Fred Hoyle - The Black Cloud

“Well, frankly I’ve had quite a lot to worry about during the last six weeks. And after all your situation is really pretty good. You’ve said, without exception, what a nice place this is. And when the crisis comes you’ve a vastly better chance of surviving than you could possibly have had otherwise. We shall survive here if survival is at all possible. So at root you may think that you’ve been pretty fortunate.”

“This address book business, Kingsley,” said McNeil, “doesn’t seem to apply at all in my case. As far as I’m aware we never met until a few days ago.”

“Incidentally, McNeil, why are you here, if I may ask?”

“Cock and bull story evidently. I’ve been concerned with finding a site for a new sanatorium, and Nortonstowe was recommended to me. Ministry of Health suggested I might like to see the place for myself. But why me I can’t imagine.”

“Perhaps so that we had a doctor on the spot.”

Kingsley got up and walked to the window. Cloud shadows were chasing each other across the meadows.

One afternoon in mid-April, Kingsley returned to the house after a brisk walk round the Nortonstowe estate, to find aniseed smoke pervading his room.

“What the …!’ he exclaimed. “By all that’s wonderful, Geoff Marlowe. I’d given up hopes of you getting here. How did you manage it?”

“By deception and treachery,” replied Marlowe between large mouthfuls of toast. “Nice place you’ve got here. Have some tea?”

“Thanks, it’s very kind of you.”

“Not at all. After you left we were moved down to Palomar, where I was able to do a certain amount of work. Then we were all transported into the desert, with the exception of Emerson, who I believe was sent over here.”

“Yes, we’ve got Emerson, Barnett, and Weichart. I was rather afraid they’d given you the desert treatment. That’s why I cleared out so quickly as soon as Herrick said he was going to Washington. Did he get a thick ear for allowing me to leave the country?”

“I gather so, but he didn’t say much about it.”

“Incidentally, am I right in supposing that the A.R. was sent over to your side?”

“Yes, sir! The Astronomer Royal is Chief British Liaison Officer to the whole U.S. project.”

“Good for him. That’ll be exactly up his alley, I expect. But you haven’t told me how you managed to give the desert the slip, and why you decided to leave.”

“The why of it is easy. Because of the way we were organized to death.”

Marlowe took a handful of lumps out of the sugar bowl. He laid one on the table.

“This is the guy who does the work.”

“What do you call him?”

“I don’t know that we call him anything in particular.”

“We call him a “bod” over here.”

“A “bod”?”

“That’s right. Short for “body”.”

“Well, even though we don’t call him a “bod”, he’s a “bod” all right,” went on Marlowe. “In fact he’s a hell of a “bod”, as you’ll soon see.”

Next he laid down a row of sugar lumps.

“Above the “bod” comes his Section Leader. In view of my seniority I’m a Section Leader. Then comes the Deputy Director. Herrick became a Deputy Director in spite of his being in the doghouse. Then here’s our old friend the Director himself. Above him comes the Assistant Controller, then who else but the Controller? They’re the military, of course. Next comes the Project Coordinator. He’s a politician. And so by degrees we come to the President’s Deputy. After that I suppose comes the President, although I can’t be sure because I never got as high as that.”

“You didn’t like it, I suppose?”

“No, sir, I didn’t,” continued Marlowe as he crunched another piece of toast. “I was too near the bottom of the hierarchy to like it. Besides I could never find out what was going on outside my own section. The policy was to keep everything in watertight compartments. In the interests of security, they said, but more likely in the interests of inefficiency, I think. Well, I didn’t like it as you can imagine. It isn’t my way of going about a problem. So I started agitating for a transfer, a transfer to this show over here. I had an idea that things would be done a lot better here. And I see they are,” he added, as he took up another piece of toast.

“Besides I suddenly got a longing for a sight of green grass. When that comes on you it isn’t to be denied.”

“This is all very well, Geoff, but it doesn’t explain how you prised yourself loose from this formidable organization.”

“Pure luck,” answered Marlowe. “The people over in Washington got the idea that maybe you people weren’t telling everything you knew. And as I’d let it be known that I’d welcome a transfer, I was sent over here as a spy. That’s where the treachery comes in.”

“You mean you’re supposed to report on anything we may be concealing?”

“That’s exactly the situation. And now that you know why I’m here, am I to be allowed to stay or are you going to throw me out?”

“It’s the rule here that everyone who comes into Nortonstowe stays. We don’t let anyone out.”

“Then it’ll be all right if Mary comes along? She’s been doing some shopping in London. But she’ll be right along some time tomorrow.”

“That’ll be fine. This is a big place. We’ve got plenty of room.We shall be glad to have Mrs Marlowe here. Frankly, there’s an awful lot of work to be done, and far too few people to do it.”

“And maybe occasionally I might send a crumb of information to Washington, just to keep them happy?”

“You can tell ’em anything you like. I find the more I tell the politicians the more depressed they get. So it’s our policy to tell ’em everything. There’s no secrecy at all here. You can send anything you wish on the direct radio link to Washington. We got it working about a week ago.”

“In that case maybe you’d give me an outline of what’s been happening at this end. Personally, I’m very little wiser than on the day we talked out in the Mohave Desert. I have done a bit, but it isn’t optical work we need just now. By the fall we could get something. But this is a business for the radio boys, as I think we agreed.”

“We did. And I stirred up John Marlborough as soon as I got back to Cambridge in January. It took some persuasion to start him on the job, because I didn’t tell him the real reason to begin with — although he knows now of course. Well, we got out a temperature for the Cloud. It’s a little above two hundred degrees, two hundred degrees absolute of course.”

“That’s pretty good. About what we’d hoped for. A bit cold, but possible.”

“It’s really better than it sounds. Because, as the Cloud approaches the Sun, internal motions must develop inside it. My first calculations showed that the resulting rise of temperature might be somewhere between fifty and a hundred per cent, making in total a temperature somewhere around freezing point. So it looked as if we might be in for a frosty spell and nothing more.”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“That’s what I thought at the time. But I’m not really an expert in gas dynamics, so I wrote off to Alexandrov.”

“My God, you were taking a chance in writing to Moscow.”

“I don’t think so. The problem could be put in a purely academic form. And there’s nobody better suited to tackle it than Alexandrov. In any case it led to us getting him here. He regards this as the best concentration camp in the world.”

“I see there’s still a lot that I don’t know. Go on.”

“At this time, still in January, I was feeling pretty clever. So I decided to take the political authorities for a really rough trip. I perceived that two things the politicians must have at all costs — scientific information and secrecy. I determined to give both to them, on my own conditions — the conditions you see around you here at Nortonstowe.”