by Colin Wilson
So in a way, he already knew everything I told him. It instantly made sense to him. The others understood it intellectually, and digested it slowly, like a python digesting a rat, in a state of intellectual excitement. Holcroft knew it all instinctively.
Now this was far more important than it sounds. For Reich and Fleishman and myself and the Graus were also intellectuals. We could not get out of the habit of trying to use the intellect to explore the world of the mind, and this tended to waste time—like an army commanded by a general who refuses to act without making out documents in triplicate and consulting headquarters about everything. Holcroft was a kind of ‘medium’; not a spirit medium, although this is closely related. His sphere was not the ‘spirit’ but the instincts. On that first evening, we were able to ‘key him in’ to our telepathic circle; his inner ear was naturally attuned to us. And a new hope sprang up among the five of us. Could this man dive deeper into the mind than we could? Could he give us some idea of what the parasites were up to?
For the next two or three days, we spent most of the time in our hut, teaching our new pupils all we knew. Our telepathic powers made this easy. But we also came to recognize that we had overlooked one of the most important problems of phenomenology. When you teach a man that he has been completely mistaken about his own nature all his life, it is as unsettling as suddenly giving him a million pounds. Or it is like taking a sexually frustrated man, and giving him the run of a harem. He suddenly discovers that he can turn on moods of poetry like a tap, that he can heat up his emotions to a kind of incandescence. He realizes, with a shock, that he has been handed the key to greatness: that all the world’s so-called ‘great men’ were men who had a mere glimmering of these powers which he now possesses in abundance. But he has spent all his life taking a relatively modest view of himself. His old personality has achieved a certain density through thirty or forty years of habit. It refuses to wither away overnight. But the new personality is also exceptionally powerful. He becomes a battle ground of two personalities. And he wastes an enormous amount of energy in all this confusion.
Holcroft, as I have said, was an excellent pupil; but the other four had far more strongly developed personalities. And they had no real feeling of danger or urgency: after all, the rest of us had survived an attack from the parasites, so why shouldn’t they?
I am not blaming these four men. It was almost inevitable.
Every university faces a version of this same problem: students who find their new life so fascinating that they don’t want to waste it in hard work.
It cost the five of us a considerable mental effort to prevent Fleming, Philips, Leaf and Ebner from throwing all discipline to the winds. We had to watch them constantly. These new ideas were a powerful intoxicant; their minds were so stimulated that they wanted to splash around like happy schoolboys in a river. While they should have been reading Husserl or Merleau Ponty, they would start to remember scenes of childhood or past love affairs. Ebner was a music lover who knew all the operas of Wagner by heart, and as soon as he was left to himself, he would begin to hum some theme from the Ring, and immediately sink into a passive ecstasy. Philips was something of a Don Juan, and would recall past conquests until the atmosphere vibrated with a sexual excitement that the rest of us found distracting. In defence of Philips, I should say that his sexual adventures had always been a search for something he never found; now he had suddenly found it, and he couldn’t stop himself from holding constant post mortems on the past.
On the third day after our arrival at Base 91, Holcroft came over to talk to me. He said:
‘I’ve got a feeling that we’re making fools of ourselves.’
I asked with foreboding what he meant.
‘I don’t quite know. But when I practise trying to pick up their wavelength’ (he meant the parasites) ‘I get a feeling of great activity. They’re up to something.’
It was maddeningly frustrating. We possessed the great secret; we had warned the world. And yet, in a fundamental sense, we were as ignorant as ever. Who were these creatures? Where did they come from? What was their ultimate aim? Were they really intelligent, or were they as unintelligent as the maggots in a piece of cheese?
We asked ourselves these questions often enough, and had arrived at a few tentative answers. Human intelligence is a function of man’s evolutionary urge; the scientist and the philosopher hunger for truth because they are tired of being merely human. Now, was it possible that these creatures were intelligent in the same way? Since they were our enemies, it was hard to believe. But history has taught us that intelligence is no guarantee of benevolence. At all events, if they were intelligent, perhaps we might propose a truce? Again, if they were intelligent, perhaps they might realize that they were beaten.
But were they beaten?
As soon as Holcroft had spoken to me about his suspicions, I called the others together. It was after breakfast, on a clear, bright morning, with plenty of warmth in the air. A few hundred yards away, a group of airmen in white gym tunics were drilling, and we could hear the shout of the sergeant’s voice.
I explained my fears, and said that I thought we would have to make an attempt to learn something more about the parasites. We asked our four ‘pupils’ to make an effort to establish telepathic link with us. This was going to be a dangerous operation, and we needed all the support we could get. After half an hour of practice, Leaf suddenly announced that he was getting us clearly. The others had exhausted themselves in the effort to reach us, so we told them to forget it, and relax. We did not say what was in our minds: that in the event of an attack from the parasites, they would be in the greatest danger, since they had had so little practice in using their mental powers.
We drew the blinds, locked the doors, and all sat and concentrated hard. I had become so used to this operation that I did it almost automatically. The first step was identical with the one I take when I wish to fall asleep; complete dismissal of the outside world, forgetfulness of my body. Within seconds, I was plunging downwards into the darkness of my own mind. The next step took some practice. I had to detach myself from my ordinary physical personality. The intelligent part of me had to remain wide awake, and move down into this world of dreams and memories.
