Mandrake (26 page)

‘Rubbish,’ Brunner said. ‘We have emergency powers.’

‘The people of this country are nothing but a lot of hypnotized ostriches. Have you seen their eyes?’

‘Of course,’ Mandrake said. He looked at him, smiling, and Queston felt his stomach twist as he saw the old appalling blind stare, the other-listening, the eyes looking out of a mind connected elsewhere. What was this man?

Brunner came towards him. Queston said quickly, playing for time: ‘There must be a reason for it all. You are too secret.’ The buzzing behind the screen rose insistently. ‘You achieved peace by disarming,’ he said, and Mandrake paused, waving Brunner to answer the noise.

‘Yes.’

‘All of you?’

‘Yes,’ Mandrake said easily. ‘A general disarmament treaty was signed five years ago. All the nuclear powers—the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, China and Federal Europe.’

‘Yet three months ago there was a major outbreak of nuclear war?’

Mandrake smiled. ‘You know as well as I that there has been no such thing. It is politic to have people believe so for a little while—men can have peace given them, but they will not perpetuate it unless they have learned humility, and gratitude. There is considerable trouble outside, certainly, but it will be very rapidly calmed when the spiritual force that we are about to generate in this country reaches its highest level. Surely you don’t seriously believe that we would all have disarmed for fun?’

Queston’s mind ached; he did not understand. Certainly he knew that the great explosions of three months ago, that Oakley had spoken about, had not been bombs: they had been the first eruptions of the Intelligence, and what they had done to the countries where they had taken place was best not imagined. But what did Mandrake think they had been? Was there any conceivable chance that they could have come from some other cause? For if Mandrake were honest in what he said about general disarmament, there was an unnerving possibility that he, David Queston, had been wrong all along. Total disarmament for five years, absolute trust between nations, took away the threat of the greatest holocaust. Freed from that, why should the earth rise against man?

He said uncertainly: ‘How sure can you be that the disarmament treaty is fully observed?’ And Mandrake laughed in unaffected amusement, and he knew suddenly that he had not been wrong after all.

‘Politicians are not altogether naive, Dr Queston. One can be sure of nothing in this world. But our anti-missile missiles are exceptionally effective now, and of course we have the eight-minute warning—I have direct lines from this room to the radar stations in Yorkshire, Essex and Northern Ireland. And the unanswerable strength of all those three, of course is the laser system.’

‘The laser system?’

‘Ah yes. I was forgetting your remoteness from the world. Not the tame little lasers you would remember, the high-energy beams that brought us all our television shows so much more effectively. A much fiercer animal. Did you know the way lasers were used in industry—to cut metals, diamonds and so forth? This is our laser, going hand in hand with the radar—but a hundred thousand times as intense as that cutting beam. Guarding these shores, Dr Queston, we have beams of radiation as hot as the sun, that can be focused on any object rash enough to come within range of the radar scopes. And instantly that object will be vaporized.’

‘Charming,’ Queston said. ‘I see you have great faith in your neighbours.’

Mandrake waved one hand impatiently. ‘But the greatest safeguard of all, naturally, will always be the deterrent itself.’

Queston stared, wondering if he had imagined what he heard.

‘The deterrent? When you’ve disarmed?’

‘Nuclear disarmament is a simple process. To disband an army, now that is an undertaking. And an even bigger one to put it together again. But a bomb? We have none stockpiled, but do you think it would be difficult to put that right, if there were need? Do you think the peaceful uses of nuclear energy differ very much, in basic terms, from the business of exploiting its destructive power? Swords or ploughshares, the muscles behind them are the same. We agreed to keep the
status quo,
we suppressed the imperialist instincts, but do you think any of us could afford to forget that?’

Queston said slowly: ‘So there is no trust in your peaceful world.’

‘Shall we say there is no risk,’ said the Minister.

Switches clicked; Brunner swung the screen impatiently back and said, from the great bank of dials: ‘They’re worried, sir. The interference has stopped, but they can’t get anything from the stations in the south. A faint signal comes from Dover, but apparently it makes no sense.’

‘An emergency code, probably,’ Mandrake said irritably.

‘Tell them to check.’

‘They have, sir. They say it’s deliberate gibberish.’ Queston felt a curious quiver of anticipation.

‘Damn.’ Mandrake paused, irresolute. ‘There’s only one thing we can do.’

