Джон Пристли - The Doomsday Men

Malcolm, staring out of heavy hot eyes, saw all three brothers now make their appearance on the platform of the tower; and though it was several hundred yards away, he could see that John was wearing some kind of white robe. But where was Andrea? He had not seen her, nor had any word from her, since she left the music room last night. Jimmy thought she must have been caught telephoning, and have been locked up somewhere. Malcolm kept staring from the tower to the house itself in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. He now saw that Henry and Paul MacMichael were no longer on the tower platform, and Hooker muttered that they must have gone below, where the great electrical apparatus was housed. John, a clear figure in his white robe, was now standing higher than he had been before, and had obviously mounted a small rostrum. To Malcolm’s astonishment, John’s voice suddenly came booming out to them all on the hillside: he must be using a powerful loud-speaker.

“Kneel down,” the voice commanded, “and give me your thoughts, for now I will pray.”

“I suppose we might as well too,” muttered Hooker.

“I’ve done plenty of praying already,” said Jimmy gloomily, “but a bit more won’t do me any harm.”

All the brethren, some of them already in a highly emotional state, were kneeling, and even the guards contrived a sort of compromise between prayer and sentry-duty, by dropping down on one knee and perhaps, as Malcolm could not help thinking, by keeping only one eye open. Malcolm had reached that queer exhausted condition in which a person wants either to cry or to giggle and is not certain which and swings idiotically between the two. But now he knelt, like the others, and tried to shut his ears and mind to what John was crying through the loud-speaker and to pray to another and less vengeful God than the one John invoked, not some jealous monster invented by fierce old Israelites who had spent their lives fighting for waterholes in the burning desert, a terrible patriarch of the tribe, but a patient and tolerant and infinitely wise Creator who had known ages ago that man was foolish and slow to learn and yet somehow gradually struggled upwards out of the slime. As he struggled to present before his mind some image of this Creator, he felt a sudden rush of somebody near him and then a warm sweet neighbouring presence. It was Andrea.

“I did telephone last night,” she whispered, “but it was awfully difficult and the man seemed all confused-it was hard to make him understand but I think he did in the end. But what can he do? Oh-Malcolm-what can we do? And I know now how wrong it’s all been.” She was terribly contrite.

“Never mind,” he whispered, very close to her ear, and putting an arm round her as she knelt beside him. “Are you frightened, Andrea?”

“Not much now, darling. It’s no longer quite real. You’re real-and being out here in the sun with you-that’s real. But not the rest of it.”

The high priest of the strange ceremony now temporarily concluded his prayer and left them to their meditations, which gave Malcolm a chance to tell Jimmy what had happened.

“He’s probably spent the last twelve hours trying to persuade people he’s not off his nut,” Jimmy said mournfully. “And he’s not the right sort of chap to do it. But who would be, with this packet to handle? Even me-and I’ve seen it coming and been damnably mixed up in it for days-even me-why, I feel half barmy. It just can’t be true. He’ll give the signal, and we’ll all wake up somewhere else.”

“If half of what he told me last night is true,” said Hooker grimly, “and unless somebody manages to interfere, there’ll be no waking up, unless it’s in heaven.”

There were strange cries, half mournful, half ecstatic, from the believers, for the most part simply-dressed middle-aged men and women, huddled together on the hill-side. They terrified Andrea, and rather frightened Malcolm, who began to talk to her quickly; while Jimmy and Hooker, whom the cries simply seemed to anger, glared across at the emotional brethren.

“Blast ’em!” muttered Jimmy. “What a crowd to go popping off with! And why didn’t I remember to send a message by Charlie to Rosalie Atwood?”

“Who’s she, Mr. Edlin?” asked Andrea, who could still be curious even on this doomsday morning. “I think that man said something about her.”

“She and I sort of started in this business together,” said Jimmy, “and if everybody’s going to go off-bang!-then I wish to God she was here with me, to see the finish of it together. There’s one grand little woman.”

“Were you going to marry her?”

“That I don’t know,” he replied gloomily, “and the less we talk about such things, it seems to me, the better. What’s the use? And I thought Charlie might have tried something, but they’ve probably got him in a strait-jacket and a padded cell by now.” But anxiously he searched the sky and listened for some sign of poor old Bendy.

“It’s ten minutes of ten,” said Hooker, with a fine appearance of being casual.

John MacMichael was now asking them to pray with him again, for the last time, and all his followers, with shouts and groans, threw themselves down and put up their clasped worn hands. And the sun still smiled out of a bright empty sky. Andrea gripped and squeezed Malcolm’s hand until it hurt. Hooker kept glancing from the tower to his watch. Jimmy stared angrily into the western blue.

“Let us now depart in peace, O Lord, from this earth, which is altogether lost in evil, to a new earth,” cried the voice from the tower, “an earth that is another Eden straight from Thy hand, where Thy word shall be fulfilled and we shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more-”

“Listen!” cried Jimmy. And as they listened, they heard, cutting through the voice from the tower, the sound of an approaching plane. They looked over the western hills, from which the sound came, and after a few moments the plane itself could be seen making straight towards them at a high speed. Before the prayer was ended, it had come roaring above the valley.

“It’s Bendy,” shouted Jimmy, dancing with impatience. “Charlie, Charlie,” he yelled ineffectually into the blue, waving like a madman, “for Pete’s sake, do something, boy.”

But what could he do? John MacMichael, having finished his prayer, gave a glance upwards, and then obviously decided to ignore the intruder, though they saw him descend for a moment from his rostrum, presumably to call down to his brothers below. But a moment later, he stood erect again, and now raising his voice because the plane was circling lower and making more noise, he asked them all to ignore it, for it could do nothing, and implored them to receive his blessing, for the hour had arrived. The old biplane went circling round in an unsteady bewildered fashion. Jimmy, joined now by Hooker, was waving and shouting to it, and the two armed men near them were uneasily dividing their time between their charges, whom they were telling to be quiet, and the approaching plane, which they threatened, as ineffectually as Jimmy had shouted to it, with their guns.

The white figure on the tower now raised its two arms high, and at the sight of this first solemn warning, the watching crowd of brethren, most of them still huddled together on their knees, gave a shout.

The plane turned and rose, as if its pilot had decided there was nothing he could do and was leaving them. Though Jimmy and Malcolm and Hooker could not have said what they had expected the plane to do, yet now their hearts sank, and Jimmy groaned. “Oh-Charlie-boy-for God’s sake!”

Again, the white figure raised its arms, very high this time, and the responding cries of the crowd were louder still. And now Malcolm felt terribly afraid, and held Andrea, who had suddenly turned to bury her face in his shoulder, closely to him, praying hard that the vast coming terror would not find him a gibbering coward. But the plane was not leaving them. It had swung round sharply, with a sudden accelerated roar, then shot down like a great projectile. Poor Charlie Atwood, who had performed so many stunts for meagre pay, now did his last stunt for nothing, and perhaps saved the world. He sent old Bendy crashing into the nearest pylon, and as she splintered and flamed and he went to his death, the cables parted. No more electric current was flowing into the tower.