The Complete Short Stories

The Comsat Angels

When I first heard about the assignment, in the summer of 1968, I did my best to turn it down. Charles Whitehead, producer of BBC TV’s science programme Horizon, asked me to fly over to France with him and record a press conference being held by a fourteen-year-old child prodigy, Georges Duval, who was attracting attention in the Paris newspapers. The film would form part of Horizon’s new series, which I was scripting, ‘The Expanding Mind’, about the role of communications satellites and data-processing devices in the so-called information explosion. What annoyed me was this insertion of irrelevant and sensational material into an otherwise serious programme.

‘Charles, you’ll destroy the whole thing,’ I protested across his desk that morning. ‘These child prodigies are all the same. Either they simply have some freak talent or they’re being manipulated by ambitious parents. Do you honestly believe this boy is a genius?’

‘He might be, James. Who can say?’ Charles waved a plump hand at the contact prints of orbiting satellites pinned to the walls. ‘We’re doing a programme about advanced communications systems — if they have any justification at all, it’s that they bring rare talents like this one to light.’

‘Rubbish — these prodigies have been exposed time and again. They bear the same relation to true genius that a crosschannel swimmer does to a lunar astronaut.’

In the end, despite my protests, Charles won me over, but I was still sceptical when we flew to Orly Airport the next morning. Every two or three years there were reports of some newly discovered child genius. The pattern was always the same: the prodigy had mastered chess at the age of three, Sanskrit and calculus at six, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity at twelve. The universities and conservatories of America and Europe opened their doors.

For some reason, though, nothing ever came of these precocious talents. Once the parents, or an unscrupulous commercial sponsor, had squeezed the last drop of publicity out of the child, his so-called genius seemed to evaporate and he vanished into oblivion.

‘Do you remember Minou Drouet?’ I asked Charles as we drove from Orly. ‘A child prodigy of a few years back. Cocteau read her poems and said, "Every child is a genius except Minou Drouet."

‘James, relax… Like all scientists, you can’t bear anything that challenges your own prejudices. Let’s wait until we see him. He might surprise us.’

He certainly did, though not as we expected.

Georges Duval lived with his widowed mother in the small town of Montereau, on the Seine thirty miles south of Paris. As we drove across the cobbled square past the faded police prefecture, it seemed an unlikely birthplace for another Darwin, Freud or Curie. However, the Duvals’ house was an expensively built white-walled villa overlooking a placid arm of the river. A well-tended lawn ran down to a vista of swans and water-meadows.

Parked in the drive was the location truck of the film unit we had hired, and next to it a radio van from RadioTelevision-Franaise and a Mercedes with a Paris-Match sticker across the rear window. Sound cables ran across the gravel into a kitchen window. A sharp-faced maid led us without ado towards the press conference. In the lounge, four rows of gilt chairs brought in from the Hotel de Ville faced a mahogany table by the windows. Here a dozen cameramen were photographing Madame Duval, a handsome woman of thirty-five with calm grey eyes, arms circumspectly folded below two strands of pearls. A trio of solemn-faced men in formal suits protected her from the technicians setting up microphones and trailing their cables under the table.

Already, fifteen minutes before Georges Duval appeared, I felt there was something bogus about the atmosphere. The three dark-suited men — the Director of Studies at the Sorbonne, a senior bureaucrat from the French Ministry of Education, and a representative of the Institut Pascal, a centre of advanced study — gave the conference an overstuffed air only slightly eased by the presence of the local mayor, a homely figure in a shiny suit, and the boy’s schoolmaster, a lantern-jawed man hunched around his pipe.

Needless to say, when Georges Duval arrived, he was a total disappointment. Accompanied by a young priest, the family counsellor, he took his seat behind the table, bowing to the three officials and giving his mother a dutiful buss on the cheek. As the lights came on and the cameras began to turn, his eyes stared down at us without embarrassment.

Georges Duval was then fourteen, a slim-shouldered boy small for his age, self-composed in a grey flannel suit. His face was pale and anaemic, hair plastered down to hide his huge bony forehead. He kept his hands in his pockets, concealing his over-large wrists. What struck me immediately was the lack of any emotion or expression on his face, as if he had left his mind in the next room, hard at work on some intricate problem.

