Fistful of digits, p.13
Fistful of Digits, page 13
“Programmed! Are you saying? —”
“I’m saying nothing. The fatal thing for me to do at this stage is to make it all sound simple — it isn’t. You’ve got to learn slowly. Otherwise, how can you believe it? It was a long time before I did. That’s why I sent you in here — alone. To get the first impact entirely to yourself. That is essential.”
The executive man continued his executive telephone call. The rest remained still. Stranger surveyed them sadly, then said: “All you need know, at this point, is this…” For some reason he went to the set and turned it on again. Then he switched out the fights of the foyer. The scene was as before when the picture, still slipping as it had done, dimly lighted the place fluorescently. “What is left of their ability to think and act for themselves is very precious to them…more precious than you could conceivably imagine. We can only help them in ways they don’t really notice. And believe it or not, they can ‘notice’ things…if only on a deeply unconscious level. On this level they can also suffer; the cliché that the mentally afflicted don’t suffer just isn’t true. We merely cling to it because it makes us feel better. So…” He crossed to the first man Peter had stared at, the one who had groaned in that fearful, stifled way. “Yes…ways they don’t notice. Like trying to make sure the place doesn’t smell. Just occasionally…” and here he paused, as if for a second having to fight his emotions, “just once in a while, one of these people will get up and go to the set and try to adjust the picture. It costs them, in terms of effort, what it might take you or me to cross the Sahara Desert, with rocks on our shoulders, on foot. There is no greater triumph, for them, than such an effort.” He took out a cigarette and Peter desperately regretted his former rage because, even now, Stranger could not entirely master his grief. “Likewise,” he said huskily, “there is no greater triumph, either for Dr Williams or for Ham Nichols or for me, when we find them doing it.”
And for some reason, this was the moment when Peter recalled, vividly, Sedgewick’s last moments of thwarted fife in the freezing wind of Stradt.
In his mind’s eye he saw him clearly straddling the cross-member of the pylon, playing his crazy game of Statues and thereby impersonating the stature of the pylon itself.
And he recalled — at last — the word that Sedgewick had muttered, over and over, through lips frozen by cold and sickness.
So Peter turned to Stranger and experimented.
Watching for Stranger’s reaction, he uttered the word now.
“Servex,” he said. And waited.
And Stranger snapped right out of his moroseness.
“Yes,” he said, smiling a little. There seemed fresh hope in his eyes. “I was frightened it might have been shut off from you. That would have meant…” He broke off, then led the way out of that appalling place.
The night air seemed uniquely clean. Cleaner than any air in Peter’s life experience. “It’s time,” said Stranger, “that we talked detail — about the collective organism known as Servex.”
Peter nodded thoughtfully as the glass door swung to on the victims. “Funny…giving them a name makes a difference. Something you can fight.”
Part Two – Hands
Chapter Nine
Successful nuns are like successful generals: they have simple, incisive minds. Sister Theresa, watchful of her colleagues and subordinates of the Clinic of the Snows, discarded muddled thinking which arose from cloaked neurosis and divided followers of the faith into two sorts: those who used their religion as a means of understanding others, and those who used it as a means of deceiving themselves.
She used to say: “If you can’t use your brain without begging permission from God, you might just as well not use it at all. Faith is no substitute for logic.” Most of all she fought shy of probationers who protested their womanhood. “The world,” she would say, “is not just divided into two sexes. If you think you’re Cleopatra, go and prove it elsewhere. In here your task is to be compassionate towards those who have already done so without one-tenth the effort.” The repressed lesbians were a menace not because there was ever any question of overt peculiarity but because their emotional dilemma generated sentimentality towards female patients who needed firmness, and masked hatred towards men who merely found sin commendably straightforward. “Our job,” she said, “is to help them control it, not to add to their confusion with a piece of our own. Remember we are structurally the same as the people we deal with: ninety-nine per cent water.”
The itinerant Mother Superior, who visited the clinic every three months or so, disliked some of Theresa’s modern views on life; but had to keep quiet because there was a strong movement in Rome in support of the “enlightened” school. Theresa was difficult to snub; already doing well through correspondence tuition from a University she could back up her views with facts.
But on the day of the Mother Superior’s routine visit, which came a week after the Sedgewick incident, Theresa did not attempt to communicate her inner suspicions — facts or no — concerning the liaison between the psychiatrist (Dr Moyen) and George Verolde and what it meant on a spiritual level. She knew that the older woman couldn’t possibly grasp it; as she also knew that she herself could not, with success, go over her head to the cardinal.
So as she bid the stern lady goodbye at the door, and watched the car wind out of sight down the pass towards Stradt, she resolved to find out more. Hard facts were what she needed; and hard facts were going to be difficult to come by. But a written report with a few of these would be difficult for the Mother Superior to block and that was the only course open.
To begin her enquiries, Sister Theresa employed precisely that quality within herself which she neither flaunted nor admitted to: her feminine intuition.
And she could not take her mind off that dam.
