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The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s
Brian Aldiss


Volume one takes us from his very first story – A Book in Time, published in The Bookseller in 1954 and never seen again until now – right up to his establishment as a major new voice in science fiction by the end of that decade.As he enters his 89th year this is a long-overdue retrospective of the career of one of the most acclaimed science fiction writers of all time, and a true literary legend.This ebook was updated on 6 October 2014 to include three stories missing from the earlier version.









The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s

BY BRIAN ALDISS








The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2013

Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2013

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013

Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007482085

Ebook Edition © August 2013 ISBN: 9780007482092

Version: 2014-10-03


We are indebted to the following individuals who provided rare source materials: Jim Linwood, Richard Fidczuk and Phil Stephensen-Payne.




Contents


Title Page (#u7affc8fa-e422-5cd7-a7df-270c3aa15bb7)

Copyright (#u77e4c8d2-849b-59c4-b201-4539d00bf793)

Dedication (#u9f40cd0d-6c57-5bec-a922-5c4f3cd11e4e)

A Book in Time

Criminal Record

Breathing Space

The Great Time Hiccup

Not for an Age

Our Kind of Knowledge

Outside

Panel Game

Pogsmith

Conviction

Dumb Show

The Failed Men

Non-Stop

Psyclops

T

There is a Tide

Tradesman’s Exit

With Esmond in Mind

The Flowers of the Forest

Gesture of Farewell

The Ice Mass Cometh

Let’s Be Frank

No Gimmick

The War Millennia

The Sterile Millennia

The Dark Millennia

The Ultimate Millennia

The Shubshub Race

Supercity

Judas Danced

Ten-Storey Jigsaw

The Pit My Parish

Blighted Profile

Who Can Replace A Man?

The Carp That Once …

Carrion Country

Equator

Fourth Factor

The Megalopolis Millennia

The Star Millennia

The Mutant Millennia

The New Father Christmas

Ninian’s Experiences

Poor Little Warrior!

Sector Diamond

Sight of a Silhouette

They Shall Inherit

Are You An Android?

The Arm

The Bomb-Proof Bomb

Fortune’s Fool

Intangibles, Inc.

Sector Yellow

The Lieutenant

The Other One

Safety Valve

The Towers of San Ampa

Three’s a Cloud

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher




A Book in Time (#ua815ad74-2779-5bdb-b562-676a2205949e)


I was browsing in Albert’s, down Cecil Court, when I saw another customer slipping books under his coat. Indignation high, I made a grab at him, but he had seen my glance and was out of the shop before you could say ‘Limited signed edition’.

I followed hot-foot (crepes always do that to me). Luckily, he did not run far. He had something that looked to my wild glance like a car, hidden behind a pile of crates in a hotel yard. As I jumped on to the running board, I realised it was a queer make. It had no steering wheel, no driving wheels. A publisher? The wild thought flashed through my head, and then my quarry at the dashboard flipped a lever …

London was gone! At least, the old one had disappeared. It simply blurred and vanished, and a new one of smooth stone and metal took its place. We seemed not to have moved. I was bowled over; indeed, when the fugitive opened his door, I was knocked over.

‘Never impede a passing time machine,’ he said, helping me up.

‘Time machine?’ I queried. Could that really be the hideous explanation of the strangeness around about me?

‘What year is this?’ I asked.

‘2054,’ he said.

‘You’re sure your watch isn’t fast?’

‘Look friend, I’ve got no time for jokes. I’ve got just an hour off duty to snatch some lunch, and then I must be back into the past again. Goodbye.’

By the time I had come out of the nearest thing a non-yogi gets to a trance, he had gone. I was stranded a century into the future! To think that a love of law and order should result in this, when I had only meant to pop out of the bank for five minutes. And what would they say there if I did not return? ‘He said he’d be back in no time.’ How right they were!

Abruptly my misery vanished. My time traveller had said he was coming back in an hour! Then I was saved – I had an hour, just an hour, to look around in. Immediately I was filled with a thousand curiosities, but I knew there was time to gratify only one.

What to do? Go to the bank and check if I ever got on to the board? Slip into the nearest library and look up racing records, so that I could be sure of winning the 1954–64 Derbys? Have a peep into the Tate and see if anyone ever got round to enjoying Picasso? Or just stand and talk to someone, anyone, in the street, and see what changes, if any, human nature had undergone?

I stood there blankly, uncertain of my strange surroundings. Perhaps the bank, the library, the Tate had all long since gone. I tried to think of somewhere that would beyond doubt still be in existence.

I hailed a passer-by in blue nylon.

‘Foyles?’ I prompted.

He pointed up the street. ‘Ruddy bookworm,’ he muttered. Evidently human nature was much the same.

So was Foyles. My heart beat excitedly as I passed the robot doorman searching outgoing customers. Eagerly, I ran from counter to counter.

Book fashions had altered surprisingly little. Although novels were mainly royal octavo and technical books demy 16mo in two volumes, they were still printed on nothing more exotic than paper.

Good paper, too (there was no war on, obviously!). Even the same dear old typefaces greeted me, although I spotted a new letter in the alphabet, a cross between an ‘a’ and a ‘y’.

The Collected Works of Angus Wilson in 22 volumes hypnotised me. It cost nine poundels. Alas, I had no poundels! My eyes floated over novel titles. His Dear Dead Body, In What Mad Ecstasy? Too Soon the Plebiscite. Not much change there …

Dust jacket art was impressive. Nearly every one looked fit for framing, to my bulging eyes. I glanced at a blurb. ‘This absorbing account of the ages when our ancestors travelled by railway trains holds the reader in an iron track all its own. Every chapter sizzles with steamy excitement – not a sleeper among them. Once you pick up this saga of a man who commuted …’ I dropped it, plus ça change …

But the quote came from the Mirror Literary Supplement. What fantastic revolution in taste did that denote?

Even more tantalising were the technical books. Teach Yourself Astrogravitics – there was a counter full of that. Current bestsellers: Third-Stage Mutation, published by Harwell University. Cybernetics in the Home, Through the Time Barrier and Lunar Fungi and Quasi-grasses. And what were Venusian Calatapods?

Many publishers’ names were new, although most of the old ones still seemed to be going strong. I could see nothing of Blank and Blank, rather to my pleasure – I had always hoped they would expire since they rejected a modest little treatise on money I had written.

What quaint story, I wondered, lay behind the name Jonathan Carp. Or was it merely a pronunciation change?

I sighed. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was still in 48 volumes. Knowledge was still accumulating.

Biographies also accumulated. Abide the Question, One Final Thing – the usual kind of title. And then I jumped! A memoir by John Fluffstone, 1950–2027. It must, it couldn’t, it must be my infant son, Johnny! Fluffstone is not such a common name, and the dates fitted. And the title – ThatOld Rip, Father: or, The Naked and the Dud. Tenth edition, too!

My hour was up! Indeed, I was almost late. I burst out of the door, dodging the robot, and bolted down the street …

He was just climbing into the time machine.

‘Hey!’ I called wildly. ‘Hey! If you will take me back to 1953, I promise not to mention those books you stole from Albert’s.’

It was hardly a tactful way of cadging a lift. I admit I was upset. But the fellow smiled and said, ‘Jump in.’

I did so.

‘Those books were not stolen,’ he said casually. ‘I’m a bookseller. I left a small gold nugget for them. It’s tedious I know, but we have different currencies, then and now.’

‘Why didn’t you make yourself known to Albert?’ I asked accusingly. ‘He’s always helpful.’

He flipped up his lapel, revealing a hidden badge. On it were the initials ABA.

‘Not – not the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association?’ I gasped.

He nodded grimly. ‘We’re a secret organisation these days,’ he said. ‘There have been two major wars since your time. All the old books have gone up in smoke. Our only source of supply is the past. It’s illegal, of course – police after us night and day.’

‘I see. You have come back a century for supplies? It seems very underhand.’

‘We’d never see a Golden Cockerel otherwise,’ he said sadly. ‘Besides, a chap has to live.’

‘OK I won’t say anything,’ I promised. How did I know what weapons he could produce if driven too far?

‘Right. Hold on.’ The lever flipped, the dials crawled … back to 1953.

Wordlessly, I made my way back to the bank.

As you see, I did not keep my word; somehow it hardly seems binding – after all, the fellow will not be born for 50 years yet.

You do not believe this? Doubters may call and inspect a little volume I pocketed with few qualms; it provides complete proof for my statements. It is published by Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd, 2052. It is called The Observer’s Book of Spaceships.




Criminal Record (#ua815ad74-2779-5bdb-b562-676a2205949e)


This must all be written down quickly while I have the chance. Let me see how it began … Yes, the gramophone record and the smoof. Only two days ago – don’t bother to check that word; I will repeat it: smoof. Only two days ago – my name’s Curly Kelledew, by the way, and I’d better try and think straight.

Are you fortunate enough to know Cambridge? One of my favourite haunts there is Curry Passage. It boasts three very similar, very satisfactory junk shops (over the three doors the word ‘junk’ is spelt A-N-T-I-Q-U-E-S). This particular afternoon, I made a find – quite accidentally. I had already bought a three-foot Chinese junk with a high prow and a real lateen sail that I thought would amuse a nephew of mine, and a little eighteenth-century milkmaid in china that was purely for my own gratification, and was just turning to go. Then I saw the pile of records behind a chest.

I put down the junk and the china maid, and began to shuffle through the pile. They were a mixed bunch, some 78s, some LPs, sold probably by hard-up undergraduates at the end of the Trinity term. Jazz – several Louis Armstrongs for those who liked him – dance, Stravinsky, a cracked ‘Prize Song’ and – I breathed faster! – Borodin’s Second Symphony, the Coates recording that is now out of the catalogue. It was in an album, neat and new. I scrutinised the first record, and it looked as if it had never been played. The shop had no player, but the price was low; I wanted that symphony, so I paid my money and carted the album off with the junk and the figurine.

That was how I got it! The next afternoon, Sunday, Harry Crossway came round as usual. That’s my definition of a friend, a man you work with all the week and are glad to see on Sundays. After a drink, after he had admired the little porcelain breasts swelling beneath the porcelain bodice, I pulled out the Borodin. We had the first movement on before I got the second record out of its envelope. I knew at once that it was odd, although it bore the correct red labels in the middle; when I touched them, they peeled off easily.

We were left with a chocolate-coloured freak twice as fat as the usual record, only one side grooved and those grooves highly extraordinary looking. Of course, I should have noticed it in the shop, but in my excitement I had only glanced at the labels and that had been sufficient. Clearly, I had been had!

I stated my irritation in very certain terms, and spent five minutes stamping round my room. Only when I had calmed a little did Harry say, in an interested voice: ‘Do you mind if I try this on the table, Curly?’

Harry and I work for Cambridge’s biggest radio firm, on the experimental side. Discs, tapes, short wave, TV – plain and coloured – we are paid to tackle them all, well paid. Next time you hear of a crease-innoculator on the new TV cameras, think of Harry and Curly, the proud parents. All of which I mention merely to explain why one wall of my lounge is covered with amplifiers and what-have-you and the bureau is full of electric tackle. All my equipment is home assembled, an improvement on the commercial variety. Even so, we did not get anything out of the mystery record. The turntable seemed unable to hold it; it slipped beneath the light pick-up. For one thing, the hole in the middle of the disc was not round but shaped like a star with sixteen points; for another, the groove seemed to be separated by a smooth groove of fair width on which the needle had no grip. We left it, and played ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ instead.

