Mandrake stood watching him, impassive. He said softly, ‘For a man who has watched several thousand people die at his own hand, Dr Queston, you seem in remarkably good spirits.’
Suddenly there was an extraordinary menace in the quiet, standing figure, the intent face. Reflected light glittered for an instant on one of his eyes, and was gone; and Queston, exhausted by laughter, felt a hollowness inside his throat.
‘For God’s sake, Mandrake—’
‘You will understand, shortly. I imagine you remember what happened at Gloucester.’
‘Thorp-Gudgeon said—’
‘James Thorp-Gudgeon says what he is told to say, like most people. You and I know what happened. And I know that your mind was behind it all.’
‘My God,’ Queston said. ‘I think you really believe it.’
Mandrake picked up his glass from the table, and stared down at it. ‘It took us too long to find out.’ He swung round, suddenly savage. ‘In this world of ideas, the balance of power is delicate. The man who creates a belief such as yours is dangerous, Dr Queston, intensely dangerous. He interferes, he jams transmission. He can deflect forces of inconceivable strength into channels of disaster. He can by accident create a giant form of psycho-kinesis—and that is what you have done.’
‘You’re insane,’ Queston said in despair. ‘You’re puppets, and you think you are masters—and God help you, you think I’m one as well. I tell you, Mandrake, you and your toy-soldier terrorists can do nothing to stop what’s happening to the world. Something else is working on the little people you think you control, and the shaking of the earth is simply a sign of its impatience. There’s a force let loose all right, but it’s not of your making. And neither you nor I can lift a finger to stop it.’
‘And I tell you we can and shall,’ the Minister said. ‘You have shattered the work of ten years, my friend, and now you are going to make amends before it is too late.’
As he spoke, the querulous buzzing wail began again from behind the screen. It seemed very loud. Queston heard his own voice rise shrill over it: ‘What are you going to do? ’ Mandrake smiled politely. ‘Excuse me.’ He crossed behind Queston’s chair and disappeared: his voice came muffled: ‘Who?… Yes, put him on at once.’
There was a pause. Shaken as he had not been before, Queston drank the last of his whisky in a large gulp. ‘You are going to make amends…’ Would they kill him? Why hadn’t they killed him before? The man’s insane, insane. If he touches Beth—
‘Damn!’ Mandrake’s voice was shouting violently and alarmed down the telephone. He supposed it was a telephone. He stood up, quietly, and crossed to the screen. Mandrake was hissing: ‘Finish them, then. No, damn you, I don’t care how. And send emergency forces out to Bristol. Divert from Gloucester, there’s not much more they can do there. How’s the south coast? Good. The Exeter and Plymouth groups into Cornwall, if they can get in. No, not Portsmouth, the Channel will be affected soon. They’re all alerted, are they? What? God damn and—well, tell them to do their best.’ His voice dropped back under control. Queston moved quietly round so that he could see behind the screen. It was some moments before he believed what he saw.
Mandrake was sitting before a bank of dials and switches like the control-panel of an aircraft; red lights glowed, needles flickered, with no indication of what any of them meant. All radio? He looked at Mandrake; a microphone jutted towards his face, he clicked one switch back, and pressed another. A yellow light shone.
‘Klaus? Is that you? Have you heard—yes. Yes. Very well. Finish as soon as you can, and come down here.’ He pressed the switch slowly up again, and sat very still. The yellow light flicked out. He sat looking straight ahead, into the dials, through the dials. Queston sensed fear, and anger; involuntarily he moved back.
The Minister rose to his feet and came out into the room, and for those few steps his walk was old, ancient, puzzled in defeat. He looked at Queston. He said, his voice flat: ‘Do you know what a tsunami is?’
‘A tidal wave, of sorts. Tropical. I saw one in Chile once. Monstrous things.’
‘Caused by earthquake,’ Mandrake said. He stared, and the age creasing his face smoothed and straightened into the calm confident menace of before. His voice rose.
