Bob Shaw - The Peace Machine

I’m miles away from home , he thought. And that’s where the envelopes are.

He considered looking for a taxi, then remembered they were a rarity in Crymchurch. The idea of stealing a car was somehow more shocking, on its own level, than anything else he had done since he had broken all ties with society. It would be his first outright criminal act — and he was not even certain he could do it — but there was no good alternative. He began examining the dashboards of the cars parked along the street on which he was walking. Two blocks further along, where Crymchurch’s business section was shading into a residential area, he spotted the gleam of keys in an ignition switch. The car was not the best sort for his purpose — it was one of the new Government-subsidized safety models, with four high-backed aft-facing seats and only the driver’s seat facing forward. All such cars had a governor on the engine which limited the top speed to a hundred kilometers per hour.

On consideration, Hutchman decided he would be better not to break any speed regulations anyway. He glanced around to make sure the owner was not in sight, dropped the bedding on the footpath, and got into the car. It started at the first turn of the key, and he drove away smoothly but quickly. Not bad for a big soft amateur, he thought in a momentary childish glee. But beware of hubris, Hutch, old son!

He circled the outskirts of the town, gradually adjusting to the feel of the unfamiliar controls, and once was shocked when he glimpsed his unshaven face in the driving mirror. It was a tired and desperate face, one which belonged to a hunted stranger. On reaching his house he drove slowly past it, satisfying himself that there were no police around, then halted and backed into the driveway. His own car, windows opaqued with moisture, was sitting where he had left it. He parked the stolen car close to the shrubbery and got out, staring nostalgically at the house and wondering what he would do if he saw Vicky at a window. But the two milk bottles still sitting on the doorstep told him she had not returned. Symbols. Two quotation marks which signified the end of the dialogue with Vicky. His eyes blurred painfully.

He searched in his pockets, found the ignition key of his own car. It, too, started at the first turn of the switch and a minute later he was driving northward, toward winter.

The whole broad back of the country lay before him, daunting in its size, complexity, and possibilities of danger. He had been accustomed to thinking of Britain as a cosy little island, a crowded patch of grass which scarcely afforded a jetliner space to trim for level flight before it was time for it to nestle down again. Now, suddenly, the land was huge and misty, crawling with menace, magnified in inverse proportion to the number of human beings to whom he could turn for help.

Hutchman drove steadily, aware of the consequences of a speeding offence or even the slightest accident. He watched the mirror more than usual, cursing the other cars which hung near his offside rear wheel, bristling with kinetic energy, always about to overtake yet paradoxically frozen in formation with him. Other drivers, secure and separated in their own little Einsteinian systems of relative movement, met his eyes with mild curiosity until he put on his Polaroids, investing the windscreen with a pattern of oily blue squares. He crossed the Thames at Henley and drove northwest in the direction of Oxford, stopping at isolated mailboxes to post small bundles of his envelopes.

By midday Hutchman was deep in the Tolkein-land of the Cotswolds, swishing through villages of honey-coloured stone which seemed to have grown by some natural process rather than artifice. Domesticated valleys shone in pale tints beneath veils of white mist. He surveyed the countryside in detached gloom, his brain seething with regrets and reconsiderations, until the mention of his name on a newscast brought him back to the minuteby-minute business of living. The car radio crackled as he turned up the volume, causing him to lose part of the item.

“…intensive police activity centered on the house in Moore’s Road, Camburn, where two men died yesterday, one of them as a result of a fall from an upper window, the other shot dead when the biology lecturer Andrea Knight was abducted from her apartment by three armed men. The man who fell to his death was Mr. A ubrey Welland, a schoolteacher, of 209 Ridge Road, Upton Green; and the man who was shot during the gangsterstyle abduction was fifty-nine-years-old Mr. Richard Thomas Bilson, of38 Moore’s Road, Cam burn, who was passing by at the time and is understood to have tried to prevent the three men from pushing Miss Knight into a car. The police have no known clues as to the present whereabouts of Miss Knight, but both she and Welland were members of the Communist Party, and it is thought that her disappearance may have some political motivation.

“Latest development in the case is that thirty-nine-years-old Mr. Lucas Hutchman, of Priory Hill, Crymchurch, a mat hematiclan with the guided-weapons firm of Westfield’s, is being sought by the police, who believe he can materially assist with their inquiries. Hutchman was taken to Crymchurch police station last night, but disappeared this morning. He is described as six-feet tall, black-haired, slim-built, clean-shaven, wearing gray slacks anda brown-suede jacket. He is thought to be driving apale-blue Ford Sierra, registration number B836 SMN. Anybody seeing this car or a man answering to Hutchman ‘s description should contact their nearest police station immediately…

“Reports of a serious fire on board the orbiting laboratory have been denied by…”

Hutchman turned the radio down until it was producing background noise. His first thought was that somebody had beenfast. Scarcely three hours had elapsed since he had walked out of Crymchurch police station, which indicated that the police had not waited for reporters to uncover the facts but had gone to the BBC and enlisted their aid. He did not know much about police procedures, but memory told him that outright appeals on the public broadcasting system were fairly rare events. The signs were that Crombie-Carson, or somebody above him, had an idea that something really big was taking place. Hutchman glanced in his mirror. There was a car a short distance behind, belatedly rising and sinking on the irregularities of the hedge-lined road. Was that silvery flash an aerial? Had the driver been listening to the same newscast? Would he recall the description of the car if he overtook? Hutchman depressed the accelerator instinctively and pulled ahead until the following vehicle was lost from view, but then found himself drawing closer to another car. He fell back a little and tried to think constructively.

The main reason he needed transport of his own was so that he could diffuse his mailings over a wide area, and do it quickly. All the envelopes had to be in the mails before the last collection of the day. Once that was done he could abandon the car — except that it might be found almost immediately, giving the police an accurate pointer to his location. His best solution seemed to be to examine the main points of the broadcast description and decide which of them really were invariants…

Reaching the outskirts of Cheltenham he parked the car in a quiet avenue and, leaving his jacket in it, took a bus into the center of the town. Sitting on the upper deck he took the roll of notes from his pocket and counted it. The total was £338, which was more than enough to take care of his needs until D-Day. On descending from the bus in the unfamiliar shopping center he found himself shivering in the sharp November air, and decided that walking about in slacks and a worsted sweater could make him too conspicuous. He went into an outfitter’s and bought a zippered gray jacket. In a nearby general store he acquired a battery-powered electric razor and while trying it out trimmed his stubble into the beginnings of a signoral beard. It was only three days old, but the blackness and thickness of the growth made it acceptable as a beard which would register as part of his appearance.