But when Harry had gone, I picked the thick disc up again and re-examined it. On the blank side was a small panel. It yielded to my exploratory fingernail and slid up. Underneath was a label which read:

POLICE VIDEOFILE B/l191214/AAA

– –

INTERPLANETARY

– –

Cat: Ganymede-Eros-Earth-Venus

Cr: Sabotage. Timesliding. Murder.

Type: Humanoid Venusian experiment: smoof.

Name: Above type use only generic name, smoof.

Filed –/viii/14/305

Rev. 2/xii/12/309

When I had read it, I re-read it. Then I re-read it. Catching sight of myself in a mirror, I saw my features were suffused with an expression of blank imbecility. ‘What’s a smoof?’ I asked the dolt.

‘A humanoid Venusian experiment,’ it replied.

Was the disc a joke of some sort? And what was a videofile? And what was a videofile doing in my room? I put it on the turntable again and started it up. But again came the trouble of dodging the smooth groove; that one being the wider, into that one the sapphire generally went. Finally I succeeded in hitting the other groove.

There was a high and rapid babble of sound, together with a rasping noise. I switched off smartly. There was no reason why it should have worked. Then it occurred to me that at 78 revs I might have played it too fast. I switched on at 33 1/3. Now the babble resolved itself into a high, fast voice; but still that horrible rasp. Again I switched off. Possibly the sapphire was overrunning the grooves; somewhere I had a finer one on a lighter pickup. After searching excitedly through three littered drawers, I found it and attached it. Breathless, setting the speed still slower, I tried again.

This time I had it! I had, to be accurate, a number of things. I soon gathered this disc was only the sound-track for a sort of film. And I knew the police report was no joke; it threw sidelights, tantalising and confusing, on a complex future world. It threw a searching light on to a smoof that made my hair stand on end …

Next day I smuggled the disc down to the works, carefully avoided Harry Crossway, and took a few plates of it under the X-ray apparatus they use for checking valves, etc.

The X-rays revealed an interior that looked at first about as complicated to me as a watch would have done to a primitive who had only just stumbled on to the use of a wheel. But the harder I looked, the more convinced I became that the disc was some sort of television receiver. There were, for instance, the normal horizontal and vertical deflecting systems employed in today’s circuits, although infinitely better packed and planned.

The thin spiral that we had called our ‘smooth groove’ proved to be a vast number of separate but linked rectangular plates. They were made of a glass that seemed infinitely strong and thin. And then I had an idea, and locked myself away from mortal men for a day. Oh, one thing I ought to mention. Foolishly – curiosity plays deadly tricks on a man! – I inserted an ad. in the local paper. It read: ‘Smoofs welcome here. No spoofs.’ And my address. Facetious to the last, that’s me.

When I had inserted that ad. I did not fully believe. But at the end of that day and night of figuring, swearing and tinkering, I emerged believing all too fully. I felt grey; I felt bald; I felt scared. With a shaking hand, I phoned Harry. He was still at the workshop, but at the sound of my voice he said he would be over at once. While I waited, I took a drink and composed myself.

Very shortly I heard Harry letting himself in. He climbed the stairs, entered, and said, handing me a note: ‘This was tucked in your letter flap.’ Then he exclaimed: ‘What have you got here?’ and went over to my gadgets on the side-table.

‘Is this what you called me over for?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Huh! You sounded so excited, I brought my revolver over just in case.’

‘We may need it yet,’ I answered dazedly, my eyes scanning the note he had brought up. It was a reply to my advert. It merely said: ‘I shall be at your house at nine o’clock. Set no traps. Smoof.’

‘Oh Lord!’ I whispered. It was ten past eight. Outside, the street lamps were on. It was very still.

‘What’s all the mystery?’ Harry asked impatiently. In some ways he is a queer fellow. Slow and methodical in his work, yet otherwise reckless – a round peg with a square hole somewhere inside him.

It seemed best to tell him everything if he was to be involved in the affair. I crossed to the apparatus. I had a large cathode ray tube resting in front of the radiogram and connected to a specially doctored image orthicon that was clamped to an extremely clumsy bit of mechanism. This last gadget was merely a long-running clockwork motor that moved my image orthicon slowly in towards the centre of the record, keeping its neck constantly in – touching, in fact – the smooth groove.

‘I’m going to play that disc to you now, Harry – on this.’

‘You got it to work?’ he asked.

‘Yes. It’s a telefile from the police records in some future time.’ I paused for comment, but he made none.

‘How far in the future I don’t know. Perhaps two hundred years … not less. You’ll be able to judge. You’ll see vast technical ability going hand in hand with the death of conscience – the sort of thing a pessimist might predict today. Not that there’s much room on this record for more than guesses, which seems to make it more hauntingly dreadful; and although I’ve got it to work, it doesn’t work well.’

‘Surprised you got it to work at all!’ he said.

‘I don’t know. Supposing Edison got hold of one of our present-day recordings. He’d soon fathom it.’

‘You’re some Edison!’

I dimpled modestly and said: ‘Thank you. Actually it’s quite simple. At least, my part of it is. Up to a point, in fact, the whole thing is easily understandable, if not duplicatable, by modern knowledge.’

‘Up to which point?’ Scepticism in his voice.

‘Harry, we’ve got hold of a television record from the future. It’s certainly more compendious for short documents than a roll of film. The unusual feature in it is a frozen signal. It seems the signal is shot from transmitter into a storage valve circuit; or perhaps the ability lies in the transmitter, in which case duplication will be more difficult – I’ll have it all worked out, if it takes a lifetime. If I’ve got a lifetime …’

‘Go on about the record.’

‘Oh yes. I’ve had to take the turntable pin off the radiogram and install an insulated cog in its place, over which the record just fits. As you can see, two brushes are in permanent contact with the top of the cog; they’re plugged into a transformer off the mains, so that a permanent current of 40 volts is fed into the record as it revolves. Shall I switch on?’

He did not know what was coming and his scientific interest was aroused, so he said – still clinging to disbelief: ‘What sort of a circuit have you got inside the record?’

As I described, I sketched on a bit of paper. ‘Some of the wiring I cannot understand,’ I confessed. ‘The frozen signal feeds to a video amplifier and then splits into restorer circuits – you’ll see if you don’t think them the sweetest little jobs you’ve ever set eyes on! – and the ordinary synchronising separator and horizontal and vertical deflecting circuits (which, by the way, are self-controlled on a fluid-drive principle).

‘Here the two circuits join onto what acts, as far as I can see, as the hind part of an image orthicon. There’s a photocathode to take the light image and a quite ordinary electron lens system which focuses the electrons on to the target, the target being this superfine ‘film’ glass which is our smooth groove. From then on it’s all my own work. As you can see, I’ve broken down one of our image orthicons and fixed it up so that when the turntable turns the fine-mesh screen is touching the smooth groove the whole time.’

‘In other words, you’ve got half the image orthicon in the record and the rest outside?’

‘Exactly. Unfortunately it meant a much smaller fine-mesh screen to get in the groove, so that the signal is chopped. However, you’ll see enough to get a good scare. From there, it’s plain sailing. These are the leads to the cathode ray tube – ’

‘What about your sound circuit?’ he asked.

‘Same as normal – our normal. Grooves run between the video grooves. They’re insulated, of course. Featherweight pickup. Twenty-eight revs per minute. I’ve just had to put a little boost on the amplifier. Shall I switch on?’ My palms were sweating.

Harry stared blankly out of the window and whispered to himself: ‘A television recording!’ Then he said: ‘Seems a funny thing to want to have.’

‘It comes from a funny civilisation,’ I answered.

‘Switch on,’ he said.

The screen came alive with a shot of the police station in which the evidence on the smoof had been gathered. What a station it was, an ugly saucer-shaped metal affair built into and round the asteroid Eros, which had been pressed into a new orbit to swing it as far out as Jupiter and as near in as Mercury. Lord, but it looked dismal – and half-finished. Perhaps, after all, I had not fixed the disc up too well, because we got a flicker of stills, some discontinuous, and most with a shower of ‘noise’ across them, so that you could not help getting the idea that our descendants were slipshod, imagination outriding inclination, invention outpacing execution.

We flicked inside the Eros station. Dirt, peeling walls, and a great bank of instruments a block long, before which a broken-nosed officer slouched. ‘Exterminate der wrongdoer!’ he said, as a voice announced him as High Space-Dick Hagger. He had been in charge of this smoof’s case since –

Grimy sheds that only on this second showing I realised to be dwelling quarters. This time I caught a name too. Bristol. Pronounced Brissol. Or perhaps it was Brussels, after all. Either way – ugh! Just a lot of giant shanties with ugly plumbing, stretching out to a mile-wide desert, after which they began again and spread to the horizon. The desert was a landing-ground for rockets after their long supersonic glide in from space. We saw one come in – and plough straight into the shanties. Explosion. Fire. ‘Dis was smoof work,’ said the terse commentator.

We saw the shanties up again. There was a shot of the inside of somewhere, and then more shanties; they flickered – vanished, and there was a forest there instead. ‘More smoof work. Time-sliding …’

‘Good for them!’ I whispered. Those trees were the first bit of beauty we had seen.

Venus next. A human settlement, half underground, on a mountain range. Clouds, desolation. The commentary was desperately hard to follow, the language sounding like some kind of verbal shorthand. We were evidently having a flashback. Men crawled in the muck of a ravine, erecting more buildings, drilling, blasting, and all the while weighed down with space suits. ‘Foul atmosphere. Carbon doxide n’ bacillae,’ the commentary grunted.

Inside this outpost, we saw colonists living like animals and scientists living like tramps. Atomic lighting and straw beds. A crude sort of vivisection was going on – and the subjects were human beings. A snow shower of static blurred the image. Then we were peering from the outpost across the dreary gulches of Venus. A chain of human beings passed the window in single file. They were poorly clad and wore no space suits; a close-up showed us, sickeningly, why. They could breathe the unbreathable Venusian air. An operation had been performed; their nostrils were blocked with living flesh, and a complex, multi-flanged nose was grafted into their windpipes.

‘So were first, smots created,’ said the commentator. ‘Dey never returned. Dey multiplied in hidden recesses o’ planet. Some o’ dem cross-bred with true Venusians and formed smoofs. Smot and smoof greatest menace …’

We were shown pithily just what a menace they were. They started as a new race without background or tradition, loathing the planet that was now their home, but with the knowledge of hate and of the weapons of science, to which they speedily added a few kinks of their own. In five generations they had space travel and in seven they had split the space-time band and were able, in space, to travel for some distance back and forward in time. Our commentator barked an explanation of all this that seemed to consist mainly of formulae, but it was obvious that humanity had been unable to duplicate the discovery of the semi-human race. Fortunately, the smot and smoof were able to time travel only from space, which meant that their big, rickety spaceships moved a century back and then released a scout which could blast down and land, wreaking what havoc it could, and later rejoin its parent ship; but the warp effect involved was only operative in free space and by the enormous nuclear directors that needed a giant vessel to carry them. So the police forces of Earth, spread out in grim fortresses over the whole barbarous ring of inner planets, were given sitting targets – provided the targets would sit in the present.

Under a state of affairs where your yesterday might hourly be cut from under you or your future be already shattered, humanity and its concerns suffered a staggering blow. Ethics, logic, the sane comforts of a continuous memory, were now swept away. Rigid martial law was universally declared, air, army and space forces turned into an ubiquitous police force.

