The Stone That Never Came Down (14 page)

XVII

There was silence. Malcolm made it more complete by switching off the TV.

“Ruth,” he said in a tone suddenly full of tenderness, “it would clear all our consciences, not just yours, if we could persuade Hector what we plan to do is right. That’s what I had in mind when I appealed to him just now. I submit to you that one could not at random pick a more ideal judge. He is not affected by VC, but he knows about it, and he knows people who have it, and he has examined one of them–me–using tests of his own choice and all available medical facilities. Furthermore, he is a doctor in general practice at a large clinic. Not only is he acquainted with the use of virtually every drug in the pharmacopoeia; he is also acquainted with the social conditions that obtain in London today, because he sees patients from every class every day. It’s a dreadful burden to place on any man. But if he is willing to undertake the task, will you abide by what he says?”

Stiff-featured and pale, Ruth countered, “Will the rest of you? Or will you simply go ahead anyway?”

“If we can’t prove to you and Hector that it’s right, it won’t be worth doing. Particularly to you.”

“What? Why?” She stared at him.

“Because you were deprived of your own life, and that hasn’t made you hate the world. You care about it, and the people in it. It would be pointless reasoning with somebody like Charkall-Phelps, who doesn’t give a damn for mankind, only for himself.”

“And if we can’t persuade you,” Kneller said, “I’ll personally destroy this.” He held up the test-tube.

“Good. Hector?”

“You want me to–to sort of interrogate you about your motives, is that it? I’ll do my best, although …” Hector gathered himself. “Very well! To begin with, all my instincts as a doctor cry out against turning loose VC, a substance that once at large can never be eradicated short of killing everybody who carries it. Maurice asked me whether someone who had it in his power to alter human nature should do so. I couldn’t answer. I still can’t. Such a thing is unprecedented.”

“Not at all,” Malcolm said. “It’s directly owing to just such a chemical alteration in a large terrestrial population that we can sit here and reason with one another.” He glanced at Kneller. “Wilfred, you must know what I’m talking about.”

“I believe I do. The loss of the enzyme which converts urea to allantoin.”

“I don’t know about that,” Ruth said stubbornly. “Or”–seemingly suddenly giddy, she put her hands to her temples–“or do I? It’s so awful, this turnover period! Neither able to remember nor able to forget!”

“Urea stimulates activity in the nervous system,” Malcolm said. “Loss of the power to excrete it as allantoin has been compared to adding a permanent pep-pill to our diet.”

“I–uh … Yes, I read about it once. But in a story. Not an article or a book that I’d have taken seriously.” Ruth let her hands fall to her lap.

“But that occurred naturally,” Hector objected. “What you’re planning is–”

Malcolm interrupted. “Are we not natural creatures? Are we not evolved, too? Surely all the lessons we’ve learned in the past century come to a single point: we have to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow apart from nature, and recognise that we’re inseparable from it.”

“Which is something I’m keenly aware of,” Randolph said. “Since catching VC I feel that instead of being an isolated entity which I keep here in my frontal lobes”–tapping his forehead–“my consciousness is more integrated with the rest of me. The forebrain has been termed a tumourous outgrowth, and inasmuch as a tumour has the power to kill that’s an apt comparison. Thanks to it, we’ve become able to ruin the world we live in and even to exterminate our species. Rationally, that’s a decision we ought never to take. But if it is taken it won’t be on a rational basis.”

“Inside my head,” Malcolm quoted, “a man is trying to ride a dog which is trying to ride a lizard. We find it easy to decide which way we’d like to go. Because we’re being pulled three ways at once, small wonder we never get there!”

“And small wonder,” Bradshaw chimed in, “that so many of us give up–cast ourselves on the mercy of a hypothetical all-powerful supreme being who can really do what we can only envisage.”

“We all know what it’s like to have plans frustrated,” Ruth said, and gave a slight shudder. Clearly she was struggling to control herself. “That’s among the reasons why we sometimes lose our tempers and strike out at random and even kill one another. But it’s an inescapable part of being human.”