This operation is, in a way, similar to what happens if you are having a nightmare, and you tell yourself: ‘This is only a dream; I am asleep in my bed; I must wake up.’ Your daylight self is present, but it is bewildered in its world of phantasmagoria. I soon found that I could descend through the layer of dreams retaining full consciousness—a difficult trick, since human beings use the body as a kind of reflector of consciousness. It is a strange, silent world, the dream layer of the mind, one feels literally like swimming under the sea. For a beginner, this can be the most dangerous part of the experience. The body acts as an anchor on the mind. In one of his poems, Yeats thanks God that he ‘has body and its stupidity’ to rescue him from his nightmares. The body acts as a great weight on our thoughts, and prevents them from floating all over the place. It is rather like being on the moon, and only weighing a few pounds. If you take an ordinary step, you go flying through the air like a balloon. Thoughts also gain this demonic energy when freed of the body’s gravity. If the thinker happens to be a morbid sort of person, his thoughts immediately become terrifying devils. And unless he happens to know that these are his thoughts, and that they have no existence apart from him, he may become panic-stricken and make everything ten times worse. It is like a man in an aeroplane going into a steep dive, and failing to realize that he is unconsciously pushing the joystick forward.
As I bumped gently downwards through my dreams and memories, I took care to remain passive, to ignore them. If I made the mistake of concentrating on any one of them, it would instantly expand and become a universe of its own. For example, I encountered the smell of a pipe tobacco called Ginger Tom that my grandfather used to smoke. It had been so long since I had remembered it that I paused and allowed my interest to b
e drawn towards it. Immediately, I became aware of my grandfather, and of the back garden of his Lincolnshire cottage. In fact, I was in the back garden, and it was recreated in a minute detail that, under different circumstances, would have convinced me of its reality. I made a determined effort to dismiss it, and in a moment was again sinking down into the warm darkness.
This darkness is full of life, and it is not simply a reflection of the life of the body. It is the life that swarms like electricity throughout the universe. So the lower regions of the mind have been referred to as the ‘nursery’. There is an intensely alive feeling of warmth and innocence; it is a world of children without bodies.
Below the ‘nursery’, there is an emptiness that is like the emptiness of interstellar space, a sort of nothingness. This is a particularly terrifying region where it is easy to lose your bearings. In all my early experiments, I always fell asleep in this region and woke up many hours later. There is nothing to reflect back one’s feeling of individuality, or even of existence, so that a single moment’s inattention loses the thread of consciousness.
This was as far as I could go. Even then, I had to allow myself to rise periodically to the nursery region, to concentrate my attention.
During all this time, our brains remained in telepathic contact. This is not to say that all seven of us were swimming side by side, so to speak. Each was alone; it was the brains that maintained contact. All this meant was that we were able to help one another by a kind of remote control. If I had fallen asleep when I paused in my grandmother’s garden, the others could have wakened me. If one of us was attacked, we would all ‘wake up’ instantly and unite to repulse the attack. But at that depth, you were on your own.
It was now that my remote contact with Holcroft told me that he was still descending. I was filled with admiration. I had become absolutely weightless at that depth. My consciousness was like a bubble that wanted to rise. I knew there was some ‘knack’ of getting deeper, but acquiring a knack takes a certain amount of exploration, of practice, and if it is all you can do to remain conscious, this is impossible. Holcroft obviously had the knack already.
There is almost no sense of time in these regions of the mind —it passes and yet it does not pass, if this makes any sense. Since there is no body to get impatient, there is something neutral about its passage. I could tell that there were no parasites anywhere near me, so I simply waited, keeping my attention alert. Soon I gathered that Holcroft was returning. I floated gently back upwards, through the dreams and memories, and came back to physical consciousness about an hour after the experiment had begun. Holcroft was still unconscious. It was about ten minutes before he opened his eyes. The colour had left his cheeks, but he was breathing quietly.
He looked at us calmly, and we saw that he had nothing much to tell us. He said:
‘I can’t understand it. There’s almost nothing going on down there. I could almost believe they’d all cleared out.’ ‘Didn’t you see any?’
‘No. I had a feeling once or twice that there were some around, but very few.’
We all recorded the same experience. It looked hopeful. But none of us felt very happy.
At midday, for the first time in three days, we turned on the television news. And then we found out what the parasites had been doing for the past three days. We learned of Obafeme Gwambe’s murder of President Nkumbula of the United States of Africa, and the coup d’etat that had made him master of Cape Town and Aden. Then there was an extract from the speech Gwambe made over the radio after the coup. We looked at one another. The voice was oddly expressionless, as if he was repeating something learned by rote, and was too tired to do it justice. ‘For too many years now the black man has looked on himself as the white man’s inferior. This has got to stop. The black man knows that he is superior to the white man in every way. He is physically stronger, he is more sexually potent, he can do longer hours of brain work without getting tired. The twenty-first century will be the century of the black man…’ And so on. It was all extremely inflammatory stuff, and Gwambe spoke it with a certain conviction. Yet it was somehow too well controlled to sound absolutely convincing, as if Gwambe were an actor who had recorded his speech after a dozen attempts.
