The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  With a last slow look at me, Oettle left the room. I heard his heavy tread on the concrete path.

  Then Mungo-Mitchell said: “These houses are wired for sound, I warn you. I’ve disconnected, for a few minutes . . . Oh damn the luck, and blast your photographic eyes, Oaks! You, of all the men in the world, have to be in court when Mungo-Mitchell goes up for trial!”

  “Does that matter so very much?” asked Oaks.

  “Yes, it does. They know there’s one man in the world, somewhere, whom they have reason to fear. Chatterton is comfortably convinced, at present, that that man is you, Oaks. That was all right with me, because I calculated on their taking a few days before getting to work on Kemp, and afterwards on you. And even if you had had to go through the questioning then, it would still have been all right—in the interests of the Job, I mean—because what you didn’t know you couldn’t talk about. But now you do know one thing—that I am not Mungo-Mitchell—and knowing, believe me, eventually you’ll tell; and when you tell, they’ll know that I am the man they want. And that will be the end of me and the Job. Why didn’t I tell you this on the plane? Because I’ve only just heard that the Council are having a look at you tonight. That means they’ll get to work on you very soon now. Now, for God’s sake, temporise, procrastinate, use your wits, play for time. A few days will see us through, with luck. Meanwhile, in case—just in case—eat very light tonight; eat very, very light. You, Kemp, especially.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  But then Oettle’s step sounded outside, and Mungo-Mitchell darted to the bar and all in one movement took out two tumblers and a bottle, so that when Oettle came in with menu and wine-list (bound in dark-green leather) he was meticulously measuring Scotch whisky, and simpering: “Soda, sir?”

  “Water,” said Oaks, sullenly, taking the menu. “What do you fancy for dinner, Albert?”

  I said: “My nose hurts like the devil, and I’ve got a headache. An omelette is all I want.”

  “I shan’t be hungry until much later,” said Oaks. “I’ll have the same for now. And see that mine is moist, Mungo—just about as moist as your grandfather’s rags were when he damped them down to tip the scales another couple of pounds—in other words, not as dry as it appears on the surface. But see that there’s something cold for supper about midnight.”

  “Wine, sir?”

  “Hock. Ask the cellar-man for something decent. Don’t use your own discretion. I trust you with filthy cocktails, nothing more. And one other thing: try and let us see as little of you as possible, will you? And that goes for your boy-friend, too. You both reek of the gaols. Scram!”

  I gulped my drink, and mixed another, for my throat had become suddenly dry and tight. “I wonder what happens now,” I said.

  Tipping a wink in the direction of the curved wall, and touching one of his ears, Oaks said: “Question us, I suppose. Chatterton sounded as if he meant business.”

  “You don’t seriously believe he means to torture us, do you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, old friend. Why not? The Russians do it every day. Whenever they bring up for trial a prisoner who’s too big for secret disposal, why, do you think, that prisoner invariably pleads guilty—even an iron man like Cardinal Minszenty, for example, who is beyond the ordinary tremors of the flesh and the spirit, and believes in Hell, to boot?”

  I said: “All right. I can understand their torturing a man to make him say, in a public statement, exactly what they want him to say. But what’s the use of torturing us if we don’t know what they want us to tell them? You might as well, say, twist a Scotsman’s arm to make him talk Greek.”

  “Just so, Albert, old friend,” said George Oaks, gently. “But suppose you were convinced that this Scotsman really could talk Greek and was holding out on you?”

  I knew, almost telepathically, how he wanted me to react to this, and my voice really broke as I cried: “But damn it all, what do I know? Nothing, nothing! Damn you, I believe you knew about Monty Cello all along, when you dragged me off to the Savoy! And that ‘Regent Lambert’ man he was supposed to get in touch with—he or Kurt Brevis—by God, George, I’ve got it now! You are Regent Lambert!”

  George Oaks winked at me, but his voice faltered a little as he said: “Now . . . don’t be silly, Albert. If it were as you say, why should I drag you into it? Where would you come into the picture?”

