The Stone That Never Came Down Read Online Free Page A

this particular Employment Exchange. How to explain the reason for his unwillingness to enter by himself?
    In fact it was very simple. He knew this drab, forbidding building. It was right on his own home patch. He couldn’t count how many hours he had wasted waiting here for the chance of work that never materialised, or to claim from grudging clerks the benefit money due to him by law.
    So he might very well run into some of his mates here.
    And while there was a lot to be said for joining the Army in times of high unemployment–security, technical training, the chance of travel, plenty of sport, and all the rest of it, which had tempted him when he grew bored beyond endurance and certainly had been provided as promised–if it were true, as the headlines on today’s Daily Mirror claimed, that they were going to send troops to Glasgow and drive the men who’d been on strike these past nine weeks back to work at gunpoint … Well, those old mates of his weren’t likely to make a soldier very welcome, were they?
    “Get a move on, lance!” the driver pleaded.
    “Okay, okay!” Tucking the cardboard tube under his arm like a swagger-stick, he crossed the sidewalk with affected boldness, thinking about what the papers had said.
    –Never paid too much attention to that old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud I have for a father. But I do believe he’s right to say the power to strike is precious. What else are working folk to do if they can’t get a decent wage? Bloody fools in Parliament! What do they want, another Ireland on their hands?
    As it turned out, he’d worried needlessly; the only person who recognised him was the clerk who had to sign for the recruiting posters, and he offered congratulations on putting up a stripe, having done some Army time himself.
    –Thank goodness!

    Professor Wilfred Kneller stood gazing down from the window of his office at the sluggish traffic in the street below. He was director of the Gull-Grant Research Institute, which occupied the top floor of a four-storey block on the eastern edge of Soho, premises donated by its founder, who had been a tobacco millionaire with a guilty conscience.
    At the time of his appointment eight years ago this had been a lively district, maintaining Soho’s long-standing reputation as a centre of night-life–and, of course, prostitution. The recession, however, had taken its toll, and from here he could count half a dozen “to let” signs without craning his neck, testimony to the bankruptcy of restaurants, clubs, and borderline pornography shops.
    –How tilings have changed!
    Moreover, during the night, a team of godhead flyposters had been by, and every wall and window in sight was decorated with stickers repeating their current slogan: put christ back in your christmas!
    –That is, apart from the windows that they smashed … I wonder how many proprietors went broke because they couldn’t afford to insure their plate-glass after the godheads moved in.
    “Morning, Wilfred,” a voice said from behind him.
    “Morning,” he grunted in reply. He knew without looking that the speaker was Dr Arthur Randolph, a portly man in his forties–ten years his junior–who, like himself, had been with the Institute since its foundation and who headed one of the two departments it was divided into. Officially his was called Biological, while his colleague Maurice Post’s was Organochemical; in practice, particularly since the inception of the VG project, they worked in double harness, sharing funds, lab facilities, and even staff.
    –Natural enough. How could you draw a line between living and nonliving where VC is involved?
    “Admiring the street decorations, are you?” Randolph went on, walking across the room to join him. “Makes me think of something Maurice once said to me. Maybe to you too, of course.”
    “What?”
    “Oh, he was wondering what society would have been like if we’d socialised cannabis instead of dangerous drugs like alcohol and