Despite this, I confess that my first reaction upon seeing him was one of pathetic gratitude, for he had brought the suit-case containing my clothing from my bedroom in the stables, and I was permitted five minutes in which to go upstairs with the flat-eyed Grayles and dress myself. As I did so, it occurred to me that the two men had only removed their protective head-pieces once they had come inside the house. I wondered whether this implied merely that Spears was taking no chances, or that some of the Retreat’s rightful inhabitants had eluded their custody. Not being aware of Jimmie’s abscondment, however, I concluded that they were probably concerned about the missing Percival.
I might have been cold, scared and profoundly exhausted, but this had not eclipsed my fellow-feeling for the children, who I was certain must be worse off in their captivity than I. When I returned downstairs, I gathered that Emily had been haranguing Spears on this very point. ‘For now, Miss Blandish, all we’re doing is keeping them under control,’ he said. ‘We still have plans for them – I should say our partners do. We had to pull in ten kinds of favour from your government to be here at all, and Mr Beech’s scientific friends had some requests as well. The kids are safe for now, though, you have my word.’
‘Safe “for now”?’ Emily repeated. ‘You must forgive me, Colonel, if I don’t feel your word’s worth much when you qualify it like that. What conditions are you holding them under, please? If it comes to that, what laws are you holding them under?’
Spears sighed. ‘We’re here with the authority of the British government, so you’ll forgive me if I’m disposed to let them handle the legal niceties. As for conditions – most of them are in their meeting-room, under armed guard. We’ve taken steps to neutralise their telepathic assault capabilities. Other than that we’re being as humane as we can – more than we have to be, take it from me.’
Further enquiries disclosed that the supernormal children had been fitted (forcibly, in many cases) with head-sets of their own. These were not the same type with which the soldiers had been issued, but simpler devices for generating noise of a loud, random and distracting nature: they were carefully designed to prohibit the wearer from exercising mental concentration in any degree, and would therefore, it was hoped, prevent the children from utilising their psychical abilities. To stop them from removing the machines, each of the children had been handcuffed to one of the chairs in the meeting-chamber. To me, as it is probably unnecessary to remark, this seemed a brutally barbaric way to treat a fellow human being, let alone a child, but to Spears it was an elementary precaution.
Emily asked after Violet in particular. I suppose that, just as I felt a particular bond towards Percival, so she felt protective towards the young urchin who had first drawn her into all this mess. Spears was reluctant to reply, but Emily was a persuasive, forthright young person, and the Colonel eventually revealed that Violet was being kept separately from the others. ‘She’s of interest to Mr Beech’s biologist friends, that’s all. They want to know more about her condition.’
‘Her condition? Is Violet ill?’ Emily stared at Spears. ‘You surely don’t mean she’s pregnant?’
‘So we understand, Miss Blandish. The information came from Mr Beech.’
‘Is this true, Beech?’ I asked. ‘I understood that none of them had yet managed to conceive.’
‘“No viable offspring” is I think the way they usually put it,’ Beech mused. ‘Who knows if this child would have been the one to break that run of luck?’
Emily, who was more concerned about Violet’s current circumstances than her child’s prospects, challenged Spears fiercely as to the morality of applying what she called ‘psychological torture’ to a lame and pregnant girl; but the Colonel was intractable. A short while later he left us, locking the three of us in once more.
As I would discover when I came to investigate the Colonel’s personal history, he had good reason to be cautious of the supernormals’ mental powers. Some of his story I obtained, reluctantly on both our parts, from Beech once the crisis was over, while other particulars came to me from certain of the political contacts whom I have made over the years (and who have not yet deserted me quite to a man).
St John Spears was born the heir to a prosperous Boston manufacturing family, but one whose paterfamilias believed in ‘toughening up’ his sons to prepare them for what he called the ‘cut and thrust’ of business life. At his father’s insistence, young St John had joined the Army shortly before the entry of the United States into the last war, and had distinguished himself by his great bravery on behalf of the men in his care. (He had, we discovered, been briefly billeted at the same small town in Northern France as Lechasseur, but neither man had any cause to remember the other.) In the late stages of the war Spears had been co-opted by the commanders of the Allies, given the precocious rank of Colonel, and set to leading a highly secret task-force which was intended to accompany the final Allied assault on Germany.
Throughout the war there had been rumours on both sides of German ‘miracle weapons’, created at the behest of the Führer himself, which would, it was asserted, result in uncontested victory once deployed. The consensus on the Allied side was that such stories were mostly propaganda (especially since by this time the Germans were conspicuously getting the worst of the conflict), but it was known that there had been actual programmes of research into extraordinary weapons: the V-1 bomb and V-2 rocket had been the macabre fruits of just such a project. Spears’ international team was charged with locating all such weaponry and capturing or, failing that, dismantling it.
