matter that people must not be prepared. The warning comes in the middle of a wedding, a funeral, a confinement. It causes the restaurants of the Ohamps- Elysees to disgorge their diners into the street, gourmets with their napkins still tucked into their collars. All this in the interests of 1’h.onneur.

  Through a series of accidents the British had escaped all this. In the sixties of the last century their politicians had at last realized that power had become a shadow. A little genuine power could be won, however, by joining in a United Europe. This they earnestly strove to do, but their efforts were thwarted through a series of mischances, an intransigent French president, the conservatism of their own people at home, and the lack of conservatism of the people abroad. At all events, the British were kept outside, and power vanished for ever from Whitehall. Gone was the need for expensive military budgets or for the remorse

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  less logic of the deterrent. The British slept in their beds, the forgotten men of the twenty-first century.

  Or not quite forgotten. For to the harassed American, the ulcerous Russian, the thought of a few weeks’ holiday in London became indescribably precious. New York became almost entirely automatized, Paris became the city with thoughts only for the glorious future, in Moscow, puritan- ism lay like a dead hand on the people. Only in London could one dine in peace. Only in London could one follow dinner with a little play that didn’t matter at all.

  Because of its enormous attraction for tourists Britain was extremely prosperous. Other parts of the world, Africa in particular, split themselves asunder in their rivalries, in their attempts each to become the workshop of the world. Small financial crises triggered each other across the globe like falling rows of skittles. And throughout all this the British lent money here and there on profitable terms, as the Swiss had done a century earlier.

  The Swiss at last abandoned their neutral position and threw in their lot with Europe. Communication through radio and the aeroplane, prosperity and power, achieved what invading armies could not do. It was the enormously rising prestige of Europe that did it. The Swiss gained status by joining, it was like marrying the daughter of a noble house. One effect was that the various small international organizations that had made Switzerland their home felt obliged to seek new quarters. Britain by now had become the obvious place. After all, what was Britain except a raft afloat in the sea, a raft exposed to the wind and weather, populated by a calm people who went about their business without ever realizing that the world was a serious place to live in? It was just the place for bored international secretariats to move to.

  The decision to build the Helios Centre in Britain was a more serious affair, however. This was not a small matter. Its ramifications affected every major nation in the world. And just for this reason it could not be placed in any one of

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  those major nations. Quite obviously the Russo-Chinese bloc would not permit the Centre to be sited in the territory of the Euro-American bloc. And, of course, vice versa. Africa was too hot, dusty, and industrial. South America was a serious possibility, but the fact that most interested parties were in the Northern Hemisphere, the attractions of London, and the precedence established by other International Agencies, swayed the day. So the Helios Project came to be established at Harwell.

  Around the year 2040, the British Government made an attempt to get itself back into the power complex in a small feeble way. The belt of power spreads in an ominous girdle across the northern latitudes of the Earth. The two division points, one in the Bering Strait, the other to the east of Germany, unified during the short period of Western ascendancy in the 1990s. The West is the West, America and Europe, and the East is the East, Russia and China. The leaders of neither group want war, for war would put an effective end to the exercise of their power. But neither do they want a cessation of tension, for this also would produce an important down-grading of their functions. Besides, it had been proved mathematically by the social scientists, now dominant and rampant, that a world without tension would be a world in decline. The problem is to live with tension without allowing it ever to break loose. Our main safety factor lies in our ability to predict, again with mathematical precision, just what the other side will do in a given set of circumstances. Unpredictable behaviour by either side would soon lead to disaster.

  All this was first recognized, long, long ago by the scientists of the Rand Corporation, a decade or so before that organization took over the effective control of American policy from the Pentagon. To begin with, the fly in the ointment was that one side didn’t quite know the basis on which the other side made its calculations. Without this knowledge things could go wrong - they could become unstable, as the mathematicians said. Nobody at first had the impudence to

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  suggest the obvious solution. But little by little steps were taken towards it. A hundred years ago the most closely guarded secrets were those that concerned methods of calculation, military logistics as it was then called. Then secrecy was gradually relaxed. Papers on the subject began to be published quite openly. Finally, after a series of seventeen summit meetings, the answer was reached, the answer that an intelligent child might have arrived at after five minutes’ study. The military planners of both sides should get together to discuss their suppositions and hypotheses. So it came about that biannual meetings between the planners and mathematicians of both sides were arranged. The meetings would allow them not only to make sure they understood each other but to arrive at a common basis far future developments. The seminar was the answer. But the question immediately arose where the meetings should be held. It was here that the British Government made its bid. The meetings should obviously be held in Britain, that raft in the middle of the ocean, beholden to neither side. But, of course, this was not to be. It was decided that the meetings be held alternately, first on the one side, then on the other. That is why they were arranged biannually, and have been so ever since.

  ‘Gentlemen, the meetin
g is integrated,’ boomed the voice of the Chairman, ‘the time is half past nine.’

  Conway wrenched his mind back to Helios and today’s meeting. He thought to himself, not for the first time, how screamingly boring it all was. How boring compared with the world of ideas!

  Chapter Three

  First Preparations

  Conway had known that this would be a critical meeting. He had never before had to sit in on anything quite like it. Very difficult decisions had to be taken, and lives would depend upon them. And the meeting wasn’t properly constituted; it didn’t have the right technical knowledge, it was too high-level for that. There were still higher levels, of course, but it was unlikely that anyone would have the energy or determination to change what this committee decided.

  The first part of the meeting, up to coffee-time at eleven o’clock, was taken up mainly by four speakers. There was Dr Hoddas, a Hungarian. Conway, as he drank his coffee, would have been in some difficulty to remember a single word that Dr Hoddas had said. For Conway had long since learnt the art of not listening. If you listened to everything that was said you became utterly exhausted and were unable to take effective part when the really important issues came up for discussion. In fact, the exhausting of a meeting with pretentious inconsequential nonsense was a part of the technique of a good committee man. It was also part of Dr Hoddas’s technique to speak in a guttural French. He was equipped with a large dictionary in which he insisted on looking up words and phrases.

  Professor Bombas from Tanganyika had urged that, whatever decisions were taken, the small nations should not be left out. Conway wondered just what he meant by this. Perhaps that the metal coils be made in Togoland, the graphite chambers in Colombia, the computer in Greenland, and the whole thing assembled by a friendly consortium of Americans and Russians. If so, God help the crew.

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  Doctor Leybum, the economist, wanted decisions to be taken as soon as possible, so that exactly what was involved financially could become known to the respective governments. Conway also wanted the decisions to be taken, but for a different reason, because Helios and its retinue of planets was approaching them by seventy kilometres in every second, and the later they started the harder would everything become. Irichenko wanted parity. Whatever the West was going to do, the East would do and, of course, vice versa. He emphasized this critical observation with an enormous blow on the table, and was on the point of raising his fist for a second time when he remembered that emphasis was regarded as bad form in the West.