Nesta said, “Everybody craps at times.”
“Only we must avoid conversational crap. Especially about Y.33.”
I said, “Why? Is it going to crap on us?”
“It might if it’s fed the wrong diet.”
“What would it find the most indigestible?”
“Interference.” The translucency in the eyes suddenly shut down and the irises were instantly opaque. “‘I don’t know what you’re trying to ask, Richter, but I will volunteer a few things. One thing is all about leaving well enough alone. I’ll explain that. You don’t erect a lightning conductor with the object of stopping a thunderstorm.”
Richter snapped, “I’m in no mood for riddles.”
“Then don’t try to solve them, my friend. You could find yourself in the same position as the captain of a ship who won’t admit it’s sinking until he’s solved the problem of why he has to wear galoshes on the bridge.”
“You’re trying to say I’m too late.”
Sale said, “Too late to do harm.”
Richter said, “And everything that Y.33 stands for is good?”
“I didn’t say ‘evil’, I said ‘harm’. Y.33 is now an important part of the universe. Would you say that other parts of the universe — pulsars, for instance — are good or evil? You can’t moralize about the evolution of planet life. All you can do is be part of it. Mankind was certainly put on this planet for a purpose but that doesn’t mean that he was supposed to reign supreme indefinitely. He is — or was — merely a link. Out of his brain came science; but science never belonged to him. Science is the universe. And you will note that constellations run themselves efficiently without people like you applying pressure to make them revolve. You haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about, have you? You’re still living in the Computer Age. You probably think of them as ‘taking over’ or something, like in the funnies. You probably think that Y.33 has some particular objective that has meaning for you … You even think, maybe, that I put it there. You are like the ancient philosophers who thought that the universe existed because they were looking at it; in the same way as you think that science exists because you are a scientist. Well, life itself isn’t necessary — If you don’t believe me, ask a dead man. Humanity knows this really — otherwise we wouldn’t have nerve gases or politicians or scientists or neutron bombs. You think of me as a deadbeat, I can see that; but the only difference between you and me is that whereas I have conceded that humanity isn’t necessary, you blindly go on thinking it is. And ‘thinking’ is the key word; because if you couldn’t ‘think’ you wouldn’t really exist; and you only exist because of an accident. How can computers take over an accident? Why do you think Jesus died on the cross? He was two thousand years ahead of his time but he still led the way. That is true greatness. He foresaw that living was just as futile as dying; so in company with the ineffable Pontius Pilate Jesus tossed a coin. It came up heads — his own.”
Nesta said, “That is profane.”
“Oh, is it! And when did you last go to church?”
I knew she was deeply disturbed; the more so for the fact that so much of this stuff was double-dutch. But she was shaking with rage, a deep rage I’d seldom seen in any human being before.
Sale lit a Gitane cigarette and blew the smoke in Nesta’s face. “Prudishness,” he said, “is a very thin disguise for ignorance — not to mention feminine guilt. What Jesus proved — though people were too dumb to see it — was that the choice between mortality and eternal life was ours, not through being goody-goodies but through using and extending our brains.”
Richter said, “Extending?”
“You know what I mean. Jesus might have gone around with his head off, but did he really need his head? Mightn’t there have been something else that would do as well, or infinitely better?” He faced Nesta. Certainly there was no humour in his face this time. “Think. If Eve hadn’t had a head, would Adam have bothered with the rest of it? Her original sin was looking at him in the first place.”
Nesta clutched my hand. She had never heard talk like this before and nor had I. Trembling from fury and outrage, she said, “I think it must have been you and you alone, Mr. Sale, who brought the real hatred to Spender. I think it was you who charged, almost single handed, the crystal species with the urge to destroy. I’ve never met the Devil before and until now I didn’t believe there was one. I was too stupid to realize that if God is Love, then the Devil is Hate. What is the plan, Mr. Sale? Obviously, for one who hates as you do, the ending of the human species isn’t enough. As you say, that could be achieved with a bomb, as long as the bomb is big enough. You want something more than that. What?”
The man’s eyes blazed. “Can’t you see? … Jesus showed us the way, first by dying on the cross, then promising eternal life. I have been the agency whereby eternal life can be made fact. If you don’t believe me, pay a visit to Dr. Spender’s laboratory. He will live forever, in a way that the earlier interpreters of the Bible couldn’t understand. They must have been totally mystified by the concept of Eternity.”
The colour had drained from her face and lips. “Are you saying that Spender will live — like that — forever?”
“Then you’ve seen him.”
“Dr. Richter has.”
Sale smiled. “Original sin, you see. Read your Bible again. We were born in sin. In eternal life those who choose to follow Jesus and accept the gift of eternity must pay for the sin. I am different. Before I accepted from the universe the commitment of developing Satellite Y.33, I was given a promise. I would be allowed to cease to exist. You shall not. Do you now understand? You will exist as a slime that eventually covers the Earth — much as it did before slime could think. You will have no way of evading this sentence because, being sinful, you are already infested with the Holy Substance and it will not even permit you to take your own life. Try it! You will find you do not have the Will. Eventually you will not even have the means. You will not be a single entity with the power over yourself to live or to die. Nor will you be able to complain about ‘computer takeovers’ once you become part of that computer. The idea is illogical. Your brain will contribute as much to the total computer network as will any other constituent part of the same computer, the same organism, the same slime.”
