“Go to hell!”
“Think what a long journey you and I have come, Anna! Here we are together in this house; perhaps in one sense we have always been here. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that we don’t understand each other. Perhaps we hate each other, who knows? We make the journey together. It’s like crossing a glacier—in moments of danger, all the various differences between us become unimportant and we are forced to help each other to survive. There’s no way of making sense out of such testing journeys until we have the tools to understand what human life is about.”
Anna fumbled in her pocket for a tissue. One nostril was blocked with incipient cold. “I don’t want your philosophizing.”
“But you must understand what I’m saying. Nobody lives out their life without being brought up against a sudden moment when they see themselves as in a screen or mirror and ask themselves, ‘What am I doing here?’ Once, it used to be a religious question. Then people started to interpret it more in socio-economic terms. Your generation tried to answer it in terms of individual escape, and a poor job they made of it. I’m trying to provide an evolutionary solution which will take care of all the other aspects.”
He sounded so reasonable. She was baffled by his changes of mood, always had been.
“If you didn’t want to have me here, you should have phoned and told me so. How can you ill-treat me so? I’ve never harmed you. Pointing that gun at me! I just want to go away—I don’t know whether I can ever recover from what you’ve done to me.”
“You keep saying that. Try and pull yourself together, Anna. We are father and daughter—nothing can ever come between us, not even if I had to kill you.”
He had put his arm round her, but now she drew away, looking at him with a face of dread, seeing only a blankness in his eyes and a cruel estrangement round his mouth.
“I want to go now, father, if you don’t mind. Back home. Please let me go. I’ve never done you any harm. Let me go and I’ll never bother you again!”
He was as unmoving as stone.
“Never done me any harm? What child had not harmed it’s parents? Didn’t you, every day of your life, come between your mother and me with your insatiable craving for attention? Didn’t you drive her into an early grave with your perpetual demands? But for you, wouldn’t she be here, on this very bed, with us now?”
“Your evolutionary theory, father—are you sure you ought to talk about it with Nicholson? Shouldn’t you publish a paper on the idea first? Or write to Nature, or something?”
He was standing now and looking down on her. She had hunched herself up on the bed with her legs tucked under her.
“You’re frightened, aren’t you? Why should you be interested in my theories? As—”
The roar of a plane swamped his sentence. For a moment, the room was darkened as the machine passed low overhead. It seemed to distract Macguire’s attention. He wandered over to the window.
“The sooner we get control of reality, the better. One of these days, they’re not just going to fly over—they’ll drop an H-bomb on me, right smack down the chimney, since they can see their warnings don’t scare me off.” He turned back to her. “I must prepare my notes for Nicholson’s arrival tomorrow. You’d better come down and clear the place up. If there’s time, I’ll give you the demonstration I plan to give him and see how you like it. This time, you’d better attend.”
“Oh, I will, I will, father.”
He walked out of the room, still clutching the saw in his hand. She hesitated, then climbed off the bed and followed him downstairs.
“The front door’s locked, by the way, Anna, and I have the key in my pocket.”
“I wasn’t thinking of going out.”
“No? Well, it’s raining, but just in case you were . . .”
He went into the living room, pushed past the partition, and sat down at his console as if nothing had happened. She went into the kitchen, leaned her elbows on the window sill, and buried her face in her hands.
After a while, the involuntary shaking in her limbs died away and she looked up. The house was absolutely silent. No, not absolutely. The camera made a faint registration of its presence. With very intent listening, she could hear slight movements from her father in the next room. She looked at her watch, decided to make a cup of tea, and started the soothingly traditional preliminaries of filling the kettle, switching it on, and getting down teapot and tea-caddy from the shelf.
“Like a dutiful daughter, you are making me a cup too.” A loud-speaker.
“Of course, father.”
How could she persuade him that she loved him? It was impossible, because she did not love him. She had failed to love him. Shouldn’t love have sprung up in her spontaneously, however he behaved, the way spring flowers—the modest and incorrigible snowdrops—bud and blossom even in the teeth of chilly winds? The truth was that she understood so little about herself; perhaps she even hoped that he would carry out his direst threats.
When the tea was made, she put everything on a tray and carried it through to him. Felix smiled and motioned her to put it on a side-table.
As she did as he indicated, she saw the carbine. Her father had stood it in the corner behind him. It was ready for action, she thought—was he secretly planning to grab it up and shoot her?
“There are some chocolate biscuits in the cupboard over the sink, if you’d like to get them. You always enjoyed chocolate biscuits, Anna.”
“I still do, as it happens.” She fetched the biscuits.
He drank his tea absently, staring into the miniature screens, switching the view from one or another on to the larger screen, scrutinising his static universe. Finally he settled on a panorama of the dining room through Camera Six, with the table, loaded with electronic gear, to one side of the screen and most of it filled by wall and desolate fireplace. This cheerless scene held his attention for so long that his tea grew cold by his elbow.
Anna sat staring towards the carbine.
