The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  This time it must have been morphine, because when I awoke again I felt myself smoothly sliding up out of a black pit in Time. My mouth was very dry, but I was too drowsily preoccupied with the tails of strange dreams that were scuttling back into their holes in the basement of my consciousness. I groped, found a deeply upholstered ledge, and hauled myself into a sitting position. There was a curtained window on my left. Looking out I saw a vivid sky and caught a dazzling flash of sunlight on a silver wing. Then a restrained voice said: “Coffee, sir?” and Chatterton’s “man Powell” stood at my elbow, dressed in white now, like a steward, offering a large tray richly laid with massive silver covers. “I did not wish to disturb you, sir,” he said, “so I took the liberty of bringing you some devilled kidneys, and some Virginia ham, and eggs. But if there is anything else you prefer—”

  “—A cigarette?” I said, gulping orange juice.

  “Virginian? Turkish? Egyptian, sir?” He offered a silver box of three compartments.

  “Where’s Oaks?” I asked.

  “Mr. Oaks has breakfasted, sir, and is dressing. He was inquiring after you. If you will ring when you have finished, sir, I will prepare your shower, if you will tell me how you prefer it. Your clothes are being pressed, and I have laid out a fresh shirt, underwear and socks. Also a bathrobe. Will that be all, sir?”

  “Thank you,” I said, stupidly.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He went away, and then, discovering that I was hungry, I ate ravenously, and climbed out of bed. The sheets, I noticed, were of dark green silk. A pair of dark green slippers were placed heel to heel at an angle of forty-five degrees on the dense carpet, and there was a robe of the same colour at the foot of the bed. I found myself standing, half-stupefied with astonishment, in a small but most luxuriously appointed chamber, carpeted, curtained, upholstered, and painted all in dark green and silver. One felt rather than heard the engines, much as one feels rather than hears the purring of a sleepy, satisfied cat. The bathroom fittings were of solid silver. I shaved, showered, and dried myself with a dark green towel. Powell was waiting for me, standing like a graven image, pointing to my clothes which were carefully laid out on the bed, which had been skilfully made up in my brief absence.

  “You will find all your money and things in their proper pockets, sir,” he said, “only I took the liberty of putting away a certain . . . instrument, which I found in your left-hand inside breast pocket. I was sure you wouldn’t need it.” The mask of the valet slipped; he uncovered three teeth in a mean smile and, in the voice I had heard him use before the plane took off, he asked: “Where d’you buy your coshes? Swaine andd Adeney, or Cogswell andd Harrison? I have mine made upp for me by a fellow calledd Sim.” Then, with horridly simulated obsequiousness: “Shall I brush your hair for you, sir?”

  “Get out of here,” I said.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  I dressed. There was a silver-edged panel in the wall that had the appearance of a little door. I pushed it tentatively, and it turned on a pivot, swinging into view a well-stocked cocktail bar, from which I helped myself to a whisky and soda, after which, glass in hand, I parted the curtains through which Powell had passed on his way out. They covered a door. The door was locked. There was nothing to do, then, but sit in an easy chair and wait; which I did. Half an hour passed before the door opened again, and Chatterton came in.

  “You know,” he said, “even if I hadn’t liked you and George in the first place I couldn’t help liking you now. Do you know, that was a devilish clever trick of yours?”

  “What was?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “Ah, deep, deep! I tell you, no other two men in two million would have had the presence of mind to keep their pistol and their blackjack in their pockets, confronted by guns as you were last night. You know, that was deucedly clever of you and George, Kemp! Your assumption was, of course, that we’d assume that if you had had weapons, you’d have tried to use them: ergo we wouldn’t bother to search you later on. And we wouldn’t have, either, you know. Only the Kad hates a sloppy appearance, d’you see, and we generally get people tidied up a bit before we present ’em. Otherwise we’d never have dreamed of going over your pockets. Dashed smart! I respect you for that. You know, I really believe we are going to get along together, once you begin to see eye to eye with us, what?”

  I could only laugh, somewhat bitterly, at the memory of an advantage forgotten; but Chatterton misconstrued my laugh. He said: “Oh no, really, if it had just been a matter of hauling you along, we’d never have twigged that little ruse. Only the Kad likes everything just so, and his word is law . . . well, more or less. . . . Now let’s go and get George, shall we?”