  “I’ll tell you where,” I said. “You knew I loved and trusted you. You knew I’d follow you to the ends of the earth. You wanted a man with a strong arm, a loyal heart and a thick head—that’s why I fitted into your picture!” I threw down my glass, and stepped very close to him, standing over him, so that he could whisper if need be.

  And whisper he did: “Strangle me.” Then, aloud: “Albert! Alb——”

  I took him by the throat, not very hard, and shook him, shouting: “You got me into this mess—you’ve got to get me out of it!”

  And then my arms were pinned to my sides. Oettle had me from behind. Not drugged now with delight of battle, I was appalled by the strength of the man. Still, I butted him in the face with the back of my head before I submitted and became limp; whereupon he tossed me on to a settee. Mungo-Mitchell was there, too. He said: “Oh dear! No trouble, I hope?”

  George Oaks gasped: “Nothing, nothing.”

  I said: “Sorry, George. Lost my temper. Nerves.”

  “Give us another drink, Mungo, and get to hell out of here . . . Calm, calm, Albert . . . It’ll all come right in the end.”

  “I’m sorry, George.”

  When we were alone again, he winked at me, and we sat in silence after that, waiting for time to pass. But time seemed to have stopped. George Oaks was deep in thought, and I was in the clutch of cold, naked Fear.

  Chatterton came in at nine o’clock, dressed, now, in a dinner-suit; only the double-breasted jacket was dark green, with velvet lapels. He noticed my look of exacerbated distaste, and said: “Bit on the bizarre side, perhaps, but the Kad finds the colour soothing, so We all wear it for the evening—all except old Pur; he won’t come out of those off-white rompers of his. . . . Dinner all right? Let’s have some brandy—don’t look at me like that, George; I’ll drink some too, this time. . . . I hear that you birds have been having a bit of a row.”

  “Who said so?” asked George Oaks.

  “Oh, Powell told me. What a fire-eater you are, Kemp! You made Oettle’s nose bleed again. But there seems to be electricity in the air this evening. Eve of the Battle, and all that, you know. I tell you, the Big Boys are like so many over-trained bantam-weights in the dressing-room five minutes before a championship fight. They were practically scratching each other’s eyes out at dinner, and H.R.H. the Maharajah of Pur went into such a pet that he didn’t eat his lentils. Can you imagine it? Revenues, ten million pounds per annum; hereditary reserve in gold and precious stones, incalculable. He has drawn on his Reserves to the extent of three hundred million pounds in the past three years, to my certain knowledge, and has scarcely scratched the surface of his capital. And he lives on lentils and sour milk! . . . Tarrytowne nearly lost his temper, too, but he managed to get through the best part of a young turkey. . . .”

  He handed us great brandy-bubbles filled with fragrance. “Ah!” said George Oaks, inhaling, “this is the breath the God breathed into the grape! . . . What was it all about?”

  “Question of manpower; nothing more. Some kind of argument is inevitable, of course. You see, every one of the Council has, in the name of the Council, absolute control over a given area, where his particular stronghold is situated. Lord Kadmeel, for example, has Western Europe and Canada. Tarrytowne has the lower half of the North American Continent dominated by the Rockies. Pur has the northern half of what will be left of India—which will be the best part of India. Van Weenen (you know, the Diamond Syndicate) has all Africa south of the
Equator; while the froggy, Simplon, has Africa north of the Equator: the whole of the Sahara will be under water, of course, and the ‘Dark Heart’ of the Continent will be a huge inland sea . . .

  “Well, to cut a long story short—now that We come to the point of actually shifting our carefully selected (you might say, highly exclusive) population groups, there comes the inevitable palaver, you know. You understand how it is.

  “The Maharajah of Pur, for example, complains that, when the waters subside, he will find himself with too many peasants and soldiers, as opposed to Kadmeel’s and Tarrytowne’s skilled technicians, artisans, and heavy-industry men. He wants Us to start immediately on a system of Decanting desirable couples—in effect, swapping bits of population. It can’t be done, of course—it would attract too much attention.