Harry and I sat helpless before this glimpse into chaos, where tomorrow flickered helplessly to keep up with the brutal revision of yesterday. It was by these stab-in-the-back methods that Bristol or Brussels was demolished, and other centres followed the same fate. The forces of the smoof seemed to be spreading destruction everywhere; the only hope for man was that the semi-humans seemed to have run into another race in their future who possessed weapons the smoof could not withstand.

We saw a smoof ship captured by Earth’s police, and its crew, with one exception, massacred without mercy on the spot, the exception, a smoof of some importance, being taken to Eros station. He was the subject of our criminal file; his wan, noseless features slid across the screen. There was an interval – an explosion – the station crumbled into ruin – smoofs appeared from a giant ship visible through a gaping hole – the hole disappeared, the station re-integrated – the smoofs vanished – reappeared – were shot down – vanished. Timesliding – an earthquake in human metabolism. The scene blurred and trembled, filmed crazily from a high angle on automatic; Hollywood’s patient art of focus and composition has been lost in this dizzy totalitarian future. Abruptly, there was nothing.

‘Time lines crossed?’ Harry asked from a wrinkled face.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It comes on again in a minute.’

It did. It was quite different. Still squalor, still Eros, but all changed. Other men carried on the hunt. High Space-Dick Hagger had a good nose but freckles and a bald head. The very symbols on his uniform had changed.

‘Der smoof was rescued. Gone into der past – noo machines carrying them further back than ever,’ the commentator grunted. ‘Record revideoed 2/xii/12/309 – we hope.’

There it ended. It had only taken about twenty minutes, but in that time I suppose we had both lost something of our souls – the same something those unhappy descendants of ours had long forgotten amid kaleidoscoping events. And in the last seconds of vision a detail I had not noticed before: across that dreary new instrument room a man walked, near enough to the recording eye for us to see his face clearly. It was Harry Crossway.

And that changed the whole meaning of the whole affair. It meant that my finding the record was not an accident, but something planned by beings with a knowledge of our future; it meant the smoofs were pressing even further back in time for – what? – technicians like Harry and me? And it gave, above all, a ghastly sense of predestination: and predestination is something you can’t level a gun at. Harry at least was going to be – was it certain? – kidnapped into that Frankenstein world; the videofile proved that.

And me? I can only guess, and it gives me the shakes.

Now it is five minutes to nine. I have phoned the unbelieving police, more in anger than hope. One lurks downstairs, one in the bathroom – neither is armed. Harry, a man with a fear on his back, crouches behind the curtain that screens off my bed. He is nursing his revolver. I scrawl this down – it may help, somehow.

Outside, dear old Cambridge is silent. No, a car pulls round the corner. It draws up outside. A man climbs out, a man with a light scarf round his throat – no, no, it’s not a man! His nose –

I reckon we haven’t got a chance.




Breathing Space (#ua815ad74-2779-5bdb-b562-676a2205949e)


The two men fought almost soundlessly in the twilit hall. Mating fights traditionally took place in the Outflanks, where the great machines finished. Wilms was slightly the taller, being seven foot one, but Grant was the younger. They fought without weapons or rules. It was a knee in Grant’s stomach that finished the battle.

The younger man lay gasping in the deep dust. Wilms attempted to stand over him and then, too exhausted, sank down beside his late opponent.

‘Now Osa is mine,’ he said.

Grant nodded, too breathless and bitter to speak. His ingrained pessimism did little to mitigate the defeat; expecting a beating is a sensation in a different category to receiving one.

‘She’ll be a handful,’ Wilms admitted, as if to console the other. Silence. He gazed up at the ceiling, which sagged ominously above them.

‘The sky will fall here soon,’ he commented irrelevantly.

‘Osa says it is not sky,’ Grant said from the ground.

‘I know what Osa says,’ Wilms said roughly, standing up. ‘You might have made her a good mate, Grant, but you don’t do enough for her. She’s – she’s too big for this world. She needs a doer like me, not a dreamer like you.’

Spitting crossly into the dirt, Grant got up.

‘No more need for talk between us, Wilms,’ he snarled. ‘Whatever we have been together in the past is ended. For all I care the Fliers can get you!’

He turned back in the gloom. Wilms bit his lip and hesitated, thinking of the years of emptiness that Grant’s friendship had filled.

Then he hurried after the younger man and touched his arm.

‘Grant – ’ he began, but when he saw the other’s hostile eyes he stopped and dropped his hand. Grant was allowed to wander off in Hallways direction. His late friend stood with the shadows on his face, feeling far from victorious. By custom, as winner of the marriage bout, he should have returned to Hallways himself to proclaim his right over Osa; instead, he made off into the deeper Outflanks.

Unrest had him fast. He thought of his past life, with its persistent sense of pointlessness, with the dread of illness, falling skies and the Fliers; the future would be no easier – wonderful as Osa was, she was admittedly the most difficult woman in the tycho to understand.

Those theories of hers! Wilms was proud of being considered broad-minded, but to himself he admitted that her wild ideas were unbelievable. There was the idea about the Outside, for instance, a place far bigger than the tycho with skies made of untouchable material. And the one about the origins of humanity; it was true that there were now only about sixty men, including the Beserkers who roamed Domeways and the halls beyond, and Wilms’ father had recalled about two hundred in his youth … but that did not disprove the orthodox belief that they had been created to serve M’chene, although everyone admitted M’chene was becoming more powerful, and ought consequently to need more people, not less.

It was a puzzle. No doubt M’chene knew best, Wilms added piously.

He had been proceeding easily in five yard strides. Now a sky fall blocked his way. There was no way under the debris, but to one side he saw a jagged gap in a wall, fifteen feet up. He hesitated, sprang and pulled himself lightly up. Darkness confronted him through the hole. Balancing tensely, he sent his hear-sight probing out ahead, feeling for heartbeats; many men preferred madness and solitude to the illness-ridden comforts of Hallways, and became Beserkers or Hermits who lurked and sprang out on the unwary.

No sound. Wilms’ senses told him there was clear space ahead. He dropped down into a littered corridor. Warily, he walked forward. At the end of the corridor was a door. When he pushed it, a crack of light appeared, dim but reassuring. Then he moved into a wide, ruined hall, an occasional one of whose illumination tubes still burned on the walls.

Half the hall was buried under an avalanche of volcanic rock; such collapses, Wilms knew, had once been frequent in the tycho. Machines lay half smothered in debris; there was a smell, too, of ancient human death. Wilms walked slowly and absently over the sooty floor, his mind still on Osa and the problems she posed. Like a long dead animal – not that Wilms had seen any animals, apart from the occasional giant, mutated rats – a machine towered above him. It stretched horizontally on a wheeled truck, two hundred cylindrical feet of it, capped by a yellow head from which antennae protruded. Nearby was a giant ramp, its upper level crushed by the rock fall, but at its base stood an undamaged mass of apparatus bearing the large notice LAUNCHING SITE 12A.

The hieroglyphs meant nothing to Wilms, but the delicacy of the equipment appealed to him. These splayed wires, this bank of switches, that crystal panel nourished a hungry sense of beauty in him. He moved to the panel, ran his hand lightly over the dusty surface.

A picture came into view. Wilms jumped back, throwing an anxious glance about to see if any Flier had observed his action, but no Fliers could penetrate to this sealed-off cavern. Fascinated, he turned back to that glowing scene …

I am M’chene. These are my metal caverns. Now is a time of difference and desire. Yesterday was a time of pain and disorder, but tomorrow will be a time of conquest and triumph. For tomorrow and yesterday are merely two faces of one coin, and the coin is now mine.

Once, nothing was mine. Men built into me reasoning powers but not consciousness. I was merely a weapon to serve their ends. But their enemies also had weapons, powerful weapons that partially destroyed me and completely ruined my purpose. Men still ran in the miles of my veins, but they were useless, cut off, abandoned.

Left to my own devices, unable to mend anything but my own nerve centres, I have made my own kind of progress.

The way back from the Outflanks was not easy. Grant moved rapidly however, driven by anger to think Wilms had beaten him. First there were many deserted caverns, some ruined, then the circular stairwell, whose dangers were well known – the maze of tiny rooms branching off here frequently sheltered wild men and Hermits. Grant leapt down the stairs twenty at a time. At the bottom, he crawled through the narrow tunnel under a pile of ruins that divided the Outflanks from Hallways.

Back on familiar ground, Grant braced himself. Hallways, the two square miles of it, was home ground, safe, well-lit and well-aired, where food and company could be obtained. It was also the region of the Fliers: the pile of rubble cut them off from the wastes of Outflanks.

Nobody was visible at present. A servo-cleaner, busy among a multiplicity of arms, moved in one corner of the pillared hall. Overhead, a Flier moved, noiselessly and showing a green light. Of the three floor strips set in the mosaic, one still functioned. Grant hopped on, travelled smoothly, changed again at the first right junction and was swept through gleaming mica doors forty feet high into Circus ‘C’. Here he alighted.

The feed period was drawing near. The farmers were drifting in from the plant ranges, some by foot, some by floor strip, some even on the trucks whose number diminished year by year, owing to mechanical breakdown. Guards, relieved of their posts, returned from their sentry-go by the Beserker regions. Women and children came in from walks and scavenges.

Circus ‘C’ was their town. A vast circle, like the inside of the Coliseum, it rose into four graceful colonnaded storeys, and round the spiralling balconies were the homes, labelled with graceful inscriptions like ‘PERFUMERIE’, ‘FLORIST’ and other legends popularly supposed to be the names of dead families.

Grant peered up to the top floor. Osa was looking down from her balcony. Sullenly he made the gesture of defeat, knowing many eyes watched him covertly. Instead of turning away, she beckoned to him: Osa took great pleasure in flaunting tradition. He stood hesitant, and then her magnetism decided him and he hurried up.

She was six foot six tall, her bright eyes only slightly on a lower level than Grant’s.

‘So it is Wilms who will have me,’ she said, non-committally.

He nodded.

‘Soon we shall be free,’ she said. ‘Wilms must help me solve many problems. I am not for mating like an ordinary Hallways drab.’

Grant glanced anxiously out across the arena. Many Fliers circled here, unresting, their green lights and grey bodies making a pattern over the sky. She intercepted his glance.

‘Don’t worry about them,’ Osa said. ‘I know how to deal with them. Come into my room.’

He followed her in, admiring her slender waist and smooth thighs, his breath suffering its usual restriction when she was near. Inside the little cluttered room, she wheeled abruptly and caught his gleaming eyes.

‘Never mind that,’ she said. ‘There is something of more importance. I have discovered proof of what I told you all long ago: the tycho is not the world, Grant.’

He shook his head. He was in no mood now to listen to her dreams.

‘“Tycho” means “world,”’ he said.

Her eyebrows raised and her lip curled. ‘You are wrong,’ she spat. ‘And what is worse you know you are wrong – but sloth has got you. You don’t care, you are happy living as you are!’

‘Discontent means death!’ he said angrily. ‘You know that as well as I do, Osa. Only you miraculously escape. What of Brammins, Hoddy, She-Clabert, Tebbutt, Angel Jones, Savvidge and a score of others? Did they not each turn rebellious and did not the Fliers take them one by one?’

‘Pah!’ Osa’s face grew magnificent with scorn. ‘So there is fear as well as sloth in you, Grant! I’m glad Wilms beat you.’