The speech ended with a reference to us: ‘The white men have thought up a new way of swindling the blacks. They have invented a lot of bogies called the Sagothuans [Gwambe mispronounced it] who are supposed to be invading the earth. Well, has anybody seen any of these bogies yet? No, because they don’t exist. It’s another trick of the whites to keep the black man’s mind off his grievances.’
Gwambe went on to list the ‘right’ of the negro population of earth. Each country with a large negro population was to hand over a part of its territory to its negro citizens, and allow them an independent government. America was to hand over the states of Texas and California. England was to hand over its southern counties, including London. The negroes of Europe were to be given a country of their own—either Italy, Poland or Austria.
These details, of course, bothered no one; they were obviously bluff. What did bother us was that Gwambe was obviously under the control of the mind parasites. And we now knew enough of the parasites to know that underrating them was the most dangerous of mistakes.
We understood their policy immediately; it was, after all, the policy they had pursued with such success for two centuries now: keeping mankind distracted with war. For two centuries, mankind had laboured to change its state of consciousness for something more intense. For two centuries, the parasites had given them other things to think about.
We sat and talked late into the night. This new development obviously called for immediate action—but what action? We all had a strange sense of foreboding. At three in the morning we went to bed. At five, Holcroft woke us, and said: ‘They’re planning something—I can feel it. I think we’d better get out of this place.’
‘Where to?’
It was Reich who answered the question.
‘To Washington. I think we’d all better go and talk to the president. ’
‘What good would that do?’
Reich said: ‘I don’t know. But I have a feeling that we’re wasting time while we’re sitting here.’
There was no point in delaying. Although there was still an hour to dawn, we went to the helicopter that the United States government had placed at our service. By daylight, we saw the long, straight avenues of Washington below us. We brought it down gently in the street outside the White House. The soldier on duty at the gate came running over, his atom gun raised. He was a young man, and it was not difficult to convince him that he had better fetch his superior officer, while we moved the helicopter on to the White House lawn. This was one of the pleasantest advantages of our powers: the ordinary obstacles of officialdom vanished.
We gave the officer a message for the president, and then went for a walk to find coffee. To casual passersby, the eleven of us probably looked like a business delegation. We found a big, glass-plated restaurant, and occupied two tables overlooking the street. As we sat there, I looked into Ebner’s mind. He felt my probing, and smiled at me. He said:
‘It’s funny. I ought to be thinking about the danger that confronts the human race, and the city of my birth—I was born in Washington. Instead of that, I feel a kind of contempt for these people wandering by in the street. They’re all asleep. It doesn’t really seem to matter much what happens to them…’
Reich said, smiling: ‘Don’t forget you were one of them a week ago.’
I telephoned the White House, and discovered that we had been invited to breakfast with the president at nine o’clock. As we walked back through the morning crowds on their way to work, we suddenly felt a faint tremor in the pavements. We looked at one another, and Ebner said: ‘Earthquake?’
Reich said: ‘No. An explosion.’
We quickened our step, and arrived back at the White House at 8:45. I asked the officer who came to meet us if he’d heard any ne
ws of an explosion. He shook his head. ‘What explosion?’
We found out twenty minutes later, just after we had sat down to breakfast. The president was called out. When he came back, his face was bloodless, and his voice was trembling. He said: ‘Gentlemen, Base 91 was destroyed by an explosion half an hour ago.’ None of us spoke, but the same thought came to all of us: How long would it be before the parasites caught up with us?
Both Reich and Holcroft have written detailed accounts of that interview with the president, so I shall confine myself to a brief outline of what happened. We saw that he was on the point of collapse, and calmed him by the methods we had now used so often. Melville was not a strong-minded man. He was an excellent peacetime president, with a fine grasp of administration, but not the man to cope with a world crisis. We discovered that he had been so shaken by the news that he had forgotten to ring army headquarters to order America’s full defence system to come into action. He was soon persuaded to remedy this, and we were glad to learn that the new high speed particle radar could guarantee the interception of an atomic missile travelling at a mile a second.
Melville was inclined to cling to the hope that the explosion at Base 91 was due to some kind of accident, perhaps to the Mars rocket that was being constructed there. (Its energy units packed enough power to destroy half New York State.) We told him brutally that there was no chance of this. The explosion was the work of the parasites, and they had almost certainly used Gwambe as their instrument. He said that, in that case, America was committed to a full scale atomic war with Africa. We pointed out that this was not necessarily so. The explosion was aimed at killing us. It had been a throw of the dice that had failed because of chance—and Holcroft’s intuition of danger. Gwambe would not have another chance to use this method. So in the meantime, Melville could pretend to believe that the explosion was due to the Mars rocket. But one thing was obviously of immense importance: that we should get together the largest possible number of intelligent men, capable of grasping the problem of the mind parasites, and of training them into a kind of army. If we could get enough men capable of psychokinesis, we might be able to destroy Gwambe’s rebellion before it had time to spread. In the meantime, we had to find a place where we could work undisturbed.