There is another yelp of command from the Marshalissimos. Among the booted apes in charge of either army’s supply of Genius there is a violent cracking of whips, a tugging of leashes.
Close shot of the Einsteins as they try to resist.
«No, no. . . I can’t.»
«I tell you I can’t.»
«Disloyal!»
«Unpatriotic!»
«Filthy Communist!»
«Stinking bourgeois-Fascist!»
«Red Imperialist!»
«Capitalist-Monopolist!»
«Take that!»
«Take that!»
Kicked, whipped, half throttled, each of the Einsteins is finally dragged toward a kind of sentry box. Inside these boxes are instrument boards with dials, knobs and switches.
NARRATOR
Surely it’s obvious.
Doesn’t every schoolboy know it?
Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man’s.
Papio’s procurer, bursar to baboons,
Reason comes running, eager to ratify;
Comes, a catch-fart, with Philosophy, truckling to tyrants;
Comes, a pimp for Prussia, with Hegel’s Patent History;
Comes with Medicine to administer the Ape-King’s aphrodisiac;
Comes, rhyming and with Pihetoric, to write his orations;
Comes with the Calculus to aim his rockets
Accurately at the orphanage across the ocean;
Comes, having aimed, with incense to impetrate
Our Lady devoutly for a direct hit.
The brass bands give place to the most glutinous of Wurlitzers, «Land of Hope and Glory» to «Onward, Christian Soldiers.» Followed by his very Reverend Dean and Chapter, the Right Reverend, the Baboon-Bishop of the Bronx advances majestic, his crozier in his jewelled paw, to pronounce benediction upon the two Field Marshalissimos and their patriotic proceedings.
NARRATOR
Church and State
Greed and Hate: —
Two Baboon-Persons in one Supreme Gorilla.
OMNES
Amen, amen.
THE BISHOP
In nomine Babuini. . . .
On the sound-track it is all vox humana and the angel voices of choristers.
«With the (dim) Cross of (pp) Jesus, (ff) going on before.»
Huge paws hoist the Einsteins to their feet and, in a close-up, seize their wrists. Ape-guided, those fingers, which have written equations and played the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, close on the master switches and, with a horrified reluctance, slowly press them down. There is a little click, then a long silence which is broken at last by the voice of the Narrator.
NARRATOR
Even at supersonic speeds the missiles will take an appreciable time to reach their destination. So what do you say, boys, to a spot of breakfast while we’re waiting for our Last Judgment!
The apes open their haversacks, throw some bread, a few carrots and two or three lumps of sugar to the Einsteins, then fall to themselves on rum and Bologna sausage.
We dissolve to the deck of the schooner, where the scientists of the Rediscovery Expedition are also breakfasting.
NARRATOR
And these are some of the survivors of that Judgment. Such nice people! And the civilization they represent — that’s nice too. Nothing very exciting or spectacular of course. No Parthenons or Sistine Chapels, no Newtons or Mozarts or Shakespeares; but also no Ezzelinos, no Napoleons or Hitlers or Jay Goulds, no Inquisitions or NKVD’s, no purges, pogroms or lynchings. No heights or abysses, but plenty of milk for the kids, and a reasonably high average IQ, and everything, in a quiet provincial way, thoroughly cosy and sensible and humane.
One of the men raises his binoculars and peers at the shore, now only a mile or two distant. Suddenly he utters an exclamation of delighted astonishment.
«Look!» He hands the glasses to one of his companions. «On the crest of the hill.»
The other looks.
Telescopic shot of low hills. On the highest point of the ridge, three oil derricks stand silhouetted against the sky, like the equipment of a modernised and more efficient Calvary.
«Oil!» cries the second observer excitedly. «And the derricks are still standing.»
«Still standing?»
There is general astonishment.
«That means,» says old Professor Craigie, the geologist, «that there can’t have been much of an explosion hereabouts.»
«But you don’t have to have explosions,» explains his colleague from the Department of Nuclear Physics. «Radioactive gases do the job just as effectively and over much wider areas.»
«You seem to forget the bacteria and the viruses,» puts in Professor Grampian, the biologist. His tone is that of a man who feels that he has been slighted.
His young wife, who is only an anthropologist and so has nothing to contribute to the argument, contents herself with glaring angrily at the physicist.
