“I must go down there,” Claire said urgently, starting to her feet. “Immediately.”
“I’ll go with you,” Arnold told her, his voice breaking. “And I talked about responsibility. How could I know? How could I know?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sally was in the hospital in the nearest small town, a few miles from Entchley. But they were too late to see her that night.
They went to visit her in the morning, but the police called before nine at Claire’s house to tell Sally’s mother that they had found the man responsible—dead.
Sally was propped up in bed. Physically, the doctor told them, she would heal. But the mental wound was horribly deep. The man who had inflicted it on her had shot himself as the police had closed in. He was a casual labourer-cum-poacher from another village. He had left a pathetic, misspelled note, confessing to the crime. There was one small mercy. At least, Sally would not have to appear in court to re-live the experience. Another was that, in his note, the man had made no mention of telepathy—or anything that, in his crabbed vocabulary, could have been construed as that.
But Arnold knew that that was what had provoked it. He knew it from the way Sally flinched and turned away from him when he entered the ward, and from the fact that nothing—not even a cry—broke from the poor hurt mind. He was a man, like that other man who had come to her door. The man joined in her wonderful new game, just as he had done. And the man had smiled at her, and suddenly the smile had frozen—
Here was the first fruit of the power. The power that would mean a new life, a new wisdom for people! It was no consolation at all now that this terrible happening confirmed that the power could be passed on. The dream image loomed up before him again. But now the golden gift in his hands changed, not to dross but to something positively evil, a weapon that glinted lethally in the yellow glare of nightmare. Three people, apart from Claire and himself, had known the power. One, brutish and quite conceivably never aware of what had really happened, lay cold by his own hand on a mortuary slab. Another lay here in a hospital bed.
Arnold stayed with Claire in the old farmhouse, visiting Sally every day, waiting for her to get better. Not once did Claire reproach him. Heaven only knew, she could have. She had sensed the possible dangers. She had wanted to turn back. He had forced her to go on. But not one word of blame escaped her lips—or her mind. He knew that she recognized his own torment. Their minds swung to each other once—and fled. The anguish in the one was no help to the anguish in the other.
They spent two weeks in that creaking house, their minds numbed against the vigil. The days were sunny, and they went for long walks through the countryside like a pair of sad lovers.
Then Sally was discharged from the hospital. Her mother, desperate because of her own inadequacy, gladly handed her over to Claire’s charge. As Arnold had surmised, Mrs. Acres did not know about the power. She accepted Claire’s solicitude as the act of a friend and employer who was educated in the ways of a monstrous world.
And they brought Sally back to London with them.
A pile of letters, forwarded from the TV station, awaited Arnold on the mat. He took them to his room, spread them on the table and sat looking at them blankly for a long time. Then he bore them down to the yard and put a match to them. His eyes followed the upward wreathing of the smoke against the afternoon blue—and met the girder sticking out from the top of the building like a gibbet. He shuddered and went back inside.
Three of the letters among the pile had had nothing to do with the television appearance, but had contained orders for advertising work. He worked on them with a furious intensity for the next few days, putting all thought of the power from his mind.
Then, one afternoon, there was a knock at the door. He went to it.
A man stood there, a small man in a light grey topcoat, despite the warmth of August. He also had on an old-fashioned grey homburg.
“Mr. Arnold Ash?” His voice was quiet and carried a slight middle-European accent.
“Yes.”
“I thought I recognized you. I saw you on television.”
Arnold winced and made to turn back.
“I’m Professor Michael Green, head of the Department of Social Psychology of London University.” He held out a small, plump hand.
Arnold took it. He looked into the face of his visitor. It was the face of a man well over sixty, but he somehow looked younger, The eyes were brown and old and wise, but the lines about them were lines of tolerance, not age.
“You didn’t answer my letter,” his visitor went on quietly, precisely. “I got your address from the television company.”
“I’m sorry. I—”
But he couldn’t have begun to explain. It would have taken too long. Despite his wretchedness of spirits, he invited his visitor in.
Claire was in her studio with Sally. He showed Professor Green into his yellow-painted room and indicated a chair.
Green sat down, placing his hat meticulously on the table beside him. He looked at Arnold intently for a long moment without speaking.
“You say you saw me on television?” Arnold said, feeling compelled to speak. “Surely a strange programme for a professor of social psychology to be watching?”
“I never miss it,” Green said with a smile. “You think it’s only a gimmick programme? I see it as a valuable field for research. It’s like taking the top off an ant hill. There’s nothing like it for keeping up with the extreme instances of human behaviour.”
“Like me, I suppose?” Arnold said bitterly. “If that’s all you’ve come for—”
Green lifted a podgy hand and smiled slightly. “Aren’t you an extreme instance?” His tone was unhostile. “Isn’t that exactly what you went on that programme to demonstrate?”
Arnold felt like protesting vehemently. But—his visitor was so compelling in his directness—he nodded.
