The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  Mungo-Mitchell said to us: “Straighten your clothes. Follow me. Walk slowly. Kemp, shuffle your feet, walk with a slouch. This is madness; but we must take a chance.” He picked up a white telephone, and cut the flex with a pair of surgical scissors, saying to Treit: “Make all the noise you please. You are locked in for five hours, now.”

  We left the room. The last I saw of Treit was his back. He was shaking his half-conscious assistant, saying: “Vake up, vake up, O’Fladdigad, add get your dotebook!”

  Then the door locked behind us.

  “Oaks, when I engage Oettle in talk, walk straight out. Kemp, stay close to me. Cover your face with your handkerchief, Kemp—mop it as if you were sweating. Now——”

  My slouch and my gait were not simulated; I was moving with the dragging sag of a man without hope. The guards sprang stiffly to attention, staring straight to their front at their first glimpse of me, and I shambled into the moonlight.

  Mungo-Mitchell said to Oettle: “Stand by, Oettle. No one to come in, or go out, for five hours. Nothing doing till then—Major Chatterton’s strict instructions. Oh—I put in a word for you. Major Chatterton says you may come and look, about five a.m., when His Excellency and Oaks and I return. Compensation for your broken head—reward for being a good boy. Meanwhile, don’t leave the gate.”

  I heard the guards’ feet shuffle on the concrete as they stood easy, and then the three of us were walking at a leisurely pace through the shadows.

  “What now?” asked George Oaks.

  “What now?” said Mungo-Mitchell, with bitter mockery. “We die now, that’s what now.”

  Conclusion

  I began to say that I was sorry that I had lost my capsule, that I couldn’t help it. But Mungo-Mitchell cut me short. “It wouldn’t have helped much, in the long run,” he said. “If you and Oaks had taken your poison, their suspicion would naturally have concentrated itself on me. I had charge of you. And if I managed to kill myself before they ‘Questioned’ me —why, that very fact would give them most of the answers. No, perhaps it’s better this way.”

  “But we must die, anyway?” asked George Oaks.

  “Yes, I believe so—but at least we’ll die to some purpose. My evidence against these people is only half complete. I have scarcely enough for the tiniest international action, now. My case is hollow as a rotten nut. I can’t call a raid for forty-eight hours, by which time every shred of evidence will be hidden over a dozen frontiers. There’s only one thing left to do—send the whole damned works sky-high, ourselves and all. God give us strength to do it!”

  “We are game, aren’t we, Albert?” said George Oaks. “But how . . . ?”

  I said: “Whatever it is, for pity’s sake, let’s do it soon—I tell you, I’m smeared with honey and crucified on an anthill!”

  Mungo-Mitchell said: “My poor friend, you have nearly five hours before the agony really starts. What you feel now is nothing but a gentle hint of what’s to come. . . . Here’s the First Gate. Do you remember the Password?” I nodded.

  Two trim sentries saluted me, and stood like statues in my path. “Quid Si Coelum Ruat?” I said. They stepped aside. High steel doors parted, and I led the way through them. The doors came together behind us with a gentle thud, and we were in the Second Circle, among the monstrous shapes that loomed over the murmuring sheds and shops. I realised then that Kadmeel’s domain was terraced, built in circular steps on the plateau.

  We climbed (I counted them) a hundred and twenty steps. At the sixty-ninth, I remember, all the strength drained out of me, and I paused, whimpering that I was exhausted. Mungo-Mitchell said: “You begin to feel a catching in your chest? You can take your breath in, but you can’t get it out? . . . Then we must hurry, hurry! You must bear up, Kemp, you must bear up!”

  A quarter of an hour of walking took us to the Second Gate. “Quid . . . Si . . . Coelum . . . Ruat . . . ?” I wheezed. And again heels clicked; pistons sighed in cylinders; and doors opened.

  I heard Mungo-Mitchell say: “His Excellency has an attack of asthma and wants fresh air. Let me have an open car. A jeep will do.” And I stood, struggling for mouthfuls of air, dripping with sweat and tears until strong hands helped me on to a hard, cool seat, and an engine started, and I felt cool wind. I knew then how it must be to die of thirst at the brink of a pool; I would have given my right arm for half a breath of that wind; but now my lungs, having in one spasm emptied themselves, refused to expand again . . . and out of a million runways in the convolutions of my brain the frightened ants were crawling into my eyes.

