Ice

TWELVE

The news I heard during the flight confirmed my worst fears. The world situation seemed to be entering its last fatal phase. The elimination of many countries, including my own, left no check on the militarism of the remaining big powers, who confronted each other, the smaller nations dividing allegiance between them. Both principals held stocks of nuclear weapons many times in excess of the overkill stage, so that the balance of terror appeared to be nicely adjusted. But some of the lesser countries also possessed thermo-nuclear devices, though which of them was not known: and this uncertainty, and the resulting tension, provoked escalating crises, each of which brought nearer the final catastrophe. An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt. I was profoundly depressed, left with a sense of waiting for something frightful to happen, a sort of mass execution.

I looked at the natural world, and it seemed to share my feelings, to be trying in vain to escape its approaching doom. The waves of the sea sped in disorderly flight towards the horizon; the sea birds, the dolphins and flying fish, hurtled frenziedly through the air; the islands trembled and grew transparent, endeavouring to detach themselves, to rise as vapour and vanish in space. But no escape was possible. The defenceless earth could only lie waiting for its destruction, either by avalanches of ice, or by chain-explosions which would go on and on, eventually transforming it into a nebula, its very substance disintegrated.

I went through the jungle alone, searching for the Indris, believing their magic influence might lift the dead-weight of depression which had fallen on me. I did not care whether I saw or dreamed them. It was hot, steamy; the mad intensity of the sun pouring down all its force on the equator for the last time. My head was aching, I was exhausted: unable to stand the burning sun any longer, I lay down in black shade, shut my eyes.

At once I felt that the lemurs were near me. Or was it their nearness that abolished despair and dread? It seemed more as if I received a message of hope from another world; a world without violence or cruelty, in which despair was unknown. I had often dreamed of this place, where life was a thousand times more exciting and splendid than life on earth. Now one of its inhabitants seemed to stand beside me. He smiled at me, touched my hand, spoke my name. His face was calm and impartial, timelessly intelligent, full of goodwill, impossible to associate with any form of pretence.

He told me about the hallucination of space-time, and the joining of past and future so that either could be the present, and all ages accessible. He said he would take me to his world, if I wanted to go. He and others like him had seen the end of our planet, the end of the human race. The race was dying, the collective death-wish, the fatal impulse to self-destruction, though perhaps human life might survive. The life here was over. But life was continuing and expanding in a different place. We could be incorporated in this wider life, if we chose.

I tried to understand. He was a man, but seemed more; he was not what I was. He had access to superior knowledge, to some ultimate truth. He was offering me the freedom of his privileged world, a world my inmost self longed to know. I felt the excitement of the unimaginable experience. From the doomed dying world man had ruined, I seemed to catch sigh of this other one, new, infinitely alive, and of boundless potential. For a second I believed myself capable of existing on higher level in that wonderful world; but saw how far it was beyond my powers when I thought of the girl, the warder the spreading ice, the fighting and killing. I was part of all that, irrevocably involved with events and persons upon this planet. It was heartbreaking to reject what a part of me wanted most. But I knew that my place was here, in our work under sentence of death, and that I would have to stay and see it through to the end.

The dream, the hallucination, or whatever it was, had a powerful effect on me afterwards. I could not forget it, could not forget the supreme intelligence and integrity of that dream-face. I was left with a sense of emptiness, loss, as if something precious really had been in my grasp, and I had thrown it away.

It did not seem to matter what I did now. I was committed to violence and must keep to my pattern. I managed to react the mainland where guerrilla fighting was going on, and, indifferent to everything, joined a company of mercenaries in the pay of the west. We fought in the marshes, in the delta of a tidal river with many mouths, thigh-deep in mud most of the time. More men had been lost in the mud than through enemy action when finally we were withdrawn. It seemed to me we were fighting against the ice, which was all the while coming steadily nearer, covering more of the world with its dead silence, its awful white peace. By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe.

I still felt I was waiting for something fearful to happen, but in a curious sort of suspended state. There was an emotional blockage. I recognized it in others besides myself. In suppressing food riots, our machine guns indiscriminately cut own rioters and harmless pedestrians. I had no feeling about it and noticed the same indifference in everyone else. People stood looking on as at a performance, did not even attend to the wounded. I had to share a sleeping tent with five other men for a time. They had fantastic courage, but no idea of danger, of life, death, anything; were satisfied as long as they got a hot meal every day with meat and potatoes. I could not make any contact with them; hung up my overcoat as a screen and lay sleepless behind it.

Presently I began to hear the warden mentioned again. He was attached to western headquarters, held an important post here. I remembered his wish to co-operate with the big powers, and admired the way he had achieved it. Thinking of him made me restless. It seemed idiotic to spend my last days in a hired fighting unit, and I decided to ask him to find me a job in which I would have more scope. The problem was how to reach him. Our leader was the only person who occasionally had direct dealings with the higher command, and he refused to help me, interested in nothing but his own advancement. For days we had been attacking a strongly- defended building said to contain secret papers. He would not ask for reinforcements, determined to get the credit for taking the place unaided. By a simple trick, I enabled him to capture the building and send the documents to headquarters, for which he was highly praised.

Impressed by my ingenuity, he asked me to have a drink with him, offered me promotion. He was making a personal report the next day, and I said that the only reward I wanted was to go to headquarters with him. He replied that he couldn’t spare me, I must give him more of these tips. He was half drunk. I deliberately encouraged him to go on drinking until he passed out. In the morning, when he was about to start, I jumped into his car, pretending he had promised to take me, relying on his having been too drunk the previous night to remember what had been said. It was a nasty moment. He clearly suspected something. But he did not have me thrown out of the car. I drove with him to headquarters, neither of us speaking a word the whole way.