by John Wyndham
And so on …
At length, the little parlourmaid reappeared to say that my attendants were ready to leave when it should be convenient. But there was one thing I very much wanted to know before I left. I put the question to the old lady.
‘Please tell me. How did it – how could it – happen?’
‘Simply by accident, my dear – though it was the kind of accident that was entirely the product of its time. A piece of research which showed unexpected, secondary results, that’s all.’
‘But how?’
‘Rather curiously – almost irrelevantly, you might say. Did you ever hear of a man called Perrigan?’
‘Perrigan?’ I repeated. ‘I don’t think so, it’s an uncommon name.’
‘It became very commonly known indeed,’ she assured me. ‘Doctor Perrigan was a biologist, and his concern was the extermination of rats – particularly the brown rat, which used to do a great deal of expensive damage.
‘His approach to the problem was to find a disease which would attack them fatally. In order to produce it he took as his basis a virus infection often fatal to rabbits – or, rather, a group of virus infections that were highly selective, and also unstable since they were highly liable to mutation. Indeed, there was so much variation in the strains that when infection of rabbits in Australia was tried, it was only at the sixth attempt that it was successful; all the earlier strains died out as the rabbits developed immunity. It was tried in other places, too, though with indifferent success until a still more effective strain was started in France, and ran through the rabbit population of Europe.
‘Well, taking some of these viruses as a basis, Perrigan induced new mutations by irradiation and other means, and succeeded in producing a variant that would attack rats. That was not enough, however, and he continued his work until he had a strain that had enough of its ancestral selectivity to attack only the brown rat, and with great virulence.
‘In that way he settled the question of a long-standing pest, for there are no brown rats now. But something went amiss. It is still an open question whether the successful virus mutated again, or whether one of his earlier experimental viruses was accidently liberated by escaped “carrier” rats, but that’s academic. The important thing is that somehow a strain capable of attacking human beings got loose, and that it was already widely disseminated before it was traced – also, that once it was free, it spread with devastating speed; too fast for any effective steps to be taken to check it.
‘The majority of women were found to be immune; and of the ten per cent or so whom it attacked over eighty per cent recovered. Among men, however, there was almost no immunity, and the few recoveries were only partial. A few men were preserved by the most elaborate precautions, but they could not be kept confined for ever, and in the end the virus, which had a remarkable capacity for dormancy, got them, too.’
Inevitably several questions of professional interest occurred to me, but for an answer she shook her head.
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there. Possibly the medical people will be willing to explain,’ she said, but her expression was doubtful.
I manoeuvred myself into a sitting position on the side of the couch.
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Just an accident – yes, I suppose one could scarcely think of it happening any other way.’
‘Unless,’ she remarked, ‘unless one were to look upon it as divine intervention.’
‘Isn’t that a little impious?’
‘I was thinking of the Death of the Firstborn,’ she said, reflectively.
There did not seem to be an immediate answer to that. Instead, I asked:
‘Can you honestly tell me that you never have the feeling that you are living in a dreary kind of nightmare?’
‘Never,’ she said. ‘There was a nightmare – but it’s over now. Listen!’
The voices of the choir, reinforced now by an orchestra, reached us distantly out of the darkened garden. No, they were not dreary: they even sounded almost exultant – but then, poor things, how were they to understand …?
My attendants arrived and helped me to my feet. I thanked the old lady for her patience with me and her kindness. But she shook her head.
‘My dear, it is I who am indebted to you. In a short time I have learnt more about the conditioning of women in a mixed society than all my books were able to tell me in the rest of my long life. I hope, my dear, that the doctors will find some way of enabling you to forget it, and live happily here with us.’
At the door I paused and turned, still helpfully shored up by my attendants.
‘Laura,’ I said, using her name for the first time. ‘So many of your arguments are right – yet, over all, you’re, oh, so wrong. Did you never read of lovers? Did you never, as a girl, sigh for a Romeo who would say: “It is the east, and Laura is the sun!”?’
‘I think not. Though I have read the play. A pretty, idealized tale – I wonder how much heartbreak it has given to how many would-be Juliets? But I would set a question against yours, my dear Jane. Did you ever see Goya’s cycle of pictures called “The Horrors of War”?’
The pink car did not return me to the ‘Home’. Our destination turned out to be a more austere and hospital-like building where I was fussed into bed in a room alone. In the morning, after my massive breakfast, three new doctors visited me. Their manner was more social than professional, and we chatted amiably for half an hour. They had evidently been fully informed on my conversation with the old lady, and they were not averse to answering my questions. Indeed, they found some amusement in many of them, though I found none, for there was nothing consolingly vague in what they told me – it all sounded too disturbingly practicable, once the technique had been worked out. At the end of that time, however, their mood changed. One of them, with an air of getting down to business, said:
‘You will understand that you present us with a problem. Your fellow Mothers, of course, are scarcely susceptible to Reactionist disaffection – though you have in quite a short time managed to disgust and bewilder them considerably – but on others less stable your influence might be more serious. It is not just a matter of what you may say; your difference from the rest is implicit in your whole attitude. You cannot help that, and, frankly, we do not see how you, as a woman of education, could possibly adapt yourself to the placid, unthinking acceptance that is expected of a Mother. You would quickly feel frustrated beyond endurance. Furthermore, it is clear that the conditioning you have had under your system prevents you from feeling any goodwill towards ours.’
