Vail by Trevor Hoyle

Author:Trevor Hoyle [Hoyle, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Published: 1984-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

[3]

A person or persons unknown had been trying to get in touch with Vail on the telephone. He, she or they wouldn’t leave their name(s), and this Vail found unsettling. Was it a lone psychotic or an organised group? There were millions of cranks in the world, – stood to reason he would get his fair share. Still, he didn’t like it. His past was too near for him to breathe easy.

Also, events had moved fast. It seemed to Vail that he had been taken in hand by people and forces beyond his control. Not that he objected to this: he was of a mind to be swept along willy-nilly, the pawn of obsessional careerists, sexually ambitious women, and the whimsical ebb and flow of arbitrary circumstances. In his numbed state it was a relief to, as it were, let go. Sooner or later an Opportunity would present itself, of this he was confident.

– No, he didn’t believe in justice, but he believed in good and evil, and just as in nature every action has an opposite and equal reaction, the callous and the sordid and the meretricious were ultimately balanced and rectified by other, positive forces, completing the algebraic equation, wiping the slate clean. This was so, had to be so, otherwise the universe would not function, would collapse under the weight of its own inertia, spiralling downwards into entropy and annihilation.

[It doesn’t occur to Vail that this may be the truth of the matter: that the exquisite symmetry of the atoms and the majesty of celestial engineering are a shameless hoax, a blatant deceit, and that we are all doomed to the pit. An electromagnetic god is no respecter of moral stances. Who is to say, in a purposeless universe, that we shall not all end up squashed flat like gnats? Ask a squashed gnat what it thinks of moral stances and you will get a dusty answer.]

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