At last, he sighed and looked up at her.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? Human environment with humans abstracted. Almost a new art form—and utterly neglected. But that’s neither here nor there.”
Silence.
“Father, would it annoy you to explain to me what you see in the screen?”
“I see everything. The history of the world in that one shot. The grate, designed to burn fossil trees trapped in the earth since they grew in the jungles of the Carboniferous Age. Look at its Art Nouveau motif on the black-lead canopy. AH obsolete. A great age of mankind gone for ever. Fires will never burn there again, prehistoric energy never be released there. Now the only function of that fireplace is to form part of this picture. The function of the picture is to activate part of my brain. My brain has been activated by retinal designs, formed in this house, never viewed before. I view them every day. They have made me conscious of my own brain structure, which in turn has modified that structure, so that I have been able to fit together facts—facts available to anyone through evolutionary study—and make them into a new whole, Anna. You’d never understand.”
He paused and drank down his cold tea.
Keeping herself under control, Anna reflected on the virtue of sanity; it was not half as boring as madness. With sudden impatience, she said, “Spare me the reasoning, please. Give me the facts. What exactly is this theory you keep bragging about?”
He looked rather guiltily up at her. “You must let it all soak in gradually. It needs practice to understand.”
“I’m sorry, father, I have a job to go back to. You may not think it important but it is important to me. If you will not show me straight-forwardly, then I shall have to leave before it gets dark.”
He digested that. “I hoped you’d stay and have a bite of supper with me.” His mild manner suggested he had forgotten his earlier threats.
“Why should I, after the way you have treated me? Explain at once or I shall go.”
He shrugged. “As you will. If yo
u feel up to it.”
Pushing his teacup out of the way, he fiddled v :h various switches, rose, and messed about behind the partition, before saying, “Right, then, watch this carefully.”
She dragged her eyes from the weapon in the corner.
The big screen lit. Anna looked with interest, but there was nothing except yet another view of the interior of the house. This was Camera Three working, moving slowly, so that the viewpoint descended from the upper landing to the hall, to a slow-moving shot of the hall cupboard and the ever-open door through to the garage. In the small section of the garage revealed, the door into the workshop could be seen. Only the eternal gleaming black cables, running across the floor, gave any sense of life. Then she saw a shadow move in the workshop. A man came through into the garage. She gasped.
“It’s all right. This is tapex you’re watching.”
The man emerged into the hall. It was Felix, rather blank-faced, hair slanting across forehead. Without pausing, he moved forward and along the corridor towards the kitchen.
Now the scene was a blank again, unpopulated. The camera eye travelled over it in a leisurely and dispirited fashion. A shadow moved in the depths of the picture and a man passed from workshop to garage. Anna instinctively leaned forward, expecting something—she did not know what: something to frighten her. The man came out of the garage into the hall. It was her father, somewhat blank-faced. Without pausing, he moved out of camera range in the direction of the kitchen.
“Keep watching,” Felix ordered.
The screen still showed only the view of the hall, its shadows, and the angles and perspectives created by the doorways beyond—a pattern that, by constant wearying repetition, seemed at once to annihilate sense and to acquire an ominous significance of its own: just as the single note of a dripping tap, listened to long enough, becomes an elusive tune. When something stirred in the shadows beyond the furthest doorway, she was prepared for it, prepared for the man who stepped from workshop to garage and then, after a pause, from garage to hall. It was her father, wearing his old sweater. Without pausing, blank-faced, he walked towards the kitchen and was lost from view.
The hall was empty. In a brief while, the whole insignificant action was repeated as before. Then it was repeated again. Each time, the same thing happened.
At last the screen went blank, just when Anna thought she would have to scream if it happened once more.
“What have you seen, Anna?”
“Oh—you know. You coming out of the garage a million times!”
“Live or on tape?”
“On tape, obviously. The first time round, I thought it was live—well, except that you were here beside me. What does all that prove?”
“If I’d have been hidden in the kitchen, you couldn’t have told what you saw from live. Or any of the re-runs, if they had been shown first.”
“I suppose not.”
“How many times did you see me come into the hall?”
“I’ve lost count. Twelve? Eighteen?”
“Nine times. Do you imagine they were all re-runs of one occasion on which I came into the hall?”
“Obviously.”
“It’s not obvious. You’re wrong. What you witnessed was me coming into the hall on three different occasions—three different days, in fact. Each was re-run three times. And you didn’t spot the difference?”
“One time must have been very like another.” She was weary of the nonsense of his solemnity. “You always looked just the same. The light always looked just the same. Obviously the house always looked just the same.”
“Okay. You’re talking about the scientific theory of convergence.”
He pressed a key, ran the videotape until he was once more stepping from garage to hall; then he froze the action. Staring out at his image, he said, “Obviously, ways of getting from one room to another are always closely alike. Right? So close you mistook them for identical. But they aren’t identical. I’ve tried to remove the difference between one day and the next in this environment, as early as I can. Yet I—the living!—am aware of the change between one day and the next, as you were not when witnessing that change on the screen.
