On coming down from his third-floor flat to the street, a plastic shopping-bag tucked under his arm, he had chanced to spy a young boy, perhaps ten years of age. A sharp-nosed, pinch-faced boy in shabby grey clothes, with narrow eyes and a mean, stupid look, a boy who (Madders had studied physiognomy) was destined for many misdeeds and much unhappiness. An unlikely object to win Madders’s love!
And yet there it was. Madders loved that boy. Love had been born in him, at first glance, like the striking of a match, bringing searing insights, a burning perception of a unique, if flawed, human being. He had stopped in his tracks, momentarily paralysed. He had thought to go after the boy, to get to know him somehow, to try to help him steer through the tragedies of life that, all too clearly, awaited him.
But the boy had turned a corner, and before Madders could act a new surprise was upon him.
How happy mankind was to be bereft of love! For was not love the most powerful of human emotions, and therefore the most destructive? Was it not an agony to be consumed with love, to ache and grieve for another person, to feel, as though they were one’s own, his sufferings, his disappointments, to become aware of the helplessness that secretly surrounds each human life?
Madders’s punishment now was to love everyone he met or saw, to love unrestrainedly and unreservedly. Seconds after seeing the boy, love had flared in him again, this time for a girl, not very attractive, in an ill-fitting skirt. Then for a hag, stooped and withered, lost in dreams as she carried home scant provisions in a tattered cloth shopping-bag. Next he saw a young man in baggy trousers, vague of manner, who stumbled as he mounted the kerb.
Madders loved them all, and he could not stop loving them even now! To love one person could be burden enough. But to feel the same intensity for every single person one encountered! For the heartbreak to be continuous, to flame anew a hundred times a day, anew and anew and anew, for love to pile on love!
No! The human frame could not endure it!
Within an hour Madders was devastated, and was conscious that before the day was out he would feel obliged to destroy himself. For this was nothing like the generalised love for all mankind he had once believed in, had even imagined he possessed. Now he knew that emotion for the sentimental and self-congratulating lie that it was. No, there was nothing generalised about this. Love could not count past the number one, and was never abstract. It was intimate, a gaze that rested only on living individuals, it was specific to the individual, it was never the same twice, and it blotted out the lover by forcing him never to forget that another was more precious to him than he himself was.
“Who are you?” Madders demanded in a low, unsteady voice. “Who taught you to do this?”
“I was trained by the Galactic Observance,” replied Wizard Wazo, as though repeating a self-evident fact. “And I it was who trained the Order of the Secret Star.”
“Tell me what you want of me.”
“My words of power. That is all.”
Madders shook his head. “I have no words of power, as you call them. I didn’t even know there were such things.”
Wizard Wazo bridled. “I am speaking to the Master of the Order of the Secret Star, am I not?”
“Yes… I mean, no. I took the name of the order, and some of the ceremonies, that’s all… as much as I could find. It was in a manuscript in the British Museum.” Madders groaned. “You’ve made a mistake, don’t you see?”
On hearing this, Wizard Wazo committed the indiscretion that, to judge by what Madders had just said, was probably no indiscretion at all. Determined to get at the truth, he entered Madders’ mind.
And the truth was roughly as stated. Madders had no connection with the group founded by Wizard Wazo at all. He had done no more than commandeer the empty shell of the order, preserved by writings stored in some dusty archive. Of the order itself, nothing remained. It had failed to maintain itself, had perished, Wizard Wazo’s precious words scattered before the winds as its last adepts turned to dust!
As for Madders himself, he was no magician at all! For all he knew about magic, he might barely have made the grade as a pot-boy in the restaurant here! His knowledge was all cant, useless tittle-tattle picked up here and there, from blathering books, from self-deluding nonentities, from playing-cards, from idle doodles masquerading as cosmic sigils, from the drivellings of, to use a phrase in the current repertoire, senile Jews!!!
And as for his possessing words of power, he could put no more conscious force into any word whatsoever than was enough to induce the waitress yonder to fetch him a cup of tea, and barely that!!!
The words lost! Even for this miserable and unadmired planet, such incompetence was beyond belief. Wizard Wazo surged to his feet. His whole body was shaking, and his face had turned purple.
“WHAT??? Can I trust NO ONE??!! I make the most straightforward of arrangements to preserve my property, and what happens? I return here and am cheated, spurned and insulted, my requirements are completely ignored, and in the end I find that my valuable property has been discarded and lost like dirty old rags!!! WHAT AM I TO MAKE OF IT ALL??!!!”
He kicked over the table, and Arnold Madders fell back in terror as Wizard Wazo’s displeasure exploded across the restaurant. For an instant Madders received a memory flash: the picture of a dynamic Christ throwing the money-changers out of the temple. Wizard Wazo raged, upturning table after table, scattering customers and chairs like chaff, and mouthing a ceaseless stream of vituperation.
Before he could reach the door a tall figure clad in dark blue had entered the restaurant to bar his path. Though Wizard Wazo tried to brush this obstacle aside the policeman skilfully detained him, twisting his arm up behind his back.
“You’ll have to leave, sir.”
“Leave?” Wizard Wazo brayed in the policeman’s grip. “With pleasure! Indeed I will leave!”
Such abominable treatment as he had received here deserved retribution several times more severe than that he had visited upon Nekferus. He quit Earth; but while pausing to direct himself to distant regions, he also created upon that despicable planet, which he wished never to see again, a world ocean, covering all but the tips of the highest mountains. All across the surface of the Earth the human population abruptly found itself placed under water. On streets, on farms, in rooms, in buildings, in ships, in aircraft and even in submarines, four thousand million people stumbled and threshed, gurgled in bewilderment, were unable to draw another breath of air. In buildings people floundered or swam to doors and windows, only to discover that in the street, too, there was nothing but water. Because of the suddenness of the change, which meant at first that the new ocean’s pressure was uniform from top to bottom, no crushing weight was anywhere felt, and some were thus deluded into supposing that only a few feet separated them from fresh air; they struck vainly upwards, for a surface that was too, too far overhead.
Most, however, lacked the presence of mind to do anything. Children died first, squirming and kicking, watched by agonised parents who were themselves to live for only tens of seconds longer. In minutes it was all over. Henceforth only marine creatures would swarm in the shells of civilisation, oblivious of harm, picking mammalian bones on the floor of the galaxy’s newest panthalassa.
The Infinite Searchlight
“The materialist view,” the radio lecturer said, “is that no entities exist in the universe other than entities as they are understood by the science of physics. The only major obstacle to this view lies in the problem posed by the experience of consciousness. Opponents of materialism are able, with justification, to point to the absence of any convincing physical description of consciousness, and will claim that it is impossible to give consciousness such a description. This objection has never been enough to overthrow the materialist school, however, for the reason that in ascribing consciousness to a non-physical agency the non-materialist then puts himself in the position of having to explain how such an agency interacts with a physical brain. This he has never been able to do.