Mandrake (25 page)

‘O yes, indeed you can. It is vital now…’

Mandrake’s voice dropped again, gentle, intimate. Sonata form, Queston thought: from the moment it had begun, from the moment he had first entered the room. First subject, second subject, intertwining, dropping in key; after the exposition the recapitulation; quicken the pace, hold the attention. Then gently now, andante—and from there, where do we go? When he comes to working out his theme, what then?

Mandrake said, smoothly: ‘Are you familiar with the work of Price?’

‘Price?’

‘The Oxford philosopher. Notably what he was doing some twenty years ago, linked in some ways with that Cambridge fellow, Broad. Price postulated the theory of a collective subconscious—not the Jungian variety, nothing so simple. He suggested that the unit of consciousness was not a mind, but an idea. That once conceived, an idea, whether or not it was expressed in any way, took on an existence of its own. That there exists—perhaps the only thing that does exist—a world of ideas with which we are all linked, through our idea-forming minds. And which is therefore capable of influencing us all. It accounts for many things.’

‘Which is presumably why it was postulated,’ Queston said, bored. ‘Most dons prefer to work off that kind of academic ingenuity by writing thrillers.’

‘It accounts for ghosts,’ Mandrake said, as if he had not spoken. ‘For telepathy. For extra-sensory perception. For mediumistic—events. For insanity, even.’

‘Ingenious.’

‘More than ingenious, Dr Queston. It is a theory which we accept.’ He smiled. ‘It has been the basis of our work these last ten years.’

Queston stared at him. ‘You can’t be serious. All you’ve been operating is a peculiar form of mass hypnosis—and that has succeeded almost by accident. A tiny extra push for something caused and controlled from elsewhere.’

‘O no. There is something you do not know about. We have founded the secret of control, you see. There is a method of governing the minds of men that can succeed without any of the trappings of communication. We know, at last, that an idea of sufficient power, properly projected—and you do not know what I mean by projection—can overwhelm all other ideas. We have the collective subconscious—’ he held out his hand, the palm cupped, the fingers crooked ‘—like
that
.’

Queston shrugged contemptuously. ‘You’ve read my book. You know what absurdity I must think this. Do you really think I’m likely to help you?’

‘Shall we say rather that you are going to stop hindering us?’

‘I’m not hindering you. You’ve killed all possible acceptance of my book, by ridicule. What can I do?’

Mandrake stood up, looking down at him; he was very tall. ‘In its present state, the collective subconscious is an intensely dangerous and powerful thing. Any intrusive intellectual stream, if it is strong enough, can divert it to fantastic ends. Your mind, working as it does with great intellectual voltage, forms such a stream.’

‘How very tiresome for you,’ Queston lay back in his chair, and sipped his whisky. The man was mad: desperately, terribly powerful, and mad. ‘And what fearsome result does this have?’

‘Earthquakes,’ Mandrake said.

Queston choked, swallowed, and began to laugh. He heard the laughter gurgle harshly through his skull, and it poured and rasped and gasped out as if it had been there held back for a long time. He laughed; he felt tears spill out at the corners of his eyes; he bent over his knees, shaking and spluttering. Without looking up he said through his catching breath: ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll
blow
your house down.’ Then he choked again, and went on laughing hopelessly until the laughter became a pain and at last died.

Mandrake stood watching him, impassive. He said softly, ‘For a man who has watched several thousand people die at his own hand, Dr Queston, you seem in remarkably good spirits.’

Suddenly there was an extraordinary menace in the quiet, standing figure, the intent face. Reflected light glittered for an instant on one of his eyes, and was gone; and Queston, exhausted by laughter, felt a hollowness inside his throat.

‘For God’s sake, Mandrake—’

‘You will understand, shortly. I imagine you remember what happened at Gloucester.’

‘Thorp-Gudgeon said—’

‘James Thorp-Gudgeon says what he is told to say, like most people. You and I know what happened. And I know that your mind was behind it all.’

‘My God,’ Queston said. ‘I think you really believe it.’

Mandrake picked up his glass from the table, and stared down at it. ‘It took us too long to find out.’ He swung round, suddenly savage. ‘In this world of ideas, the balance of power is delicate. The man who creates a belief such as yours is dangerous, Dr Queston, intensely dangerous. He interferes, he jams transmission. He can deflect forces of inconceivable strength into channels of disaster. He can by accident create a giant form of psycho-kinesis—and that is what you have done.’

