The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  George Oaks said: “My first conclusion must be, that I have been an unmitigated ass in assuming that Kadmeel and his Sciocrats would look for a world either above or below the surface of the known world. If I hadn’t dreamed myself into being more of a fool than God made me, I might have known that Kadmeel and his friends would go after a complete, open, arrogant conquest of a world which they at present partly rule. I might have known that it must hurt the Sciocratic pride to tamper with a legislature here, and finance a politician there, and fiddle with common bribery and corruption everywhere. Of course, of course—premising that the Sciocrats are mad—it is perfectly reasonable to assume that they’d want to make their present power openly absolute. . . . They hate all the laws that bind them, all the laws of the world, Ohm—all the laws begotten of hunger, love, and the fear of death.”

  “For me,” said Ohm Robertson, “you’re speaking entirely in unknown quantities. For my part I have never known hunger, love, or the fear of death. But I beg pardon—do go on, Oaks.”

  “You know, Albert, Ohm is telling the truth. In the first big show, Jerry was strafing hell out of us—Minnies, Jack Johnsons and all—Ohm simply plugged up his ears and read a book. He doesn’t understand what fear is. I told you, Albert, he isn’t of this world.”

  With another of those pale smiles, Ohm Robertson said: “A heavy bombardment was the only thing that could drown Oaks’s voice, Mr. Kemp. I welcomed a shower of Minnenwerfer missiles, for the sake of peace and quiet, especially when Oaks decided to hum Sir Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’, with appropriate gestures, playing pizzicato with the lid of an empty herring tin. Apart from a jew’s harp, I have never heard a more deplorable twanging than Oaks got out of that bit of tin. Upon my word, Mr. Kemp, I verily believe that if you enclosed that man in cotton wool, he would contrive some means of making a noise out of it.”

  “Why, yes,” said George Oaks. “Being pretty strong in the fingers, I’d spin the cotton into strings of varying thicknesses, and, by the God, I bet you I’d make you a workable harp. Would you like to bet, Ohm? Give me a carton of cotton wool and a chair frame—especially one of those bentwood frames—and in two hours I’ll play you ‘Scheherezade’. Eh?”

  I said: “Don’t bet, sir. He’d do it, and then you’d have to listen to it. During the first blitz he made a one-string fiddle out of a soup plate, some twisted-up cellophane from cigarette packets, and an umbrella rib, and played ‘Lily of Laguna’. Also, ‘A Bicycle made for Two’.”

  “Yes,” said Ohm Robertson, still smiling, but smiling to himself now, and not at me. “Oaks has a most remarkable gift—to get a certain joy, a certain merriment, out of anything and everything. And I really believe that he sincerely loves, in their fundamentals, the laws of the world that are begotten of hunger, love, and the fear of death!”

  Now George Oaks was strangely still, and there was a look about him that made me uneasy. He glanced at me before replying, and I saw that his eyes were, at the same time, watchful and bewildered: they were the eyes of a man across whose consciousness has flashed a thought that ought to be unthinkable. But he said, immediately: “And so I do, by the God! Where would we be without them, Ohm? Without them, there’d be no Beethoven, no Shakespeare, nothing. Take away hunger and love, and the world becomes a castrated fat cat on a mat. There’s no glory, Ohm, except in achievement, and there’s no fun in achievement except through a clean fight. It must be so! If you’re starving in a kennel, your instincts tell you that it must be so. If Winnie had said: ‘I can offer you nothing but champagne, deodorant, and Chanel Number Five’, whose blood would have stirred? Blood, sweat, tears—hunger, love, fear of death—Man lives by these things. He always must, if he is to keep on being Man. I subscribe to the laws begotten of hunger and love and the fear of death, I do!”

  “Now I wonder why,” said Ohm Robertson.

  “Why? For the simple reason that men are men, or ought to be, and must bleed and sweat and weep their way.”

  “Their way where, Oaks?”

  “Nobody knows, Ohm. He is born to struggle as a hammer is made for percussion, or a file is cut for friction. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be a man. On my honour, old friend, nothing is born without healthy pain.”

  “You must correct me if I am wrong; I am no pathologist,” said Ohm Robertson, “but I am informed that Pain is in the nature of a warning signal, a danger signal, indicative of the nearness of a state of affairs to be avoided.”

