The Thinktank That Leaked
Christopher Hodder-Williams
© Christopher Hodder-Williams 1979
Christopher Hodder-Williams has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1979 by UNITED WRITERS PUBLICATIONS.
This edition published in 2015 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1
At first you won’t notice anything unusual up on the moor. Except from the air I doubt whether anyone could. Subtle, expertly planned precautions have been taken which render the hospital, huge though it is, unobtrusive and inaccessible. True, there is a large ‘military’ zone, heavily guarded under the ruthless, impregnable terms of the Official Secrets Act. It is called ‘Exmoor Ballistic Experimental Centre’. Occasionally they even fire a missile. Those intent on preserving the unique character of the National Park have, of course, formed an angry protest group. The only problem is that they cannot know what they are protesting about. That is one reason why this narrative has to be written. I would hardly describe it as a labour of love. But from what I’ve seen, so far, of the Draft White Paper those angered conservationists aren’t going to be any the wiser about what goes on so near to the big antenna dish that was originally used for tracking Communications Satellite Y-33, unless someone comes up with the facts. It might as well be me.
So I decided, before attempting to write about the origins of Electronic Cancer, to pay two key visits. One was to the Hospital Complex; the other to Orscombe — only eight miles from the big dish itself. And since the so-called Ballistic Experimental Centre is virtually inaccessible by road I drove from London only as far as Watchet — on the coast — and flew on my own from there in a Piper Apache.
At this point I’m not prepared to state in too much detail just how I managed this. Let’s just leave it that there are still angry men in high places afflicted with a thing called Conscience. Although I haven’t a lot to lose — in view of the charges (Treason, I’m given to understand) already hanging over my head, these people have acted at considerable risk to themselves. Questions in the House — especially about Block H — had produced the usual idiocies. ‘D’-Notices were slapped on the press. And the enormous sums of public money that went into the hasty erecting of one of the most gruesome hospitals in the world remain unaccounted for. So two senior officials in the Home Office fitted me out with bullet-proof credentials, a small aeroplane, and a landing clearance for the airstrip. In a way I wish they hadn’t. But that’s what they did.
By this time I had cause to know Exmoor pretty well from the air. The radio dish was easy enough to find; the drab, bungaloid expanse of the emergency hospital was not. Some of it was turfed over. Other sections were mingled-in with derelict farm buildings, down in the gulley by the stream. Even the airstrip, trowelled-out of the forest, was cunningly obscured except from almost directly overhead. I lost it twice on the approach. The third time I got down okay and was greeted icily by tight-lipped officials. Block H, it turned out, was the first thing you came to. There were grim reasons for this. Its pathetic little patients wouldn’t have lived long if they couldn’t have been rushed to all that intensive care equipment. In my view it was criminal to have allowed them to live at all.
The place was enormous … an unevenly assembled prefabricated bungalow that followed the slopes on which it was erected. Camouflaged, it was little better than a series of interconnected huts, made of plastic and wood, with miserable little windows placed high up. On being allowed to enter, after a lengthy argument with the Senior Registrar, I was presented with a spectacle that even I — after all that I’d witnessed before it — found so horrifying that I did what for an agnostic like myself is something totally irrational: I prayed.
It wasn’t that the scene was in any way disgusting in the sense that other manifestations of hell on earth had been. It was, rather, deeply tragic; but tragic on a scale that no one should really be expected to contend with.
Some of the children had neither nose nor mouth. How they breathed I did not ask. Why they had been allowed to live was far from clear to me; I could only suppose that part of the reason for the aura of super-secrecy surrounding the place was the very lack of any justification for perpetuating such suffering. This was Science.
There was more, and it was worse. And because they were Other People’s Babies the military-type nurses had managed — God knows how — to keep their emotions strictly out of it. “Children of pilots, mostly,” one of them said to me. “You probably know why they got it first.” Her face seemed as starched as her uniform as we made our way along the line of spruce-looking beds.
I asked her, when we reached a particularly mutilated infant (I won’t describe the child’s condition) if she ever cried. She said, “It wouldn’t help them.”
“Does this?”
“It may help others.”
*
I had resolved to revisit the place I now knew to be the origin of the afflictions I had just witnessed. Sick at heart in one sense, I was now mortally afraid in another. Orscombe, and all that had lodged itself in my memory there, was not the ideal antidote to what I’d witnessed up on the moor. But I was committed; and once you start running away from personal undertakings on that level you find yourself burying the facts as the rest of them do. Someone’s got to write this; and I am best equipped to do so. Accordingly I picked up my car at Watchet, gulped a large scotch in the pub there, and drove to the place I hate most in the world.
Orscombe lies in a valley in the foothills of Exmoor … it’s before you reach what is really the moor itself. You can easily make the distinction; in its own way Exmoor is one of the most lusciously beautiful places in the country — but almost none of it is green. It is forever a deep, rich purple — the combination of bracken and heather keeps it that way. It has scars on it usually, because great stretches of it have been burned away where forest fires have taken hold, and ripped through the undergrowth far beyond the trees.
