For one moment, as he cradled the telephone, his whole mind was concentrated upon Herbert Terrell. He saw him more clearly than he had ever seen him in the flesh: forty-five or so, middling tall, even-featured, obstinately unmemorable; a useful, reliable subordinate, thorough, valuable, arid and uninteresting. He saw again the dry, tough methodical body, the austere face, the humourless eyes. Can there be such a thing as a civil servant who has ceased to be anything separate from his office? Where the human qualities are feeble and ill-developed, perhaps the function eats them. Phelps saw his Chief Security Officer clearly as never before, but he saw him for only a moment. The features began to fade at once, until all that was left was the empty outline of a man, the vacancy that would have to be filled immediately.
The Marrion Research Institute was one of those hybrids so frequent in English public and social life. Old man Marrion had founded and endowed the place out of his oil millions, to prospect in dynamics and fuels for the future. The government had taken advantage of an optimistic director’s over-spending to muscle in on this profitable field, and propped up the Institute’s temporarily shaky finances in exchange for a watching brief and an option on all the results the Marrion computers, drawing-boards and laboratories produced. And this uneasy and contentious engagement had culminated in a slightly embittered marriage a year later, when the Ministry assumed the husband’s role, and the Institute’s scientists and mechanicians found themselves islanded and fenced in by considerations of national security, who had ingenuously considered themselves, up to then, as dedicated to human advancement. They had felt, some of them, like the children of an autocratic Victorian household, strictly confined in a world where the cheerful and ungifted ran free. And some of them, Sir Broughton remembered, had rebelled. For a little while.
Circumstances had exalted Herbert Terrell’s office, as circumstances had placed him in it. Where security precautions are so tight and vital, the sudden death of one man cannot be allowed to disrupt essential services. To-day only a skeleton office staff and the maintenance men were in, tomorrow someone else must be securely installed in Terrell’s place, that man-shaped outline, faint as a wraith now, solidly filled again, another hand on the curbs, another sharp eye on the most secret of secret files, the private personnel file.
He supposed he’d better contact the Minister, and ensure that his authority to appoint could not be questioned. The old man didn’t care a damn, if the truth were told, but could be awkward if his perquisites were infringed or his nominal authority by-passed.
Sir Broughton Phelps picked up the telephone again, and switched on the scrambler before he asked for the number of the Minister’s country house. No doubt where
“Just a few minutes, darling, ” he said across the desk to his decorative and influential wife, who had put her head into the library to call him to lunch. “Something’s come up unexpectedly. I won’t be long.”
She made a face at him, not entirely playfully. Not even on Sundays did his time belong to her, but she still considered that it should. “Something bad?”
“No, no, ” he said soothingly. “Nothing serious. Just a vacancy that’s cropped up and has to be filled, that’s all.”
The Minister’s private secretary was a dashing young man whose native flippancy was held in check by his unerring sense of occasion. He had more respect for Sir Broughton Phelps than for most people, but even that wasn’t saying very much. He intended, however, to rise in his profession, and he was good at official languages. It didn’t matter that Sir Broughton could disentangle his utterances at the other end of the line just as effectively as the scrambler could unscramble it. What is said, not what is meant, goes in the records.
“I’m extremely sorry, Sir Broughton, but the Minister’s just gone out for some urgently needed air and exercise. He’s been hard at it all morning. Is it anything urgent? Should I try to find him? Or can I convey a message, and get him to call you back later?”
Fishing, thought Sir Broughton, mentally translating. Slept all morning, and won’t come in until dusk. Could be over at Patterson’s with his horses, but more likely fishing.
“I’d be obliged if you could get word to him. I just heard from Prague that the Institute’s Security Officer has had an accident on holiday there, climbing in the mountains. I must make some arrangements to fill his place at once. No, it won’t be a temporary appointment. Terrell’s dead. If you could reach the Minister, I should be glad. My own nomination would be Blagrove, but of course I defer to his judgment.”
The secretary unscrambled that into: What does the old devil care, as long as the job’s done properly? Go and get his OK for me, and he can doze off again.
So he went. His thoughts, as he walked down the fields towards the river, were speculative and pleasurable. He had his eye on a certain promotion job himself, but unfortunately the most hazardous thing the present incumbent ever did was to play a moderate game of golf. A pity!
The Minister was flat on his tweedy back in the lush, vivid turf by the river, his rod carefully propped beside him. He opened one speedwell-blue eye, startlingly young under its thick grey brow, and trained it forbiddingly on his favourite assistant.
“No touts, no hawkers, no circulars!” he said, in the buoyant and daunting voice he had only acquired in his old age, after a lifetime of watching his step, and one liberating instant of abandoning every such anxiety.
“No, sir, I promise you needn’t move. It’s Phelps on the secret line. I wouldn’t call what he has a problem. It could be a slight jolt. His right-hand man’s died on him—Terrell, his Security Officer.”
“Nonsense!” said the Minister, closing the eye again. “Terrell’s out of England somewhere, the Caucasus, or some such outlandish region. Climbing. Does it every year. Never could understand people taking up such unintellectual hobbies. What’s in a lump of rock? What does he get out of it?”
“A broken neck, sir, apparently. It seems he fell off one of his pitches this time. They picked him up dead. No, sir, there’s no doubt. Sir Broughton’s had the official report. He’s concerned about the vacancy, and would like your authority to appoint.”
“Hmm, yes,” owned the old man after a moment’s thought, “I suppose we shall have to be thinking about that. Did for himself finally, did he? I always said it was an idiotic way of passing one’s time. Why do they do these things? I take it Phelps has someone in mind for the job?”
“He mentioned one Blagrove, sir, if you approve.”
“Old Roderick’s boy. Might do worse. Used to work with Terrell before his promotion, I remember. All right, tell him he can go ahead, I approve.” He closed both eyes again, and lay soaking in sun. Not fishing weather, of course, but you can’t have everything. “Oh, and, Nick…” He opened one eye again, reluctantly.
“Sir?”
