Now at last I must make this accusation and disclose the truth.
I make it with the hard realization of the dangers that are inherent
for us all. I make it knowing that these risks have terrified those
whom we chose to govern us, and I make it only because their terror has
paralyzed their minds. And you and I--the world as we know it--cannot
wait any longer.
We must not underestimate these risks. We take the chance of losing
everything that mankind has accomplished in the tens of thousands of
years since our first ancestor shed his tail and rose erect and walked
in the full consciousness that he, alone of all God's creatures, had a
soul.
But it is a risk we must take. We must take it now, while there is
still time, or we condemn our world--the countless billions of Europe
and Asia and Africa--forever to our chronic agonies of hunger and
disease, which I now know are needless.
Between what we stand to lose and what it is possible to achieve, if we
act wisely and in time, there is a middle course which means freedom
from starvation and pestilence. The truth is that we need fear only our
greed. If we can content ourselves with enough, and not insist upon
too much, if we act with iron resolution in this immediate future, we
can revivify our static history. The facts as I know them convince me
of this, and more to the point, they have convinced far abler minds,
although not those of the World Council of Nations, which in the final
analysis means the Twelve Old Men of Geneva. It is their minds which
you and I must now convince. Or we must set the Twelve Old Men aside.
And so I am compelled before the bar of public opinion to accuse these
Twelve Old Men. It was they alone, acting in secrecy, who ordered that
the sensational O'Hara Report be buried deep within the archives of
the International Patrol at Geneva, never--they thought--to be made
public. They have buried the Report and they have attempted to blot out
even the vague rumor that it did exist. Those few who actually read
it, the officials at Croydon Airport here in London who first received
it and sent it sealed upon its way to Geneva, have been transferred to
the more remote corners of the earth, never two of them together and
none of them knowing where the other is. Not more than a fraction of
the upper hierarchy in government has even heard of the Report and that
fraction has gone and will continue to go to extreme lengths to prevent
inquiries concerning it. It is the greatest hush-hush document of all
time.
But within hours of its receipt at Croydon, I, Arthur Blair, obtained
a first-hand summary of the Report. For reasons which will become
obvious I was ordered by my paper, the _Observer_, to obtain the text
of it, and for reasons which were even more imperative to me I sought
to do it. I went at once to Croydon, where I was rewarded only by blank
and noncommittal stares, as if I were inquiring after the secrets of
the fourth dimension or the precise geographical location of the lost
continent of Mu.
I did not resent that attitude. I had expected it. But what I did not
anticipate was the reaction of the Twelve Old Men. I was in Paris, on
my way to Geneva, before I realized how far they meant to go to silence
me. The warning was delivered by a small, clean-shaven little man in a
business suit who called while I was absent from my hotel room. When I
returned, he smilingly assured me that he had no interest in me--the
condition of my luggage proved him a liar--and in the next breath told
me that my chance of leaving Paris alive, if my direction was Geneva,
was less than zero.
The little man in the business suit impressed me. A more oblique
approach and possibly some short cuts were indicated. In consequence I
went from Paris quite openly to the resort of Trieste. I spent three
weeks there, as obviously "resorting" as I could, until the night I
chose for departing aboard a chartered fishing boat that landed me
eventually at Salonika.
An old acquaintance of mine at Salonika, an incurable romantic,
suspecting me of extraordinary journalism--a missing blonde,
perhaps--provided me with what I asked, a private plane for the
Prefecture of Turkey.
That plane was shot down two minutes after leaving Salonika. I
happened not to be aboard it, although my labeled luggage was. I had
the satisfaction of reading an account of my accidental death in the
Istanbul press when I arrived there two days later.
I felt certain that I had thrown off any pursuit and that I could now
proceed safely direct to Geneva. You may imagine my concern when my
host in Istanbul, who knew me only by a pen name I had used obscurely
years before, offered me my morning coffee and then sipped his own, and
immediately keeled over.
A charge of murdering my host was subsequently filed against me. That
charge is outstanding today. I do not doubt the evidence is there to
convict me, manufactured evidence, were I located and returned to the
Prefecture of Turkey.
But I have no intention of being located until the world knows what I
have to tell. I had no such intention from the moment I saw my host's
complexion changing to that ugly blue that goes with cyanic poisoning.
And before the spittle upon his writhing lips was dry--it was intended
that they should have been my lips--I had disappeared again.
All this scrambling is a personal matter, an adventure I suppose, of
no importance save to those who befriended me. Some of them are dead
and beyond the dangerously long arm of the World Council's Bureau of
Security. Some of them are not dead or aware that they ran the risk of
death, for I did not share the purpose of my frantic journey home. Yet
I cannot--I dare not--trace any further the slow zigzagging pattern by
which I returned to London.
My journey was a failure. I did not get the text of the O'Hara Report.
I am never going to get it, for the august authority which decreed
my persecution has consigned it to oblivion. That authority was
unquestionably the Twelve Old Men.
