That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy #3)

by C.S. Lewis

There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet.

sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including prenatal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain

A new type of man:

it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the NICE wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you’d have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it reeducation of the maladjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end. Odd thing it is—the word ‘experiment’ is unpopular, but not the word ‘experimental.’ You musn’t experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the NICE and it’s all correct!”

She also knew, of course, that she was deeply angry with herself for the collapse which had betrayed her last night, into being what she most detested—the fluttering, tearful “little woman” of sentimental fiction running for comfort to male arms.

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.

“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the NICE is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us—to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re nonpolitical. The real power always is.”

it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

This time he wandered round to the back parts of the house where the newer and lower buildings joined it. Here he was surprised by a stable-like smell and a medley of growls, grunts and whimpers—all the signs, in fact, of a considerable zoo. At first he did not understand, but presently he remembered that an immense program of vivisection, freed at last from Red Tape and from niggling economy, was one of the plans of the NICE.

Mark had no scruples about vivisection. What the noise meant to him was the greatness and grandiosity of this whole undertaking from which, apparently, he was likely to be excluded. There were all sorts of things in there: thousands of pounds’ worth of living animality, which the Institute could afford to cut up like paper on the mere chance of some interesting discovery. He must get the job: he must somehow solve the problem of Steele. But the noise was disagreeable and he moved away.

“Everyone begins as a child by liking Weather. You learn the art of disliking it as you grow up. Haven’t you ever noticed it on a snowy day? The grown-ups are all going about with long faces, but look at the children—and the dogs? They know what snow’s made for.” “I’m sure I hated wet days as a child,” said Jane. “That’s because the grown-ups kept you in,” said Camilla. “Any child loves rain if it’s allowed to go out and paddle about in it.”

“But,” said Jane, “I don’t know anything about all this. Do I? I don’t want to take sides in something I don’t understand.” “But don’t you see,” broke in Camilla, “that you can’t be neutral? If you don’t give yourself to us, the enemy will use you.”

The words “give yourself to us” were ill-chosen. The very muscles of Jane’s body stiffened a little: if the speaker had been anyone who attracted her less than Camilla she would have become like stone to any further appeal.

“Do you mean I’m to ask Mark’s permission?” said Jane with a strained little laugh. The resentment which had been rising and ebbing, but rising each time a little more than it ebbed, for several minutes, had now overflowed. All this talk of promises and obedience to an unknown Mr. Fisher-King had already repelled her. But the idea of this same person sending her back to get Mark’s permission—as if she were a child asking leave to go to a party—was the climax. For a moment she looked on Mr. Denniston with real dislike.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Jane presently. “I won’t join your—your—whatever it is. But I’ll promise to let you know if I have any more dreams of that sort.” “That is splendid,” said Denniston. “And I think it is as much as we had a right to expect. I quite see your point of view.

The childish levels, the undersoil of the mind, had been turned up. She wanted to be with Nice people, away from Nasty people—that nursery distinction seeming at the moment more important than any later categories of Good and Bad or Friend and Enemy.

How could she have thought him young? Or old either? It came over her, with a sensation of quick fear, that this face was of no age at all. She had (or so she had believed) disliked bearded faces except for old men with white hair. But that was because she had long since forgotten the imagined Arthur of her childhood—and the imagined Solomon too. Solomon—for the first time in many years the bright solar blend of king and lover and magician which hangs about that name stole back upon her mind. For the first time in all those years she tasted the word king itself with all linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy and power. At that moment, as her eyes first rested on his face, Jane forgot who she was, and where, and her faint grudge against Grace Ironwood, and her more obscure grudge against Mark, and her childhood and her father’s house. It was, of course, only for a flash.

“I am not allowed to be too prudent. I am not allowed to use desperate remedies until desperate diseases are really apparent. Otherwise we become just like our enemies—breaking all the rules whenever we imagine that it might possibly do some vague good to humanity in the remote future.”

“It looks as if you will have to go back; at least for the present. You will, no doubt, be seeing your husband again fairly soon. I think you must make at least one effort to detach him from the NICE.”