  “The wisest course is the course We are at present pursuing, and have been pursuing these past five years: to skim Our cream-of-the-cream of the population, teaspoonful by teaspoonful, into cold storage in Our Walled Cities—you know of them as hush-hush factories—and rely upon them, and the weapons at Our disposal, plus the prevailing chaos against which We’ll be fore-armed. When the survivors of Our little cataclysm come crawling up Our slopes like so many flies out of a milk-pot, We’ll be quite numerous enough and strong enough to dry ’em off, or chuck ’em back, at Our leisure . . .

  “We don’t need a very densely populated world, you know.” Chatterton sipped his brandy.

  “And so We start a clean, new breed of men. Any swapping will have to be done after the Flood. . . . There’ll have to be quite extensive sorting out by a process of elimination, even of the survivors, you know. We’ll be able to get along very nicely indeed with a world population of not more than ten millions. Because, don’t you see, it will take a little time for the New Continents to dry off and grow fertile . . .

  “And, in the meantime, Our Selected Population will be breeding, naturally—but not breeding indiscriminately, needless to say. We’ll check and double-check ’em from conception to birth; pick ’em like pups. No runts, no scrubs—only the cream-of-the-cream. That’s what Nature does, in the last analysis, isn’t it?”

  George Oaks said: “All resolved, eh?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Chatterton. “We have Our little differences, naturally. But We realise that it’s all for one, and one for all, now. . . . One allows, naturally, for little idiosyncrasies. Pur, for instance, has a bias in favour of his country’s gods. Two generations of the very Decanting he proposes will soon wash all that nonsense away; because, don’t you see, under the Sciocrats, every man, in his own right, will be in his way a God.”

  “What for?” asked George Oaks.

  Chatterton ignored this. “Idiosyncrasies . . .” he said, with a short laugh. “Romagna, for example, wants to revive the old Roman Games, but on a modern scale. . . . There was nearly quite a scandal, once; he had two blindfold men walk a race over a course dotted with electrified studs; killed ’em both. Has an idea for a chess game between two masters, on a field with living pieces; every piece taken, to be killed on the spot; pawns armed with spears, knights with axes, the rest with swords; losing king to take poison. One indulges such fancies, what? A lot less bloody and vastly more amusing than a World War, don’t you think? . . .

  “However; the way things are, We’re going to have to hustle you fellows, I’m afraid. Pur is particularly keen on looking you over, George. The others are, too. They expect to see a kind of Superman, like the one in the comics, or something. And do you know, I’m really half inclined to believe that you must be. We’ll find out soon enough, won’t We—eh, Kemp?”

  I said: “You can torture me, Chatterton, but you can’t make me tell what I don’t know.”

  “No, Kemp, but good old Treit with his Limit of Human Endurance Test will certainly make you tell all you do know, you know . . . I’m afraid it’ll be rather harrowing for you, George, if you force Us to it. However, one more brandy and a cigarette, and then we’ll be off. What say?”

  “All right,” said George Oaks. “Only one thing: what Albert says is true. He knows nothing, nothing at all. He’s in this affair by sheer chance.”

  “I’m not denying it, old fellow. But there’s no harm in trying, is there? One never knows, does one—eh, George? . . . Besides, in a manner of speaking—you being Kemp’s close friend—the very contemplation of his suffering ought, spiritually, to constitute quite a severe Form of Persuasion for you . . . without permanently injuring you for Us, as I’m afraid poor Kemp may be injured. Do you follow? Well, here’s hoping it won’t come to that. . . .”

  Chatterton looked at his watch. “Not quite time, yet,” he said. “Feel like a little walk?”

  So we went out. At a respectful distance, Oettle and Mungo-Mitchell walked behind us.

  Beyond the high circular wall that ringed this, the inviolably secret centre of the place, towered the disturbingly strange shapes of mysterious edifices ghostly in the moonlight. Here five leprous giants huddled in a ring about a titanic hookah, through the test tubes of which they seemed to be sucking green smoke; there twenty cubical colossi crouched before a dreadful mosque, domed with darkness, and with minarets tipped with flame. Beyond steamed four fantastic Turkish coffee-pots, with twisted handles, straddled by pot-bellied things with spidery tripod legs. And they all simpered and muttered, bubbled and chuckled, murmured and whispered together.

