'You're named Wilt, aren't you?' shouted Glaushof.
'Yes.'
'And you drive a beat-up Ford, registration plates HPR 791N, right?'
Wilt nodded. 'I suppose you could put it like that,' he said. 'Though frankly my wife'
'You saying your wife put those transmitters in your car?'
'Good Lord no. She hasn't a clue about things like that. Anyway, what on earth would she want to do that for?'
That's what you're here to tell me, boy,' said Glaushof. 'You ain't leaving till you do, you better believe it.'
Wilt looked at him and shook his head. 'I must say I find that difficult,' he muttered. 'I come here to give a lecture on British Culture, such as it is, and the next thing I know I'm in the middle of some sort of raid and there's gas all over the place and I wake up in a bed with doctors sticking needles into me and...'
He stopped. Glaushof had taken a revolver out of the desk drawer and was loading it. Wilt watched him apprehensively. 'Excuse me,' he said, 'but I'd be grateful if you'd put that...er...thing away. I don't know what you've got in mind but I can assure you I am not the person you should be talking to.'
'No? So who should that be, your controller?'
'Controller?' said Wilt.
'Controller,' said Glaushof.
'That's what I thought you said, though to be perfectly honest I still don't see that it helps very much. I don't even know what a controller is.'
'Then you better start inventing one. Like the guy in Moscow who tells you what to do.'
'Look,' said Wilt, desperately trying to get back to some sort of reality which didn't include controllers in Moscow who told him what to do, 'there's obviously been some terrible mistake.'
'Yea, and you made it coming in here with that equipment. I'm going to give you one last chance,' said Glaushof, looking along the barrel of the gun with a significance Wilt found deeply alarming. 'Either you spell it out like it is or...'
'Quite,' said Wilt. 'Point taken, to use a ghastly expression. What do you want me to tell you?'
'The whole deal. How you were recruited, who you contact and where, what information you've given...'
Wilt stared miserably out the window as the list rolled on. He had never supposed the world to be a particularly sensible place and airbases were particularly nonsensical, but to he taken for a Soviet spy by a lunatic American who played with revolvers was to enter a new realm of insanity. Perhaps that's what had happened. He'd gone clean out of his tiny. No, he hadn't. The gun was proof of some kind of reality, one that was taken for granted by millions of people all over the world but which had somehow never come anywhere near Oakhurst Avenue or the Tech or Ipford. In a sense his own little world with its fundamental beliefs in education and books and, for want of a better word, sensibility, was the unreal one, a dream which no one could ever hope to live in for long. Or at all, if this madman with his cliche talk of guys dying in here and nobody knowing had his way. Wilt turned back and made one last attempt to regain the world he knew.
'All right,' he said, 'if you want the facts I'll give them to you but only with men from MI5 present. As a British subject I demand that right.'
Glaushof snorted. 'Your rights ended the moment you passed that guardhouse,' he said. 'You're telling me what you know. I'm not playing footsy with a lot of suspect faggots from British Intelligence. No way. Now talk.'