“What we’re saying,” Malcolm contradicted, “is that it isn’t inescapable any longer. Consider. Plans can be frustrated by inanimate forces, and it’s foolish to rail against them. If a thunderstorm blows tiles off your roof and your home gets flooded, you may be angry but you don’t blame the storm. On the other hand you have every reason to blame the builder who last mended the roof if he charged you a fat fee for making it stormproof. The weather is beyond reach of a complaint. Other human beings aren’t. What hurts is to have your plans frustrated by people whom you think of as being trustworthy because they’re members of your species.”

“Wait a moment,” Hector said. “I was describing to Wilfred the other day how some of my Irish patients expect me to cure with a single pill children who are mentally disturbed because they had to live through years of violence at home.” He leaned back in his chair. “I can’t help letting them down. What they expect of me is literally out of the question.”

“Don’t you tell them so?” Malcolm said.

“Of course, but they don’t listen.”

“VC makes it impossible not to listen,” Malcolm murmured. “If they had VC, those people would stop treating you like a magician and start treating you like a doctor.”

“Exactly,” Kneller agreed. “They’d be able to draw on their own and other people’s experience of what medicine is. They no doubt have the information, and they disregard it.”

“But merely making use of more information isn’t a panacea,” Hector snapped, reverting to his devil’s advocate rôle. “While I’m not a hundred per cent convinced you’ve made your point about this being analogous to what’s already happened in the course of evolution, I do have to concede that the chance of another war breaking out does seem very real, and what with nuclear weapons that’s like writing a factor of infinity into an equation. Admitting something has to be done, the question stands: is this the right thing to do? Could the ability to calculate with all the data accumulated in a lifetime help a savage in–oh–New Guinea if fallout came sifting down and everyone in the village was ill with radiation sickness?”

“Yes,” Malcolm said promptly. “Given that people had been weak and ill before and some had recovered when they did this or that or the other, ate this or that, drank this or that … You picked a poor example; radiation sickness has to be cured by helping the body to mend itself.”

“Besides, we’re not talking about New Guinea savages,” Sawyer said. “We’re talking about technological Western man. Here’s a question for you, Doctor. Do you approve of murder, the pushing of hard drugs, and driving people out of their homes with dogs and petrol-bombs?”

“What? No, of course I don’t.”

“As to driving people out of their homes, it’s because Harry Bott caught VC that the memory of his spell as a frightener has turned him against crime for good. As to drug-peddling, VC persuaded him to shop his brother-in-law Joe Feathers, whom we’d been after for years without success. As to murder, but for catching VC myself I couldn’t have deduced just by looking at Dr Post’s body that I very probably already had his killer under arrest. Nor could I have assembled that dossier on Washgrave Properties. How did George Washgrave get away with it? He exploited our selective inattention.” Glancing at Kneller and Randolph. “I didn’t know that term until I heard it from you at Post’s home. But that’s what he took advantage of. He was a filthy villain, but he was rich and respectable and gave to charity and went to church every Sunday, and that’s what people took notice of.”

“Which brings us to the nub of the matter,” Malcolm said. “How do you fool people? How do you get them to put up with things that are harmful to them and bring you a handsome profit? How do you get them to eat food that doesn’t nourish them properly? How do you get them to believe it’s worth emptying serviceable houses at a time of shortage in order to build a motorway that the homeless citizens can’t afford to use?” He pointed in the direction of the one which droned day and night within earshot of Chater Street. “How do you get them to re-elect you to power when you’ve made ghastly mistakes and propose to keep right on repeating them? As it were, ‘We did it before and it didn’t work but it damned well should have done so let us do it again!’ We’re seeing that around us all the time: the cost of living doubled in the past four years, the number of unemployed doubled too, and services
halved!
Lord, street-lamps switched off, tube-trains packed to overload capacity, the Health Service being cut back, people suffering from scurvy and rickets in one of the world’s richest countries! How do you get away with it? Above all, how do you persuade people to risk their lives in order to kill total strangers whom they know almost literally nothing about? Why, the answer’s simple. You lie to them!”

He leaned forward earnestly. “And all too often the lie is easier to believe than the truth.”

