Fistful of Digits Read online

  Fistful of Digits

  Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Copyright © Christopher Hodder-Williams 1968

  The right of Christopher Hodder-Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1968 by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

  This edition published in 2015 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue – The Beginning

  Part One – Fingers

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two – Hands

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Three – Stranglehold

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgments and List of People-thinkers

  Prologue – The Beginning

  London Airport, Tuesday

  To Richard Stranger, Freid Institute.

  Dear Richard:

  I have the oddest feeling. And as the man who has publicly ridiculed the work you’ve been doing I feel hardly entitled to communicate it to you. At the same time you may not find it entirely unnatural that I took my son’s side…however misguided this proved to be.

  In a few minutes I shall be flying on holiday to Morocco; and a few days ago I would have sworn that this was my own Idea. Now, I wonder.

  You remarked, when you visited me that last time at the Ministry of Technology that I had — what was the phrase, exactly? — “submerged my personality completely in this obsession for electronic efficiency”…? something like that, anyway. You may remember I was not very courteous in my reply. And if I get bad; safely from this trip I shall try and improve on it.

  I now find myself quite incapable of a decision. You’d think that someone who could sit down in an airport lounge and reel off a letter like this would be able to go to the ticket office and cancel, I can’t do so. I know you will think I am not making any sense.

  I wonder if the other passengers feel any of this? Richard, you’ve got to believe — for the sake of others in the future — what I’m going to say now: they aren’t boarding this plane of their own free will. (I’ve just heard the final announcement to board. Of course, I will obey. One does.)

  The group at the next table…they have that very same detached look you’ve accused me of. They wear sunglasses, all of them…dark lenses in steel frames of the sort that baffle; they remove the identity from the face. And I think they also are just rejects from an intolerant world — Would you, I wonder, say an electronic world? I pray that I will live to withdraw what I said about your crackpot ideas…

  God, rambling is the word! But I can offer you just one fact, one tangible thing which may help someone, should it turn out that Air Europeda Flight 9A fails to reach its destination. Despite your own personal prejudices (and I seem to remember they date from our dim and distant Cambridge days) I became a patient of Dr Moyen recently, because I was under heavy pressure of work at the Ministry and was consistently sleeping extremely badly.

  Dr Moyen issued me with a machine. I am quite used to machines. (Bitter words, perhaps, they may well seem to you!) This one is a little black box. It is not what is conventionally known as a “sleep machine” but that’s what it’s for. Or at least, that’s what Moyen said it was for.

  By accident I happened to see inside another passenger’s briefcase while he opened it for something or other. Richard, he had one! And I have not the least doubt, though I can’t prove it, of course (and wouldn’t anyway, because I don’t seem to have that kind of mental freedom of action), that others among these passengers have got them too…

  (I must go in a minute…they’re all drifting out towards the aircraft…)

  This made me think, of course. How did I come to decide to be on this particular holiday? Or, to put it another way (however looney this may sound) what did I do to fail the cause of automation? — See what I mean? How could I say this to anyone else? — to John, for instance? Well, you know my son better than I do. I have a feeling that a boy reveals himself to his housemaster better than to anyone else on earth. So I don’t have to tell you how dangerous it would have been to have confided anything to him. Yes, dangerous! — now I’m afraid of my own son!

  I’ve got to go now. Got to? Yes, I think that’s the right word.

  Julian Forbes

  *

  For some reason the above letter was delayed three months…as were other documents which might have explained things.

  Part One – Fingers

  Chapter One

  It was solely a matter of timing. Had Peter first met her when the weird music was playing, then he would never have followed it up. That curious feature of her personality — the one he so quickly noticed — would have shut him out from the start. Then, he would simply have done what he came down to Cornwall to do, and gone back to London the better for it.

  But she was alone in the cottage and the others were still at lunch.

  She came to the door as he swung the Mini into the drive and said smiling: “I don’t know which one you are but would you like coffee? I’ve just made some.”

  He returned the smile. “Is that your job, then?”

  “One of them.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I’m not one of your ‘Musiconics’ people but that smell of coffee beans is just irresistible.”

  “Good.” She led the way inside. “You must have come to see John.”

  “Yes…He’s my business partner.” He looked around. “I thought when I arrived that I must have come to the wrong place! But this cottage is cram full of our equipment so it must be right.”

  She poured some extra coffee beans into the grinder. “So you’re Peter Shackleton — a rather angry Peter Shackleton, by the looks of things.”

  “Oh, hell…Does it show?”

  She chucked a quick, appreciative look. “That wasn’t a complaint! Most of our people are…I don’t know — sort of introverted. It’s part of the creed to be enigmatic.”

  “Are you?”

  “That’s not for me to decide.”

  “You aren’t very enigmatic at the moment — except about your name!”

  “It’s Christina.” Rattle of cups. “So why are you angry? — or are you always angry?”

  “Business-type anger.”

  “Oh. I shouldn’t pry, should I?”

