Second Wind Part 18

The nurse came out of the kitchen and offered me coffee.

Coffee, I thought, was nowhere near enough.

"Go for an hour's walk, my dear, " my grandmother said sweetly to her, and smiled with age-old wiles.

Jett van Els, working beyond her week-on, week-off schedule, asked if I would still be there if she returned in an hour.

I could have said I would be there whenever... but after she'd gone out into the chilly damp all-too-English November day I called a different young woman first.

Tentatively, I spoke to Belladonna, who replied in an ear-drum shattering shriek.

"Perry! Dad told me yesterday you were alive. I can't believe it! We all thought you'd drowned. " "Well... no, " I a.s.sured her calmingly, and asked where

I.

could find Kris.

"I'm supposed to be marrying him, did you know? " " Congratulations. " "He asked me when I'd thought him dead all day. It's not fair. " "Your true feelings came out. " I smiled. "Where is he? " "Here. He drove to see Oliver Quigley, heaven knows why, that poor man's a frightful wreck even though Dad's not going to sue him over the filly after all, and then Kris is going to work, he's on his way now, actually, he spent the night here.

with me. Not the first time... why am I telling you. " I sorted out her meanings and inquired about the filly.

Alive or dead?

"Alive, " Bell said. "Sick to death but not dying, except that her mane and tail are thinning out, and now the equine research place are talking about what's wrong with her isn't ragwort in her hay, which they thought had been fed to her to n.o.bble her, but, and you'll never believe it, they think it may be due to radiation sickness, I ask you! " I sat on my grandmother's sofa as if punched breathless.

I said

"Uh? " uselessly.

"Radiation sickness, " Bell repeated disgustedly. "They say, in the filly it's very mild, if it can ever be said to have a mild, but probably terminal, complaint. They say she's probably been exposed to radium or something similar. And where did she get it? Dad's absolutely furious. Kris said you would have known where to get radium. He said you'd have known about uranium and plutonium too because you were a physicist as well as a weather forecaster. " "Mm, " I said. "Well, it's very difficult to get hold of radium but not impossible. Marie Curie isolated it from pitchblende a hundred years or more ago in Paris. But the others... " I stopped abruptly, and then said, "Did Kris talk about me as if I were dead? " "I'm so sorry, Perry, we all did. " I said not to worry, learned where Kris would be when and sent good wishes to her father. Then I sat in the armchair beside my grandmother's wheels, and told her everything significant I had seen and felt and thought since Caspar Harvey's invitation to lunch at Newmarket.

She listened as if she'd been everywhere with me, as if her eyes and ears had duplicated my own.

At the end, she said in great alarm, "You need to ask someone for information, Perry, and for help. " "Yes, " I agreed, "but who? " That corny old phrase "going to the authorities" raised its ba.n.a.l head. Who, exactly, was an authority? Could I walk into the local nick and expect to be believed? No, I couldn't.

"Maybe, " I said after thought, "I'll try the Health and Safety Executive. " "Who are they? " "They inspect factories. " My grandmother shook her head, but I looked them up under civil service departments in the phone book and got them to agree to a meeting in an hour. Being Perry Stuart, weatherman and widely known TV face, had its uses.

Jett van Els returned to the minute with the warmth of Eve in her brown eyes and the chill of November on her cheeks.

There had been other nurses in my life with generous and willing impulses as temporary as their employment, but my all seeing grandparent, whileJett made coffee in the kitchen, un.

expectedly warned me this time not to awaken what I couldn't later put back to sleep. In amus.e.m.e.nt I promised, but a promise wasn't enough.

"I mean it, " my grandmother said. "When you want to be, you're too powerful for your own good. " Powerful wasn't the word for my impact on the motherly fiftyish official I at length met as my first true "authority. " I was not, she pointed out, a factory.

"I'm talking about a trading company, " I said.

She pursed her mouth. "Has it anything to do with weather? " "No. " She looked aimlessly for a while into the distance, sighed, then wrote a few words on a slip of paper and handed it to me.

"Try here, " she said. "You never know. " The "here" of the instruction was an office high in the premises of a textbook publis.h.i.+ng house in Kensington. I rode an elevator as directed by an entrance-hall name-taker, and was met when the doors slid open by a young female general a.s.sistant with long untidy brownish hair and a long creased brownish skirt.

