The Mind Parasites Read online

  At breakfast, I was tempted to talk to Reich about it all. Something withheld me—the fear, I suppose, that he would simply fail to understand. He remarked that I seemed abstracted, and I said that I’d made the mistake of smoking Darga’s cigar—and that was all.

  That morning, I supervised the moving of the electronic probe to a place further down the mound. Reich went back to his tent to try to devise some easier method for moving the thing—a cushion of air underneath, for example, on the hovercraft principle. The workmen shifted the probe to a position halfway down the mound, below the lower gate. Then, when it was ready, I took my seat, adjusted the controls on the screen, and pulled the starter.

  Almost instantly, I knew I had struck something. The white line that ran from the top to the bottom of the screen showed a distinct bulge halfway down. When I cut the power, increasing the feedback, this immediately spread into parallel horizontal lines. I sent the foreman to fetch Reich, and proceeded to move the control cautiously, probing around the regular object in all directions. The screen showed that there were more of these objects to the left and right of it.

  This, of course, was my first experience of discovering anything with the probe, so I had no idea of the size of the object I had found, or of its depth below the ground. But when Reich came running over a moment later, he took one look at the dial, another at the controls, and said: ‘Oh Christ, the bloody thing’s gone wrong.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘You must have twisted the control too far, and disconnected something. According to this, the object you’ve located is two miles below the ground and seventy feet high!’

  I climbed off the seat rather ruefully. It is true that I have no ability to deal with mechanical appliances. New cars break down within hours when I drive them; machines that have never given the slightest trouble blow a fuse as soon as I approach. In this case, I had no consciousness of having done anything wrong, but I felt guilty all the same.

  Reich unscrewed a plate and looked inside. He said there was nothing obviously wrong, and that he would have to test all the circuits after lunch. When I apologized, he slapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Never mind. We’ve found something anyway. Now all we’ve got to discover is how deep it lies.’

  We ate a good cold lunch. Then Reich rushed off to his machine. I took an air mattress, and went and lay down in the shadow of the lion gate, to make up for lost sleep. And I slept deeply and peacefully for two hours.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw Reich standing beside me, staring out across the river. I looked at my watch, and sat up hastily.

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you wake me?’

  He sat down on the ground beside me. His manner struck me as subdued.

  ‘What is it? Can’t you trace the fault?’

  He looked at me thoughtfully.

  ‘There is no fault.’

  I failed to understand.

  ‘You mean it’s repaired?’

  ‘No. There never was any fault.’

  ‘Well, that’s cheering. What went wrong then?’

  ‘That’s what bothers me. Nothing went wrong.’

  ‘No? In that case, you know how deep this thing is?’

  ‘Yes. It’s as deep as the gauge showed. Two miles.’

  I restrained my excitement; stranger things had happened.

  ‘Two miles,’ I said. ‘But that’s quite a distance below the foundations of this hill. I mean… that kind of depth ought to take us down to archaeozoic rocks.’

  ‘That depends. But I’m inclined to agree with you.’

  ‘Besides, if it’s accurate about the depth, it’s presumably accurate about the size of the blocks—seventy feet high. That sounds a trifle unlikely. Even the building blocks of the great pyramid aren’t that size.’

  Reich said good-humouredly: ‘My dear Austin, I agree with you completely. The thing is impossible. But I have checked every circuit in the machine. I don’t see how I could be mistaken.’

  ‘There’s only one way to find out—send a mole down.’

  ‘Which is what I was about to suggest. However, if it’s really two miles down, the mole is of no use.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To begin with, because it was never intended to cut through rock—only through earth or clay. It’s bound to en-counter rock at that depth. Second, because even if there’s no rock at that depth, the pressure of the earth would destroy the mole—it would be like being two miles under the sea. The pressure would be thousands of pounds to the square inch. And since the temperature rises by a hundred degrees to a mile, it could also be too hot for its electrical equipment.

