Mandrake (16 page)

‘All these thousands of hollow houses,’ the girl said. She leaned forward to steady the can of water resting on the fire. ‘Think of the packed furniture stores there must be in all the towns. I mean, the people that went back to their roots—there can’t be nearly enough houses for them in the places they’ve gone. They take all their belongings from the homes they’ve left, and where do they put them?’

‘A reshuffle,’ Queston said; cross-legged, as he had learned to sit in the last two months. ‘People go back to a place—but others leave it, to go back to somewhere else. The dead lands aren’t so very big, with their dead houses like this one. And there were new blocks waiting in the really big towns, where you could have got overcrowding. The Ministry’s been preparing for this for a very long time.’

‘I suppose so.’ She sat with one arm propped on the blanket spread over the bare boards, gazing into the fire. The light glinted on her hair; it had dried to a curious golden-shot bronze, curling over her forehead and ears, and she looked, Queston thought, like a long-legged and rather chubby Puck. He sat facing her, his back against the fireplace; his right leg and side were slowly roasting, but he enjoyed the view. They had no light but the fire; the house stood alone by a level-crossing on a small railway line, the home of a departed crossing-keeper, and the gas which was its only power supply had been cut off.

The girl was quiet now. She had emerged from the red coat dressed all in black: a heavy woollen sweater and pleated skirt that gave the same young-old impression that had struck him at first. She was something outside his experience, and there was a wariness in his interest.

Her name was Beth Summers, she had told him: twenty-three years old, an actress. Not a very successful actress: ‘but I was going to be, if this hadn’t happened.’ She had spent two years at one of the London drama schools, and the four years since in the no-man’s-land of beginners’ theatre: three seasons of repertory, a handful of one-line television parts, a provincial tour of a West End play in the last winter before the Ministry tightened its hold. She had talked about the stage, as they sat eating in front of the fire, with a mixture of sage disillusion and childish delight.

She said, as if it were her own phrase: ‘I’ve never had any roots.’ As a child she had been tossed between divorced parents; when the last Ministry edict had come into force she had applied to live in London, since she could think of nowhere else, but had failed. Unlike Queston, she had tried to find somewhere to settle; but her friends had grown curiously cool, and one Ministry office after another refused her admittance to any town.

By the time the real change began, she was wandering from one hostile community to the next; she seemed to be one of those on whom the invisible barriers of place had no effect. She said little about this, either; only that the gang from whom Queston had rescued her were typical of many inside. Like animals, they could sense an outsider, and hunted him—or her—as fair game for anything they pleased to do.

She lay rolled in blankets, her head pillowed on her coat, while Queston banked up the fire. She said: ‘The most terrifying thing isn’t the people themselves. It’s something that’s got hold of them. They’re—possessed. That blank, listening look. Even the Ministry men have it. That was the thing that scared me stiff always.’ She looked at him, in a sudden, fierce appeal. ‘I don’t understand, I want to know what it means. Do you know? I can’t go to sleep, I haven’t for a long time. Tell me what it means.’

Queston squatted on his haunches, and gazed sombrely up at the stars prickling the bare black windows, and for the first time his mind was clear and cold and open, admitting the things that he knew and had deliberately shrouded, all this time, in ambiguity. If he had told Lindsey… When he spoke, he was speaking not to her only but to himself, and to Lindsey, and Thorp-Gudgeon, and the farmer on the underground platform; the man on the Plain, the woman in the pub. Even to the dog. All the people he had never properly spoken to at all.

‘You have to forget a lot of things,’ he said slowly. ‘Unknow them. All the things that bound our little horizon. You have to look at the stars out there, and think that when the light left them the earth was still practically molten, and human life was millions of years away. Man is an episode, on that scale. And his intelligence is tiny. We’ve never known quite how tiny—we haven’t the capacity to know. We know less about the human mind than about anything. We potter about with something like the electro-encephalograph, and we think we’re enormously advanced, but it’s about as clumsy as trying to hear a Beethoven quartet on a metronome. We don’t understand the nature of life, or intelligence, any more than we can grasp infinity. We don’t understand the connexion between our mind and our nervous system, but because they obviously are connected we can’t imagine any intelligence that isn’t linked to an organism.’