“You asked for interested people to contact you. Well, I have.”
“I’m sorry, but—”
“What has gone wrong? I can see that you are upset.”
“The power. Just that. Somebody learned to use it—and suffered.”
Green looked at him intently. “You are genuine,” he said at last. “I knew it. I knew something—somebody—like you had to happen. When and how did you first find out that you had this power?”
Arnold told him, briefly and without enthusiasm.
“This other person, that was the man who was with you on television?”
“No. It’s a girl. A young woman, that is. She’s in another room here. I don’t want her to be disturbed.”
“Of course. But you and she were the first?”
Arnold nodded.
“And you never had any experience before in your life in any way comparable to this?”
“No.”
“How many of you are there now?”
“Four.” The image of another face rose up before him. He turned from it, then turned back. It had to be counted too.
“There were five,” he added, his voice flat. “One of them is dead.”
“I see.” The little professor did not probe the matter. Arnold felt a quick respect for a mind which combined such alert scientific curiosity with a tact which ignored side issues that were obviously distressing. Or was one the inevitable result of the other?
“And you say that you have had this power for about four months?”
“Yes. And that’s about four months too long.”
“What does that mean?”
“That I’m going to forget that I ever had it.” He remembered, Claire had used those identical words, the very first evening.
“Do you think that will be easy? No—I’ll say it another way—do you think that will be possible?”
“There’s always one way.” The image of the gibbet danced in his head.
“You couldn’t do that, either,” the little man said matter-of-factly. His eyes had not left Arnold’s face. “Maybe you could, at that. But you m
ustn’t. No matter what has happened. Let me tell you why. May I take my coat off?”
“Certainly. I’m sorry.” Arnold took his coat and hung it up.
Shed of it, the little professor looked even smaller.
“I am, as I told you, a social psychologist. That means that I study the motivations and reactions of people en masse, the group—business, social, political, ethnic or whatever. It is a science—ill-defined in its terms often, but a science just the same. And I am a scientist.
“What makes a scientist? Curiosity and, certainly in my case, a concern for humanity. That’s why I chose this subject. I was always interested in people, not atoms or stars. But all scientists worthy of the name have a concern for humanity. The public image of a man of science is of a man concerned with the meticulous checking of data—a remote person who had removed himself from the dreams and problems of men around him. It is a false image.
“For one thing, the man of science is just as much of his time as anybody else. He can only state his questions and his theories in the framework of the age he lives in. Darwin shook the world with his hypothesis of the evolution of species by natural selection. He did not realize that he was only voicing the laissez faire ideas of the ruling class of his day. But he was stating his vision of the truth in the only way he could. We, in a future age, see that his hypothesis is only partially true. Similarly, Lysenkoism, the theory that an individual creature can pass on characteristics that it acquires in its own lifetime—that was a theory that was very attractive in a state which believed that society could be changed overnight.
“So a scientist is not the aloof intellect that people, and very often he himself, may think he is. He is moved by irrational dreams—hunches. The dream comes first—the theory second. Not always, but often enough with the big things. Einstein, for instance, had a hunch that the old Newtonian conception of the universe was wrong, and he set out to prove it wrong. Do you see?”
“I see, all right. But I don’t see what it has to do with your visit to me.”
“Don’t you? Well, I had a hunch, too. It wasn’t one I could work out into a theory. It’s not that kind of a hunch. I had to wait for it to take shape. I didn’t even know what it would look like when it did. Now I know.”
Arnold’s puzzlement mounted. “Know what?”
“What it looks like. I’m sitting across from it right now.”
“You mean…? You’ll have to explain a bit more than that. But, first, why are you sure that I’m genuine? I’ve found by now that there are all sorts of people in the world who make weird claims.”
Green laughed. “Perhaps because you ask that question. Perhaps because people are my raw material. A mineralogist does not have to put pyrites to any test to know that it is not gold. Nor gold to know that it is. I will explain further. And this is the core of it.
“In something less than two hundred years there has been a phenomenal increase in man’s understanding of the world about him and in his power to harness its forces. In two hundred years man has learned far, far more than in the whole of history before that. But, in the process, man himself has changed. Slowly but surely man has mutated—as a result of the very changes in the world that he himself has effected. Slowly but surely man has individually diverged from the main stock.”
“But—” Arnold, for all his feeling that here was somebody who could give purpose and meaning to the power, was compelled, in the light of what had happened to Sally, to strive against it and deny it at any point that he could—“surely that doesn’t agree with all the talk of mass psychology and conformism?”
“Pah!” said the little man with surprising vehemence; “That’s the bastard talk of advertising men. Don’t tell me—” He flapped a hand. “All right, I am not interested in what you do for a living. I’m trying only to encourage you. But the point is that the urge to conformity is the blind counter-instinct against the forces that have caused the individual ego to become more and more isolated.