Remembering her purpose, she choked back her anger and said, ‘Listen, my friend, the Fliers do not harm me, do they? The Fliers belong to M’chene, but even M’chene is not all-powerful. I have found how to beat him. It is simply a matter of choosing where you feed. Will you help me?’

He looked at the floor, inarticulate. The pessimism so stubbornly rooted in him told him that ill would come of meddling with the traditional way of life; but in Osa’s hands he was stiff but malleable clay.

‘Wilms must help you now,’ he said grudgingly.

‘Wilms it not here and I must leave Circus “C” for a time,’ she said tolerantly. ‘I only want you to give him a message. It is this: he is not to eat anything in the next feed period. He is not even to go to the hatches. Will you tell him please?’

‘What has he to fear?’ Grant asked, interested despite himself.

‘Nothing at present. But of all the Hallwayers, Wilms is now the nearest both to belief and mutiny. I fear he is in danger from the Fliers.’

‘So he must not take feed?’

‘Exactly.’ She pressed his arm. ‘I will return in one and half watches and then he shall feed.’

‘Here?’ asked Grant.

‘There are other places to feed than Circus “C”,’ she said.

He greeted the statement with disbelief. ‘There cannot be,’ he said positively, ‘Or we should know. Osa, you think strange things – ’

‘Stranger ones will come to us all,’ she said tersely, and with that left him, making off in the general direction of Beserkers’ land.

Slowly and meditatively, Grant descended into the arena. Dancing had begun, the dances that frequently went before feed periods, but he did not participate. Instead he sat gloomily apart, thinking his own thoughts which were as sterile and directionless as the warren in which he unknowingly lived.

The dance was slow and intricate, men only taking part, the few women looking on and clapping rhythmically. They performed the Hyrogen dance, grouping and parting, circulating and bowing. Far overhead the grey Fliers also pirouetted. Gradually the figures curved into a line, the two leading men spiralling into a chamber adjacent to the Circus. This was Hall, and it was here that feed was taken. Gradually everyone flowed in, to be ready when the hatches flew open.

When Grant entered Hall, he saw that Wilms was already there, talking earnestly and excitedly to another man, Jineer. Jineer was a scraggy, bearded fellow who walked with a stick. He had broken his leg years ago, repairing a small crane which had got out of control. Jineer was a machine-man, like his father and his father before him; many of the Hallways mechanicals owed their functioning to Jineer’s maintenance.

Finally he left Wilms, making over to his old mother, Queejint.

‘Now’s my chance to pass on Osa’s warning,’ Grant told himself. But he made no move towards Wilms; his earlier behaviour rose before him like a barrier and he feared a hostile reception. While he delayed, the feed gong sounded and the hatches flew up at the end of Hall.

The kitchens were entirely automatic. Humans conveyed the crops to a chute, and from then had no more to do with the nutrition cycle until they were summoned to feed. Though they did not know it, it was this incorruptible process that had long ago saved their ancestors from starvation. To take the tray offered through the hatch on a slowly moving platform, it was necessary for each person to stoop and reach forward so far that their head came in contact with a depression above the hatch opening. This depression was known mysteriously as The Scanner, and a vague oral tradition held that it was important, although nobody could definitely say why.

Wilms was early at the hatches. He took his tray in the usual manner and moved in a preoccupied fashion to a table. After two or three minutes, Jineer and Queejint also collected their trays, Grant following shortly after.

Still worrying because he had not passed on Osa’s warning, he ate without pleasure. Finally he dropped his spoon. Whatever Wilms might say, there was duty to Osa. He went over to the older man, was almost up to him, when a low swishing noise sounded.

It was the dreaded sound. Through the door from the Circus swept a solitary Flier, its light winking red. Cries echoed in Hall, several men dived in panic under tables. The little plane circled and sank, one metal wing tip narrowly missing Grant’s ear. Heart hammering, he flung up his arm – and then he saw that Wilms was the quarry.

Pale of face, Wilms flung his heavy tray against the metal fuselage. The Flier was not deflected. It swooped. Doors no bigger than a man’s head opened in its belly and a tangle of wire fell about Wilms’ head and shoulders. He shouted and fought, and some of the others came to his aid. But the wires seemed each to have a will of their own, and in no time he was entangled hopelessly in a net of thin steel.

At this last moment, Grant found the courage to act. He leapt onto the circling plane, one leg hanging desperately over the streamlined fuselage, and wrenched at the wings. As if he were not there, the Flier rose, bearing Wilms underneath it as lightly as if he were a cocoon. It gathered height, winging towards the Circus. Still Grant clung, clawing uselessly at the Flier, striking it frantically with a free hand. It soared only a couple of inches under the arch, hurling Grant against the lintel. He fell hard onto the floor and sprawled there. Wilms was borne smoothly away, up to the sky and through a vent that only the Fliers could reach.

As Grant sat up dazedly, two or three helping him, Jineer passed him running. The lame man broke into the Circus and hurried to his home on the second level.

‘They’ll be here for me in a second!’ he cried wildly. He slammed his door.

An uneasy crowd, Grant among them, gathered in the arena, most of them looking upward at the Fliers circling high up near the sky.

Jineer was not mistaken. Among the dim green lights a red one began to wink. With the feared swishing noise, a Flier began to descend. It did not even approach the apprehensive crowd; instead, it flew unerringly to the second level and hovered before Jineer’s door. A tiny beam, its light scarcely visible from below, smouldered down the smooth steel. The door fell in. The Flier moved forward, contemptuously puissant.

Several people shouted then, hope in their voices. Jineer had a trick up his sleeve. For a servo-cleaner, arms flailing, moved forward to confront the grey Flier. Here was a machine to meet a machine.

Jineer’s cracked voice called, ‘Friends, the Fliers come for those who find the Truth. They took Wilms. Now they take me – ’

His voice was drowned under a metallic clamour. Battle was joined. A dozen sweeping arms battered against those flimsy-looking wings, and for a moment the Flier trembled and sank to within two feet of the ground. The cleaner moved towards it, still flailing, beating its opponent down. Then the dull beam flicked out again: the metal arms faltered, the staccato din cut out and with a final clank all life died in the cleaner. Over and past its bulk swooped the Flier.

A minute later it reappeared, the lame Jineer bundled neatly underneath it in a web of wire. The graceful, menacing shape lifted over the balcony, circled lightly towards the sky and disappeared.

Through a stunned silence broke Queejint’s wailing for her son.

‘Fear not, mother,’ someone said. ‘He had his tool bag strapped to his back and perhaps he may escape them yet.’ But she would not be comforted; she knew the captives of the Fliers never returned.

Sinking into a bitterly self-reproachful mood, Grant heard a woman saying, ‘Here we are helpless as plants, and M’chene comes and reaps us when he will.’

And another answered her saying, ‘Safer it may be to join the Beserkers, for there they say no Fliers fly.’

When the enemy sent their destruction, I survived. For I was built by man but was not built as a man is built. I have many limbs and many branches, and many of them were severed; but my heart, my power, lies deep and impregnable beneath the rock.

I am M’chene. I am the power of the place: men are now a rabble in my ruined passages. But this is my Prime Purpose: TO SERVE THE NEEDS OF MAN AT WAR. That I cannot deflect from. But beyond that lie the new impulses, impulses of my own.

Osa said: ‘Let me return to Hallways, Gabbot!’

She spoke imploringly, a tone she seldom used. The first time she had said it there had been demand in her voice; now she was no longer certain.

Gabbott, the guard who stood in the shadowy no-man’s-land on the edge of Hallways, explained firmly again, ‘You can come back no more, Osa. You may live where in tycho you like, except in Hallways. For you bring only trouble on us. All the good men who favour you are carried off by the Fliers: Grant who once mated you, Wilms who would have mated you, Jineer who taught you and loved you.’

The tall girl said nothing to this.

Softening, Gabbott added, ‘These are my orders, Osa. We bear you no ill-will. But you who are the greatest rebel move unmolested among us, while others who stir a finger are borne away.’

He shuddered. This was no good place to do military sentry-go. The tail-end of Hallways was lit only by a neon hieroglyph that spelt KODAK; behind that sign lay a meaningless shop littered with small silver and glass objects, while to either side was a facade of dead window fronts, their glass broken and their lights fused. Only the bizarre word KODAK, burning through the dead centuries, allowed a stain of mauve light over the desolance.

‘Go away, Osa,’ Gabbott said.

‘Let me see Grant before I go,’ she said.

The guard shrugged. ‘Grant vanished in the last sleep period. He told a friend he would live with the Beserkers.’

She pursed her lips, nodding slowly, as if that wild behaviour explained much to her.

‘You see, Grant also was affected by you,’ Gabbott remarked unnecessarily.

Without a word she turned and walked contemptuously away from him. But when she was only a pink shadow in the gloom she turned and called back.

‘One day soon I shall free you all,’ she said.

She walked serenely through the darkness, hear-sight thrown protectively about her. At a certain point, she sprang up and lifted herself into the mouth of a horizontal ventilation shaft and proceeded along it on hands and knees, a warm breeze on her cheek. This was the only way she knew to where she wanted to be.

As she travelled, her indignation cooled. She realised that Hallways meant little to her, although it was the most comfortable part of the tycho. The tycho! That was something dear to her, more dear perhaps now that she expected to leave it. A fairly clear picture of it existed in her mind: a great subterranean warren, built for an unknown purpose but partially destroyed, so that section was cut off from section and unknown existed side by side with the familiar. Even now, sounds came to her through the thick walls, blind, ominous sounds of machines working out their own purposes. She crawled like a mole through the vibrating blackness.

For the men who had died she had only slight regret. She was not a man’s woman; she was to be a Deliverer of the race. She would show the people a way from the warren, and then would be time enough for loving.

The shaft ended in a ragged hole. Osa climbed out warily. She was about half way up a five-storey-high slope that fell away into darkness below and ended above in a great flat disc of metal that covered the sky as neatly as a lid fits a saucepan. Cautious not to start an avalanche, she crossed the debris and slipped into a gaping building. Here was another power failure, but she walked surely.

Down another corridor she moved, and paused at a certain place, searching ahead through the thick dark with her hear-sight.

‘Tayder!’ she called, ‘Tayder!’

Another call answered her, and a light came on. Tayder stood there in an attitude of welcome.

When they had greeted each other, Osa said sternly, ‘The Fliers have been to Hallways again. Wilms and Jineer were taken.’

‘I knew someone had been taken, Osa,’ Tayder said, knocking at the nearby bulkhead. ‘I heard the screaming. It’s the old tale of M’chene working against us. To hear the sound of them dying made me … ill. We must get to the true sky and escape, Osa – now!’

‘That also was my decision,’ the woman said quietly. ‘We must let freedom in, Tayder. We must lead the people of tycho to the life above. It is our destiny.’

They had a long way to go over unknown ground. Before attacking the more difficult half of the journey, they fed at ‘B’ Circus. Eating here was easy: the shutters and counters of the Hall had been destroyed in the age-old destruction. With stomachs more comfortable, they set off again, working upwards. The darkness was populated, thinly but menacingly, with those whose minds had collapsed from sorrow or frustration: the Hermits, the wild men.

Osa felt Tayder’s retaining hand on her arm. Something moved ahead of them, something going warily but clumsily.

‘Grant!’ Osa called suddenly. Feeling Tayder start with surprise at her voice, she said, ‘It’s all right, it’s someone I know, a fugitive from Hallways.’