‘Religions do. They have gods, I mean.’

‘Gropings in the dark,’ Queston said. He glanced at her. ‘If that doesn’t offend you.’

She said: ‘No one ever gave me any good reason for believing in a god.’

‘Religion… even the Christians have to think of the Holy Ghost in terms of an intelligence like their own. O, vast, infinite, omniscient, but not different in kind. Some of the ancient religions were groping in the right direction, I suppose. Some of the primitive peoples I came across, once…’

He felt the words come as they had come when his book took shape; fumbling, flickering at snatches of what he chased. ‘You see, if you try to put yourself outside the idea of man, it can all change. Blake came nearer to it than anyone, and they said he was mad… Suppose you say: Life is energy. And suppose you equate the two things that no one can account for—life and intelligence. On that basis, the hydrogen atom that’s being fused inside the sun, turned into energy, is alive—and intelligent. The universe is full of suns and novae and solidified matter, and they are all of them energy, and so it’s a kind of community of intelligences. Only man’s scale of values doesn’t include this. He can’t appreciate an intelligence that consists of performing to certain immutable laws, and of being indestructible. Transforming itself by natural processes into another form if its own is attacked. He can’t see the laws of the universe as a kind of cosmic intelligence.’

The girl lay on her back, her face tightened with listening. ‘But it isn’t. I mean, there’s nothing intelligent about a set of rules. A machine can obey rules. Intelligence is choosing what you do—free will.’

‘Is it? ’ He spread his hand in the air, and took hold of one finger. ‘If I bend that back far enough, it snaps. I don’t choose whether it does. We are born, and we die—we don’t choose that. No. You’re doing what we always do, thinking in our own terms. Our scale of values has to be based on what we know. On ourselves. When we wonder if there’s life on another planet, we choose Mars, or one with conditions most like our own. When we scrape around for traces of life in meteorites, it’s organic life we’re looking for. Or we wonder if there’s some great mind somewhere, like our own only much bigger, outside all these manifestations of energy and governing them all. It never occurs to think that perhaps the physicists might be the theologians. That energy
itself,
the common denominator in all things, is the basic life and mind and intelligence. The nearest we get to it is talking about the music of the spheres, and the poetry of motion. Trying to turn the laws into intangibles. And when we sense that our own intelligence is a dim reflection of the whole intelligence of the universe, we give the elements our own attributes—our only small admission of the ruthlessness of the laws. We talk about the cruel sea, and the merciless sun. It’s a cover for something we daren’t think about.’

‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’ Beth said. ‘The rough winds. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May… all right. But what then?’

‘Then,’ Queston said, ‘we miss altogether the whole terrible significance of the elements, and the universe, and the earth. The intelligence that’s in all these things. We think we’ve learnt pretty well to control the earth. So we can’t see, now, that it’s controlling us.’

‘The earth?’

‘You’ve seen it. Gradually it’s been happening, this last ten years. You know as well as anyone the state it’s reached now.’

‘I’ve seen this insane Ministry of Planning getting a stranglehold,’ she said bitterly. ‘People like them. The peace-makers. The governors. That terrible kind of hypnosis they put on people. It wasn’t the earth that started shutting everyone up in boxes.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘But the earth’s not alive.’

‘Isn’t it? ’ Queston said, and the words had hold of him again. ‘Listen. For fifteen years I’ve been studying the relationship between men and their environment. Men and places. It’s always been a far stronger thing than anyone bothered to realize. Local loyalties, romantic feelings about mountains… and did you ever come across one of those little societies for preserving a railway branch line? No, of course not, you’re too young. But all that emotion—if anyone had been asked to define it they’d have said it was just a matter of attaching affection to an inanimate object. Very strong affection, but a one-way force. They wouldn’t have admitted the one great danger. The fact that any strong emotion makes you vulnerable. The lover is always vulnerable—the one he loves has such power over him. The force can work both ways.’

