Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [30]
'I am the Lord thy God and thou shalt worship no other God before me?' he queried.
'Yes, well, we all like to be at the centre of everyone's attention, don't we? It's only natural.'
He indicated that I should sit, which I did. I was still trying, without much success, to determine whether he was merely a fast-talking and rather eccentric lunatic with a silly messiah complex or something infinitely more dangerous. Again, I looked at the bell jar, and that helped me to reach my decision far more quickly than I should have liked.
'Part of the process you've perfected?' I asked.
Osbourne smiled at me. An odious, calculated, self-satisfied little grin. 'The final part of the process,' he announced proudly. 'The culmination of a seismic and unstoppable chain reaction. It does this.' The scientist leaned over to the nearest tangle of wires and circuitry and flicked a triggerswitch. The instrumentation hummed into action as, across the room, the metronome began to tick hypnotically backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.
Coils whirred, spools of magnetic tape looped and sang, electricity flowed through valves in the makeshift particle accelerator, which spluttered to life like a bronchial old man rising unwillingly from a deep sleep. An electric current connected with the jar, which began to hum softly and glow a faint translucent yellow. 'Behold,' said Osbourne like a conjurer producing the Ace of Spades from up his sleeve to a startled audience, 'the miracle of the resurrection. This, what happens now, is the
really impressive bit.'
The glass glowed brightly and I could see the ghosts within it, pressed against the glass, tormented faces sealed in miniature. Trapped within the confines of the jar. Their suffering was, I imagined, almost unimaginable.
For the universe runs on such contradictions as this and lots more besides.
Osbourne was talking, now, of the specifics of his theories and of the possibilities of time displacement for practical and recreational use. Replacing television with a device that enabled one to see, in one's own living room and at the flick of a switch, the Crusades or the Crimean War or, even better, events yet to come. But his manic bleating held no real interest for me. All I could focus on was what terrible things were going on within the bell jar.
I reflected then that some people do terrible things to others because they have been the victims of traumatic, life-changing events in their own lives, and this has warped their morality. Or, they do terrible things to try to understand the process that makes others do such deeds in the, usually mistaken, belief that such understanding will as a matter of course make the world a better place. Some people blame their environment or the circumstances of their early lives for making them the way that they are; and, in the final analysis, there may be something to be said for each being a contributory factor. Still others do the things that they do as an intellectual exercise, as part of a game they play with their own rationality. It's a tough world, the argument goes, and you've got to be tough in it.
But there are some people who, simply, do terrible, wicked things to others because they like doing them.
'That's why I'm going to America, do you see?' he chattered on. 'They're reasonable people, they're absolutely loaded and they appreciate genius. They've got the sun and they've got the palm trees. I mean, I could have stayed in London, of course. If only those fools at the Ministry had actually been interested in something other than new uses for toxic nerve gas or how to get radium to power television sets or whatever nonsense they want from us this week. Well, I ask you ...' He shook his head in annoyance. 'I could have built my time visualiser there and marketed it. "Watch your own future from the comfort of your armchair!" Companies were interested.