Professor Leroux of the Sorbonne opened the press conference. Georges had first come to light when he had taken his mathematics degree at thirteen, the youngest since Descartes. Leroux described Georges’s career: reading at the age of two, by nine he had passed his full matriculation exam — usually taken at fifteen or sixteen. As a vacation hobby he had mastered English and German, by eleven had passed the diploma of the Paris Conservatoire in music theory, by twelve was working for his degree. He had shown a precocious interest in molecular biology, and already corresponded with biochemists at Harvard and Cambridge.

While this familiar catalogue was being unfolded, Georges’s eyes, below that large carapace of a skull, showed not a glimmer of emotion. Now and then he glanced at a balding young man in a soft grey suit sitting by himself in the front row. At the time I thought he was Georges’s elder brother — he had the same high bony temples and closed face. Later, however, I discovered that he had a very different role.

Questions were invited for Georges. These followed the usual pattern — what did he think of Vietnam, the space-race, the psychedelic scene, miniskirts, girls, Brigitte Bardot? In short, not a question of a serious nature. Georges answered in good humour, stating that outside his studies he had no worthwhile opinions. His voice was firm and reasonably modest, but he looked more and more bored by the conference, and as soon as it broke up, he joined the young man in the front row. Together they left the room, the same abstracted look on their faces that one sees in the insane, as if crossing our own universe at a slight angle.

While we made our way out, I talked to the other journalists. Georges’s father had been an assembly worker at the Renault plant in Paris; neither he nor Madame Duval was in the least educated, and the house, into which the widow and son had moved only two months earlier, was paid for by a large research foundation. Evidently there were unseen powers standing guard over Georges Duval. He apparently never played with the boys from the town.

As we drove away, Charles Whitehead said slyly: ‘I notice you didn’t ask any questions yourself.’

‘The whole thing was a complete set-up. We might as well have been interviewing De Gaulle.’

‘Perhaps we were.’

‘You think the General may be behind all this?’

‘It’s possible. Let’s face it, if the boy is outstanding, it makes it more difficult for him to go off and work for Du Pont or IBM.’

‘But is he? He was intelligent, of course, but all the same, I’ll bet you that three years from now no one will even remember him.’

After we returned to London my curiosity came back a little. In the Air France bus to the TV Centre at White City I scanned the children on the pavement. Without a doubt none of them had the maturity and intelligence of Georges Duval. Two mornings later, when I found myself still thinking about Georges, I went up to the research library.

As I turned through the clippings, going back twenty years, I made an interesting discovery. Starting in 1948, I found that a major news story about a child prodigy came up once every two years. The last celebrity had been Bobby Silverberg, a fifteen-year-old from Tampa, Florida. The photographs in the Look, Paris-Match and Oggi profiles might have been taken of Georges Duval. Apart from the American setting, every ingredient was the same: the press conference, TV cameras, presiding officials, the high-school principal, doting mother — and the young genius himself, this time with a crew-cut and nothing to hide that high bony skull. There were two college degrees already passed, postgraduate fellowships offered by MIT, Princeton and CalTech.

And then what?

‘That was nearly three years ago,’ I said to Judy Walsh, my secretary. ‘What’s he doing now?’

She flicked through the index cards, then shook her head. ‘Nothing. I suppose he’s taking another degree at a university somewhere.’

‘He’s already got two degrees. By now he should have come up with a faster-than-light drive or a method of synthesizing life.’

‘He’s only seventeen. Wait until he’s a little older.’

‘Older? You’ve given me an idea. Let’s go back to the beginning — 1948.’

Judy handed me the bundle of clippings. Life magazine had picked up the story of Gunther Bergman, the first postwar prodigy, a seventeenyear-old Swedish youth whose pale, over-large eyes stared out from the photographs. An unusual feature was the presence at the graduation ceremony at Uppsala University of three representatives from the Nobel Foundation. Perhaps because he was older than Silverberg and Georges Duval, his intellectual achievements seemed prodigious. The degree he was collecting was his third; already he had done original research in radioastronomy, helping to identify the unusual radio-sources that a decade later were termed ‘quasars’.

‘A spectacular career in astronomy seems guaranteed. It should be easy to track him down. He’ll be, what?, thirtyseven now, professor at least, well on his way to a Nobel Prize.’

We searched through the professional directories, telephoned Greenwich Observatory and the London Secretariat of the World Astronomical Federation.

No one had heard of Gunther Bergman.

‘Right, where is he?’ I asked Judy when we had exhausted all lines of inquiry. ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s twenty years; he should be world-famous by now.’

‘Perhaps he’s dead.’

‘That’s possible.’ I gazed down pensively at Judy’s quizzical face. ‘Put in a call to the Nobel Foundation. In fact, clear your desk and get all the international directories we can up here. We’re going to make the Comsats sing.’

