'It's incredible,' thought Hilary to herself, 'incredible that I've been here ten days!' The frightening thing in life, Hilary thought, was how easily you adapted yourself. She remembered once being shown in France some peculiar torture arrangement of the Middle Ages, an iron cage wherein a prisoner had been confined and in which he could neither lie, stand nor sit. The guide had recounted how the last man imprisoned there had lived in it for eighteen years, had been released and had lived for another twenty after that, before dying, an old man. That adaptability, thought Hilary, was what differentiated man from the animal world. Man could live in any climate and on any food and under any conditions. He could exist slave or free.
She had felt first, when introduced into the Unit, a blinding panic, a horrible feeling of imprisonment and frustration, and the fact that the imprisonment was camouflaged in circumstances of luxury had somehow made it seem all the more horrible to her. And yet now, already, even after a week here she had begun insensibly to accept the conditions of her life as natural. It was a queer, dreamlike existence. Nothing seemed particularly real, but already she had the feeling that the dream had gone on a long time and would go on for a long time more. It would, perhaps, last, forever… She would always live here in the Unit, this was life, and there was nothing outside.
This dangerous acceptance, she thought, came partly from the fact that she was a woman. Women were adaptable by nature. It was their strength and their weakness. They examined their environment, accepted it, and like realists settled down to make the best of it. What interested her most were the reactions of the people who had arrived here with her. Helga Needheim she hardly ever saw except sometimes at meals. When they met, the German woman vouchsafed her a curt nod, but no more. As far as she could judge, Helga Needheim was happy and satisfied. The Unit obviously lived up to the picture she had formed in her mind of it. She was the type of woman absorbed by her work, and was comfortably sustained by her natural arrogance. The superiority of herself and her fellow scientists was the first article of Helga's creed. She had no views of a brotherhood of man, of an era of peace, Of liberty of mind and spirit. For her the future was narrow but all conquering. The super race, herself a member of it; the rest of the world in bondage, treated, if they behaved, with condescending kindness. If her fellow workers expressed different views, if their ideas were Communist rather than Fascist, Helga took little notice. If their work was good they were necessary, and their ideas would change.
Dr. Barron was more intelligent than Helga Needheim. Occasionally Hilary had brief conversations with him. He was absorbed in his work, deeply satisfied with the conditions provided for him, but his enquiring Gallic intellect led him to speculate and ponder on the media in which he found himself.
'It was not what I expected. No, frankly,' he said one day, 'entre nous, Mrs. Betterton, I do not care for prison conditions. And these are prison conditions, though the cage, let us say, is heavily gilded.'
'There is hardly the freedom here that you came to seek?' Hilary suggested.
He smiled at her, a quick, rueful smile.
'But no,' he said, 'you are wrong. I did not really seek liberty. I am a civilised man. The civilised man knows there is no such thing. Only the younger and cruder nations put the word Liberty on their banner. There must always be a planned framework of security. And the essence of civilisation is that the way of life should be a moderate one. The middle way. Always one comes back to the middle way. No. I will be frank with you. I came here for money.'
Hilary in her turn smiled. Her eyebrows rose.
'And what good is money to you here?'
'It pays for very expensive laboratory equipment,' said Dr. Barron. 'I am not obliged to put my hand into my own pocket, and so I can serve the cause of science and satisfy my own intellectual curiosity. I am a man who loves his work, true, but I do not love it for the sake of humanity. I have usually found that those who do so are somewhat woolly headed, and often incompetent workers. No, it is the pure intellectual joy of research that I appreciate. For the rest, a large sum of money was paid to me before I left France. It is safely banked under another name and in due course, when all this comes to an end, I shall have it to spend as I choose.'
'When all this comes to an end?' Hilary repeated. 'But why should it come to an end?'
'One must have the common sense,' said Dr. Barron, 'nothing is permanent, nothing endures. I have come to the conclusion that this place is run by a madman. A madman, let me tell you, can be very logical. If you are rich and logical and also mad, you can succeed for a very long time in living out your illusion. But in the end -' he shrugged, '- in the end this will break up. Because, you see, it is not reasonable, what happens here! That which is not reasonable must always pay the reckoning in the end. In the meantime -' again he shrugged his shoulders, '- it suits me admirably.'
Torquil Ericsson, whom Hilary expected to be violently disillusioned, appeared to be quite content in the atmosphere of the Unit. Less practical than the Frenchman, he existed in a single-minded vision of his own. The world in which he lived was one so unfamiliar to Hilary that she could not even understand it. It engendered a kind of austere happiness, an absorption in mathematical calculations, and an endless vista of possibilities. The strange, impersonal ruthlessness of his character frightened Hilary. He was the kind of young man, she thought, who in a moment of idealism could send three quarters of the world to their death in order that the remaining quarter should participate in an impractical Utopia that existed only in Ericsson's mind.
With the American, Andy Peters, Hilary felt herself far more in accord. Possibly, she thought, it was because Peters was a man of talents but not a genius. From what others said, she gathered he was a first-class man at his job, a careful and skilled chemist, but not a pioneer. Peters, like herself, had at once hated and feared the atmosphere of the Unit.
'The truth is that I didn't know where I was going,' he said. 'I thought I knew, but I was wrong. The Party has got nothing to do with this place. We're not in touch with Moscow. This is a lone show of some kind – a Fascist show possibly.'
'Don't you think,' said Hilary, 'that you go in too much for labels?'
He considered this.
'Maybe you're right,' he said. 'Come to think of it, these words we throw around don't mean much. But I do know this. I want to get out of here and I mean to get out of here.'
'It won't be easy,' said Hilary, in a low voice.
They were walking together after dinner near the splashing fountains of the roof garden. With the illusion of darkness and the starlit sky they might have been in the private gardens of some sultan's palace. The functional concrete buildings were veiled from their sight.
'No,' said Peters, 'it won't be easy, but nothing's impossible.'
'I like to hear you say that,' said Hilary. 'Oh, how I like to hear you say that!'
He looked at her sympathetically.
'Been getting you down?' he asked.
'Very much so. But that's not what I'm really afraid of.'
'No? what then?'
'I'm afraid of getting used to it,' said Hilary.
'Yes.' He spoke thoughtfully. 'Yes, I know what you mean. There's a kind of mass suggestion going on here. I think perhaps you're right about that.'
'It would seem to me much more natural for people to rebel,' said Hilary.
'Yes. Yes, I've thought the same. In fact I've wondered once or twice whether there's not a little hocus-pocus going on.'
'Hocus-pocus? What do you mean by that?'
'Well, to put it frankly, dope.'
'Do you mean a drug of some kind?'
'Yes. It might be possible, you know. Something in the food or drink, something that induces – what shall I say – docility?'
'But is there such a drug?'
'Well, that's not really my line of country. There are things that are given to people to soothe them down, to make them acquiescent before operations and that. Whether there is anything that can be administered steadily over a long period of time – and which at the same time does not impair efficiency – that I don't know. I'm more inclined to think now that the effect is produced mentally. I mean that I think some of these organisers and administrators here are well-versed in hypnosis and psychology and that, without our being aware of it, we are continually being offered suggestions of our well being, of our attaining our ultimate aim (whatever it is), and that
