The Doomsday Men

by J. B. Priestley

  “Only that you were just as damned high-hat then as you’re being now. Can’t you drop it, and talk like an honest-to-God scientist?”

  “When I first began to have a few ideas of my own, Hooker—oh, much younger than you are now—I did talk, as you say, like an honest-to-God scientist—talked straight out of my mind and heart, for I think we fellows sometimes have to use our hearts too—and what did I get in return? You ask some of those pompous old frogs still drivelling in their professorial chairs what they tried to do to me. And I’d even changed my name, so that people wouldn’t think I was trading on the old man’s fame and fortune. I received too many neat slaps on the face, Hooker, so I stopped showing it to them.”

  “Well, I didn’t do it,” said Hooker, speaking abruptly. “And I’ve had to take it—even from you—without getting sour. But let’s get back to the subject.”

  “Willingly. I was talking about my other little new coinage, and I say that I know you’re well acquainted with electrons, neutrons, deuterons, photons, but this, I think, will be quite new to you. And you saw it in operation here. Shall we call it a dynatron?”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “I know that, Hooker. But it meant something round here—didn’t it—a few minutes ago?”

  “Alpha particles?”

  “No, that won’t do, quite. In fact, we’ll have to reconsider a good deal of that radioactive theory, in the light of what I’ve recently discovered. I can’t explain the result of five years’ intensive research in five minutes, Hooker, but you can take it from me that what I’ll call my dynatrons have a very respectable kinetic energy indeed—hence the name. I suspect all the radium compounds are releasing them, but you know how difficult they are to handle, whereas this tiny group of peculiar unstables, of which paulium is easily the best for my purpose, are comparatively easy to handle. Now bombard, even mildly as we did just now, this paulium, and it starts to disintegrate at once, releasing the dynatrons—only a few, of course, if you treat it gently. Even then, as you saw, the fun begins. And if you don’t treat it gently, if you’re really rough with it——”

  “Listen, MacMichael,” Hooker broke in, earnestly regarding him, “I’ve just heard some ridiculous talk here about ending the world. Now quite apart from the sheer God-damned wickedness of the thing, you’re not cracked enough to believe you could do it—are you—just because you’ve discovered one or two things ahead of anybody else?”

  “Foolish idea, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and you know it is. Handing ’em out that stuff—and you call yourself a scientist!” Hooker made the taunt quite deliberate.

  “Why, you young lout, I not only call myself a scientist, but I’m a better scientist than you could prove yourself to be within the next five hundred years, not one of which you’re going to live to see.”

  “World ends to-morrow, I suppose?” Hooker jeered.

  “That’s exactly what I’m planning, my dear doctor,” said MacMichael, in a quiet but deadly tone, “and later I’ll let you know the exact time.”

  “Boo! You can’t kid me, MacMichael, even if you can play about with your precious paulium, and your dynatrons, which ten to one will turn out to be heavy electrons——”

  “I knew they weren’t that, nearly two years ago,” said MacMichael, still quiet but very angry, which was precisely what Hooker intended he should be. “And I’m not fool enough to imagine I can explode this planet, for even you know what its density must be near the centre. But I can peel it like peeling an orange, only faster.”

  “Talk sense!”

  MacMichael’s gigantic conceit, amounting to megalomania, responded at once to this further jeer. “Just come this way, Hooker,” he said, in the same quiet but very angry tone, and went to the other end of the laboratory and opened a door there. Hooker was not slow to follow him. A short flight of curving metal stairs led down to a small platform, inside the body of the tower. They reached the platform, and MacMichael switched on a light or two. Hooker, peering down, exclaimed in surprise. The few lights that had been turned on were not enough to illuminate clearly the great shaft, but Hooker caught sight of vast metal bulbs and other apparatus that suggested an electrostatic generator of unusual size.