“I shall start there,” she said to herself, without praying — and joined one of the conducted tours around it.
Up here on the parapet it was, as usual, a brilliantly sunny day; and you could look down if you wanted to (Theresa didn’t) from a great height upon the skiing residents of the Randolf, who may have been of lower elevation (in more ways than one) but who were none the less employing the law of gravity to perfectly good use.
The ruddy-faced guide now led the way across the buttress towards the intake tower…which didn’t look like a tower at all but had the appearance of a great flat box standing on thick legs sunk into the bottom of what had once been a natural lake. He had an easy time of it, because the visitors, of many nationalities, all wore headphones and simply listened to a recorded commentary in whatever language they chose. Each section of the commentary coincided with each location at which the guide paused. The parade of tourists then pulled out their plugs, followed obediently to the next site, and plugged in for more canned information. This was offered in the style of the old-fashioned, “goodness-gracious-me-isn’t-that-marvellous” kind of travelogue, liberally weighted down with statistics…
“From where you are standing, looking towards the south-east, you are now observing what is probably one of the most spectacular examples of modern engineering on earth. For here, in what was once a natural lake, is a vast amount of power, stored in the form of one thousand million gallons of water…”
Sister Theresa adjusted her headphones and tried to imagine a thousand million gallons of water.
“For beneath the beautiful, ice-topped surface are some huge pipes which carry the water down to Stradt. And there the turbines — in effect, water wheels — drive the generators which make the electricity,” obliged the tape recorded voice. Then followed the impressive statistics. “In cubic metres, the amount of concrete used for the dam wall itself was in excess of…The diameter of the draw-off is no less than…the this that and the other is incredibly more than this-much and that-much and the other-much and…” But though a technician would have been perplexed at there being no mention of a “spillway” Theresa herself wasn’t listening. She was, in fact, constitutionally impervious to statistics and preferred to study the be-headphoned group of fifteen or so lethargic wanderers who were taking even less notice of the remorseless squawking than she was.
She noticed a marked predominance of hats, and concluded from their tilt that few of these bore relevance to the skiers down below.
She noticed a man and woman from England who had the same pushed-out mouths exactly. She was quite sure this arose from drinking huge quantities of tea from identical, thin china cups and she wondered momentarily if this helped them kiss.
And she noticed — suddenly — that Dr Moyen had joined the group from behind. This disturbed her, but she smiled very slightly without really looking at him and greeted him appropriately.
In German, Moyen said: “My dear Sister Theresa! It is quite hopeless to disguise yourself as a tourist.”
“Even nuns tour, Doctor.”
“But not with your eagle eyes. Are they never off duty? I always get the impression you can take in at least six quite different things at once. For instance the way you look at the hats. You don’t see them as hats. You see them as labels. I don’t think you could pass a garbage bin without lifting off the lid to see inside.”
They were ushered into an elevator and as a change from the headphones the ruddy-faced guide mentioned that this shaft passed all the way down through the rock to the powerhouse itself, thousands of feet below. “Well, it’s a lot warmer than a chair-lift, Sister Theresa,” said the doctor. “Might I ask, simply out of curiosity, what brought you up here?”
The elevator started to descend rapidly and somebody giggled as somebody else clasped a hand to a tormented stomach. But Theresa stood quite still. “Curiosity,” said Theresa with a cool smile. “And you followed me up.”
“Yes. Sister Mary Wilhelmina told me my only chance of seeing you at all this afternoon was to pursue you all over the darn.”
“You wish me to talk about a patient? Who?”
Moyen looked around the car. “Later,” he said, and fell silent. Moyen had a tight jaw, capable of ending a conversation just by the set of it. When he talked, in his crisp, energetically accurate manner, the jaw machined itself into ratchet action then stopped as suddenly as before. When he wanted to he could be. charming; but like the jaw, this chann could be turned abruptly on and off. Now, as he stood still, facing the metal doors, standing as he was slightly crouched and with both hands thrust into pockets, it was in the “off” position.
“It is advisable,” said the guide in a bland, singsong voice, “for you all to yawn and swallow, due to the change in pressure.”
So everybody yawned and swallowed and discussed the change of pressure in several languages all the way down to the bottom. There they started laughing because most of them couldn’t stop yawning even when there was no further change of pressure. Moyen did not laugh. The electric doors drew open, showing the upper floor of the powerhouse. Most of the party followed the guide some twenty yards along to the first of the huge row of generators. Though you could only see the housing covering their tops, the general impression was one of sepulchral vastness. There was surprisingly little sound from the machines. More plugging in of headphones; more facts and figures, no doubt, squirting into bored ears.
Moyen drew Theresa away from the group, standing with his crouched-up back towards them. He stared unseeingly at a row of electronic indicator dials. Theresa could see that the guide was watching the two of them cautiously. He evidently decided, though, that nuns don’t interfere with the works. So he left them alone and wandered up and down like a patient shepherd, tolerant of his herd.