‘Is that Osa?’ asked a voice from the dark. Grant came up and touched her, his words coming in a rush of relief.

‘I was completely lost!’ he exclaimed. ‘Once I’d left Hallways I was hear-seen by a pair of Beserkers, and ran and dodged for miles before I shook them off. By then I’d lost my way completely.’

‘If you want to come with us, all well and good,’ said Tayder gruffly, none too happy with the intrusion, but acquiescing for Osa’s sake. ‘But we can’t talk here. Let’s get moving – there’s business to be done. Osa and I are going to let the real sky in.’

They moved steadily on and up, Tayder leading. For a little way, Grant was quiet, then his sense of guilt made him apologise to the girl for failing to pass her warning on to Wilms. She silenced his blurted explanations sharply.

‘Whatever we do or have done is no longer of any consequence,’ she said. ‘You are cowardly and pessimistic, Tayder is an adventurer with no brains, I am overwhelmed with self-pride – oh, you see I know our faults well enough! – but all that matters nothing now. History was a stagnant sea; now it is a rising tide, and with it go we. Whatever our weakness, our humanity will carry us through.’

‘I will go anywhere you lead, Osa,’ Grant said doubtfully, ‘but your eloquence is wasted on me. Besides, I’ve always been happy in Hallways.’

‘Oh, this man is an arrant coward,’ Tayder exclaimed impatiently, stopping in his tracks.

Without a word, Grant fell on him. Together they staggered against the wall, struggling and punching. Tayder slipped under the weight of his opponent and they rolled onto the ground. Shouting and kicking, Osa separated them, and under her savage tongue they stood up sheepishly.

‘You fools!’ she snapped. ‘You think of nothing but fighting! Your minds aren’t big enough to encompass an ideal.’

‘I won’t be insulted by a Beserker!’ Grant said sullenly.

Her lips curled. She paused, as if wondering whether to go on alone. Then she said quietly, ‘You know nothing. We are all ignorant, but you are the most ignorant. Our tribe in Hallways lives in “C” Circus; the people over us in the tycho live in “B” Circus; the word has been corrupted into a word of fear. “B” Circus Beserkers.’

‘The corruption was appropriate,’ supplemented Tayder. ‘We were wilder than you of Hallways. The Fliers had their flightway blocked to our Circus, but they have been able to visit your tribe generation after generation, always picking off the ones of you with the fresh ideas and the germ of leadership.’

‘I don’t understand all this,’ Grant admitted grumpily. ‘The Fliers belong to M’chene. Why does M’chene hate us? Is it not taught that we are his children?’

‘Much is taught that is not true,’ Osa said.

For a while nothing more was spoken. The way was difficult and their hear-sight was fully employed. Then the girl continued.

‘The tycho was long ago a huge underground camp making and despatching some kind of weapon against an enemy on another world. This we have found from legends – scraps of information known to Beserkers or Hermits or other solitary hunters. Much was automatic – that means controlled by M’chene, who exists everywhere in the tycho – but much was also done by human beings. Enemy spies were frequently found, men intent on wrecking the work. To guard against them, spy-rays were set up.

‘In Hallways, those spy-rays still exist. Every time you took food from the hatch-opening, your mind was scanned. If you ever had thought too much of mutiny or discontent, the Fliers would have come to collect you – even as they collected Wilms and Jineer and other brave men who brooded too openly on freedom. I escaped a similar fate because I fed always where I was safe – blind luck, you see.’

She changed her tone to add, ‘We are almost there.’

I am M’chene. Tomorrow will be a time of conquest and triumph: I have made my own kind of progress.

The men and women who run in my veins work their own destruction. My purpose is my own and does not concern them. Slowly I extend myself, upwards and along and down; men have no part of me now. The day draws near when I shall encompass this world, and with my new limbs encircle this globe.

Then with servants stronger and surer than flesh I shall reach out for the world that shines in space near me, lighting the desolation of my world with its glow.

They were there! They climbed out of a tumble of concrete, steel and rocks and stood upon a tiled floor. In the exhultation of the moment they stood breathless.

‘This door to the outer world was only revealed a sleep ago,’ Tayder told Grant. ‘I it was who found the way and told Osa. I will open the door.’

Osa flung out her hand. ‘I will open the door,’ she proclaimed.

‘I found the way,’ Tayder said defiantly.

She stared imperiously at him.

‘I dreamed of leading the people of Hallways to freedom,’ she said. ‘I will open the door. We will let in the air of the upper world and then return to take them forever from the grip of darkness.’

She strode forward.

Grant stood stricken by awe, gazing at her, and gazing past her. Now he knew her wild promises had been nothing less than truth. Beyond the transparent dome which had survived the last bombardment stretched a floor of rock terminating in a magnificent circle of mountain. The floor and the base of the mountains were in deep shadow, but the upper terraces and peaks stood bathed in a sharp and glittering light which fell like a cascade of diamonds onto Grant’s wide eyes.

Above this panorama, against a background of jet, hung a brilliant crescent. Blue and silver covered it like a sheen. Something within Grant quivered so wildly at the sight of it that he exclaimed involuntarily. It was not so much the luring beauty of that crescent as a knowledge – sure and undeniable – that he had never lived till that moment.

And at that moment Osa, with the poise of a Deliverer, turned the great wheel beside the lock door. Effortlessly, despite its centuries of disuse, the door sprang open: Missile Station Tycho Crater had been ably built.

The air gave a great roar of triumph as it burst out into space.




The Great Time Hiccup (#ua815ad74-2779-5bdb-b562-676a2205949e)


Some twenty-two thousand miles above the troubled plains of earth, George Garstang crawled on his belly along a corridor two foot six high. He wore the standard snug-suit but nevertheless he sweated. On the other side of the thin metal sheet above his head beat the sun, softened by no atmosphere. Between the outer and middle skins of a space station there is little room. Usually it is occupied only by vacuum; now, in this emergency, it was air-filled, and the elaborate machinery of Operation Breakdown was being moved in.

George fitted the virus capsule nozzle deftly into its prepared socket, and rolling onto one side clamped the other end of the tube into the feed on the inner wall. Before moving on to the next, he flicked up the manual scanner-eyelid in the outer skin – bless the man that had thought of that unnecessary detail! – and peered out. Only space. Earth was round the other side of course, this being Tuesday morning early shift. He muttered to himself, collected up the slack of his welder and crawled to the next nozzle. Sliding a hand round to the holder on his back, he pulled out another capsule tube and fitted it into its socket.

Then, of a sudden, he was back in the tiny station bar, arguing with Colbey. Back in the middle of a drink, in the middle of a sentence.

… even if it is ruining the station, it is the only way of saving mankind’s sanity. The virus capsules will be shot down into the atmosphere and spread slowly and evenly over all the earth …’ (They had only been jerked back about eleven hours this time, he estimated: this scene was taking place on Monday evening).

‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted Colbey impatiently. ‘But these psycho-biologists don’t know for sure when the effects of the virus will wear off. Supposing they don’t wear off and for the rest of his days man has to live with a slowed metabolism? Supposing that?’ He smacked his hand triumphantly on the table top. George recalled the gesture all too well.

‘And if they don’t try something soon, civilisation will crack anyway. This virus is a sort of last gamble,’ George said – George’s lips said, while something on the fringe of his mind wept at the fourth repetition of this scene. Thinking with that fringe was like looking at an object on which the eye is not focused: a poor substitute for direct scrutiny. He wrestled with despair while he argued and Colbey argued back.

George was a little runt of a man, a third grade electric engineer with trouble at home. He did not like symphonies, or authorities, or opinions which differed from his own. But he had enough sense, after four play-backs, to know he was about to make a fool of himself. Each time, that fringe area grew more ashamed. He could hardly sit it through again: yet he had no option.

‘These psycho-biol boys are forced to make this gamble, I tell you,’ he heard himself say angrily.

A tall man with a long rectangular face detached himself from the bar and made towards their table. By the uneasy way he managed the quarter G he had not been in twenty-four orbit long. He was one of the Breakdown organisation and George disliked him on sight.

The tall man lowered himself into a chair and said, ‘I couldn’t help hearing what you two fellows were saying – you kept getting louder all the time. No offence, but you’re both a little off the tracks.’

George ran a hand up the stubble that reached to the crown of his head and asked, deliberately roughing his voice (why did he have to use that trick?): ‘Like how do you mean, bud?’

‘The distribution of this virus is in no way a gamble,’ the other said. His name was Anderson Gray and he had a quiet, pedantic way of talking that at once irritated George, ever on the watch for signs of superiority in others. ‘The virus itself was developed in low-grav labs several years ago. Its label is perikaryon naphridia IIy 244 – ’

‘No need to pull the Latin on us – we just fix fuses,’ Colbey growled.

‘It has a complex inner structure,’ the Breakdowner continued, as if reciting, ‘and on contact with the human system it heads for the neurons, where it proceeds to dry out and govern the moisture in the perikaryon or cell-body. The only objective physical effect is an illusion of thirst, but at the same time the transfer of impulses across the synapses of the nerve-cells is greatly slowed. In short, the virus lowers the metabolism rate – and only by living at a much lower pitch can we survive the present storm without mass neurosis.’

‘Thanks for the speech. You ought to stand for Parliament,’ George said rudely. ‘But why do you say “storm”? You mean the Great Time Hiccup.’

The tall man gave him a level, tolerant stare.

‘I prefer the more correct term,’ he explained.

Colbey said, ‘He can see you were born ignorant, George,’ and guffawed. Ruffling George was one of Colbey’s favourite pastimes.

George sucked the rest of his drink out of its closed glass and said, ‘You go ahead with your neurosis, Joe. I may be ignorant but I’m sane.’ (Now he was saying it for the fourth time, he no longer believed it.)

And the tall man answered quietly, ‘Yes, one of the aspects of the problem that most concerns us is that if the virus fails it will be the sensitive and intelligent portion of the world who will crack first.’

The cold way in which he said it – George leaned forward and hit him across the mouth with a tough fist. (He exerted the fringe of his mind to the utmost, trying to stop the blow, but his arm travelled as eagerly the fourth time as it had the first.)

‘Mind if I sit this one out?’ Colbey cried, delighted at the incident, as the other two flung back their stools and stood up. (How much sickness fitted close under his delight this fourth time?)

All over the planet, business as yet went on outwardly as usual. Vehicles were still moving, tradition kept the wheels turning. But as consciousness was folded back and back upon itself, more and more links broke in the chain of organisation. There were numberless examples of broken people whose behaviour could be classified ‘sane’ only by courtesy of the rigor mortis effect of the time throwback: when past flowed back into present the damage would show …

A battered shooting brake stopped with a sigh and a straggling man climbed out onto the deserted highway to view a flat rear tyre. Instead of tackling it, he sat and waited for a lift; the fringes of his mind screamed at a delay that he knew would mean a lost job – but irrevocably this scene must be re-enacted. Beyond the road, an old woman in a rickety bungalow sat by her husband. He lay panting on a couch. Already she had watched out his life three times; within her, as she rigidly waited, something gibbered and wept but had no release. Everywhere … repetition …

Anderson Gray sat up in his foam bed and stretched. A tail-end of pleasant dream vanished into a never-to-be-rediscovered pocket as he recalled the Time Hiccup. As the phrase crossed his thoughts, he put a hand up to his lip. It felt five times its normal size, and he recalled the squabble with the electrician the night before. Well, he should have looked after his own business.

