Saturn Over the Water (25 page)

The sun was going down, the dusty world was on fire, when I got to Charoke, a crossroads where there was a combined garage and small general store. I soon learnt that what I wanted was the new
College of Applied Psychology
(
Modern Methods in Salesmanship and Personnel Management
), only a mile down a good road it had made for itself. It wasn’t quite as solidly built and expensively rigged up as the Institute at Uramba, and it hadn’t anything to compare with von Emmerick’s Black Forest façade at Osparas, but Steglitz and his friends, whoever they were, had made quite an impressive job out of this College a long way from anywhere. No corrugated-iron dinkum-Aussie rough stuff for Dr Steglitz. It looked like some of the better sheep stations I’d passed, though of course on a bigger scale and much newer. There were about twenty large huts, white-walled and red-roofed with a few big trees for shade and plenty of flower beds. The main building, facing the entrance, was only one storey high but was long and looked roomy, and had a dark roof that came curling forward, over a railed verandah, and was supported by white pillars. Nobody, I felt, was roughing it in there. But very soon, T. Bedford, arriving uninvited, might be. Unless of course I was simply told to go away – and where I went away to, I couldn’t imagine. Cheerless thoughts of this sort kept me still sitting in the car, pretending to myself to be looking the place over, when I ought to have been out and ringing the doorbell. Even when I drove in, I hadn’t sufficient confidence to park the car among some others on the far side, but left it, looking as if it didn’t belong, near the entrance.

There were several young men hanging around just inside the entrance, and I told one of them that I was Tim Bedford and that I wanted to see Dr Steglitz and that we’d been fellow guests in the Arnaldos house in Peru. He asked me to wait, and I went on waiting, also wondering if this was the silliest move I’d made yet, for at least five minutes. Then he took me along a corridor to the left and showed me into a kind of Top Man office, where Dr Steglitz was just putting down the telephone. He looked even more of a brown Humpty-Dumpty than I’d remembered him as being, bigger and balder in the head, longer and fatter in the body, shorter in the legs. My recollection of him simply hadn’t done him justice. He was also more informally dressed than he’d been at Arnaldos’s, and seemed to be wearing a subtropical Casual Living outfit that wouldn’t have looked much worse on a hippopotamus. But for all these brave sneers, I’ll admit that I was even more relieved than astonished, which doesn’t mean that I wasn’t astonished, when he gave me a wide welcoming smile and held out his hand. There could be no doubt about it. Dr Steglitz was delighted to see me.

‘Of course, of course I remember you, Mr Bedford. We had quite an interesting discussion over the excellent dinner our friend Arnaldos gave us. You have heard perhaps that he is now having to rest almost all the time? A pity for such a remarkable man. But that is how it is. And now you have come to see what we are doing here. First – the Institute. Then Osparas, I believe. Now our College here at Charoke. And why not – why not? As you see, I am very pleased you are here. This is how it is.’

I didn’t know how to take this. Steglitz might look like a caricature out of a fifty-year-old copy of
Simplicissimus
but I’d no illusions about his intelligence, the mind working at full speed somewhere behind that huge smiling face. I knew without being told that he was in a higher class than von Emmerick and Merlan-Smith and Randlong. So what, then, was he up to? But he didn’t give me any time to think.

‘Now what was the name of the friend – the bio-chemist – you were looking for? Of course – Farne. I knew about that when we met before. And you still haven’t found him?’ he asked, almost playfully.

‘No, Dr Steglitz.’ I looked him in the eye. ‘Joe Farne left Osparas just after I arrived there.’

‘So this is how it is. All very stupid, in my opinion, Mr Bedford. But I will tell you this – on my honour or whatever you wish. He is not here. If you are looking for him here at Charoke, you are wasting your time. That is how it is. You believe me?’

‘Yes, I do.’ It was easy to say this with sincerity because it had never occurred to me that Joe Farne, in whatever shape he might be now, would come thousands of miles to trap himself all over again. Only a chump like Bedford –

But he was off again, smiling and twinkling. ‘You have come to stay a day or two of course. Later, somebody will take you to your room. But now we have not the time. I will explain why – perhaps while you remove the dust of the road – in here.’ He opened the door of a small washroom behind his desk, and while I cleaned myself up in there, he stood in the doorway and went on talking. ‘When I was told you were here, Mr Bedford, I was speaking – not in this office but in the next room – to a few members of my staff and one or two other guests. It is a little special time we have here – I am very fond of it myself. It comes when work for the day is over. It is, you can say, the cocktail time. But it is also a little seminar. I discuss freely any ideas that might be of some value to the people who are invited – both to this cocktail-seminar, shall we call it, and to eat afterwards. This is how it is. And of course now you are invited, Mr Bedford. So if you are ready – nice and clean – let us go in.’