In this goal, insofar as I can ascertain through layers of bureaucratic and military obfuscation, they enjoyed considerable success. After the German defeat, Spears testified to his opinion that potentially dangerous remains could still exist throughout Germany and the states which she had occupied. As a consequence of some political manoeuvring which I confess remains obscure to me, authority over his command passed from the Allies to the United Nations, and the unit ceased to be strictly military by formal definition, for all it remained so effectively. Spears was given leave to continue with his mission throughout the nations of Europe, including all four of the German occupation zones.
It is, naturally enough, extremely difficult to find out exactly which types of weapon Spears’ men were compelled to decommission during this time; and, such information not being germane to the matter in hand, I have not attempted to do so. What I have learned is that Spears began in late 1947 to encounter rumours of one particular programme of research, whose materials had not merely been left idle after the war but which was supposedly being prosecuted still, in secret and with funding from certain senior surviving members of the National Socialist party. The research supposedly involved lebenwaffen, ‘weapons that lived’, and it was Spears’ conjecture that this phrase referred to some form of artificial biological plague.
Spears’ investigations led him to Upper Bavaria, to a small mountain village where a private clinic run by one Dr Mannheim, late of the University of Ingolstadt, had remained open since the war despite a lack of obvious business. The clinic proved to be heavily guarded, and Spears’ men found themselves, for the first time since the conclusion of the official hostilities, embroiled in actual combat. Mannheim’s security guards defended the building fiercely, and the doctor himself was captured only after he had destroyed every one of his notes.
While attempting to consolidate his control of the complex, Spears discovered that the clinic contained a sealed inner compound. The captive Mannheim killed himself before he could be questioned concerning its contents.
Convinced now that he had uncovered a very dangerous plot against Germany’s erstwhile enemies, Spears called on the aid of the United States’ occupying forces in the region. Immunological experts were summoned from England and France, and stood by along with American soldiers as Spears’ men opened up the inner compound of the clinic. Out through the open doors st
epped seven children, each between four and eight years old, and wearing crisp starched uniforms of the Hitler Youth. Each of them held a hand-grenade, and the foremost of them, a muscular blond lad with a serious, intelligent face, told them in flawless English that his brothers, his sisters and he would die before being taken by the foes of the Reich.
This proved to be a feint. As the Americans began a hasty evacuation of all but a few negotiators, the children launched against the retreating men a psychical attack which, drawing corporately upon the siblings’ combined power, was several orders of magnitude more potent than that which Percival would unleash against Lechasseur two years later. Most of the soldiers and attendant experts collapsed, some of them undergoing spasms and haemorrhages. A handful, Spears among them, found themselves irrationally overtaken by blind animal panic, trampled their colleagues in their rush to quit the clinic, and ran and ran until exhaustion claimed them. Those who fled were the survivors: inside the compound, the supernormal children calmly primed their hand-grenades, positioned them amongst the incapacitated men, and made off into the mountains together.
Two weeks later in a psychiatric hospital in Munich, Colonel Spears recovered from a deep fugue, to discover that nine-tenths of his troops were dead, or had suffered irreparable damage to their bodies and minds. Bathetically, he also learned that he was now the owner of the family business, his father having died of a heart attack on being told of his son’s condition.
As soon as he was able to quit the hospital, Spears contacted the United Nations to resign his commission, and returned to America, where against the protests of the family he liquidated his business assets in their entirety. He then assembled those remnants of his task-force who still had the stomach for the job, and armed them for war.
Dr Mannheim’s brood of infant supermen had dispersed, scattering as best they could across the globe. Some of them had hidden themselves away in distant places, while some had sought refuge with the progeny of the Hampdenshire Project and its equivalents. Over the past two years, Spears’ unit (now operating without the authority of the League or that of any government, although they found that there was covert support for what they did in every country where supernormals had inadvertently been bred) had worked tirelessly to hunt down, harry and destroy the Mannheim children, and all the other communities of Homo peculiar where they had found succour.
Six of those children were already dead when Spears visited me at my house in London. The last of them remaining was little blue-eyed Freia.
A Personal Revelation
And now I must, I fear, divulge a matter which I was not able to explain to Emily then or later, and which I may feel sanguine enough to mention now purely because of my certain knowledge that the present volume will form my final literary communication with the world.
Like Emily, I had been much distressed by Spears’ news of Violet’s state of health, and of her captivity. I was, of course, equally unhappy at the thought of Mary, Freia and the others forced to endure handcuffing and the deprivation of their mental powers; although I found that I was thankful that at least Percival, my own particular protégé, was not among them. But this relief was dashed by the information, awkwardly imparted by Spears before he left us once again, that three of the children were already killed. They were the sentries Lukas and ‘Argos’, and the lovely Jelena, who had succeeded in relieving a soldier of his gun and had maimed several of his comrades, before Krovsky had taken a grenade and blown her up along with a considerable part of one of the outbuildings.