  I said, with idiotic resignation: “I’m bearing up. Only if it gets any worse, quite simply, I’ll go mad.”

  “It will get worse and worse yet, Kemp, and the trouble is, you won’t go mad,” said Mungo-Mitchell. “Now hold yourself together, for God’s sake, while your sense of honour, and loyalty, and decency lasts—which will only be for a little while now, Kemp!—Hold yourself, while I tell you what we have to do.”

  I managed to say: “Whatever it is, make it soon—soon!”

  Mungo-Mitchell said: “It is a chance in millions, but we have got to fight for it. We have nothing to lose. We are as good as dead——”

  “—Though we are ringed with spears, And the last hope gone, Romans stand firm, Albert, the Roman dead look on. Eh? Before the breath of life blows back to Him Who gave, Burn clear, brave hearts, and fight our pathway to the grave,” said George Oaks.

  “Chatterton told you that the power that supplies Kadmeel’s place comes from the mountain in the form of water,” said Mungo-Mitchell. “That is so. Kadmeel has harnessed a fall, dammed a torrent, and piped off a spring. The dam and the cataract provide electricity for the Plant. The perpetual cooling and washing systems are dependent upon the spring—it comes out of the rock, and is never warmer than seven degrees Centigrade. Up near the waterfall is the central powerhouse and the pumping-station. Well, as I see it now, we have to smash that power station.”

  George Oaks said: “Well and good, Mungo. You have, of course, a cache of dynamite?”

  Mungo-Mitchell said: “No; all these things were to come, of course. Meanwhile, I was playing a lone hand—and you, with your sharp eyes, forced my hand . . . Yet again, perhaps, it’s fortunate that you exposed yourself to me as you did, when you jumped me on the plane. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been this millionth chance. . . . No, there’s no dynamite. There’s only the three of us, and one pistol. But—a power-station! Lord! An educated woman can stop a power-station with a hairpin. Any of us could do it with his naked hands, if he knew which terminals to grab—if he were game! . . . I have eight high-velocity, forty-five-calibre cartridges in my pistol——”

  George Oaks interrupted: “—Of which one or two, properly placed, would be as effective as a bobby-pin, or a human body, properly placed, to make a short-circuit in any power-station. Now, Mungo, you will listen to me. Stop the jeep for a minute: I want to be heard clearly, and once and for all.”

  The jeep stopped. George Oaks went on: “Mungo, The God knows that Albert and I are all for the counsel of desperation, and the millionth chance. The God knows, furthermore, that we throw ourselves upon His mercy, only when the light of reason fails us—and not until then. Mungo, your counsel of desperation is unenlightened.”

  A great owl screeched in the blackness of the trees, and in my agony I thought of Monty Cello on another Road. Mungo-Mitchell said, soberly: “How do you mean?”

  George Oaks said: “First of all, there is desperation and desperation. Your desperation, Mungo, is nothing but despair.”

  “Say your say, Oaks, and let’s get on!”

  “All right, Mungo. Take first and foremost the business of busting the power-station. I grant you that, heavily guarded though it is, one of the three of us strong and desperate men could burst in, and burn himself between two terminals to
short-circuit the electricity supply—or fire a pistol—or throw a wrench at a control board. But to what purpose? And for how long operative? Chatterton talked, down there, of auxiliary power sources, thermostatically controlled, and automatically sensitive to a fraction of a degree rise in temperature. I am telling you, Mungo, that it is not through the power-station that we must expend ourselves.”

  “Then where?” asked Mungo-Mitchell.

  George Oaks said: “Let the power-station go full blast, feeding the works below. Our desperation is best expended on the cooling system. You’ve told me that the cold spring is piped off down into the plateau partly for cooling—but it must be mainly for the washing away of radio-active debris. The devil knows the inwardness of it; but I can tell you one thing, and that’s this: in any atomic energy plant, where washing water doesn’t flow, and flow fast, life stops.”