Athletic in tweeds, but at the same time brightly intelligent behind her horn-rimmed glasses, Miss Ethel Hook, of the Department of Botany, reminds them that there was, almost certainly, a widespread employment of plant diseases. She turns for confirmation of what she says to her colleague, Dr. Poole, who nods approvingly.
«Diseases of food plants,» he says in his professorial manner, «would have a long-range effect hardly less decisive than that produced by fissionable material or artificially induced pandemics. Consider, for example, the potato. . .»
«But why bother about any of this fancy stuff?» bluffly booms the engineer of the party, Dr. Cudworth. «Cut the aqueducts, and it’s all over in a week. No drinky, no livey.» Delighted by his own joke, he laughs enormously.
Meanwhile Dr. Schneeglock, the psychologist, sits listening with a smile of hardly disguised contempt.
«But why even bother about aqueducts?» he asks. «All you need do is just to threaten your neighbour with any of the weapons of mass destruction. Their own panic will do the rest. Remember what the psychological treatment did to New York, for example. The short-wave broadcasts from overseas, the headlines in the evening papers. And immediately there were eight millions of people trampling one another to death on the bridges and in the tunnels. And the survivors scattered through the countryside, like locusts, like a horde of plague-infected rats. Fouling the water supply. Spreading typhoid and diphtheria and venereal disease.
Biting, clawing, looting, murdering, raping. Feeding on dead dogs and the corpses of children. Shot at sight by the farmers, bludgeoned by the police, machine-gunned by the State Guard, strung up by the Vigilantes. And the same thing was happening in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington; in London, in Paris; in Bombay and Shanghai and Tokyo; in Moscow, in Kiev, in Stalingrad; in every capital, every manufacturing centre, every port, every railway junction, all over the world. Not a shot had been fired and civilization was already in ruins. Why the soldiers ever found it necessary to use their bombs, I really can’t imagine.»
NARRATOR
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. What remains is the dumb or studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the obscene Presence in the corner of the room and knows that the door is locked, that there aren’t any windows. And now the thing bears down on him. He feels a hand on his sleeve, smells a stinking breath, as the executioner’s assistant leans almost amorously toward him. «Your turn next, brother. Kindly step this way.» And in an instant his quiet terror is transmuted into a frenzy as violent as it is futile. There is no longer a man among his fellow men, no longer a rational being speaking articulately to other rational beings; there is only a lacerated animal, screaming and struggling in the trap. For in the end fear casts out even a man’s humanity.
And fear, my good friends, fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life. Fear of the much touted technology which, while it raises our standard of living, increases the probability of our violently dying. Fear of the science which takes away with one hand even more than what it so profusely gives with the other. Fear of the demonstrably fatal institutions for which, in our suicidal loyalty, we are ready to kill and die. Fear of the Great Men whom we have raised, by popular acclaim, to a power which they use, inevitably, to murder and enslave us. Fear of the War we don’t want and yet do everything we can to bring about.
As the Narrator speaks, we dissolve to the alfresco picnic of the baboons and their captive Einsteins. They eat and drink, with gusto, while the first two bars of «Onward Christian Soldiers» are repeated again and again, faster and faster, louder and louder. Suddenly the music is interrupted by the first of a succession of enormous explosions. Darkness. A long-drawn, deafening noise of crashing, rending, screaming, moaning. Then silence and increasing light, and once again it is the hour before sunrise, with the morning star and the delicate, pure music.
NARRATOR
Beauty inexpressible, peace beyond understanding. . .
Far off, from below the horizon, a column of rosy smoke pushes up into the sky, swells out into the likeness of an enormous toadstool and hangs there, eclipsing the solitary planet.
We dissolve again to the scene of the picnic. The baboons are all dead. Horribly disfigured by burns, the two Einsteins lie side by side under what remains of a flowering apple tree. Not far off a pressure tank is still oozing its Improved Glanders.
FIRST EINSTEIN
It’s unjust, it isn’t right. . .
SECOND EINSTEIN
We, who never did any harm to anybody;
FIRST EINSTEIN
We, who lived only for Truth.
NARRATOR
And that precisely is why you are dying in the murderous service of baboons. Pascal explained it all more than three hundred years ago. «We make an idol of truth; for truth without charity is
