half-tracks lumbered among the wrecked cars and cabins. Once, as I watched with Quinton from a fallen water tower, a half-track and two jeeps came within four hundred yards of the basin, held back only by the stench from the settling beds and the cracked concrete causeways.
During this time, Judith sat in the cabin, the shoe-box on her lap. She said nothing to me, as if she had lost all interest in me and the salvage-filled hollow at Cape Kennedy. Mechanically, she combed her hair, making and remaking her face.
On the second day, I came in after helping Quinton bury the cabins to their windows in the sand. Judith was standing by the table.
The shoe-box was open. In the centre of the table lay a pile of charred sticks, as if she had tried to light a small fire. Then I realized what was there. As she stirred the ash with her fingers, grey flakes fell from the joints, revealing the bony points of a clutch of ribs, a right hand and shoulder blade.
She looked at me with puzzled eyes. ‘They’re black,’ she said.
Holding her in my arms, I lay with her on the bed. A loudspeaker reverberated among the dunes, fragments of the amplified commands drumming at the panes.
When they moved away, Judith said: ‘We can go now.’
‘In a little while, when it’s clear. What about these?’
‘Bury them. Anywhere, it doesn’t matter.’ She seemed calm at last, giving me a brief smile, as if to agree that this grim charade was at last over.
Yet, when I had packed the bones into the shoe-box, scraping up Robert Hamilton’s ash with a dessert spoon, she kept it with her, carrying it into the kitchen while she prepared our meals.
It was on the third day that we fell ill.
After a long, noise-filled night, I found Judith sitting in front of the mirror, combing thick clumps of hair from her scalp. Her mouth was open, as if her lips were stained with acid. As she dusted the loose hair from her lap, I was struck by the leprous whiteness of her face.
Standing up with an effort, I walked listlessly into the kitchen and stared at the saucepan of cold coffee. A sense of indefinable exhaustion had come over me, as if the bones in my body had softened and lost their rigidity. On the lapels of my jacket, loose hair lay like spinning waste.
‘Philip…’ Judith swayed towards me. ‘Do you feel — What is it?’
‘The water.’ I poured the coffee into the sink and massaged my throat. ‘It must be fouled.’
‘Can we leave?’ She put a hand up to her forehead. Her brittle nails brought down a handful of frayed ash hair. ‘Philip, for God’s sake — I’m losing all my hair!’
Neither of us was able to eat. After forcing myself through a few slices of cold meat, I went out and vomited behind the cabin.
Quinton and his men were crouched by the wall of the settling tank. As I walked towards them, steadying myself against the hull of the weather satellite, Quinton came down. When I told him that the water supplies were contaminated, he stared at me with his hard bird’s eyes.
Half an hour later, they were gone.
The next day, our last there, we were worse. Judith lay on the bed, shivering in her jacket, the shoe-box held in one hand. I spent hours searching for fresh water in the cabins. Exhausted, I could barely cross the sandy basin. The Army patrols were closer. By now, I could hear the hard gear-changes of the half-tracks. The sounds from the loudspeakers drummed like fists on my head.
Then, as I looked down at Judith from the cabin doorway, a few words stuck for a moment in my mind. contaminated area.., evacuate.., radioactive…’
I walked forward and pulled the box from Judith’s hands.
‘Philip…’ She looked up at me weakly. ‘Give it back to me.’
Her face was a puffy mask. On her wrists, white flecks were forming. Her left hand reached towards me like the claw of a cadaver.
I shook the box with blunted anger. The bones rattled inside. ‘For God’s sake, it’s this! Don’t you see — why we’re ill?’
‘Philip — where are the others? The old man. Get them to help you.’
‘They’ve gone. They went yesterday, I told you.’ I let the box fall on to the table. The lid broke off, spilling the ribs tied together like a bundle of firewood. ‘Quinton knew what was happening — why the Army is here. They’re trying to warn us.’
‘What do you mean?’ Judith sat up, the focus of her eyes sustained only by a continuous effort. ‘Don’t let them take Robert. Bury him here somewhere. We’ll come back later.’
‘Judith!’ I bent over the bed and shouted hoarsely at her. ‘Don’t you realize — there was a bomb on board! Robert Hamilton was carrying an atomic weapon!’ I pulled back the curtains from the window. ‘My God, what a joke. For twenty years, I put up with him because I couldn’t ever be really sure..
‘Philip…’
‘Don’t worry, I used him — thinking about him was the only thing that kept us going. And all the time, he was waiting up there to pay us back!’
There was a rumble of exhaust outside. A half-track with red crosses on its doors and hood had reached the edge of the basin. Two men in vinyl suits jumped down, counters raised in front of them.
‘Judith, before we go, tell me… I never asked you—’ Judith was sitting up, touching the hair on her pillow. One half of her scalp was almost bald. She stared at her weak hands with their silvering skin. On her face was an expression I had never seen before, the dumb anger of betrayal.
As she looked at me, and at the bones scattered across the table, I knew my answer.
The Comsat Angels
When I first heard about the assignment, in the summer of 1968, I did my best to turn it down. Charles Whitehead, producer of BBC TV’s science programme Horizon, asked me to fly over to France with him and record a press conference being held by a fourteen-year-old child prodigy, Georges Duval, who was attracting attention in the Paris newspapers. The film would form part of Horizon’s new series, which I was scripting, ‘The Expanding Mind’, about the role of communications satellites and data-processing devices in the so-called information explosion. What annoyed me was this insertion of irrelevant and sensational material into an otherwise serious programme.
‘Charles, you’ll destroy the whole thing,’ I protested across his desk that morning. ‘These child prodigies are all the same. Either they simply have some freak talent or they’re being manipulated by ambitious parents. Do you honestly believe this boy is a genius?’
‘He might be, James. Who can say?’ Charles waved a plump hand at the contact prints of orbiting satellites pinned to the walls. ‘We’re doing a programme about advanced communications systems — if they have any justification at all, it’s that they bring rare talents like this one to light.’
‘Rubbish — these prodigies have been exposed time and again. They bear the same relation to true genius that a crosschannel swimmer does to a lunar astronaut.’
In the end, despite my protests, Charles won me over, but I was still sceptical when we flew to Orly Airport the next morning. Every two or three years there were reports of some newly discovered child genius. The pattern was always the same: the prodigy had mastered chess at the age of three, Sanskrit and calculus at six, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity at twelve. The universities and conservatories of America and Europe opened their doors.
For some reason, though, nothing ever came of these precocious talents. Once the parents, or an unscrupulous commercial sponsor, had squeezed the last drop of publicity out of the child, his so-called genius seemed to evaporate and he vanished into oblivion.
‘Do you remember Minou Drouet?’ I asked Charles as we drove from Orly. ‘A child prodigy of a few years