  “Yes, there’s the generator,” said MacMichael complacently, “but of course that’s not all. I’ve combined that with a cyclotron of an entirely new type, and much, much bigger than the ones those boys at Cal. Tech. are playing about with. In fact, you may say that most of the tower itself is a kind of cyclotron. Which ought to make you think a bit, Hooker. And not only that,” he continued, motioning his companion back up the stairs, “but as you may have guessed, I’m going to use a very high voltage indeed, something quite prodigious.”

  “You’re on that power line from Boulder Dam, aren’t you?” said Hooker bluntly.

  “Yes, my brother arranged that for me, and though of course it’s been an expensive business, it’s going to be worth it. But you’re still looking puzzled, though I notice not quite so incredulous as you were a few minutes ago.”

  “Then I’m not looking what I feel,” said Hooker, in the same blunt tone. “I still feel you’re cracked. You’ve got one hell of an apparatus there, I’ll grant you that—it makes anything else I’ve seen look like a toy from a ten-cent store——”

  “Oh, the whole thing, I can tell you, is very impressive, and I’m sorry I can’t show it to you in detail. But you know the size of this tower—and that’ll give you some idea of the scale I’m working on.”

  “All right. It’s a honey. And so what?”

  Paul MacMichael put his hands together with a little clap. Oh!—he was enjoying himself all right! Hooker concluded that probably the real reason why he had been brought up here was that MacMichael couldn’t resist showing off to a fellow physicist. His brothers, though probably sympathetic, weren’t really interested; and his colossal vanity demanded at least one scientist as a final audience. And now he clapped his hands together and looked delighted with himself. Hooker could not imagine what was coming.

  “According to my calculations, Hooker, and I’ve given the matter very careful and long consideration—I’m very thorough, though I may not look it, because I don’t happen to be a dull little professor—when that little instrument you’ve just had a glimpse of is set in motion, the structure of the world’s surface will not stand the resulting strain.”

  “Because you can bombard a pinch or two of your paulium, I suppose?” said Hooker, still trying to jeer hard.

  “Not a pinch or two, my friend. I told you we’d been fortunate in our situation here. I’ve been working hard and I’ve managed to manufacture—a vulgar word for it, but you know what I mean—and accumulate far more than a pinch or two, or even a pound or two, of this most dangerous element. And I’ve worked out a very severe treatment for it—it’s quietly waiting down there—and unless my calculations are very faulty, the instantaneous and prodigious flight of dynatrons—I must use my own term, if you don’t mind—will be very disturbing to the structure of the upper levels of our earth, which was never devised to withstand such a sudden release of energy, energy gone mad, instantaneously breaking all decent bounds. What may happen to the earth’s core, I neither know nor care, but for everything outside that—unless, I repeat, my calculations are all wrong—I think I can promise instant dissolution. I’ve taken science as far as it will go in the life of mankind, Hooker. You’re listening—now, I’m glad to say with that oafish grin off your face—to the last and greatest of its great scientific figures.”

  “I’m listening,” said Hooker, rather painfully, “to a madman. You wouldn’t do such a thing.”

  “I would,” and he glanced at his watch, “and in an hour’s time, after we’ve all had some food, I, along with my two brothers, will explain why. Yes, we’ve agreed to justify ourselves. We
’d hoped to do it on a much bigger scale, but that won’t be possible now. I’ll take you down. I must tell you, by the way, that there’s no possible chance of your getting away from here to-night, and that we have guards all over the place, who, reasonably enough, as I think you’ll agree, wouldn’t hesitate if necessary to kill you here and now. After you. No, no, that’s not politeness. You go first. And here, you see, waiting for us, is one of our men. You’ll find them all over the place, I’m afraid.”

  Once back in the house, they separated, Paul joining his brothers, and Hooker being taken into a small room just off the entrance hall. Here he found both Malcolm and Jimmy Edlin, and food was brought for the three of them. While they ate, with no great show of appetite, Hooker grimly explained what he had recently seen and heard from Paul. He was still sceptical about the total result, he told them, but admitted that with such vast unknown forces being used deliberately to achieve the maximum of destruction, any horror might happen.