  “Yes,” cried George Oaks, “but hold hard, there! There are two kinds of pain. There is good pain and bad pain. There is clean pain and dirty pain. Good pain is the pain you accept because you know that it leads to something beyond yourself—the pain of the woman in labour, the pain of the wheel on the road, the pain of the artist in travail. These pains you forget or forgive, because they don’t hurt you—they make you stronger. But bad pains you never quite forget, and never forgive, because they are pain for pain’s sake—destructive pains—the pangs of unnecessary death. Ohm, in the last analysis, the right to inflict Pain belongs to the God, Who can see the end of it. Not to Man——”

  “—Hush, Oaks, hush. What can one gain by shouting? We are not deaf, I believe? . . . For my part, I believe that pain is unnecessary; that the human organism is all-too-human, and deucedly clumsily designed and inefficient in operation. I am by way of being a perfectionist, you know—theoretically, Oaks, necessarily theoretically, since after all I am a similar parcel of similarly-working parts. But I cannot find it in my heart to be out of sympathy with, say, your Kadmeels and your Kurt Brevises who find natural processes of evolution somewhat slow, who very properly desire to be alone and untrammelled and who find the maximum life-span too short.”

  And then Ohm Robertson looked again at the face of his watch, so that I said to George Oaks: “George, I think we are keeping Professor Ohm Robertson.”

  But Ohm Robertson put away his watch, saying: “Oh no, please, not at all. This is a great pleasure, I assure you. Don’t go.” And he got up and fetched the brandy bottle.

  While his back was turned, Oaks looked at me with something like a grimace of agony: his mouth squared itself in a kind of rictus, and then narrowed under a ponderous frown, so that his expression said: Calm, calm; above all, be calm and leave it to me! “Thanks, Ohm,” he said, taking the bottle, and pouring only a little brandy into my beaker and his, while the scientist settled himself again: “. . . Ah, Lord! If it were Albert talking and not Ohm Robertson, I’d begin to look forward, now, to some nonsense about super-evolved thinking creatures, all brain and no body, all pure reason divorced from emotion . . . a kind of palpitating bladder of convoluted grey slime which it would be the function of leggy bipeds like me and Albert to feed and lubricate.”

  Ohm Robertson replied: “The romances of Mr. Wells apart, Oaks—seriously now; what is the man in the street to you as an individual, except a creature that makes your everyday life possible? In your heart, you must confess, you put yourself a cut above the cabby who drives a taxi, the barman who draws your beer, the waiter who fills your plate, the office-boy who brings your tea, the telephone operator who puts a plug into a socket to connect you with me through the wire. Don’t you?”

  Ohm Robertson’s eyes were closed again. George Oaks gave me another keen, hard look as he said: “I suppose I do.” His voice was low, and his tone indecisive, now: I did not know whether to hate him for his humility, or his old friend for his condescension.

  “As a reasoning man, Oaks—which you are—you must see that these Sciocrats (an ugly and pretentious term, but one label is as good as another, given the content, as witness the bottle by your side), these Sciocrats, Oaks, although they may be mad, are not without reason. And they reason as follows: The world is too full of too many people. In the course of nature your Too-Many must reduce itself in ultimate combat, each to each, until a kind of manœuvrable mass of population is e
stablished. The resources of the earth are being rapidly exhausted. Food-producing soil is diminishing year by year, as are the sources of mechanical energy—I mean, fuel. A Lord Kadmeel, or whoever it may be, may accumulate in billions or in trillions, I grant you.”

  “But——?” said George Oaks.

  “—But what your magnate amasses is a mere flea-bite compared with what is blindly consumed every day by the unseen swarms of utter nonentities that live simply for the sake of living. It is all very well to complain that your Fords and your Rockefellers accumulate more than they can possibly, as individuals, produce. But have you ever stopped to think of your Superfluous Man—the man who, merely in the act of living, consumes something like one-sixtieth of his average weight in solids and liquids every twenty-four hours, constantly multiplying himself, and exhausting the world without replenishing it? Have you paused to consider, Oaks, that your Man of the People is by far a more ferocious glutton than your multi-millionaire? Now really, Oaks, you cannot reasonably deny that the majority of Mankind is unnecessary?”

  “I do deny it,” said George Oaks.

