‘For how long?’ I pulled a chair up to his desk and opened my briefcase, then spread the dozen files in front of him. ‘Let me put you in the picture. Judy and I have been back to 1948. In those twenty years there have been eleven cases of so-called geniuses. Georges Duval is the twelfth.’
I placed the list in front of him.
1948 Gunther Bergman (Uppsala, Sweden) 1950 Jaako Litmanen (Vaasa, Finland) 1952 John Warrender (Kansas City, USA) 1953 Arturo Bandini (Bologna, Italy) 1955 Gesai Ray (Calcutta, India) 1957 Giuliano Caldare (Palermo, Sicily) 1958 Wolfgang Herter (Cologne, Germany) 1960 Martin Sherrington (Canterbury, England) 1962 Josef Oblensky (Leningrad, USSR) 1964 Yen Hsi Shan (Wuhan, China) 1965 Robert Silvetherg (Tampa, USA) 1968 Georges Duval (Montereau, France)
Charles studied the list, now and then patting his forehead with a floral handkerchief. ‘Frankly, apart from Georges Duval, the names mean absolutely nothing.’
‘Isn’t that strange? There’s enough talent there to win all the Nobel Prizes three times over.’
‘Have you tried to trace them?’
I let out a cry of pain. Even the placid Judy gave a despairing shudder. ‘Have we tried? My God, we’ve done nothing else. Charles, apart from checking a hundred directories and registers, we’ve contacted the original magazines and news agencies, checked with the universities that originally offered them scholarships, talked on the overseas lines to the BBC reporters in New York, Delhi and Moscow.’
‘And? What do they know about them?’
‘Nothing. A complete blank.’
Charles shook his head doggedly. ‘They must be somewhere. What about the universities they were supposed to go to?’
‘Nothing there, either. It’s a curious thing, but not one of them actually went on to a university. We’ve contacted the senates of nearly fifty universities. Not a mention of them. They took external degrees while still at school, but after that they severed all connections with the academic world.’
Charles sat forward over the list, holding it like a portion of some treasure map. ‘James, it looks as if you’re going to win your bet. Somehow they all petered out in late adolescence. A sudden flaring of intelligence backed by prodigious memory, not matched by any real creative spark… that’s it, I suppose — none of them was a genius.’
‘As a matter of fact, I think they all were.’ Before he could stop me I went on. ‘Forget that for the moment. Whether or not they had genius is irrelevant. Certainly they had intellects vastly beyond the average, IQs of two hundred, enormous scholastic talents in a wide range of subjects. They had a sudden burst of fame and exposure and—’
‘They vanished into thin air. What are you suggesting — some kind of conspiracy?’
‘In a sense, yes.’
Charles handed me the list. ‘Come off it. Do you really mean that a sinister government bureau has smuggled them off, they’re slaving away now on some super-weapon?’
‘It’s possible, but I doubt it.’ I took a packet of photographs from the second folder. ‘Have a look at them.’
Charles picked up the first. ‘Ah, there’s Georges. He looks older here, those TV cameras are certainly ageing.’
‘It’s not Georges Duval. It’s Oblensky, the Russian boy, taken six years ago. Quite a resemblance, though.’ I spread the twelve photographs on the table top. Charles moved along the half-circle, comparing the over-large eyes and bony foreheads, the same steady gaze.
‘Wait a minute! Are you sure this isn’t Duval?’ Charles picked up Oblensky’s photograph and pointed to the figure of a young man in a light grey suit standing behind some mayoral official in a Leningrad parlour. ‘He was at Duval’s press conference, sitting right in front of us.’
I nodded to Judy. ‘You’re right, Charles. And he’s not only in that photo.’ I pulled together the photographs of Bobby Silverberg, Herter and Martin Sherrington. In each one the same balding figure in the dove-grey suit was somewhere in the background, his over-sharp eyes avoiding the camera lens. ‘No university admits to knowing him, nor do Shell, Philips, General Motors or a dozen other big international companies. Of course, there are other organizations he might be a talent scout for..
Charles had stood up, and was slowly walking around his desk. ‘Such as the CIA — you think he may be recruiting talent for some top-secret Government think-thank? It’s unlikely, but -’
‘What about the Russians?’ I cut in. ‘Or the Chinese? Let’s face it, eleven young men have vanished into thin air. What happened to them?’
Charles stared down at the photographs. ‘The strange thing is that I vaguely recognize all these faces. Those bony skulls, and those eyes… somewhere. Look, James, we may have the makings of a new programme here. This English prodigy, Martin Sherrington, he should be easy to track down. Then the German, Herter. Find them and we may be on to something.’
We set off for Canterbury the next morning. The address, which I had been given by a friend who was science editor of the Daily Express, was on a housing estate behind the big General Electric radio and television plant on the edge of the city. We drove past the lines of grey-brick houses until we found the Sherringtons’ at the end of a row. Rising out of the remains of a greenhouse was a huge ham operator’s radio mast, its stay-wires snapped and rusting. In the eight years since his tremendous mind had revealed itself to the local grammar-school master, Martin Sherrington might have gone off to the ends of the world, to Cape Kennedy, the Urals or Peking.
In fact, not only were neither Martin nor his parents there, but it took us all of two days to find anyone who even remembered them at all. The present tenants of the house, a frayed-looking couple, had been there two years; and before them a large family of criminal inclinations who had been forced out by bailiffs and police. The headmaster of the grammar-school had retired to Scotland. Fortunately the school matron remembered Martin — ‘a brilliantly clever boy, we were all very proud of him. To tell the truth, though, I can’t say we felt much affection for him; he didn’t invite it.’ She knew nothing of Mrs Sherrington, and as for the boy’s father, they assumed he had died in the war.
Finally, thanks to a cashier at the accounts office of the local electric company, we found where Mrs Sherrington had moved.
As soon as I saw that pleasant white-walled villa in its prosperous suburb on the other side of Canterbury, I felt that the trail was warming. Something about the crisp gravel and large, well-trimmed garden reminded me of another house — Georges Duval’s near Paris.
From the roof of my car parked next to the hedge we watched a handsome, strong-shouldered woman strolling in the rose garden.
‘She’s come up in the world,’ I commented. ‘Who pays for this pad?’
The meeting was curious. This rather homely, quietly dressed woman in her late thirties gazed at us across the silver tea-set like a tamed Mona Lisa. She told us that we had absolutely no chance of interviewing Martin on television.
‘So much interest in your son was roused at the time, Mrs Sherrington. Can you tell us about his subsequent academic career? Which university did he go to?’
‘His education was completed privately.’ As for his present whereabouts, she believed he was now abroad, working for a large international organization whose name she was not at liberty to divulge.
‘Not a government department, Mrs Sherrington?’
She hesitated, but only briefly. ‘I am told the organization is intimately connected with various governments, but I have no real knowledge.’
Her voice was over-precise, as if she were hiding her real accent. As we left, I realized how lonely her life was; but as Judy remarked, she had probably been lonely ever since Martin Sherrington had first learned to speak.
Our trip to Germany was equally futile. All traces of Wolfgang Herter had vanished from the map. A few people in the small village near the Frankfurt autobahn remembered him, and the village postman said that Frau Herter had moved to Switzerland, to a lakeside villa near Lucerne. A woman of modest means and education, but the son had no doubt done very well.