He sounded as if he was talking to me from the top of the world. He was pleased to see me, he was pleased with himself, he was delighted with everything. But why? What, I wondered again as I followed him across the office, was the game? Judging by the depths of self-satisfaction on which his phoney host work darted and glittered, I felt it might be some famous Steglitz end game, black to mate, poor white Bedford to pack up, in about three moves.

‘So this is how it is,’ he announced triumphantly in the lounge doorway, making an entrance with his signature tune. ‘Here is Mr Bedford, an artist from London, visiting us.’

I realised afterwards that it was a longish narrow lounge, admirably decorated, furnished and lit. But only afterwards, because the moment after I entered I was staring at the only female member of the company we’d joined – Rosalia Arnaldos. She looked brown and sleek and very handsome, and she was wearing a pale blue linen suit that set off her extraordinary dark blue eyes. It would help at this point if she’d jumped to her feet, cried ‘My God – it’s you,’ and then fainted. But all she did was to lift her eyebrows about half an inch, and then look away, as if all that Steglitz had brought in was a bowl of nuts, and the wrong nuts.

‘Have a drink, Bedford?’ I knew the voice, and when I turned round I knew the man. Mitchell. He kept his long lined face straight, but there was a look in his eyes that suggested he was laughing at me. I must have hesitated about taking the drink. Steglitz seized it, and said: ‘You imagine we have hocus-pocus here with drinks? Never. We are psychologists here, not chemists. You are not at Osparas now, Mr Bedford. See.’ And he downed the cocktail in one gulp. ‘Now Mr Mitchell will bring you another one just like it. Him you know already, I believe – Miss Arnaldos of course – and these gentlemen are members of my staff. Now we all drink – and I talk again. This is how it is.’

To understand the peculiar session that followed, one or two things have to be made clear. To begin with, I was almost reeling inside, not from any drinks I had but because one surprise after another had hit me – bang bang bang! Then, what’s more important, Steglitz was in such a curious mood, altogether unexpected. He wasn’t tight, though he’d certainly had his share of drink, but he was bung full of delight with himself, felt charged with power, ready to defy the gods. I ought to add here and now that I don’t think this reckless intoxication, this floodlit idea of himself, came from anything so small as any arrangements he may have made to dispose of me. It came from elsewhere, and now that I know more than I did then, I think I could guess what influences and powers might have been at work on him. But anyhow, as he could have said all too easily, that is how it was.

After motioning us to sit down, while he remained standing, he began talking. ‘I had to break off my talk – why? Because Mr Bedford had arrived to visit us. This could not be better – and this is how things are sometimes. I was about to offer you some examples of wrong method that might not have interested you very much. You would not have known the persons in question. But here is Mr Bedford – a good example – a nice hamster – guinea pig – for us. I am not trying to be rude to you, Mr Bedford – ’

‘You’re out of luck then, Dr Steglitz,’ I told him sourly. I took a poor view of this guinea pig line, with Rosalia Arnaldos sitting there. But I didn’t know the half of it.

‘Now, Miss Arnaldos please. You know Mr Bedford. I saw you together at Uramba. What is your opinion of him?’

‘A stuffy painter, too pleased with himself,’ she replied at once, cool and detached. ‘Partly because of his pictures, partly because he thinks he is successful with women.’

‘I’ve had my failures. All right, Dr Steglitz,’ I went on. ‘I won’t interrupt again. You didn’t ask for a talking guinea pig.’

He ignored this and turned to Mitchell. ‘You knew him in London, Mr Mitchell, I think. Your impression, please.’

‘I guessed he’d be no trouble to us. Said so. He dithers in the wrong part of the field. A bit too clever in one way, not clever enough in another. Says too much or too little. Told him so.’ Mitchell flashed a grin across at me. I felt like flashing a boot at him.

‘So this is how it is,’ cried Steglitz, a radiant Humpty-Dumpty. ‘Now what happens? He is looking for an Arnaldos Institute research man named Farne – the husband of a cousin, I think you told me, Mr Mitchell. Farne would have been one of my examples of wrong method. But Mr Bedford is better. He arrives at the Institute. True, he is the guest of Mr Arnaldos – but this is only a further argument for using my method. My colleagues at the Institute know why he is there. They have been warned. He is suspicious, he is curious. This is how it is. Everything that is done, everything that is said, only makes him more suspicious, more curious. The closed method, as I said before. So now he goes to Osparas. Von Emmerick, with his chemists and their products, knows how to handle so crude
närrisch
a fellow – oh yes – it is all very easy. The same method, only with chemical variations. What happens? He loses Bedford and with him his best chemist, Rother. I had asked to handle Rother when he was at the Institute, but in vain. No, they knew better. Where is he now, Rother? You can speak this time please, Mr Bedford.’

