The big man’s voice was flat but relaxed. Ten feet from Forbis, he watched him amiably. His face was plump and sallow, a callous mouth half-hidden by a brush moustache. He wore a bulky black overcoat, and one hand rested confidently in a deep pocket.
‘Fowler!’ Involuntarily, Forbis tried to move forward, for a moment attempting to reassemble his perspectives, but his feet had locked into the white surface of the roof.
Three hundred feet above, an airliner roared over. In a lucid interval provided by the noise, Forbis recognized Fowler, Vansittart’s rival for the psychology professorship, remembered the long sessions of hypnosis after Fowler had picked him up in a bar three months earlier, offering to cure his chronic depression before it slid into alcoholism.
With a grasp, he remembered too the rest of the buried command.
So Vansittart had been the real target, not himself! Go up to the 100th floor and… His first attempt at Vansittart had been a month earlier, when Fowler had left him on the roof and then pretended to be the janitor, but Vansittart had brought two others with him. The mysterious hidden command had been the bait to lure Vansittart to the roof again. Cunningly, Fowler had known that sooner or later Vansittart would yield to the temptation.
‘And…’ he said aloud.
Looking for Vansittart, in the absurd hope that he might have survived the thousand-foot fall, he started for the balcony, then tried to hold himself back as the current caught him.
‘And—?’ Fowler repeated pleasantly. His eyes, two festering points of light, made Forbis sway. ‘There’s still some more to come, isn’t there, Forbis? You’re beginning to remember it now.’
Mind draining, Forbis turned to the balcony, dry mouth sucking at the air.
‘And—?’ Fowler snapped, his voice harder.
…And… and…
Numbly, Forbis jumped up on to the balcony, and poised on the narrow ledge like a diver, the streets swaying before his eyes. Below, the horns were silent again and the traffic had resumed its flow, a knot of vehicles drawn up in the centre of a small crowd by the edge of the pavement. For a few moments he managed to resist, and then the current caught him, toppling him like a drifting spar.
Fowler stepped quietly through the doorway. Ten seconds later, the horns sounded again.
‘The signs, Doctor! Have you seen the signs?’
Frowning with annoyance, Dr Franklin quickened his pace and hurried down the hospital steps towards the line of parked cars. Over his shoulder he caught a glimpse of a young man in ragged sandals and paint-stained jeans waving to him from the far side of the drive.
‘Dr Franklin! The signs!’
Head down, Franklin swerved around an elderly couple approaching the out-patients department. His car was over a hundred yards away. Too tired to start running himself, he waited for the young man to catch him up.
‘All right, Hathaway, what is it this time?’ he snapped. ‘I’m sick of you hanging around here all day.’
Hathaway lurched to a halt in front of him, uncut black hair like an awning over his eyes. He brushed it back with a claw-like hand and turned on a wild smile, obviously glad to see Franklin and oblivious of the latter’s hostility.
‘I’ve been trying to reach you at night, Doctor, but your wife always puts the phone down on me,’ he explained without a hint of rancour, as if well-used to this kind of snub. ‘And I didn’t want to look for you inside the Clinic.’ They were standing by a privet hedge that shielded them from the lower windows of the main administrative block, but Franklin’s regular rendezvous with Hathaway and his strange messianic cries had already become the subject of amused comment.
Franklin began to say: ‘I appreciate that — ‘ but Hathaway brushed this aside. ‘Forget it, Doctor, there are more important things now. They’ve started to build the first big signs! Over a hundred feet high, on the traffic islands outside town. They’ll soon have all the approach roads covered. When they do we might as well stop thinking.’
‘Your trouble is that you’re thinking too much,’ Franklin told him. ‘You’ve been rambling about these signs for weeks now. Tell me, have you actually seen one signalling?’
Hathaway tore a handful of leaves from the hedge, exasperated by this irrelevancy. ‘Of course I haven’t, that’s the whole point, Doctor.’ He dropped his voice as a group of nurses walked past, watching his raffish figure out of the corners of their eyes. ‘The construction gangs were out again last night, laying huge power cables. You’ll see them on the way home. Everything’s nearly ready now.’
‘They’re traffic signs,’ Franklin explained patiently. ‘The flyover has just been completed. Hathaway, for God’s sake, relax. Try to think of Dora and the child.’
