Seeking the Mythical Future Page 8

  ‘He said I came from the sea, but did he say how I got there?’ Those flat grey eyes were fixed on Black and he had to give way, to lower his head and gaze down on the ocean. Sarah had been right, the fellow was a dangerous influence on a calm, self-collected personality. Black felt intimidated and strangely weak: it was as though (had he believed it possible) his energy and purpose were being drained away. By God, if only they had let him continue the Gestalt Treatment he would have made the fellow suffer!

  ‘Did the question never occur to you?’ Q inquired mildly.

  ‘Of course it did.’

  ‘But you never sought an answer.’

  The canaries in their cages were twittering, filling the airship with their noise. The yellow sun blazed in through the windows, its rays illuminating the dust-motes circulating in the still air.

  Black said, ‘Where you came from is of no consequence. The MDA concerns itself with practicalities, not with vague curiosity or blind guesswork. We don’t need to know where you came from, it isn’t important. We live in the real world, not in some—’

  ‘What about the things you don’t understand?’

  Black said, ‘Sarah was right when she said you were disruptive. I’m beginning to think the Complex is the best place for you.’

  ‘Yet you have an idea that my “babblings” might be closer to the truth than the Authority are prepared to admit. You abide by their rules, but underneath you’re not sure—’

  ‘Non-associative claptrap,’ Black said, waving his hand dismissively. ‘My only interest is in the pursuit of medikal knowledge. You just happened to be available. If it hadn’t been you, some other patient would have done just as well.’

  Q tried to ease his cramped position but the ropes held him firmly. ‘Does Dr Hallam agree with this philosophy? Does she think that everyone who has non-associative thoughts is fit only for Psy-Con?’

  ‘Dr Hallam did believe that.’ Black gazed down on to the ocean. He said, ‘Sarah’s dead. The rats got her.’

  *

  The Torremolinos sailed on sedately through azure, skies, the quiet days unbroken by anything more remarkable than the occasional vessel below, its sails full and yellow under the glare of the sun; once, they saw a pirate ship, the skull-and-crossbones plainly discernible to the naked eye, but they were too far from land to telegraph its position, and even had they been able to do so, the King’s fleet would have taken days to intercept.

  It was approaching high summer in the southern hemisphere, the days becoming longer and the air noticeably warmer: the trades stiffened at these latitudes so that the airship picked up speed as it neared the Australasian continent. There was a daily contest to see who could estimate the distance travelled, though the Captain, had he been prepared to admit it, wasn’t altogether certain of the precise mileage. But it was a harmless diversion and the Captain saw to it that everyone won the contest at least once on the voyage.

  Each evening, after dinner, the passengers retired to the saloon deck and played bridge or read outdated periodicals or simply gazed out upon the ocean, its colour fading with the darkness until it became a black shifting mass – on the western horizon a faint line marking the division between sea and sky, dusk and nightfall.

  Dr Black wrote up his notes, taking care not to be too explicit lest the Authority suspect him of having a more than professional interest in the patient; he was there to observe, to keep the patient under control, to ensure that the initial phase of screening was carried out smoothly and according to regulations. He certainly wasn’t there to further his career by investigating such new-fangled techniques as galvanology and the like.

  He wrote: ‘The tendencies exhibited by the patient conform to the general pattern (imaginative leaps, etc) but diverge in two respects which are perhaps worth noting. First, the patient displays few, if any, signs of agitation. His behaviour is subdued, almost dreamlike, and he accepts without question or complaint the situation in which he finds himself. Secondly, his hallucinatory flights are characterized by an unusually high degree of coherence: that is to say, his imaginings, however fanciful, are consistent within themselves and do contain a weird Logik which …’

  He was about to write ‘gains in conviction with the accumulation of data’ but hesitated, his pen hovering over the page. He couldn’t write that, they would smell a rat for sure. (Poor Sarah.) Instead, he would put something about ‘standard procedure’, which was sure to please them. How careful one had to be! His hands felt suddenly cold, there was a dryness in the roof of his mouth; it had occurred to him out of the blue that there might be an ulterior motive in having assigned him to accompany Q to Psy-Con. And why two guards? He felt the sweat prickle on his forehead. Why not one, or three? Was he being stupid to get so worked up into a panic; and then he decided that, stupid or not, he couldn’t think of a single logikal reason why, on reaching Psy-Con, he shouldn’t be imprisoned there too. The Authority worked that way, they led people blithely along and then, quick as a wink, everything changed, the benign smiling faces became scowls and you found yourself in the High Intensity Complex.

