Land Under England by Joseph O'Neill

Author:Joseph O'Neill [O'Neill, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General, Dystopian, Action & Adventure
ISBN: 9781473224070
Google: -GBbDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2018-06-27T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Mind-Murder

FOR FIVE MORE of their days they brought me around the schools, but the critical period had passed. Fear encompassed me, pressed in on me, but I was not at any time in serious danger of being overcome by it.

The understanding that had come to me on the second day had given me a psychological strength to meet it, and I walked amongst them much more securely.

It was clear now that their system had arisen from the deep fear of the darkness, and the forces of destruction and death that they dreaded in the darkness. Under the pressure of this fear they had gradually withdrawn themselves from ordinary life by putting away all thought and feeling about everything except the things that were needed to protect them.

When they had once entered on this downward course, the rest of their story was easy to understand. The system that had been created by their fear grew, until, in the end, it began to function for its own sake and to suppress, not merely irrelevant or unnecessary things, but all tendencies, emotions, actions, whether essential or not, so that it might control completely the social, mental, and emotional life of its people.

The driving-force behind it was the throb of this dread, the mass-hysteria of the race, that kept welling up through the ever-present darkness. It was that fear that had been encompassing me in the schools and in all their gatherings, calling to the dread and the hysteria that lay deep in the abysses of my subconscious mind, urging, compelling me to come into this shelter they had built, away from the storms and agonies of individuality.

This was the force on which the Master of Knowledge had counted to draw me into their orbit. It might have done so if I had been of a more sensitive, a less tough and resistant, fibre. It had failed, and, now that I had a rational attitude to it, as well as experience of its effects, it would have little chance of succeeding, unless other forces, of which I knew nothing, were brought into action.

If they were to get me, they would have to seize me through the attack of a powerful individual mind—a mind, like that of the Master of Knowledge, so overwhelming in its powers of concentration that I should not be able to resist.

That attack was coming. The Master had left me in little doubt about it.

At the end of my respite I should have to meet the assault of his mind, and that might mean either madness or death.

The alternative was absorption, and I felt that, if I were driven to it, I should certainly choose death rather than live as an automaton.

If only I could find my father, I felt that I should make some headway in my struggle to rescue him and myself from this peril, but, although every hour that passed was bringing the end of my respite nearer, I was making no progress in my quest.

During the

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