The Power Ball (The John Lymington SciFi/Horror Library #23)

By John Lymington

As long ago as 1937, the successful inventor and scientist Sir Arthur Barnes created a device which generated electricity on a practical scale without the need of fuel or machinery or power distribution lines. When he died a year later in an accident, he died with his secret intact. No generator was visible, and any notes he had ever made had been hidden or destroyed. Why?
War was imminent, and Barnes’s nephew, beginning a career at a Government department, was sent down to the house in Cornwall because aircraft testing RDF equipment had detected untranslatable signals coming from there.
The nephew found the generator, and perhaps the answer to the mystery of Arthur’s silence. The generator gave a by-product, and that product was one which seemed to create the terrible figure of fate as something real and approaching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Feb 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215803578

John Lymington

John Richard Newton Chance was born in Streatham Hill, London, in 1911, the son of Dick Chance, a managing editor at the Amalgamated Press. He studied to become a civil engineer, and then took up quantity surveying, but gave it up at 21 to become a full-time writer. He wrote for his father's titles, including "Dane, the Dog Detective" for Illustrated Chips, and a number of stories for the Sexton Blake Library and The Thriller Library.He went on to write over 150 science fiction, mystery and children's books and numerous short stories under various names, including John Lymington, John Drummond, David C. Newton, Jonathan Chance and Desmond Reid. Including 20+ SF potboilers, adding that he "made a steady income by delivering thrillers to Robert Hale (the UK publisher) at a chapter a week".His novel Night of the Big Heat was adapted to television in 1960 and to film, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in 1967.

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As long ago as 1937, the successful inventor and scientist Sir Arthur Barnes created a device which generated electricity on a practical scale without the need of fuel or machinery or power distribution lines. When he died a year later in an accident, he died with his secret intact. No generator was visible, and any notes he had ever made had been hidden or destroyed. Why?

War was imminent, and Barnes’s nephew, beginning a career at a Government department, was sent down to the house in Cornwall because aircraft testing RDF equipment had detected untranslatable signals coming from there.

The nephew found the generator, and perhaps the answer to the mystery of Arthur’s silence. The generator gave a by-product, and that product was one which seemed to create the terrible figure of fate as something real and approaching.

THE POWER BALL

By John Lymington

First published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1981

©1981, 2024 by John Newton Chance

First Electronic Edition: February 2024

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate

Series Editor: David Whitehead

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

Prologue

THERE IS A day which comes to all of us when the wish to escape fathers the thought, If only I had my time over again I would not have done that. There was a day I had that thought, but time has passed, and now I can see that, were I back exactly where I was those years ago, in circumstances exactly as they were then, and armed with only the knowledge I had then, I would have done the same. I could not have done anything else. I was myself of that time, with only the experience of that time to let me weigh the chances of combating the forces all around me then. They may seem calmer forces now, and the problem of yesterday looks clearer, but that experience of today can’t be sent back to another time to help.

Suppose, then, that at that time, in the past, I could have seen forward. Would that have helped?

I did see forward, all those years ago. I was shown the future, but what help can that be in practice? The answer, I have learnt, is none at all.

It was a morning at the end of August that Barnes came to my drawing-board and said A.J. wanted to see me in his office. I looked at him. He looked back at me. I thought I saw sympathy in his eyes. He was older and no longer a kicker against pricks.

I had never seen the feared A.J. He was God in the Ministry. Juniors never saw him but on the rare occasions when they were called in, and after that we didn’t see them anymore. We said they had been condemned to Hell and sent there by Special Messenger.

I tidied my desk and had sullen thoughts.

I had never wanted to be a civil servant. My ambition had been to become an engineer. Father’s friends said, No; not mechanical; civil engineering was the thing. Even better, they decided, was the construction industry. That was after I’d studied civil engineering for a term. But more money, they then decided, was to be made in architecture. I channelled from one to the other, like a train switching lines, puffing on useful advice.

Then another of Father’s influential friends got me an interview with the Architectural Department of the Office of Works. That was when I left the technical college and, in four weeks, I was a civil servant.

As I cleared my small desk and looked at the drawing-board I used less and less, I began to see how it had all been engineered, by someone behind the scenes, manipulating my life. Someone composed of parts of Father’s friends, advisers, and now A.J.

On that day and at that time I got the first idea that A.J. was the master of my puppet strings, was Godhead, an ogre. I was a draughtsman in the Architectural Department. But I went to Germany for my holidays. I had German friends, young like myself. I went there as often as I could. I had taken up sailing—and gliding—with my friends there.

It was then I was shifted into another Ministry to study airfields and make drawings of proposed new ones and learn just what was required to keep an airfield working efficiently to keep its staff and personnel efficiently flying warplanes in peace and in anything else that might come along.

I was encouraged to take longer leaves in Germany and take a look at what was going on in the world of civilian airfields there, and their gliding establishments. I was young and the chance of getting back there to whoop it up with my friends there at government expense was fine. It was just advancing my efficiency at planning future airfields. I made no reports. When I came back I just chatted to seniors who asked me what sort of time I’d had. Of course, each official has his own personal and private interests, hobbies, and each asked—usually over a break for tea—about things I had seen abroad which affected his particular interest.

And A.J., unseen behind my scene, pieced all these things together and composed a complete picture.

Without knowing it, I had become a junior spy.

It was thinking thus, sullenly, perhaps fearfully, I went to see A.J.

Miss Ransom was making tea and looked up at me and smiled, which was strange for a dragon.

