The Arch-Vicar shakes his head.
«I don’t know anything that’s been published after the Thing,» he answers curtly.
«But how stupid of me!» cries Dr. Poole, regretting, as so often in the past, that gushing loquacity with which he overcompensates a shyness that, left to itself, would reduce him almost to speechlessness.
«But I’ve read quite a bit of the stuff that came out before,» the Arch-Vicar continues. «They had some pretty good libraries here in Southern California. Mined out now, for the most part. In future, I’m afraid, well have to go further afield for our fuel. But meanwhile we’ve baked our bread and I’ve managed to save three or four thousand volumes for our Seminary.»
«Like the Church in the Dark Ages,» says Dr. Poole with cultured enthusiasm. «Civilization has no better friend than religion. That’s what my agnostic friends will never. . .» Suddenly remembering that the tenets of that Church were not quite the same as those professed by this, he breaks off and, to hide his embarrassment, takes a long pull at his bottle.
But fortunately the Arch-Vicar is too much preoccupied with his own ideas to take offence at the faux pas or even to notice it.
«As I read history,» he says, «it’s like this. Man pitting himself against Nature, the Ego against the Order of Things, Belial» (a perfunctory sign of the horns) «against the Other One. For a hundred thousand years or so the battle’s entirely indecisive. Then, three centuries ago, almost overnight the tide starts to run uninterruptedly in one direction. Have another of these pig’s feet, won’t you?»
Dr. Poole helps himself to his second, while the other begins his third.
«Slowly at first, then with gathering momentum, man begins to make headway against the Order of Things.» The Arch-Vicar pauses for a moment to spit out a piece of cartilage. «With more and more of the human race falling into line behind him, the Lord of Flies, who is also the Blowfly in every individual heart, inaugurates his triumphal march across a world, of which he will so soon become the undisputed Master.»
Carried away by his own shrill eloquence and forgetting for a moment that he is not in the pulpit of St. Azazel’s, the Arch-Vicar makes a sweeping gesture. The trotter falls off his fork. With a good-humoured laugh at his own expense, he picks it up from the floor, wipes it on the sleeve of his goat-skin cassock, takes another bite and continues.
«It began with machines and the first grain ships from the New World. Food for the hungry and a burden lifted from men’s shoulders. ‘Oh God, we thank Thee for all the blessings which in Thy Bounty. . .’ Etcetera etcetera.» The Arch-Vicar laughs derisively. «Needless to say nobody ever gets anything for nothing. God’s bounties have their price, and Belial always sees that it’s a stiff one. Take those machines, for example. Belial knew perfectly well that, in finding a little alleviation from toil, flesh would be subordinated to iron and mind would be made the slave of wheels. He knew that if a machine is foolproof, it must also be skillproof, talentproof, inspirationproof. Your money back if the product should be faulty, and twice your money back if you can find in it the smallest trace of genius or individuality! And then there was that good food from the New World. ‘Oh God, we thank Thee. . .’ But Belial knew that feeding means breeding. In the old days, when people made love, they merely increased the infantile mortality rate and lowered the expectation of life. But after the coming of the food ships, it was different. Copulation resulted in population — with a vengeance!»
Once again the Arch-Vicar utters his shrill laugh.
Dissolve to a shot through a powerful microscope of spermatozoa frantically straggling to reach their Final End, the vast moonlike ovum in the top left-hand corner of the slide. On the sound track we hear the tenor voice in the last movement of Liszt’s Faust Symphony: La femme eternelle toujours nous eleve. La femme eternelle toufours . . . Cut to an aerial view of London in 1800. Then back to the Darwinian race for survival and self-perpetuation. Then to a view of London in 1900 — and again to the spermatozoa — and again to London, as the German airmen saw it in 1940. Dissolve to a close shot of the Arch-Vicar.
» ‘Oh God,’ » he intones in the slightly tremulous voice that is always considered appropriate to such utterances, » ‘we thank Thee for all these immortal souls.'» Then, changing his tone, «These immortal souls,» he goes on, «lodged in bodies that grow progressively sicklier, scabbier, scrubbier, year after year, as all the things foreseen by Belial inevitably come to pass. The overcrowding of the planet. Five hundred, eight hundred, sometimes as many as two thousand people to a square mile of food-producing land — and the land in process of being ruined by bad farming. Everywhere erosion, everywhere the leaching out of minerals.
And the deserts spreading, the forests dwindling. Even in America, even in that New World, which was once the hope of the Old. Up goes the spiral of industry, down goes the spiral of soil fertility. Bigger and better, richer and more powerful — and then almost suddenly, hungrier and hungrier. Yes, Belial foresaw it all — the passage from hunger to imported food, from imported food to booming population and from booming population back to hunger again. Back to hunger. The New Hunger, the Higher Hunger, the hunger of enormous industrialised proletariats, the hunger of city dwellers with money, with all the modern conveniences, with cars and radios and every imaginable gadget, the hunger that is the cause of total wars and the total wars that are the cause of yet more hunger.»
The Arch-Vicar pauses to take another swig from his bottle.
«And remember this,» he adds: «even without synthetic glanders, even without the atomic bomb, Belial could have achieved all His purposes. A little more slowly, perhaps, but just as surely, men would have destroyed themselves by destroying the world they lived in. They couldn’t escape. He had them skewered on both His horns. If they managed to wriggle off the horn of total war, they would find themselves impaled on starvation. And if they were starving, they would be tempted to resort to war. And just in case they should try to find a peaceful and rational way out of their dilemma, He had another subtler horn of self-destruction all ready for them. From the very beginning of the industrial revolution He foresaw that men would be made so over-weeningly bumptious by the miracles of their own technology that they would soon lose all sense of reality.
And that’s precisely what happened. These wretched slaves of wheels and ledgers began to congratulate themselves on being the Conquerors of Nature. Conquerors of Nature, indeed! In actual fact, of course, they had merely upset the equilibrium of Nature and were about to suffer the consequences. Just consider what they were up to during the century and a half before the Thing. Fouling the rivers, killing off the wild animals, destroying the forests, washing the topsoil into the sea, burning up an ocean of petroleum, squandering the minerals it had taken the whole of geological time to deposit. An orgy of criminal imbecility. And they called it Progress. Progress,» he repeats, «Progress! I tell you, that was too rare an invention to have been the product of any merely human mind — too fiendishly ironical! There had to be Outside Help for that. There had to be the Grace of Belial, which, of course, is always forthcoming — that is, for anyone who’s prepared to cooperate with it. And who isn’t?»
«Who isn’t?» Dr. Poole repeats with a giggle; for he feels that he has to make up somehow for his mistake about the Church in the Dark Ages.
«Progress and Nationalism — those were the two great ideas He put into their heads. Progress — the theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in one field without paying for your gain in another; the theory that you alone understand the meaning of history; the theory that you know what’s going to happen fifty years from now; the theory that, in the teeth of all experience, you can foresee all the consequences of your present actions; the theory that Utopia lies just ahead and that, since ideal ends justify the most abominable means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave and murder all those who, in your opinion (which is, by definition, infallible), obstruct the onward march to the earthly paradise. Remember that phrase of Karl Marx’s: ‘Force is the midwife of Progress.’
He might have added — but of course Belial didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag at that early stage of the proceedings — that Progress is the midwife of Force. Doubly the midwife, for the fact of technological progress provides people with the instruments of ever more indiscriminate destruction, while the myth of political and moral progress serves as the excuse for using those means to the very limit. I tell you, my dear sir, an undevout historian is mad. The longer you study modern history, the more evidence you find