  Somebody put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Dr Black,’ He jumped.

  ‘Yes?’ Black said, ashen-faced.

  The guard said, ‘I think you’d better come along. The patient seems to be having a fit.’

  Black followed him up to the middle deck where the sleeping-cubicles were arranged along each side of the gondola; there was just enough room for a bed and a wicker chair; a small bureau folded down from the wall containing two drawers and a swivel mirror, and underneath the bed a large flat skip was provided for the passenger’s clothing.

  Q was strapped to the bed and the bed was bolted down, but it seemed to Black that, even so, the patient might wrench the entire assembly from the deck. He was paler than before, his flesh transparent, with the bones, musculature and blood vessels clearly visible, his eyeballs turned upwards into his head so that the sockets were a blind staring white. There was a foam on his lips, flecks of it flying off with his exhalations.

  ‘You better do something,’ one of the guards said unemotionally. ‘He’s going to tear that bed loose.’

  Black said, ‘It’s an excess of poison in the blood. We’ll have to bleed him.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake, do it,’ the other guard said. ‘He’s your responsibility.’

  ‘Hold him down,’ Black said. He went to fetch his bag from the next cubicle. The guards were kneeling on Q’s arms, but they couldn’t control his body which, even though bound by the straps, was jerking frenziedly from side to side, bucking like a stranded fish.

  ‘Hold him, hold him,’ Black said. ‘I’ll try for the forearm.’ He took the pointed instrument and was about to make an incision when, all at once, there was no need to do anything. The patient went rigid, his breathing stopped and he lay still. The guards released his arms which fell either side of the bed, slack as a doll’s.

  ‘Is he dead?’ one of the guards asked.

  ‘If he is, he’ll make the angels happy,’ said the other.

  ‘He’s got a hard on like a flagpole.’

  Black fumbled for the pulse and found it, weak and erratic, and when he checked the heart it was fluttering like a frightened dove’s. He said: ‘This is very similar to a state of galvanic shock.’ He turned to one of the guards. ‘Has he been given stimulants of any kind?’

  ‘I gave him nothing,’ the man said stolidly.

  ‘What happened exactly?’ Black demanded. (He was in charge now, the doktor with his mysterious rituals, and he felt a new surge of confidence and authority.)

  ‘I was doing the hourly check, according to regulations, and when I opened the door he was trying to sit up, and staring at me and babbling like a madman. I tried to restrain him but he went berserk, gabbling something about “time” as near as I could make out. Then I came and got you.’ He scratched his chin with a broad thumbnail. ‘Is he a loonie?’

  ‘I can’t discuss the patient’
s case-history,’ Black said officiously. ‘He said something about “time”. What was it? Try and remember.’

  The guard frowned. He stared at the wall for a moment. His face cleared. ‘He said “There shall be time no longer”. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.’

  ‘That was all? Nothing else?’

  ‘There was, but I couldn’t catch it. I told you, he was babbling, it sounded like nonsense to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Black. ‘It would to you.’ He leaned over the patient and raised one of his eyelids. ‘There’s nothing we can do except let him rest.’ He adjusted the straps, tightening them another notch. ‘Keep checking every hour but don’t disturb him.’

  ‘Disturb him!’ one of the guards said. ‘He disturbs me.

  Black stepped into the corridor. ‘This is a medikal matter and so I don’t expect you to understand.’ He stretched himself to his full five feet four. ‘If you need me I shall be in the lower saloon,’ and went quickly away while he still had the advantage.