  “That is right,” said Mungo-Mitchell.

  “Now,” said George Oaks, “there must, therefore, be an underground pipeline from the spring to the plateau.”

  “Yes,” said Mungo-Mitchell, “there is a pipe four feet in diameter that runs three miles down from the mountain.”

  “Four feet? That’s a big pipe,” said George Oaks.

  Mungo-Mitchell said: “It takes the spring floods.”

  “Good again,” said George Oaks, “but we’re early autumn now, are we not? Excellent! That pipe will be carrying scarcely two feet of water, surely?”

  “For about two miles,” said Mungo-Mitchell. “After that, the gauge narrows. The water goes in at high pressure, below, and there some of it is involved in a hydraulic pressure system for the freezing of air——”

  “—In other words,” said George Oaks, “this four-foot pipe must fork suddenly into two narrower pipes, one carrying water for washing, and the other for hydraulic pressure?”

  “That’s the idea,” said Mungo-Mitchell. “But come to the point!”

  “I am at the point,” said George Oaks, rubbing his hands, and I saw his eyes shining in the moonlight. “I am at the point of intersection of three pipes. Mungo, I spit on your death, and your desperation! Can you lead me to the nearest manhole that lets into the great water-pipe?”

  “Less than five hundred yards from here,” said Mungo-Mitchell. “We had better walk.”

  I said, with something like gaiety: “Glory be! I feel better!”

  “You can breathe now? You don’t itch so much?”

  “Why, no,” I said. “It’s passing.”

  “In that case,” said he, “brace yourself, Kemp—your agony is just beginning to come on you.” He took from a compartment in the jeep one of those heavy double-headed spanners that are cut to fit six different sizes of nut. “If we are to open the manhole,” he said, handing it to George Oaks, “this will be handy. Hurry, now. Kemp, here, will be screaming crazy in a little while.”

  As we walked, George Oaks said: “You know, I was the runt of the family. My father and my brother were all six feet tall. All the girls used to laugh at me. I mailed a ten-shilling postal-order to a man who advertised an appliance to increase one’s height, to be sent in a plain wrapper . . . I used to pray for a few extra inches. I asked the God why He had made me so little, out of the snippets left over from my tall brothers. Well, now I know. This is the end for which the God stamped me small—here is the keyhole for which I was cut! . . . From this base metal may be filed a Key . . . Eh, Albert?’

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  Mungo-Mitchell laid a hand on my shoulder, and said: “Let him be.”

  George Oaks was on his knees, now, working with the spanner at the bolts which held fast a sunken circular plate of steel at the side of the road. In less than a minute, he had flung aside five of them. “Up with the manhole cover, Albert,” he said, and I lifted it out, and dragged it to one side. The black hole which now lay open at our feet was little more than two feet in diameter, and from out of it came a noise of rushing water; and then I thought of the well in my garden, and the sick horror of George Oaks, shivering in the hot summerhouse at the very recollection of it; and I cried: “No, George, no—turn about’s fair play! My turn this time——”

  But he said: “—No, Albert, this is work for a little man. Thanks, Designer Infinite, for cutting me in miniature!”

  He had been busy with his buttons; and now three of the plastic capsules of metallic potassium lay on his palm. “No,” he said, “this is my show, without argument.”

  I knew that his whole soul shuddered away from the pit of shadows at his feet, but he looked steadfastly down at it with a face of stone. Then he put a finger in his mouth, and I thought that he was going to bite the nail; but he fished out his little bead of cyanide. Automatically, I held my hand out for it. He pushed my hand aside, gently, and politely wiping the capsule upon his neck-tie, gave it to Mungo-Mitchell, saying: “He knows more than you, Albert. He has priority. . .

  “And now,” he said, “this is what I am going to do. I am going down that pipe, past where it narrows, to the very intersection. Then, I am going to puncture my capsules of potassium and send them off, two into the feed-pipe of the cooling system, and one into the other pipe.”

  Mungo-Mitchell said: “The cooling system is the left-hand pipe. The wash pipe is on the right. That is a devil of a long chance, Oaks!”