“I was talking with the Mother Superior when she came yesterday,” said Moyen. “I told her that although I felt that the atmosphere at the Clinic was good for my patients, I nevertheless thought it improper that you should use too much Christian teaching in my absence. It sometimes confuses psychiatric patients, you know, if they feel they are being indoctrinated. I hope you don’t mind my saying this.” He watched her, not minding if she minded or not. “As you know, I’ve said the same kind of thing before — to you.”
Theresa never replied to Moyen immediately and this was a deliberate, thought-out policy. It meant that on those occasions when she needed time to think it didn’t show so much. For her this policy was an effort; she was naturally a spontaneous person used to speaking her mind. At length she asked mildly: “Are you thinking of a particular patient?”
“Christina Teuson.”
Sister Theresa was not hand in glove with the automated powerhouse, but she could scarcely have timed her question to better effect.
An unearthly wail went up; and even Moyen, who did not know about the acoustical effect of water being forced into a system of cavities, seemed shaken for a moment.
So he stared at her, almost as if she’d done it.
And as Theresa held her expression on him she wondered in that second whether some hallucination had momentarily appeared before him, as if deeply ingrained guilt concerning something he was doing to other human minds, without being aware of it himself, had somehow been conjured by the gasp that echoed through the hall.
And Moyen seemed to see in Theresa’s face an unspoken accusation.
With a weird, low-pitched screaming noise, often likened to a dying monster of the deep, the newly started generator cut into the system. One or two tourists had ripped off their headphones as they gawked at each other. The guide was grinning at them and the two pink patches over his cheeks came up a few tones as he explained briefly that the end of the world hadn’t yet come.
Theresa waited for the newly operative turbine to settle to the quiet note of the others, and went on: “In the first place I can’t quite understand why she’s there, Dr Moyen,” raising her eyebrows politely.
But Moyen had had time to recover. Adopting the role of an indulgent expert too secure to be angered, he said, “For you that’s unusual. You generally understand the illnesses of my patients very well. Because of this I tolerate what is sometimes dangerously like interference from you on basic matters of treatment.” He watched her carefully. “I take it that you haven’t varied her regime of sedation?”
This time he had angered her. “Are you telling me,” she said, “that you think such ‘interference’ from me extends to changing their medication?”
“You remarked to me the other day that Christina’s sedation was surprisingly heavy.”
“It is. But the only person I said that to is you. And you’re the only person who can do anything about it.”
“And you think I should?”
“I think six hundred milligrams of chlorpromazine is a lot of tranquillizer.”
As the group started sauntering back towards them for the next point of call, Theresa and Moyen drifted on with them and Moyen remarked: “And how long will it be, Sister Theresa, before you start writing to Rome, saying that I over-prescribe?”
“Rome is hardly a general post office for that purpose, Doctor. You may rely on it.”
He raised his eyebrows as she had done. “Good.”
In the control room next door the guide decided that nuns should get preferential treatment. Shyly he asked: “Is there anything special you’d like to see?”
“Well, yes. Thank you. You’ve been telling us this is the control room…But who controls it? I don’t see anyone.”
The guide looked pleased with the question, even if the answer came out very much like the other tape-recordings. “In fact, there is always a man on duty here though he has little to do. The level of the dam at the top and the number of generators actually in use…these and a number of other factors are decided by a computer.”
“Are we going to see it?”
A grin. “That would be quite difficult. This unit here at Stradt,” he taped, “is part of a centralized scheme and is controlled, along with many other similar schemes at great distance.”
“Why?”
“It is a great saving on equipment and expense. It is cheaper to build one large computing centre than it is to build a number of smaller ones.”
“Then if it’s a long way away, how does it, er, know what to do?”
“Information is carried to and from the computer centre instantaneously. That generator you heard switched on, for instance…Much information has to be exchanged rapidly before the decision to start up is made.”
Theresa smiled politely. “Would it be a silly question to ask where this computer centre actually is?”
“Not silly.” The ruddy cheeks went up a further notch. “But I can’t answer it and I doubt if the supervisor can, either. We don’t know!”
Moyen stepped forward as if to say something and Theresa caught his guarded look for a moment. Then the look was gone. He just said, smiling: “I can see that your curiosity does not stop within the confines of the clinic.”
Theresa smiled, but didn’t comment and went on with her questions. “I suppose,” she said, “that the water level of the dam has to be very carefully watched. Could it ever break the dam wall?”
The guide cocked his head on one side. “Well, to be honest, you could break any dam wall if the weight of water behind it became greater than the design tolerance of the bulkhead. But it is a very simple matter to maintain the right level. The water cannot exceed a certain depth because sluice gates are opened automatically when the required level is achieved. This diverts superfluous water down the natural cataract where it used to flow before we sunk the pipes into the rock for the purpose of spinning the turbines. You can see the waterfalls further round the mountain. They are very beautiful and make many rainbows. They feed into the same river as here, but further downstream. In the thaw there is a considerable spill of water round there; but the level in the dam is low so at present it is only a trickle.”
