Джон Пристли - The Doomsday Men

Malcolm stared at him, his mind racing but finding no exact words to utter in protest. “It’s all so twisted,” he stammered, “so wrong-deep down-not mad in the ordinary way perhaps-but-but-”

John made a gesture to stop him. “Paul?”

Paul’s brooding clever face kindled with a sort of bright malice. He gave a mocking glance towards Hooker, to whom he chiefly addressed his curt sentences. “I’m a scientist. A good one, an honest one, who’s given his life to pure knowledge. I agree with with what my brother has just told you. And of course I have my own angle too. I have a chance of performing the last and greatest experiment known to science. To release the earth’s energy to destroy-I hope in a flash-the life on it. That life, in my opinion, was an accident. Here I differ from my brother John, who has mystical views, though fortunately we agree about what will happen, must happen, to-morrow morning. I’m a materialist. What we call life is matter so arranged that it begins to think and feel. And it has no business thinking and feeling. That’s the mistake. Man or any being like him is doomed from the start. He can’t possibly find a lasting place for himself in this universe, which if it has plans are not plans for us. Out of the eternal dance and changing patterns of light and energy,” he cried, now suddenly losing his curt cold tone and speaking with passion, “mind has somehow emerged, to acquire knowledge but also to understand its own noble despair. But it can still use that knowledge for one last triumphant stroke, one supreme act of defiance, refusing to wait until its long dreary death sentence is carried out, but deliberately timing its exit, with all humanity like a Socrates, grandly destroying itself, leaving the mindless cosmos to its own damned dance of blind energies, for ever.”

Malcolm looked across at Hooker and was startled to see that long, lean, sceptical face suddenly wet with tears. Hooker did not speak but continued to look down, twisting his big capable hands, as if there had been something in this speech of Paul’s-and something, too, that deeply stirred him-to which he could find no

reply.

It was Jimmy, snorting and nearly purple with suppressed indignation, who found his voice. “Do you know what’s the matter with you?” he cried, glaring from one to the other of the three dark brothers. “Partly conceit-thinking you know it all, not admitting most of it’s above your head. And partly staying in too much, shut in a room, thinking round and round. One sharp morning’s walk, with the sun shining, would teach you more than you all know put together, if you’d only keep your mind open and let it.”

They ignored this outburst. Paul had clearly finished. John had still to begin, and apparently was in no hurry. But he made a sign, and Jimmy stopped fuming and grunting.

The strange John turned on them his unseeing amber gaze, shook his head so that the dark lock trembled on his brow, then smiled. “My brother does not realise,” he said quietly, “that he himself is but an instrument in the grasp of a power whose very existence he will not acknowledge. This universe of his, with its blind dance of atoms, is only an illusion, and all our life here is only a kind of dream, a shadow play. And we can only be bewildered by the dream and the shadows if we imagine that science can give us any true vision of reality. The measurements of a house are not the house. The reading of a man’s weight on the scales does not give you the man himself. My brother looks out through his eyes and is in despair because nowhere can he see himself, forgetting that he is behind and not in front of his own eyes. But I have looked the other way-and found God. Now all that is happening in the world has long been foretold, for God warns us. But all the nations, one by one, are turning away, some to this idol, some to that, and like the men who built Babel or mocked at Noah, in an age not unlike ours, they imagine they can live without God. But God is not mocked. And this world is now the great Babylon that was foretold in the Book of Revelation . I have prayed that no more souls of men may be born into this later and greater captivity, and as it has happened many times before, by the divine irony, my prayer has been granted and the instrument of destruction and salvation placed in my hand by the errors of my own brothers. They go to seek death. I go to seek life. And we cannot be judged by such as you, who are not proud enough to prefer death, nor wise enough to know where life is. Mad?” concluded John MacMichael calmly. “Are we, who know what it is we seek and take the shortest road to it, to be called mad, by such as you, who, like all true madmen, live in an uneasy dream of life, pursued by and pursuing shadows? I tell you-”

“You’ll tell me nothing else, you crack-pot,” bellowed Jimmy, jumping up and looking as if he were about to charge like a maddened bull. John stared calmly, but the two men, at a quick signal from Henry, came forward, pointing their guns. And even the furious Jimmy shrank from being immediately minced by those point-blank wide charges of heavy shot.

“Well, we’ve had our say,” said Henry wearily. “Take ’em away-shove ’em in one of those little end rooms-and don’t leave ’em until morning.”

Without another word from the three brothers, they were roughly hustled away, Jimmy still shouting protests, Malcolm and Hooker subdued and silent. As they were marched along the corridor, Malcolm had no sight of Andrea, and felt it dangerous to enquire for her. Hooker looked grim, and said nothing. Jimmy muttered curses on the three they had just left. The room they were given for the night had no window in it, was not properly furnished, and appeared to have been used as a minor store-room. In the sharp light of its two naked white bulbs, they looked at one another, seeing in each other’s eyes a growing and deepening despair, a dread of the coming hours of night, and a mounting vision of mountain peaks and desert valleys, of fields and gardens, rivers and forests, little towns and great cities, the whole familiar, stupid, beloved world, already passing away; and now they did not want to talk, but sat down, huddled together, on packing-cases and piled sacks, listening to their hearts, like time-pieces of rich curdling blood, registering and ticking away the moments of Doomsday Eve.

It was a morning no different from the others they had lately enjoyed. Some great shadow, left over from a night of terrible dreams, ought to have darkened the earth; but there was no sign of it. Lost Lake valley lay smiling under the bright sun and the flawless azure of the sky; the peaks to the west, in full light, glistened and shone, as if crammed with precious stones and metals, and those to the east, not yet facing the sun, wore plum-coloured shadows; the yellow cottonwoods trembled a little in the breeze; the distant sandy floor of the valley began to shimmer; and the air was very sweet and fresh, still with a cool sparkle in it. A few horses and cattle stirred in the narrow pastures. Now and then a red cardinal or a blue jay turned and flashed above the mesquite or among the grim tangle of the Joshua trees. Very high, one of the great birds of prey lazily circled in the blue. The place looked almost the same as usual. There had been no invasion from a terrified world; no cars filled with armed men tearing up the valley, or warplanes roaring down from the distant sky. If the messages to the broadcasting offices, last night, had been handed to the people in charge, then those people had merely laughed too, and may perhaps have passed on the information to the editors of the news service as a possible humorous little fill-up if they should happen to be short of items. If any outsiders had heard the news of the attempt and had taken it seriously, then they had not heard it in time to set out and arrive before the hour; which is not surprising, because Lost Lake was very remote and hard to reach. But a number of the brethren from the Coast, driving all night, were already here, and were now congregated on the hill-side, in small prayerful groups, like others of their kind before them, in this Western land, who had gone out to the hills to await the end of the world. The only difference was, as Hooker grimly pointed out to his two companions, as they too were taken up the hill-side, that whereas those other groups of fanatical believers had vainly looked for some miraculous piece of destruction, these were privileged to be on the spot where it was to be attempted. The two men who had been told to watch Malcolm and his two friends had been most formidably zealous, and even now, within half an hour of the appointed time, were still watching them, ready with their shot-guns. There had not been the smallest chance of escape, and there was none now. Other men, perhaps twenty altogether, and also armed, were posted round the tower.