  “I know. A chance in millions, Mungo, but the only one. There are countless factors against it, but if I can wash just one pellet of potassium to where it will explode somewhere in the coils of any of the coolers, all their thermostatic auxiliaries won’t switch on in time to save them. If that misses, a potassium explosion in the radio-active sludge may not. And in any case I shall have cut off the water.”

  “Cut off the water? With what?” asked Mungo-Mitchell.

  “With this,” said George Oaks, passing a hand over his body. “It stands to reason. I can go down the mountain with the water, but not up the mountain against the water. And the pressure of two miles of water in a four-foot pipe should tamp me into the fork, and give the plumbers a headache . . . because, don’t you see, it will take a living, alert, intelligent foreign body to pass the Filters, and get far enough down to block the fork. Give me the wrench. . . . One thing, Mungo—have you a torch?”

  Mungo-Mitchell handed him a little metal flashlight, such as doctors carry clipped in their breast pockets. “Thank the God for that!” said George Oaks, kissing it. “Albert, good-bye. It’s all right! I have been living on borrowed time since Passchendaele. . . . This is what it was for. Put back the cover after me, and drive like the wrath of God over the mountain.”

  Before he disappeared, he smiled at me out of the pit, and said: “I will make my own peace with the God; but burn a candle for poor Monty Cello.”

  And then the manhole cover was back in position, and Mungo-Mitchell was half dragging me to the jeep, muttering: “There is a Man!”

  I was crying, brokenly: “George! George!”

  Mungo-Mitchell said: “There is still time. We’ll take the mountain road. But first——” He fumbled under his tunic, and pulled out his belt. “—Better let me fasten your hands behind you. Your next spasm ought to be due any time now.” I let him do as he wished. I looked up into the sky, and my eyes, hot and dry now, seemed to have sunk back and back in their sockets, so that I saw the stars too brilliant as through two tubes . . . And I thought of a little pencil of light stabbing the darkness underground between a bitter torrent and an arched darkness while George Oaks went to his glorious Doom singing; I knew that he must be singing, and that he would be comforted by the tremendous reverberations of his voice in the great pipe . . . I remembered his voice in the well . . .

  . . . Then we were on a narrow road, and I could see below and beyond a chaos of black and white and green triangular dots—moon-lit mountain forest. About then, even in my
agony, I felt that a certain sound was missing from Chaos. The jeep had stopped. (I learned, later, that we had been driving for nearly three hours.)

  Mungo-Mitchell said: “No more petrol. We walk.” And I begged him, for pity’s sake, to shoot me in the head, through the ears, where the fiery itching was. When he would not, I wrenched my hands loose, and rushed him, trying to get the pistol; but he knocked me down with it, and when I—all too soon—came to, my wrists were strapped again, and my ankles also were tied with Romagna’s braces. I was lying, writhing, in a little clearing. Mungo-Mitchell was sitting near me, limp and spent.

  “This is about all, for the present,” he said, “I have broken my ankle. The alarm will have been out this past hour, certainly. The helicopters will be up; they’ll spot the jeep, and beat the mountain for us . . . We tried, God knows. But Oaks didn’t make it; it was too much to expect; the odds were too long against it. Nothing to do but sit it out now.”

  He looked to the magazine of his pistol, balanced it in his hand, and said: “Eight cartridges. Seven for them; one for you; and the pill for me . . . But what the devil’s that? It can’t be dawn so soon!”

  My face was set in the direction in which he was pointing. Over the great shaggy hump of the mountain down which we had so tortuously climbed, the sky was full of light. As we looked, the light grew brighter—unbearably bright—then sickly opalescent. It was a feverish, diseased, crawling, tingling, rotten kind of light—a cancerous light. It hung over the world for a moment, and then, as if to shade itself from that evil glare, the earth beneath put up three black umbrellas on one fantastic shaft. The umbrellas were sucked away. The light, in its anger, became red. And then the very concussion of the noise that followed, even from all those miles of distance, knocked me senseless.

  . . . Shakily, at first, like a bubble in muddy water, I came up out of a deep black well of sleep . . . grew lighter, rose, pleasantly rocking, into a murmuring twilight, through which I sped, between the clutching fingers of grey dreams, into a film of luminescence, and so into the broad light of another day.