The Insulators (16 page)

Suddenly, Philip snatched his hands away.

“Don’t come near me!” he cried. “Don’t touch me.” And as her expression changed to one of ludicrous dismay, he went on: “There is no freedom if man is compelled to do what others want him to.”

Janey stood very still.

Philip, quivering from head to foot, stood in front of his chair.

“Gentlemen,” said Oboku, “what is needed is a little time.”

“What you have to understand,” the Russian impersonator said, “is that your methods, Dr Palfrey, are no better than ours. Haven’t
you
torture chambers? Don’t you control the minds of men when you think it’s for the common good? Don’t you use force and strategy, cunning and deceit to get what you think right?”

Palfrey, who could not say ‘no’, did not respond at all.

“And Palfrey,” said the man who could have convinced the world, by voice as well as by appearance, that he was the President of the United States. “You have to remember and Carr has to realise that by the time-honoured – or should I say time-dishonoured – democratic methods, the world is a cauldron of conflict, and a dust bowl in which millions starve. Isn’t that true?”

“Dr Palfrey,” said the man who looked so like the President of China, “is it not better that a man should be compelled to behave with goodness rather than allowed, even encouraged, to be bad?”

And Palfrey stayed silent, aware of Stefan’s absolute stillness, and Carr’s quivering, and the woman’s serenity.

“Dr Palfrey,” said the man who could have convinced the world that he was the newly elected President of India, “my people starve. Should we not compel the world to feed them? For we do not lack the means, only the will.”

And Palfrey bowed his head.

“Palfrey,” said the man who was impersonating Wetherall: “You are the one man trusted by the world’s leaders. If you call a meeting of all the leaders of the nations represented here – in London, in Moscow, in Washington, anywhere – they will come. And we will replace them, one by one. You can render the greatest service to mankind.”

“None will be harmed,” Oboku put in gently.

“But if you will not work with us,” ‘Wetherall’ said, “millions will be harmed. We would far rather win by subtlety than by violence, but we do have the means to get victory one way or the other. You have seen so many examples of our power. We can use the crystals, powdered crystals of great variety, to insulate the air against sound – against radioactivity. We have evolved rays which can be used as rockets to bring down aircraft, to sink great ships. We can create great areas which are safe from pollution as well as from contamination. In the process armies and air forces and navies will be pitted against us, but they cannot succeed, for we can approach them in the stealth of our silence, creep up on them with weapons of incalculable destructive power.

“And you can prevent the carnage, Palfrey. You can save the world. I doubt if any other man can.”

The last words fell gently. No one in the room moved, even Philip’s trembling had ceased, and he was looking at ‘Wetherall’ with hopelessness in his eyes. He avoided Jane Wylie’s gaze. All the men at the crescent-shaped table were looking at Palfrey as if no one else was in the room.

Still he did not speak.

He heard Stefan move, draw a deep breath, and say: “We need time to consider, time to think.”

Oboku looked along the men alongside him. “Is that reasonable?” he asked.

Each man nodded, or said ‘yes’ in turn, while staring at Palfrey. And he was agonisingly aware of their gaze, of the weight of responsibility which they had thrust upon him.

“How long?” asked Oboku.

“Twelve hours at least,” Stefan answered quietly, and he looked at Palfrey. “Is that long enough, Sap?”

Palfrey moistened his lips but did not answer. He studied each of the men in front of him in turn, then turned to Jane Wylie until her gaze shifted towards him; she looked startled, almost afraid. He turned away from her and spoke at last, to Oboku.

“What made you so sure I knew what you were doing?” he asked.

“Made us so sure?” echoed Oboku, and shot a startled look at Jane Wylie. “We were told so. Did you not know we had been informed?”

“Ah,” Palfrey said. “Who told you?”

“But Sap,” Jane Wylie interrupted. “
I
told them. Who else could?” She moved towards him, now. “You always told me, as an agent of Z5, that I should hold out to the limit of my resistance, and only then give way. I
did
hold out; but at last I had to tell them I worked for Z5, that I had been able to send out a great deal of other information and was quite sure other agents had, too. I tried to make them realise that if there was any hope of avoiding world disaster, they had to confer with you.”

Every man in the room was hanging on to her words, none more than Palfrey, and he was so intent that he did not even wonder what Philip Carr was thinking.

He, Palfrey, was the only man in the room who knew that she was lying; knew that she was not a member of Z5 and never had been. But she had convinced these men that she was.

What an agent she would be!

And how much they owed to her, for whatever chance there remained.

He raised his uninjured hand and gestured with the other. “There will never be another agent like you,” he declared; and he was almost sure there was a spark of humour in her eyes.

“Gentlemen,” interrupted Oboku, quietly, “it is agreed that you should have not twelve but twenty-four hours in which to consider your decision. We shall now adjourn. We hope you will all join us for dinner, and after that you will be able to sleep on your deliberations. We shall expect you to tell us what you have decided here, tomorrow, at this time.”