  “If you consider the facts and the figures of the matter,” said Ohm Robertson, as if he had not heard, “speaking quantitatively, even as manure, the Average Man comes expensive: as a mass, he must (speaking in figures) put back into the ground no more than about seventy per cent of himself in the next two hundred years. From the viewpoint of Humanity, therefore, he pays less than three-tenths of one per cent per annum. Your average inhabitant of the earth, then, though he be the humblest toiler in factory or field, accumulates where he does not produce. Hence, it may be argued that the rapidly multiplying population is superfluous and parasitic . . . this mass, by its very existence, is destroying itself. The process of its self-destruction must necessarily be bitter, painful, and prolonged: it must involve war upon war, famine upon famine, pestilence upon pestilence. And, in the end, what can remain to nibble the last few blades of grass and gnaw the last few thigh-bones and roots on the face of a vitiated earth? A reduced breed of bestial men, living by the laws of tooth and nail—a broken mass that, by the very exigencies of survival, must have climbed back to the tree-tops or slunk back into the caves. The figures say so, Oaks; it must be so. Figures don’t lie; that is why I am devoted to them. Similarly, Oaks, I have a high regard for you, because you are a lover of the truth. In your emotional way, I believe that you are a realist.”

  “It depends what you mean by reality,” George Oaks said. But Ohm Robertson smiled and waved this away.

  “Your Sciocrat,” he said, “or whatever you like to call him, proposes, if you like, to hurry things along. In the evolutionary sense, it is necessary to consider Mankind as something on the move—is it not? This being the case, why should not Mankind, on the move, move faster in its given direction towards its pre-ordained goal?”

  I asked: “Who ordains the goal? Who dares to set the direction?” I said that because George Oaks was unaccountably silent, and I felt that this was what he would have said if he had spoken. Looking to him for approbation, I received a cold stare; and somewhere between his eyebrows I saw an inward-and-downward movement which said: Shut up!

  “Well, then,” said Ohm Robertson, making a little tent of his hands, and putting his nose into it, “your Sciocrat, or whatever you like to call him, proposes to do for Mankind, as a body on the move, no more than Watt and Stevenson proposed to do with vehicles: in effect, to convey him, as it might be from York to London, in less than one-tenth of the hitherto accepted time. Quite simply; your Sciocrat anticipates the Inevitable. He sees his destination, and takes steps to get there somewhat sooner. Life being short, your Sciocrat aims to achieve tomorrow a little in advance of the clock. Think, now, Oaks, and tell me—what is there in this to which a reasoning man may take exception?”

  George Oaks said: “One has a prejudice, of course, against washing out three-quarters of the civilised world at one swoosh.”

  “Of course one has, Oaks, on the face of it. But on reflection, why should one have? In five hundred years, or less, quite two-thirds of the Unknown Superfluous must be eliminated more or less unpleasantly in the course of nature.”

  “Agreed, Ohm; but given five hundred years, they’d have a sporting chance,” said George Oaks. “The God gives a sporting chance.”

  “I don’t quite follow you,” said Ohm Robertson. “The world, as its inhabitants knew it, has been changed overnight many times before now. Would you call the explosion of Krakatoa a sporting chance? Or the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii? Or the frost that froze the mammoths? Or your Hiroshima bomb? Since the Part is comprehended by the Whole, every act, surely, must ultimately be an Act of God?”

  “I agree with you there,” said George Oaks. “Ultimately, yes. Ultimately. But let’s get back to the Kurt Brevis papers, and Lord Kadmeel’s connection with them. As I see it, Kadmeel and his Sciocrats propose to blow down the Atlantic and the Pacific barriers, and flood the world. Having established themselves, dug themselves in, on the high places of the world, the Sciocrats propose to come out in broad daylight, and rule the earth under a brand-new code. Like that!” He snapped his fingers.

  Ohm Robertson, nodding, said: “That is about it, Oaks.”

  “Of course, the Sciocrats can’t do this without Kurt Brevis’s Megatopic Silicon Bomb?”

  “Without something of the sort, I believe, it would be out of the question, Oaks.”

