The Mind Parasites

by Colin Wilson

  In Durango, Colorado, a group of scientists had been working on a type of space rocket powered by giant photon sails. We had heard talk about it at Base 91. It was constructed of a specially light alloy of lithium and beryllium, and was enormous in size—as it had to be to support its giant sails.

  I spoke to the President. How far had the project advanced? Could the ship be used yet? He contacted the Durango base and came back with the answer: No. The structure was complete, but the engines were still in the experimental stage.

  I told the President this was unimportant. All we needed was the ship. And it had to be sprayed black. The base replied this was impossible: its surface area was nearly two square miles. The President scowled and shouted into the telescreen. Then he pulled out the plug. He told me that the ship would be black by the time a rocket plane could get us to Durango.

  The sheer size of the ship startled us. It was being constructed in the immense crater made by the impact of the 1980 meteor. Its construction was top secret. The crater was roofed with an opaque force barrier. And under this barrier the Durango rocket looked like an immense and foreshortened bullet. Its largest flat area was its rear end, which housed the sails. This was two thousand feet high.

  We arrived at the Durango base five hours after the President’s call. The whole place stank of cellulose paint, and everything was covered with black spray. The men themselves were all black from head to foot. But the ship itself was also black, every inch of it.

  It was nearly midnight. We told Major-General Gates, the station commander, that all the men were to be sent home, and the force barrier was to be withdrawn. He had been told to obey every order without question, and he gave us excellent cooperation. But I have never seen a man look so completely puzzled.

  He showed us the mechanism for operating the photon sails. These had not been painted black, and they were of bright silver, and shaped roughly like a butterfly’s wings.

  I must admit that we all felt a little absurd, standing in the immense silver hall. It was icy cold and smelt of spray paint. The controls had been installed, but very little else. There was another year’s work to be done on the interior. There were only six seats at the front, near the controls. The others had to sit on camp stools that had been installed for them.

  But as soon as we began the work of getting it off the ground, this feeling of absurdity vanished. There were no difficulties; the shell was extremely light. One man could have moved it alone. As it was, we assigned the task of powering the ship to a ten man team led by Ebner. I undertook the steering. The only man who was not a member of our team was Captain Haydon Reynolds of the U.S. Air Force, the navigator. He obviously wondered what he was doing there, since a ship without engines needs no navigator.

  We lifted off at twenty minutes after midnight, rose to a height of ten thousand feet, and proceeded due east. Reynolds was so astounded for the first quarter of an hour that it was difficult to get any coherent instructions from him. Then he settled down, and from then on the flight was uneventful.

  The American defence system had been warned that we would be breaking through the early warning system at half past midnight, and we had no trouble. At a quarter to one, our television set brought warning that some immense intruder had entered the earth’s atmosphere from the direction of the moon. This was according to the instructions we had left with the President.

  Over the Atlantic, we accelerated to a speed of a thousand miles an hour. The result was that the temperature in the ship increased uncomfortably. But time was important. When we set out from Durango, it would already be half past eight in the morning at Maribor. We had five thousand miles to travel, and it was important to do it before evening fell.

  Before we crossed the European coast, we increased height to twenty-five thousand feet. We knew that early warning systems all over France and England would be ringing by this time, and that we would need constant vigilance.

  The first rocket was launched at us from somewhere near Bordeaux. Ten of our team under Reich were maintaining the force barrier around the ship, and exploded it when it was two miles away from us. Unfortunately, Reich forgot to block the force waves, with the result that we were all suddenly tossed about like corks in a storm. For a few seconds we lost control, then I managed to block the force waves, and we moved forward smoothly again. After that, Reich took care to direct the force of the explosion away from us.

  The television screens showed us that our passage was universally observed. The explosion of the missiles that were aimed at us left no one in any doubt that we were the moon aliens, and that we had some kind of destructive ray.

  By one o’clock, European time, we were directly over the battlefield at Maribor. We had reduced height to a few thousand feet. Since our method of propulsion made no sound, we could distinctly hear the explosion of shells underneath us.

  It was as well that we had chosen a ship of this size. The battlefield was enormous—ten miles across. There were no large troop concentrations—only the small groups of men who handled the mobile guns and rocket launchers. Our size meant that we could be plainly seen by both sides, even though the ground was covered with a thick haze of smoke.

  Now began the major part of the operation—and the part whose success we were unable to guarantee. It would have been easy enough to destroy all life within that area of a hundred square miles, and put a complete stop to the fighting. And yet none of us would have been able to do this. We had nothing but contempt for the men who were trying to kill one another, but we felt we had no right to kill them.

  The first thing was to immobilize the mobile rocket units. Within ten minutes of our appearance, a dozen of them had tried firing rockets at us. The missiles were destroyed, and Reich’s group then destroyed each of the launching machines by simply crushing them out of shape. But there were probably a thousand or so large guns and rocket launchers on the battlefield; we had to make sure of each of these, too. We wanted to be able to concentrate fully on the major part of the task. It took us nearly an hour of groping around in the smoke to locate every gun and launching site, and to destroy it.