‘A tsunami hit the west coast of Britain half an hour ago. Eighty-foot waves, Dr Queston, moving at several hundred miles an hour. I have little hope for the western towns of Cornwall and Wales. The destruction sweeping up the Severn at this moment is indescribable.’
‘My God,’ Queston said, appalled. He thought of the Chilean chaos he had seen twenty years before. The sea had retreated, suddenly and terribly, leaving a great impossible expanse of mud and sand and weed-green rocks, and then roared in again in a raging towering brown wall of surf, a great hundred-foot terror pouring noise and death and ruin irresistibly through a dozen towns. He had been safe in the hills; but after that the landslides had begun. He tried to picture what the ravaged Welsh coast must look like, and felt cold. He thought of words he had forgotten: himself, comforting a small sad man on a deserted railway station. ‘We’ll go to Wales, we’ll find your wife… ’ Not much to find now.
He was horrified, but he knew he was not surprised. The censor was watching, calculating, in his brain, as it had always done. This now would be the end; the knowledge, like the memory of a sweating dream, that had lived with him for years; that had shouted too late in his book. He felt almost relieved. This he had expected, but they had been too intent on their frantic race of suspicion, and he had not cared to do more than stand aloof and prophesy. And then the earth had woken, then it had begun, and Mandrake and the rest used as tools but too deaf to know it; always deaf, blind, insensate, falling into the oldest, most fatal error, basing their system on the small mind of man.
And the pride of their belief in it, he thought, looking at the Minister’s taut grey face, was the worst blindness of all. You might almost believe it the old warning come true: the deadliest of sins, bringing the fall and end of the world—
But not the end of the world. Only the end of man.
They stood a yard apart, facing each other, and the full extraordinary force of Mandrake was in his eyes.
‘Ten years’ work,’ said the slow voice. ‘Ten years’s control. A nation at peace, and now—this. Your beliefs have grown like a cancer. You should have been destroyed long ago, before it could have begun. Before your mind could have given birth to this vehicle of destruction. You should have read Price, Dr Queston. You should have read one thing he wrote. He said: “Ideas are dangerous things, because they have a tendency, however slight, to come true.” ’
The madness of it was impossible. ‘You cannot believe,’ Queston said desperately, ‘that the earth is shaken only by my belief that it’s able to shake.’
‘There are others like you. Christopher Oakley, and others. We have eradicated most, but there are too many still. The rootless, aimless ones, the old danger to any society. O, they haven’t your originality. Their thoughts are vague, but they are similar enough. Your ideas are the core round which their thoughts have clung.’
‘Without their knowing, of course. Up in the collective bloody subconscious. Shaking the world.’
‘Don’t sneer, my friend,’ Mandrake said softly. ‘You are a heretic, but like most heretics you will recant.’
Queston sat down deliberately on the arm of a chair. A packet of cigarettes lay on the table, with a lighter. He took one, and lit it. Blowing out smoke, clinging to the absurdity of bravado, he said: ‘Do you propose to kill me?’
‘O no,’ Mandrake said. The door of the room opened, but neither of them moved their gaze; they stared taut as bull and toreador (and which, Queston thought grimly, is which?). ‘Killing you would not kill the ideas you have created. The mind that made them must make others, with the same conviction, to nullify their force. It may be too late, but there is nothing else to do now. You are Luther. His beliefs started a fire, but when he saw the flames he hel
ped to put them out.’
‘Perhaps I’m Latimer,’ Queston said. ‘He was burned.’
‘But you would burn the whole world with you, David, and no martyr has as much licence as that.’
It was another voice, and it came from behind him. He saw Mandrake’s eyes shift. He turned, and at once he knew the black hair and the square red-patched face and the grey eyes. He said nothing.
‘They think they’ll be in touch with the south coast again in half an hour, Minister,’ Brunner said. ‘Some kind of electrical discharge. Of course, they could try the other way—’
‘No,’ Mandrake said shortly. ‘On no account. Far too dangerous, now.’
‘I told them so.’ Brunner was like an eager black puppy, gazing up with something like love. Watching, Queston felt the old dislike, and a new contempt.