“That has been the problem when the planners have built new towns for people to live in. They have made row upon row of houses, all the same. And supermarkets where everybody buys the same kind of food, dance halls where they dance the same dances, modern palaces where they all see the same stereo films. Yet, I tell you, Mr. Ash, that in those places people are desperately alone. That is why the suicide rates, the juvenile delinquency rates, are higher there than anywhere else. And they are high enough, God alone knows, all over the world.
“Did you ever read a modern psychiatric case book? No? You would be surprised at the multiplicity of man’s divergence from the norm. This—this fragmentation is all about you. Television, the stereos, the tabloids, they live on it like ghouls. There are three times more psychiatrists today than there were fifteen years ago. Two out of every five people today will have schizophrenia at some time in their lives—and that is only going by current figures. The rate of incidence increases yearly. Modern therapy can patch them up, of course; well, most of the time. So people put the problem to the back of their minds.
“People have feared mutations for a long time. They’ve read, scare reports in the papers, and they’ve been relieved when they’ve seen no monsters or freaks. But it’s been happening under their very noses. Everybody is to a greater or lesser degree a freak today—mentally.
“Here we come to my hunch that I spoke about. I have an incurable optimism. It used to bother me when I was a young man, a student. It was fashionable to think that an optimist was a special kind of moron. My optimism is not personal. I mean a scientific optimism. The whole natural world is a system of force and counter-force. Diseases provoke antibodies. Overpopulation explodes in war. War stimulates the incidence of male births. Check and counter-check all the time. If you’ve been wondering what all this is leading up to, it is this:
“I have seen this process of mutation going on. I have been waiting for what you might call the counter-mutation, the principle or faculty which would counteract what was happening. I hadn’t foreseen absolute telepathy, I must confess; I thought it would be no more than an empathy. And I thought it would appear in a rudimentary, but detectable form in a number of people. Instead, it has appeared at one leap in you. At least, I believe it has. I believe that you are my counter-mutation.”
“I’m a mutation?”
Arnold looked down at himself and unconsciously spread his arms. He had two arms, ten fingers. It was only one pair of eyes that told him that. Despite the fact that he had just been told that mutation could be a mental factor, the word “mutation”, precisely as Professor Green had just said, provoked such a response. It had been a stock-in-trade of sick humorists for years.
An objection occurred to him.
“But I’m thirty. I was born before the first atom bomb.”
Green shrugged fiercely.
“Who was talking about atom bombs? Mention mutation and people always think of atomic radiation. That is only one factor. An important one, but radiation doesn’t come only from bombs. The level was rising long before atom bombs were invented. And several hundred mutative factors have been identified by now. All sorts of things—caffeine, for instance, or ozone or formalin.”
“But—but why should this have happened to me? And to—to the other person? Don’t forget there were two of us.”
“Haven’t you asked yourself that question already?”
“Many times,” Arnold admitted. “But I’m asking you now.”
Green smiled. “I don’t know all the answers. Far from it. I don’t know, you might have some history of predetermining influences. I’m not interested in that at this moment. What I am interested in, vitally interested after what you said to me earlier, is your going on with this ability, developing it, spreading it. Will you assure me that you will?”
Arnold thought again of Sally and of Claire. “I can’t.” Then he thought over what Green had told him. And he remembered what he himself had told Claire, that if it demanded sacrifices he would h
ave to make them. That he had no choice. “I can’t. Not just like that. Excuse me a moment, will you?”
He went to Claire’s studio. He knocked, as always. She called to come in, and he entered. She had Sally on her knee, directing her hand at painting. Sally looked up at him warily but managed a faint smile. The wounds were healing. But she made no attempt to reach out to his mind. She had not done that once since they found her in the hospital. He didn’t know whether Claire had any contact with her; he hadn’t asked.
“Can I see you for a moment?” Arnold asked her.
Claire put Sally down and came over to him.
“Somebody’s here from London University. A Professor Michael Green. He’s head of the Social Psychology Department.”
“Yes?”
“He—he believes that I have the power. He wants me to go on. I was going to chuck it, believe me. But he says it’s important that I go on. And what he says makes sense. What should I do?”
“Who am I to tell you, Arnold?”
“Who else could?”
“But—could you chuck it?”
“I could try.”
“Would you really want to?”
“There wouldn’t be much left in life now if I did. But after—”
He gestured towards Sally.
“That wasn’t your fault,” Claire said softly but insistently. “It was mine. I passed the power on to her. The decision is yours. But… I know I haven’t been much help to you… but if you go ahead with it now… I couldn’t help you at all.”
He looked at her. Her meaning took a moment to become clear.
“Are you making it a choice? Stay here and forget it, or carry on with it but leave? Is that what you mean?”
“Oh no, no. You don’t have to leave. But I must. I made up my mind today. I haven’t told you before. I didn’t want to complicate things any more. I know how worried you’ve been. But I have to get away, let this heal over, try and get on with my work. I must.”
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