Clive Lewis - That Hideous Strength

All day the wind had been rising and they found themselves looking out on a sky swept almost clean. The air was intensely cold; the stars severe and bright. High above the last rags of scurrying cloud hung the Moon in all her wildness-not the voluptuous moon of a thousand southern love-songs, but the huntress, the untameable virgin, the spear-head of madness. If that cold satellite had just then joined our planet for the first time, it could hardly have looked more like an omen. The wildness crept into Jane’s blood.

“That Mr, MacPhee . . .” said Jane, as they walked steeply uphill to the very summit of the garden.

“I know,” said Camilla: and then, “You believed it?”

“Of course.”

“How does Mr. MacPhee explain the Director’s age?”

“You mean his looking-or being-- so young-if you call it young?”

“Yes. That is what people are like who come back from the stars. Or at least from Perelandra. Paradise is still going on there; make him tell you about it some time. He will never grow a year or a month older again.”

“Will he die?”

“He will be taken away, I believe. Back into Deep Heaven. It has happened to one or two people, perhaps about six, since the world began.”

“Camilla!”

“Yes.”

“What-what is he?”

“He’s a man, my dear. And he is the Pendragon of Logres. This house, all of us here, and Mr. Bultitude and Pinch, are all that’s left of Logres: all the rest has become merely Britain. Go on. Let’s go right to the top. How it’s blowing. They might come to him to-night.”

That evening Jane washed up under the attentive eye of Baron Corvo, the jackdaw, while the others held council in the Blue Room.

“Well,” said Ransom, as Grace Ironwood concluded reading from her notes. “That is the dream, and everything in it seems to be objective.”

“Objective?” said Dimble. “I don’t understand, sir. You don’t mean they could really have a thing like that?”

“What do you think, MacPhee?” asked Ransom.

“Oh aye, it’s possible,” said MacPhee. “You see it’s an old experiment with animals’ heads. They do it often in laboratories. You cut off a cat s head, maybe, and throw the body away. You can keep the head going for a bit if you supply it with blood at the right pressure.”

“Fancy!” said Ivy Maggs.

“Do you mean, keep it alive?” said Dimble.

“Alive is an ambiguous word. You can keep all the functions. It’s what would be popularly called alive. But a human head-and consciousness-I don’t know what would happen if you tried that.”

“It has been tried,” said Miss Ironwood. “A German tried it before the first war. With the head of a criminal.”

“Is that a fact?” said MacPhee with great interest.

“And do you know what result he got?”

“It failed. The head simply decayed in the ordinary way,”

“I’ve had enough of this, I have,” said Ivy Maggs, rising and abruptly leaving the room.

“Then this filthy abomination,” said Dr. Dimble, “is real-not only a dream.” His face was white and his expression strained. His wife’s face, on the other hand, showed nothing more than that controlled distaste with which a lady of the old school listens to any disgusting detail when its mention becomes unavoidable.

“We have no evidence of that,” said MacPhee. “I’m only stating the facts. What the girl has dreamed is possible.”

“And what about this turban business,” said Denniston, “this sort of swelling on top of the head?”

“You see what it might be,” said the Director.

“I’m not sure that I do, sir,” said Dimble.

“Supposing the dream to be veridical,” said MacPhee.

“You can guess what it would be. Once they’d got it kept alive, the first thing that would occur to boys like them would be to increase its brain. They’d try all sorts of stimulants. And then, maybe, they’d ease open the skullcap and just-well, just let it boil over, as you might say. That’s the idea, I don’t doubt. A cerebral hypertrophy artificially induced to support a superhuman power of ideation.”

“Is it at all probable,” said the Director, “that a hypertrophy like that would increase thinking power?”

“That seems to me the weak point,” said Miss Ironwood. “I should have thought it was just as likely to produce lunacy-or nothing at all. But it might have the opposite effect.”

“Then what we are up against,” said Dimble, “is a criminal’s brain swollen to superhuman proportions and experiencing a mode of consciousness which we can’t imagine, but which is presumably a consciousness of agony and hatred.”

“It’s not certain,” said Miss Ironwood, “that there would be very much actual pain. Some from the neck, perhaps, at first.”

“What concerns us much more immediately,” said MacPhee, “is to determine what conclusions we can draw from these carryings-on with Alcasan’s head and what practical steps should. be taken on our part-always, and simply as a working hypothesis, assuming the dream to be veridical.”

“It tells us one thing straightaway,” said Denniston.

“What’s that?” asked MacPhee.

“That the enemy movement is international. To get that head they must have been hand-in-glove with at least one foreign police force.”

MacPhee rubbed his hands. “Man,” he said, “you have the makings of a logical thinker. But the deduction’s not all that certain. Bribery might account for it without actual consolidation.”

“It tells us something in the long run even more important,” said the Director. “It means that if this technique is really successful, the Belbury people have for all practical purposes discovered a way of making themselves immortal.” There was a moment’s silence, and then he continued: “It is the beginning of what is really a new species-the Chosen Heads who never die. They will call it the next step in evolution. And henceforward all the creatures that you and I call human are mere candidates for admission to the new species or else its slaves-perhaps its food.”

“The emergence of the Bodiless Men!” said Dimble.

“Very likely, very likely,” said MacPhee, extending his snuff box to the last speaker. It was refused, and he took a very deliberate pinch before proceeding. “But there’s no good at all applying the forces of rhetoric to make ourselves skeery or daffing our own heads off our shoulders because some other fellows have had the shoulders taken from under their heads. I’ll back the Director’s head, and yours Dr. Dimble, and my own, against this lad’s whether the brains is boiling out of it or no. Provided we use them. I should be glad to hear what practical measures on our side are suggested.”

With these words he tapped his knuckles gently on his knee and stared hard at the Director.

“It is,” said MacPhee, “a question I have ventured to propound before.”

A sudden transformation, like the leaping up of a flame in embers, passed over Grace Ironwood’s face. “Can the Director not be trusted to produce his own plan in his own time, Mr. MacPhee?” she said fiercely.

“By the same token, Doctor,” said he, “can the Director’s council not be trusted to hear his plan?”

“What do you mean, MacPhee?” asked Dimble.

“Mr. Director,” said MacPhee. “You’ll excuse me for speaking frankly. Your enemies have provided themselves with this Head. They have taken possession of Edgestow, and they’re in a fair way to suspend the laws of England. And still you tell us it is not time to move. If you had taken my advice six months ago we would have had an organisation all over this island by now and maybe a party in the House of Commons. I know well what you’ll say-that those are not the right methods. And maybe no. But if you can neither take our advice nor give us anything to do, what are we all sitting here for? Have you seriously considered sending us away and getting some other colleagues that you can work with?”