He stood up, bowed slightly, and went out, and the others filed after him. Another door opened, and two men and two women stood in a room set for a buffet breakfast, with bacon and eggs and sausages on hotplates, some buckwheat cakes and maple syrup, coffee, tea, cocoa and chocolate.

Leading off this were washrooms and beyond these, single bedrooms rather like those in a good quality motel or hotel. The three men washed, Palfrey with some difficulty, and went back to the room which had off-white walls with the flags of all the world’s nations, in wooden panels about it. Jane was still there, and there was some constraint between her and Philip although much less than there had been. They sat at a table for four, served with quiet efficiency, and lingered over coffee – good, creamy American coffee.

A man in a turtleneck sweater came in with a letter for Palfrey. He opened it, read, and turned it so that the others could see. It read:

When you are ready you may go, if you wish, to a patio above ground, where the day will be pleasantly warm, and where you may talk without fear of being overheard.

Joku Oboku.

Even the signature was identical with the real man’s!

“Do you know,” Stefan said in a reflective voice, “I could grow to like that man.”

“I don’t know whether I ought to admit it, but I’ve come to like them all,” said Janey. She looked at Philip apprehensively, as she went on: “And I’ve come to admire and respect them, too.”

“They
must
be wrong!” cried Philip.

Palfrey didn’t respond, and Stefan finished his coffee and then stood up to his full height.

“We are all wrong, some of the time.” His tone changed. “I would like a bath and an hour’s rest before we go up to the surface. Would that suit you, Sap?”

“Very well indeed,” said Palfrey.

They went to their adjoining rooms, where Palfrey found a man in a white smock waiting, a Chinese who spoke in good if patchy English.

“I am to help you, sir, and also dress your burns,” he said. “We have in communication been with the doctors in Moscow and we know what is the best to treat. It will not be necessary to give you a local anaesthetic, today, the drugs which heal are most remarkable. No?” He went on chattering as he gave Palfrey a sponge bath on the bed, and Palfrey’s thoughts drifted from this man and his brightness, marvelling at the trouble that had been taken over him, trying not to think too much about Janey and the brilliant way she had convinced these men that she worked for Z5, trying desperately to come to grips with the problem.

What should he do?

The firm hands massaged him; the sound of flesh moving over flesh, the occasional slap, a kind of rhythm, went through his body and, it seemed, through his mind. What should he do? Which course was the right one? Was it right to allow the world to go on as it was doing?
Look at the facts.
There were sickness, pollution, hatred and greed. There was envy, cruelty and malice. Crime was rife in every country, even in those where social standards were good and few if any were hungry. The moral standards which had lasted for centuries were breaking, yes, but – had they been the right ones? Was it time they broke down? Wave after wave of eroticism, of drug taking, of promiscuity followed each other. Whole generations, it seemed whole nations, succumbed to them. The family as a family was being broken up, derided and despised and rejected. There had never been such a complete breakdown of accepted standards, since the days of Nero’s Rome.

‘Love’ had become a word used simply to mean sexual intercourse; ‘love’ as a permanent feeling was gone.

Such as his for his wife, Drusilla . . .

Oh, God! How the loss of her hurt, even today.

Love was not a fleeting thing, the old standards, traditions and habits
were
gone. In wars between nations other nations supplied the warring groups and gained more profit from the war than from the peace. Civil wars could divide a nation, whole tribes, whole races threatened with extinction while powerful nations stood aside and washed their hands in the way of Pontius Pilate.

What was the use of fighting for good if the bad was so often triumphant?

What was the use of fighting for the freedom of man’s mind if man himself enslaved that mind by drugs or drink, or else destroyed the freedom by turning it into licence, abusing all that the great men and the meek men of the ages had wrested from the tyrant and the weakling kings.

How right was he to continue to fight for the old gods?

And conversely, how wrong were men like the impersonators he had seen and talked to? Men who had contrived to control power by violence and deception, and who argued so speciously, even convincingly, for imposed goodness, not goodness won out of the blood and the slaughter and the starvation and the slavery of the centuries.

Here were men who
had
power and had demonstrated it; and these same men in the high places of authority could say to the world:
“Do good, or you shall perish.”

Was it, faced so coldly, different from the old laws?

Was it so different from the Commandments of the prophets – even, he thought in anguish, from Christ?

Were these new holders of power the true gods or the false?

These were the questions that formed in his mind and turned over and over in it as the firm hands moulded and pushed and pinched and slapped the flesh.

At last, the masseur said: “All finish now, sir. I help off table?” His small arm was like steel. He gave Palfrey another gentle rub and then rebandaged the leg, which had healed much better than he had dared to hope. It was still tender to the touch and he had to put his foot down gingerly, but the rest of his body glowed with well-being.