  “But—but—hell’s bells!——” stammered Jimmy, who had listened open-mouthed, “we can’t just sit here and let three madmen blow everybody to smithereens. We must do something—now.” And he banged the table.

  “Yes, but what?” asked Hooker.

  “Oh—jumping Moses!—I dunno—but there must be something, and you ought to be the fellow to tell us what—you know about this electron business.”

  While Hooker meditated, Malcolm remarked: “It seems to me the only possible thing we can do is to bust up the apparatus in some way, so that he has to postpone his attempt, and then meanwhile we’ll persuade the authorities——”

  “I don’t believe much in those authorities,” said Jimmy. “While we’re trying to persuade them these MacMichaels are dangerous lunatics—and, mind you, from what I’ve seen and heard of ’em, they’d have us taped from the start, probably jailed before we’d begun our persuading—these three madmen would have time to take California to bits even with a pick and shovel.”

  “It’s not as bad as that,” said Hooker, who was all seriousness now, “because I believe I could get some federal people to take my word for it that something was all wrong here. But that would take time. And in order to give ourselves time, the only thing we can do, as Darbyshire says, is to try and wreck his apparatus. We can’t cut off the electric power.”

  “Why not? That’s an idea—if it’ll stop it.”

  “It would cramp his style all right,” said Hooker, “though of course he’s probably storing up the juice right now. But how are we going to do it? We have to get outside first, and even then—those pylons are high and the cables are thick and tough. No, our best chance is to get inside that tower, with an axe or two.”

  Jimmy sighed. “I wish we’d a few shots of dynamite. I’d show those boys something.”

  “Whatever we do,” said Malcolm, looking rather pale and desperate, “we must do to-night. I believe it’s our last chance.”

  “Brother John—and there’s a happy-go-lucky pal, believe me, Brother John—he told me they want to have a little chat with us, a nice cosy little party after dinner and a nice cosy little talk about why and how they’re going to blow hell of everything. Great suffering catfish!” Jimmy bellowed. “Can’t we do anything? I’m getting as nutty as they are, just trying to think about it.”

  Their presence was now demanded in the music room upstairs. It was, as Jimmy had said, quite a little party, and Malcolm thought as he surveyed it that the world could hardly ever have known a stranger party than this. The setting was nearly as odd as the people. Here they were among the Californian mountains and desert, but they might have been somewhere in Thuringia or Bavaria, for in this music room the MacMichaels had departed from the excellent old Spanish style and had attempted the old German or Austrian, a sort of Gothic with a touch of baroque, and a perfect background for one of Hoffmann’s wilder tales. It was a long room with many heavily carved rafters, a great Gothic fireplace, pointed tall windows, some carved wooden screens, and high-backed chairs covered with dark-brown hide. In the wall opposite the fireplace was a wide and richly ornamented alcove, with its floor raised about a foot above the rest of the room, and here there was a fine concert grand piano. Opaque, golden-tinted bulbs in the two wrought-iron chandeliers, together with the red-gold flickering of the great wood fire, gave the place a dim soft light and made it look even more mysteriously Gothic. There ought to have been green-coated foresters in attendance, and a miller’s beautiful daughter and a witch or two somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood. Malcolm stared at it all in amazement, and began to feel once more that ordinary reality was vanishing, to make way for fantastic dream stuff.

  Andrea was there, thank goodness, to drown him in her great dark glances. Her father was there, coolly smoking a cigar, as if this really were a party. And now Malcolm saw her two uncles for the first time: Paul with his thick eyebrows and dark short beard, a kind of brooding brilliance about him; and the strange John with his falling lock of hair and his queer visionary’s eyes. All three brothers were quite different, and it was as if they represented three different qualities of our species, for Henry seemed the embodiment of ruthless power, Paul of searching mind, and John of intuitions and dreams and visions; yet there was also a definite likeness between the three, something dark, twisted, remote, they had in common, like the branches of one sinister tree. And it caught at Malcolm’s heart to remember that Andrea too had flowered from this same tree. He stared at her as if to discover where it had flawed her, and it seemed as if she knew what he was thinking and wondering, for suddenly she looked deeply troubled. Meanwhile, as if to give the scene its crowning oddity, John was stormily improvising at the piano. He played well too, though there was his own quality in the music, now despairing in great descending chords, now rising and clashing into some disturbing triumph. Malcolm, busy with his unspoken commerce with Andrea, only half-heard him. Hooker, who like many mathematically-minded fellows was extremely fond of music, listened carefully. Jimmy Edlin stared about him, and moved restlessly and impatiently, and appeared to be on the point of interrupting at any moment.