Yes, theirs must be this terrible responsibility. Theirs alone must be
the blame if future generations of our world are doomed so needlessly
to subhuman levels. It is they who have decided--unless we can break
through the lethargy of hypercautious minds--that in this year of A.D.
2230, more than two hundred and eighty-five years after the first
splitting of the atom, the Sahara must still remain the Sahara, a
vast wasteland capable of feeding all our starving and multiplying
billions were only water made available. It is they who decree by
their conspiracy of silence that the deserts of Australia and Arabia
and China are as parched today, and the tundras of Siberia as utterly
fruitless, as they were in the years before the miracle of Los Alamos.
It is they, these dread-chilled Twelve Old Men, who are insisting that
the Western Hemisphere, which at one time seemed destined to redeem us
all from want, must remain for further centuries a whispered mystery
behind its impenetrable Atomic Curtain.
Why are they doing this to us? Why were they so determined that I
must be silenced? Are they brutal men, incapable of understanding how
our billions suffer? No, the answers are not so simple. Their minds
grope vague through the twilight world of doubt and fear, for they do
not trust us--by their very natures they cannot trust us--to guide
ourselves according to the facts laid down in the O'Hara Report.
But I insist that the people must know these facts. The people must get
the truth--as I got the truth--from Emmett O'Hara himself.
Yes, I got the truth from Emmett O'Hara himself, soon after he filed
at Croydon the text of his astonishing Report. That is why my life
is at forfeit--not that the Twelve Old Men are sure I know, but they
suspect it. They are capable at least of decision in one respect, they
will do anything to preserve the status quo. But they are panicked
at the possibilities that Emmett O'Hara has brought back to us. They
cannot bring themselves, these doubting old men, to believe that he is
acting in the interests of both our world and that which lies behind
the Atomic Curtain, the fabled Western Hemisphere. And they will never
accept, unless we force them--and there is almost no time left to do it
now--the offer that O'Hara brought to us.
That offer will come to us formally, and we will have to act on it at
once, at any moment in these next few days. And I pledge you this, that
if we accept, our world begins to live again. And theirs.
I wish for your peace of mind that I could tell you precisely what has
happened to O'Hara and that magnificent creature whom he introduced
to me as his wife. And she was his wife, I think. Certainly she was
his woman, bound to him by all the custom of that strange society from
which she came. And if O'Hara had the time, in the brief interval
between the filing of his Report and his abrupt and traceless
disappearance, I would like to think that he further complied with the
laws under which he was born and reared, although I know it would not
have mattered to anyone except myself--O'Hara would not have cared. And
she would not have given a snap of her exquisite and completely capable
fingers. What could possibly have seemed of value in our conventions
to those two? When you know what they knew--or at least what O'Hara
knew--when you have experienced the nadir of disillusion and the zenith
of human living, what could seem of essential value except the savor of
the next moment's breath?
As I say, O'Hara vanished. He filed this Report of his in London at
four o'clock on the afternoon of his return, which was the day after
Christmas. He immediately went to his old flat in Bloomsbury from which
he telephoned to me at the _Observer_, and at six o'clock I dined
with him. By eight o'clock I had heard from him the substance of his
Report. It was then that I met his wife, if wife she was.
At eight-fifteen I left them, and went immediately to the _Observer_,
where for two hours I was in conference with the Editorial Director,
Edgar Soames, who told me that the story could not be published without
the complete documentation of the text. The _Observer_, as Soames
pointed out, had its reputation as a journal of fact to remember and
not even the paramount importance of my story could be permitted to
override that.
Very well, documentation. I returned to O'Hara's flat in Bloomsbury by
eleven o'clock. O'Hara was not there, or was that splendid red-haired
creature who--well, they were gone, and their few belongings were gone,
and the flat itself, so I was told repeatedly by the manager of the
properties, had not been occupied at all for the past three years.
Surely I was mistaken--O'Hara? Never heard of an Emmett O'Hara!
No, the manager had never heard of an Emmett O'Hara. And neither, I
soon discovered, had anyone else. He seemed to be a delusion I had
suffered. I had spent those two hours listening to his amazing Report,
and there had never been such an O'Hara in the International Patrol
and the letters that I had earlier received from him had never been
written. Or they were forgeries, perhaps--yellow journalism!
Someone had moved very swiftly. But whether it was O'Hara himself, or
whether it was the Bureau of Security, I could not determine. It is
essential for me--and the rest of us--in this hour of imminent crisis
to rely upon faith in his indomitable skill and courage, and to believe
he managed his escape. Although he had had his luck twice over.
That was a phrase that O'Hara used himself. "I have had my luck twice
over," he told me, and then he laughed, that deep roar of mirth that I
remembered from our school days together.
"Twice over?" I answered. "A thousand times, I should say."
"I don't mean this business I've been telling you," O'Hara said. "Or
rather, not the hazard of death. Although," he smiled, "there is the
hazard of death in this part of it too. Will you come into the next
room, I want you to see Nedra."
"Nedra?"
"Yes," he said. "Nedra. You didn't think I'd leave her there?"