By contrast, the villages nearer the sea lie in richer terrain where every conceivable shade of green merges into a patchwork-quilt of carelessly assembled fields. These are seldom flat and are therefore not very easy to farm; but the soil is healthy and the grazing nutritious. Where it is ploughed, you can see how skilful the men on the tractors have been; tilling the land in complicated curves that seem to correspond with the contours on the map. There are clusters of cottages every three miles or so; you could hardly call them villages because nowadays they don’t really have shops; you take the bus into the surrounding towns and forage in the supermarkets and fill up the freezer. Or you make the run into Taunton in a Land Rover, up over the Brendons is the quickest way, going via Wheddon Cross until you eventually come down to sea level below the Quantock Hills.
I don’t know what I expected to find when I did this weird sort of check-up. I don’t remember talking to anybody. In fact I can’t really remember the visit very clearly because it’s got merged in my mind with what went before. Certain things stand out, though; I can recall examining that entire stretch of concrete and making absolutely sure nothing was coming through, not even tufts of rough grass growing through cracks.
Orscombe was eerie and quiet. There was no wind that day; and pretty well all I could hear was the sea, a good two miles away beyond the forest hills. There were no birds; nor could I see any cattle
grazing on the fields nearby. That could have been simply because the farmers concerned were giving the grass a rest; it doesn’t take long, in the hot summer months, for a herd to strip a field almost down to the bare turf. But what grass there was seemed wretchedly anaemic.
What I remember most was the sheer physical effort of conquering my terror of the place … the palpitation as I took a few hasty shots with a camera that was shaking in my hands. I had decided, before setting out, to stick it for thirty minutes. During these, it was all I could do to focus my eyes on my wrist-watch as I tried to urge the hands to go round faster. After twenty-six minutes I’d had enough. I found myself making a dash for the car and praying that the engine would start first time. I had an irrational conviction that there would be something wrong with it, that I’d be stranded there, forced to spend the night in the neighbourhood. I remember composing, as I inserted the ignition key, an imaginary conversation with the local garage man, pledging him an outlandish sum of money to get the thing running again.
But it started first time, and I drove off fast; avoiding the route over the Brendons and taking the long way round. I drove like a fiend until I’d got back on the motorway. And I made no stops even then; belting for London as if it were some kind of oasis. When I arrived at Hammersmith that’s what it seemed like. There are times when you can forgive a dirty old town absolutely everything. Bad-tempered rush-hour driving and unbearable heat rising from uninspired buildings and the squalor of pseudo-American hamburger cafes that reek of old fat and rancid butter and the bisodium-glutumate they put in the prefabricated meat-inserts to keep them edible for far too long at the expense of any other flavour. And a lot more.
I’ve learned to love all of that now; and the so-called ‘rat-race’ of town life is sheer massage compared with the fake innocence of Orscombe — fake, I mean, after what they did to the place. Of course, the substance of this chronicle concerns the events that led up to that final check-up on the quiescence of a country hamlet raped by galloping technological malignance. Final? That is precisely what I’m not sure about. Some people are afraid of human graves. I’m not. You bury your dead and you mourn them; and because you once loved them there is no malevolence under the soil. I’m not afraid of that kind of ghost. But there is another kind; and though London is a haven compared with Orscombe itself, the tangible beginnings of these events began, albeit enigmatically, here in this town.
*
When I first met Spender it was in the Senior Common Room at a branch of the University of London. We were both cowering in a corner of the room, during one of those unspeakable academic cocktail parties where the first drink is a diluted martini and the replenishment comes out of a fruit bowl. Bored as I was with the egotistical monologues of bloated professors who taught little and learned even less — once they’d cleared the foolscap hurdle of their Ph.Ds — I yearned for feminine company. I certainly didn’t regret the fact of my divorce but it was high time to call a halt to interim philanderings … I prefer to play the album all the way through.
On inspection, it was quite evident that there wasn’t an attractive girl among the entire desultory gathering — indeed, most women seem to have an instinct for giving such immovable feasts a wide berth. So I maintained a glum silence with a weak drink and chewed stale bits of cracker bedecked with slivers of smoked salmon you could have used as viewfinders, till we started to talk. Or rather, Spender did.
I wasn’t really listening at first; for there was something about the man which grated very slightly on my mind, and I was trying to work out what it was. I think the impression I got at that time was that Spender was a professional People-Lover. People-Lovers are those who wear their adulation for humanity on their sleeves; and their attitudes arise from their inner conviction that whereas they Love People nobody else does. If this doesn’t seem to ring a bell, I can draw an allusion from rather a different sphere. As you must have gathered I’m quite keen on flying — during this period I had a one-fifth share in the ownership of a two-seater Grumman — and the one sort of pilot I had learned never to trust is the individual who thinks everyone else is unsafe at the controls. Not only do they bore you to distraction in the flying club about their latest aerobatic triumphs; they almost always undergo an alarming jump from total self-satisfaction to abject panic when something goes wrong.