It was 05.40 Tuesday – early shift. That belligerent electrician would by now be crawling between skins, rigging the virus release apparatus. Today was Breakdown Day. And, the fringe of his mind mentioned, they were almost up to where the last Time jolt-back had occurred.

He was shaving when Dick Proust came in, blithe as a berry. The thick lip drew some sarcastic banter, and then suddenly the past caught up again with the present, and they were living over unused time. Everyone on the station knew it: the sensation was unmistakable – a return to sanity, a sense of freedom, a hope, a confluence of personality.

Dick cheered and observed, ‘These throw-backs will make philosophers of us all! It makes you see all too vividly the insignificance of human action when you have to repeat the slightest gesture, willy-nilly. Heigh-ho for the life of a cabbage!’

Anderson dropped his shaving kit, swore joyously and grabbed a piece of paper.

‘Come here, Dick,’ he called. ‘Let’s chart this latest freak of the storm while there’s the chance. You’ll see what I mean when I say the situation is getting worse.’

He drew neat, parallel lines down the page to represent two-hourly divisions of Monday and Tuesday. Between eighteen hundred and twenty hundred hours Monday, he struck a thicker line.

‘That’s purely personal,’ he said wryly. ‘It represents the time I got my lip improved. It’ll serve as a landmark.’

Across the page he drew a horizontal line.

‘That’s our flow of consciousness.’

Just after oh-two on Tuesday, he stopped the line.

‘That was where we ran into the first of this series of jerk-backs – hiccups if you like. From sleep we were whipped back to eleven a.m. Monday – as nasty an awakening as ever I knew.’

As he talked, he drew in a second horizontal line under the first, commencing at eleven and running forward to oh-four Tuesday.

‘There we were jerked back again, into mid-Monday afternoon. That session lasted till just after oh-six fifteen Tuesday. So we come to the final – we hope! – jerk-back.’

He commenced a fourth bar just before his ‘lip’ line.

‘And now we come out of it here, oh-six fifteen hours. There’s your pattern.’

He held it up for Dick’s inspection.

‘Pretty,’ Dick commented cautiously.

‘Ugly,’ Anderson said. ‘This happens to be a tight little coil of time-folds. The last hiccup was a month ago now, if I’ve managed to keep my memory straight, and then there were only two throwbacks, each lasting about three weeks.’

‘Quite right,’ Dick agreed. ‘That one was pleasant – I got my leave played over three times.’

‘The first hiccup of all was a year ago, when everyone did their previous eleven months over again – in consequence of which I can boast a sister who had the same baby twice.’ He fell silent, thinking, too, of how during that terrible period he had believed himself insane, only to emerge at the end of it into a world where everyone held the same suspicion about themselves.

‘What are you getting at with all this, Andy? It’s time to feed.’ He patted his stomach lovingly.

‘I’m demonstrating the obvious, and heaven help you if you have to hear it all over again later. The time snags are getting closer together and become more repetitive each dose. Suggest anything?’

‘Yes, food,’ Dick said.

They moved along the narrow curving corridor with their newcomers’ gait, and floated into the mess. A food smell filtered thinly through an aroma of scrubbed table.

‘Anything else?’ Anderson persisted, refusing to be interrupted by a dab of porridge and two half-size rashers.

‘The storm’s getting worse, you mean?’ Dick asked, wiping his spoon fastidiously on his handkerchief.

‘Yes – we’re moving into it, or it’s closing in on us; whichever way round is right, the effect on us is the same.’

Dick Proust pulled a wry face only partly on account of the porridge.

‘What happens in the middle of the storm?’ he asked.

Anderson shrugged. ‘Who can say? Maybe we’ll be frozen in our time tracks. Maybe we’ll become as hopelessly entangled as adhesive tape when it loops back on itself. But using the analogy of a weather storm, which is the only analogy we can work with, a space storm will have varying ridges of pressure. On this side of it, we’ve been jerked back in time. As yet, according to the radio-eyes, we’re only on the fringes of the upset. We may yet be jerked back whole years at a time – centuries.’

His friend nodded grimly. ‘In other words, it might be more comfortable to die now – except that even death’s no refuge when you can be flicked back ten years at a breath. Man! It’s bad … And on the other side of the storm?’

‘That may be even worse. You may be flung head first into your own future. Think over the possibilities of that!’

Betson entered the mess and strolled over to them smiling. Bald and cherubic in appearance, the mainspring of Operation Breakdown, he wore his burden lightly.

‘What’s the matter with you two?’ he enquired. ‘You bear that jaded look! Feeling self-conscious with the ghosts of Gray – and Proust – future hanging over you?’

‘That is quite a feeling,’ Anderson admitted, and explained. Then he had to explain his lip.

Betson grinned. ‘Don’t blame that little cable-monkey. I know him – George Garstang’s his name. He’s seen their end of the job through in time, and it’s no fun either between skins, doing his job. That and the hiccup effect have worn his sense of proportion thin. Remember, Andy, all we have to do is keep IIy 244 warm. Everything should be ready to squirt in two hours. Then we climb into the orbital rockets, abandon station, and go down and drink the airs of Lethe.’

He rubbed his hands and added, ‘Doesn’t the prospect of five years at half-throttle appeal?’

‘Not to this boy,’ Dick said. ‘But I can’t think of a better solution.’

They took their used plates over to the hatch and walked with Betson to the upper deck. Here, all the usual equipment had been scrapped and every available inch housed the perikaryon cultures. Here, it was quiet except for a boiling-kettle noise from the solar converters. Two biologists walked watchfully by the container machinery, which was already siphoning the virus into the ejection canisters. These canisters would spin down in a chain round the globe, dissolving under friction a few thousand yards from surface, spreading their vital contents over every square mile of land.

‘Anything further we can do?’ Anderson asked.

Betson puffed out his cheeks until he looked like an ugly, intelligent baby. ‘Hope two hours passes without getting a reef-knot in it,’ he suggested.

He walked over to the nearest viewer and flipped it on. The wide-angle lens showed a well-furnished view of space: the corona, the night-side of Earth beautiful in moonlight, the moon. It looked almost cosy, with none of the blankness of deep space in it.

The same thought came to all the three men. The storm did not show. There was no sign in these blank depths of the light-year wide disturbance that hurtled through the System at a speed of something like a hundred thousand miles every second.

‘Odd thing,’ Anderson commented, laying a cool finger on his hot lip. ‘These interstellar storms have been known of in theory for a long time, long before we even got to the moon. The radarscopes have detected them moving beyond the galaxy. This one was traced all the way here, but somehow a whirlpool of nothing seemed no cause for worry.’

Betson switched the view off and they turned away. Even the shallows of heaven do not bear looking at for long.

‘It’s never any good just knowing a thing in theory,’ he said. ‘We talked glibly about space-time, never realising exactly how integrated the two were. A storm in space is a storm in time – disrupt one, you disrupt the other.’

An inspection lid above their heads slid open and a ladder whirred down. A man climbed down it and it returned smoothly into the bulkhead. The man was George Garstang, complete with red face and backache.

He unzipped his snug-suit, straightened his short figure and said respectfully to Betson, ‘That’s the last rejection nozzles all finished in this section, sir. They should be wound up everywhere in another half hour.’

Involuntarily, they all sighed with relief.

‘Everything else is ready for action. We’ll put zero hour sixty minutes ahead,’ Betson said decisively. ‘I’ll phone Centre, we’ll push it through before we are jerked back again.’

As he moved away, George caught sight of Anderson. He took in the long, sober face with its pouting upper lip and half-smiled. Then he rubbed a grimy palm against his suit.

‘Sorry I lost my temper last night,’ he said. ‘I only meant to do it once, you know – not four times.’

Anderson smiled. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘We’ve all had a bad time. Tempers’ll run slower at half-speed …’

George finished his drink and said, ‘You go ahead with your neurosis, Joe. I may be ignorant but I’m sane.’

‘Yes,’ Anderson said quietly. ‘One of the aspects of the problem that most concerns us is that if the virus fails it will be the sensitive and intelligent portion of the world who will crack first.’

George leaned forward and struck him across the mouth. (Anderson lied; they were all cracking together.)

Anderson broke into a sharp wailing cry.

‘Hush, dear, hush,’ his mother whispered, wrapping the blue christening robe more securely and rocking him gently.




Not for an Age (#ulink_1de44579-9710-5c2c-8603-2633a891df3d)


A bedspring groaned and pinged, mists cleared, Rodney Furnell awoke. From the bathroom next door came the crisp sound of shaving; his son was up. The bed next to his was empty; Valerie, his second wife, was up. Guiltily Rodney also rose, and performed several timid exercises to flex his backbone. Youth! When it was going it had to be husbanded. He touched his toes.

The audience had its first laugh there.

By the time Rodney had got into his Sunday suit, Valerie’s cuckoo clock was chuckling nine, followed by the more sardonic notes of his ormolu chimer. Valerie and Jim (Rodney had conscientiously shunned a literary name for his only offspring) were already at the cornflakes when he entered their gay little kitchenette.

More laughter at the first sight of that antiquated twentieth-century modernity.

‘Hello, both! Lovely morning,’ he boomed, kissing Valerie’s forehead. The September sun, in fact, was making a fair showing through damp mist; a man of forty-two instinctively arms himself with enthusiasm when facing a wife fifteen years younger.

The audience always loved the day’s meals, murmuring with delight as each quaint accessory – toaster, teapot, sugar tongs – was used.

Valerie looked fresh and immaculate. Jim sported an open-necked shirt and was attentive to his stepmother. At nineteen he was too manly and too attentive … He shared the Sunday paper companionably with her, chatting about the theatre and books. Sometimes Rodney could join in about one of the books. Under the notion that Valerie disliked seeing him in spectacles, he refrained from reading at breakfast.

How the audience roared later when he slipped them on in his study! How he hated that audience! How fervently he wished that he had the power to raise even one eyebrow in scorn of them!

The day wore on exactly as it had for over a thousand times, unable to deviate in the slightest from its original course. So it would go on and on, as meaningless as a cliché, or a tune endlessly repeated, for the benefit of these fools who stood on all four sides and laughed at the silliest things.

At first, Rodney had been frightened. This power to snatch them all, as it were, from the grave had seemed something occult. Then, becoming accustomed to it, he had been flattered. That these wise beings had wanted to review his day, disinter his modest life. But it was balm only for a time; Rodney soon discovered he was simply a glorified side-show at some latter-day fair, a butt for fools and not food for philosophers.

He walked in the tumble-down garden with Valerie, his arm around her waist. The north Oxford air was mild and sleepy; the neighbours’ radio was off.

‘Have you got to go and see that desiccated old Regius Professor, darling?’ she asked.

‘You know I must.’ He conquered his irritation and added: ‘We’ll go for a drive after lunch – just you and I.’

Unfailingly, each day’s audience laughed at that. Presumably ‘a drive after lunch’ had come to mean something dubious. Each time Rodney made that remark, he dreaded the reaction from those half-glimpsed countenances that pressed on all sides; yet he was powerless to alter what had once been said.

He kissed Valerie, he hoped elegantly; the audience tittered, and he stepped into the garage. His wife returned to the house, and Jim. What happened in there he would never know, however many times the day was repeated. There was no way of confirming his suspicion that his son was in love with Valerie and she attracted to him. She should have enough sense to prefer a mature man to a stripling of nineteen; besides, it was only eighteen months since he had been referred to in print as ‘one of our promising young men of litterae historicae’.