  The sheer size of the problem now struck me. If Reich was correct, we could never hope to unearth the ‘objects’ down there—objects that were obviously part of a wall of a city, or of a temple. With all our modern engineering efficiency, we had no machines capable of working at that temperature and pressure, and raising enormous blocks for two miles.

  Reich and I returned to the probe, discussing this problem. If the probe was correct—and Reich seemed to think it was—then it set archaeology an extraordinary problem. How on earth could remains sink to this depth? Perhaps the whole tract of land had subsided in some eruption—collapsed into an abyss underneath? Then perhaps the hollow had been filled with water and mud… But mud to a depth of two miles! How many thousands of years would that take? We both felt as if we were going insane. It was a temptation to rush to the telephone and consult colleagues, but the fear of having made some absurd mistake held us back.

  By five o’clock, we had the mole ready to launch, its nose pointing straight downwards. Reich operated the remote control panel, and its bullet-like nose began to revolve. Earth sprayed, then settled into a small, loose pile. For a few moments, the pile quivered. Then there was no sign of the mole.

  I went across to the radar screen. At its top, a brilliant white dot seemed to tremble. As we watched, it moved down slowly—very slowly, slower than the minute hand of a watch. Next to the radar screen, a kind of television screen showed only wavy lines that looked as if they were made of smoke. Occasionally, these lines became thinner in places, or vanished altogether; this was when the mole encountered a rock. If it encountered any object that was more than ten feet across, it would stop automatically, and the electronic laser would scan its surface.

  An hour later, the white dot had moved halfway down the screen—a depth of about a mile. It was now moving slower. Reich went to the probe, and set it going. Its screen registered the mole—at a mile down. And still in the same position, further down the screen showed the enormous blocks. The probe was accurate.

  Now we all felt the tension. The workmen were standing in a group, their eyes fixed on the radar screen. Reich had switched off the probe, since its beam could damage the mole. We were risking damaging an expensive piece of equipment—yet we could see no alternative. We had checked and rechecked the probe. It indicated unmistakably that the immense blocks were of a more or less regular shape, and were resting side by side. It was impossible that they could be natural rocks.

  Neither was it inevitable that we should lose the mole. Its electronically fortified metal would withstand a temperature of two thousand degrees; its makers had assumed that it might encounter veins of volcanic lava. The strength of its shell was enormous; the makers guaranteed that it could stand a pressure of two and a half tons to the square inch. But if it reached the blocks at a depth of two miles, it would be supporting about twice that weight, or very nearly. Besides, its transmitting equipment might not stand the temperature. And then there was always the possibility that it might pass beyond the range of the remote control, or sustain damage to its receiver.

  By half past eight, night was falling, and the mole had traversed another half of the distance. The blocks were only half a mile below it. We had told the workmen to go home, but many of them stayed. Our cook prepared us a meal from tins; he was obviously in no condition to cook anything elaborate. When th
e night came down, we sat there in the dark, listening to the faint hum of the radar equipment, and watching the brilliant white dot. Sometimes, I became convinced that it had stopped. Reich, whose eyes were better than mine, assured me that it hadn’t.

  By half past ten, the last of the workmen had gone home. I had wrapped myself up in a dozen blankets, for the wind had risen. Reich chain-smoked; even I smoked two cigarettes. Suddenly, the humming stopped. Reich leapt to his feet. He said: ‘It’s there.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I found that my voice had become a croak.

  ‘Absolutely. The position’s right. It’s now directly over the blocks.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Now we activate the scanner.’

  He started the machine again. Now our eyes were fixed on the television screen. It was blank, indicating that the scanner was trained on a massive and hard object. Reich adjusted the controls. The wavy lines began to reappear, but they were now thinner and straighter. Reich made some adjustment that brought them closer together, until the whole surface of the screen became a pattern of fine white and black lines, like a pair of pin-strip ed trousers. And showing very clearly against this pattern of lines there were a number of black scars, indentations in the rock. The excitement of the past few hours had been so great that I was able to look at these without strong emotion. It was impossible to doubt what they were. I had seen them many times before—on the basalt figurines. I was looking at the symbols that represented the name of Abhoth the Dark.