Spender didn’t bore me in this way; but there was a blankness about his face that implied a hole in his personality.
I was in the course of trying to locate the weakness in his personal superstructure when he suddenly came out with one of the most astonishing statements I’ve ever had thrown at me. For having released the gloomy information that he was a psychiatrist he said this: “When a patient suffers from an overabundance of one particular emotion — let us say hatred, for example — where does this hate go, once the patient has been cured?”
“What do you mean, where does it go?”
“Just that. If a surgeon takes out someone’s appendix, he can pickle it and put it in a jar. It is there — no longer inside the patient, but apparent to everyone else in the operating theatre as a totally separate item.”
“I can’t make out whether you’re joking. Surely, an emotion is abstract —”
“— Come on! You’re a scientist, Kepter. You know better than I do that the distinction between what is tangible and what is intangible isn’t precisely as they teach it in infant school. I don’t do conjuring tricks when I’m faced with a patient who is trapped in the quagmire of Hate. I can’t wave a wand and declaim, ‘Disappear!’ ”
“No,” I said. “Surely what you do is to get the individual to take a good look at himself and then you help him resolve whatever conflicts that generate the hatred.”
He smiled thinly. “Quite. But resolving conflicts is equivalent to separating chemicals in solution. You finish up with all the different constituents poured into a rack of test-tubes.”
I said, “An alternative to doing that is to arrive at a different mix.”
“Ah. Now you’re talking.”
I didn’t think I’d said anything particularly clever.
But he went on, “You have to re-mix the instincts the patient wants to be left with, in such a way that he can do without the Hate that formerly had been a basic ingredient.”
“Aren’t you a bit obsessed by Hate?”
“Necessarily so. Hate — whether it’s obvious or whether its frustrated and repressed — lies at the root of almost all mental afflictions. It has to be removed. It doesn’t go back into the psychiatrist who’s treating him … As far as I know I don’t hate anyone all the more for having reduced the misery of one of my patients.”
I said, “You’re trying to get me to cue you into giving me the answer to a question you think you’ve solved.”
“Well, I wouldn’t come out with my own solution in a hurry with someone who was incapable of appreciating what I try to do.”
I found myself trying to provide an appropriately charming smile. “You mean, psychiatrists can’t afford to sound as if they’re crazy?”
He didn’t like that too much. “Let’s just say it would be wasting words. But I know I’m not wasting words on you because I know what your line of country is.” The look I got with this was something between coy and sly … I can’t describe it. I do remember not wanting to proceed with the conversation. Computer Science — my ‘line of country’ was, to me, rapidly becoming a big yawn and I wanted to get out. For one thing, the Field was critically over-populated; for another I didn’t much care for some of the things it implied. Another way of putting this is quite simply that computers were beginning to scare the living daylights out of me and there was a shortage of lifeboats.
Spender went on, “In short, Kepter, I want your advice. You are being nobbled.”
“Then I’d better confess that I am not going to persist with my project and I’m scrapping the whole idea of a Ph.D.”
“I know that too.”
“Then wo
uldn’t it be more productive,” I said, “to get professional advice from someone who isn’t getting the hell out of it?”
“Not necessarily.” He was looking at me almost pleadingly; and although I was beginning to sense that there was something faintly unsavoury about him I was also getting a stronger message. Had he, in sorting-out his test tubes, done something he hadn’t foreseen? If so, did this fringe on the subject of computers? For if not, why choose me? … Whatever was on his mind, I was only getting a very small fraction of it from the spoken word. The feature of his behaviour which conveyed a great deal more was the peculiar cringing attitude he’d struck. It was unwholesome — like a secretive mother who, obsessed with pot-training, felt disgraced because one of her offspring had wet its pants at a party, yet couldn’t bring herself to ask the way to the loo.
Dr. Spender eventually nerved himself into hinting where the loo might be. “Mr. Kepter, do you, er, mind if I ask you to take a look at some of the work I’ve been doing under the auspices of the university?” As he was looking down at his shoes he couldn’t gauge my response to the invitation, so he went on hastily, “I expect it would bore you but after all it’s only just up the road and I won’t keep you long.”
I felt anything would be more entertaining than the creeping paralysis of that kind of Common Room gathering, so I put Spender out of his agony. He jostled his way eagerly out through the human traffic jam and led me down the stairs and out through the gates.
Outside it was drizzling and humid and impersonal. Looking back, I certainly couldn’t have appreciated London as I do now. I would have given a lot for some sea air and pastures green, instead of the atmospheric sulphur and the depressing view of aging, monolythic buildings that could have used a wash-and-brush-up. Spender’s brand of companionship couldn’t have helped much, either.
We walked a few blocks up toward Hyde Park and I tried to immunize myself against Spender’s garrulous volley of nervous comments. He was like a newscaster who had run out of legitimate news and dreaded revealing what really lay beneath it. I couldn’t help wondering what he’d be like with a patient whose affliction was too like his own — a stymied, bottled-up personality that could only communicate by means of hints and ambiguous semaphor.
The Thinktank That Leaked Page 1