You must not mention me nor the company at all. We have put our lives in your hands. You must simply ask him to leave Belbury. You must put it on your own wishes. You are his wife.”

Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.” “I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.” “You were mistaken,” said he gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes—that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a bluebook.”

“You see,” said the Director, “I live like the King in Curdie. It is a surprisingly pleasant diet.” With these words he broke the bread and poured himself out a glass of wine.

This fourth and supreme Jane was simply in the state of joy. The other three had no power upon her, for she was in the sphere of Jove, amid light and music and festal pomp, brimmed with life and radiant in health, jocund and clothed in shining garments.

For beauty was made for others. Her beauty belonged to the Director. It belonged to him so completely that he could even decide not to keep it for himself but to order that it be given to another, by an act of obedience lower, and therefore higher, more unconditional and therefore more delighting, than if he had demanded it for himself.

“I’d like the Curdie books, please,” said Jane, “and Mansfield Park and Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Having thus been provided with reading matter for several hours, she very comfortably went to sleep again.

Of course, it doesn’t do to look at the cups too closely on the men’s day, but on the whole we get along pretty well.”

An emergency governor of Edgestow must be appointed. Feverstone was the obvious man. As a member of Parliament he represented the Nation, as a Fellow of Bracton he represented the University, as a member of the Institute he represented the Institute. All the competing claims that might otherwise have come into collision were reconciled in the person of Lord Feverstone;

Dick was a mere politician at heart and always would be. Wither, deeply sighing, confessed that his talents had been perhaps more useful at an earlier stage of the movement than they were likely to be in the period on which they were now entering.

“But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess.” “I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing.” “Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet.” “Do you mean,” put in a man called Gould, “that we are to have no vegetation at all?” “Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.” “I wonder what the birds will make of it?” “I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.” “It sounds,” said Mark, “like abolishing pretty well all organic life.” “And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?”

“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mold—all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”

There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.”

The world I look forward to is the world of perfect purity. The clean mind and the clean minerals. What are the things that most offend the dignity of man? Birth and breeding and death. How if we are about to discover that man can live without any of the three?”

Small clouds were scudding across the stars and the full Moon—Mark had never seen her so bright—stared down upon them. As the clouds passed her she looked like a ball that was rolling through them. Her bloodless light filled the room. “There is a world for you, no?” said Filostrato. “There is cleanness, purity. Thousands of square miles of polished rock with not one blade of grass, not one fiber of lichen, not one grain of dust. Not even air. Have you thought what it would be like, my friend, if you could walk on that land? No crumbling, no erosion. The peaks of those mountains are real peaks: sharp as needles, they would go through your hand. Cliffs as high as Everest and as straight as the wall of a house. And cast by those cliffs, acres of shadow black as ebony, and in the shadow hundreds of degrees of frost. And then, one step beyond the shadow, light that would pierce your eyeballs like steel and rock that would burn your feet. The temperature is at boiling point. You would die, no? But even then you would not become filth. In a few moments you are a little heap of ash; clean, white powder. And mark, no wind to blow that powder about. Every grain in the little heap would remain in its place, just where you died, till the end of the world . . . but that is nonsense. The universe will have no end.”

“I want you to like him if you can. He’s one of my oldest friends. And he’ll be about our best man if we’re going to be defeated. You couldn’t have a better man at your side in a losing battle. What he’ll do if we win, I can’t imagine.”

“My uncle, Dr. Duncanson,” said MacPhee, “whose name may be familiar to you—he was Moderator of the General Assembly over the water, in Scotland—used to say, ‘Show it to me in the word of God.’ And then he’d slap the big Bible on the table. It was a way he had of shutting up people that came to him blathering about religious experiences. And granting his premises, he was quite right. I don’t hold his views, Mrs. Studdock, you understand, but I work on the same principles. If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer.”

“It tells us something in the long run even more important,” said the Director. “It means that if this technique is really successful, the Belbury people have for all practical purposes discovered a way of making themselves immortal.” There was a moment’s silence, and then he continued: “It is the beginning of what is really a new species—the Chosen Heads who never die. They will call it the next step in evolution. And henceforward, all the creatures that you and I call human are mere candidates for admission to the new species or else its slaves—perhaps its food.” “The emergence of the Bodiless Men!” said Dimble.

