The Mind Parasites Read online

  I told the producer of the programme that there would be some delay, and beckoned the others over to a foreman’s hut on the far side of the digging. We locked the door, and concentrated on finding out what could be done. The link between us was easily established, and we were able to enter the brains of some of the reporters. At first, it was difficult to discover what was happening; we had never come across anything like this before. Then, luckily, we came upon a reporter whose wave-length was identical with that of Ribot. This enabled us to conduct a closer exploration into his cerebral processes. The brain has about a dozen major pleasure circuits, the most familiar being the sexual, the emotional and the social. There is also an intellectual pleasure circuit, and a higher-intellectual circuit, connected with man’s powers of self-control and self-conquest. Finally, there are five circuits that are almost entirely undeveloped in human beings, connected with the energies that we call poetical, religious or mystical.

  The parasites were boosting the energy of the social and emotional circuits in most of these men. The fact that there were fifty of them did the rest: the ‘crowd’ mechanism amplified their pleasure.

  All five of us concentrated on the reporter we were examining. We had no difficulty in breaking the circuit and reducing him to a sudden state of depression. But as soon as we with-drew the pressure, he recovered.

  We tried a direct attack on the parasites. It was hopeless. They were beyond our reach, and determined to stay beyond it. We had a feeling that the energy we directed against them was completely wasted, and that they were mocking us.

  It was a dangerous situation. We decided that we would have to rely entirely on PK powers to keep the situation in hand. This meant working in close proximity to the reporters.

  Someone banged on the door of our hut and shouted ‘Hey, how much longer you gonna keep us waiting?’ So we went out, and said we were now ready.

  I went ahead with Reich. The reporters followed us, laughing cheerfully, and the voice of the television commentator went on continually in the background. Walking at the back of the crowd, Fleishman and the Grau brothers concentrated on this television commentary. We heard the man say in a worried voice: ‘Well, everybody seems very light-hearted, but I can’t help wondering if it’s genuine. There’s a strange kind of tension here tonight…’ At this, the reporters all began to laugh. And now the five of us linked our wills in series, and exerted a pressure of insecurity and vague fear. Immediately, the laughter stopped. I said aloud: ‘Don’t worry. The air at this depth isn’t as pure as it might be. But it’s not poisonous.’

  The tunnel was seven feet high, and sloped at an angle of about twenty degrees. A hundred yards down, we were all able to climb into a number of small railway wagons. During the ten mile journey, nothing was audible above the rattle of the wheels. There was no need to exert any pressure to lower their spirits as we went downwards. The tunnel was roughly corkscrew-shaped—the alternative would have been to place its entrance several miles from the Black Mountain, and set up another site, which would have doubled our security problem. Every time the trucks lurched around a bend, we felt the wave of alarm that rose from them. They were also afraid that the vibrations of the trucks might collapse part of the tunnel.

  It took nearly half an hour to get down to the Abhoth block. This in itself was an impressive enough sight; its immense, grey-black sides towered above us like a cliff.

  Now we deliberately created an atmosphere of oppression. It would have been far better if we could have allowed their imaginations to work, and merely stimulated them with a touch of fear. But the parasites were pouring energy into them, and it was necessary for us to paralyse the parts,of their brains that would respond. So we exerted a dead weight of fear and distaste. The television commentator was obviously embarrassed to go on talking in the oppressive silence; he was speaking into his microphone in a whisper. ‘There’s an unpleasant, suffocating feeling down here. It could be the air.’

  Then the parasites began to attack. Not in force, this time, but in ones and twos. Their purpose was obviously to harass us, to make us lose our grip. As soon as we turned our attention to fighting them, the atmosphere lightened; everybody became more cheerful. It was a frustrating experience, for there was little that could be done. In small numbers, they were almost invulnerable. It was like fighting shadows. The best thing was to ignore them, but this was as difficult as to ignore a mongrel dog snapping at your ankles.

  And then the idea came to all of us simultaneously: at least, we were so linked that it is impossible to say who thought of it first. We looked at the Abhoth block, and at the ceiling that was some thirty feet above it. It weighed three thousand tons. The Grau brothers had lifted a thirty ton block in the British Museum. We decided that it was worth trying. So after deliberately sending a wave of fear over the reporters, we began to exert our wills in unison to lift the block.

  It seemed hopeless, as hopeless as trying to lift it with our bare hands. Then the Grau brothers gave us the clue. Instead of exerting the effort in unison, they exerted it alternately, at first slowly, then with increasing speed. We understood what they were doing, and joined in. The moment we had grasped the trick, it became absurdly easy. The power that five of us generated in this way was immense, enough to have lifted the two miles of earth above us. The block suddenly floated clear of the ground, and moved up to the ceiling. The lights flickered as it brushed a power cable. There was an immediate panic, and some of the idiots ran under the block, or were pushed under. We moved it sideways, and immediately plunged the place into darkness as the block ripped the power cable. The end of the cable trailed on the ground, and we heard a man give a throaty scream as he stumbled on it. The smell of charred flesh filled the chamber and made us all feel sick.

