Circus. Alistair MacLean

rain, moving slowly so that Wrinfield might not lose him. Eventually he came to the large, dark limousine in which he and Pilgrim had arrived and climbed into the back seat. A dark figure was pushed up against the far corner, his face as deeply in shadow as possible.

      Fawcett said: ‘Hello. My name’s Fawcett. I hope that no one saw you arrive?’

      The driver answered: ‘No one, sir. I was keeping a pretty close look-out.’ He looked out through the rain-spattered windows. ‘It’s not much of a night for other people to be minding other people’s business.’

      ‘It isn’t.’ He turned to the shadowy figure. ‘A pleasure to meet you.’ He sighed. ‘I have to apologize for all this comic-opera cloak-and-dagger business, but I’m afraid it’s too late now. Gets in your blood, you know. We’re just waiting for a friend of yours – ah, here he comes now.’ He opened the door and Wrinfield got in beside them. What little could be seen of his face didn’t display a great deal in the way of carefree rapture.

      ‘Poynton Street, Barker,’ Fawcett said.

      Barker nodded in silence, and drove off. Nobody spoke. Wrinfield, more than a little unhappy, kept turning restlessly in his seat and finally said: ‘I think we’re being followed.’

      Fawcett said: ‘We’d better be. If not the driver of that car would be out of a job tomorrow. That car’s following us to make sure that no other car follows us. If you follow me, that is.’

      ‘I see.’ From the tone of his voice it was questionable whether Wrinfield did. He became increasingly unhappy as the car moved into what was very close to a slum area and unhappier still when it drew up in an ill-lit street outside a sleazy walk-up apartment block. He said, complainingly: ‘This isn’t a very nice part of town. And this – this looks like a house of ill-fame.’

      ‘And a house of ill-fame it is. We own it. Very handy places, these bordellos. Who, for instance, could ever imagine that Tesco Wrinfield would enter one of those places? Come inside.’

       CHAPTER TWO

      For such an unsalubrious place in such an unsalubrious area the sitting-room was surprisingly comfortable, although the person who had furnished it would appear to have had a fixation about the colour russet, for the sofa, armchairs, carpet and heavily discreet curtains were all of the same colour or very close to it. A smokeless coal fire – for this was a smokeless area – did its best to burn cheerfully in the hearth. Wrinfield and Bruno occupied an armchair apiece: Fawcett was presiding over a cocktail cabinet, one of the portable kind.

      Bruno said carefully: ‘Tell me again, please. About this anti-matter or whatever you call it.’

      Fawcett sighed. ‘I was afraid you might ask me that. I know I got it right first time, because I’d memorized what I had to say and just repeated it parrot fashion. I had to because I don’t really know what it’s all about myself.’ Fawcett handed round drinks – a soda for Bruno – and rubbed his chin. ‘I’ll try and simplify it this time round. Then maybe I’ll be able to get some inklings of understanding myself.

      ‘Matter, we know, is made up of atoms. There are lots of things that go to make up those atoms – scientists, it seems, are becoming increasingly baffled about the ever-increasing complexity of the atom – but all that concerns our simple minds are the two basic constituents of the atom, electrons and protons. On our earth – in the universe, for that matter – electrons are invariably negatively charged and protons positively charged. Unfortunately, life is becoming increasingly difficult for our scientists and astronomers – for instance, it has been discovered only this year that there are particles, made of God knows what, that travel at many times the speed of light, which is a very upsetting and distressing concept for all those of the scientist community – and that was one hundred per cent – who believe that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. However, that’s by the way.

      ‘Some time ago a couple of astronomers – Dicke and Anderson were their names – made the inconvenient discovery, based on theoretical calculations, that there must exist positively charged electrons. Their existence is now universally accepted, and they are referred to today as positrons. Then, to complicate things still further, the existence of anti-protons was discovered – this was in Berkeley – again electrically opposite to our protons. A combination of positrons and antiprotons would give rise to what is now termed “anti-matter”. That anti-matter does exist no serious scientists seriously dispute.

      ‘Nor do they dispute that if an electron or positron or proton and anti-proton collided or both sets collided the results would be disastrous. They would annihilate each other, giving off lethal gamma rays and creating, in the process, a considerable local uproar and a blast of such intense heat that all life within tens or perhaps hundreds of square miles would be instantaneously wiped out. On this scientists are agreed. It is estimated that if only two grams of anti-matter struck our planet on the side out-facing the sun the result would be to send the earth, with all life immediately extinct, spinning into the gravitational orbit of the sun. Provided, of course, it didn’t disintegrate immediately on contact.’

      ‘A delightful prospect,’ Wrinfield said. He did not have the look of a convert about him. ‘No offence, but it sounds like the most idle science-fiction speculation to me.’

      ‘Me, too. But I have to accept what I’m told. Anyway, I’m beginning to believe it.’

      ‘Look. We don’t have any of this anti-matter stuff on earth?’

      ‘Because of anti-matter’s unpleasant propensity for annihilating all matter with which it comes into contact, that should be fairly obvious.’

      ‘Then where does the stuff come from?’

      ‘How the hell should I know?’ Fawcett hadn’t intended to be irritable, he just disliked treading the murky waters of the unknown. ‘We think ours is the only universe. How do we know? Maybe there lies another universe beyond ours, maybe many. It seems, according to latest scientific thinking, that if there are such universes, there is no reason why one or more should not be made of anti-matter.’ Fawcett paused gloomily. ‘I suppose if any intelligent beings existed there they would consider our universe as being composed of anti-matter. Of course, it could have been some rogue material thrown off at the moment of creation of our own universe. Who’s to say?’

      Bruno said: ‘So the whole matter is speculation. It’s just a hypothesis. Theoretical calculations, that’s all. There is no proof, Colonel Fawcett.’

      ‘We think there is.’ He smiled. ‘Forgive the use of the “we”. What could have been, in the terms of human lives, a disaster of the first magnitude occurred in a happily unpopulated area of northern Siberia in 1908. When Russian scientists got around to investigating this – almost twenty years later – they discovered an area of over a hundred square miles where trees had been destroyed by heat: not fire but by instantaneous incineration which, in many cases, led to the petrification of trees in the upright position. Had this extraordinary phenomenon occurred over, say, New York or London, they would have become blackened cities of the dead.’

      ‘Proof,’ Bruno said. ‘We were speaking of proof, Colonel.’

      ‘Proof. Every other known damage caused to the earth by the impact of bodies from outer space has, without explanation, been caused by meteors. There was no trace of the meteor that might have caused this Siberian holocaust and no signs of any mark upon the ground where the meteor might have crashed into it; when meteors crashed into Arizona and South Africa they left enormous craters in the ground. The now accepted and indeed inevitable conclusion is that Siberia was struck by a particle of anti-matter with a mass of something of the order of one hundredth of a millionth of a gram.’

      There was a considerable silence, then Wrinfield said: ‘Well, we have already covered this. Second time round it’s a bit clearer, but not much. So?’

      ‘Some dozen years ago there was scientific speculation as to