Destination Unknown - Agatha Christie [59]
‘It was not what I expected. No, frankly,’ he said one day, ‘entre nous, Mrs Betterton, I do not care for prison conditions. And these are prison conditions, though the cage, let us say, is heavily gilded.’
‘There is hardly the freedom here that you came to seek?’ Hilary suggested.
He smiled at her, a quick, rueful smile.
‘But no,’ he said, ‘you are wrong. I did not really seek liberty. I am a civilized man. The civilized man knows there is no such thing. Only the younger and cruder nations put the word “Liberty” on their banner. There must always be a planned framework of security. And the essence of civilization is that the way of life should be a moderate one. The middle way. Always one comes back to the middle way. No. I will be frank with you. I came here for money.’
Hilary in her turn smiled. Her eyebrows rose.
‘And what good is money to you here?’
‘It pays for very expensive laboratory equipment,’ said Dr Barron. ‘I am not obliged to put my hand into my own pocket, and so I can serve the cause of science and satisfy my own intellectual curiosity. I am a man who loves his work, true, but I do not love it for the sake of humanity. I have usually found that those who do so are somewhat woolly-headed, and often incompetent workers. No, it is the pure intellectual joy of research that I appreciate. For the rest, a large sum of money was paid to me before I left France. It is safely banked under another name and in due course, when all this comes to an end, I shall have it to spend as I choose.’
‘When all this comes to an end?’ Hilary repeated. ‘But why should it come to an end?’
‘One must have the common sense,’ said Dr Barron, ‘nothing is permanent, nothing endures. I have come to the conclusion that this place is run by a madman. A madman, let me tell you, can be very logical. If you are rich and logical and also mad, you can succeed for a very long time in living out your illusion. But in the end’–he shrugged–‘in the end this will break up. Because, you see, it is not reasonable, what happens here! That which is not reasonable must always pay the reckoning in the end. In the meantime’–again he shrugged his shoulders–‘it suits me admirably.’
Torquil Ericsson, whom Hilary had expected to be violently disillusioned, appeared to be quite content in the atmosphere of the Unit. Less practical than the Frenchman, he existed in a single-minded vision of his own. The world in which he lived was one so unfamiliar to Hilary that she could not even understand it. It engendered a kind of austere happiness, an absorption in mathematical calculations, and an endless vista of possibilities. The strange, impersonal ruthlessness of his character frightened Hilary. He was the kind of young man, she thought, who in a moment of idealism could send three-quarters of the world to their death in order that the remaining quarter should participate in an impractical Utopia that existed only in Ericsson’s mind.
With the American, Andy Peters, Hilary felt herself far more in accord. Possibly, she thought, it was because Peters was a man of talent but not a genius. From what others said, she gathered he was a first-class man at his job, a careful and skilled chemist, but not a pioneer. Peters, like herself, had at once hated and feared the atmosphere of the Unit.
‘The truth is that I didn’t know where I was going,’ he said. ‘I thought I knew, but I was wrong. The Party has got nothing to do with this place. We’re not in touch with Moscow. This is a lone show of some kind–a Fascist show possibly.’
‘Don’t you think,’ said Hilary, ‘that you go in too much for labels?’ He considered this.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Come to think of it, these words we throw around don’t mean much. But I do know this. I want to get out of here and I mean to get out of here.’
‘It won’t be