  It was important not to panic. One of us had to disengage his will and push the reporters to the edge of the chamber, so the block could be lowered without delay. This was difficult, since our wills were ‘locked’ together upholding the block. We were, so to speak, in parallel instead of in series, sustaining the block with a five-fold alternation.

  This was the moment the parasites chose to attack in force. They had us helpless, of course. The situation would have been funny if it had not been so dangerous, and if it had not already cost a life.

  It was Reich who said: ‘Could we atomize it?’ For a moment, in the confusion, we failed to understand him—the parasites were surrounding us like an army of shadows. Then, as we saw what he meant, we knew it was the only hope. The power we were exerting was enough to lift a thousand blocks of this size: would it be enough to destroy this one? We tried it, gripping the block mentally and exerting a crushing pressure on it. We increased the rate of alternations automatically, and the exhilaration was so great that we scarcely noticed the pressure of the parasites around us. Then we felt it grind and crumble like an enormous piece of chalk held in a vice. In a few seconds, it was a great block of fine powder we were holding in the air. In this form, it could be forced into the tunnel. This we did, at such a pace that the draught sucked us back towards the tunnel, and the air filled for a while with dust.

  The moment the block was out of the way, we used the accumulated will-power to lash out at the parasites, with the impatience of a man striking at a flea. The result was satisfying; again, they had not time to retreat, and we had the sensation of cutting into them like a flame-thrower into dead leaves. Then Reich disengaged his will and picked up the end of the power cable, which he fused to the broken end. The lights came on, and showed us utter confusion. The ‘social circuit’ had been snapped in all of them; each man felt himself totally alone, and terrified. The air was full of black dust that made us all choke. (We had to allow it to settle in the tunnel before we could drive it upwards, in order to allow clean air to flow in above it.) The remains of the dead man were stuck to the power cable above us, and still produced a charring smell. We were all black in the face, like coal miners. The atmosphere of panic was terrifying. Each one of
them believed that he would never see the surface again.

  We were able to still the panic by again linking in series. Then we ordered them to form into a double line, and return to the trucks. Reich concentrated on the three television men, making sure that they started their cameras again. (The power cut had affected them, of course.) Meanwhile, the rest of us cleared the dust out of the tunnel, and sent it slowly up to the surface. where it rose into the sky—luckily it was a dark night—and was allowed to settle over a wide area.

  When we came out into the air, we knew that we had won a considerable victory over the parasites—mainly by accident. They had not given up, of course. They were still pouring energy into the reporters as we came to the surface. We were able to block this completely. But obviously we would be unable to do so when they separated. Still, the whole world had seen what had happened over the television cameras, and had seen the disappearance of the block. Whatever the reporters wrote hardly mattered. Besides, there was another factor. This artificial boosting of their social and emotional circuits would inevitably produce a reaction of fatigue, a kind of hangover. They could not be kept in this state of semi-intoxication forever. The reaction should serve us well.

  It was after midnight when the five of us ate a meal together. It was in a special room that A.I.U. had provided for us. We had decided that, from now on, the five of us had to stay together, by day and night. Singly, we had a certain strength, but together, this strength was multiplied by a thousand, as we had demonstrated that evening.

  We did not deceive ourselves into believing that we were invulnerable. We were, perhaps, safe from direct attack from the parasites. But they knew how to use other men against us, and this was the real danger.

  When we saw the newspapers the next morning, it was difficult not to congratulate ourselves on a major victory. Since almost everyone in the world had been watching their television screens, it was as if everyone had been present when the Abhoth block vanished. We thought that a few of the newspapers would suspect fraud—after all, what we had done was no more than a glorified conjuring trick—but no one did. There were plenty of hysterical attacks on us, but they were attacks on our stupidity in releasing these ‘terrifying forces’. Everyone assumed that the ‘Tsathogguans’—it was a Lovecraft expert in the States who was responsible for the name—had destroyed the block to prevent us from learning more of their secrets. What terrified everyone was that if they could destroy a three thousand ton block, they could destroy a modern city just as easily. This fear was increased later in the day when scientists detected the layer of basalt dust covering the scrub for miles around the site, and deduced correctly that the block had been somehow disintegrated. They were baffled. It would, of course, have been possible to disintegrate the block using an atomic blaster, but the resultant release of energy would have destroyed everyone in the underground chamber; they could not understand how it had been done without even raising the temperature of the chamber.

  Gunnar Fangen, the president of the United Nations, sent us a message asking what steps we thought he should take against the parasites. Did we think it would help if Kadath was destroyed by atomic mines? Had we any idea of what weapons might be effective against them? We sent him a message asking him to come and see us, which he did forty-eight hours later.

  Meanwhile, A.I.U. was facing a problem of its own. The publicity of course, was highly gratifying; but while hundreds of reporters waited outside, they were in a state of siege, and business came to a standstill. It was important that we find ourselves a new headquarters. For this reason, I spoke directly to the President of the United States, Lloyd C. Melville, asking him if he could find us a high security area where we would be guaranteed privacy. He acted quickly, and within an hour notified us that we could move to the U.S. Rocket Base 91, at Saratoga Springs, New York State. We moved there the following day, October 17th.