  He opened the door and led me through a corridor into a dark green lounge curiously panelled with pale green glass behind which, at cunningly-measured distances, lay exquisitely-painted panoramas of strange seas and beautiful landfalls. Standing in the centre of this room, and slowly turning, a man might imagine that Satan had taken him to the top of a high mountain, and was showing him all the kingdoms of the earth . . . until he put out his hand to touch the middle distance, and felt a window, and saw through it to the heart of the illusion.

  George Oaks was there, looking remarkably spruce, with a knife-edge crease in his trousers and a glowing polish on his shoes, smoking a cigarette and drinking a bottle of Bass. As soon as he saw me he said, with some indignation: “Albert, while I was asleep, they actually gave me a haircut!” Then he came close to me, holding up the long beer-glass, and his eyes, holding mine, were deadly serious as he said: “Will you do as I do, Albert? A Bass?”

  I took his meaning, and said, easily: “Why, of course, I’ll do as you do, George.”

  “You couldn’t do better,” he said, with an almost imperceptible wink, and turned to press a button. An attendant appeared immediately. “Mr. Kemp will do as I do. A Bass, without.”

  “Without, sir?”

  “Without chloral hydrate. . . . Well, Chatterton, what now?”

  “Well, now you drink your beer, and then you come and see Lord Kadmeel, George,” said Chatterton.

  “But where the devil are we?” I asked.

  “Oh, somewhere close to the coast of Labrador, I fancy,” said Chatterton, easily; and, smiling at my exclamation of astonishment, he added: “This is the Kad’s own extra-special Stratoliner, you know, and you’ve been bye-byes a dozen hours or more, don’t you see. We’ll land fairly soon, I think.”

  “Up in the north of Quebec, where you took Kurt Brevis, eh?” said George Oaks.

  “Perhaps,” said Chatterton.

  George Oaks said: “He played you for a sucker, didn’t he?”

  “Oh no, George, not in the long run he didn’t. All’s well that ends well, you know.”

  “Chatterton,” said George Oaks, “only the God can see the end. Meanwhile, haven’t you observed that all along the line His hand has been against you?”

  “As I see it, quite the reverse,” said Chatterton. “We must go into this at our leisure.”

  “I’ll tell you in the Condemned Cell, if I live, Chatterton.”

  “Very necessary saving clause, that, George,” said Chatterton.

  A bell tingled very musically—a silver bell, no doubt. Chatterton said: “The Lord Kadmeel will see you now. Come along.”

  And so he led us into the presence of Lord Kadmeel, the Chief of the Sciocrats.

  Over-insistence on a colour, like the perpetual repetition of a single note, drives some men mad. As I stepped into Lord Kadmeel’s saloon, I caught myself gritting my teeth, and saying to myself: Now, some more dark green! And, surely enough, there it was, that same succulent decor picked out with silver. Only here large glass tanks were built into the walls, and in these tanks swam a fantastic diversity of brilliantly coloured and oddly shaped tropical fishes.
Lord Kadmeel was contemplating four sea-horses in a tank by themselves. When the door closed, he turned to confront us—a large, sullen, fat man in a smoking-jacket of dark-green brocade. Then he put his hands behind him, and said, in a slow thick voice which made me think of the sluggish bubbling of boiling porridge: “They can sit down, Chatterton.”

  “Won’t you have a pew, George? Kemp?” said Chatterton.

  We sat.

  “They may smoke if they like,” said Lord Kadmeel.

  George Oaks said to Chatterton: “Tell your master that Albert Kemp and George Oaks, having knocked about the world a little, will make shift to understand him without the aid of an interpreter, however wretchedly he mishandles the King’s English. Make it clear to him that if he has anything to say to us, he will say it direct, or not at all. Construe!”

  “Better humour them, I think, sir,” said Chatterton.

  Lord Kadmeel said: “I don’t see why I should—but, well, if you like. It can’t make any difference, ultimately . . .” Then to us: “You have given us some trouble. I believe, more trouble than you are worth. It remains to be seen. If you prove to be more trouble than you are worth, you’ll be written off. Do you understand?”

  George Oaks said: “I wish you would look at me if you are talking to me, instead of watching your reflection in that fish tank. Understand you? I’d understand you better if you cleared your throat. Say what you have to say. Come to the point.”

