‘He’s in his lab, sir. It’s just down the hall, third door on the right,’ he said quickly, hoping that other matters would intervene between us. I gave him a crisp nod and brushed past. He saluted. I walked down the corridor with my heels drumming just like Larsen’s.
Elston was in his laboratory, but he was not working; he was seated on a high stool, all sunk up in himself. I had the impression of a dunce at a blackboard. I closed the door and he looked up. ‘You,’ he said, without surprise. He was beyond surprise. I walked over to him and knocked my pipe out against the edge of a shelf. Test tubes rattled in a rack and arcane fluids sloshed about in beakers.
‘You should have contacted me sooner,’ I said.
‘I wish to God I had.’
‘Will you tell me about this… thing?’
‘It’s too late.’
‘It could prevent a recurrence elsewhere.’
‘I doubt…’ he said, and paused, as if his doubt were a categorical statement. His eyes turned about, looking for some object deserving of that doubt. ‘I doubt that even the government would attempt such a thing again. I am not a brave man, Harland… but there does not exist a torture that would ever again induce me to cooperate.’
‘But you never intended this.’
‘My God, no! I… never…’ His voice trailed off. He lifted a murky beaker and looked into it, as if he expected to find resolution there, or courage; reading the runes of science. He moved the beaker and the fluid sloshed about; peering at it, he seemed to be contemplating a rare vintage, a distillate of evil. I felt that the fluid should be roiling and giving off vapours; had he suddenly drained it on a compulsive whim, I would not have been surprised.
Abruptly he began to speak, driven to explain and exonerate himself.
‘In my research into chemical lobotomy, I discovered a process by which to make men mindless. I had not sought this result, it was a side-effect, accidental. These… subjects… were totally obedient and docile, but they were immensely powerful, for they no longer had inhibitions of any sort. They no longer knew the limitations of self preservation; were no longer confined by human instinct. They could, upon command, perform tasks that amazed me…’
‘The man who broke his arm lifting against an unliftable weight?’
‘You know of that? Yes, that is an example. No normal man could exert enough pressure to break his own skeleton. But, feeling no pain and totally uninhibited, a man treated by this process became a superman.’
‘But to what purpose?’
‘To my purpose, to my intentions, it was merely a side-effect. I sought to make the incurable manageable, that was all. The purpose put to this by the agency, however… the dark vision of those fiends… they foresaw an army of living robots…’
‘Of course. Men without fear, unable to feel pain, totally obedient.. ’
‘That was the idea. An army that would walk through enemy fire, keep on walking even though they had been shot several times, had limbs blown off… even crawling, legless, to carry out the attack… only an absolutely mortal wound could stop them; even dead they could move for a few moments. It is shock that stops a wounded man, but only death itself could stop these poor creatures. But there was a flaw. Nearly mindless, they could make no decisions, could not discriminate between friend and foe; nor were they belligerent. They were unstoppable but they were useless. I believed that we had come to a dead end, and I was glad. But the devious minds that controlled me… those minds must be as warped as those of my creations, their thoughts twisted through hideous configurations which bleed out humanity and distil pure evil…’ He looked directly at me. ‘The next stage… I balked at this, they threatened… well, no matter; I am a coward; I did as they wished.’
Elston shook his head from side to side.
‘Harland, I took the obedience out. I made these creatures savage and bestial, instilling bloodlust and ferocity… the very factors that my original research had been designed to quell. It was not a difficult thing, merely a matter of finding the proper chemical balance. And again we seemed to have reached a dead end. Again I was glad. In taking the obedience from them, I made them unmanageable.’
‘Then you were back where you started…’
‘Not quite. In one day, these men that controlled me, in one day those minds had realised a use for this… monstrosity.’
‘I can see none.’
‘Nor did I. But we are not like them. By this time, other scientists, scientists who thought like them, were working with me. They had access to all my material. It was one of those men who discovered that this state of mindless bloodlust could be transmitted from man to man, from host to victim. The chemicals that transfigured the mind ran rampant through the body. They infected the blood, the saliva… and could be transmitted, like any disease… like leprosy, like plague… but far, far more terrible. It was communicable madness.’
He put his hands to his face, dragging his fingers down his cheeks.
‘I still don’t see…’
‘No, you wouldn’t. I… again I protested. But by this time the work could have continued without me — or so I told myself, to justify what I did. And it was hideous. The first man we treated tore his eyes out. Obviously not a trait desirable in a soldier. We corrected that. We tested their aggression by putting them in a cage together.’ He closed his eyes, remembering what he had seen in those cages. ‘To find the proper balance, you see. They did not want these… ghouls, they call them… they did not want them to be so ferocious that they killed. That would have defeated their purpose…’
‘And that purpose was?’
Elston ignored me. He continued, ‘Like rabid dogs… that was the desirable condition… wounding and then leaving the victim alive, so that he, in turn, would become… one of them. The madness would spread by geometrical progression. I say madness, I might say bestiality… there is no term for them, really. Ghouls — they call them ghouls — they caused them to be created and then call them that. They are not cannibals, yet they would eat human flesh as any other… nor necrophagics, although they would devour a corpse… quite casually, these mindless things would devour… themselves.’ He paused for a few moments, head cocked as though listening for the echo of his words from amongst the vials and beakers. ‘But this is no more than a side-effect of their condition. They might just as well eat nothing and starve to death. A side effect, just as their fear of water. I could have removed that inhibition, of course. It was deemed wise to let it remain — a way to control them, surrounding them by water, confining them; useful on this island and later, in other places…’
‘What places, Doctor?’
Again he ignored me. ‘Well, it was done. I had regulated their fury to the proper degree. That fury was contagious. In the initial instance, when the disease is induced by injection, the time period between treatment and the onset of the violence can be regulated — that is, knowing the subject’s weight and metabolism, I can regulate the dosage, leaving the disease like a slow fuse within him. But when it is transmitted directly from man to man, with the disease at full virulence in the host, it will take effect within hours in the victim. This was just as they wished it; it suited their scheme.’
‘But what was that scheme?’ I asked.
He looked at me, his fingers still dragging at his cheeks, drawing the flesh down.
‘Their plan, Harland,’ he said. ‘Their plan was… to infect enemy prisoners of war!’
I saw it then. My flesh crawled.
‘They would be treated to go berserk in, say, a month’s time. Then allowed to escape, or be dealt in an exchange of prisoners, with the abomination smouldering in them. You can imagine the results. They laughed, those men… my masters… they laughed, thinking of a plague of ghouls behind the enemy lines. It would be most effective. The carriers would no doubt be killed, but not before inflicting wounds which would, in turn, create a second wave of monsters.’