That Hideous Strength

IV

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?”

“Dissolve the Company, do you mean?” said Dimble.

“Aye, I do,” said MacPhee.

The Director looked up with a smile. “But,” he said, “I have no power to dissolve it.”

“In that case,” said MacPhee, “I must ask what authority you had to bring it together?”

“I never brought it together,” said the Director. Then, after glancing round the company, he added: “There is some strange misunderstanding here! Were you all under the impression I had selected you?”

“Were you?” he repeated, when no one answered.

“Well,” said Dimble, “as regards myself I fully realise that the thing has come about more or less unconsciously-even accidentally. There was no moment at which you asked me to join a definite movement, or anything of that kind. That is why I have always regarded myself as a sort of camp follower. I had assumed that the others were in a more regular position.”

“You know why Camilla and I are here, sir,” said Denniston. “We certainly didn’t intend or foresee how we were going to be employed.”

Grace Ironwood looked up with a set expression on her face, which had grown rather pale. “Do you wish . . . ?” she began.

The Director laid his hand on her arm. “No,” he said, “no. There is no need for all these stories to be told.”

MacPhee’s stern features relaxed into a broad grin. “I see what you’re driving at,” he said. “We’ve all been playing blind-man’s buff, I doubt. But I’ll take leave to observe, Dr. Ransom, that you carry things a wee bit high. I don’t just remember how you came to be called Director: but from that title and from one or two other indications a man would have thought you behaved more like the leader of an organisation than the host at a house-party.”

“I am the Director,” said Ransom, smiling. “Do you think I would claim the authority I do if the relation between us depended either on your choice or mine? You never chose me. I never chose you. Even the great Oyeresu whom I serve never chose me. I came into their worlds by what seemed, at first, a chance; as you came to me-as the very animals in this house first came to it. You and I have not started or devised this: it has descended on us-sucked us into itself, if you like. It is, no doubt, an organisation: but we are not the organisers. And that is why I have no authority to give any one of you permission to leave my household.”

For a time there was complete silence in the Blue Room, except for the crackling of the fire.

“If there is nothing more to discuss,” said Grace Ironwood presently, “perhaps we had better leave the Director to rest.”

MacPhee rose and dusted some snuff off the baggy knees of his trousers-thus preparing a wholly novel adventure for the mice when they next came out in obedience to the Director’s whistle.

“I have no notion,” he said, “of leaving this house if anyone wishes me to stay. But as regards the general hypothesis on which the Director appears to be acting and the very peculiar authority he claims, I absolutely reserve my judgement. You know well, Mr. Director, in what sense I have, and in what sense I have not, complete confidence in yourself.”

The Director laughed. “Heaven forbid,” he said, “that I should claim to know what goes on in the two halves of your head, MacPhee, much less how you connect them. But I know-what matters much more-the kind of confidence I have in you. But won’t you sit down? There is much more to be said.”

MacPhee resumed his chair, Grace Ironwood, who had been sitting bolt upright in hers, relaxed, and the Director spoke.

“We have learned to-night,” he said, “if not what the real power behind our enemies is doing, at least the form in which it is embodied at Belbury. We therefore know something about one of the two attacks which are about to be made on our race. But I’m thinking of the other.”

“Yes,” said Camilla earnestly, “the other.”

“Meaning by that?” asked MacPhee.

“Meaning,” said Ransom, “whatever is under Bragdon Wood.”

“You’re still thinking about that?” said the Ulsterman.

“I am thinking of almost nothing else,” said the Director. “We knew already that the enemy wanted the Wood. Some of us guessed why. Now Jane has seen-or rather felt-in a vision what it is they are looking for in Bragdon. It may be the greater danger of the two. But what is certain is that the greatest danger of all is the junction of the enemies’ forces. He is staking everything on that. When the new power from Belbury joins up with the old power under Bragdon Wood, Logres-indeed Man-will be almost surrounded. For us everything turns on preventing that junction. That is the point at which we must be ready both to kill and die. But we cannot strike yet. We cannot get into Bragdon and start excavating for ourselves. There must be a moment when they find him-it. I have no doubt we shall be told in one way or another. Till then we must wait.”

“I don’t believe a word of all that other story,” said MacPhee.

“I thought,” said Miss Ironwood, “we weren’t to use words like believe. I thought we were only to state facts and exhibit implications.”

“If you two quarrel much more,” said the Director, “I think I’ll make you marry one another.”