Brunner nodded, bright-eyed, and licked his lips. His tongue made a sticky, greedy sound against the skin.

‘Only one thing,’ Mandrake said again. He was savouring the words, mock-reluctance masking the same greediness, like a man denying praise. Queston looked uneasily from one to the other. Then Mandrake moved, suddenly decisive. ‘They checked the video power last night?’

‘Yes,’ Brunner said. ‘It won’t run for long, though.’

‘Long enough, I think. Let me come there.’

He took the seat before the flickering, flashing panel, and looked back towards the broad glass screens that Queston had seen in the brick-pillared wall opposite the door. One switch clicked, and the lights in the room dropped to a dim glow. Queston blinked, and gasped. It was blue light: the same peculiarly insistent blue glow that had shone in the nightmare cave at Gloucester. Brunner glanced at him.

‘Minister, we’re losing time. I should take him up to Atkinson’s people.’

‘Very well,’ Mandrake said, intent over the dials. Queston felt for the first time that they were real people, would do real things; his fingers curled into his palms, and he waited for Brunner to come near.

Then Mandrake said suddenly: ‘Ten minutes won’t make all that difference.’ He was looking at Queston with a small austere smile, and again the shock of recognition came: Queston saw, incredulously, the half-withdrawn, half-proud eagerness of one scholar who speaks to another. ‘ I should like you to see this,’ he said; and it was the classic approach of the man who has an experiment, theory, thesis, recognizable only by an equal; and so few equals that any one of them must be seized while he is there as audience.

And then the fine chord snapped, and Mandrake was changed again, rougher-grained, the politician. The smile was a different smile. He turned back. The pride lost its reticence, became open, almost lascivious. ‘You have never seen anything like this before, Dr Queston. Few men have ever dreamed of it. You will see that I am right about everything that we can do, and be convinced at last, I think… but I’m afraid you won’t remember it for long, if Professor Atkinson is as efficient as he has always been.’

‘So that’s it,’ said the laconic swift censor in Queston’s mind; but then the thought was doused as soon as it came.

Under the luminous blue light, glowing from high circles that seemed to float in the dark ceiling, the Minister bent eagerly over his rows of twitching needles and bulbs; his face seemed to change, to grow softer and open-mouthed, with imbecile intensity as if he were in a trance. Queston thought of the wretched Warren. It was absurd and faintly horrible, like a spiritualist service
de luxe.

He heard a low throbbing resonance fill the room, indefinable but insistent. The screens in the wall drew his eyes, growing luminous with a strange deep white light subtly filled with other colours, melting and changing, red, yellow, green, blue, through the spectrum—yet not the clear colours of broken light but all somehow perverted, softened, turned to unpleasant pastel shades. They compelled his eyes, swirling and twisting, and all the while the humming pulsation seemed to grow and fade and yet always remain the same; and then slowly, within the colours and within the sounds, disturbing, jarring patterns began to take shape. He knew that they were clutching slimily at his reason; that he was not seeing or hearing, but caught in something that had total, terrifying control over the seventh sense.

He forced himself to look away, to think coherently. He looked at Mandrake; he had thought the man could not see the screens, but now he realized that a mirror hung over the banked switchboard, angled to catch the reflected picture down, and that the Minister sat there like some insane organist with his head raised and his hands weaving meaningless patterns to and fro over the controls. Suddenly it was all frightful, the madman and the light and the noise; the sense of immanent terror was on him again, as it had been while the senseless Warren gibbered possessed, and he knew that he must not stay there in the room, that his reason would not be able to tolerate the monstrosity of what was to come.

As he turned, the door swung violently open. It banged loud against the wall, and a figure fell forward out of the dark.

‘Minister! ’ The high terrified voice was almost a scream.

At the very edge of the abyss, the light and the sound exploded, as if the organ that was not an organ had been flung into a great crashing discord. Queston’s mind cringed and whirled under the impact; a fearful, bruising eruption, as if the universe shook. And then relief came, flooding in to bring him back into sanity before he had been caught quite away. He never forgot the intensity of that relief.

The room rang with smitten silence. He saw that a second, smaller form also stood in the doorway; and that the first, whimpering softly, did not move. ‘Minister!’ The voice was lower now, and recognizable.