"I'm Melanie, " she announced, and then exclaimed, "I say!

Aren't you Perry Stuart? Good heavens! Come this way. " The office she led me into was small and its occupant, large.

Four bare walls and a skylight housed a desk, two chairs of soso comfort and a gray metal filing cabinet. The tall man who rose to a sketchy handshake and an introduction of himself as John Rupert could easily have filled the part of textbook publisher downstairs.

"My colleague at the Health and Safety Executive, " he said without preliminaries, "informs me you may have something to tell me about the Unified Trading Company--and while we are at this stage, do you find your appearance a hindrance on occasion? " I said, "I couldn't come to your office, for instance, without someone remarking that I'd been here. " "Melanie, for instance? " "I'm afraid so. " "Mm. " He thought briefly, so briefly that I was pretty certain he'd thought before my arrival. "If you were to publish a textbook, Dr. Stuart, what subject would you choose? " I gave him not the instinctive answer of' Wind and rain, " but the more oblique thought' Depression " His eyes narrowed. He nodded briefly. He said, "I was told you might be a player. " A contemplative silence lengthened.

"There appears to exist, " he said finally, "a small packet of extremely sensitive information. I myself think it's very unlikely you've seen it, but I'm told that if you have, you may have understood what you were looking at. " He left another extended pause. "Can you help us? " Who, I wondered, was us? Us, I concluded, were "the authorities" I'd come looking for. "Us" had to be trusted...

for now.

I asked, "Where would you look for your sensitive package? " "It could be anywhere in the world.

"John Rupert pinched the thin bridge of his nose. "We had a man in Mexico, near the northern border. He'd had a sight of a sensitive package,

L.

he'd reported its existence, he'd heard it was for sale and on its way to Miami. He asked us whether he should steal it if he could, or buy it.

"John Rupert grimaced. "He let the wrong people know that he had seen it, and he was found floating face down in the Florida Everglades with a bullet in his head and his legs half eaten away by alligators. " I'd got myself into a right pickle, I thought, and telling anyone anything at all was asking for more trouble, if not a bullet. I didn't know if what I'd learned was worth dying for, and yet I found I couldn't, from some obscure instinct towards justice and order, simply walk away and forget it.

"Suppose, " I said at length, "as a result of too many cooks trying to keep a sensitive package safe, it gets too thoroughly hidden away on an island and has to be retrieved so that it can be used. It's no good to anyone if it's not in use. " I stopped.

"Go on, go on,

"John Rupert urged.

"To collect the package there's a suitable light airplane available, but no suitable pilot to fly it, until along comes a meteorologist, a private pilot with a hankering to fly through the eye of a hurricane. The pilot agrees to make a detour flight to pick up the package, in return for his hurricane adventure. " John Rupert, understanding, gave me a nod.

"That simple errand fails, " I said. "The hurricane crashes the aircraft into the sea. Collecting the package, still essential, now involves more certain measures, such as a calmer sky, and a much larger aircraft with a bigger crew equipped and ready to do actual battle if necessary. " "Battle for the package? " "More like battle for the repossession of the whole island, whose owners.h.i.+p is in dispute. The crew, I think, are the UniIX !

I.

unified Trading Company, who ruled the place before they frightened the residents away by growing exotic mushrooms in containers that gave off radioactivity... " I stopped talking.

H.

face was smoothing to disbelief.

"Goodbye, " I said briefly, standing up. "Children in school can make more or less anything appear to give off radioactive alpha particles. Just scatter a little powdered uranium ore around. " I gave him a small card with my grandmother's phone number on it. "Phone if you're interested in any more. " "Stop, " he said, his interest growing already.

"People aren't wrong to be frightened, " I said from the doorway. "If you swallow a pea-sized alpha particle source, it will kill you, but you can carry it safely for a long time in a paper bag. I expect I'm telling you what you already know. " "Don't go yet. " "I have to take the bad news from Air to Ghent. " John Rupert laughed.

KRIS IN THE end was easy to find as he was back at the BBC Weather Center at Wood Lane, preparing to share with me the bad-weather broadcast ahead for the run-up to Guy Fawkes Night.