Three weeks later, when I carried my bulky briefcase into Charles Whitehead’s office, there was an electric spring in my step.

Charles eyed me warily over his glasses. ‘James, I hear you’ve been hard on the trail of our missing geniuses. What have you got?’

‘A new programme.’

‘New? We’ve already got Georges Duval listed in Radio Times.’

‘For how long?’ I pulled a chair up to his desk and opened my briefcase, then spread the dozen files in front of him. ‘Let me put you in the picture. Judy and I have been back to 1948. In those twenty years there have been eleven cases of so-called geniuses. Georges Duval is the twelfth.’

I placed the list in front of him.

1948 Gunther Bergman (Uppsala, Sweden) 1950 Jaako Litmanen (Vaasa, Finland) 1952 John Warrender (Kansas City, USA) 1953 Arturo Bandini (Bologna, Italy) 1955 Gesai Ray (Calcutta, India) 1957 Giuliano Caldare (Palermo, Sicily) 1958 Wolfgang Herter (Cologne, Germany) 1960 Martin Sherrington (Canterbury, England) 1962 Josef Oblensky (Leningrad, USSR) 1964 Yen Hsi Shan (Wuhan, China) 1965 Robert Silvetherg (Tampa, USA) 1968 Georges Duval (Montereau, France)

Charles studied the list, now and then patting his forehead with a floral handkerchief. ‘Frankly, apart from Georges Duval, the names mean absolutely nothing.’

‘Isn’t that strange? There’s enough talent there to win all the Nobel Prizes three times over.’

‘Have you tried to trace them?’

I let out a cry of pain. Even the placid Judy gave a despairing shudder. ‘Have we tried? My God, we’ve done nothing else. Charles, apart from checking a hundred directories and registers, we’ve contacted the original magazines and news agencies, checked with the universities that originally offered them scholarships, talked on the overseas lines to the BBC reporters in New York, Delhi and Moscow.’

‘And? What do they know about them?’

‘Nothing. A complete blank.’

Charles shook his head doggedly. ‘They must be somewhere. What about the universities they were supposed to go to?’

‘Nothing there, either. It’s a curious thing, but not one of them actually went on to a university. We’ve contacted the senates of nearly fifty universities. Not a mention of them. They took external degrees while still at school, but after that they severed all connections with the academic world.’

Charles sat forward over the list, holding it like a portion of some treasure map. ‘James, it looks as if you’re going to win your bet. Somehow they all petered out in late adolescence. A sudden flaring of intelligence backed by prodigious memory, not matched by any real creative spark… that’s it, I suppose — none of them was a genius.’

‘As a matter of fact, I think they all were.’ Before he could stop me I went on. ‘Forget that for the moment. Whether or not they had genius is irrelevant. Certainly they had intellects vastly beyond the average, IQs of two hundred, enormous scholastic talents in a wide range of subjects. They had a sudden burst of fame and exposure and—’

‘They vanished into thin air. What are you suggesting — some kind of conspiracy?’

‘In a sense, yes.’

Charles handed me the list. ‘Come off it. Do you really mean that a sinister government bureau has smuggled them off, they’re slaving away now on some super-weapon?’

‘It’s possible, but I doubt it.’ I took a packet of photographs from the second folder. ‘Have a look at them.’

Charles picked up the first. ‘Ah, there’s Georges. He looks older here, those TV cameras are certainly ageing.’

‘It’s not Georges Duval. It’s Oblensky, the Russian boy, taken six years ago. Quite a resemblance, though.’ I spread the twelve photographs on the table top. Charles moved along the half-circle, comparing the over-large eyes and bony foreheads, the same steady gaze.

‘Wait a minute! Are you sure this isn’t Duval?’ Charles picked up Oblensky’s photograph and pointed to the figure of a young man in a light grey suit standing behind some mayoral official in a Leningrad parlour. ‘He was at Duval’s press conference, sitting right in front of us.’

I nodded to Judy. ‘You’re right, Charles. And he’s not only in that photo.’ I pulled together the photographs of Bobby Silverberg, Herter and Martin Sherrington. In each one the same balding figure in the dove-grey suit was somewhere in the background, his over-sharp eyes avoiding the camera lens. ‘No university admits to knowing him, nor do Shell, Philips, General Motors or a dozen other big international companies. Of course, there are other organizations he might be a talent scout for..