Mandrake said: ‘
You bloody fool
—’

‘Don’t blame him,’ said the small man in the doorway. ‘He didn’t have much choice.’

‘Oakley!’ Queston leapt forward.

‘Put some more light on,’ Oakley said coldly to Mandrake; there was absolute assurance in his voice. After an instant, Mandrake moved, and the room was bright again. Queston saw James Thorp-Gudgeon before him, stooped and dishevelled, the small eyes wide with fear in his pasty, podgy face. His tie was askew, his thin hair wisping in wild strands, his mouth slack and wet. He no longer wore a gown. He looked extremely unattractive. He was clasping one forearm to his chest; it seemed bent at a curious angle.

Oakley stood behind him, in shirt and trousers. He moved slightly backwards, so that the revolver in his hand covered the whole room. ‘Come on out past me, David.’

‘Where’s Beth?’

‘Outside, keeping watch. Quickly.’

Queston came past him, still dazed. He said foolishly: ‘Where did you get the gun?’

‘From our fat friend. He was trying to show off, I guess. Do they have guns? ’ Oakley was watching the three men; suddenly he snapped: ‘Come away from there! ’ Mandrake, who had moved gently towards the screened switchboard, jerked forward to where Brunner and Thorp-Gudgeon stood in the middle of the room.

Queston looked at them. ‘I don’t know. I doubt it. Those suits hang too well.’ He grinned, seeing from the bitter twist of Brunner’s mouth that he was right.

‘Good.’ The journalist’s flippant detachment was all vanished; he spoke crisply, a copy-book outlaw, a thin white wire of a man. ‘Not a squeak, any of you, or I shall shoot. I’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘If you try to take your friend away, or get him killed,’ Mandrake said quietly, ‘you will lose everything for all of us.’

‘I’ve had my indoctrination, thanks,’ Oakley looked contemptuously at Thorp-Gudgeon. ‘It didn’t take. David?’

‘Yes? ’ Queston had been peering out into the gloom for Beth.

‘Anyone around?’

‘No.’

‘If Beth sees anyone she’ll whistle. Now quickly. There were Ministry cars parked outside when we were brought in. We have to get one. Officially. That means a big bluff. Taking one of these boys—’ he jerked the revolver, and Queston saw all three heads jerk with it—‘along as a guarantee.’

‘Which one?’

‘Would they miss Fatso?’

Queston looked from Mandrake’s cold furious face to the cringing Thorp-Gudgeon. ‘I doubt it.’

Oakley grinned. ‘We’ll move up to top league. Take Big Boy himself. Come on, Minister.’

Brunner swung a stiff arm forward in protest. ‘The Minister is bound to Oxford. If you take him out you will kill him.’

Oakley looked at him, and said a single casual word.

‘I swear it.’ The sweat glinted on Brunner’s forehead. ‘Queston, tell him. You can’t do it. You’ve seen the pull working. Take me, you and I are the same. I’m not bound anywhere. Only the rootless can go, now.’

Queston studied Mandrake’s unflickering eyes. ‘O, come. He’s above such things.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Brunner said urgently. ‘You can’t. It’s true. Minister, tell them.’ He turned, protective and passionate, but Mandrake did not move, and he flung round again. ‘Queston
you’ve seen what happens
.’

‘Yes,’ Queston said. ‘I have. Come on, Mandrake. We’re going for a drive.’

Mandrake stepped forward in silence. Oakley came down the steps, his revolver steady. ‘Better do something about those two. Here.’ He pulled his tie from his neck, and held it over his shoulder.

Queston followed and took it. He unknotted Thorp-Gudgeon’s tie. There were tears of pain on the pudgy face. ‘My arm, David. Mind my arm.’

‘It’s broken, I guess,’ Oakley said.

Queston moved the fat, quivering form to stand back to back with Brunner. He tied Thorp-Gudgeon’s sound arm tightly to Brunner’s at the wrist. Then he looked round the room. At the far end, on the map-covered wall, a pipe ran high up along the rough-plastered stone. He led them towards it, and tied Brunner’s other wrist viciously tight to the pipe so that his arm was held high in the air.

‘That’ll hold long enough. Nobody’ll hear them down here. The radio’s the danger.’ He went to the switchboard at the opposite end of the room, peered at the back and jerked out as many free wires as he could see. There were small white flashes as they came away. For the first time, Mandrake made a sound of protest, like a groan.