“But analysis is the beginning of knowledge.”
“Heavens! I know that. It’s not analysis as such I’m against, it’s the over-use of it. It’s the modern disease. You and your—”
He stopped short. She had come to him under the compulsion of the same need that possessed him—she must have—and here they were, flying at each other’s throats again, and about things which were quite marginal to their central problem. It was becoming a reflex between them.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m glad you came.” The words sounded terribly inadequate.
“I had to.” She smiled. “And don’t worry about our arguing. At least it helps us understand each other.”
“That sounds funny. I mean, for us of all people.”
“Isn’t it better that we fight out our antipathies in words? And I suppose it’s inevitable—I’m so much on the defensive all the time. This—this thing between us only makes it worse. But it’s not only us now. That’s why I had to see you again. Have you found out, too?”
He nodded. “I tried it with one person. All I achieved was—what can I call it—ego-consciousness?”
“I know what you mean. I feel it too.”
“With the man I tried it on, I managed to wake in him the same sort of consciousness of me. But that was all. That feeling, does it trouble you? Disturb your work, I mean?”
“No. I think if I had somebody really hostile standing right behind me—” she laughed a little raggedly—“somebody like you, I think that might be disturbing.”
“I’m not really hostile, believe me.”
“I know. You are as you are.”
He changed back. “You’ve explored this power more deeply than I have.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I met Sally.”
“What! When? How?”
“How I found her, first. I wasn’t looking for Sally, of course—I didn’t know she existed—I was looking for you. When I was in contact with you I was conscious of that place in your mind. I didn’t know it was an actual place, or where it was. At least, I didn’t know consciously. When? This morning. At least it was morning before I found your place.”
“But if you know that Sally can use the power, that means that—”
“That she can use it with me, too.”
She looked bewildered. “It works three ways, then. Of course, it must. If A can communicate with B, and also with C, it must mean that B and C can communicate with each other. I didn’t realize. When I found I could do it with Sally I was disturbed enough. It seemed to bear out what you said, that I was the one with the power. But I knew that wasn’t so. I don’t know how I knew, I was just sure of it. In any case, what you’ve told me now—the way you found me, I mean—surely that implies that you possess a greater share of this power—faculty, sense, whatever it is—than I do.”
He laughed self-deprecatingly. “That was probably only a triumph of my more disorganized mind.” He told her how he had achieved it, then shuddered. “I wouldn’t want to repeat that in a hurry. But, seriously, with Sally you reached a far fuller contact than I did with my guinea pig.”
“Maybe—but the pressure was there. In a child who has never been able to speak, the urge to communicate is so terribly strong. Didn’t you feel it? And perhaps with a child’s mind it’s easier, though I’m not sure about that. A child’s mind may be more impressionable, but it may lack the necessary concentration.”
“How did it happen with her? Did you get contact immediately?”
“No. I went down there soon after the last time you and I met. I had to get away. It—it wasn’t so easy to put it out of my mind as I had thought. With Sally I got a keener ego-consciousness—no, we’ll have to find a better word than that for it—than I’d found in anybody. That was natural, I suppose. I’ve known her since she was born. Mrs. Acres, her mother, used to come and do the housework for us—my father and me. Sally was born not long before my father died. It was then I let Sally and her mother move in. She’s on holiday just now from the special school that she goes to, so I saw a lot of her. After a while I felt her respond—I felt she had the same sense of me as I had of her. The same effect as you mentioned with your friend. Then I—I had to try the full thing with her. Her need was so great. It worked.”
“Just the same as with us?”
“No-o, It was more orderly. That may be because I’m getting used to it, learning how to handle it. Or it may be because of Sally’s special case. Anyway, from the moment we broke through, it was much more purposive. We spoke.
“It was then I realized that this thing couldn’t be side-stepped, I saw what it could mean. You must have seen the change in that child when she’s in contact.”
He nodded.
“Of course, she lapses back into her old state of pitiful frustration in between times. Believe me, that was more interruption to me than you were, the feeling that she was so dependent on me.”
“Is that why you left in such a hurry to come here?”
“Only partly. I knew I had to face it. This morning I woke up and knew that I couldn’t put it off any longer. So let’s face it.”
She smoothed her skirt and settled herself in her chair as calmly as if she were about to discuss something as impersonal and unurgent as the price of coffee in Peru.
“First, let me analyse it the way I see it.” She cocked her head tauntingly “That’s if you don’t mind analysis in this case?”
He smiled. “No, go ahead.”
