Free Ossian's Ride by Fred Hoyle Page B

what sort of an organization he had at his disposal, but it was safest to assume that the organization might be formidable. He would obviously look for Cathleen at every place he could think of, and Morag’s cottage might well be one of these. It would have been wiser to have slept in the woods, but Cathleen was so tired that I couldn’t find it in my heart to insist. The one comfort was that the lights of any car could be seen approaching the cottage from far off. I thought it most unlikely that anyone would, drive that particular night without at least some degree of lighting.
    Morag had of course brewed up a pot of tea. She offered me a cup when I came in from the lane.
    “And now be off to bed with you,” she said to Cathleen.
    “Try to get some sleep, but don’t take your clothes off,” I added. “We might have to make a quick getaway. I’ll keep watch, don’t worry.”
    Cathleen nodded, evidently seeing the point.
    “Morag, can you tell if a car turns into the lane?” I asked. The old woman answered that she could.
    “Then would you be willing to keep a watch, in case I fall asleep?”
    “You may be assured that I will.”
    But I had no intention of sleeping. I took out the file of papers and began to look systematically through them. The first part was scientific, the latter part and the appendices were mathematical. One needed little knowledge of science to appreciate the importance of the first part; it was no less than a description and blueprints of a thermonuclear reactor, the disposition of magnets, currents and voltages, etc. I remembered Parsonage’s statement that I.C.E. had produced a working thermonuclear reactor, and a piece of the puzzle became complete in my mind.
    Not to make a mystery of the matter I might remark that one of the entries in Colquhoun’s notebook read as follows:
    Michael O’Rourke (I), sister Cathleen.
    The
I
was probably short for I.C.E. Presumably the situation was that Michael had a job at I.C.E. or at least had had the entree into the I.C.E. territory. It must have been Michael who got hold of the manuscript. In the ordinary course of his business he had brought the manuscript to Shaun Houseman, who must instantly have perceived its fantastic value on the open market. When Michael got wind of Houseman’s intentions, he, Michael, had simply been brutally snuffed out. This seemed to make sense, at any rate the sort of sense that one expects to meet in this brand of business.
    As I read on, I became more and more uneasy. By now I had reached the mathematical parts. Either my memory was slipping, or there were steps in the various proofs that simply did not seem to follow. At first I thought the stress and strain of the last month, and of the last day in particular, had softened my wits, but bit by bit I found things that were certainly wrong. I even found an elementary blunder: the statement that apart from an additive constant every monotonic continuous function is equal to the integral of its derivative. On a grand scale, this was another nonsensical document of the sort that I had already seen in Parsonage’s office.
    But it gave me some idea of the subtlety of the people I would soon be dealing with. Evidently I.C.E. had a deliberate policy of turning out spoof documents, which they fed to the foreign agents much as one might fling hunks of poisoned meat to a pack of snarling wolves. Poor Michael! This was something that I must be careful to keep from Cathleen.
    I must have dozed off round about dawn, for I was roughly wakened by Morag.
    “Away with you. They’re coming up the boreen.”
    The lane was a little more than half a mile long. Assuming the car came quickly along the very rough surface, it would take the best part of a minute, sixty precious seconds, of which Morag must have consumed ten. I took five more to get upstairs to Cathleen’s bedroom, another five to drag her out of bed, ten to get her downstairs and a final ten to grab my rucksack and the