The Mind Parasites

by Colin Wilson

  The task of providing the president with the moral courage and energy to meet the crisis occupied us for most of the morning. Melville had to appear on television and state that he believed the explosion to have been an accident. (It had destroyed an area with a thirty mile radius—it was no wonder we felt it in Washington.) This did a lot to soothe the nation’s nerves. Then the whole American defence system had to be elaborately checked, and a secret message sent to Gwambe warning him that there would be instant reprisals in the event of any further explosions. We decided that it would be better to announce that we were still alive. It was almost impossible to keep this from the parasites. On the other hand, the announcement of our death might cause widespread despair, since millions of people now looked to us for leadership.

  But when we sat together for an early lunch, there was a heavy atmosphere of gloom. It seemed impossible that we could win. The only hope was to admit another hundred or so men into our circle of ‘initiates’, and then try to destroy Gwambe by the same methods we had used against Georges Ribot. But in all probability we would be under constant observation from the parasites. There was nothing to stop them from taking over other leaders as they had taken over Gwambe. In fact, they could even take over Melville! It was no use thinking about making Melville himself an ‘initiate’. Like ninety-five per cent of the human race, he would never be capable of grasping the problem. We were in constant danger. Even as we walked through the streets, the parasites might take over some passerby, and hurl him at us like a missile. And one passerby with an atomic pistol could make short work of us.

  It was Reich who said:

  ‘It’s a pity we can’t simply move to another planet and start another race.’

  It was not intended to be a serious observation. We knew that no planet in the solar system was habitable; in any case, earth had no spaceship capable of carrying human beings the fifty million miles to Mars.

  And yet… would this not be the answer to the security problem? America did have several rockets capable of carrying five hundred people to the moon. And then there were the three satellite stations that were in orbit round the earth. While we remained on earth we were in constant danger from the parasites. Alone in outer space, there would be no danger.

  Yes, that was obviously the answer. Immediately after lunch, Reich, Fleishman and I went to the president and explained our idea. If the parasites succeeded in destroying us, then the earth was lost anyway. Having won that battle, they would ruthlessly exterminate everyone who tried to rediscover our secret. The best hope for the earth lay in allowing about fifty of us to embark in a moon rocket, and spend the next few weeks on one of the satellites, or cruising around between earth and the moon. In that time, we might be strong enough to challenge the parasites. If not, then the fifty of us would split up into teaching groups, and each group would take another fifty men into space. We would finally create an army capable of taking over a country.

  It has been suggested by one historian that we ‘took over’ President Melville as the parasites had taken over Gwambe, and forced him to agree to everything we asked. Such a course would, of course, have been justifiable in the crisis; but it was unnecessary for us to take it. Melville was glad enough to do whatever we suggested; the crisis terrified him.

  I have said that Spencefield and Remizov had provided us with a list of a dozen men who could be admitted to our circle. We had only covered half this list. Moreover, Holcroft, Ebner and the rest had a number of suggestions of their own. The result was that by late afternoon, we had spoken to some thirty men, all of whom agreed to join us. The US air force collaborated with us in getting them to Washington, and by eight the following morning our group had swelled to thirty-nine members. It should have been forty-one; but the plane bringing two psychologists from Los Angeles crashed over the Grand Canyon. We never discovered the reason for the accident, but it was not difficult to guess.

  The president had arranged that we could leave earth the following afternoon from the rocket port at Annapolis. In the meantime, we put our twenty-eight pupils through a high-speed course in phenomenology. We discovered that practice was making us perfect or very nearly so. Perhaps the general atmosphere of crisis also helped. (It had certainly produced an amazing change in Merril, Philips, Leaf, and Ebner.) Before the day was over, we actually had one of our new recruits producing slight PK effects on a piece of cigarette ash.

  Still the feeling of foreboding was on us. It was a highly unpleasant sensation–a feeling that we were menaced from the outside and the inside. Against any individual enemy we would have felt confident. But it was frustrating to realize that the parasites might use any one of several billions of people against us. It produced a ‘needle in a haystack’ feeling of hopelessness. I must also admit that we kept a close check on the president during all the time we were in Washington; it would have been so easy for the parasites to take over his brain circuits.

  Meanwhile, Gwambe’s success in Africa was startling. When the United Nations issued a warning to him, he simply used it for propaganda purposes—the white men trying to bully the blacks. And the speed with which his revolt spread made it very clear that the parasites had made Africa the scene of a mass operation of mind-invasion. Without consulting their troops, negro generals declared their allegiance to Gwambe. It took Gwambe only about three days to become virtually the master of the United States of Africa.

  The whole of that night before we left earth, I lay awake thinking. I had found that I now needed only a few hours’ sleep a night. If I allowed myself to oversleep, the result was a weakening of my mental powers, of my control over my own consciousness. But I now felt that I had to come to grips with a problem that teased and tormented me. I had a feeling that I was overlooking something important.