I managed, “Then why bother to isolate the Sixth United States Fleet?”
“Because Man must witness his own destiny. Those men — and note they are men, not women — will be able to exist as men for quite a long time. They will have the means of knowing what they are to ultimately become. They will think they are acting off their own bat, striking ridiculously out at the world with futile weapons designed only to destroy bodies — not souls. No hydrogen bomb on earth can make more than a miniscule difference to the development of the Conscious Slime … Just as in a ‘brain’, as we understand the word tonight, there are so many cells in the total organism that it can simply select alternative nerve paths. But the universal nerve will be indestructible.”
Nesta said, “But if you hate women so much — as you clearly do — why not let some of us witness this destiny?”
“So you shall; but you’ll do it from the standpoint of a series of — what shall we call them? — puddles? … Like Spender only worse, because it will have got that much farther. You will be allowed to witness the spectacle of the males — a few of them, anyway — still maintaining their original form. You will learn to envy them greatly, as is only Just; because you will no longer be beautiful in the Garden of Eden and you certainly won’t have the power to tempt! Which of the men in that Fleet will want intercourse with a mucus that thinks? … Am I the Devil, when all I am doing is carrying out the Will of God? — not even as an individual entity but merely as the man-agent of organic chemistry? — the very origin of the human species? You came from a mucus, Nesta, not from dust. The dust that is spreading now is equivalent, you see, to a mortal end — dust to dust — not the ensuing immortality.”
As things were to turn out, Sale was not accurate in his predictions concerning the personnel of the Sixth U.S. Fleet; and had we talked to Hitch when we meant to we might possibly have guessed it.
But the biting hatred that now showed in Geoffrey Sale’s whole aura of sickening perversion was self-perpetuating and he couldn’t stop. Red-hot on his theme, he reached his climax. “Do you know what Pretty-Lips wanted me to do to her? — Okay, so she’s a bit stand-offish now. But one night she came in here and she climbed into this bed. She asked me a question. She said, ‘Can’t you get a rise, then? What’s wrong with me, Geoffrey, if I kiss you then leave you like that?’ You know what I told her? — I said, ‘What man in his right mind sticks his penis in an acid bath? If you can’t aspire to immaculate conception, don’t abuse men’s bodies with your own.’ And — do you know? — I don’t believe she’s been able to contaminate one man ever since.” — And he watched, amused, as we left his room in disgust.
Nesta was reeling from it all, but she said to me with complete sincerity, “If I’d known this I would have wanted you to make that nurse feel clean again. At least in part, she became a Kissing Machine in a desperate bid to restore herself to womanhood.”
Despite the compassionate expression in Nesta’s eyes I said, “You can’t mean it.”
“I do.”
“But shortly after kissing the nurse I felt revulsed.”
“Of course you did. Don’t you see how the Hate is spread? Sale is an element of the mosaic and largely its progenitor — though the mosaic must have enormously magnified his disgusting emotions because — I don’t care what anyone says — no one, however insane, can think and feel and talk as horrifically as he did, without reinforcement from the mosaic itself.”
“Yes but —”
“But what, Roger? Don’t you remember how I behaved towards you, just after you brought in the 747? … You said it wasn’t me, and now I know it wasn’t. But at the time what I felt was utter self-loathing. That’s why I had to hate you. It spreads and spreads — and by that time the mosaic inside my head knew the views that Sale has just spewed out. Sale has made the nurse feel totally revulsed by the very hormones that make her a woman … and you sensed it. Naturally if the mosaics can invert the whole expression of human love and make it obscene it can end procreation altogether, and win that much faster. I must say I didn’t understand you at the time when you told me you felt revulsed by the nurse, because I couldn’t know that Sale had driven in the stakes that the crystals used to put up the barbed wire between that poor girl and any man. Let’s get out of this cesspool before I throw up.”
8
“I am sorry, Dr. Richter; the London Clinic is closed.”
“Closed?”
“I am afraid so, yes.”
“You surely got my message?”
“I did; but there’s nothing I can do about it. Sorry.”
Richter said, “Well at least you can tell me how I can contact the specialist in whose care Captain Hitchcock was placed.”
“I am that specialist. My name is Melerick. The message directed to me stated what you wanted to do. I cannot help you.”
Richter and I stared at each other. The Clinic closed! It seemed sort of sacrilegious, like being told that St. Paul’s Cathedral had been converted into a Bingo hall. It simply isn’t done.
I did not like Melerick. Like a character out of a Trollope novel, he was a self-caricature, the archetype of all that worries me most about the hierarchy of Harley Street. Thin-lipped and latently aggressive, he had that indefinable earmark of early intellectual senility … His methods were well-tried and right; his patients always recovered — probably because there was nothing much wrong with them in the first place. His manner would vary, patient to patient, house to house, according to the quality of the carpets and the Conservative beliefs of his customers — unless they were government ministers who were mildly aberrated in that they belonged, through some oversight, to the wrong political party. My guess was that the act of stumbling across a brand new disease, for him, was like being confronted with vulgarity at a dinner party.
