Element 79

Blackmail

Angus Carruthers was a wayward, impish genius. Genius is not the same thing as high ability. Men of great talent commonly spread their efforts, often very effectively, over a wide front. The true genius devotes the whole of his skill, his energies, his intelligence, to a particular objective, which he pursues unrelentingly.

Early in life, Carruthers became skeptical of human superiority over other animals. Already in his early teens, he understood exactly where the difference lies—it lies in the ability of humans to pool their knowledge through speech, in the ability through speech to educate the young. The challenging problem to his keen mind was to find a system of communication every bit as powerful as language that could be made available to others of the higher animals. The basic idea was not original, it was the determination to carry the idea through to its conclusion that was new. Carruthers pursued his objective inflexibly down the years.

Gussie had no patience with people who talked and chattered to animals. If animals had the capacity to understand language, wouldn’t they have done it already, he said, thousands of years ago? Talk was utterly and completely pointless. You were just damned stupid if you thought you were going to teach English to your pet dog or cat. The thing to do was to understand the world from the point of view of the dog or cat. Once you’d got yourself into their system, it would be time enough to think about trying to get them into your system.

Gussie had no close friends. I suppose I was about as near to being a friend as anyone, yet even I would see him only perhaps once in six months. There was always something refreshingly different when you happened to run into him. He might have grown a black spade beard, or he might just have had a crewcut. He might be wearing a flowing cape, or he might be neatly tailored in a Bond Street suit. He always trusted me well enough to show off his latest experiments. At the least they were remarkable, at the best they went far beyond anything I had heard of, or read about. To my repeated suggestions that he simply must “publish,” he always responded with a long, wheezy laugh. To me it seemed just plain common sense to publish, if only to raise money for the experiments, but Gussie obviously didn’t see it this way. How he managed for money I could never discover. I supposed him to have a private income, which was very likely correct.

One day I received a note asking me to proceed to such-and-such an address, sometime near four p.m. on a certain Saturday. There was nothing unusual in my receiving a note, for Carruthers had got in touch with me several times before in this way. It was the address which came as the surprise, a house in a Croydon suburb. On previous occasions, I had always gone out to some decrepit barn of a place in remotest Hertfordshire. The idea of Gussie in Croydon somehow didn’t fit. I was sufficiently intrigued to put off a previous appointment and to hie myself along at the appropriate hour.

My wild notion that Carruthers might have got himself well and truly wed, that he might have settled down in a nine-to-five job, turned out to be quite wrong. The big tortoise-shell spectacles he had sported at our previous meeting were gone, replaced by plain steel rims. His lank black hair was medium-long this time. He had a lugubrious look about him, as if he had just been rehearsing the part of Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Come in,” he wheezed.

“What’s the idea, living in these parts?” I asked as I slipped off my overcoat. For answer, he broke into a whistling, croaking laugh. “Better take a look, in there.”

The door to which Gussie pointed was closed. I was pretty sure I would find animals “in there,” and so it proved. Although the room was darkened by a drawn curtain, there was sufficient light for me to see three creatures crouched around a television set. They were intently watching the second half of a game of Rugby League football. There was a cat with a big rust-red patch on the top of its head. There was a poodle, which cocked an eye at me for a fleeting second as I went in, and there was a furry animal sprawled in a big armchair. As I went in, I had the odd impression of the animal lifting a paw, as if by way of greeting. Then I realized it was a small brown bear.

I had known Gussie long enough now, I had seen enough of his work, to realize that any comment in words would be ridiculous and superfluous. I had long ago learned the right procedure, to do exactly the same thing as the animals themselves were doing. Since I have always been partial to rugby, I was able to settle down quite naturally to watch the game in company with this amazing trio. Every so often I found myself catching the bright, alert eyes of the bear. I soon realized that, whereas I was mainly interested in the run of the ball, the animals were mainly interested in the tackling, qua tackling. Once, when a player was brought down particularly heavily, there was a muffled yap from the poodle, instantly answered by a grunt from the bear.

After perhaps twenty minutes, I was startled by a really loud bark from the dog, there being nothing at all in the game to warrant such an outburst. Evidently the dog wanted to attract the attention of the engrossed bear, for when the bear looked up quizzically, the dog pointed a dramatic paw toward a clock standing a couple of yards to the left of the television set. Immediately the bear lumbered from its chair to the set. It fumbled with the controls. There was a click, and to my astonishment we were on another channel. A wrestling bout had just begun.

The bear rolled back to its chair. It stretched itself, resting lazily on the base of its spine, arms raised with the claws cupped behind the head. One of the wrestlers spun the other violently. There was a loud thwack as the unfortunate fellow cracked his head on a ring post. At this, the cat let out the strangest animal noise I had ever heard. Then it settled down into a deep, powerful purr.

I had seen and heard enough. As I quitted the room the bear waved me out, much in the style of royalty and visiting heads of state. I found Gussie placidly drinking tea in what was evidently the main sitting room of the house. To my frenzied requests to be told exactly what it meant, Gussie responded with his usual asthmatic laugh. Instead of answering my questions, he asked some of his own. “I want your advice, professionally, as a lawyer. There’s nothing illegal in the animals watching television, is there? Or in the bear switching the programs?”

“How could there be?”

“The situation’s a bit complicated. Here, take a look at this.”

Carruthers handed me a typewritten list. It covered a week of television programs. If this represented viewing by the animals, the set must have been switched on more or less continuously. The programs were all of one type, sports, Westerns, suspense plays, films of violence.

“What they love,” said Gussie by way of explanation, “is the sight of humans bashing themselves to pieces. Really, of course, it’s more or less the usual popular taste, only a bit more so.”

I noticed the name of a well-known rating firm on the letterhead.

“What’s this heading here? I mean, what’s all this to do with the T.V. ratings?”

Gussie fizzed and crackled like a soda siphon. “That’s exactly the point. This house here is one of the odd few hundreds used in compiling the weekly ratings. That’s why I asked if there was anything wrong in Bingo doing the switching.”

“You don’t mean viewing by those animals is going into the ratings?”

“Not only here, but in three other houses I’ve bought. I’ve got a team of chaps in each of them. Bears take quite naturally to the switching business.”

“There’ll be merry hell to pay if it comes out. Can’t you see what the papers will make of it?”

“Very clearly, indeed.”

The point hit me at last. Gussie could hardly have come on four houses by chance, all of which just happened to be hooked up to the T.V. rating-system. As far as I could see, there wasn’t anything illegal in what he’d done, so long as he didn’t make any threats or demands. As if he read my thoughts, he pushed a slip of paper under my nose. It was a check for fifty thousand pounds.

“Unsolicited,” he wheezed, “came out of the blue. From somebody in the advertising game, I suppose. Hush money. The problem is, do I put myself in the wrong if I cash it?”

Before I could form an opinion on this tricky question, there came a tinkling of breaking glass. “Another one gone,” Gussie muttered. “I haven’t been able to teach Bingo to use the vertical or horizontal holds. Whenever anything goes wrong, or the program goes off for a minute, he hammers away at the thing. It’s always the tube that goes.”

“It must be a costly business.”

“Averages about a dozen a week. I always keep a spare set ready. Be a good fellow and give me a hand with it. They’ll get pretty shirty if we don’t move smartly.”

We lifted what seemed like a brand-new set from out of a cupboard. Each gripping an end of it, we edged our way to the television snuggery. From inside, I was now aware of a strident uproar, compounded from the bark of a dog, the grunt of a bear, and the shrill moan of a red-headed cat. It was the uproar of animals suddenly denied their intellectual pabulum.