all this does produce a definite effect. A lot can be done that way, you know, if it's done by people who know their stuff.'
'But we mustn't acquiesce,' cried Hilary, hotly. 'We mustn't feel for one moment that it's a good thing to be here.'
'What does your husband feel?'
'Tom? I – oh, I don't know. It's so difficult. I -' she lapsed into silence.
The whole fantasy of her life as she lived it she could hardly communicate to the man who was listening to her. For ten days now she had lived in an apartment with a man who was a stranger to her. They shared a bedroom and when she lay awake at night she could hear him breathing in the other bed. Both of them accepted the arrangement as inevitable. She was an impostor, a spy, ready to play any part and assume any personality. Tom Betterton she quite frankly did not understand. He seemed to her a terrible example of what could happen to a brilliant young man who had lived for some months in the enervating atmosphere of the Unit. At any rate there was in him no calm acceptance of his destiny. Far from taking pleasure in his work, he was, she thought, increasingly worried by his inability to concentrate on it. Once or twice he had reiterated what he had said on that first evening.
'I can't think. It's just as though everything in me has dried up.'
Yes, she thought, Tom Betterton, being a real genius, needed liberty more than most. Suggestion had failed to compensate him for the loss of freedom. Only in perfect liberty was he able to produce creative work.
He was a man, she thought, very close to a serious nervous breakdown. Hilary herself he treated with curious inattention. She was not a woman to him, not even a friend. She even doubted whether he realised and suffered from the death of his wife. The thing that preoccupied him incessantly was the problem of confinement. Again and again he had said,
'I must get away from here. I must, I must.' And sometimes, 'I didn't know. I'd no idea what it was going to be like. How am I going to get out of here? How? I've got to. I've simply got to.'
It was in essence very much what Peters had said. But it was said with a great deal of difference. Peters had spoken as a young, energetic, angry, disillusioned man, sure of himself and determined to pit his wits against the brains of the establishment in which he found himself. But Tom Betterton's rebellious utterances were those of a man at the end of his tether, a man almost crazed with the need for escape. But perhaps, Hilary thought suddenly, that was where she and Peters would be in six months' time. Perhaps what began as healthy rebellion and a reasonable confidence in one's own ingenuity, would turn at last into the frenzied despair of a rat in a trap.
She wished she could talk of all this to the man beside her. If only she could say: 'Tom Betterton isn't my husband. I know nothing about him. I don't know what he was like before he came here and so I'm in the dark. I can't help him, for I don't know what to do or say.' As it was she had to pick her words carefully. She said,
'Tom seems like a stranger to me now. He doesn't – tell me things. Sometimes I think the confinement, the sense of being penned up here, is driving him mad.'
'It's possible,' said Peters drily, 'it could act that way.'
'But tell me – you speak so confidently of getting away. How can we get away – what earthly chance is there?'
'I don't mean we can walk out the day after tomorrow, Olive. The thing's got to be thought out and planned. People have escaped, you know, under the most unpromising conditions. A lot of our people, and a lot your side of the Atlantic, too, have written books about escape from fortresses in Germany.'
'That was rather different.'
'Not in essence. Where there's a way in there's a way out. Of course tunnelling is out of the question here, so that knocks out a good many methods. But as I say, where there's a way in, there's a way out. With ingenuity, camouflage, playing a part, deception, bribery and corruption, one ought to manage it. It's the sort of thing you've got to study and think about. I'll tell you this. I shall get out of here. Take it from me.'
'I believe you will,' said Hilary, then she added, 'but shall I?'
'Well, it's different for you.'
His voice sounded embarrassed. For a moment she wondered what he meant. Then she realised that presumably her own objective had been attained. She had come here to join the man she had loved, and having joined him her own personal need for escape should not be so great. She was almost tempted to tell Peters the truth – but some instinct of caution forbade that.
She said goodnight and left the roof.
Chapter 16
I
'Good evening, Mrs. Betterton.'
'Good evening, Miss Jennsen.'
The thin spectacled girl was looking excited. Her eyes glinted behind the thick lenses.
'There will be a Reunion this evening,' she said. 'The Director himself is going to address us!'
She spoke in an almost hushed voice.
'That's good,' said Andy Peters who was standing close by. 'I've been waiting to catch a glimpse of this Director.'
Miss Jennsen threw him a glance of shocked reproof.
'The Director,' she said austerely, 'is a very wonderful man.'
As she went away from them down one of the inevitable white corridors, Andy Peters gave a low whistle.
'Now did I, or did I not, catch a hint of the Heil Hitler attitude there?'
'It certainly sounded like it.'
'The trouble in this life is that you never really know where you're going. If I'd known when I left the States all full of boyish ardour for the good old Brotherhood of Man that I was going to land myself in the clutches of yet another Heavenborn Dictator -' he threw out his hands.
'You don't know that yet,' Hilary reminded him.
'I can smell it – in the air,' said Peters.
'Oh,' cried Hilary, 'how glad I am that you're here.'
She flushed, as he looked at her quizzically.
'You're so nice and ordinary,' said Hilary desperately.
Peters looked amused.
'Where I come from,' he said, 'the word ordinary doesn't have your meaning. It can stand for being just plain mean.'
'You know I didn't mean it that way. I mean you're like everybody else. Oh dear, that sounds rude, too.'
'The common man, that's what you're asking for? You've had enough of the genius?'
'Yes, and you've changed, too, since you came here. You've lost that streak of bitterness – of hatred.'
But immediately his face grew rather grim.
'Don't count on that,' he said. 'It's still there – underneath. I can still hate. There are things, believe me, that should be hated.'
The Reunion, as Miss Jennsen had called it, took place after dinner. All members of the Unit assembled in the large lecture room.
The audience did not include what might be called the technical staff: the laboratory assistants, the corps de ballet, the various service personnel, and the small assembly of handsome prostitutes who also served the Unit as purveyors of sex to those men who had no wives with them and had formed no particular attachments with the female workers.
Sitting next to Betterton, Hilary awaited with keen curiosity the arrival on the platform of that almost