I took that straight; simply as a judgement without bias. Moreover, I could not dispute it. The prospect of spending the rest of my life in pink, scented, soft-musicked illiteracy, interrupted, one gathered, only by the production of quadruplet daughters at regular intervals, would certainly have me violently unhinged in a very short time.
‘And so – what?’ I asked. ‘Can you reduce this great carcass to normal shape and size?’
She shook her head. ‘I imagine not – though I don’t know that it has ever been attempted. But even if it were possible, you would be just as much of a misfit in the Doctorate – and far more of a liability as a Reactionist influence.’
I could understand that, too.
‘What, then?’ I inquired.
She hesitated, then she said gently:
‘The only practicable proposal we can make is that you should agree to a hypnotic treatment which will remove your memory.’
As the meaning of that came home to me I had to fight off a rush of panic. After all, I told myself, they were being reasonable with me. I must do my best to respond sensibly. Nevertheless, some minutes must have passed before I answered, unsteadily:
‘You are asking me to commit suicide. My mind is my memories: they are me. If I lose them I shall die, just as surely as if you were to kill my – this body.’
They did not dispute that. How could they?
There is just one thing that makes my life
worth living – knowing that you loved me, my sweet, sweet Donald. It is only in my memory that you live now. If you ever leave there you will die again – and for ever.
‘No!’ I told them. ‘No! No!’
At intervals during the day small servitors staggered in under the weight of my meals. Between their visits I had only my thoughts to occupy me, and they were not good company.
‘Frankly,’ one of the doctors had put it to me, not unsympathetically, ‘we can see no alternative. For years after it happened the annual figures of mental breakdowns were our greatest worry – even though the women then could keep themselves fully occupied with the tremendous amount of work that had to be done, so many of them could not adjust. And we can’t even offer you work.’
I knew that it was a fair warning she was giving me – and I knew that, unless the hallucination which seemed to grow more real all the time could soon be induced to dissolve, I was trapped.
During the long day and the following night I tried my hardest to get back to the objectivity I had managed earlier, but I failed. The whole dialectic was too strong for me now; my senses too consciously aware of my surroundings; the air of consequence and coherence too convincingly persistent …
When they had let me have twenty-four hours to think it over, the same trio visited me again.
‘I think,’ I told them, ‘that I understand better now. What you are offering me is painless oblivion, in place of a breakdown followed by oblivion – and you see no other choice.’
‘We don’t,’ admitted the spokeswoman, and the other two nodded. ‘But, of course, for the hypnosis we shall need your co-operation.’
‘I realize that,’ I told her, ‘and I also see now that in the circumstances it would be obstinately futile to withhold it. So I – I – yes, I’m willing to give it – but on one condition.’
They looked at me questioningly.
‘It is this,’ I explained, ‘that you will try one other course first. I want you to give me an injection of chuinjuatin. I want it in precisely the same strength as I had it before – I can tell you the dose.
‘You see, whether this is an intense hallucination, or whether it is some kind of projection which makes it seem very similar, it must have something to do with that drug. I’m sure it must – nothing remotely like this has ever happened to me before. So, I thought that if I could repeat the condition – or, would you say believe myself to be repeating the condition? – there may be just a chance … I don’t know. It may be simply silly … but even if nothing comes of it, it can’t make things worse in any way now, can it? So, will you let me try it …?’
The three of them considered for some moments.
‘I can see no reason why not …’ said one.
The spokeswoman nodded.
‘I shouldn’t think there’ll be any difficulty with authorization in the circumstances,’ she agreed. ‘If you want to try, well, it’s fair to let you, but – I’d not count on it too much …’
In the afternoon half a dozen small servitors arrived, bustling round, making me and the room ready, with anxious industry. Presently there came one more, scarcely tall enough to see over the trolley of bottles, trays and phials which she pushed to my bedside.
The three doctors entered together. One of the little servitors began rolling up my sleeve. The doctor who had done most of the talking looked at me, kindly, but seriously.
‘This is a sheer gamble, you know that?’ she said.
‘I know. But it’s my only chance. I’m willing to take it.’
She nodded, picked up the syringe, and charged it while the little servitor swabbed my monstrous arm. She approached the bedside, and hesitated.
‘Go on,’ I told her. ‘What is there for me here, anyway?’
She nodded, and pressed in the needle …
Now, I have written the foregoing for a purpose. I shall deposit it with my bank, where it will remain unread unless it should be needed.
I have spoken of it to no one. The report on the effect of chuinjuatin – the one that I made to Dr Hellyer where I described my sensation as simply one of floating in space – was false. The foregoing was my true experience.