  There was nothing more to be done. We photographed the screen, then went back to Reich’s tent to radio Darga at Izmir. Within five minutes, Reich was speaking to him. He explained the situation, apologized for the risk we had taken with the mole—which belonged to the Turkish government—and told him that we had definitely established that these blocks belonged to the culture of the ‘great old ones’ mentioned on one of the figurines.

  Darga, I suspect, was a little drunk. The situation had to be explained to him at length before he understood. Then he proposed fetching Fu’ad and flying over to join us immediately. We convinced him there would be no point, as we were about to go to bed. He said that we should move the mole along to scan the next blocks. Reich pointed out that this was impossible. It could not move sideways, only forwards and backwards; it would have to be withdrawn a hundred feet or so, and redirected. This would take several hours.

  Finally, we convinced Darga, and broke the connection. We were both appallingly tired, yet neither of us felt like sleep. The cook had left equipment for making coffee. Against our better judgement, we used it, and opened a bottle of brandy.

  It was there, sitting in Reich’s tent at midnight, on the 21st of April, 1997, that I told Reich about my experience of the night before. I started to tell him, I think, to distract our minds from the problem of those seventy-foot blocks below the ground. In this, I succeeded. For, to my surprise, Reich found nothing strange in what I had to say. At university, he had studied the psychology of Jung, and was familiar with the idea of a ‘racial unconscious’. If there was a racial unconscious, then human minds are not separate islands, but are all part of some great continent of mind. He had read a great deal more psychology than I had. He cited the work of Aldous Huxley, who had taken mescalin sometime in the 1940’s, and had also reached my own conclusion that the mind stretches for infinity inside us. Huxley, apparently, had gone further, in a way, and spoken of the mind as a world of its own, like the world we live on—a planet with its own jungles and deserts and oceans. And on this planet—as one would expect—there live all kinds of strange creatures.

  At this point, I objected. Surely Huxley’s talk about strange creatures was only a metaphor, a piece of poetic licence? The ‘inhabitants’ of the mind are memories and ideas, not monsters.

  At this, Reich shrugged.

  ‘How do we know?’

  ‘I agree, we don’t. But it seems common sense.’

  I thought about my experience of the night before, and felt less sure of myself. Was it ‘common sense’? Or have we got into a habit of thinking about the human mind in a certain way—as our ancestors thought of the earth as the centre of the universe? I speak of ‘my mind’ as I speak of ‘my back garden’. But in what sense is my back garden really ‘mine’ ? It is full of worms and insects who do not ask my permission to live there. It will continue to exist after I am dead…

  Oddly enough this train of thought had the effect of making me feel better. It explained my anxiety—or seemed to. If individuality is an illusion, and mind is actually a kind of ocean, why should it not contain alien creatures? Before falling asleep, I made a note to send for Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell. Reich’s thoughts had taken a more practical turn. Ten minutes after we separated, he called to me from his tent: ‘You know, I think we might be justified in asking Darga to lend us a large hovercraft for shifting the probe. It’d certainly make life easier…’

  It now seems absurd that neither of us anticipated the consequences of our discovery. We expected, of course, to produce some excitement in archaeological circles. Both of us had conveniently forgotten the kind of thing that happened when Carter found the tomb of Tutankhamen, or when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered at Qumran. Archaeologists are inclined to discount the world of mass communications and the hysteria of journalists.

  Fu’ad and Darga woke us up at half past six, before the workmen arrived. They had with them four officials of the Turkish government, and a couple of American film stars who happened to be sightseeing. Reich was inclined to resent this unannounced intrusion, but I pointed out to him that the Turkish government was within its rights—except, perhaps, where the film stars were concerned.