‘Take Dr Queston up there,’ Mandrake said. ‘Let him—talk—to Atkinson.’
Brunner smiled unpleasantly. ‘You’ll like Atkinson, David. Regius Professor of Medicine. A neuro-surgeon.’
It wasn’t real, it was two madmen playing a child’s game—and then Queston thought of Beth, and was flooded suddenly with a desperation more urgent than anything he had ever felt before. He grasped Mandrake’s arm: ‘For God’s sake, man, get out of this before it’s too late. Think that you might be wrong, just for a moment. Can’t you see, it’s a two-way channel you’re using—all the time you think you’re in control, the control’s working the other way, on you.’
‘Ah yes, the atomic intelligence,’ the Minister said contemptuously. ‘The world defending itself from destruction. You fool, Queston—these fantasies themselves are the destroyers. Nothing has power but belief, and the more perverted the belief, the more disastrous its power.’ He shook his arm free, and he was something from the passionate remembered arguments of Queston’s youth: the entrenched academic, unshakeable this side of death, putting his life’s obdurate case. ‘I stake my hand on the hidden powers of the mind of man, and I have all history to prove me right. And you have nothing but superstition and myth.’
Brunner sniggered. ‘Back to religion. He sees himself as Noah.’
The switchboard was buzzing again. ‘Take him away,’ Mandrake said. ‘I brought peace of mind to the people of this country, out of a world going to ruin, and no one is going to destroy that work.’
Queston moved to stand in his way, ignoring Brunner. He laughed. ‘Peace of mind? Under the cosy iron hand of the Ministry police?’
‘Rubbish,’ Brunner said. ‘We have emergency powers.’
‘The people of this country are nothing but a lot of hypnotized ostriches. Have you seen their eyes?’
‘Of course,’ Mandrake said. He looked at him, smiling, and Queston felt his stomach twist as he saw the old appalling blind stare, the other-listening, the eyes looking out of a mind connected elsewhere. What was this man?
Brunner came towards him. Queston said quickly, playing for time: ‘There must be a reason for it all. You are too secret.’ The buzzing behind the screen rose insistently. ‘You achieved peace by disarming,’ he said, and Mandrake paused, waving Brunner to answer the noise.
‘Yes.’
‘All of you?’
‘Yes,’ Mandrake said easily. ‘A general disarmament treaty was signed five years ago. All the nuclear powers—the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, China and Federal Europe.’
‘Yet three months ago there was a major outbreak of nuclear war?’
Mandrake smiled. ‘You know as well as I that there has been no such thing. It is politic to have people believe so for a little while—men can have peace given them, but they will not perpetuate it unless they have learned humility, and gratitude. There is considerable trouble outside, certainly, but it will be very rapidly calmed when the spiritual force that we are about to generate in this country reaches its highest level. Surely you don’t seriously believe that we would all have disarmed for fun?’
Queston’s mind ached; he did not understand. Certainly he knew that the great explosions of three months ago, that Oakley had spoken about, had not been bombs: they had been the first eruptions of the Intelligence, and what they had done to the countries where they had taken place was best not imagined. But what did Mandrake think they had been? Was there any conceivable chance that they could have come from some other cause? For if Mandrake were honest in what he said about general disarmament, there was an unnerving possibility that he, David Queston, had been wrong all along. Total disarmament for five years, absolute trust between nations, took away the threat of the greatest holocaust. Freed from that, why should the earth rise against man?
He said uncertainly: ‘How sure can you be that the disarmament treaty is fully observed?’ And Mandrake laughed in unaffected amusement, and he knew suddenly that he had not been wrong after all.
‘Politicians are not altogether naive, Dr Queston. One can be sure of nothing in this world. But our anti-missile missiles are exceptionally effective now, and of course we have the eight-minute warning—I have direct lines from this room to the radar stations in Yorkshire, Essex and Northern Ireland. And the unanswerable strength of all those three, of course is the laser system.’
