The Mind Parasites Page 23

  There was something dreadfully oppressive about the moon. Shelley had exhibited a sixth sense when he asked ‘Art thou pale for weariness?’ And Yeats had shown almost frightening perception when he compared the moon to an idiot staggering through the sky. This was what was wrong. It was like visiting a tormented soul in bedlam.

  Half an hour later, the moon lay far behind us, and the whole of the front port was occupied with the misty blue globe of the earth. This is always an exciting moment—to see the moon behind you, the earth in front of you, both about the same size. But on this occasion, we still had business with the moon.

  We wished to establish how far it could be influenced by psychokinetic force. It will readily be seen that this had to be done from a position midway between the earth and the moon, since we had to ‘brace’ ourselves against the earth. Obviously, we could exert no force from our spaceship; the moon’s incomparably greater mass would turn such force against ourselves and destroy us. Our ship was merely the third angle of a flattened triangle.

  This was a difficult exercise. First of all, it involved all of us for the first time—fifty minds in parallel. This actually proved to be the most difficult part of the problem. Most of them were barely aware of their powers of psychokinesis, and now they were being asked to run these immature powers in double harness with a crowd of other people. Fleishman, Reich and myself had to act as directors of the force. What we were doing was highly dangerous. Never had the spaceship seemed so tinny and crude. One man losing control for a moment could easily destroy us all. So the three of us concentrated upon preventing accidents, while Holcroft and Ebner coordinated the attempt to build up the vibratory wave of PK energy. Then it was necessary to ‘feel’ our way to the earth; and this in itself produced a shock. It was suddenly like being back in Washington. Earth was transmitting ‘life’ as powerfully as the moon; not frustrated. imprisoned life, but fear and neurosis. The correctness of Reich’s theory about the mind parasites became immediately obvious. The people of earth were building up panic waves just as we were building up psychic energy; this panic removed them further from their true selves, and created a cancerous shadow, an alter-ego, that immediately achieved a strange independent reality—as you can sometimes look at your reflection in the mirror and imagine it alive.

  Once we had established our contact with earth, we were in a position to exert a double leverage on the moon—a direct beam of PK energy from the spaceship, and a reflected beam from the earth.

  The point of this experiment was not to affect the moon in any way, but to gauge our response to it, as a cricketer might weigh the ball in his hand. I have said that the sensation of using PK energy is not very different from the sensation of actually touching something. The only difference is that its range is far greater. In this case, once we had established the reflected beam from earth, we could actually gauge the moon’s resistance. This meant simply exerting an increasing force, and finding out what happened. I had no direct experience, of course; it was all Reich, Fleishman and I could do to ‘steady’ the force, to prevent its vibrations from wrecking the ship. We were aware of its increased power by the increase in the vibrations. Finally, I sharply ordered them to stop. It was becoming too dangerous.

  I asked Holcroft what happened. He said:

  ‘I’m not sure, but I think we got a response. It’s not difficult to encompass the moon. But it’s hard to say how much pressure would affect it. We’d have to try again from earth.’

  He meant, of course, that the PK beam had been able to explore the shape of the moon. But we still had no idea of whether it could be moved by PK force.

  We were all exhausted. Most of us slept for the remaining hour of our journey to earth.

  At nine o’clock we fired the braking jets and slowed down to a thousand miles an hour. At 9:17, we entered earth’s atmosphere, and cut off all power. Massey’s control beam now picked us up, and we were able to leave the rest to him. We landed at a few minutes before ten.

  It felt like coming back after a thousand years. Everything in us had changed so completely that the earth itself seemed a changed place. And the first thing we noticed was, perhaps, predictable. Everything seemed infinitely more beautiful than we had remembered it. This came as a shock; it was something we had not noticed on the moon, because of the satellite’s disturbing influence.

  On the other hand, the human beings who greeted us seemed alien and repulsive, little better than apes. It was suddenly incredible that these morons could inhabit this infinitely beautiful world and yet remain so blind and stupid. We had to remind ourselves that man’s blindness is an evolutionary mechanism.

  Instinctively, we all shielded ourselves from the gaze of other men, doing our best to appear unchanged. We felt the shame that a happy person feels among hopeless misery.

  Massey looked very tired and ill. He said:

  ‘Well, sir, any luck?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  His face changed, and the fatigue fell away. I felt a sudden wave of affection for him. These creatures might be little more than idiots, yet they were still brothers. I put my hand on his arm, and let some of the life flow out of me into him. It was a pleasure to see how quickly he became transformed—to watch the energy and optimism straightening his shoulders and taking the lines out of his face. I said:

  ‘Tell me what’s been happening since we left.’