  Our first appearance had caused a panic. But when no death rays came from us, it subsided. The operation of immobilizing the guns was unspectacular; only those in actual contact with them noticed it. So after a while, everyone regarded us with curiosity rather than fear. Our mental ‘feelers’ were aware of this, and we actively encouraged the mood.

  It was a strange feeling. We all sat there, in complete silence. The only sound was the wind. All firing from below us had stopped. We were aware of being watched by a million men massed in two great armies. I was even aware of the presence of the parasites in many of them, for the response that came from the ‘zombis’ was cold and incurious, unlike the human response.

  At this point, Fleishman touched the button that controlled the photon sails, and they slowly opened. It must have been an impressive sight—these immense silver wings that first of all slid out of the back of the ship, then slowly expanded until they were four times bigger than the ship, with a total area of eight square miles. We now looked like a giant insect with a black body, and shiny but almost transparent wings.

  It must be understood that we were in close contact with our ‘audience’, as close and intimate as any such contact between an actor and his audience in a theatre. Consequently we were able to register the reaction of astonishment that contained only an element of fear.

  As we began to move very slowly across the sky, I became aware of a change in the quality of the response. They were watching this great silver object with fascination, but no longer with intelligent curiosity. Their active attention was flagging—which is hardly surprising, since no one had taken their eyes off us for over an hour. The sunlight on the photon sails was dazzling.

  For them, we looked like a gigantic and beautiful insect, too bright to watch with comfort, and yet too fascinating to lose sight of.

  The effect was exactly what we had
supposed. The quality of the attention became flaccid and hypnotic as we moved very slowly, drifting across the sky, gradually dropping towards the ground. This slow, gentle movement was a considerable effort for Reich’s team, since the huge wing area meant that the ship was being constantly buffeted by wind, which would have sent it spinning if their vigilance relaxed for a moment.

  The other forty of us now linked in parallel. These watching minds were completely in our power, like a child fascinated by a story. I also observed an interesting thing that I had always suspected: all of these spectators were also telepathically linked together by their interest in us. It explains why mobs can be so dangerous. An excited crowd builds up a certain telepathic force by a vibratory process, but in a clumsy and uncoordinated manner, so that it feels impelled to violent action to release the tension.

  The tension of this crowd was at our disposal. It was like one enormous mind opened to us. This mind was wholly concentrated on a great, insect-like object, that was now very close to the ground. They were hypnotized and completely open to suggestion.

  The central part of the operation was now in my hands. Their minds were like so many television screens, and I was the central transmitter. The consequence was that every one of them suddenly became aware that two huge doors were opening in the sides of the spaceship. And then from these doors—more than a thousand feet high—stepped the moon aliens. The aliens were also more than a thousand feet high. They were also suggestive of insects, being green in colour, and possessed of long legs like a grasshopper. Their faces were humanoid, with great beaky noses, and small black eyes. They moved in a jerky way, as if unused to the earth’s gravity. Their feet were claws, like a bird’s.

  Then, in great leaps, the aliens moved across the ground towards the watching armies. I transmitted nightmare waves of panic, certainty of a horrible destruction. At the same time, I released the tension that held them all to the spot, watching helplessly. The result was a stampede away from us. The sense of panic was so unpleasant—almost indecent in its abject terror—that we broke telepathic contact with them, and left them to run. No one looked back. Thousands fell and were trampled to death; later figures showed that fifteen per cent of them died in this way. The havoc could hardly have been increased even if the hostile aliens had been real.

  It was a highly unpleasant experience. For weeks afterwards, I kept remembering that panic; it returned like a bad taste in the mouth. But it was necessary. It certainly ended the war. From that moment on, Gwambe and Hazard were no longer leaders. They were ignored, forgotten. The war was a dream from which everybody had awakened, a children’s game that had come to an end. Over the next three days, troops of the World Organization, acting in close cooperation with the President of the United States, were able to arrest thousands of the scattered armies, including Gwambe and Hazard. (The latter was shot while ‘attempting to escape’; Gwambe was confined in a lunatic asylum in Geneva, where he died a year later.) It might be assumed that after this victory, we felt inclined to rest on our laurels. In fact, we felt nothing of the sort, for two reasons. The victory had been child’s play. I have related it in some detail here because of its historical interest, but as a piece of strategy it barely deserves two lines. Second, the really interesting part of our task now lay ahead of us: to restore the world to some kind of sanity, and to consider measures for the final destruction of the parasites.