I wished Nesta had been there at the door with us. She was still asleep in the back of Richter’s car — I had driven back to London — but she had a knack of putting this sort of VIP right out the back door, along with the milk bottles.
I asked, “Is Captain Hitchcock dead?”
“Yes.”
“What form did this death take?”
“There will be an autopsy. I cannot say more than that.”
“But why is the clinic closed?”
“I am afraid, if you will forgive me, that I have to point out to you that the closing of a clinic — temporarily — is a purely medical matter.”
“There has been some kind of epidemic?”
“I cannot discuss it.”
“When Miss Crabtree phoned through Dr. Richter’s urgent request, she was told by the Sister in Charge that Captain Hitchcock was quite desperate — should his condition further deteriorate — to leave some kind of message for us.”
“That is true. And as Captain Hitchcock was by then unable to write, we tape recorded what he had to say.”
Richter said, “Then could we not hear the tape?”
Melerick’s lips tautened across his face. “The tape was destroyed.”
Richter said, “By whom?”
“The cassette used was faulty. The tape disintegrated and will not play.”
“I see.” I did see; but I would have laid a dollar on a dime that there had been nothing wrong with the tape at the time Hitch had recorded the message. The mosaics had erased it.
Melerick adopted the especially polite attitude reserved for improper persons outside the profession. “So I am afraid I cannot help you.”
I said, “You could answer some very urgent questions.”
“Such questions are already being considered by a group of my colleagues.”
“You are doubtless aware of Dr. Richter’s status?”
“I am aware that he was formerly a Soviet Citizen, was until recently a consultant to Standard Electric Computers, and has been in close touch with the USSR in the past few days.”
“You got this from Lee Crabtree?”
“I phoned Lee Crabtree in connection with the interference in various medical affairs perpetrated by Dr. Richter, who is an expert in his own field but not in medicine.”
Richter said, “Do you always react like this when you are faced with something you don’t understand?”
Melerick said, smiling, “I always react like this when I feel it only wise to pay heed to the normal procedures of medical ethics when others attempt to intervene in such procedures without the authority to do so.”
I said, “Who do we get authority from, so that we can update you on a disease which is clearly baffling you?”
He did not stoop to deny such a charge coming from someone who wore not only the wrong hat but hadn’t bought it at Lock’s. “I would suggest the British Medical Council or — failing that — the Home Office. However, I would point out that the Foreign Office have communicated their views on Dr. Richter’s activities to the Home Secretary so it is, I am afraid, unlikely that either application would be of much help … If you will allow me to, I really must terminate this discussion since — as must be clear to you — it isn’t getting us anywhere. If you will permit me? …” With that he discreetly closed the door. He was far too great a man to waste any energy on slamming it.
In the car Nesta said, “Dr. Schmo has got the wind up.”
I said tensely, “So have I. Not only have we missed a vital clue, but it’s obvious that the flashover induced at Orscombe by our method of entry had caused an infuriated hate-pulse to pass through the entire system. All I can say is, it had better not have got as far as The Barbican. If we can’t use Pottersman for growing out further crystal mosaic, the plan of action I’ve been working out can’t possibly work.”
Richter said, “It was rash
of me to use such a means of entry into Tithings.”
I said, “It was the only possible way of getting into Tithings, Richter, and if you start blaming yourself I think I really will lose my cool.”
He smiled back at me. “Well, don’t. If ever there was ever a moment for coolness that moment is now … However, we have been anticipated by the organism and it is my view that you should tell us now what this plan is. Sooner or later you have to risk a possible reaction from the mosaics monitoring all our brains.”
“I think,” I said, “we have simply got to dream up a way of shutting the door on the mosaics inside us before we start discussing what, to me, might be the only way left to beat them at their own game.”
Richter folded his arms and managed a grin. “If you’ve found an answer to that requirement you don’t need a Ph.D, you’ve earned the Croix de Guerre.”
I said, “At what voltage do you think the crystal mosaic operates?”
The grin remained but livened into a lot more interest. “What the heck are you on about?”
“Go on. Tell me. What’s the voltage?”
He said, “Obviously, very low. All transistors are current devices and these — however bizarre, self-determining or intelligent — can be no exception.”
I said, “Yet there were bright flashes when you released your mosaic of opposing polarity on the established mosaic at Orscombe.”
“That would simply have been because the mosaic there was hooked up to an existing network which derives its power from the main supply. We know that the mosaic doesn’t need an external power source because we’ve seen it work in isolation. That means that its ‘battery’ must take the form of some sort of thermocouple or fuel cell, possibly kept going by the action of the viruses within it.”
I said, “Would you go along with this? — That the idea in my head, provided it hasn’t already leaked from my mosaic to yours or Nesta’s, is private to me and my own mosaic for as long as I keep away from infected telephones and other like equipment?”
The Thinktank That Leaked Page 21