  “That’s the Research Plant,” said Chatterton. “ ‘Industrial Research’ as We call it. We’ve got half a dozen uranium mines tucked away back there, but We’re all set to go into production on Silicon. There’s a further ring of common or garden factory sheds beyond that; then the railway. It goes in concentric circles, as you might say; and for your information, this inner circle, and the one beyond, can only be got into, or out of, each by a single gateway.”

  “Where do you get your power?” asked George Oaks.

  “Mainly, water from the mountain,” said Chatterton. “It supplies Us with about four-fifths of what We need. Also, which is important, it feeds the Cooling System day and night. Do you know, even in the dryest weather Our little mountain torrent never fails; and in the hottest part of the summer is only a matter of a few degrees above zero. A blessing, that, because, as you must know, even if you’re making harmless necessary nitrocellulose, there is a stage at which a sudden rise in temperature might easily spoil it—with very damaging results . . . I say nothing of what might happen to the Experimental Plant in such an eventuality. But it’s out of the question, of course. Thermostatic controls switch on auxiliary refrigerators at a rise of one-quarter of a degree in temperature, and Bob’s your uncle.”

  “Precarious,” George Oaks suggested.

  “Not a bit of it. Safe as Oak Ridge. . . . Here we are, troops. After you.”

  We passed through a corridor done with dark green carpet. Dark green guards opened dark green doors, and bowed us into a dark green ante-room. Chatterton said a word to a pale watchful man in a Sciocratic dinner-jacket, who said: “They are expecting you at ten precisely.” He looked at his watch, and must have been counting seconds, for, after a long half minute, he nodded, and said: “Now!”

  And as he said it, great double doors slid apart, and suddenly the ante-room was one with another, far greater room, dimly lighted, and so sparsely furnished that the dark green tables at the far end had the appearance of tables cleared at twilight after a dreary garden party on a funereal lawn. I say, tables—there were a dozen or fourteen of them. Obviously, every Member of the Council of the Sciocrats was head of his own table, at which he sat alone. Only six were present now, including Kadmeel, all dressed in green dinner-jackets, with the exception of a little old man in washed-out grey cotton clothes—a high-collared jacket, long as a nightshirt, long, narrow, wrinkled trousers, and a grey felt fez. This, of course, was the Maharajah of Pur, the richest prince in th
e world.

  I did not like the cold, implacable arrogance of Tarrytowne’s face; I detested the mock-innocent mouth and cruel languorous eyes of the Italian, Romagna; I hated the cynical fat face of the Frenchman, Simplon, with its topsy-turvy smile; and I wanted to hit the face of Van Weenen, just to see whether or no it was made of wood. But the face of the Maharajah of Pur filled me with indescribable loathing. Imagine a napkin which has been used to mop up spilled coffee, haphazardly thrown down, having accidentally pleated and wrinkled itself into an expression of senile lechery. In the fold that looks like the mouth, place three or four Brazil-nuts for teeth. Over the shadows, under the corrugated part that may be a forehead, hang a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles with half lenses. Such was the Maharajah of Pur. And his voice, when it came, seemed to come through wet linen.

  He said: “Which iss the man? The big one, or the little one?”

  Chatterton pointed to George Oaks.

  The Maharajah said, hissing and whistling: “Ssmall ssnakess are ssometimess the mosst dangerouss. The krait iss more dangerouss than the cobra, because it iss more difficult to ssee. Sso, thiss iss the fellow who will have ssomething to ssay to Uss?” Chatterton nodded; and he went on: “You will be ssorry that you tried to pit your witss against Uss, ssir. I am very pleased to ssee you. I wass mosst curiouss. You are a very clever man, and when We are ssatisfied that you are truly ssorry, then you will be permitted, perhapss, to sserve Uss. Only firsst, you must be made to feel truly ssorry, sso that through repentance you will come to love Uss. You will be proud to be Our sservant.”

  With some impatience, Tarrytowne said: “Might I suggest that We haven’t much time for philosophy right now, Pur? We are waiting for what can be gotten out of this fellow. I have a hundred and twenty-five agents standing by for a possible change of orders.”