  Our new base had many advantages. We still had a list of a dozen men in America whom we had intended to ‘initiate’ into our secret in due course; their names had been supplied by Reimizov and Spencefield of Yale. Five of them were in New York State. We asked President Melville if he would ask these men to meet us on our arrival at Base 91. The men were Oliver Fleming and Merril Philips of the Psychological Laboratory of Columbia, Russell Holcroft of Syracuse University, and Edward Leaf and Viktor Ebner of the Albany Research Institute.

  The evening before we left A.I.U., Fleishman made a television appearance, recorded at A.I.U., in which he again emphasized that earth had no cause for panic. He did not believe that the parasites were strong enough to do any real damage to the human race. It was our business to try to make sure they never became strong enough.

  For us, this ‘public’ side of our work was the least important; in fact, it was a tiresome irrelevancy. We wanted to get down to the real business of exploring our own strength and that of the parasites.

  A.I.U. organized a fast rocket to take us to Base 91, and we were there within an hour. Our arrival was announced on television the same afternoon. The President made a personal appearance to explain his reasons for allowing us into Base 91 (which was the United States’ maximum security area—a joke said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to get into Base 91). He said that our safety was a matter of world importance, and that any attempt by reporters to contact us would be treated as a breach of security regulations, and dealt with as such. This certainly solved one of our major problems; from that time onward, we could move about without being followed by a dozen helicopters.

  Base 91 was hardly comfortable compared with the directors’ block at A.I.U. Our quarters consisted of a nissen hut that had been constructed in the twenty-four hours before our arrival; it was little more than a well-furnished barrack room.

  The five men were waiting to meet us when we arrived—Fleming, Philips, Holcroft, Leaf and Ebner. All were under forty. Holcroft hardly looked like a scientist, being over six feet tall with pink cheeks and very blue eyes: I felt some misgivings on seeing him. The others struck me as first-rate men: intelligent, self-controlled, and with a sense of humour. We all had tea with the O.I.C. of the base and the chief security officer. Both these men seemed to me typical soldiers; intelligent enough, but somehow literal-minded. (The security officer wanted to know what measures he could take against Tsathog-guan spies.) I decided to try to make them understand precisely what we were up against; not an enemy who attacked you from in front or behind, but one who was already inside us all. They looked baffled until General Winslow, the O.I.C., said ‘I suppose you mean you could compare these creatures to germs that get into the bloodstream?’ I said that indeed you could, and from then on I had a feeling that they were altogether happier about the idea, although the security officer was now thinking in terms of disinfectant.

  After tea, we took the five new ‘recruits’ back to the hut. I read in the security officer’s mind that there were a number of vibration microphones concealed under the concrete floor of our hut—placed there on his own orders—so as soon as we moved in, I located them and destroyed them. They were, of course, set in the concrete itself an inch deep, so it should have been theoretically impossible to destroy them without drilling into the concrete. Whenever I saw the security officer over the next week, I caught him looking at me in an odd way.

  We spent the evening explaining the situation to our five ‘recruits’. First of all, they were given photostated copies of the Historical Reflections to read. Then I told them briefly my own story. While I did so, it was tape recorded, so that it could be played back later if they still had questions. I quote here from the last five minutes of that tape recording, since it states clearly the nature of the problems we faced:

  ‘So we suspect that these things can be combated by a human being with a basic training in phenomenology. We also know that their chief power seems to lie in their ability to unbalance the mind. (I had already confessed that the destruction of the Abhoth block was our doing.)
This means that we have to learn how to resist them at every mental level.

  ‘But this in itself raises a new problem, which we must solve as quickly as possible. We know so little about the human soul. We do not know what happens when a man is born and when he dies. We do not understand man’s relation to space and time.

  ‘The great vision of the nineteenth century romantics was of “men like gods”. We now know that this is within the bounds of possibility. Man’s potential powers are so immense that we cannot begin to grasp them. To be god-like means to be in control of things instead of being a victim of circumstance. But it must be emphasized that there can be no ultimate control while there are great unanswered questions. If a man walks with his face turned to the sky, it is easy to trip him up. While we do not understand the foundations of our being, these parasites could be planning to attack these foundations and destroy us. For all I know, these parasites are as ignorant as we are about these questions. But we cannot risk making that assumption. We have got to know the secrets of death and of space and time. This is our only guarantee of winning this fight.’

  To my surprise—and great pleasure—Holcroft turned out to be one of the best pupils I’d ever had. That look of babyish innocence was, in a way, a true guide to his nature. He had been brought up in the country by two maiden aunts who adored him, and had done well in science at school. He was naturally generous and sunny and un-neurotic, so this fortunate background allowed him to preserve these qualities. As an experimental psychologist, he was not brilliant: he lacked the kind of nervous drive that makes a first-rate scientist. But what was far more important is that he had a natural, instinctive adjustment to nature. He had a kind of spiritual radar that meant that he made fairly light work of the business of living.