  *

  Q appeared to have fully recovered the next morning and didn’t seem to be suffering any ill effects following his ‘attack’. He was fed, as usual, by one of the guards who performed the task with ill grace, shovelling the mush into the patient’s mouth and hardly caring how much went in and how much ran down his chin and dropped into his lap. But Q never complained; he seemed indifferent to physical discomfort, unfailingly calm and composed.

  Dr Black had pondered the meaning of the phrase which Q had uttered during his seizure, but if it meant anything at all it was lost on him. He felt better this morning, his depression had lifted and he no longer – for the time being – feared the guards or was too perturbed about the arrival of the Torremolinos in Australasia.

  After breakfast he sat beneath the subdued canaries on the saloon deck and leafed through the Medikal Direktory he always carried with him. It listed four main causes of seizure: apoplexy, dementia, epilepsy and poisoning of the bloodstream. Any of these might have been the cause, there was no way of knowing, and even with the necessary instruments it was largely a matter of personal interpretation. What one doktor might have diagnosed as dementia another could just as easily and with as much reason have classified as epilepsy. Providing the explanation sounded logikal and didn’t conflict with the prevailing Authority directive it would be accepted without question.

  The phrase still bothered him – ‘There shall be time no longer’. There shall be time no longer for what? he asked himself. Was time running out and, if so, who for? For the patient? Black could only suppose that at last Q was beginning to realize what lay in store for him, had woken up to the cold unpalatable fact that Psy-Con was a place from which no one ever returned.

  Black looked around him. He regretted that there were no females on board: he was dying for a quick thrust and a poke. Since Sarah had ceased to be available he had cojoined on several occasions with Miss Jardine, the large-busted blonde receptionist (once underneath his desk among the rat droppings while the Registrar hammered impotently on the door); and he was feeling the pain of withdrawal quite acutely. But until landfall there was nothing to be done. In lieu of anything better he would have to settle for his nightly handslide and like it.

  A glass tipped over and rolled off the table. The airship had tilted – or the gondola itself had swung askew under a sudden gust of wind. The bamboo cages rocked in unison and set the canaries off to a burst of shrill twittering. The First Officer appeared, treading cautiously between the tables, and assured everyone that there was no cause for alarm. In these latitudes, he explained, the thermal currents were unpredictable and sometimes upset the trim. Everything was under control.

  As he said this, there was a violent shudder followed by a wild swaying motion which upset more glasses and sent them tumbling to the deck. ‘We’re re-aligning the trim,’ said the First Officer with a brave smile. ‘Please don’t be alarmed.’

  ‘Progress has its price,’ Black observed, and the First Officer gave him a dark look.

  Then the airship seemed to right itself and sailed on as calmly as before. It had been a meteorological aberration, nothing more. They were due to sight the northern coastline of Australasia later in the day, and following that there would be two days of overland flight before berthing at the reception centre, situated in the Eastern Province.

  At noon they passed over the mangrove swamps at a height of fifteen hundred feet. What lay ahead was barren desert baking in the heat of a relatively cool 107 degrees, inhabited only by scorpions, centipedes, two-headed King snakes and, further inland, the high-security settlements surrounded by wire enclosures and the alligator pits. The alligators were sunning themselves in the ooze, their wide flat bodies flaked with dried grey mud. Black had the patient brought to the observation porch, and together they gazed out on the mile after mile of single-storey wooden huts laid in symmetrical blocks of eight stretching away as far as the eye could see.

  ‘This is the High Intensity Complex,’ Black explained. ‘Once you arrive here you never get out. Everyone sent here is a terminal case.’

  ‘They’re dangerous people, are they?’ Q inquired, as if out of polite interest.

  ‘Very dangerous.’

  'Violent?’

  Black looked surprised. ‘Of course they’re not violent. In any case, violence isn’t a crime. It’s their thoughts which are dangerous: non-associative, subversive, against the King, the State, the Authority. If these people were allowed to roam freely, to think and do as they wished, they would be a disruptive influence on society. We can’t allow that. We’re entering an age of great scientific progress, the Mekanikal Era some call it, and these people want to wreck and destroy it.’

  ‘In what way?’ Q was curious.

  ‘In any way they can,’ Black said vehemently. ‘The facts are well documented. That’s why the Royal Charter was issued which directs the MDA to find some effective means of control and stamp down hard on the reversionaries before they get out of hand.’

