The cause being the
Prisoner’s apparent resignation. The effect being his subsequent abduction to
The Village. The effect in this case is clear, the cause being not so clear. It
is easy to understand the cause if it was the resignation, and yet prior
to that, and perhaps for some considerable time, the Prisoner had been under
close surveillance. The surveillance was caused by something else. It might
have been that the Prisoner had become suspect of something. He may have been
acting differently, which had been caused by the kind of work the Prisoner had
been carrying out. Even thinking about chucking a job in can have the effect of
causing one to behave differently. The fact of the matter is we know the
effect, but cannot be certain of the cause. The act of the Prisoner resigning
his job could simply have been coincidental. He had been under close
surveillance, by whom, his own people, why? The other side? Possibly, as he
would have information which would be valuable to them. And that’s a good
enough reason for his own people to protect that information, and have the
Prisoner placed in The Village of their own! And yet there could be another
cause, Seltzman, Professor Jacob Seltzman. One side, both sides, either side
had been looking for Seltzman. And it was just about the time of the Prisoner’s
abduction to The Village that he deposited a roll of film with the proprietor
of the Wold Camera photographic shop. The receipt for which he left with his
fianceé Janet Portland, and so only the Prisoner knew where Seltzman was. It
seems apparent that he was protecting Seltzman from both sides. Did the
Prisoner not once tell Number 2 that the trouble with science is that it can be
perverted. Perhaps the Prisoner could see that Professor Seltzman’s mind
transference process could be perverted in the way it had already been by
scientists and technicians in The Village.
Cause and effect. Whether or not the cause of the Prisoner’s
resignation was to do with Seltzman is clearly impossible to say, the effect of
that being, we can only theorise and speculate.
Be seeing you
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