She shifted inside the cocoon of blankets. ‘But to say the earth’s
alive
—’

‘The earth. Which is matter, which is energy, which is intelligence. Not just a big thinking ball—a form of existence, of life, which happens to have encountered rules that it had to obey, and that turned it into solid material.’ He leant forward earnestly, hunting to keep the words. ‘But it’s none the less alive, don’t you see, and capable of action. This is that action, everything that’s happening now. Suddenly it’s taken advantage of the power it has over man. It’s making him do the things he thinks he’s doing of his own free will. All this business of guard thine own, and peace through isolation, and the frightening wall of emotion you find round places now. It’s a beginning. I think it’s the beginning of the end.’

‘What will happen? ’ She spoke coolly, linking her hands behind her head so that she could look at him. She sounded as though she did not very much care.

‘Only one thing can happen,’ Queston said. ‘It’s out to destroy mankind.’

‘But why now? It’s put up with us for a long time.’

Queston looked at her. ‘I dare say you think I’m very comic, don’t you? Poor old thing, gone off his head after all that wandering about.’

‘No,’ she said calmly. ‘I think you’re quite sane. And you aren’t old.
Why now
?’

‘The bomb, I suppose.’

‘Nuclear tests, you mean?’

‘O no. The first. Hiroshima. Thirty-five years ago.’

‘I don’t follow,’ she said. ‘We’ve disarmed, haven’t we?’

‘We have. Everyone hasn’t.’

‘All the more reason not to bother about destroying mankind, I should have thought. Mankind will do it himself fairly soon. I’ve never really believed in the year A.D.
2000
—
we’ll have blown the earth sky-high long before then.’ As she said it she stopped suddenly, wide-eyed.

‘Precisely,’ Queston said.
‘
The earth doesn’t want to be blown sky-high.’

‘Are you trying to say that this—what’s happening is a kind of self-defence?’

‘Something like that.’

‘But that’s impossible.’

‘I dare say. But it’s happening.’ He shifted wearily on the hard floor. ‘Think of this form of intelligence. Not organic—existing only in obedience to its rules. The laws of Nature, we called them. Somehow our own kind of intelligence developed alongside it, separate and independent, but living off it like a highly complex parasite. The Intelligence was quite content for us to coexist. We were harmless enough, scratching at the surface of the earth, enclosed in our small senses. But then we overreached ourselves. We discovered how to break one of the great laws.’

‘Splitting the atom?’

He nodded. ‘We couldn’t affect the cosmic intelligence until then. We could have sprayed blood around with our little wars as much as we liked, that didn’t matter. But when we began monkeying with the energy of the nucleus… all the tests since the sixties haven’t been bomb tests as such, you know. Just refinements. The biggest bomb they could make now couldn’t be tested, the risk is too great. The force of it could affect the planet as a whole. And its satellite too, because if America and Russia want to blast at each other now they’ve got to blast those stations off the moon as well… But no one’s going to think about the risk in time of war. They’ll just press the button. And when they do that they’ll affect the whole solar system, and the whole cosmic intelligence—you can’t break one law without affecting the whole. Of at least that’s what I believe the Intelligence, or whatever it ought to be called, thinks. All it’s doing now is what we do when we find death-watch beetle burrowing into a house—get rid of it, before it brings the whole lot crashing down.

We’re just as dangerous now, and not much more than particularly arrogant beetles. So it’s doing things its own way. Getting rid of us. Animal life can stay, it won’t evolve again in a form like us. The Intelligence is working just to paralyse the intelligence of man. And the appalling thing is, everything that it makes him do he thinks he’s doing of his own free will. Or else at the behest of a Ministry that’s even more unwittingly under the influence than he is. The earth’s taken over, and no one knows. Maybe all parasites live and die without knowing their host exists.’

He stopped, and sat silent and very tired. Even in the dead night it seemed to be pressing in, shouting, all round him; the vast, inconceivable force against which there was no defence. A nightjar rattled outside the black window. He forgot the girl.

She said, wriggling farther down into the blankets: ‘What shall we do in the morning?’

Queston stared at her.

Her voice came muffled out of the cocoon. ‘I’ve heard you. It fits with everything, I’m sure you’re right. But I mustn’t
believe
it… I mean, we’re alive, aren’t we? It doesn’t seem to have got at us. Someone once said to me that there was only one great crime, and that was a denial of life while you were still alive.’