“Animals that adapt to similar environments and pursue the same inclinations also tend to resemble each other. However alien the animals themselves may be from each other, there are only a limited number of ways of getting through a doorway or living in a desert or swimming in a sea. To fly, you have to have wings; there are animals which mimic birds in that respect, and they are examples of convergence.”
He pressed a key in front of him, and a shot of the wall of the workshop came up, a grey view with nothing on which to fix attention except three blown-up photographs ranged one under the other on the wall. The photographs depicted three gigantic sea-going creatures, each remarkably similar to the next in its functional streamlined form. Felix left them in view for a while before speaking.
“This is part of the big game I have been hunting for forty years, you might say. You know what these creatures are?”
“Are they all sharks?” Anna asked.
A plane roared overhead. The house vibrated, the picture on the screen shimmered and split into a maze of lines and dots. When it reassembled and the noise died, Felix said, “The top one is a shark. The next one down is a porpoise. The bottom one is an ichthyosaur. They all look alike—prime examples of convergence; yet one is a cartilaginous fish, one a marine mammal, and the other an extinct marine reptile—inwardly, they are nothing alike.”
She fidgeted a little. It was growing dark and she wanted to be away from the house and its insane pedant. The rain had ceased; all was still outside, with the stillness of dripping trees.
“That’s hardly a discovery, father. It has been known for a long time.”
His head drooped, his shoulders slumped. She feared that he was about to burst into one of his insane rages. When he looked up again, his face was distorted with anger, so that she hardly recognized him, as if he had undergone some uncharted Jekyll-Hyde transformation. Instinctively, she took a step back. But he spoke with a measure of calm.
“You do not believe in me, you stupid vegetable . . . Have the wit at least to hear me out when I try to explain in layman’s language and by analogy. My discovery is that there are creatures as strange as fish and extinct reptiles that go about the world under the same forms as man!”
Anna’s first terrified thought was that he was living proof of his own hypothesis. Was there not, in that mottled jowl, that prognathous face, those blazing eyes, something that argued against idiothermous origin and whispered of a reptile brain lurking like an egg inside that bony nest of skull?
He stood up and stood glaring into her face, so that they confronted each other only a few inches apart.
“Reptiles structurally similar to man,” he said. “Forms almost identical, intentions entirely different. Why is our world being destroyed? Why are the seas being polluted, why are nuclear weapons proliferating towards a holocaust, why do human beings feel increasingly powerless? Because there is an enemy in our midst as different from us as moon is from sun—an enemy intent on wiping out human civilization and reverting to a Jurassic world it still carries in its mind. These enemies are old, Anna, far older than mankind, still carrying a heritage from the Mesozoic in which they were formed, still hoping to bring the Mesozoic back down about our ears!”
With a mingling rush of light and dark in the room, another plane roared overhead, making everything in the room shake, Anna included.
Felix rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. “There they go! They are gradually assuming power, and power for destruction. Men develop the, technology, reptile-men take over its results and use them for destructive ends!”
She clutched at her throat to help bring out her voice. “Father—it’s a terrifying idea you have . . . but . . . but it’s—isn’t it just your fancy?”
The clouded swollen look was still on his face.
“There is archae
ological evidence. Nicholson knows. He has some of it. Evidence from the past is all too scarce. There’s my quarrel with Darwinism—a fine picture of evolution has been built up on too little evidence. The layman believes that deceptively whole picture of dinosaurs dying out and mammals developing, and finally homo sapiens rising out of several extinct man-forms; but the layman fails to realize how the picture is in fact conjured up merely from a few shards of bone, a broken femur here, a scatter of yellowed teeth there . . . And the picture we now accept is wrong in several vital instances.
“You may know that there is no understanding of why all the species of the two dinosaur genera, the saurischia and the ornithischia, suddenly died out. Both the saurischians and the ornithischians were capable of tremendous variety, adapting to all kinds of conditions, even achieving flight, covering the globe. Both produced creatures which walked on their hind legs like man. But the saurischians also produced a man-creature, evolving from the theropod line.”
“Is there physical proof of the development of this creature?”
“There is no physical proof of the development of any dinosaur—for all we know to the contrary, the brontosaur and tyrannosaur may have popped out of existence overnight . . . But a few remains of a late development of reptile-man have been found. You have heard of Neanderthal Man, I presume?”
“Certainly. You aren’t going to tell me that Neanderthal Man was a development from a dinosaur!”
“He evolved from the same original stock as the dinosaurs. He was probably always few in number, but he helped kill off the big dinosaurs. The popular folk idea that men were about when the dinosaurs lived is nothing less than the truth—perhaps it’s a sort of folk memory.”
“Can I put the light on? It’s getting dark in here. But you say the line died out?”
“I didn’t say that. The so-called Neanderthal is popularly said to have died out. There’s no evidence, though. The Neanderthal reptile-men merged with humanity—mammal-humanity, and we have never been able to sort them out since.”
Strangeness Page 7