‘You’re insane,’ Queston said in despair. ‘You’re puppets, and you think you are masters—and God help you, you think I’m one as well. I tell you, Mandrake, you and your toy-soldier terrorists can do nothing to stop what’s happening to the world. Something else is working on the little people you think you control, and the shaking of the earth is simply a sign of its impatience. There’s a force let loose all right, but it’s not of your making. And neither you nor I can lift a finger to stop it.’

‘And I tell you we can and shall,’ the Minister said. ‘You have shattered the work of ten years, my friend, and now you are going to make amends before it is too late.’

As he spoke, the querulous buzzing wail began again from behind the screen. It seemed very loud. Queston heard his own voice rise shrill over it: ‘What are you going to do? ’ Mandrake smiled politely. ‘Excuse me.’ He crossed behind Queston’s chair and disappeared: his voice came muffled: ‘Who?… Yes, put him on at once.’

There was a pause. Shaken as he had not been before, Queston drank the last of his whisky in a large gulp. ‘You are going to make amends…’ Would they kill him? Why hadn’t they killed him before? The man’s insane, insane. If he touches Beth—

‘
Damn!
’ Mandrake’s voice was shouting violently and alarmed down the telephone. He supposed it was a telephone. He stood up, quietly, and crossed to the screen. Mandrake was hissing: ‘Finish them, then. No, damn you, I don’t care how. And send emergency forces out to Bristol. Divert from Gloucester, there’s not much more they can do there. How’s the south coast? Good. The Exeter and Plymouth groups into Cornwall, if they can get in. No, not Portsmouth, the Channel will be affected soon. They’re all alerted, are they?
What?
God damn and—well, tell them to do their best.’ His voice dropped back under control. Queston moved quietly round so that he could see behind the screen. It was some moments before he believed what he saw.

Mandrake was sitting before a bank of dials and switches like the control-panel of an aircraft; red lights glowed, needles flickered, with no indication of what any of them meant.
All
radio? He looked at Mandrake; a microphone jutted towards his face, he clicked one switch back, and pressed another. A yellow light shone.

‘Klaus? Is that you? Have you heard—yes. Yes. Very well. Finish as soon as you can, and come down here.’ He pressed the switch slowly up again, and sat very still. The yellow light flicked out. He sat looking straight ahead, into the dials, through the dials. Queston sensed fear, and anger; involuntarily he moved back.

The Minister rose to his feet and came out into the room, and for those few steps his walk was old, ancient, puzzled in defeat. He looked at Queston. He said, his voice flat: ‘Do you know what a tsunami is?’

‘A tidal wave, of sorts. Tropical. I saw one in Chile once. Monstrous things.’

‘Caused by earthquake,’ Mandrake said. He stared, and the age creasing his face smoothed and straightened into the calm confident menace of before. His voice rose.

‘A tsunami hit the west coast of Britain half an hour ago. Eighty-foot waves, Dr Queston, moving at several hundred miles an hour. I have little hope for the western towns of Cornwall and Wales. The destruction sweeping up the Severn at this moment is indescribable.’

‘My God,’ Queston said, appalled. He thought of the Chilean chaos he had seen twenty years before. The sea had retreated, suddenly and terribly, leaving a great impossible expanse of mud and sand and weed-green rocks, and then roared in again in a raging towering brown wall of surf, a great hundred-foot terror pouring noise and death and ruin irresistibly through a dozen towns. He had been safe in the hills; but after that the landslides had begun. He tried to picture what the ravaged Welsh coast must look like, and felt cold. He thought of words he had forgotten: himself, comforting a small sad man on a deserted railway station. ‘We’ll go to Wales, we’ll find your wife… ’ Not much to find now.

He was horrified, but he knew he was not surprised. The censor was watching, calculating, in his brain, as it had always done. This now would be the end; the knowledge, like the memory of a sweating dream, that had lived with him for years; that had shouted too late in his book. He felt almost relieved. This he had expected, but they had been too intent on their frantic race of suspicion, and he had not cared to do more than stand aloof and prophesy. And then the earth had woken, then it had begun, and Mandrake and the rest used as tools but too deaf to know it; always deaf, blind, insensate, falling into the oldest, most fatal error, basing their system on the small mind of man.