I concealed it because after I came round, when I found that I was back in my own body in my normal world, the experience haunted me as vividly as if it had been actuality. The details were too sharp, too vivid, for me to get them out of my mind. It overhung me all the time, like a threat. It would not leave me alone …
I did not dare to tell Dr Hellyer how it worried me – he would have put me under treatment. If my other friends did not take it seriously enough to recommend treatment, too, then they would have laughed over it, and amused themselves at my expense interpreting the symbolism. So I kept it to myself.
As I went over parts of it again and again in detail, I grew angry with myself for not asking the old lady for more facts, things like dates, and details that could be verified. If, for instance, the thing should, by her account, have started two or three years ago, then the whole sense of threat would fall to pieces: it would all be discredited. But it had not occurred to me to ask that crucial question … And then, as I went on thinking about it, I remembered that there was one, just one, piece of information that I could check, and I made inquiries. I wish now that I had not, but I felt forced to …
So I have discovered that:
There is a Dr Perrigan, he is a biologist, he does work with rabbits and rats …
He is quite well known in his field. He has published papers on pest-control in a number of journals. It is no secret that he is evolving new strains of myxomatosis intended to attack rats; indeed, he has already developed a group of them and calls them mucosimorbus, though he has not yet succeeded in making them either stable or selective enough for general use …
But I had never heard of this man or his work until his name was mentioned by the old lady in my ‘hallucination’ …
I have given a great deal of thought to this whole matter. What sort of experience is it that I have recorded above? If it should be a kind of pre-vision of an inevitable, predestined future, then nothing anyone could do would change it. But that does not seem to me to make sense: it is what has happened, and is happening now, that determines the future. Therefore, there must be a great number of possible futures, each a possible consequence of what is being done now. It seems to me that under chuinjuatin I saw one of those futures …
It was, I think, a warning of what may happen – unless it is prevented …
The whole idea is so repulsive, so misconceived, it amounts to such a monstrous aberration of the normal course, that failure to heed the warning would be neglect of duty to one’s kind.
I shall, therefore, on my own responsibility and without taking any other person into my confidence, do my best to ensure that such a state as I have described cannot come about.
Should it happen that any other person is unjustly accused of doing, or of assisting me to do, what I intend to do, this document must stand in his defence. That is why I have written it.
It is my own unaided decision that Dr Perrigan must not be permitted to continue his work.
(Signed) JANE WATERLEIGH.
The solicitor stared at the signature for some moments; then he nodded.
‘And so,’ he said, ‘she then took her car and drove over to Perrigan’s – with this tragic result.
‘From the little I do know of her, I’d say that she probably did her best to persuade him to give up his work – though she can scarcely have expected any success with that. It is difficult to imagine a man who would be willing to give up the work of years on account of what must sound to him like a sort of gipsy’s warning. So, clearly, she went there prepared to fall back on direct action, if necessary. It looks as if the police are quite right when they suppose her to have shot him deliberately; but not so right when they suppose that she burnt the place down to hide evidence of the crime. The statement makes it pretty obvious that her main intention in
doing that was to wipe out Perrigan’s work.’
He shook his head. ‘Poor girl! There’s a clear conviction of duty in her last page or two: the sort of simplified clarity that drives martyrs on, regardless of consequences. She has never denied that she did it. What she wouldn’t tell the police is why she did it.’
He paused again, before he added: ‘Anyway, thank goodness for this document. It ought at least to save her life. I should be very surprised indeed if a plea of insanity could fail, backed up by this.’ He tapped the pile of manuscript with his finger. ‘It’s a lucky thing she put off her intention of taking it to her bank.’
Dr Hellyer’s face was lined and worried.
‘I blame myself most bitterly for the whole thing,’ he said. ‘I ought never to have let her try the damned drug in the first place, but I thought she was over the shock of her husband’s death. She was trying to keep her time fully occupied, and she was anxious to volunteer. You’ve met her enough to know how purposeful she can be. She saw it as a chance to contribute something to medical knowledge – which it was, of course. But I ought to have been more careful, and I ought to have seen afterwards that there was something wrong. The real responsibility for this thing runs right back to me.’
‘H’m,’ said the solicitor. ‘Putting that forward as a main line of defence isn’t going to do you a lot of good professionally, you know, Hellyer.’
‘Possibly not. I can look after that when we come to it. The point is that I hold a responsibility for her as a member of my staff, if for no other reason. It can’t be denied that if I had refused her offer to take part in the experiment, this would not have happened. Therefore it seems to me that we ought to be able to argue a state of temporary insanity; that the balance of her mind was disturbed by the effects of the drug which I administered. And if we can get that as a verdict it will result in detention at a mental hospital for observation and treatment – perhaps quite a short spell of treatment.’
‘I can’t say. We can certainly put it up to counsel and see what he thinks of it.’
‘It’s valid, too,’ Hellyer persisted. ‘People like Jane don’t do murder if they are in their right minds, not unless they’re really in a corner, then they do it more cleverly. Certainly they don’t murder perfect strangers. Clearly, the drug caused an hallucination sufficiently vivid to confuse her to a point where she was unable to make a proper distinction between the actual and the hypothetical. She got into a state where she believed the mirage was real, and acted accordingly.’