Charles had stood up, and was slowly walking around his desk. ‘Such as the CIA — you think he may be recruiting talent for some top-secret Government think-thank? It’s unlikely, but -’

‘What about the Russians?’ I cut in. ‘Or the Chinese? Let’s face it, eleven young men have vanished into thin air. What happened to them?’

Charles stared down at the photographs. ‘The strange thing is that I vaguely recognize all these faces. Those bony skulls, and those eyes… somewhere. Look, James, we may have the makings of a new programme here. This English prodigy, Martin Sherrington, he should be easy to track down. Then the German, Herter. Find them and we may be on to something.’

We set off for Canterbury the next morning. The address, which I had been given by a friend who was science editor of the Daily Express, was on a housing estate behind the big General Electric radio and television plant on the edge of the city. We drove past the lines of grey-brick houses until we found the Sherringtons’ at the end of a row. Rising out of the remains of a greenhouse was a huge ham operator’s radio mast, its stay-wires snapped and rusting. In the eight years since his tremendous mind had revealed itself to the local grammar-school master, Martin Sherrington might have gone off to the ends of the world, to Cape Kennedy, the Urals or Peking.

In fact, not only were neither Martin nor his parents there, but it took us all of two days to find anyone who even remembered them at all. The present tenants of the house, a frayed-looking couple, had been there two years; and before them a large family of criminal inclinations who had been forced out by bailiffs and police. The headmaster of the grammar-school had retired to Scotland. Fortunately the school matron remembered Martin — ‘a brilliantly clever boy, we were all very proud of him. To tell the truth, though, I can’t say we felt much affection for him; he didn’t invite it.’ She knew nothing of Mrs Sherrington, and as for the boy’s father, they assumed he had died in the war.

Finally, thanks to a cashier at the accounts office of the local electric company, we found where Mrs Sherrington had moved.

As soon as I saw that pleasant white-walled villa in its prosperous suburb on the other side of Canterbury, I felt that the trail was warming. Something about the crisp gravel and large, well-trimmed garden reminded me of another house — Georges Duval’s near Paris.

From the roof of my car parked next to the hedge we watched a handsome, strong-shouldered woman strolling in the rose garden.

‘She’s come up in the world,’ I commented. ‘Who pays for this pad?’

The meeting was curious. This rather homely, quietly dressed woman in her late thirties gazed at us across the silver tea-set like a tamed Mona Lisa. She told us that we had absolutely no chance of interviewing Martin on television.

‘So much interest in your son was roused at the time, Mrs Sherrington. Can you tell us about his subsequent academic career? Which university did he go to?’

‘His education was completed privately.’ As for his present whereabouts, she believed he was now abroad, working for a large international organization whose name she was not at liberty to divulge.

‘Not a government department, Mrs Sherrington?’

She hesitated, but only briefly. ‘I am told the organization is intimately connected with various governments, but I have no real knowledge.’

Her voice was over-precise, as if she were hiding her real accent. As we left, I realized how lonely her life was; but as Judy remarked, she had probably been lonely ever since Martin Sherrington had first learned to speak.

Our trip to Germany was equally futile. All traces of Wolfgang Herter had vanished from the map. A few people in the small village near the Frankfurt autobahn remembered him, and the village postman said that Frau Herter had moved to Switzerland, to a lakeside villa near Lucerne. A woman of modest means and education, but the son had no doubt done very well.

I asked one or two questions.

Wolfgang’s father? Frau Herter had arrived with the child just after the war; the husband had probably perished in one of the nameless prison-camps or battlegrounds of World War II.

The balding man in the light grey suit? Yes, he had definitely come to the village, helping Frau Herter arrange her departure.

‘Back to London,’ I said to Judy. ‘This needs bigger resources than you and I have.’

As we flew back Judy said: ‘One thing I don’t understand. Why have the fathers always disappeared?’

‘A good question. Putting it crudely, love, a unique genetic coupling produced these twelve boys. It almost looks as if someone has torn the treasure map in two and kept one half. Think of the stock bank they’re building up, enough sperm on ice in a eugenic cocktail to repopulate the entire planet.’

This nightmare prospect was on my mind when I walked into Charles Whitehead’s office the next morning. It was the first time I had seen Charles in his shirtsleeves. To my surprise, he brushed aside my apologies, then beckoned me to the huge spread of photographs pinned to the plaster wall behind his desk. The office was a clutter of newspaper cuttings and blown-up newsreel stills. Charles was holding a magnifying glass over a photograph of President Johnson and McNamara at a White House reception.