‘The laser system?’
‘Ah yes. I was forgetting your remoteness from the world. Not the tame little lasers you would remember, the high-energy beams that brought us all our television shows so much more effectively. A much fiercer animal. Did you know the way lasers were used in industry—to cut metals, diamonds and so forth? This is our laser, going hand in hand with the radar—but a hundred thousand times as intense as that cutting beam. Guarding these shores, Dr Queston, we have beams of radiation as hot as the sun, that can be focused on any object rash enough to come within range of the radar scopes. And instantly that object will be vaporized.’
‘Charming,’ Queston said. ‘I see you have great faith in your neighbours.’
Mandrake waved one hand impatiently. ‘But the greatest safeguard of all, naturally, will always be the deterrent itself.’
Queston stared, wondering if he had imagined what he heard.
‘The deterrent? When you’ve disarmed?’
‘Nuclear disarmament is a simple process. To disband an army, now that is an undertaking. And an even bigger one to put it together again. But a bomb? We have none stockpiled, but do you think it would be difficult to put that right, if there were need? Do you think the peaceful uses of nuclear energy differ very much, in basic terms, from the business of exploiting its destructive power? Swords or ploughshares, the muscles behind them are the same. We agreed to keep the status quo, we suppressed the imperialist instincts, but do you think any of us could afford to forget that?’
Queston said slowly: ‘So there is no trust in your peaceful world.’
‘Shall we say there is no risk,’ said the Minister.
Switches clicked; Brunner swung the screen impatiently back and said, from the great bank of dials: ‘They’re worried, sir. The interference has stopped, but they can’t get anything from the stations in the south. A faint signal comes from Dover, but apparently it makes no sense.’
‘An emergency code, probably,’ Mandrake said irritably.
‘Tell them to check.’
‘They have, sir. They say it’s deliberate gibberish.’ Queston felt a curious quiver of anticipation.
‘Damn.’ Mandrake paused, irresolute. ‘There’s only one thing we can do.’
Brunner nodded, bright-eyed, and licked his lips. His tongue made a sticky, greedy sound against the skin.
‘Only one thing,’ Mandrake said again. He was savouring the words, mock-reluctance masking the same greediness, like a man denying praise. Queston looked uneasily from one to the other. Then Mandrake moved, suddenly decisive. ‘They checked the video power last night?’
‘Yes,’ Brunner said. ‘It won’t run for long, though.’
‘Long enough, I think. Let me come there.’
He took the seat before the
flickering, flashing panel, and looked back towards the broad glass screens that Queston had seen in the brick-pillared wall opposite the door. One switch clicked, and the lights in the room dropped to a dim glow. Queston blinked, and gasped. It was blue light: the same peculiarly insistent blue glow that had shone in the nightmare cave at Gloucester. Brunner glanced at him.
‘Minister, we’re losing time. I should take him up to Atkinson’s people.’
‘Very well,’ Mandrake said, intent over the dials. Queston felt for the first time that they were real people, would do real things; his fingers curled into his palms, and he waited for Brunner to come near.
Then Mandrake said suddenly: ‘Ten minutes won’t make all that difference.’ He was looking at Queston with a small austere smile, and again the shock of recognition came: Queston saw, incredulously, the half-withdrawn, half-proud eagerness of one scholar who speaks to another. ‘ I should like you to see this,’ he said; and it was the classic approach of the man who has an experiment, theory, thesis, recognizable only by an equal; and so few equals that any one of them must be seized while he is there as audience.
And then the fine chord snapped, and Mandrake was changed again, rougher-grained, the politician. The smile was a different smile. He turned back. The pride lost its reticence, became open, almost lascivious. ‘You have never seen anything like this before, Dr Queston. Few men have ever dreamed of it. You will see that I am right about everything that we can do, and be convinced at last, I think… but I’m afraid you won’t remember it for long, if Professor Atkinson is as efficient as he has always been.’
‘So that’s it,’ said the laconic swift censor in Queston’s mind; but then the thought was doused as soon as it came.