  They paused. She floated the coffee on the water she had boiled in a saucepan. He watched this and grinned. “I’ve always heard,” he said, “that Musiconics people were highly scientific…Yet you’re in an ancient cottage and you make coffee like a peasant!”

  “Peasants don’t drink coffee.”

  “If they did, that’s how they’d make it.”

  “Oh, I see…Well, perhaps this is how I rebel.”

  “That the only way?”

  She looked at him, then brushed coffee grounds off her fingers by wiping her hands on her jeans. “You don’t talk like an electronics engineer at all! Are you sure you’re genuine?”

  “Do we all have to be the same?”

  “Sorry…I touched a nerve. How do you like your coffee?”

  “With some of that terrific country cream.”

  “Brown sugar?”

  “Great.”
/>
  “‘Great’…So you’ve lived in America? Or am I generalizing again?”

  “You are — but I have…So why am I a fraudulent engineer?”

  “Insufficiently dedicated.”

  “That’s always been my trouble.”

  “Don’t apologize, though…” She handed him a steaming mug. “It makes quite a change.” She looked away deliberately. “What do you make of John?”

  “I’m quite surprised you ask me that question.”

  “Why?”

  “Insufficiently secretive!”

  “I’m not always Musiconically orientated.”

  “That’s a nice, official phrase…Do you change backwards and forwards at will? — or does it just happen?”

  “It depends who I’m with.”

  “How unreliable of you.”

  “Yes…isn’t it a nuisance? So what do you think of John?”

  “He’s an Etonian.”

  “If I’d been a boy I’d have gone to Eton.”

  “Then we’re in the clear!”

  “What else do you think about John? — apart from his education problem?”

  “I think he’s far more secretive than even your Musiconics would warrant…on account of not telling me about you.”

  “Well, I’m not his bird so perhaps he would think that irrelevant.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  She said: “I don’t doubt it” — and they watched each other as the cars drew up outside.

  And that was when it happened first — the sudden switch in the girl’s entire manner from one state to another state. You couldn’t miss it and it was unnerving and absolute.

  It was in her eyes as Peter watched her, a drop in temperature of the kind that makes good metal crack down the welds.

  It was in her body, in whose zestful curves a muscular tension abruptly dented their significance, so that she even ceased to move in the graceful, easy manner that had so agreeably turned the coffee-making act into a feminine statement.

  Ignoring Peter suddenly, like a courtesan realizing instantaneously that a pretender in the palace was eliciting services to which he had no claim, she turned to Forbes as he came in and said curtly: “Mr Shackleton is here — apparently to see you.”

  “I can see that!” Unfriendly eyes in sleekly chosen spectacles and a peremptory: “Hallo, Peter, What on earth are you doing here?”

  The note from the office which had brought Peter down was an irritating abrasive in his trouser pocket. He could actually feel it against the skin, “You should know.”

  “Oh…that. I’m surprised you’re surprised.”

  Peter watched the weirdies filing in. They looked like immigrants from an over-stocked Chelsea. He said: “And who the hell is this Verolde man who wants to take over our firm?”

  Two of the immigrants paused, as if dumbstruck by this phrasing and that ignorance.

  Forbes glanced from them to Peter, offering a thin smile. “Now you really have shocked them!” — then glanced at his watch, as if no lesser man than Verolde was expected any minute.

  But Stan, the bearded maestro in the blue jeans, took the floor in some authority. “Right…silence now. That’s fine. Amplifiers on? Tape loaded…? Oh, Andy love, be an absolute darling and be in charge of Tea, there’s an angel?”

  Andy, not so much a Twiggy as a straight piece of brittle timber, blushed from the thrill of being given a task, then bravely restrained her emotions with an overwrought, “Of course, Stan!”

  “Good girl…Who’s got the score? Where’s the score? Christina, seen the score?”

  It turned out to be stacked neatly under the spool of tape, which lay enticingly on the console near the machine.

  And somehow all was ready, and the dozen or so enthusiasts damped their twitterings to an expectant silence as the maestro pressed the playback button and started the tape. An unearthly series of noises exploded from the speakers in the ceiling and the concert had begun. Peter thought it sounded like feeding time in some electronic zoo, whose inmates restively contemplated eating the keeper. The implied relationship between Stan and his tape-recorded charge was a disturbing one.

  Peter, half-numbed by the din around him, told himself as he gazed fixedly at the rotating spools that this sensation of misgiving was totally irrational. Yet he couldn’t stifle the feeling that the. girl was more a victim than a participant. Mud-splashed jeans can be evocative enough of a certain offbeat sex-appeal, but even this she seemed to be suppressing, as if Musiconics wasn’t just an art form but a religion. The habit she had of tossing her head, as if her hair were long and loose, instead of quite short and cropped as it was now, seemed again to suggest paradox.

  Stan, who every now and then made an adjustment to the elaborate controls on the console in front of him, displayed a benign indulgence towards back-sliding disciples that savoured of farce. In answer to a remark of Peter’s he declaimed: “Progressive music does not set out to exclude you. You’re making it do that yourself.”