  “The point,” said Lord Kadmeel, “the point is this. Firstly: Chatterton is convinced that you are in possession of some information which may be useful to Us. We have means of extracting information—means which We do not hesitate to use. Why should We hesitate? But Chatterton is opposed to Our using these means except as a last resort because . . . Secondly: Chatterton has a remarkably high opinion of your ability in general. By ‘ability’ I mean, of course, your potential usefulness to Us. He argues, not without reason, that if We were to have recourse to . . . compulsion, you could not possibly afterwards be of any service to Us. By the time We had finished with you, you would only be a charge upon Us if We kept you alive; so that, naturally, We should in that case have you destroyed. Chatterton is of the opinion that once Our intentions, together with the inevitability of their fulfilment, are made clear to you, you will become one with Us. The decision rests with you. You will give Us, fully and freely, all information in your possession which may be in any way of service to Us. If you do not give to Us fully and freely, We will take from you by inches. If you are for Us, you live in comfort and with dignity. If you are against Us, you die. And if you withhold one crumb of the truth from Us, you will pray for death. I hope Chatterton may be right. He generally is. . . . They can go now, Chatterton. Take them away.”

  He turned back to the sea-horses, and Chatterton conducted us back to the panoramic room, and when we were seated, with full glasses in our hands, he said: “Well, George? Well, Kemp? What do you think?”

  Now George Oaks put on an air of resignation, and said: “You have us here, twenty thousand feet above the open sea, and you say ‘What do you think?’ What would you think, if you were me?”

  “You didn’t talk like that to the Kad, did you, though, George?”

  “I don’t like him. He got me the sack for riding in his private lift. Besides, one has one’s dignity. Eh, Albert?”

  “I don’t like him either,” I said.

  “Oh, but, my dear fellows, you don’t have to like the Kad! I mean to say, how could one? You’ll never see him, anyway. It’s just a question of being sensible, that’s all. You don’t have to like, say, your Troop Sergeant-Major, but you’ve jolly well got to ride with him for your own sake, and everybody else’s, haven’t you? Likes and dislikes don’t signify. I quite like a whole lot of Turks, for instance, but that didn’t stop my killing quite a few of them in Mesopotamia. And I can assure you that while I’ve had the pleasure of knocking over a number of Prussians in my time, some of my best friends were Jerries; and I’ve never disliked any of the men I’ve killed one tenth as much as a fellow in my mess called Braithwaite, for the privilege of cutting whose throat I would have given ten years of my life . . . And he saved my life, in the end! And do you know, because he saved my life I hated him worse than ever. . . . Let’s not talk of likes and dislikes. Let’s take the long view, George, shall we? Emotion aside, like sensible people; let’s be adult. Friendship . . . likes . . . dislikes . . . love-of-country . . . really, now, you and I have lived long enough to know these catch-phrases for what they are worth. You surely must know, George, that if the End is good, it justifies the Means?”

  “Perfectly,” said George Oaks. “There is only one snag. From where a man starts, it is not given to him to see the End. The Ultimate is always a dream. The End is never better than a hope. The only facts within your control are the Means, Chatterton. And your vision—you being only a man—is so limited that every Means must be in itself an End. And so, poor man, you follow a broken thread in a dark maze, and are lost. Lenin, for instance, imagined that he could see a noble End; and out of his Means came Stalin—and where, then, was the glory and the dream? Again——”

  “—There isn’t all the time in the world, George,” said Chatterton, gently. “The metaphysics, or whatever you call it, can wait. You will meet all kinds of Thinkers where we are going, and can argue away to your heart’s content. Let’s take things in their proper order, shall we? I want to tell you this: first and foremost, I must have everything you know. You must open your heart, George, you really must, you know.”

  “Say I do tell all I know, what then?” asked George Oaks.

  “Why, then, after a certain probationary period, you and Kemp become one of Us, and you are in clover.”

  “And if I don’t open my heart?”