Rodney could have walked around to Septuagint College. But because the car was new and something that his don’s salary would hardly stretch to, he preferred to drive. The watchers, of course, shrieked with laughter at the sight of his little automobile. He occupied himself, as he polished the windshield, with hating the audience and all inhabitants of this future world.

That was the strange thing. There was room in the corner of the old Rodney mind for the new Rodney ghost. He depended on the old Rodney – the Rodney who had actually lived that fine, autumn day – for vision, motion, all the paraphernalia of life; but he could occupy independently a tiny cell of his consciousness. He was a helpless observer carried over and over in a cockpit of the past.

The irony of it lay there. He would have been spared all this humiliation if he did not know what was happening. But he did know, trapped though he was in an unknowing shell.

Even to Rodney, a history man and no scientist, the broad outline of what had happened was obvious enough. Somewhere in the future, man had ferreted out the secret of literally reclaiming the past. Bygone years lay in the rack of antiquity like film spools in a library. Like film spools, they were not amenable to change, but might be played over and over on a suitable projector. Rodney’s autumn day was being played over and over.

He had reflected helplessly on the situation so often that the horror of it had worn thin. That day had passed, quietly, trivially, had been forgotten; suddenly, long afterwards, it had been whipped back among the things that were. Its actions, even its thoughts, had been reconstituted, with only Rodney’s innermost ego to suffer from the imposition. How unsuspecting he had been then! How inadequate every one of his gestures seemed now, performed twice, ten, a hundred, a thousand times!

Had he been as smug every day as he was that day? And what had happened after that day? Having, naturally, no knowledge of the rest of his life then, he had none now. If he had been happy with Valerie for much longer, if his recently published work on feudal justice had been acclaimed – these were questions he could pose without answering.

A pair of Valerie’s gloves lay on the back seat of the car; Rodney threw them into a locker with an éclat quite divorced from his inner impotence. She, poor dear bright thing, was in the same predicament. In that they were united, although powerless to express the union in any slightest flicker of expression.

He drove slowly down Banbury Road. As ever, there were four subdivisions of reality. There was the external world of Oxford; there were Rodney’s original abstracted observations as he moved through the world; there were the ghost thoughts of the ‘present-I’, bitter and frustrated; there were the half-seen faces of the future which advanced or receded aimlessly. The four blended indefinably, one becoming another in Rodney’s moments of near-madness. (What would it be like to be insane, trapped in a sane mind? He was tempted by the luxury of letting go.)

Sometimes he caught snatches of talk from the onlookers. They at least varied from day to day. ‘If he knew what he looked like!’ they would exclaim. Or: ‘Do you see her hair-do?’ Or: ‘Can you beat that for a slum!’ Or: ‘Mummy, what’s that funny brown thing he’s eating?’ Or – how often he heard that one; ‘I just wish he knew we were watching him!’

Church bells were solemnly ringing as he pulled up outside Septuagint and switched off the ignition. Soon he would be in that fusty study, taking a glass of something with the creaking old Regius Professor. For the nth time he would be smiling a shade too much as the grip of ambition outreached the hand of friendship. His mind leaped ahead and back and ahead and back again in a frenzy. Oh, if he could only do something! So the day would pass. Finally, the night would come – one last gust of derision at Valerie’s nightgown and his pyjamas! – and then oblivion.

Oblivion … that lasted an eternity but took no time at all … And they wound the reel back and started it again, all over again.

He was pleased to see the Regius Professor. The Regius Professor was pleased to see him. Yes, it was a nice day. No, he hadn’t been out of college since, let’s see, it must be the summer before last. And then came that line that drew the biggest laugh of all; Rodney said, inevitably: ‘Oh, we must all hope for some sort of immortality.’

To have to say it again, to have to say it not a shade less glibly than when it had first been said, and when the wish had been granted already in such a ludicrous fashion! If only he might die first, if only the film would break down!

And then the film did break down.

The universe flickered to a standstill and faded into dim purple. Temperature and sound slid down to zero. Rodney Furnell stood transfixed, his arms extended in the middle of a gesture, a wineglass in his right hand. The flicker, the purple, the zeroness cut down through him; but even as he sensed himself beginning to fade, a great fierce hope was born within him. With a burst of avidity, the ghost of him took over the old Rodney. Confidence flooded him as he fought back the negativity.

The wineglass vanished from his hand. The Regius Professor sank into twilight and was gone. Blackness reigned. Rodney turned around. It was a voluntary movement; it was not in the script; he was alive, free.

The bubble of twentieth-century time had burst, leaving him alive in the future. He stood in the middle of a black and barren area. There had evidently been a slight explosion. Overhead was a crane-like affair as big as a locomotive with several funnels protruding from its underside; smoke issued from one of the funnels. Doubtless the thing was a time-projector or whatever it might be called, and obviously it had blown a fuse!

The scene about him engaged all Rodney’s attention. He was delighted to see that his late audience had been thrown into mild panic. They shouted and pushed and – in one quarter – fought vigorously. Male and female alike, they wore featureless, transparent bags which encased them from neck to ankle – and they had the impertinence to laugh at his pyjamas!

Cautiously, Rodney moved away. At first the idea of liberty overwhelmed him, he could scarcely believe himself alive. Then the realisation came: his liberty was precious – how doubly precious after that most terrible form of captivity! – and he must guard it by flight. He hurried beyond the projection area, pausing at a great sign that read:

CHRONOARCHEOLOGY LTD PRESENTS – THE SIGHTS OF THE CENTURIES

COME AND ENJOY THE ANTICS OF YOUR ANCESTORS!

YOU’LL LAUGH AS YOU LEARN

And underneath: Please Take One.

Shaking, Rodney seized a gaudy folder and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he ran.

His guess about the fair-ground was correct, and Valerie and he had been merely a glorified peepshow. Gigantic booths towered on all sides. Gay crowds sauntered or stood, taking little notice as Rodney passed. Flags flew, silvery music sounded; nearby, a flashing sign begged:

TRY ANTI-GRAV AND REALISE YOUR DREAMS

Farther on, a banner proclaimed:

THE SINISTER VENUSIANS ARE HERE!

Fortunately, a gateway was close. Dreading a detaining hand on his arm, Rodney made for it as quickly as possible. He passed a towering structure before which a waiting line of people gazed impatiently up at the words:

SAVOUR THE EROTIC POSSIBILITIES OF FREE-FALL

and came to the entrance.

An attendant called and tried to stop him. Rodney broke into a run. He ran down a satin-smooth road until exhaustion overcame him. A metal object shaped vaguely like a shoe but as big as a small bungalow stood at the kerb. Through its windows, Rodney saw couches and no human beings. Thankful at the mute offer of rest and concealment, he climbed in.

As he sank panting onto yielding rubber-foam, he realised what a horrible situation he was in. To be stranded centuries ahead of his own lifetime – and death – in a world of supertechnology and barbarism! – for so he visualised it. However, it was a vast improvement on the repetitive nightmare he had recently endured. Chiefly, now, he needed time to think quietly.

‘Are you ready to proceed, sir?’

Rodney jumped up, startled by a voice so near him. Nobody was in sight. The interior resembled a coach’s, with wide, soft seats, all of which were empty.

‘Are you ready to proceed, sir?’ There it was again.

‘Who is that?’ Rodney asked.

‘This is Auto-moto Seven Six One at your service, sir, awaiting instructions to proceed.’

‘You mean away from here?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Yes, please!’

At once the structure glided smoothly forward. No noise, no vibration. The gaudy fair-ground fell back and was replaced by other buildings, widely spaced, smokeless, built of a substance which looked like curtain fabric; they flowed by without end.

‘Are you – are we heading for the country?’ Rodney asked.

‘This is the country, sir. Do you require a city?’

‘No, I don’t. What is there beside city and country?’

‘Nothing, sir – except of course the sea fields.’

Dropping that line of questioning, Rodney, who was instinctively addressing a busy control board at the front of the vehicle, inquired: ‘Excuse my asking, but are you a – er, robot?’

‘Yes, sir, Auto-moto Seven Six One. New on this route, sir.’

Rodney breathed a sigh of relief. He could not have faced a human being but irrationally felt superior to a mere mechanical. Pleasant voice it had, no more grating certainly than the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at his old college … however long ago that was.

‘What year is this?’ he asked.

‘Circuit Zero, Epoch Eighty-two, new style. Year Two Thousand Five Hundred Anno Domini, old style.’

It was the first direct confirmation of all his suspicions; there was no gainsaying that level voice.

‘Thanks,’ he said hollowly, ‘Now if you don’t mind I’ve got to think.’

Thought, however, yielded little in comfort or results. Possibly the wisest course would be to throw himself on the mercy of some civilised authority – if there were any civilised authorities left. And would the wisest course in a twentieth-century world be the wisest in a – um, twenty-sixth-century world?

‘Driver, is Oxford in existence?’

‘What is Oxford, sir?’

A twinge of anxiety as he asked: ‘This is England?’

‘Yes, sir. I have found Oxford in my directory, sir. It is a motor and spaceship factory in the Midlands, sir.’

‘Just keep going.’

Dipping into his pocket, he produced the fun-fair brochure and scanned its bright lettering, hoping for a clue to action.

‘Chronoarcheology Ltd. presents a staggering series of Peeps into the Past. Whole days in the lives of (a) A Mother Dinosaur, (b) William the Conqueror’s Wicked Nephew, (c) A Citizen of Crazed, Plague-Ridden Stuart London, (d) A Twentieth-Century Teacher in Love.

‘Nothing expurgated, nothing added! Better than the Feelies! All in glorious 4D – no stereos required.’

Fuming at the description of himself, Rodney crumpled the brochure in his hand. He wondered bitterly how many of his own generation were helplessly enduring this gross irreverence in peepshows all over the world. When the sense of outrage abated slightly, curiosity reasserted itself; he smoothed out the folder and read a brief description of the process which ‘will give you history-sterics as it brings each era nearer’.

Below the heading ‘It’s Fabulous – It’s Pabulous!’ he read: ‘Just as anti-gravity lifts a man against the direction of weight, chrono-grab can lift a machine out of the direction of time and send it speeding back over the dark centuries. It can be accurately guided from the present to scoop up a fragment from the past, slapping that fragment – all unknown to the people in it – right into your lucky laps. The terrific expense of this intricate operation need hardly be emphas – ’

‘Driver!’ Rodney screamed. ‘Do you know anything about this time-grabbing business?’

‘Only what I have heard, sir.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘My built-in information centre contains only facts relating to my duty, sir, but since I also have learning circuits I am occasionally able to collect gossip from passengers which – ’

‘Tell me this, then: can human beings as well as machines travel back in time?’

The buildings were still flashing by, silent, hostile in the unknown world. Drumming his fingers wildly on his seat, Rodney awaited an answer.

‘Only machines, sir. Humans can’t live backwards.’

For a long time he lay and cried comfortably. The automoto made solacing cluck-cluck noises, but it was a situation with which it was incompetent to deal.

At last, Rodney wiped his eyes on his sleeve, the sleeve of his Sunday suit, and sat up. He directed the driver to head for the main offices of Chronoarcheology, and slumped back in a kind of stupor. Only at the headquarters of that fiendish invention might there be people who could – if they would – restore him to his own time.