  ‘Am I such a threat?’ Q asked in mild surprise.

  ‘You must see that you are.’ Black was deeply intense when he had a point to get across. He became feverish and lightheaded, his eyes rolled about in his small dark face and he lisped breathlessly. He rushed on, ‘Anyone outside the norm cannot be tolerated for obvious reasons. You either adhere to the rule of Logik or you must accept the consequences; there is no middle course. You – by your appearance, your conduct, your thought processes – are a million miles away from the norm and therefore constitute a threat. There is no alternative but Psy-Con.’

  Q looked down on the huts, the wire enclosures, the alligator pits. The vast black shadow of the airship moved across like a dark stain soaking into the landscape, blotting out the sun in a brief man-made eclipse. In the distance the heat haze was a shimmering yellow fog, distorting the linear perspective and turning it into a complex fragmented display. The eye was deceived, confused and lost in the shifting patterns and indices of refraction. Anything approximating to life out there must needs have the mind of an ant and the metabolism of a reptile.

  Black was jotting something down in his notebook. He looked up, preoccupied, and said, ‘Do you recall what happened last night? Can you remember any of it?’

  ‘Yes’ Q said. ‘I remember everything.’

  ‘You had some sort of fit and apparently you were trying to say something, only the guards couldn’t make head or tail of it. It struck me as being very similar to a state of galvanic shock.’ Q gazed at him unblinkingly. He said, ‘There is a similarity between the two. It’s caused by the neurons discharging an abnormally high amount of electrical energy into the cerebellum, which produces what you would probably describe as a brainstorm. The effects can vary but usually there’s a seizure which results in convulsions, periods of staring, occasional babbling, uncontrollable rage and eventually unconsciousness.’

  ‘You know the symptoms very well,’ Black said, leaning forward. ‘It isn’t the first
time this has happened to you.’

  The patient smiled. ‘No, not the first.’

  ‘Does it happen very often?’

  ‘Now and then. Whenever I feel it’s necessary.’

  ‘You can control it?’ Black said, his dark eyebrows knitting together. ‘You can induce it yourself?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes. And other times it happens without my being aware of it; there is a measure of control.’

  ‘But how?’ Black was engrossed. ‘What do you have to do?’

  ‘The methods are rather complex but the simplest way is by using a substance called Dilantin.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘I should be surprised if you had,’ Q said, smiling again.

  ‘Oh, I see. Another of your mythic projections or whatever you call them. You spirit this make-believe substance out of thin air and swallow it down and it produces an imaginary effect.’ He too was smiling, but tightly and without humour.

  ‘The effect isn’t at all imaginary, as you’ve seen for yourself.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Black said sceptically. ‘But I still don’t see the point of it all. Supposing you can induce this condition, so what? I’ve seen patients have seizures before now, there’s nothing too remarkable about that.’

  ‘To the observer that’s perfectly true. But during the Peak Experience – or seizure, as you would call it – theta waves are produced. What you might describe as “mind stuff”.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Black, the suspicion of a grin lurking at the corners of his mouth. ‘Tell me about “mind stuff”.’

  ‘“Mind stuff” is the fabric of spacetime—’ Q said. He seemed to hold his breath for a moment, almost as if he had experienced a sudden pain.

  ‘What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?’ Black asked with a sneering grin.

  Q didn’t hear him. He said absently, ‘I didn’t know any of this yesterday, nothing about neurons or Dilantin … I didn’t know any of it.’ He seemed lost, bemused.

  ‘You’ll remember next how you came to be adrift in the ocean, no doubt,’ said Black, snapping his notebook shut. ‘Any more imaginary leaps you’d like to get off your chest? Any more non-associative cod-laddle? There’s no doubt about it, you’re heading straight for the High Intensity Complex. Once they’ve rammed you through the screening process you’ll be classified as a subversive risk, Grade A. Nothing I can do about it, not a thing. You’ve heard my advice to keep your mouth shut, and yet you babble on like a loonie. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I did my best. Don’t say – Bladdering shtank!’