  The situation was serious. With tremendous speed and total ruthlessness, Gwambe had occupied Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Bulgaria. Where there was resistance, inhabitants had been destroyed by the thousand. A cosmic ray accumulator, that had been developed by African and European scientists for use in subatomic physics, had been turned into a weapon of war by the addition of a geronized-tungsten reflector, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem had been destroyed in a few minutes. From then on, there had been no resistance. An hour before we landed, Italy had surrendered, and offered Gwambe passage through Italian territory. The German armies were massed along the frontiers of Styria and Yugoslavia, but the first major clash of the war had not taken place. The Germans were threatening to use the hydrogen bomb if Gwambe used his cosmic ray accumulator, so it seemed probable that a long drawn out ‘conventional’ war would now follow. Fourteen high explosive rockets had penetrated the American air defences, and one of them had started a fire that had been raging in Los Angeles for the past week. It was difficult for the Americans to counter attack with rockets because Gwambe’s armies were diffused over such an enormous area; but earlier in the day the president had announced that in the future an African town would be destroyed by rockets every time an African rocket penetrated the American defence system.

  But it was obvious to everyone that this was not a war that anyone could hope to win. Each retaliatory measure was only another step towards mutual destruction. The general feeling about Gwambe was that he was a homicidal maniac who constituted as great a threat to his own people as to the rest of the world.

  Strangely enough, no one had yet realized that Hazard was equally insane and dangerous. During the fortnight when Gwambe was occupying the Mediterranean countries, Germany and Austria were mobilizing. Cape Town, Bulawayo and Livingstone had been heavily damaged by German rockets, but so far there had been no concerted act of war against Africa. But when it had been rumoured that Hazard was moving mobile launching sites for hydrogen rockets into Austria, both the Russian Premier and the American President had appealed to him not to use atomic weapons. Hazard’s reply had been noncommittal. It seemed to be generally felt that he would behave sensibly. We knew better. So did President Melville, but he had had the sense to keep this to himself.

  A rocket plane took us to Washington; before midnight, we were eating a meal with the President. He also looked exhausted and ill, but half an hour with us restored his spirits. The White House domestic staff did an admirable job of providing a scratch meal for the fifty of us in the great dining room. Almost the first thing he said to me was:

 
; ‘I don’t know how you can look so unconcerned.’

  ‘Because I think we can stop this war.’

  I knew that this was what he wanted to hear. I did not add that it suddenly seemed unimportant to me whether or not the human race destroyed itself. It was irritating to be back among these squalid, quarrelsome, small-minded humans.

  He asked how we proposed to stop the war.

  ‘First of all, President, we want you to get on to the central television agency and announce that you will be appearing in six hours’ time to make an announcement that concerns the whole world.’

  ‘And can you tell me what it is?’

  ‘I’m not yet sure. But I think it will concern the moon.’

  At a quarter past midnight, we were all out on the White House lawn. Clouds obscured the sky, and there was a cold, rainy drizzle. This made no difference to us, of course. Each of us knew precisely where the moon was situated. We could feel its pull from behind the clouds.

  We no longer felt tired. All of us felt immensely exhilarated by our return to earth. We also knew instinctively that there would now be no difficulty in stopping this war. Whether the parasites could be defeated or not was another matter.

  Our practice in space had served us well. With the earth braced against us, it seemed the easiest thing in the world to lock our minds in parallel. This time, there was no need for Reich, Fleishman and me to act as controllers; the worst that could happen now was that we might shake down the White House.

  There was immense exhilaration as our minds combined, such a sense of power as I have never known before. All at once, I knew what is meant by the phrase: we are ‘members of one another’, but in a deeper, realler sense than before. I had a vision of the whole human race in constant telepathic contact, and able to combine their psychic powers in this manner. Man as a ‘human’ being would cease to exist; the vistas of power would be infinite.

  Our wills locked like a great searchlight beam, and stabbed out at the moon. At this stage, we made no effort to increase the power through vibration. The actual contact with the moon was a surprise. It was suddenly as if we were in the middle of the noisiest crowd the world has ever known. The disturbing vibrations from the moon were transmitted directly along the taut cable of force that stretched between us. In fact, there was no audible noise; but for a few seconds our minds lost contact as the tidal wave of psychic disturbance broke over us. Then we combined again and braced ourselves against it. The beam of will grasped the moon, felt its shape, as a hand might feel an orange. For a moment, we gripped gently, waiting. Then, guided by Reich and myself, we began to generate pure motive power. The moon’s distance seemed to make no difference. From this, I inferred that our strength was so great that a mere quarter of a million miles was a stone’s throw. In the next twenty minutes we put this to the test. It was important to do it slowly, not to waste our strength. This giant, five thousand billion ton globe, was swinging gently on the end of the thread of earth’s gravity, unable to escape. In a sense, therefore, it was weightless: all its weight was supported by the earth.

  And slowly, very slowly, we exerted a gentle pressure at the moon’s surface, a pressure designed to make it rotate. At first, nothing happened. We increased the force, braced tightly against the earth. (Most of us found it more convenient to sit down, in spite of the wet.) Still nothing happened. We were holding it gently, completely untired, and allowing the force waves to build up almost of their own accord. At the end of a quarter of an hour, we knew we had succeeded. The moon was moving, but very, very slowly. We were like children pushing a giant roundabout. Once the initial inertia had been overcome, there was no limit to the speed we could induce by gently increasing the pressure.

  But the roundabout was not rotating in a direction parallel to the earth. Instead, we made it rotate at right angles to its own line of motion around the earth—that is to say, in a North-South direction.

