'What about Ericsson?'
'I find him frightening – he's got a dangerous kind of single-mindedness. He's like a mad scientist in a film!'
'And I believe in the Brotherhood of men, and you're a loving wife, and our Mrs. Calvin Baker – where would you place her?'
'I don't know. I find her more hard to place than anyone.'
'Oh, I wouldn't say that. I'd say she was easy enough.'
'How do you mean?'
'I'd say it was money all the way with her. She's just a well-paid cog in the wheel.'
'She frightens me, too,' said Hilary.
'Why? Why on earth does she frighten you? No touch of the mad scientist about her.'
'She frightens me because she's so ordinary. You know, just like anybody else. And yet she's mixed up in all this.'
Peters said grimly,
'The Party is realistic, you know. It employs the best man or woman for the job.'
'But is someone who only wants money the best person for the job? Mightn't they desert to the other side?'
'That would be a very big risk to take,' said Peters, quietly. 'Mrs. Calvin Baker's a shrewd woman. I don't think she'd take that risk.'
Hilary shivered suddenly.
'Cold?'
'Yes. It is a bit cold.'
'Let's move around a little.'
They walked up and down. As they did so Peters stooped and picked up something.
'Here. You're dropping things.'
Hilary took it from him.
'Oh, yes, it's a pearl from my choker. I broke it the other day – no, yesterday. What ages ago that seems already.'
'Not real pearls, I hope.'
Hilary smiled.
'No, of course not. Costume jewellery.'
Peters took a cigarette case from his pocket.
'Costume jewellery,' he said, 'what a term!'
He offered her a cigarette.
'It does sound foolish – here.' She took a cigarette. 'What an odd case. How heavy it is.'
'Made of lead, that's why. It's a war souvenir – made out of a bit of a bomb that just failed to blow me up.'
'You were – in the war then?'
'I was one of the backroom boys who tickled things to see if they'd go bang. Don't let's talk about wars. Let's concentrate on tomorrow.'
'Where are we going?' asked Hilary. 'Nobody's told me anything. Are we -'
He stopped her.
'Speculations,' he said, 'are not encouraged. You go where you're told and do what you're told.'
With sudden passion Hilary said,
'Do you like being dragooned, being ordered about, having no say of your own?'
'I'm prepared to accept it if it's necessary. And it is necessary. We've got to have World Peace, World Discipline, World Order.'
'Is it possible? Can it be got?'
'Anything's better than the muddle we live in. Don't you agree to that?'
For a moment, carried away by fatigue, by the loneliness of her surroundings and the strange beauty of the early morning light, Hilary nearly burst out into a passionate denial.
She wanted to say,
'Why do you decry the world we live in? There are good people in it. Isn't muddle a better breeding ground for kindliness and individuality than a world order that's imposed, a world order that may be right today and wrong tomorrow? I would rather have a world of kindly, faulty, human beings, than a world of superior robots who've said goodbye to pity and understanding and sympathy.'
But she restrained herself in time. She said instead, with a deliberate subdued enthusiasm,
'How right you are. I was tired. We must obey and go forward.'
He grinned.
'That's better.'
Chapter 10
A dream journey. So it seemed; more so every day. It was as though, Hilary felt, she had been travelling all her life with these five strangely assorted companions. They had stepped off from the beaten track into the void. In one sense this journey of theirs could not be called a flight. They were all, she supposed, free agents; free, that is, to go where they chose. As far as she knew they had committed no crime, they were not wanted by the police. Yet great pains had been taken to hide their tracks. Sometimes she wondered why this was, since they were not fugitives. It was as though they were in process of becoming not themselves but someone else.
That indeed was literally true in her case. She who had left England as Hilary Craven had become Olive Betterton, and perhaps her strange feeling of unreality had something to do with that. Every day the glib political slogans seemed to come more easily to her lips. She felt herself becoming earnest and intense, and that again she put down to the influence of her companions.
She knew now that she was afraid of them. She had never before spent any time in close intimacy with people of genius. This was genius at close quarters, and genius had that something above normal in it that was a great strain upon the ordinary mind and feeling. All five were different from each other, yet each had that curious quality of burning intensity, the single-mindedness of purpose that made such a terrifying impression. She did not know whether it were a quality of brain or rather a quality of outlook, of intensity. But each of them, she thought, was in his or her way a passionate idealist. To Dr. Barron life was a passionate desire to be once more in his laboratory, to be able to calculate and experiment and work with unlimited money and unlimited resources. To work for what? She doubted if he ever put that question to himself. He spoke to her once of the powers of destruction that he could let loose on a vast continent, which could be contained in one little phial. She had said to him,
'But could you ever do that? Actually really do it?'
And he replied, looking at her with faint surprise,
'Yes. Yes, of course, if it became necessary.'
He had said it in a merely perfunctory fashion. He had gone on,
'It would be amazingly interesting to see the exact course, the exact progress.' And he had added with a deep half sigh, 'You see, there's so much more to know, so much more to find out.'
For a moment Hilary understood. For a moment she stood where he stood, impregnated with that single hearted desire for knowledge which swept aside life and death for millions of human beings as essentially unimportant. It was a point of view and in a way a not ignoble one. Towards Helga Needheim she felt more antagonistic. The young woman's superb arrogance revolted her. Peters she liked but was from time to time repulsed and frightened by the sudden fanatical gleam in his eye. She said to him once,
'It is not a new world you want to create. It is destroying the old one that you will enjoy.'
'You're wrong, Olive. What a thing to say.'
'No, I'm not wrong. There's hate in you. I can feel it. Hate. The wish to destroy.'
Ericsson she found the most puzzling of all. Ericsson, she thought, was a dreamer, less practical than the