‘While you were gone we’ve been carrying out our own search,’ he said. ‘If it’s any consolation, we couldn’t trace any of them at first.’

‘Then you have found them? Where?’

‘Here.’ He gestured at the dozens of photographs. ‘Right in front of our noses. We’re looking at them every day.’

He pointed to a news agency photograph of a Kremlin reception for Premier Ulbricht of East Germany. Kosygin and Brezhnev were there, Soviet President Podgorny talking to the Finnish Ambassador, and a crowd of twenty party functionaries.

‘Recognize anyone? Apart from Kosygin and company?’

‘The usual bunch of hatchet-faced waiters these people like to surround themselves with. Wait a minute, though.’

Charles’s finger had paused over a quiet-faced young man with a high dolichocephalic head, standing at Kosygin’s elbow. Curiously, the Soviet Premier’s face was turned towards him rather than to Brezhnev.

‘Oblensky — the Russian prodigy. What’s he doing with Kosygin? He looks like an interpreter.’

‘Between Kosygin and Brezhnev? Hardly. I’ve checked with the BBC and Reuters correspondents in Moscow. They’ve seen him around quite a bit. He never says anything in public, but the important men always talk to him.’

I put down the photograph. ‘Charles, get on to the Foreign Office and the US Embassy. It makes sense — all eleven of them are probably there, in the Soviet Union.’

‘Relax. That’s what we thought. But have a look at these.’

The next picture had been taken at a White House meeting between Johnson, McNamara and General Westmoreland discussing US policy in Vietnam. There were the usual aides, secretaries and Secret Service men out on the lawn. One face had been ringed, that of a man in his early thirties standing unobtrusively behind Johnson and Westmoreland.

‘Warrender — the 1952 genius! He’s working for the US Government.’

‘More surprises.’ Charles guided me around the rest of the photographs. ‘You might be interested in these.’

The next showed Pope Paul on the balcony of St Peter’s, making his annual ‘Urbis et Orbis’ — the city and the world benediction to the huge crowd in the square. Standing beside him were Cardinal Mancini, chief of the Papal Secretariat, and members of his household staff. Obliquely behind the Pope was a man of about thirty wearing what I guessed to be a Jesuit’s soutane, large eyes watching Paul with a steady gaze.

‘Bandini, Arturo Bandini,’ I commented, recognizing the face. ‘Oggi did a series of features on him. He’s moved high in the papal hierarchy.’

‘There are few closer to Ii Papa, or better loved.’

After that came a photograph of U Thant, taken at a UN Security Council meeting during the Cuban missile crisis. Sitting behind the Secretary General was a pale-skinned young Brahmin with a fine mouth and eyes — Gesai Ray, the high-caste Indian who was the only well-born prodigy I had come across.

‘Ray is now even higher up on U Thant’s staff,’ Charles added. ‘There’s one interesting photograph of him and Warrender together during the Cuban crisis. Warrender was then on JFK’s staff.’ He went on casually: ‘The year after Oblensky reached the Kremlin, Khrushchev was sacked.’

‘So they’re in contact? I’m beginning to realize what the MoscowWashington hot line is really for.’

Charles handed me another still. ‘Here’s an old friend of yours — our own Martin Sherrington. He’s on Professor Lovell’s staff at the Jodrell Bank Radio-Observatory. One of the very few not to go into government or big business.’

‘Big science, though.’ I stared at the quiet, intense face of the elusive Sherrington, aware that someone at Jodrell Bank had deliberately put me off.

‘Like Gunther Bergman — he moved to the United States fifteen years ago from Sweden, is now very high up in the NASA command chain. Yen Hsi Shan is the youngest, barely seventeen, but have a look at this.’

The photograph showed Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai on the reviewing platform in Peking during the cultural revolution, an immense concourse of teenagers passing below, all holding copies of Mao’s Thoughts and chanting out slogans. Standing between Mao and Chou was a boy with a fist in the air who was the chief Red Guard.

‘Yen Hsi Shan. He’s started early,’ Charles said. ‘One or two of the others we haven’t been able to trace as yet, though we hear Herter is with the giant Zurich-Hamburg banking trust. Jaako Litmanen, the Finnish prodigy, is rumoured to be working for the Soviet space programme.’

‘Well, one has to admit it,’ I commented, ‘they’ve certainly all made good.’

‘Not all.’ Charles showed me the last picture, of the Sicilian genius Giuliano Caldare. ‘One of them made bad. Caldare emigrated to the United States in 1960, is now in the inner circle of the Cosa Nostra, a coming talent from all one hears.’