And the pride of their belief in it, he thought, looking at the Minister’s taut grey face, was the worst blindness of all. You might almost believe it the old warning come true: the deadliest of sins, bringing the fall and end of the world—

But not the end of the world. Only the end of man.

They stood a yard apart, facing each other, and the full extraordinary force of Mandrake was in his eyes.

‘Ten years’ work,’ said the slow voice. ‘Ten years’s control. A nation at peace, and now—this. Your beliefs have grown like a cancer. You should have been destroyed long ago, before it could have begun. Before your mind could have given birth to this vehicle of destruction. You should have read Price, Dr Queston. You should have read one thing he wrote. He said: “Ideas are dangerous things, because they have a tendency, however slight, to come true.” ’

The madness of it was impossible. ‘You
cannot
believe,’ Queston said desperately, ‘that the earth is shaken only by my belief that it’s able to shake.’

‘There are others like you. Christopher Oakley, and others. We have eradicated most, but there are too many still. The rootless, aimless ones, the old danger to any society. O, they haven’t your originality. Their thoughts are vague, but they are similar enough. Your ideas are the core round which their thoughts have clung.’

‘Without their knowing, of course. Up in the collective bloody subconscious. Shaking the world.’

‘Don’t sneer, my friend,’ Mandrake said softly. ‘You are a heretic, but like most heretics you will recant.’

Queston sat down deliberately on the arm of a chair. A packet of cigarettes lay on the table, with a lighter. He took one, and lit it. Blowing out smoke, clinging to the absurdity of bravado, he said: ‘Do you propose to kill me?’

‘O no,’ Mandrake said. The door of the room opened, but neither of them moved their gaze; they stared taut as bull and toreador (and which, Queston thought grimly, is which?). ‘Killing you would not kill the ideas you have created. The mind that made them must make others, with the same conviction, to nullify their force. It may be too late, but there is nothing else to do now. You are Luther. His beliefs started a fire, but when he saw the flames he helped to put them out.’

‘Perhaps I’m Latimer,’ Queston said. ‘He was burned.’

‘But you would burn the whole world with you, David, and no martyr has as much licence as that.’

It was another voice, and it came from behind him. He saw Mandrake’s eyes shift. He turned, and at once he knew the black hair and the square red-patched face and the grey eyes. He said nothing.

‘They think they’ll be in touch with the south coast again in half an hour, Minister,’ Brunner said. ‘Some kind of electrical discharge. Of course, they could try the other way—’

‘No,’ Mandrake said shortly. ‘On no account. Far too dangerous, now.’

‘I told them so.’ Brunner was like an eager black puppy, gazing up with something like love. Watching, Queston felt the old dislike, and a new contempt.

‘Take Dr Queston up there,’ Mandrake said. ‘Let him—talk—to Atkinson.’

Brunner smiled unpleasantly. ‘You’ll like Atkinson, David. Regius Professor of Medicine. A neuro-surgeon.’

It wasn’t real, it was two madmen playing a child’s game—and then Queston thought of Beth, and was flooded suddenly with a desperation more urgent than anything he had ever felt before. He grasped Mandrake’s arm: ‘For God’s sake, man, get out of this before it’s too late. Think that you might be wrong, just for a moment. Can’t you see, it’s a two-way channel you’re using—all the time you think you’re in control, the control’s working the other way, on you.’

‘Ah yes, the atomic intelligence,’ the Minister said contemptuously. ‘The world defending itself from destruction. You fool, Queston—these fantasies themselves are the destroyers. Nothing has power but belief, and the more perverted the belief, the more disastrous its power.’ He shook his arm free, and he was something from the passionate remembered arguments of Queston’s youth: the entrenched academic, unshakeable this side of death, putting his life’s obdurate case. ‘I stake my hand on the hidden powers of the mind of man, and I have all history to prove me right. And you have nothing but superstition and myth.’

Brunner sniggered. ‘Back to religion. He sees himself as Noah.’

The switchboard was buzzing again. ‘Take him away,’ Mandrake said. ‘I brought peace of mind to the people of this country, out of a world going to ruin, and no one is going to destroy that work.’

Queston moved to stand in his way, ignoring Brunner. He laughed. ‘Peace of mind? Under the cosy iron hand of the Ministry police?’