Mandrake (24 page)

As in Gloucester, he could not feel the earth, and he thought it strange. But gradually that day he sensed something in the walls and the people and the place that he thought he understood. He said to Thorp-Gudgeon: ‘You’re afraid. You’re all afraid. You lit a fire, and now you know your house is going to burn down. You’re afraid.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Thorp-Gudgeon. ‘I’ve read your ridiculous book. Very entertaining. But upside-down.’

‘So everything is under control?’

‘Of course it is.’ The podgy don had all the arrogance of the faithful. ‘The Ministry has more power than you can possibly realize.’

‘What about the earthquake in Gloucester?’

‘Rumours. It wasn’t an earthquake. An earthquake in Britain?’

‘I was there, James.’

‘It wasn’t an earthquake. How could it have been? That great shelter collapsed. A criminal place to put it, they should have known the danger.’

‘The cathedral came down, James. I was there.’

‘You were flustered. The cathedral is still standing. Its foundations were weakened by that absurd tunnelling, and part of the tower fell. That was all.’

‘You weren’t there.’
He began to wonder if his reason were slipping from him.

‘No,’ Thorp-Gudgeon said. ‘But the Minister’s observers were. That woman in charge of the Gloucester Guild had been getting above herself for some time.’

Queston’s mind tumbled into a thousand broken images of a thousand different moments. The Minister, Mandrake; Mandrake, the Minister: always the name was there, haunting, all the way through. What was he? Always there. Always influencing. Get with child a mandrake root… all strange wonders that befell thee… shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, that living mortals, hearing them, run mad…

He said, keeping his voice level: ‘All right, then. What about that boy? The boy on the bridge?’

‘I thought that would impress you,’ Thorp-Gudgeon said smugly.

‘But you can remember that, and still tell me you have this thing under control? James, you and I watched a normal child turn suddenly insane.’

Thorp-Gudgeon laughed. ‘Possibly. But an induced insanity, my dear boy—conditioning, suggestibility. You remember
Brave New World
? A far-fetched little work—like yours, now I come to think of it, in some ways. But the methods are similar. Our people don’t say: “I’m so glad I’m a beta,”—they say, “I’m so glad my home’s in Oxford.” Or Birmingham, or Chipping Sodbury. In fact, of course, they don’t say anything at all. Catch-phrases were needed only in the beginning.’

‘Guard thine own. Home is where your heart is…’

‘There, you noticed. You weren’t affected, of course, the little rolling stone—’ His tone was suddenly vicious, then matter-of-fact again. ‘The phrases varied in, say, Scotland and Sussex, but the result was the same. Surprising how alike the reactions of hysterical and phlegmatic races turn out to be, in the end. But make no mistake, David, this is our own accomplishment. Civilization is being saved, not destroyed. You will see, in the end. We are the masters.’

Queston said: ‘Then why should you have bothered with my ideas? Why bother to castrate my book? Why have I been hounded from the beginning? And why bring me here?’

‘The Minister wanted you. You don’t acknowledge us as masters. You, or your journalist friend. Such men are rare now, David.’ He smiled again. ‘Such men are dangerous.’

They walked through the empty streets, through darkness lit only at long intervals by a few dim lamps, until they stood at Carfax in the centre of the city, where four deserted roads met; while the tower clock over their heads chimed out its cracked tune of the hour, and all over Oxford he heard the clanging, ringing, scattered clocks join in, and over them all the six long deep strokes of Tom. When all the metal voices died away, he heard footsteps ringing faintly, gradually nearer, from the Commarket. He wondered why he did not move, did not run. Thorp-Gudgeon stood a short round shadow at his side. The footsteps grew louder.

Two figures came round the corner, and he saw that they were Oakley and Beth alone.

‘David!’

She ran to him, and flung her arms round his waist, pressing her cheek into his shoulder. He felt her shaking, and held her close, and kissed her hair. ‘Thank God. Are you all right? Have they hurt you?’

She murmured inaudibly, still clutching him. Oakley said, behind her: ‘She’s been in a woman’s college somewhere. I think they treated her O.K. My guy made me wait down the road there till a woman brought her up. Cosy old dame, seemed quite attached to her. They said we’d find you here, and vanished. They’re crazy, the lot of them. I’ve been locked up in some morgue of a college all day. What about you?’