“I’ve used that technique,” Bradshaw said. “You said a moment ago, Malcolm, that Dr Campbell’s patients look on him as more of a magician. Magic is what movements like the Moral Pollution Campaign are based on. The argument runs like this: we’ve misbehaved and so we’re being punished. We must seek out the wicked atheists and perverts and deal with them, and when we’ve demonstrated that we hate their guts everything will be all right again.”

“You can find magic in the law, too,” Sawyer said. “It’s used to cover up every conceivable type of inconsistency. If you kill a dozen people by sniping at them from a roof-top, you’re a criminal. Unless you had a uniform on. Then you get a medal. That’s more or less what Corporal Stevens said when he created that terrific scandal on TV in Scotland–and he was quite right. I arrested him when he was running with that gang I told you about, for doing what he was ordered to do in Glasgow!”

“Our whole society is schizophrenic from top to bottom,” Malcolm said.

“Absolutely!” Kneller snapped. “But it’s not surprising when you’re being asked to lick the boots of the people who are simultaneously either beating or starving you into submission!”

“I still don’t see,” Hector declared doggedly, “how VC can cure us. What we need is an injection of raw empathy. That might do some good. Not extra knowledge. Extra–ah–love!”

“That will come of its own accord,” Malcolm said. “Will you grant that human beings are readily frightened by what they don’t understand? And that when they’re afraid they can more easily be manipulated?”

“Ah … Yes, of course.”

“Will you further grant that they are most commonly manipulated by propaganda, which is a kind of lying?”

“Yes.” Hector looked uncomfortable, as though he felt he was being pushed towards a conclusion he didn’t relish.

“Will you concede that a population in full possession of data from past experience will, when invited to go and commit publicly sanctioned mass murder at the risk of their own lives, remember the faults and shortcomings of the leaders who are issuing the orders? Remember, for example, that they are the people who couldn’t arrange a decent diet for them, or decent homes, or regular work, or proper medical care?”

“Just a–”

“I hadn’t quite finished. Likewise will realise that they don’t know anything about the so-called enemy
except what those known-to-be-untrustworthy leaders have told them?
”

Into the dead pause that followed, the ring of the phone in the hallway stabbed like a dagger.

“I’ll go,” Ruth said, rising quickly. “I–uh … You just keep on at Hector. I’m leaving it to him, as I said.”

And she hastened from the room, closing the door behind her.

“You’re taking too much for granted!” Hector snapped. “According to what I’ve been told, a general who’s taken VC will become a better general. Like Ruth’s South African. If all the data you possess tend to a particular view of the world–”

“But they don’t. They can’t,” Malcolm said.

“Surely they can! Someone who’s spent his whole life in isolation …” Hector hesitated. “Oh, I believe I see what you mean. Nobody can remain that isolated and still be human.”

“Precisely. Your Afrikaner can’t avoid being aware that there are people in the world who disagree with him about
Apartheid.
Your general in the Pentagon can’t avoid being aware that there are people who seem perfectly happy under Communism, while there are others who apparently hate living under American free enterprise. Data available and power to do damage run in tandem; the people in the best-informed countries are also those who can create most havoc. Savages in New Guinea can’t exterminate mankind and very probably couldn’t conceive the idea of doing so. Citizens of the nuclear powers–”

The door swung open, and there was Ruth again, very pale. She said, “Does anybody here know a Mr Billy Cohen?”

They stared at her, not speaking.

“Because if anybody does,” she went on, a high thin note of near-hysteria keening her voice, “they wouldn’t know him now!”

“What’s happened?” Malcolm leapt to his feet.

“That was the police. They found his wallet only partly burned.” She walked forward very slowly, eyes fixed on nothing. “He was at a club called the Universal Joint. Have you heard about it? I have. Near Oxford Street. It was attacked by godheads this evening and set on fire. Seven people have been burned to death.”

She was face to face with Malcolm now, her fists clenched, her eyes still not focused on anything in present time.

“Go ahead. Don’t waste any more time arguing. If people could do that to Billy, they could do it to the whole wide world, and they wouldn’t ask my permission any more, than they asked his.”