That Hideous Strength (Space Trilogy 3)

When at -last Mr. Wither spoke, his eyes were fixed on some remote point beyond the window.

"I know who it is," said Wither. "Your name is Studdock. You had better have stayed outside. Go away."

Mark's nerve suddenly broke. All the slowly mounting fears of the last few days ran together into one fixed determination, and a few seconds later he was going downstairs three steps at a time. Then he was crossing the hall. Then he was out, and walking down the drive.

He was out of the grounds now: he was crossing the road. He stopped suddenly. Something impossible was happening. There was a figure before" him; a tall, very tall, slightly stooping figure, sauntering and humming a little dreary tune; the Deputy Director himself. And in one moment all that brittle hardihood was gone from Mark's mood. He turned back. He stood in the road; this seemed to him the worst pain that he had ever felt. Then, tired, so tired that he felt his legs would hardly carry him, he walked very slowly back into Belbury.

Mr. MacPhee had a little room at the Manor which he called his office, and in this tidy but dusty apartment he sat with Jane Studdock before dinner that evening, having invited her there to give her what he called "a brief, objective outline of the situation ".

"I should premise at the outset, Mrs. Studdock," he said, " that I have known the Director for a great many years and that for most of his life he was a philologist. His original name was Ransom."

"Not Ransom's Dialect and Semantics?" said Jane. "Aye. That's the man," said MacPhee. "Well, about six years ago, I have all the dates in a wee book there- came his first disappearance. He was clean gone-not a trace of him-for about nine months. And then one day what does he do but turn up again in Cambridge and go sick. And he wouldn't say where he'd been except to a few friends."

"Well?" said Jane eagerly.

"He said," answered MacPhee, producing his snuff-box and laying great emphasis on the word said, "He said he'd been to the planet Mars."

"You mean he said this . . . while he was ill?"

"No, no. He says so still. Make what you can of it, that's his story."

"I believe it," said Jane. MacPhee selected a pinch of snuff.

"I'm giving you the facts," he said. "He told us he'd been to Mars, kidnapped, by Professor Weston and Mr. Devine- Lord Feverstone as he now is. And by his own account he'd escaped from them-on Mars, you'll understand-and been wandering about there alone."

"It's uninhabited, I suppose?"

"We have no evidence except his own story. You are aware, Mrs. Studdock, that a man in complete solitude even on this earth-an explorer, for example- gets into remarkable states of consciousness."

"You mean he might have imagined things that weren't there?"

"I'm making no comments," said MacPhee. "I'm recording. By his accounts there are all kinds of creatures walking about there; that's maybe why he has turned this house into a sort of menagerie, but no matter for that. But he also says he met one kind of creature there which specially concerns us. He called them eldils."

"Were these things . . . well, intelligent? Could they talk?"

"Aye. They could talk. They were intelligent, which is not always the same thing."

"In fact these were the Martians?"

"That's just what they weren't, according to him. They were on Mars, but they didn't rightly belong there. He says they are creatures that live in empty space."

"But there's no air."

"I'm telling you his story. He says they don't breathe. He said also that they don't reproduce their species and don't die."

"What on earth are they like?"

"I'm telling you how he described them."

"Are they huge?" said Jane almost involuntarily.

"The point, Mrs. Studdock, is this. Dr. Ransom claims that he has received continual visits from these creatures since he returned to Earth. So much for his first disappearance. Then came the second. That time he said he'd been in the planet Venus-taken there by these eldils."

"Venus is inhabited by them, too?"

"You'll forgive me observing that this remark shows you have not grasped what I'm telling you. These creatures are not planetary creatures at all, though they may alight on a planet here and there; like a bird alighting on a tree. There's some of them, he says, are more or less permanently attached to particular planets, but they're not native there."

"They are, I gather, more or less friendly?"

"That is the Director's idea about them, with one exception."

"What's that?"

"The eldils that have for centuries concentrated on our own planet. We seem to have had no luck in our particular complement of parasites. And that, Mrs. Studdock, brings me to the point."

Jane waited. MacPhee's manner almost neutralised the strangeness of what he was telling her.

"The long and the short of it is," said he, " that this house is dominated either by the creatures I'm talking about or by a sheer delusion. It is by advices he thinks he has received from eldils that the Director has discovered the conspiracy against the human race; and it's on instructions from eldils that he's conducting the campaign-if you call it conducting! It may have occurred to you to wonder how any man thinks we're going to defeat a conspiracy by growing winter vegetables and training performing bears. It is a question I have propounded on more than one occasion. The answer is always the same: we're waiting for orders."

"From the eldils ? It was them he meant when he spoke of his Masters?"

"It would be."

"But, Mr. MacPhee, I thought you said the ones on our planet were hostile."

"That's a good question," said MacPhee, " but it's not our own ones that the Director claims to be in communication with. It's his friends from outer space. Our own crew, the terrestrial eldils, are at the back of the whole conspiracy."

"You mean that the other eldils, out of space, come here -to this house?"

"That is what the Director thinks."

"But you must know whether it's true or not."

"How?"

"Have you seen them?"

"That's not a question to be answered Aye or No. I've seen a good many things in my time that weren't there or weren't what they pretended to be; rainbows and reflections and sunsets, not to mention dreams."

"You have seen something, then?"

"Aye. But we must keep an open mind. It might be an hallucination. It might be a conjuring trick . . ."

"By the Director?" asked Jane angrily. "Do you really expect me to believe that the Director is a charlatan?"

"I wish, ma'am," said MacPhee, " you could consider the matter without constantly using such terms as believe. Obviously, conjuring is one of the hypotheses that any impartial investigator must take into account. The fact that it is a hypothesis specially uncongenial to the emotions of this investigator or that, is neither here nor there."

"There's such a thing as loyalty," said Jane.

MacPhee looked up with a hundred Covenanters in his eyes.

"There is, ma'am," he said. " As you get older you will learn that it is a virtue too important to be lavished on individual personalities."

At that moment there was a knock at the door. "Come in," said MacPhee, and Camilla entered.

"Have you finished with Jane, Mr. MacPhee?" she said. "She promised to come out for a breath of air with me before dinner."

"Och, breath of air your grandmother!" said MacPhee with a gesture of despair. "Very well, ladies, very well. Away out to the garden. I doubt they're doing something more to the purpose on the enemy's side."

"He's been telling you?" said Camilla, as the two girls went together down the passage.

Moved by a kind of impulse which was rare to her experience, Jane seized her friend's hand as she answered "Yes!"Both were filled with some passion, but what passion they did not know. They came to the front door, and as they opened it a sight met their eyes which, though natural, seemed at the moment apocalyptic.

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-the huntress, the untameable virgin, the spear-head of madness. The wildness crept into Jane's blood.