‘All right, I will,’ I said harshly. I looked at Steglitz, then at Rosalia and Mitchell. The other six men there were stooges, as far as I was concerned, and I never really had any clear impression of them. ‘Rother’s dead. I watched him die in the back room of a little Chilean farm. He’d been wounded in two places but he might have recovered if he’d wanted to. But he didn’t. The bad luck ran on too long, too far. He was a good little man. He just wanted to live a reasonable decent life, and as a young man he thought he saw it stretching out in front of him, for him, for everybody. Then, as he told me, the rest of his life seemed to be at the mercy of madmen. You’re probably one of them,’ I ended, looking at Steglitz. He could like it or lump it, I thought bitterly. I didn’t look at Rosalia Arnaldos. Let her enjoy herself as the only girl in the game.

None of this had any effect on Steglitz, who looked as pleased as ever. His first remark was addressed to the others, not to me. ‘Now we will see.’ He smiled and nodded to me. ‘So Rother died. But before that you must have had some talk with him about this organisation that made you both so suspicious, so curious. What did you decide between you? You can be frank with me, Mr Bedford. I shall be frank with you.’

‘You’re anti-Communist and pro-Communist, both at the same time,’ I told him. ‘You’re hotting up the cold war. General Giddings on one side, for instance, Melnikov on the other. Both your men – and you’ve probably plenty of others.’ I remembered then what Rother had said. ‘We live in a very small world now, packed with people who don’t believe in anything very much, haven’t really any minds of their own. A group of men, closely organised, quite unscrupulous, men who understood about power, influence, propaganda techniques, who knew how to dominate other key men, could choose any programme they liked and begin carrying it through – in a world like the one we have now. But I don’t pretend to know what you really think you’re doing – you Wavy Eight people.’

‘So that is how it is.’ He beamed approval at me. ‘And you call us Wavy Eight also. Not bad – not bad at all. Bravo, Mr Bedford. But you say you don’t know what we think we are doing. Then I will tell you. What
you
think, when you dare to think, we may be doing is exactly what we are doing. The end is quite simple, though some of the means we employ would be difficult for you to understand. So this is how it is. There are now in the world hundreds and hundreds of millions of sheep people – that is all one can call them. They are led by foolish vain men who make speeches and do not know what they are saying, who go from Moscow to New York to London to Paris and do not know what they are doing. All of them – the idiot masses, their foolish leaders – have now half a wish to destroy themselves. We will make it a whole wish, Mr Bedford. They shall destroy themselves and all the human ant-hills they live in. We will help this whole civilisation that went wrong to commit suicide, to wipe itself off the map. This is how it is.’

‘But why are you telling
me
, Dr Steglitz? You’re not expecting me to join this healthy little movement, are you?’

‘Not at all. I am doing what my colleagues refused to do, when they offered your suspicion, your curiosity, only a blank wall. I am taking you into my confidence. I am allowing you to have a glimpse of the greatest and most audacious design in all history. Think of it – a plan using all the resources of this huge idiot civilisation to bring it to an end – then to begin again, no longer multiplying imbeciles by the million. Other men – prophetic men – Nietzsche, for example – have dreamt of it. But we are doing it, Mr Bedford. This is how it is.’

‘And this is what you told Semple, isn’t it?’

‘Of course. He became suspicious after he and another physicist, Barsac, had worked on fall-out at the Institute. When he asked me why we wanted to know if the Southern Hemisphere would still be habitable after a total nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere, I told him. He killed himself in a mental hospital in London. Barsac went to Osparas – another of von Emmerick’s failures – and is now teaching physics in Sydney. He is already regarded with disapproval and suspicion by the educational authorities there, and will soon be asked to leave. Here in Australia’ – and Steglitz paused to produce a huge derisive grin – ‘we do not like these doubtful unsound European characters. But this is how it is, Mr Bedford. We are using some wonderful new techniques – I am sorry that Mr Alstir will not be able to show you what we are doing with subliminal messages in films now, as one instance – but you must remember one thing. We are like the Judo experts. We do not create force but make use of existing force. We hurry the mind along the way it is going. We stir the unconscious, which these people do not believe exists and so cannot control. I saw you look at me as if I was a murderer, when I said that Semple killed himself. But they are all going to kill themselves, to murder half the earth itself. That is how it is. Poor good Semple – broken by the bad Steglitz – that is how you think. But Semple helped to make the hydrogen bomb – and I have never even seen one – ’