Port Darwin—Guadacanal—Iwo Jima: close-ups of flame throwing tanks advancing up a ridge. He had commanded one of them.... Antlike human figures of fleeing Japs and the flames leaping at them.... So vivid was the memory that the smell returned to his nostrils, the sickening stench of burning human flesh. It tortured him. His voice was husky with revulsion as he said:
"What's the good of all this; take it away."
"Oh, no," one of the medics answered. "We couldn't think of that. We've got to see this to the end. What are your physical sensations now, Dr. Lee?"
"It's fingers now—soft fingers. They are tapping me from all sides like—like a vibration massage. It's strange though—they're tapping from the inside—little pneumatic hammers at a furious pace. They seem to work upon my diaphragm for a drum. But it doesn't pain."
"Good, very good; that was a fine description, Lee. That burning city was Manilla wasn't it, when MacArthur returned? You were in that second Philippine campaign too weren't you, Lee? That was when you won the Congressional Medal of Honor."
Yes, it was Manila all right, and there was Mindanao where the Japs had put up that suicide defence of the caves.
Lee's battalion had been in the attack; steeply uphill with no cover, it had been murder.... And seeing his best men mowed down, he had turned berserk. He had used a bulldozer for a battering ram, had driven it single handed directly into the fire-spitting mouth of the objective, raising its blade like a battle-axe. An avalanche of rocks and dirt had come down from the top of the cave under the artillery barrage and he had rammed the stuff down into the throat of the fiery dragon, again and again. He never rightly knew he did it. It had all ended in a blackout from loss of blood. It had been in a hospital that they pinned that medal on him which he felt was undeserved....
Now the reel showed him what at the time he hadn't seen; the end of the battle for the Philippines: Pulverised volcanic rock seen from the air, battle planes swooping down upon little fumaroles, the ventilator shafts of caves defeated but still unsurrendered. Big, plump canisters plummeted from the bellies of the planes. And then the jellied gasoline ignited, turning those thousands of lives trapped in the deep into one vast funeral pyre.... For over fifteen years he had tried to forget, to bury the war, to keep it jailed up in the dungeon of the subconscious. Now those accursed medics had unleashed the monster of war and as it stared at him from the screen it had that blood-freezing, that hypnotic effect which the Greeks once ascribed to the monstrous Gorgon.
Mellish's voice—or was it Bondy's?—seemed to come through a fog and over a vast distance as it asked: "What seems to be the matter, Lee? You're sweating, your body shakes; what do you feel?"
"It's those rays," he tried to defend himself. "It's the vibrations—the fingers. They are gripping the heart; it's like the whole body was turned into a heart. It's like another life invading mine—it's ghostly. Stop it, for heaven's sake."