  Peter glanced at the strangely flattened features and decided the beard didn’t help. “I simply said I didn’t like it.”

  Stan folded his arms across a dark green shirt and smiled kindly. “Prejudice,” he said, mentally breaking unleavened bread, “is another word for Fear. Listen to this bit,” he yapped, offering Peter a view of the score. “Would you have known that a cymbal, played backwards, could achieve such a texture?”

  Peter did look at the score. It didn’t tell him much. No reassuring parallel lines tied down the stereophonic subtleties overhead to the mundane rules and regulations of Beethoven or Britten. Instead, a series of black wedges and squares alternated with wild whirligigs. Occasionally there were sudden showers of recognizable music symbols, like the irresponsible platoon of semiquavers which came at the point when someone apparently upset the components of a xylophone all over the floor, and the clusters of contagious-looking pimples that broke out in red ink whenever they felt like it.

  Peter turned to watch the girl. At present she was deliberately submerging herself within the dedicated group, though it seemed to cost her an effort because she was so aware of Peter’s scrutiny. Her well-moulded face, slightly flushed all the time, showed the tension; all the time she seemed anxious, as if a sudden conflict had been imposed by Peter which rendered it impossible for her to make the choice.

  Peter shifted his gaze to include John Forbes, his partner in business — till now. John’s black-rimmed glasses gave him the air of an intellectual; and though this intellect didn’t respond any better than Peters to musical appreciation classes of this kind, John had studied history at an in-school before switching, at Cambridge, to Physics, then finally to a skilful combination of Electronics and Social Climbing. The expression was superficially indulgent. After all, Forbes-Shackleton Electronics, their mutual outfit, had supplied most of the elaborate equipment which had been crammed into the cottage with such nightmarish disregard for rustic charm. On the face of it he had good reason to be content; and the note he’d written Peter meant capital gain. Yet the eyes behind the magnifying lenses remained unamused. He again looked at his watch, as if some unforeseen issue had been raised by Peter’s arrival that might annoy the awaited guest.

  The music died to a more restrained level. This time, as the tape spool unwound its remorseless contents, the jumping pointers of the two playback meters settled, peacefully but uneasily, at their lower end while a series of slow phrases, apparently rendered by an oscillator, descended in steps like pedal notes on an organ.

  Stan, like some transistorized messiah, continued patronizingly with his sermon. “What do you seek with your ears, Shackleton? Certainly not the risk involved in actually listening. Music only gives you direct pleasure if it confirms what you are used to already. You want to go on thinking that life remains unchanged. You sustain your emotional security through repetition. I listen because of the innovation the music contains; not for the sense of dependence it generates.”

  Some
body nodded wisely; and Peter couldn’t help admiring the skilful mixture of truth with cant. It conveyed simply that anyone who didn’t like his sort of progress was already obsolete.

  Peter couldn’t reply because there came a massive crescendo that denied him speech. He gazed out of the window, and sympathized with the dock of gulls, sent up in the air hysterically by this renewed outburst of deafening dynamism, on their way to the quiet seclusion of some sheltered bay along the coast. Whichever ancient Celt had actually christened this place “Ding Dong” was now redeemed; and through the open windows into the peace outside shrieked a noise lit to wake the dead. The rugged miners who in a bygone age had burrowed deep for tin retrained, however, from stirring in their graves.

  The derelict remains of their industry were still conspicuous in this part of Cornwall. The old blockhouses, made of granite, thrust themselves against the skyline in lonely tribute; engine rooms, their chimneys broken oil short, prodded out of the hillside and one of them was visible through the window, in the gathering darkness of late autumn, against a background of bracken and broom.

  Peter caught the eye of the girl again, and instantly she looked away. She couldn’t altogether conceal her basic sensuality; in evading Peter’s glance her lowered eyelids only emphasized yet further the grave, downward slant of fresh features in such conflict with the filigree phoniness around her.

  At last it was over. The end of the tape slapped against the jockey mechanism and the automatic switch stopped the machine.

  After a suitable silence, the disciples proceeded to outdo each other, not with elaborate superlatives, but rather with heavily contrived understatements to underline the subtlety of the musical event.

  “And we’ve sold it,” said Stan, with a sudden and unexpected note of commerce, “to the BBC. It’ll be on ‘Radio Three’ next New Year’s Eve.”

  A huge teapot and a plate of buns were produced from somewhere and Peter was handed a thick cup that was badly cracked and not very clean. And while being further enlightened by one of the disciples Peter continued to watch the girl. Though she was now earnestly discussing some point or other with the maestro, who had to lean across her to reach some knob on the panel he was demonstrating, she seemed to go out of her way to avoid physical contact with the man, as if the mere touch of his hand, on the inappropriate denim she was wearing, would make her shiver. The contact was accidental, but the girl wasn’t taking any chances.