  “Believe me, George,” said Chatterton, “you will, you will! But, as the Kad said, if you don’t talk willingly, and We have to compel you to talk, you’ll be not much use to man or beast afterwards, so that We’d put you to sleep, eventually, if only for your own sake, you know. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, George—We don’t go in for thumb-screws, and racks, and strappados, and rubber truncheons, and what not, unless a case particularly calls for that kind of questioning. (It would astonish you, by the way, to see the figures: imaginative men hold out like the very devil against common or garden medieval torture; whereas they spill their guts at the touch of a needle.) No, no, We have a brilliant German neurologist who deals with these matters. He is tabulating his findings, and—this stuff is too deep for me, of course—is working on a quite ponderous treatise provisionally entitled ‘Human Endurance and its Limits’ . . . For goodness sake, George, do let us see eye to eye!”

  George Oaks was busy with his left thumb, profoundly engrossed as only a nail-biter can be. Chatterton turned to me, idly rolling the stem of his glass between his long fingers. “Really, you know, Kemp, it would interest you too—you being a writer, and a student of human reactions, and all that kind of thing. Dr. Treit would fascinate you. He is one of the fellows that started to tabulate, among other things, human resistance to extremes of heat and cold, you know, in some concentration camp or other in Poland. Quite a character, Kemp—right up your street—just your pigeon. Purely scientific, you know—actually measures screams of agony in decibels, I believe, and makes graphs. Relaxes with the lieder of Schubert; tears run down his cheeks. Oh, I promise you, We can provide you with some unique material. Dr. Treit works, for instance, with a psychologist, Dr. Scarlatti, who is putting together some kind of rigmarole about ‘Sanity in Relation to Applied Fear’. . . . You don’t say much, Kemp, but that doesn’t fool me, you know. You are as deep as the sea. Now do reason with George; you might save Us quite a bit of trouble, and yourself quite literally a Hell of a lot of unpleasantness.”

  I said: “Granting that. I still don’t see, for example, what use I could be to you
and your Sciocrats. I’m an old-fashioned story-teller, with old-fashioned moral values. I can’t see any place or use for me in your new world. I don’t see where I come into it. I don’t fit into your scheme of things at all.”

  Chatterton looked hard at me for a second or two, then smiled; and with engaging frankness said: “Intelligent of you, Kemp! I’ll be open with you, old fellow. To tell you the truth: if it comes to your fitting into Our scheme of things, well, you don’t, and you can’t. Your usefulness to Us is of an immediate nature, you know.”

  I laughed. “You can’t get blood out of a stone,” I said. “You can’t get information out of me, because I haven’t got any.”

  Chatterton replied: “I’m inclined to believe you, Kemp. I shouldn’t be surprised if, on inquiry, We get nothing out of you, because you have nothing to give. But George, here, has something to give, I’m sure; and you are his friend, you know. So—since you force me to put it brutally—if the worst comes to the worst, we’ll have to work on you in George’s presence. Get the idea? I hate to be like this, but needs must . . . Needless to say, if you fellows see reason, nobody will get hurt. Savvy, George?”

  George Oaks said: “Forgive me, old friend, for getting you into this.”

  I said: “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” What else could I say?

  “After all, you know, inside another year, the world—as it will stand then—will have to accept the accomplished fact, and jolly well like it,” said Chatterton.

  Then he began to talk rapidly, and for the first time I saw something like animation in his set, sardonic face. The game now, he told us, was entirely in the hands of the Sciocrats. They held the grand slam. The Kadmeel Bathysphere had completed its survey of the great rocky barriers under the northern Atlantic Ocean and the Bering Straits. While the old gentlemen of the Geographical Societies had been chirping their applause, and Rear-Admiral Elm, who was nominally in charge of the expeditions, had been made an F.R.S., Kadmeel’s men had been sounding the sunken mountain ranges for certain delicate spots. At a hundred points, stupendous masses of rock—billions of tons of it—were kept securely in position by their own weight, and the weight of the water above. At one place, for example, a few hundred miles off the North American coast, there was a rock formation comparable in extent, if not in height, to the Alps, which was kept in place by a species of natural keystone, which one well-placed atom bomb would knock out. Two more bombs, and the whole mass would totter; and then the pressure of the water would send it thundering down. It was clearly ascertained, beyond argument, that one hundred and fifty atomic mines of a certain magnitude were all that the Sciocrats needed to blast the sunken mountain ranges so that the hot waters of the Gulf Stream would rush to the polar ice . . .