She looked down at her hands and saw they were trembling. What had she done? Perhaps it had not been a wise move to have allowed this avalanche of opinions to spill out from between her lips.
Dr Ogilvy seemed unmoved, though. She replied to Margaret in a calm and even tone of voice.
‘I must make it clear that all of us in the Antidote are on exactly the same page that you are. None of us here love war. We all hate violence, death, suffering and all of the other concomitants associated with war. It is the ultimate aim of the Antidote to end all violence, to end all suffering on this planet, and to usher into this broken world a universal peace, the likes of which has never before been known in the history of humankind. But there are things that will have to be done to achieve this, many of them perhaps … unpleasant. For example, tell me this: what would have happened had the Allies not stood up to Hitler and the Axis powers? How many more innocents would have perished in Germany’s quest to dominate the entire European continent? How many more millions would have been slaughtered in the Reich’s death camps and gas chambers? Sometimes we must make war to end war.’
Margaret sat listening to this with a tight-lipped smile, biting her tongue and tapping her fingers on the glass-smooth surface of the table, and doing her best to restrain herself from unleashing another tirade.
‘I see,’ she murmured through clenched teeth after a few seconds of pregnant silence. ‘So you are an army then? An army of peace and justice? That’s what you call yourselves?’
‘We are a movement,’ Dr Ogilvy insisted gently, still smiling and completely concealing whatever feelings may have been simmering behind the façade of measured calm stretched tight across her angular face. ‘War is only a minor part of it, and a part that is, as any reasonable person would know, an absolute last resort.’
‘Tell me then, tell me, how exactly does your “movement” intend to bring about, well, ha! Nothing less than world peace itself! How?’
‘We did not pick the moniker “the Antidote” for just any reason. The world is poisoned, you see. The minds of the vast majority of human beings are completely poisoned. Poisoned by all sorts of insidious ideologies in myriad forms.’
‘And that is where we come in,’ the General interrupted. ‘When an organism is poisoned, an antidote must be found to neutralise and cleanse the venom from its system. The mind of every human being is infected with a most vile and heinous form of poison, a poison that begins its scourge from the time that they are brought, screaming and covered in blood and mucous, into this world. From the time each human being draws in their very first breath of this world’s air, they begin to suck in that venom, like dry sponges absorbing a murder victim’s blood. Always sucking it in, always pulling it in, drawing it all in, letting it blacken and congeal inside them as it corrupts everything they are, and destroys everything they could be.’
‘And what is this poison, exactly?’ Margaret asked, now more intrigued than refractory.
‘Human culture,’ the General grunted with a savage snarl. ‘Every single human culture in the world is a toxic cancer, a rapidly spreading poison.’
‘And what do you plan to do about this “poison”?’ she asked, somewhat nervously.
The General flashed her a subtle smile before slowly clasping his ebony hands together on the table and gritting his teeth with a fierce and intense determination.
‘We aim to annihilate it completely,’ he snarled. ‘We will wipe all cultures from the face of this blasted planet.’
26
MARGARET
‘You intend to destroyall cultures?’ Margaret asked, both stupefied and incredulous in the face of this grandiose and abhorrent statement. ‘What you’re saying, essentially, is that you wish to cause the extinction of the human race? Is that seriously what your aim is?’
Dr Ogilvy stepped in with diplomatic haste before the General could answer.
‘Figuratively speaking, Dr Green, figuratively speaking. We do not, of course, plan to literally cause the extinction of human cultures, and by extension, the human race itself. I think the General perhaps used, er, not quite the right phrase to bring his point across. Let us approach his statement with a more, hmm, with a more metaphorical viewpoint, shall we? Now, on the subject of human culture, you must understand that the base addictions found in most modern human cultures are at the forefront of every single one of the major problems facing the world today. You do understand this, do you not?’
Margaret frowned and raised a sceptical eyebrow.
‘Since your implications is that I don’t,’ she muttered sourly, ‘why don’t you just go ahead and explain it to me?’
The corners of Dr Ogilvy’s lips crinkled, moving by a mere fraction of a degree; a flicker of a smile that could have been sympathy, or mockery. Before she could continue, though, the General spoke. As quickly as his gasoline-fire wrath had flared up, it faded away, and once more his bearded face wore an expression of calm geniality.
‘Allow me to explain my views in a little more detail,’ he said to Margaret. ‘So