  There was nothing spectacular in the methods we adopted. We simply told people the truth. On the day after our ‘victory’, President Melville announced on television that the United States government had every reason to believe that the ‘moon aliens’ were on their way out of our solar system, and that there was no longer any immediate danger to our planet. He added: ‘But in view of the constant danger of an extra-terrestrial attack, the United States urges the immediate formation of a Unified World Government, armed with full powers for mobilizing a World Defence Force.’ His proposal was immediately accepted by the United Nations. And then began the great task which has been so ably documented by Wolfgang Reich in his book The Remaking of the World.

  Our most serious task, of course, was the destruction of the parasites. But we decided that this was not an immediate priority. The rotation of the moon had the effect of considerably diminishing their power by lessening the basic source of irritation. But there was another reason for treating them as a secondary problem. I have said that, in a sense, the parasites were a ‘shadow’ of man’s cowardice and passivity. Their strength could increase in an atmosphere of defeat and panic, for it fed on human fear. In that case, the best way to combat them was to change the atmosphere to one of strength and purpose. And this we regarded as our major task during the next year. The first problem was to make the World Security Force really effective, to stamp out any sign of renewed activity on the part of the parasites. This meant that about twenty of our group had to apply themselves to problems of organization. Almost equally important was to make people understand that the parasites were a reality, against which mankind had to maintain constant vigilance. And this in turn meant that we had to increase our group until it could be numbered in thousands, or even millions. For this reason only twenty of us (including Ebner and Fleishman) were assigned to the World Security Organization. The rest of us applied ourselves to the task of teaching.

  I must say a few words about this since, in fact, everything depended upon our success in this field. It was by no means an easy matter to pick candidates to be taught the techniques of ‘mind control’. It might seem that there was no problem at all; after all, I had taught myself; so had Reich and Fleishman. Surely we only had to announce the facts about the mind parasites to the human race, and men would teach themselves?

  This is only partly true. It happened, certainly. But this in itself raised a problem. The battle against the mind parasites requires a peculiarly tough and active intelligence; most people are so mentally lazy that they can easily be out-manoeuvred by the parasites. They are now in a dangerous position, for they have a sense of false security, which the parasites are careful to foster. Here is certainly a case where a little knowledge is dangerous.

  But the fact that about three-quarters of the human race immediately came to believe that they had achieved perfect ‘mind control’ set us a great problem. How were we to know which of these millions was worth our personal attention? It was not a problem we managed to solve immediately. We worked by hit and miss methods. We confined ourselves to highly intelligent people, particularly those who had ‘worked their way up,’ since our most important requirement was courage and vitality. But there were a great many failures. When Reich and I had achieved our initial victories over the parasites, we had been stimulated by a sense of immediate danger. These new candidates were not, and many of them simply could not wake themselves up to a sense of urgency. I came to realize how much of ‘success’ in the world is due to a mere habit of aggressiveness and hard work, and not at all to intelligence. We had no time to waste on the failures. If we had used our telepathic powers to ‘wake them up’, it would only have increased their laziness. So they were quickly dismissed, and others admitted in their place.

  It soon struck us that even quite intelligent and serious people could suffer from mental laziness if they had acquired the habit in childhood. So we decided that our future candidates would have to be caught as early as possible. For this reason, a number of us formed a separate group for testing the mental capacities of teenagers and children. This became the so-called ‘Behrman K-Test Group’ whose success exceeded all our expectations—within two years there were more than five hundred thousand mind control ‘adepts’ under the age of 21.

  At the end of a year, we knew we had won our battle to establish permanent world peace. We could now turn our attention back to the moon. This was by now necessary. The disturbing forces of the moon had become accustomed to its unusual motion, and were refocused on the earth. This was exactly what I had expected to happen; the rotation of the m
oon was only a temporary measure.

  Without consulting anyone about it, a group of five hundred of us decided that the moon would have to be detached from earth’s gravitational field. We commenced work on this operation in January 1999—the last New Year’s Day of the old century. It was largely an engineering problem. It meant exerting a constant pressure on the moon for a very long period, and never relaxing this pressure. The operation had to be carried out very slowly. The moon’s density is very low compared with that of the earth; it is little more than an enormous cinder. In its long life it has also been struck by innumerable meteors and comets, some of them very large indeed, so that it had been flawed through and through. like a lump of cracked glass. This meant that there was danger of its flying apart if we exerted any sudden pressure; in which case, the earth would become surrounded by a ring of lunar asteroids, and we would be no better off.

  Our intention was not simply to shield earth from the moon’s emanations. There was also the desire to do something about the life trapped in the satellite. We decided that the moon must be pushed into the sun, where its bodiless inhabitants might once again be free.

  Four groups of a hundred and twenty-five of us spaced ourselves out in the northern hemisphere, and commenced the work of pushing the moon gently into outer space. What this meant in effect was increasing its speed of revolution around the earth, imparting to it more energy. This in turn would mean that the moon would move further from the earth.

  (The moon was once much farther from the earth than it was in the twentieth century, but as it lost energy it tended to fall closer.)