  “Just so, Ohm. Now correct me if I’m wrong: Lord Kad-meel and his associates have put an immense sum of money into what the newspapers call the Bathyspheric Survey—that is to say, Kadmeel has been watching and measuring the ocean bed by means of the Hohenlohe Bathysphere between England and Newfoundland. I put it to you that the end he has in view is, a blasting of the barriers with Kurt Brevis’s bomb—a releasing of the hot sea-currents to the north, and the loosening of a new deluge.”

  Ohm Robertson took out his watch again, and opened it. This time he did not put it back, but kept on gazing at the face of it, nervously scratching at the arm of his chair with the forefinger of his free hand. “Yes,” he said slowly, “I believe that to be the case.”

  There used to be a form of torture called “The Cord”—they twisted a knotted rope about a man’s forehead until his eyes came out. Looking at George Oaks’s agonised face, which was watery white now, like candle grease, and at his straining eyes, I knew what the victim must have looked like when the torturer put on the pressure. “An overdose of sanity can drive a man mad,” he muttered. “Too much Reason, taken neat, can induce delirium.”

  “I don’t follow you,” said Ohm Robertson.

  “I mean that I’ve been thinking too hard, and I’ve given myself a headache. Do you happen to have a couple of aspirins, Ohm?”

  “Certainly. I’ll get them for you. I’d better not tell Herbage—she’ll think I want them for myself, and she’ll make me go to bed with a hot-water-bottle. Excuse me.”

  He left the room, and then George Oaks whispered: “My God, my God! The man is mad!” He caught up Kurt Brevis’s papers and stuffed them into his pocket. “Let’s get out of here, and get rid of this stuff, quick. Follow me close. If there’s any rough stuff outside, hit to break bone, but not unless I give you the office. I think Halfacre’s men will be on the watch outside. Above all, take your lead from me. Come on!”

  But then Ohm Robertson returned with a bottle of aspirin tablets. He had the vacant look of a sleep-walker; I noticed that his watch, still open, was dangling at the end of its chain from his waistcoat. As he sat down, the watch rattled against his knees, whereupon, with a faint start, he took it up and consulted it again. “Ah yes,” he said, closing it and putting it away. “Ah yes. Yes . . . Here are some aspirin tablets, Oaks. Take a couple with a little water. I don’t think you ought to have any more brandy. In such quantities it really can’t be good for you, you
know. Sit down, sit down.”

  “We must go,” said George Oaks. “I’m not well.”

  “All the more reason why you should rest a bit, surely? . . . Well, Oaks, I have helped you to the best of my ability, as I said I would, and in view of the significance of Brevis’s papers, it remains only to hand them over to the proper authorities, as I told you it would be my bounden duty to do.”

  “Just so,” said George Oaks.

  “Just so,” Ohm Robertson agreed. “I took the liberty of telephoning them shortly before you and Mr. Kemp arrived.”

  “You did?” cried George Oaks.

  “Yes. You’ll forgive me, Oaks. I know that you’re an honest man, but in these muddle-headed times one cannot be too careful. A clever and honest man may be ideologically on the wrong path. For all I know, you might in all honesty have allowed yourself to become corrupted like Brevis. In such cases there is no way of telling, is there? Therefore——”

  A bell rang. Herbage—I recognised her quick, firm footsteps—went to the front door.

  “—This must be they. Sit down, sit down, Oaks—if your hands are clean in this matter, there can be nothing for you to fear, surely?”

  Herbage tapped at the door, and opened it. “Three gentlemen to see you, Master Ohm.”

  “I’m expecting them, Herbage. Show the gentlemen in.”

  She held open the door. Three tall men came into the study.

  The foremost of them was Major Chatterton. “Good evening!” he said.

  Part Nine

  Then I felt as one of those Siberian mammoths must have felt when that unimaginable ancient frost that struck like lightning deep-froze him quicker than a startled nerve can tell a muscle to jump. Or—speaking of lightning—as a condemned man in Sing-Sing must feel when the switch is thrown and the current courses through him. I believe that if I had been strapped tight to my arm-chair by trepidation, the shock would have sent me hurtling out of it. I am quite sure that my body convulsively, between shoulders and loins, made what wrestlers call an “arch”, while something beyond sensation shot through the bore of my spine from brain to buttocks. . . . No, let us say that it was something like electrocution, because somehow I had been bracing myself for some shock from the moment when Ohm Robertson started to worry over his watch.