Thorp-Gudgeon moved forward; he said silkily: ‘I think it’s time we made a move.’

‘Ah! ’ Oakley’s pale head gleamed in the darkness. ‘Old Pangloss is still with us, is he? When do I get my notebook back, friend?’

‘You’re a little late,’ Thorp-Gudgeon said obscurely.

They followed him down the High Street; no cars passed, no people, no movement anywhere. Queston could think of nothing but Beth at his side; he gripped her hand fiercely, and to have her there sent everything that had happened back into the shadows, turned fear into unreality. He did not even care very much where they were going, or why. He noticed that Thorp-Gudgeon had put on the gown that he had been carrying in a loose black bundle under his arm. Half-way down the street two other men, in gowns and squares, suddenly turned out of a side road with a small marching squad of armed Ministry police. Thorp-Gudgeon bowed slightly as they passed, but said nothing.

‘The watch is out,’ Oakley said sardonically.

Thorp-Gudgeon stopped them at a great pair of black gates over broad steps, and rang a bell. It clanged tinnily inside.

‘University College,’ he said casually. ‘The oldest in the university, by some accounts. Balliol has a more substantial claim, but the Minister comes of those who believe Alfred created the spirit of this place in A.D.
872.’

Queston said: ‘Thanks very much.’

Oakley clasped his hands. ‘Gee, Prof!’

Beth was recovered enough to join in. ‘Fancy!’ she said, and giggled.

Thorp-Gudgeon turned contemptuously, and put his hand a second time to the bell. A small door swung open suddenly in the great gate, and they went inside.

‘Lambs to the slaughter,’ Oakley said softly. ‘Can’t we make a run for it?’

‘No. Try.’

A curious spasm crossed the journalist’s face, a confusion of effort, surprise and alarm. ‘No more we can. What is it? ’ The porter said: ‘Good evening, Mr Thorp-Gudgeon, sir. You know the way.’ He made a strange, ducking little obeisance.

Queston nerved himself for astonishment, for the parade of force and fear that must surround Mandrake. But the lodge was empty. He was puzzled; their reception must be waiting somewhere else. He thought of the black-uniformed men marching in the street.

There was no one. Thorp-Gudgeon led them along one side of the dark quadrangle, and turned into a cloister. From dark to blacker dark; Queston could not see where to tread. Beth gasped suddenly, and clutched at him, and he saw a glistening figure lying on a raised slab before them, motionless, and naked. Thorp-Gudgeon chuckled maliciously in the darkness. ‘The poet Shelley,’ he said. ‘One of the university’s less distinguished sons. He was sent down.’ Then he opened a door, and light flowed out over them, and they went dreamlike down a flight of steps into a long, low room that swamped Queston instantly in the helpless knowledge of fantasy.

He saw wires, maps, strange glass screens set in the uneven stone walls, as if the headquarters of some impossible mechanical war had been built into a cave; but all these things he saw only in a half-glance, because he was looking beyond them, over thick carpets and heavy armchairs, through air smelling faintly of leather and smoke, to the man alone in the room.

He saw a young man, dark-haired, the face obscured, sitting reading in an armchair at the far end of the room, a curl of smoke rising blue-grey into the light over his head. He wondered vaguely what an undergraduate was doing there. The moment struck at him, and always afterwards he found himself strangely remembering it; the sudden familiar calm, and the sense of normality after months of a mad world.

‘Good evening, sir,’ Thorp-Gudgeon said.

The young man threw down his book and flicked upright, coming swiftly towards them; a young man’s stride, a young man’s smooth jaw. He said, with an astonishing, winning smile, ‘Good evening, Queston. It’s been too long since we met. How do you do, Miss Summers, Mr Oakley. My name is Mandrake.’

The others had gone. ‘I shan’t keep you long, Miss Summers,’ Mandrake said to Beth, with the same brilliant smile; and she had gone out looking anxiously back, but without protest.

Queston stood there, lost, speechless. Somewhere in the room he heard a wavering buzz like a trapped wasp. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ Mandrake said.

He turned; and in the moment that he turned, as the light fell clear on his jaw and neck, Queston saw something that almost made him howl with relief. The spell broke. The man was not young at all; his skin folded dry into fine creases when he bent or turned his head, and beneath the deceptive smoothness it was worn and dark. As he crossed the room with his curious springing stride the first impression of boyishness vanished; there was a frightening suppressed vitality there, but not youth.