  This was a feeling that had been with me vaguely ever since that night when the parasites destroyed all but five of us. It seemed that, in a sense, we had been at a standstill ever since then. Oh, we had won various minor battles against them—and yet there was still a feeling that our major achievements were over. This seemed stranger still since they had apparently left us alone since the night of the battle.

  Animals are very nearly machines; they live on reflex and habit. Human beings are also very largely machines, but we also possess a degree of consciousness, which means, in essence, freedom from habit, the ability to do something new and original. Now I had the frustrating feeling that the ‘something’ I was overlooking was one of the thousands of habits that we still take for granted. I was struggling for greater control of my consciousness, but I was overlooking some deep-rooted habits that stood in the way of real control.

  Let me try to make this point clear. What bothered me was connected with the tremendous rush of vital energy with which I had defeated the parasites. In spite of all my efforts to grasp its source, it still evaded me. Now most human beings discover that sudden emergencies arouse inner-powers of which they were not aware. A war, for example, may turn a hypochondriac into a hero. This is because the vitality of most people is controlled by subconscious forces of which they are not aware. But I was aware of these forces. I could descend into my own mind like an engineer into the machinery of a ship. And yet I could not get to that source of real inner power. Why? The emergency of my battle with the parasites had enabled me to call on these tremendous energies. There was something unreasonable about this failure to get down to the root of my vital powers.

  All that night, I wrestled with the problem; I tried to descend deeper and deeper into my own mind. It was useless. There seemed to be some invisible obstacle—or perhaps it was simply my own weakness and lack of concentration. The parasites seemed to have nothing to do with it; I didn’t see a single one.

  At dawn I felt tired, but I went with Reich, Holcroft and the Graus to the Annapolis rocket base to make a final check. It was as well we did. We interviewed the whole team who had prepared our rocket, on the pretext of asking them routine questions. They all seemed comple
tely honest and friendly. We asked them how the work had gone, and they said that it had been a smooth routine job with no hitches. But Holcroft, who had been watching us without saying anything, suddenly asked:

  ‘Is there a member of your team who isn’t present?’ Colonel Massey, who was in charge of the team, shook his head. ‘All the engineers are present.’

  Holcroft persisted:

  ‘But is there anyone apart from the engineers?’

  ‘Only one man—but he’s not important. Kellerman, Lieutenant Costa’s assistant. He had an appointment with the psychiatrist this morning.’

  Costa was the man whose chief task was the programming of the electronic brain that coordinated the workings of the rocket: fuel, temperature, air control, and so on.

  I said casually: ‘I know it isn’t important, but we’d like to see him. Just a matter of routine.’

  ‘But Lieutenant Costa knows far more about the robot than Kellerman does. He can answer any queries.’

  ‘All the same, we’d like to see him.’

  So a call was put through to the base psychiatrist. He said that Kellerman had left him half an hour before. A check with the guard house revealed that Kellerman had gone out on a motorcycle twenty minutes ago. Costa said awkwardly:

  ‘He has a girlfriend on the university campus, and I sometimes let him ride over to take a coffee break with her. I suppose that’s where he’s gone.’

  Reich said casually:

  ‘I’d be glad if you’d send someone over there to fetch him back. In the meantime, would you check all the circuits of the robot brain?’

  An hour later, the check had revealed that the brain was in perfect order. But the orderly who had been sent to the university returned without Kellerman. No one had seen him. Costa said: ‘Well, he’s probably gone off into town to do some shopping. It’s a breach of regulations, of course, but I suppose he thought we wouldn’t notice on a busy morning…’

  Colonel Massey tried to change the subject, but Reich said.

  ‘I’m sorry Colonel, but we don’t intend to leave in this rocket until we’ve spoken to Kellerman. Would you mind putting out a general call for him?’

  They obviously thought us mad and boorish, but they had no alternative but to agree. So a dozen military police cars were sent out, and all the police in the area were alerted. Then a check at the local helicopter terminal revealed that a man of Kellerman’s description had taken a plane for Washington several hours ago. The hunt immediately spread to Washington, and the police there were alerted, too.

  Kellerman was finally picked up at three-thirty in the afternoon—an hour after we were supposed to have blasted off. He had taken a return trip back from Washington, and was recognized at the local helicopter terminal. He protested that he had slipped off to buy his girlfriend an engagement ring, and thought no one would notice. But as soon as we saw him, we knew our precaution had been justified. He was a curious kind of split personality; a whole area of his personality was completely immature. The parasites had taken advantage of this. There had been no need to take over his brain; the alteration of a few minor circuits had been all that was necessary. His schoolboyish desire to feel important did the rest. It was the same kind of mechanism that sometimes makes juvenile delinquents derail trains for the fun of it: a desire to join the adult world by doing something that has adult consequences.