I sat down at Charles’s desk. ‘Right, but what does this prove? It may look like a conspiracy, but given their talents one would expect them to rise in the world.’

‘That’s putting it mildly. Good God, this bunch only has to take one step forward and they’ll be running the entire show.’

‘A valid point.’ I opened Charles’s note-pad. ‘We’ll revise the programme — agreed? We start off with the Georges Duval conference, follow up with our own discoveries of where the others are, splice in old newsreel material, interviews with the mothers — it’ll make quite a programme.’

Or so we hoped.

Needless to say, the programme was never started. Two days later, when I was still organizing the newsreel material, word came down from the head of features that the project was to be shelved. We tried to argue, but the decision was absolute.

Shortly after, my contract with Horizon was ended, and I was given the job of doing a new children’s series about great inventors. Charles was shunted to ‘International Golf’. Of course, it was obvious to both of us that we had come too close for someone’s comfort, but there was little we could do about it. Three months later, I made a trip to Jodrell Bank radio-observatory with a party of scientific journalists and had a glimpse of Martin Sherrington, a tall, finely featured man watching with his hard gaze as Professor Lovell held his press conference.

During the next months I carefully followed the newspapers and TV newscasts. If there was a conspiracy of some kind, what were they planning? Here they were, sitting behind the world’s great men, hands ready to take the levers of power. But a global dictatorship sounded unlikely. Two of them at least seemed opposed to established authority. Apart from Caldare in the Cosa Nostra, Georges Duval put his musical talents to spectacular use, becoming within less than a year the greatest of the French ‘Ye-Ye’ singers, eclipsing the Beatles as a leader of the psychedelic youth generation. In the forefront of the world protest movement, he was hated by the police of a dozen countries but idolized by teenagers from Bangkok to Mexico City.

Any collaboration between Georges and Band mi at the Vatican seemed improbable. Besides, nothing that happened in the world at large suggested that members of the group were acting in anything but a benign role: the nuclear confrontation averted during the Cuban missile crisis, the fall of Khrushchev and the Russo-American dtente, peace moves in Vietnam, the Vatican’s liberalized policy towards birth-control and divorce. Even the Red Guard movement and the chaos it brought could be seen as a subtle means of deflecting Chinese militancy at a time when she might have intervened in Vietnam.

Then, three months later, Charles Whitehead telephoned me.

‘There’s a report in Der Spiegel,’ he told me with studied casualness. ‘I thought you might be interested. Another young genius has been discovered.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘We’ll do a programme about it. The usual story, I take it?’

‘Absolutely. That same forehead and eyes, the mother who lost her husband years ago, our friend in the villa business. This boy looks really bright, though. An IQ estimated at 300. What a mind.’

‘I read the script. The only trouble is, I never got to see the programme. Where is this, by the way?’

‘Hebron.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Near Jerusalem. In Israel.’

‘Israel?’

I put the phone down. Somewhere in my mind a tumbler had clicked. Israel! Of course, at last everything made sense. The twelve young men, now occupying positions of power, controlling everything from the US, Russian and Chinese governments to satellite policy, international finance, the UN, big science, the youth and protest movement. There was even a Judas, Giuliano Caldare of the Cosa Nostra. It was obvious now. I had always assumed that the twelve were working for some mysterious organization, but in fact they were the organization. They were waiting for the moment of arrival. When the child came, he would be prepared for in the right way, watched over by the Comsat relays, hot lines open, the armies of the world immobilized. This time there would be no mistakes.

After an hour I rang Charles back.

‘Charles,’ I began, ‘I know what’s happening. Israel..

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Israel. Don’t you see, Hebron is near Bethlehem.’

There was an exasperated silence. ‘James, for heaven’s sake… You’re not suggesting that—’

‘Of course. The twelve young men, what else could they be preparing for? And why did the Arab-Israeli war end in only two days? How old is this boy?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘Let’s say another ten years. Good, I had a feeling he would come.’

When Charles protested I handed the receiver to Judy.

As a matter of fact, I am quite certain that I am right. I have seen the photographs of Joshua Herzl taken at his press conference, a slightly difficult lad who rubbed quite a few of the reporters the wrong way. He vanished off the scene shortly afterwards, though no doubt his mother now has a pleasant white-walled villa outside Haifa or Tel Aviv.

And Jodrell Bank is building an enormous new radio-telescope. One day soon we shall be seeing signs in the skies.