“Well, break in if you disagree, otherwise let me go on. Now, obviously this power is something we both possess. I believe that in one respect we are complementary. Not that you had half the gift and I the other half, like a secret password, but that until one who had the power met another, neither could recognize it. Like a man with the power of speech in a world of the deaf. Until he met somebody who could hear, how could he know that he could speak? That’s not an exact comparison, because everybody can ‘hear’ himself think. Also, with this power it was two-way—we could both ‘hear’ and ‘speak’—but does what I say make sense?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“Now, the only common factor we can be deemed to possess is that we both are—or have been—acutely concerned with the problems of communication. But I don’t know if that’s important enough a factor. Everybody is concerned with communication to a greater or less extent. Some vitally—far more vitally, as a pure matter of survival, than artists or poets—like Sally. Furthermore, I deny that my work is an act of communication and you abandoned yours. No, I think that we simply had this faculty, completely unrecognized and therefore unused. Or unused and therefore unrecognized. It was just by a billion-to-one chance that we met.”
Her words woke echoes of his own reasoning. The way she put it seemed to make more sense.
“Do you think the odds have turned up elsewhere?Do you think there are others like us?”
“Wouldn’t we have heard of them?”
“Nobody’s heard of us.”
“So far.”
“True; it may be unique or it may have happened before. I’ve read a few books about it by now. In most cases it’s mixed up with a lot of hokum. In the cases where it’s been investigated scientifically, nothing decisive has been demonstrated. Some people, on card-reading tests and things like that, have returned scores a shade over fifty-fifty, but that’s all. And there have been lots of cases of sporadic telepathy with identical twins. But nothing approaching us.”
“That’s the baffling thing about it. There’s nothing identical about us. Another thing—I’ve read a book or two as well—most of the people who took those tests fancied they could do it. To us it came right out of the blue. Of course, it’s feasible that somebody could have a power all unbeknown to them. I remember reading once about a man who was given an aptitude test.” She saw the look on Arnold’s face. “But I don’t suppose you approve of aptitude tests?”
“I don’t. I don’t believe you
can analyse a man’s capabilities by means of symbols on a punched card. I—”
She gestured with her hand. “Please, let’s not get started on that track again. The point is, this man was an engineer or something like that. But the test turned up that his prime aptitudes were those of a writer. So his firm gave him leave of absence and he wrote a book. It wasn’t a best seller, but it was publishable. Which demonstrates that a talent can be buried.
“Now, the first time it happened to us it was pretty hectic. Like two people bumping into each other in the dark where each thought he was alone. The second time we had better control. The two experiences left us with this feeling of ego—no, the word is empathy; I remember now from one of the books. What seems to happen from then on is that we can induce a reciprocal empathy in anyone else—well, perhaps not anyone. We’ve only tried it with two people, but it’s worked each time. That empathy seems to be the first stage, and it has to be sought for. With us it was involuntary, so our experience can’t be equated with what happens to others. And with us the first and second stages seem to have been telescoped.”
“Second stage?”
“Yes, full communication. That has to be sought for, too. It’s harder to achieve than the first stage, if my experience with Sally is anything to go by.”
“Which means that we can communicate the power to as many people as is humanly possible for us to do. When they’ve reached second stage any of them can communicate with any other.”
“You say we. That’s the heart of my reason for coming to see you now. You realize that you can do it on your own, don’t you?”
“I could, I suppose. But with you to help me we could spread it twice as fast.”
“Just a matter of mathematics?” Her voice was caustic.
“Not really. It’s a matter of—I don’t know how to put it—but it wouldn’t be the same with anyone else. We started it, we’ve jointly got the experience to put at other people’s disposal.”
“If we pass on the experience, who would want the ability?” She sounded suddenly bitter. “My experience is two weeks of frustration and blighted work.”
“Whereas I’ve only drunk too much.”
“I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “I know I’ll have to learn to live with it.”
“You mean…?”
She shook her head savagely, not in refusal but in sheer perplexity. “It’s the implications of it that worry me. Not so much for myself, but for others.”
“What implications? Other people wouldn’t have the same responsibility as us. We’re the centre of the power. Any person who learns the use of it from us will be able to use it with anyone else who has learned it from us. Their only concern is the use of it, not the passing on of it. Even so, our responsibility ends there.”
She seemed far away. When she finally spoke, that too was as if from a distance.
“The man who invented fire probably said that. And the man who invented gunpowder. By the time the atom bomb was invented nobody seemed to care any more about personal responsibility. But with this it’s not too late. It’s just us two as yet—we can discount Sally and your experiment. We’ve barely started. We can turn back.”
“Can we? Why should we? Just what dangers are there? Complications, perhaps, but dangers?”
“I don’t know. But—well, for a start, how would you decide who should have the power and who shouldn’t? It’s not humanly possible for us to show more than a few hundred people, or a few thousand at the most. How are you going to choose them? Have a fitness test? An aptitude test?”
“Hell, no! It will be open to anyone who wants to try. We should simply make a list to be worked through in strict order of application. That seems to be the fairest way.”
“But say it’s not within everybody’s power? We’ve only tried with two people. That’s nowhere near big enough a number to be able to claim a hundred per cent. Perhaps the next ninety-eight would show blank, so the true figure would only be two per cent. In any case, we could only give the power to a minority. Don’t you see the dangers in that?”
“No-o,” he confessed.