  The North-South circumference of the moon is roughly six thousand miles long. We continued to apply the force until the point of its application was moving at three thousand miles an hour. This took a little over five minutes, after we had overcome its inertial mass. This meant that the moon would rotate on its own axis once every two hours—a speed that should serve our purpose in every way.

  We went indoors again and drank hot coffee. Fifteen leading senators had joined us by now, and the room was overcrowded. We asked them to be quiet, and then all sat there, our minds focused on the moon, to see whether our manoeuvre had worked.

  It had. Within twenty minutes, a half of the segment that our moon usually presents to the earth was turned away from us, into outer space. A half of the face that this earth has never seen was turned towards us. And, just as we surmised, the moon’s disturbing forces were halved. For thousands of years, these beams of psychic energy had been directed towards the earth. Now they were pointing away into space. The frozen vital forces in the moon no longer had active intelligence. They were not able to assess the situation and recognize that their home was rotating. Besides, it was rotating in a manner that complicated the situation. For centunes, their attention had been directed at the earth, which rotates from left to right, with a surface velocity of a little over a thousand miles an hour. Now their own home was rotating at right angles to the earth. The result was inevitably confusion.

  At the end of an hour, the former dark side of the moon was turned entirely towards the earth. The disturbing vibrations from the moon had almost ceased. We asked various senators if they noticed any difference. Some did not; others looked slightly puzzled, and said that it felt more ‘peaceful’ than an hour ago.

  It was then we were able to tell the President what he had to say. The plan was simple and obvious enough. He had only to declare that an American space research station on the moon had been wiped out, after reporting the presence of gigantic aliens, who had arrived in force.

  He seemed sceptical about whether it would work. We assured him it would, and sent him to get some sleep.

  I was not present when the President made his historic broadcast. I was taking my longest and deepest sleep since we left earth a fortnight before. I left orders that no one was to awaken me. So when I woke up at ten o’clock, it was to learn that our first result had been achieved. The whole world had been tuned in to the President’s television appearance. In the larger cities of the world, the news of the moon’s axial rotation had already caused hysterical excitement. (And I had reason to reproach myself, for my old friend Sir George Gibbs, the Astronomer Royal, had collapsed with a heart attack when he saw it through the telescope of Greenwich observatory; he died a few hours later.) The President’s announcement of aliens on the moon verified everyone’s worst fears. No one asked why aliens should have caused the moon to rotate. But that it was rotating was plainly visible to every eye during the next twenty-four hours. It was almost at the full. Over large areas of Asia and Europe visibility was perfect. Admittedly, the rotation was not immediately visible—any more than the movement of a clock’s minute hand is visible—but anyone who stared at it for more than ten minutes could see plainly that its major landmarks were moving slowly from North to South.

  We had hoped that this news would turn everyone’s thoughts away from war, but we had reckoned without the parasites. At midday, we heard that six hydrogen rockets had been fired into northern Yugoslavia and Italy, destroying an area of over a thousand square miles. Hazard was determined not to end the war without firing a shot. It would have been convenient if he had at least killed Gwambe. But apparently he hadn’t—Gwambe made a television appearance later that afternoon, and swore that, aliens or no aliens, he would never forgive Hazard for this slaughter of his men. (Actually, it was mainly Italian and Yugoslav civilians who died; the bulk of Gwambe’s forces were further south.) From now on, Gwambe said, it was total warfare to destroy the white races.

  At six o’clock that evening, the news was better. Thousands of Gwambe’s men were deserting. The prospect of a
lien invasion from the moon made them anxious to be with their own families. But still Gwambe announced that his men would fight to the death. A few hours later, the town of Graz in Styria was destroyed by a hydrogen rocket. Half a million of Hazard’s men died. Three more rockets landed in open country between Graz and Klagenfurt, killing only a few people but devastating hundreds of square miles. Late that night, we heard that Hazard’s forces had finally crossed the border into Yugoslavia and had engaged a large force of Gwambe’s men at Maribor. The actual town of Maribor had been completely destroyed by the cosmic ray gun, and the clash of armies took place a mile outside the town.

  Now suddenly it was clear that we had to act. We had hoped that this moon-threat would stop the war for a few days, and give the World Security Council time to act. What had the parasites to gain by continuing the war? If the world was destroyed—as it undoubtedly would be—they would be destroyed, too. On the other hand, if the war could be stopped, their chances of survival were almost nonexistent. Now we knew the secret—that the parasites lost their nerve in outer space—we could destroy thousands of them a day (unless, of course, they learned to adapt to this new threat). Perhaps they hoped that a few thousand people would survive the cataclysm, as they had survived earlier moon-disasters. Whatever the reason, it looked as if they were determined that the human race should commit suicide.

  The important thing was haste. If Gwambe or Hazard was really out for universal destruction, it would not be too difficult. Even a fairly incompetent engineer could easily convert a ‘clean’ H bomb into a cobalt bomb with a jacket of cobalt; it could be done in twenty-four hours. It is true that even in this event, the human race could still be saved; it would simply be a matter of finding some way of clearing the atmosphere of cobalt sixty. Our psychokinetic powers were capable of dealing with the problem, but it could take months or years. Perhaps the parasites reckoned on this.