A dark tide of madness, far worse even than that which had swept Europe in the Middle Ages, threatened to submerge civilization.
Work at the Hampton Research Laboratory speeded up and speeded up - arid members of the team began to crack. Not all these cases were noticeable to the over-worked men who remained sane. They were too busy with their frantic experiments.
Only Lee Seward and a small group of assistants kept going, making increasing use of stimulant-drugs, and depressant-drugs to do so.
But, now that Seward thought back, they had not been sane, they had not remained cool and efficient, any more than the others. They had seemed to, that was all. Perhaps the drugs had deceived them.
The fact was, they had panicked-though the signs of panic had been hidden, even to themselves, under the disciplined guise of sober thinking.
Their work on tranquillizing machines had not kept up with, their perfection of stimulatory devices. This was because they had had to study the reasons for mental abnormalities before they could begin to devise machines for curing them.
Soon, they decided, the whole world would be mad, well before they could perfect their tranquilomatic machines. They could see no way of speeding up this work any more.
Seward was the first to put it to his team. He remembered his words.
'Gentlemen, as you know, our work on hallucinomats for the actual curing of mental disorders is going too slowly. There is no sign of our perfecting, such machines in the near future.
I have an alternative proposal.'
The alternative proposal had been Experiment Restoration.
The tide, now Seward thought about it, had been euphemistic.
It should have been called Experiment Diversion. The existing, hallucinomats would be set up throughout the world and used to induce passive disorders in the minds of the greater part of the human race. The co-operation of national governments and World Council was sought and given. The machines were set up secretly at key points all over the globe.
They began to 'send' the depressive symptoms of various disorders. They, worked. People became quiet and passive. A large number went into catatonic states. Others - a great many others, who were potentially inclined to melancholia, manic-depression, certain kinds of schizophrenia - committed suicide. Rivers became clogged with corpses, roads awash with the blood and flesh of those who'd thrown themselves in front of cars. Every time a plane or rocket was seen in the sky, people expected to see at least one body come falling from it. Often, whole cargoes of people,.were killed by the suicide of a captain, driver or pilot of a vehicle.
Even Seward had not suspected the extent of the potential Suicides. He was shocked. So was his team.
So were the World Council and the national governments.
They told Seward and his team to turn off their machines and reverse the damage they had done, as much as possible.
Seward had warned them of the possible result of doing this.
He had been ignored. His machines had been confiscated and the World Council had put untrained or ill-trained operators on them. This was one of the last acts of the World Council.
It was one of the last rational-however ill-judged - acts the world knew.
The real disaster had come about when the bungling operators that the World Council had chosen set the hallucinomats to send the full effects of the conditions they'd originally been designed to produce. The operators may have been fools-they were probably mad themselves to do what they did. Seward couldn't know. Most of them had been killed by bands of psychopathic murderers who killed their victims by the hundreds in weird and horrible rites which seemed to mirror those of pre-history - or those of the insane South American cultures before the Spaniards.
Chaos had come swiftly-the chaos that now existed.
Seward and his three remaining assistants had protected themselves the only way they could, by erecting the stroboscopic Towers on. the roof of the laboratory building. This kept the mobs off. But it did not help their consciences. One by one Seward's assistants had committed suicide.
Only Seward, keeping himself alive on a series of ever-morepotent drugs, somehow retained his sanity. And, he thought ironically, this sanity was only comparative.
A hypodermic syringe lay on the table and beside it a small bottle marked M-A 19-Mescalin-Andrenol Nineteen-a drug hitherto only tested on animals, never on human beings. But all the other drugs he had used to keep himself going had either run out or now had poor effects. The M-A 19 was his last hope of being able to continue his work on the tranquilomats he needed to perfect and thus rectify his mistake in the only way he could.
As he reached for the bottle and the hypodermic, he thought coolly that, now he looked back, the whole world had been suffering from insanity well before he had even considered Experiment Restoration. The decision, to make the experiment had been just another symptom of the world-disease. Something like it would have happened sooner or later, whether by natural or artificial means. It wasn't really his fault. He had been nothing much more than fate's tool.
But logic didn't help. In a way it was his fault. By now, with an efficient team, he might have been able to have constructed a few experimental tranquilomats, at least.
'Now I've got to do it alone,' he thought as. he pulled up his trouser leg and sought a vein he could use in his clammy, grey flesh. He had long since given up dabbing the area with anaesthetic. He found a blue vein, depressed the plunger of the needle and sat back in his chair to await results.
THEY CAME SUDDENLY and were drastic.
His brain and body exploded in a torrent of mingled ecstasy and pain which surged through him. Waves of pale light flickered. Rich darkness followed. He rode a ferris-wheel of erupting sensations and emotions. He fell down a never-ending slope of obsidian rock, surrounded by clouds of green, purple, yellow, black. The rock vanished, but he continued to fall.
Then there was the smell of disease and corruption in his nostrils, but even that passed and he was standing up.
World of phosphorescence drifting like golden spheres into black night. Green, blue, red explosions. Towers rotate slowly.
Towers. Advance. Towers Recede. Advance, Recede. Vanish.
Flickering world of phosphorescent tears falling into the timeless, spaceless wastes of Nowhere. World of Misery. World of Antagonism. World of Guilt. Guilt- guilt - guilt..
World of hateful wonder.
Heart throbbing, mind thudding, body shuddering as M-A 19 flowed up the infinity of the spine. Shot into back-brain, shot into mid-brain, shot into fore-brain.
EXPLOSION ALL CENTRES.
No-mind- No-body- No-where.
Dying waves of light danced out of his eyes and away through the dark world: Everything was dying. Cells, sinews, nerves, synapses - all crumbling. Tears of light, fading, fading.
Brilliant rockets streaking into the sky, exploding all together and sending their multicoloured globes of light - balls on a Xmas Tree-balls on a great tree-X-mass-drifting slowly earthwards.
Ahead of him was a tall, blocky building constructed of huge chunks of yellowed granite, like a fortress. Black mist swirled around it and across the bleak, horizonless nightscape.
This was no normal hallucinatory experience. Seward felt the ground under his feet, the warm air on his face, the half-familiar smells. He had no doubt that he had entered another world.
But where was it? How had he got here? Who had brought him here? The answer might lie in the fortress ahead. He began to walk towards it. Gravity seemed lighter, for he walked with greater ease than normal and was soon standing looking up at the huge green metallic door. He bunched his fist and rapped on it.