“Like Jews or Catholics or black men in a white man’s country or white men in a black. Men have never been kind to minorities. With a distinction like this couldn’t it be infinitely worse?”
“It might be the other way round. You talk as if this power’s a liability. I think you’re the one who’s being subjective now, just because it’s fouled up your work so far. But I don’t think that’s final in your case. The possession of the power must change you, me, anybody who has it, into a new person—”
“People don’t change.”
“People have never had this power. People do change, anyway. Religious converts, reformed criminals—and the reverse, people who suddenly ruin their lives—people change their lives, all right. And with this, people would change. That’s the whole point. People would think differently, feel differently. I don’t think the holdup in your work is final at all. It could very well be enriched by this. And can’t you see what it could mean in the field of research? Men could pool their knowledge, their reasoning powers.” The thought had only just struck him, and it fired his imagination. “Men would no longer have to work in series, one man taking over another’s results, pushing them forward a fraction, then passing them on to someone else. It could be done in parallel now. That alone would surely make all possible risks worthwhile.”
“Would an intellectual master race be preferable?”
“Perhaps not,” he admitted. Then, with renewed conviction, “But isn’t it time intellect were given a chance again? Greece didn’t do too badly with an aristocracy of intellect.”
“So you would pick and choose.”
“Perhaps. I don’t know.” He leaped to his feet and paced the room agitatedly. “Why are we talking like this? Before we’ve even started? You’re only trying to rationalize your personal objections.”
“I’m not. I’m only trying to see the dangers. You say we haven’t even started. That’s true, desperately true. How do we know just what happened to us, what we could be starting? Somehow we’ve sparked off a power—a power that we can pass on. How do we know that we wouldn’t pass it on to somebody who could use it far more drastically than we can? Say a man could use it on anyone near him, not to communicate just with others who had the power, but to influence people’s minds. Hitler, Father Coughlin, McCarthy, imagine men like that with a power like this. Not just able to sway men’s minds with the power of words, but able to reach in and dictate to them!”
“You’re wrong! I know you’re wrong. Such men hide behind words. Words are a weapon, but also a shield. I think you’re imagining something which couldn’t happen, which there’s no reason for thinking could happen. I think that a man who wanted to use it for evil wouldn’t be able to. He’d expose himself too much in the process.”
“Well, think of this, then. What’s going to happen when we go? Say we introduce the power to a few thousand people. When we die, it will die out. The power will linger on among the people who have it, then as they die, it will die. A few decades and it will be over.”
Chastened, he saw the truth of what she said. It put the whole thing in perspective. He had dimly grasped at the idea that he—they—could start something which would be of lasting benefit to mankind. Instead—
He strove against the idea.
“You talk about what could happen. Well, other things could happen. I think they will. I don’t believe we are an isolated case. If the billion-to-one chance turned up with us, I can’t believe that it wouldn’t turn up elsewhere—already has with people just like us who hadn’t recognized it. I feel that, as we went on, we would turn up somebody who could pass on the power, too.”
He suddenly saw it. A shock-wave, widening… widening… to embrace all people. Any imagined clingers could be nothing compared to this and the benefits it could bring. With the prospects of the power opening up before him, he saw dearly, as he never had
before, the canker of man’s misunderstanding. Social reformers saw only economic exploitation, religious reformers the vanity of the self, psychiatrists the will to power. Each group, every group that had ever diagnosed man’s dilemma, prescribed its individual cure. Man had only to create an economic system in which one man could not buy or sell another, or only to lose his own self in the greater body of a dogmatic group or only to recognize the primitive demands of his id.
Only… only… only…
Whereas the root cause was the separateness of human experience. What did it profit a man to recognize his own demands if he was still blind to the demands of others? What to sacrifice his own identity? To prohibit the buying and selling of a man and his labours if that meant that he could never freely give and receive?
No—the only cure was this. They could no more withhold it than a man could stop himself going to the rescue of somebody drowning—
And he knew that he was not only justifying it to himself. His sudden passion had made him aware in only a part of his consciousness that Claire had entered it. He saw and felt her clearly now, standing in his mind. He spoke to her without words.
“No whips need fall on backs any more, no bombs on cities. What man would flog his own flesh or bomb his own children?”
Though moved by his eloquence, fear still seized her.
“If only that were true! But he does. Cain still slays Abel.”
She was trembling violently in mind and in body. He took her in his arms. Her body did not resist, but her mind cried out in his.
“Your vision frightens me. I came here, wanting to make amends, to help us settle this. I believed I had thought it out, but I know now that I hadn’t even started to.”
“Who could reason it out? I don’t want you to be hurt. I don’t think you will be. But if we should be hurt, I don’t see that we have any choice. Say we did turn back? Say the power does happen in two other people? The more I think of it, the more I believe that we can’t be the only ones. This may not even be the cause. I—I feel it could be the effect of some force that nobody knows anything about yet. In history nothing has happened alone. Everything is the outcome of forces that break through in more than one place.
The Silent Speakers Page 6