  Once we had Kellerman, there was no difficulty in bullying the truth out of him. He had made some minute adjustments to the temperature controls of the ship, so that the temperature would increase very slightly in outer space—too slightly for us to notice. But this change would cause an automatic adjustment on the part of the robot. This adjustment would affect the braking mechanism of the ship, so that when we approached the satellite, our speed would be far too great; we would smash through the satellite, destroying ourselves and it. The ordinary circuit checks had naturally failed to reveal this: after all, an electronic brain has some billions of possible circuits, and a ‘check’ only consists in making sure that its main junctions are responsive.

  We left Kellerman to his fate—I understood he was later court-martialled and shot—and blasted off finally at four-thirty. By six o’clock we were doing four thousand miles an hour in the direction of the moon. The gravitational mechanism of the ship was of the old type: the floor was a magnet, and we wore special clothing that was attracted towards it, so that we appeared to have normal weight. The consequence was that we all experienced space dizziness for the first two hours.

  When we felt normal, we gathered in the dining room, and Reich gave a preliminary talk on the parasites, and how Husserl’s method could be used to combat them. Further lectures were put off until the following day, since everyone felt too disturbed and excited by their new surroundings (most of us had never been in space before) to feel like ‘lessons’.

  While we were on the earth side of the satellite, we could pick up television. We switched on the news at 9.30. And the first thing I saw was the face of Felix Hazard, making an impassioned speech to a vast crowd of people.

  Eight hours before—at seven-thirty Berlin time—Hazard had made his first Munich speech on the glory of the Aryan race, and called for the resignation of the present social democratic government, and of the chancellor, Dr. Schröder. The response had been nationwide. Two hours later, the New Nationalist Movement announced that its leader, Ludwig Stehr, had voluntarily ceded his position to Felix Hazard. Stehr was quoted as saying that Hazard would revive the old glory of the Aryan races and lead the nation to victory. There was much talk about the ‘insolent threats of racially inferior groups’, and long quotations from Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century.

  It was obvious what had happened. The parasites had done their work in Africa, and fixed habit patterns of revolt. Now they had turned their attention to Europe. So far, the world had taken Gwambe’s revolt fairly quietly. Militant negro nationalism had become so much a matter of course in the twentieth century that no one found it too alarming; besides, most countries had defence systems that were impregnable even to hydrogen rockets. The parasites now set out to produce stronger reactions—a revival of Aryan racism. It is said that it takes two to make a quarrel; the parasites were making sure that this quarrel would not remain onesided.

  This was the biggest danger yet. Europe was in no real danger from Africa. But Africa’s defence system was crude compared with that of Europe or America. It had been the African policy to spend most of its money on raising the standard of living to the European level, and the present defence system was largely the result of the generosity of Russia and China. Half a dozen wellplaced hydrogen bombs could wipe out millions of Africans. In all probability, Russia and China would feel obliged to intervene, and the result was bound to be world war.

  I must admit that my spirits sank lower than at any time in the past months. Our task now seemed hopeless. At this rate, the world could be at war within a week—before we returned to earth. It looked as if there was nothing we could do. It was not even certain that there would be an earth for us to return to. The next thing that would happen was easy to predict: the parasites would turn their attention to disabling each country’s defence system by taking over key brains. America and Europe would cease to be impregnable as traitors sabotaged their early warning systems.

  I slept for only a few hours, and got up at four to watch the nine a.m. news from London. (Our clocks, of course, were set to American time.) It was bad. The German chancellor had been assassinated, and Hazard had declared that the social democratic government was outlawed. As a true representative of the will of the German people, he appointed himself Chancellor. His party would take over the government of Germany. Their new headquarters would be the Reichstag in Berlin instead of the palace in Bonn. All members of the public were authorized to shoot members of the ‘renegade government’ on sight. (This later proved to be unnecessary; the social democrats accepted their dismissa
l, and declared their support for Hazard.) Hazard now announced his new scheme for white supremacy. When the ‘inferior races’ of the world had been subdued, they would be deported en masse to Venus—that is, about a billion negroes! This idea apparently aroused immense enthusiasm in countries all over the world, including Britain and America. (No one pointed out that even if Venus could be made habitable, the cost of shipping a billion people thirty million miles would take more money than there was in the whole world.)

  We were due to pass the halfway mark to the moon at seven o’clock that evening. By this time, we would have lost television contact with the earth, although we would still be receiving radio signals. The question now arose: should we turn the nose of the ship, and stay within a day’s journey of the earth? If there was going to be world war we would be better off on earth, actively combating the parasites. At least we could help to prevent the parasites from penetrating the defence system of America. It would only take one of us placed in every defence unit in America to keep the parasites at bay—and one of us in the Pentagon to make sure there was no treachery from higher up.

  This seemed so obviously the best policy that we were all surprised when Holcroft opposed it. He could give no coherent reasons for opposing it; he simply said that he had a ‘hunch’. Since his ‘hunch’ had already saved our lives once, we were inclined to pay attention to what he said. I talked to him later, and tried to get him to explore the source of his hunch. After some groping, he finally said that he felt that the further we got from earth, the better. I must admit that I was disappointed. However, our decision had been made. We went on towards the moon.