  First of all, they wanted to be convinced that the blocks were really two miles deep. Reich started the probe, and showed them the outline of the ‘Abhoth block’ (as we came to refer to it), and the mole next to it. Darga expressed doubts that the mole could have penetrated to a depth of two miles. Patiently, Reich went over to the mole’s transmission panel, and switched it on.

  The result was discomforting. The screen remained blank. He tried the digging control; it produced no result. There could be only one conclusion: that the temperature—or possibly the pressure—had damaged the mole’s equipment.

  It was a setback, but not as serious as it might have been. A mole was expensive, but it could be replaced. But Darga and Fu’ad still wanted to be convinced that there was not some fault in the mechanism of the probe. Reich spent the morning demonstrating that every circuit was in order, and that there could be no room for doubt that the blocks were really two miles down. We developed the radar photograph of the Abhoth block, and compared its cuneiform with that of the basalt figurines. It was impossible to doubt that the two came from the same culture.

  There was, of course, only one possible answer to the problem: a full scale tunnel down to the blocks. I should point out that, at this point, we had no idea of the size of individual blocks. We presumed that the height indicated on the probe’s screen could be the height of a wall or a whole building. Admittedly, the radar photograph posed an interesting problem, for it had been taken from above—which meant, presumably, that the wall, or building, was lying on its side. No past civilization has ever been known to write inscriptions on the top of walls or on the roof of buildings.

  Our visitors were baffled but impressed. Unless this turned out to be some kind of a freak, it would undoubtedly prove to be the greatest find in archaeological history. So far, the oldest civilization known to man is that of the Masma Indians of the Marcahuasi plateau in the Andes—9,000 years old. But we now recalled the results of our tests on the basalt figurines with the neutron dater, which we had assumed to be inaccurate. They tended to support our assumption that we were now dealing with the remains of a civilization at least twice as old as that of the Marcahuasi.

  Fu’ad and his colleagues stayed to lunch, and left at about two o’clock. By now, their excitement was affecting me, al
though I had an obscure feeling of irritation at allowing myself to be affected. Fu’ad promised to send us a hovercraft as quickly as possible, but mentioned that it might take several days. Until this arrived, we felt reluctant to move the probe by hand. It was obvious that we were going to receive a great deal more governmental support than we had expected, and there was no sense in wasting energy. We had a second mole, but it seemed pointless to risk it. So at half past two, we sat in the shadow of the lower gate, drank orange squash, and felt at a loose end.

  Half an hour later, the first of the journalists arrived—the Ankara correspondent of the New York Times. Reich was furious. He assumed—incorrectly—that the Turkish government was seizing this opportunity for publicity. (We later discovered that the two film stars were responsible for informing the press.) Reich vanished into his tent, and I was left to entertain the journalist, a pleasant enough man who had read my book on the Hittites. I showed him the photograph, and explained the working of the probe. When he asked me what had happened to the mole, I said I had no idea. For all I knew, it had been sabotaged by troglodytes. This, I am afraid, was the first of my mistakes. I made the second when he asked me about the size of the Abhoth block. I pointed out that we had no evidence that it was a single block, even though there appeared to be similar blocks on either side of it. It could be a religious monument in the shape of an enormous block, or perhaps a construction like the ziggurat at Ur. If it was a single block, then it would indicate that we were dealing with a civilization of giants.

  To my surprise, he took me seriously. Did I subscribe to the theory that the world had once been inhabited by giants who had been destroyed by some great lunar catastrophe? I said that, as a scientist, it was my business to keep an open mind until definite evidence was produced. But was this evidence? he persisted. I replied that it was too early to say. He then asked me whether I would agree that such immense building blocks could have been moved by ordinary men—as in the case of the Gizeh pyramid or the Toltec sun pyramid at Teotihuacan. Still unsuspecting, I pointed out that the largest blocks of the Gizeh pyramid weigh twelve tons; a seventy foot block could weigh a thousand tons. But I agreed that we still had no real knowledge of how the stones of the Cheops pyramid—or those at Stonehenge, for that matter—had been moved; these ancient people may have possessed a far greater knowledge than we realize…