I was indeed flabbergasted, and wondered just how he had done it-as well as keeping it all so secret. We thought we had achieved all that could be done in this particular field at A.E.L.
'Yes,' said Mac, 'your experts will hardly improve upon it. Charon I will have many uses, especially in the medical world. I won't go into any more details tonight, except to say that it is primarily connected with an experiment I'm working on which the Ministry knows nothing whatever about.'
He smiled, and here we go, I thought, now we're coming to the 'experiments of a dubious nature' which my chief had warned me about. I said nothing, and MacLean moved to a different installation.
'This,' he said, 'is what really concerns the government, and the military chaps in particular. You know, of course, that blast is difficult to control. An aeroplane breaking the sound barrier may shatter windows indiscriminately, but not one particular window, or one particular target. Charon 2 can do just that.' He crossed the room to a cabinet, took out a glass jar, and placed it on the working bench by the wall. Then he threw a switch on his second installation, and the glass shivered to fragments.
'Rather neat, don't you think?' said MacLean. 'But of course the point is the long-range use, should you wish to inflict serious damage on specific objects at a distance. I personally don't- blast doesn't interest me-but the Services would find it effective on occasion. It's just a case of a special method of transmission. But my particular concern is high-frequency response between individuals, and between people and animals. I'm keeping this quiet from my masters, who give me a grant.' He put his fingers on another control on the second installation. 'You won't see anything with this one,' he said. 'It's the call-note with which I control Cerberus. Human beings can't pick it up.'
We waited in silence, and a few minutes later I heard the sound of a dog scratching at the further door. MacLean let him in. 'All right. Good boy. Lie down.' He turned to me, smiling. 'Nothing really in that-he was only the other side of the building-but we've got him to obey orders from long distances. It could be quite useful in an emergency.' He glanced at his watch. 'I wonder if Mrs J. will forgive me,' he murmured. 'It's only a quarter-past nine after all. And I do so enjoy showing off.' His schoolboy grin was suddenly infectious.
'What are you going to do?' I asked.
Bring her small daughter to the telephone, or wake her up if she's asleep.'
He made another adjustment to the apparatus, and once again we waited. In about two minutes the telephone rang. MacLean crossed the room to answer it. 'Hullo'?' he said. 'Sorry, Mrs J. Just an experiment. I'm sorry if I've woken her up. Yes, put her on. Hullo, Niki. No, it's all right. You can go back to bed. Sleep tight.' He replaced the receiver, then bent down to pat Cerberus stretched at his feet.
'Children, like dogs, are particularly easy to train,' he said. 'Or put it this way-their sixth sense, the one that picks up these signals, is highly developed. Niki has her own call-note, just as Cerberus does, and the fact that she suffers from retarded development makes her an excellent subject.'
He patted his box of tricks in much the same fashion that he had patted his dog. Then he glanced up at me and smiled.
'Any questions?'
'Obviously,' I replied. 'The first being, what is the exact object of the exercise? Are you trying to prove that certain high-frequency signals have potentialities not only for destruction but also for controlling the receptive mechanism in an animal, and also the human brain?'
I forced a composure I was far from feeling. If these were the sort of experiments that were going on at Saxmere, small wonder the place had been shrugged aside as a crackpot's paradise.
MacLean looked at me thoughtfully. 'Of course Charon 2 could be said to prove exactly that,' he said, 'though this is not my intention. The Ministry may possibly be very disappointed in consequence. No, I personally am trying to tackle something more far-reaching.' He paused, then put his hand on my shoulder. 'We'll leave Charons 1 and 2 for tonight. Come outside for a breath of air.'
We left by the door which the dog had scratched at. It led to another corridor, and finally to an entrance at the back of the building. MacLean unbolted the door and I followed him through. The rain had ceased and the air was clean and cold, the sky brilliant with stars. In the distance, beyond the line of sand-dunes, I could hear the roar of sea breaking upon shingle.
MacLean inhaled deeply, his face turned seaward. Then he looked upward at the stars. I lit a cigarette and waited for him to speak.
'Have you any experience of poltergeists?' he asked.
'Things that go bump in the night?' I said. 'No, I can't say I have.' I offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head.
'What you watched just now,' said MacLean, 'the glass shivering to pieces, is the same thing. Electrical force, released. Mrs J. had trouble with crashing objects long before I developed Charon. Saucepans, and so on, hurling themselves about at the coastguard's cottage where they live. It was Niki, of course.'
I stared at him, incredulous. 'You mean the child?'
'Yes.'
He thrust his hands in his pockets and began pacing up and down. 'Naturally, she was quite unaware of the fact,' he continued. 'So were her parents. It was only psychic energy exploding, extra strong in her case because her brain is undeveloped, and since she is the only survivor of identical twins the force was doubled.'
This was rather too much to swallow, and I laughed. He swung round and faced me.
'Have you a better solution?' he asked.
'No,' I admitted, 'but surely…'
'Exactly,' he interrupted. 'Nobody ever has. There are hundreds, thousands of cases of these so-called phenomena, and almost every time they are reported there is evidence to show that a child, or someone who is regarded as of sub-standard intelligence, was in the locality at the time.' He resumed his walk and I beside him, the dog at our heels.
'So what?' I said.
'So that,' he went on, 'it suggests we all possess an untapped source of energy within us that awaits release. Call it, if you like, Force Six. It works in the same way as the high-frequency impulse which I released just now from Charon. Here is the explanation of telepathy, precognition, and all the so-called psychic mysteries. The power we develop in any electronic device is the same as the power that the Janus child possesses-with one difference, to date: we can control the one but not the other.'
I saw his meaning, but not where the discussion was leading us. God knows life is complicated enough without seeking to probe the unconscious forces that may lie dormant within man, especially if the connecting link must first be an animal, or an idiot child.
'All right,' I said, 'so you tap this Force Six, as you call it. Not only in Janus's daughter, but in all animals, in backward children, and finally in the human race. You have us breaking glasses, sending saucepans flying, exchanging messages by telepathic communication, and so on and so forth; but wouldn't it add immeasurably to our difficulties, so that we ended up in the complete chaos from which we presumably sprang?'
This time it was MacLean who laughed. Our walk had taken us to a ridge of high ground, and we were looking across the sand-dunes to the sea beyond. The long shingle beach seemed to stretch into eternity, as drear and featureless as the marsh behind it. The sea broke with a monotonous roar, sucking at the dragging stones, only to renew the effort and spend itself once more.
'No doubt it would,' he said, but that's not what I'm after. Man will find a proper use for Force Six in his own good time. I want to make it work for him after the body dies.'
I threw my cigarette on to the ground and watched it glow an instant before it flickered to a wet stub.
'What on earth do you mean?' I asked him.