Oh, this alien Earth!
And yet he did not envy the Time Dwellers. Like the Moonites, they were renouncing their humanity. At least he still had his.
He turned as he heard his name called-a thin cry like that of an ancient seabird.
Tall Laugher was riding towards him, waving to him. She rode beneath the brown and heaving sky, her back straight and a smile on her lips and for some reason it seemed to him that she was riding to him out of the past, as when he had first seen her, a goddess from an age of mythology.
The red disc of the sun glowed behind her and again he noticed the strong smell of brine.
He waited by the edge of the thick, salt sea and, as he waited, he knew that his journey had been worth while.
THE DEEP FIX
QUICKENING SOUNDS in the early dusk. Beat of hearts, surge of blood.
Seward turned his head on the bed and looked towards the window. They were coming again. He raised his drug-wasted body and lowered his feet to the floor. He felt nausea sweep up and through him. Dizzily, he stumbled towards the window, parted the blind and stared out over the white ruins.
The sea splashed far away, down by the harbour, and the mob was again rushing through the broken streets towards the Research Lab. They were raggedly dressed and raggedly organized, their faces were thin and contorted with madness, but they were numerous.
Seward decided to activate the Towers once more. He walked shakily to the steel-lined room on his left. He reached out a grey, trembling hand and flicked down three switches on a bank of hundreds. Lights blinked on the board above the switches.
Seward walked over to the monitor-computer and spoke to it.
His voice was harsh, tired and cracking.
'GREEN 9/7-0 Frequency. RED 8/5-8 Frequency.' He didn't bother with the other Towers. Two were enough to deal with the mob outside. Two wouldn't harm anybody too badly.'
He walked back into the other room and parted the blind again. He saw the mob pause and look towards the roof where the Towers GREEN 9/7 and RED 8/5 were already beginning to spin. Once their gaze had been fixed on the Towers, they couldn't get it away. A few saw their companions look up and these automatically shut their eyes and dropped to the ground.
But the others were now-held completely rigid.
One by one, then many at a time, those who stared at the Towers began to jerk and thresh, eyes rolling, foaming at the mouth, screaming (he heard their screams faintly) - exhibiting every sign of. an advanced epileptic fit.
Seward leaned against the wall feeling sick. Outside, those who'd escaped were crawling round and inching down the street on their bellies. Then, eyes averted from the Towers, they rose to their feet and began to run away through the ruins.
'Saved again,' he thought bitterly.
What was the point? Could he bring himself to go.on activating the Towers every time? 'Wouldn't there come a day when he would let the mob get into the laboratory, search him out, kill him, smash his equipment? He deserved it, after all. The world was in ruins because of him, because of the Towers and the other Hallucinomats which he'd perfected. The mob wanted its revenge. It was fair.
Yet, while he lived, there might be a way of saving something from the wreckage he had made of mankind's minds. The mobs were not seriously hurt by the Towers; It had been the other machines which had created the real damage. Machines like the Paramats, Schizomats, Engramoscopes, even Michelson's Stroboscope Type 8. A range of instruments which had been designed to help the world and had, instead, virtually destroyed civilization; The memory was all too clear. He wished it wasn't. Having lost track of time almost from the beginning of the disaster, he had no idea how long this had been going on. A year, maybe? His life had become divided into two sections: drug-stimulated working-period; exhausted, troubled, tranquillized sleeping-: period. Sometimes, when the mobs saw the inactive Towers, and charged towards the laboratory, he had to protect himself. He had learned to sense the coming of a mob. They never came individually. Mob hysteria had become the universal condition of mankind-for all except Seward who had created it.
Hallucinomatics, neural stimulators, mechanical psychosimulatory devices, hallucinogenic drugs and machines, all had been developed to perfection at the Hampton Research Laboratory under the brilliant direction of Prof. Lee W. Seward (33), psychophysicist extraordinary, one of, the youngest pioneers in the field of hallucinogenic research.
Better for the world if he hadn't been, thought Seward wearily as he lowered his worn-out body into the chair and stared at the table full of notebooks and loose sheets of paper on which, he'd been working ever since the result of Experiment Restoration.
Experiment Restoration. A fine name. Fine ideals to inspire it.
Fine brains to make it. But something had gone wrong.
Originally developed to help in the work of curing mental disorders of all kinds, whether slight or extreme, the Hallucinomats had been an extension on the old hallucinogenic drugs such as CO2, Mescalin and Lysergic Acid derivatives. Their immediate ancestor was the stroboscope and machines like it. The stroboscope, spinning rapidly, flashing brightly coloured patterns into the eyes of a subject, often inducing epilepsy or a similar disorder; the research of Burroughs and his followers into the early types of crude hallucinomats, had all helped to contribute to a better understanding of mental disorders.
But, as research continued, so did the incidence of mental illness rise rapidly throughout the world.
The Hampton Research Laboratory and others like it were formed to combat that rise with what had hitherto been considered near-useless experiments in the field of Hallucinomatics.
Seward who had been stressing the potential importance of his chosen field since university, came into his own. He.was made Director of the Hampton Lab.
People had earlier thought of Seward as a crank and of the hallucinomats as being at. best toys. and at worse ' madness machines,' irresponsibly created by a madman.
But psychiatrists specially trained to work with them, had found them invaluable aids to their studies of mental disorders.
It had become possible for a trained psychiatrist to induce in himself a temporary state of mental abnormality by use of these machines. Thus he was better able to understand and help his patients. By different methods -light, sound-waves, simulated brain-waves, and so on-the machines created the symptoms of dozens of basic abnormalities and thousands of permutations.
They became an essential part of modern psychiatry.
The result: hundreds and hundreds of patients, hitherto virtually incurable, had been cured completely.
But the birth-rate was rising even faster than had been predicted in the middle part of the century, And mental illness rose faster than the birth-rate. Hundreds of cases could be cured.
But there were millions to be cured. There was no mass-treatment for mental illness.
Not yet.
Work at the Hampton Research Lab became a frantic race to get ahead of the increase. Nobody slept much as, in the great big world outside, individual victims of mental illness turned into groups of - the world had only recently forgotten the old word and now remembered it again - maniacs.
An overcrowded, over-pressured world, living on its nerves, cracked up.
The majority of people, of course, did not succumb to total madness. But those who did became a terrible problem.
Governments, threatened by anarchy, were forced to re-institute the cruel, old laws in order to combat the threat. All over the world prisons, hospitals, mental homes, institutions of many kinds, all were turned into Bedlams. This hardly solved the problem. Soon, if the rise continued, the sane would be in a minority.