  Then John came down from the piano, and stood near his two brothers. It was he who opened the fantastic proceedings. “You three men,” he began, looking at them in his queer blind fashion, “are here because you may be said to represent the world of men we wish to destroy.” He spoke in a careful, soft but clear voice that was peculiarly intimidating. “We intended to justify ourselves before the whole world, for we are not criminals——”

  This was too much for Jimmy. “Why, you’re the biggest criminals who ever lived.”

  “Keep quiet, you,” said Henry MacMichael sharply. “If you don’t, you’ll be taken outside, where a lot of things might happen to you.”

  Before John could resume, there came a knock. It was Kaydick, who stood just inside the door.

  “All the messages have gone,” he reported to John respectfully, “just as you commanded. All the broadcasting systems will now have received them. To the two here in America, I spoke myself over the telephone. The messages were received as you said they would be, in a spirit of mockery. They laughed,” added Kaydick bitterly.

  “I had already heard, in the depths of my mind, the fools laughing,” observed John calmly, while Malcolm and Hooker and Jimmy exchanged quick glances. “You can do no more. You have told all those who have served us faithfully to be present here early in the morning, to receive my final blessing?”

  “I have. And you have their prayers to-night, Father. But you have not told us what will be the exact hour and the final signal.”

  “Wait,” said John, and turned to his brothers. They withdrew into the alcove, to talk privately. Kaydick waited with his back to the door, so that the remaining four, who had now risen and were all grouped near the fireplace, were left to themselves.

  “If only one of us could get near a telephone,” J
immy groaned softly.

  “I could,” Andrea whispered, “but what use would it be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jimmy, whispering too, “but it’s the only thing I can think of—and for God’s sake, let’s try it. Here, when we know the time and the signal business, for the love of Pete make an excuse and slip out, and telephone this fellow here—” he pressed a slip of paper into her hand “—his name’s Charlie Atwood and at least he’s got a plane and he knows me and knows there’s something wrong—and tell him from me what’s happening and he’s got to try and stop it some way or other——”

  “Please, Andrea,” said Malcolm urgently, trying to repeat in one deep glance all that he had said to her that afternoon.

  She nodded. There was no time for more. They separated as the three MacMichaels came out of the alcove. Andrea, whom Malcolm was watching anxiously, now leaned back in her chair and he thought he saw her tremble slightly. But now, at least, he knew that the long spell was broken, that she had come out of the evil dream, had turned from death to life; and even though he was terribly anxious, and could believe now that this dreadful lunacy might soon sweep them all away, underneath that anxiety there was a kind of deep solemn joy.

  “Ask two of your men to come in here,” John said to Kaydick. They must have been waiting on the other side of the door, for now he brought them in at once, and Jimmy recognised them as two of the men who had been with him in the car. And now they were not only armed with revolvers, which protruded from their pockets, but also with short powerful shot-guns. Kaydick stationed one of them near the door, and the other not far from the wall opposite, commanding the group round the fire from another angle. Then he looked enquiringly at his leader.

  “At ten o’clock exactly,” said John, “and from nine-thirty onwards we three alone will be in the tower. I shall be on the platform, praying, and when all is ready and the hour comes, three times I shall raise my hands. You will station the brethren on the hill-side, where they may watch and pray, but the servers must remain on guard until the very end, and from nine onwards you will station them round the tower. These two will remain here until we have done, and then take these three men away and keep guard over them until the morning. You have done well, Brother Kaydick, and will find your reward in a life more blessed and enduring than this.”