As he thought about it, this second enigma seemed to Queston more subtly horrifying even than the first.

Mandrake disappeared behind a high wooden screen at the end of the room; the buzzing stopped, and his voice murmured unintelligibly. Queston looked round at the disturbing room. Its rough-plastered stone walls were painted a livid green; one, at the far end, was completely covered by a vast map of the British Isles, studded with red pins and networked with heavy black lines. The pins obviously marked towns; but the lines seemed to him to make no sense at all.

In the long wall opposite him two square brick pillars reached from floor to ceiling; the bricks glared rough and red, with no attempt made to conceal them. There were no windows anywhere; but between the pillars, two bulbous television screens and a complex mass of dials and knobs and lights. A green light began flashing as he watched. He was reminded of the videophones he had seen in America; but this was far more complicated.

Then he felt himself watched, and turned round. Mandrake had emerged from behind the screen; he said, smiling: ‘Toys. Immoment toys. They become more necessary, unfortunately, as their efficiency grows less. But do come and sit down. I am so sorry. Was it Herodotus who said: “The Gods are always waiting”?’

‘I was never a classicist,’ Queston said shortly. He moved across the room and sat warily in one of the big, enveloping armchairs.

Mandrake went to a table. ‘Drink?’

‘Thank you.’

‘What will you have? Sherry, whisky, gin, vodka?’

‘Whisky,’ Queston said desperately; with every moment his sense of reality was slipping farther away. Mandrake clinked bottles deftly, a tall, dark-suited mystery. Everyone in Oxford seemed remarkably well-tailored. He glanced down wryly at his own fraying jacket and trousers, and thought of the heavy homespun of the Gloucester women.

The whisky was a mistake; the first gulp brought his self-possession warming back, but the smell of it brought associations of too many other things, and the spell broke, and sitting there he knew again beyond everything that he was in a world gone mad, and that this man was the centre of its madness. The still centre. He looked at him. Was it possible?

Mandrake settled himself into the high-backed wooden chair where he had been sitting when they came in; there was bland relaxation on his strong, rather bony face, barred with black eyebrows; he looked the pattern of a self-consciously civilized don. He picked up the book he had been reading, and waved it at Queston. ‘Fascinating.’ His voice was like the rest of him: young-old, eerie, the age indefinable. Queston could not see the jacket of the book, but he knew what it was.

‘Fascinating,’ Mandrake said again. ‘A most imaginative piece of work. I had no idea you would get anything like this out of your cave men.’

Queston drank some whisky. ‘Did you hunt me down to tell me that?’

Mandrake said, unexpectedly: ‘Very well. We will put our cards on the table. I knew you were a direct man.’ He sat upright but easy in the stiff carved chair, and tapped one long finger on the book. ‘In here you propound a theory—briefly, that an intelligence higher than our own is embodied in the earth, and is working to destroy mankind. Working through man’s own attachment to the earth.’

‘Roughly. After its doctoring, I doubt whether there’s much of the theory left in the book.’

‘A quibble, Dr Queston. We have changed the presentation, as a safeguard—no more. But this is your theory. This is what interests me. You are a serious scholar of considerable, I might say world-wide, reputation, and this is what you believe.’

‘You know it is.’

‘You are mad.’

‘Am I?’

‘Of course you are,’ Mandrake said wearily. ‘Everything that has happened to this country so far is a matter of deliberate policy. Long planning, and careful suggestion. Do you take us for agents of the Devil? A great deal has been done that you can never be told, on an international level, but it has been done consciously, by scientific means.’

‘I think you flatter yourself.’

Mandrake leaned forward; his eyes were dark and deeply shadowed, as though the flesh beneath the fine skin there were black. He stared into Queston’s face. ‘Do you realize,’ he said, with a tautness that cracked suddenly like hysteria, ‘that we can save the world?’

Queston stared back. Now it came. He felt a strange, triumphant exhilaration, as if he were in a cage with some savage creature that snarled instinctively, and would spring soon when it saw that it was caged. He said again, coldly: ‘Did you hunt me down to tell me that?’

‘You can help us.’

‘I hardly think so.’