The situation was dreadful, whichever way one looked at it. From one point of view, these children, far from innocent perhaps, but very probably the greatest hope mankind had for the future, were being tormented and slain. From the other point of view, espoused by Beech and Spears, this necessary slaughter was occasioned by the stated determination of one small group of deviants to commit an atrocious act of genocide whose parallel had never been witnessed in the human race’s history. To the most uninformed observer, the moral aims of both the parties, once explained, would have been repugnant in the extreme.
To Emily Blandish, a woman with a strong and passionate sense of justice, such a state of affairs required some assignation of responsibility. This is not to say that she was a moraliser by habit, or vindictive by nature. I am quite certain that, had the two of us been free to act or even to contact the outside world, she would have done everything possible to aid her young friend, and her friend’s friends. But every means of egress from the cottage was either locked or barred, we were one physically slight young woman and an old man, and we had seen when the door had been opened that one of the soldiers stood guard outside. We were moreover constantly under the eye of another who, somewhat ambivalent though his current status might appear, had amply demonstrated by his actions his support for our captors and their goal. Under these circumstances, Emily’s natural rage at the abuse of our young friends had no other recourse than that of finding someone whom she might blame.
There was no shortage of candidates. Beech, as he willingly admitted, had betrayed the supernormals and allowed the soldiers to overrun the Retreat. Colonel Spears had ordered that Violet and the other children should be incarcerated; his men had shown, at the very least, a culpable moral negligence in unquestioningly following his commands. In some respects, guiltless though she undoubtedly was, I am sure that Emily even held herself accountable for the catastrophe: perhaps for allowing Violet to return to the Retreat, or for failing to challenge Beech earlier.
The one interested party whom Emily apparently did not blame for the disaster was me; and yet it seemed to me, as I sat listening to her furiously arguing principles with the old man, that in this, if in little else, she was entirely mistaken.
For I knew that the present sorry circumstances resulted directly from the Hampdenshire Project and its cousins. Without their fateful interference, Percival and all the others would have been ordinary children: undistinguished, dull, perhaps even stupid; but free from persecution, innocent of murderous intent, never required to shoulder the terrible responsibilities which accompanied their actual superhuman state. Without the eugenical programmes, there would have been no question of older humanity’s being brushed aside in the service of a greater end, nor of the premature cessation of all these young lives. Spears would have been an industrial capitalist, neither more nor less harmful than many others; Beech would have been a reclusive old man; Lechasseur and Percival would not be lost, and Emily and I would not be prisoners.
I had not been, as Beech claimed that he had, one of the master-minds behind the Hampdenshire conspiracy, nor even one of its ordinary members (if you have supposed that I was, then I am afraid I must disappoint you). Unlike the other actors of my generation in this story (Beech, my old friend Dr Tremaine, even the Bavarian doctor, Mannheim), I had never even been aware of the project’s existence.
And yet with all of these men I had made common cause.
My lectures, my novels, my books of philosophy: in all of them I had enthusiastically propounded the exact ideas on which the project, and its German analogue, had been based. I had written extensively and evangelically upon the subjects of eugenics and of sociological planning. I had not done so idly or without thought for the moral consequences, nor even with the intellectual detachment which one might expect of a philosopher; but zealously, with passion and the firm intention of bringing as many of my peers as I might around to my opinions.
I had insisted that mankind must take himself in hand and build himself anew: a better race of human being, I had assured my readers, was the only goal that was worth pursuing, the only goal which might in time bring all our other noble aspirations within the scope of our achievement. Those of us who were capable of seeing clearly (among whom, naturally, I accounted myself and all the others who had been inspired by the aloof idealism of such thinkers as Beech and Mr Wells: all those of us whom the old playwright had carelessly
and proprietorially claimed as his internationalists) must guide, cajole and, if necessary, coerce the masses who refused to see matters as we did.
Had Tremaine told me of his involvement in the Hampdenshire Programme (as, to tell the truth, I am still hurt that he did not), I would have applauded it whole-heartedly, praised its high ideals, begged to be allowed to be involved.
It may seem strange that this realisation came as a moral revelation to me. I had long known, after all, that Percival considered his species to be in competition with my own. I knew that when the crisis came it would involve no small deal of suffering for all. In theory I believed that, for the human spirit to prevail, the higher type of men might have to eliminate the lower altogether, and that this would entail the death of all I knew: my friends, my family, my country, and what was more sacred to me than any of these, the spiritual and the aesthetic values which Homo sapiens has struggled to establish for himself.
I told myself that I should rejoice in such a sacrifice; that I should revel in it, as in the sombre passage of a symphony which by its contrast renders the later movements all the gayer. I knew that this was how Percival himself should feel were our roles reversed and, perverse though it may have seemed to draw my spiritual understanding from a young boy, I believed that in this matter his insight was profound.
Yet I had always held out a small hope that Homo sapiens might improve himself still; that the grandchildren of my generation might yet scramble upright, and stand as equals with Percival and his kin; that, given sufficient impetus, the two species of men (assuming that they did not indeed become identical through interbreeding) might build a utopian future together.
Peculiar Lives Page 11