You and I have not started or devised this: it has descended on us—sucked us into itself, if you like. It is, no doubt, an organization: but we are not the organizers.

“If you two quarrel much more,” said the Director, “I think I’ll make you marry one another.”

And Ransom agreed. He thought that Merlin’s art was the last survival of something older and different—something brought to Western Europe after the fall of Numinor and going back to an era in which the general relations of mind and matter on this planet had been other than those we know.

It may seem strange to say that Mark, having long lived in a world without charity, had nevertheless very seldom met real anger. Malice in plenty he had encountered, but it all operated by snubs and sneers and stabbing in the back. The forehead and eyes and voice of this elderly man had an effect on him which was stifling and unnerving. At Belbury one used the words “whining” and “yapping” to describe any opposition which the actions of Belbury aroused in the outer world. And Mark had never had enough imagination to realize what the “whining” would really be like if you met it face to face.

“There is no time,” said Dimble. “And there is really nothing to think about. I am offering you a way back into the human family. But you must come at once.” “It’s a question affecting my whole future career.” “Your career!” said Dimble. “It’s a question of damnation or—a last chance. But you must come at once.” “I don’t think I understand,” said Mark. “You keep on suggesting some kind of danger. What is it? And what powers have you to protect me—or Jane—if I do bolt?” “You must risk that,” said Dimble. “I can offer you no security. Don’t you understand? There is no security for anyone now. The battle has started. I’m offering you a place on the right side. I don’t know which will win.”

Dr. Dimble drove out to St. Anne’s dissatisfied with himself, haunted with the suspicion that if he had been wiser, or more perfectly in charity with this very miserable young man, he might have done something for him. “Did I give way to my temper? Was I self-righteous? Did I tell him as much as I dared?” he thought. Then came the deeper self-distrust that was habitual with him. “Did you fail to make things clear because you really wanted not to? Just wanted to hurt and humiliate? To enjoy your own self-righteousness? Is there a whole Belbury inside you too?” The sadness that came over him had novelty in it. “And thus,” he quoted from Brother Lawrence, “thus I shall always do, whenever You leave me to myself.”

The voice did not sound like Dimble’s own: it was as if the words spoke themselves through him from some strong place at a distance—or as if they were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.

“And if he comes with you, all is well. If he does not—why then, Dimble, you must rely on your Christianity. Do not try any tricks. Say your prayers and keep your will fixed in the will of Maleldil. I don’t know what he will do. But stand firm. You can’t lose your soul, whatever happens; at least, not by any action of his.”

“Sir,” said Jane, “I know nothing of Maleldil. But I place myself in obedience to you.” “It is enough for the present,” said the Director. “This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end. But for tonight, it is enough.”

“The Dark Ages,” thought Dimble; how lightly one had read and written those words. But now they were going to step right into that Darkness. It was an age, not a man, that awaited them in the horrible little dingle.

Only three possible people left the College after him—Lancaster, Lyly and Dimble. I put them in that order of probability.

They are the sort of people who get things done—natural leaders of the other party. Dimble is quite a different type. Except that he’s a Christian, there isn’t really much against him. He’s purely academic. I shouldn’t think his name is much known, except to other scholars in his own subject. Not the kind that would make a public man. Impractical . . . he’d be too full of scruples to be much use to them. The others know a thing or two, Lancaster particularly. In fact, he’s a man we could find room for on our own side if he held the right views.”

Dimble came out last. I would have sent my last man off to follow him, but a call came through at that moment from Captain O’Hara, who wanted another car. So I decided to let Dimble go for tonight and sent my man up with the one he had. Dimble can be got any time. He comes into College pretty regularly every day; and he’s really a nonentity.”

“No. Filostrato and Wilkins are quite deceived about the Head. They have, indeed, carried out a remarkable experiment by preserving it from decay. But Alcasan’s mind is not the mind we are in contact with when the Head speaks.”