Cheer up, she said. It isn’t a hanging. Go straight in. He’s waiting for you.

I knocked and went in. He was putting golf balls into an overturned cup. The carpet was as thick as grass on a green. The windows were high, and looked out between Corinthian columns on to the obedient public moving along Whitehall.

He was much younger than I had thought. Tall, elegant, Savile Row suit, shirt from the maker in St James’s, silk tie, also made for him, shoes from his bootmaker off Piccadilly.

Play golf? he said, straightening. We must have a game some time.

He came to his fine desk. We sat down, had tea, talked about Germany, gliding, the Luftwaffe, and war. Then he spoke about my Uncle Arthur, known in our family as a rich, crackpot inventor, who had died by accident a few months before.

You know he specialised in military work, A.J. said. "Both Admiralty and Air House report aircraft testing RDF equipment have found some sort of incoherent signals coming from your uncle’s old place. We all want to know what it is, just in case something was left there before the accident killed him.

I know your father has taken the place over, but it would be best if he knew nothing of our curiosity over this. I want you to take leave, go down there and let’s know if there is anything. Right! Leave from tomorrow. Get out of this atmosphere of doom-laden talk. There is no benefit in wondering if it will come. It will come.

He saw me to the door, to be able to go on putting as soon as I’d gone.

We must have a game some time, he said.

But the only games we ever had were those he invented.

Chapter One

IT HAD BEEN unsettled for weeks, but late that summer it began to get hotter. It seemed to increase the feeling I had of a tension in the air of the city. Perhaps tension isn’t the right word. A feeling of suspense, expectation of something one hopes won’t happen. It wasn’t strange, I suppose. There had been reason enough with news building up, line by line a scene of terror that was beginning to look as if it might block the only way ahead.

There were so many rumours of strange things happening, of motorists lost suddenly on strange roads with silent engines which came to life without anyone touching them. There were complaints television was being affected at night; of telephones that rang but nobody was on the line.

People expected to see unusual things happening openly, but there was nothing. Things were outwardly going on the same as usual, but the very familiarity of a continuing normal scene seemed like a sinister shield for something frightening behind it.

My feelings that hot day picked out these atmospheric oddities and enlarged them in my mind, perhaps because I was driving away from them. The roads were busy, and too many cars got in my way. There were too many cars and not enough roads until I turned off the mainstream down towards the far west.

About five I thought there might be news coming up and switched on and waited for the warm-up to finish. The music swelled in pleasantly. Mendelssohn. I was about to tune away from it, but then remembered what I had listened to at three that afternoon and looked at the dial. Another oddity. It was very odd Mendelssohn should be playing on that station.

I turned away and came on London. News, but news of cricket. The sleepy voice of the commentator was soothing and I let it go on.

The road began to narrow and twist and climb and turn to drop down into valleys, then swing up again. I stayed in third most of that last part of the run and didn’t change gear at all. I never seemed to meet anything on that little road. I didn’t want to meet anything then.

I just wanted to think what the hell I was going to say when I saw him. The cricket voice began to interfere. I turned it off. I couldn’t tell him why I had come. I just had to find out behind his back.

Despicable. Treacherous. I should be used to treachery.

I pushed the button and read off the petrol gauge. Seven gallons. It was something to do not to feel guilty.

I knew there were seven gallons unless I’d knocked a hole in the tank.

The scattered stone buildings around the moor came in sight from the top of the next hill. I turned on the voice again. Only three miles now to the turn-off.

I tested the petrol again, noticed the speed was just where the big speedo and rev counter needles had the same angle, the temperature was on eighty and the oil on fifty and when I looked up again I could almost see him standing like an obelisk on the hump of the headland.

On the northern horn of the cove. His cove. His inherited cove, the purchase of his lunatic brother. No, not lunatic. Not exactly. He had just tried to make himself one. Daft old Arthur. But he’d died laughing. I envied him that.

Guilt, guilt with everybody I remembered. And yet I did my job. I did my job well. Because I did my job well I wrecked everybody else. Kicking shit out of a bag I hurt my foot and then my soul. I had to have a soul or I couldn’t have felt all this guilt every now and again.

When I was getting near people I shouldn’t have cheated, guilt began to come on, like a hot flush, right through my head.

I turned off the road down the track to Captain’s House, a granite place set in a combe which ran on down to the beach of the cove. It was not a sea captain who had built the place but a Captain of Mines. Uncle Arthur had not so much altered it as mucked it about to suit his nutty fancies.

The track ran down between fields all belonging to Captain’s House and surrounding it on the land side for a mile all round. The land was heavily hedged against the tourist, and stocked with sheep, cattle, and specially with bulls to discourage anybody getting in for picnics. The animals belong to local farmers.

Drawing near to the house in the combe I felt again that odd sense of magic which had come to me first as a small boy. When a child gets to know that one of the family is off his onion and is told not to mention it, a splendid fascination holds the flowering imagination and whips it into the grisly.

I stopped and got out feeling dry and burnt. I should have put the roof up instead of driving all the way open to the sun and wind.

The house, built sideways on the slope of the combe, had its seaward end raised on stilts of granite pillars and, underneath, boats and cars were housed. Father’s boat was there but not the old Ford two-seater he towed it with down the beach.

Housekeeper Emma Jones was on the veranda. Emma Jones was a big, busty, beaming, butter-and-milk-skinned beautiful woman who roused in me affection, a wish to spill my troubles on her big bosom, lust, and a vision of unattainable contentment.

He’s down on the beach, she said. Why didn’t you write and say?

"There wasn’t time, Emma.