“You’re a man of magic fingers,” he declared.

“Very grateful for compliment,” the man replied. “It is easy to make magic in magic place. Now—” he helped Palfrey on with a lightweight jacket taken from some unseen wardrobe. “I see if Mr Andellivich ready, yes? To go up to patio and bathe the sun, eh?”

Stefan, wearing his own jacket and trousers, also looked as if he too were glowing with health. At this realisation, Palfrey caught his breath. Apart from his wounds, he had never felt better. Jane Wylie looked as if she had just come off a health farm. Stefan, pale and troubled until now, had a clear complexion and clear eyes; he was the picture of health, as if all the fatigue and the anxiety had been drawn out of him. These thoughts were vivid in Palfrey’s mind as he walked towards the closed glass doors of an elevator, which opened as they approached.

The masseur bowed. “Good appetites,” he said. “I hope to see again.”

The doors closed. They had an immediate sense of movement in the softly lighted cage but could not see through the walls of the elevator. Stefan was studying Palfrey as if he, too, were aware of something different. There was the faintest sensation of slowing down, and then the doors opened silently on to a world of sunlit beauty, as if it were touched with heaven. Awestruck, Palfrey stepped out onto a paved terrace, beyond which were waist-high wrought-iron railings, but he was oblivious of these, aware only of the vista. It stretched into illimitable distances beyond twin peaks, each snow-capped and brilliant in the sunshine.

Like silver crystals . . .

Beyond these peaks mountains seemed to spill, each range more magnificent than the other, each with its own colouring and its trees, its shapes and its sharp outline. He had seen such views only two or three times, in Wyoming, in the Himalayas, in Switzerland; but none surpassed this.

He went forward very slowly, staring out, until Stefan joined him.

“Have you never been here before?” he asked.

“Never,” said Palfrey. “It’s beyond words to describe.” He gulped. “Have
you
been here before?”

“In a place like it, during the war. There were some Germans up here, showing the aircraft the way to the big industrial belts of the Urals, and I was one who had to seek them out. It was only a few months before we first met, Sap. And that seems a lifetime ago.”

Palfrey made himself turn away from the vista, and say in a baffled way, not intending to be facetious: “Only one lifetime?”

Stefan shrugged: “Sometimes it has seemed a dozen.”

“And the past few days a lifetime in itself. Do you feel like that, too?”

“Yes,” Stefan answered. “Sap—” there was a shadow on his face despite the wholesomeness, the glow of health; his eyes were slightly narrowed, his hands raised in front of his chest as if he were trying to use gestures to explain what words alone could not say. “Sap, are you at the crossroads?”

“Yes,” Palfrey responded. “I didn’t think I could ever be, but I am.”

“So here we are,” Stefan said, and after a long pause, went on: “And we have to go one way or the other.” He put a hand at Palfrey’s elbow and led him away from the twin peaks and the view which might so easily be of Shangri-La, and then towards a narrow passage alongside a covered patio. “Jane Wylie told me to come here,” he said, and opened a tall wooden gate which was on a latch. He stepped aside to allow Palfrey to pass, and Palfrey saw yet another range of mountains.

These were in shadow, for the sun was behind the snow-capped peaks. And they were dark, almost black, as if this were the scene of some volcanic eruption which had left only devastation in its wake. Beyond these nearer slopes were others just as dark; sulphurous. Palfrey hesitated then went on, towards a gap between two peaks on which was stunted, blackened vegetation. There was a vista beyond the peaks, of darkness and smoke, of fires, like the blazing of great lakes of oil. Near him was a telescope, one fitted to a pedestal as at a seaside resort or on a mountain overlook where many people went to gaze into the valleys. Almost as if he was acting under some strange compulsion, Palfrey bent his head and put his eye to the glass. It was already focused.

He seemed to be looking down at hell. There were great factories, chimneys belching fire and smoke; there were huge steelworks; there were rows upon rows of tiny blackened houses. There were cranes and derricks working, huge lines of railways trucks, waiting to be filled, workers by the thousand who worked as if they were slaves.

Then out of the floor on which Palfrey stood came Joku Oboku’s voice, very quietly but unmistakably. “That is today’s world. You see but a picture, but it is the world our generation is making: poisoned air, poisoned rivers, poisoned oceans, corrupted minds. Which way are you going to choose, Palfrey?” And, as if he could see the expression on Palfrey’s face he went on with a soft laugh. “You have to make the choice, you know, and make it for mankind. Where are you going to lead them, Palfrey? To bright heaven or dark hell?”

When Palfrey did not answer, the other man went on: “If you still have doubts, let me recreate the sounds you hear. It will be from a soundtrack but you will recognise each one and know that it is the kind of sound which is possessing the earth.”