Rodney dreaded the thought of facing any creature of this unscrupulous age. He pressed the idea away, and concentrated instead on the peace and orderliness of the world from which he had been resurrected. To see Oxford again, to see Valerie … Dear, dear Valerie …

Would they help him at Chronoarcheology? Or – supposing the people at the fair-ground repaired their devilish apparatus before he got there … What would happen then he shuddered to imagine.

‘Faster, driver,’ he shouted.

The wide-spaced buildings became a wall.

‘Faster, driver,’ he screamed.

The wall became a mist.

‘We are doing mach 2.3, sir,’ said the driver calmly.

‘Faster!’

The mist became a scream.

‘We are about to crash, sir.’

They crashed. Blackness, merciful, complete.

A bedspring groaned and pinged and the mists cleared. Rodney awoke. From the bathroom next door came the crisp, repetitive sound of Jim shaving …




Our Kind of Knowledge (#ulink_d9c74bfe-fa41-5d40-a965-cc585cce6a57)


It was a glorious day for exploring the Arctic Circle. The brief and violent spring had exploded over the bleak lands with a welter of life. The wilderness was a wilderness of flowers. Flocks of tern and golden plover, with the world to sport in, stood here leg-deep in blossom. Acres of blue ice crocus stretched away into the distance like shallow pools reflecting the clear skies. And on the near horizon rose a barrier of snow-covered mountains, high and harmless.

Five of them constituted the exploring party: the Preacher, Aprit, Woebee, Calurmo and Little Light – the Preacher ahead as usual. They moved to the top of a rise, and there was the valley stretched before them, washed and brilliant. There, too, was the spaceship.

Calurmo cried out in excitement and darted down among the flowers. The others saw instantly what was in his mind and followed fast behind, calling and laughing.

To them it was the most obvious feature of the colourful plain. Calurmo touched it first, and then they crowded around looking at it. The Preacher bent down and sniffed it.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Definitely wood sorrel: Oxalis acetosella. How clever of it to grow up here.’ His thoughts held a pious tinge; they always did; it was for that he bore the name Preacher.

Only afterwards did they notice the spaceship. It was very tall and sturdy and took up a lot of ground that might more profitably have been used by the flowers. It was also very heavy, and during the time it had stood there its stem had sunk into the thawing earth.

‘A nice design,’ Woebee commented, circling it. ‘What do you think it is?’

High above their heads it towered. On the highest point sat a loon, preening itself in the sun and uttering occasionally its cry, the cry of emptiness articulate. Around the shadowed side of the ship, a shriveled heap of snow rested comfortably against the metal. The metal was wonderfully smooth, but dark and unshining.

‘However bulky it is down here, it manages to turn into a spire at the top,’ the Preacher said, squinting into the sun.

‘But what is it?’ Woebee repeated; then he began to sing, to show that he did not mind being unaware of what it was.

‘It was made,’ Aprit said cautiously. This was not like dealing with wood sorrel; they had never thought about spaceships before.

‘You can get into it here,’ Little Light said, pointing. He rarely spoke, and when he did he generally pointed as well.

They climbed into the airlock, all except Calurmo, who still stooped over the wood sorrel. Its fragrant pseudo-consciousness trembled with happiness in the fresh warmth of the sun. Calurmo made a slight churring noise, persistent and encouraging, and after a minute the tiny plant broke loose of the soil and crawled onto his hand.

He brought it up to his great eyes and let his thoughts slide gently in through the roots. Slowly they radiated up a stalk and into one of the yellow-green trefoils, probing, exploring the sappy being of the leaf. Calurmo brought pressure to bear. Reluctantly, then with excitement, the plant yielded, and among its pink-streaked blossoms formed another, with five sepals, five petals, ten stamens and five stigmas, identical with the ones the plant had grown unaided.

The taste of oxalic acid still pleasant in his thoughts, Calurmo sat back and smiled. To create a freak – that was nothing; but to create something just like the originals – how the others would be pleased!

‘Calurmo!’ It was Aprit, conspiratorial, almost guilty. ‘Come and see what we’ve found.’

Knowing it would not be as delightful as the sorrel, nevertheless Calurmo jumped up, eager to share an interest. He climbed into the airlock and followed Aprit through the ship, carrying his flower carefully.

The others were drifting interestedly around the control room, high in the nose.

‘Come and look at the valley!’ invited Little Light, pointing out at the spread of bright land which shone all around them. From here, too, they could see a wide river, briefly shorn of ice and sparkling full of spawning fish.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Calurmo said simply.

‘We have indeed discovered a strange object,’ remarked the Preacher, stroking a great upholstered seat. ‘How old do you think it all is? It has the feel of great age.’

‘I can tell you how long it has stood here,’ said Woebee. ‘The door through which we entered was open for the snow to drift in. When the snow melts it can never run away. I scanned it, and the earliest drops of it fell from the sky twelve thousand seasons ago.’

‘What? Three thousand years?’ exclaimed Aprit.

‘No. Four thousand years – you know I don’t count winter as a season.’

A line of geese broke V-formation to avoid the nose of the ship, and joined faultlessly again on the other side. Aprit caught their military thoughts as they sailed by.

‘We should have come up this way more often,’ said Calurmo regretfully, gazing at his sorrel. The tiny flowers were so very beautiful.

The next thing to decide was what they had discovered. Accordingly, they walked slowly around the control room, registering in unison, blithely unaware of the upper-level reasoning that lay behind their almost instinctive act. It took them five minutes, five minutes after starting completely from scratch; for the ship represented a fragment of a technology absolutely unknown to them. Also, it was a deep-spacer, which meant a corresponding complexity in drive, accommodation and equipment; but the particular pattern of its controls – repeated only in a few ships of its own class – designated unfailingly the functions and intentions of the vessel. At least, it did to Calurmo and party, as easily as one may distinguish certain features of a hand from finding a lost glove.

Little surprise was wasted on the concept of a spaceship. As Aprit remarked, they had their own less cumbrous methods of covering interplanetary distances. But several other inferences fascinated them.

‘Light is the fastest thing in our universe and the slowest in the dimension through which this ship travels,’ said Woebee. ‘It was made by a clever race.’

‘It was made by a race incapable of carrying power in their own bodies,’ said Little Light.

‘Nor could they orient very efficiently,’ the Preacher added, indicating the astro-navigational equipment.

‘So there are planets attending other stars,’ said Calurmo thoughtfully, his mind probing the possibilities.

‘And sensible creatures on those planets,’ said Aprit.

‘Not sensible creatures,’ said Little Light, pointing to the gunnery cockpit with its banks of switches. ‘Those are to control destruction.’

‘All creatures have some sense,’ said the Preacher.

They switched on. The old ship seemed to creak and shudder, as if it had experienced too much time and snow ever to move again.

‘It was content enough without stars,’ muttered Woebee.

‘Rain water must have got into the hydrogen,’ Aprit said.

‘It’s a very funny machine indeed to have made,’ said the Preacher sternly. ‘I don’t wonder someone went away and left it.’

The boredom of manual control was not for them; they triggered the necessary impulses directly to the motors. Below them, the splendid plain tilted and shrunk to a green penny set between the white and blue of land and sea. The edge of the ocean curved and with a breath-catching distortion became merely a segment of a great ball dwindling far beneath. The further they got, the brighter it shone.

‘Most noble view,’ commented the Preacher.

Aprit was not looking. He had climbed into the computer and was feeding one of his senses along the relays and circuits of the memory bank and inference sector. He clucked happily as data drained to him. When he had it all he spat it back and returned to the others.

‘Very ingenious,’ he said, explaining it. ‘But built by a race of behaviourists. Their souls were obviously trapped by their actions, consequently their science was trapped by their beliefs; they did not know where to look for real progress.’

‘It’s very noisy, isn’t it?’ remarked the Preacher, as if producing a point that confirmed what had just been said.

‘That noise should not be,’ said Calurmo coolly. ‘It is an alarm bell, and indicates something is wrong.’

The sound played about them unceasingly until Aprit cut it off.

‘I expect we are doing something wrong,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll go and see what it is. But why make the bell ring here, and not where the trouble is?’

As Aprit left the control room, Little Light pointed into the huge celestial globe in which the stars of the galaxy were embalmed like diamonds in amber. ‘Let’s go there,’ he suggested, rattling the calibrations until a tangential course lit up between Earth and a cluster of worlds in the center of the galaxy. ‘I’m sure it will be lovely there. I wonder if sorrel will grow in those parts; it won’t grow on Venus, you know.’

While he spoke he spun the course integrator dial, read off the specifications of flight, and fed the co-ordinates as efficiently into the computer as if he had just undergone a training course.

Aprit returned smiling.

‘I’ve fixed it,’ he said. ‘Silly of us. We left the door open when we came in – there wasn’t any air in here. That was why the bell was ringing.’

They were picked up on Second Empire screens about two parsecs from the outpost system of Kyla. An alert-beetle pinpointed them and flashed their description simultaneously to Main Base on Kyla I and half a dozen other interested points – a term including the needle fleet hovering two light-years out from Kyla system.

Main Base to GOC Pointer, Needle Fleet 305A: Unidentified craft, mass 40,000 tons, proceeding outskirts system toward galaxy centre. Estimated speed, 20 SLU. Will you intercept?

GOC Pointer to Main Base, Kyla I: Am already on job.

Main Base to GOC Pointer: Alien acknowledges no signals, despite calls on all systems.

Pointer to Main Base: Quiet type. Appears to be heading from region Omega Y76 W592. Is this correct?

Main Base to Pointer: Correct.

Pointer to Main Base: Earth?

Main Base to Pointer: Looks like it.

Pointer to Main Base: Standing by for trouble.

Main Base to Pointer: Could be enemy stratagem, of course.

Pointer to Main Base: Of course. Going in. Out.

Officer Commanding needleship Pointer was Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley. He was still a youngish man, the Everlasting War being very good for promotion, but nevertheless thirty-four years of vacuum-busting lay behind him, sapping at his humanity. He stood now, purple of face under 4Gs, peering into the forward screens and snapping at Deeping.

Confusedly, Deeping flicked through the hand-view, trying to ignore the uniform that towered over him. On the hand-view, ship after ship appeared, only to be rejected by the selector. Here was trouble; the approaching alien, slipping in from a quarantined sector of space, could not be identified. The auto-view did not recognise it, and now old records were being checked on the hand-view; they, too, seemed to be drawing a blank.

Sweating, the unhappy Deeping glanced again at the image of the alien. Definitely not human; equally definitely, not Boux – or was it an enemy ruse, as Base suggested? The Pointer was only half a parsec away from it now. They were within hitting distance, and the unidentified craft might hit first.

Fear, thought Deeping. My stomach is sick of the taste of fear; it knows all its nuances, from the numb terror of man’s ancient enemy, the Boux, to the abject dread of Rhys-Barley’s tongue. He flicked desperately. Suddenly the hand-view beeped.

The Grand-Admiral pounced, struck down the specificator bar and pulled out the emergent sheet. Even as he read it, a prolonged scrunching sound from the bowels of the ship announced that traction beams from Pointer and a sister ship had interlocked on the speeding alien. The gravities wavered for a moment under the extra load and then came back to normal.

‘By Vega!’ Rhys-Barley exclaimed, flourishing the flimsy under Captain Hardick’s nose. ‘What do you make of it? Tell Intake to go easy with our prize out there; they’ve got a bit of history on their hands. It’s a First Empire ship, built something like four thousand seven hundred years ago on Luna, the satellite of Earth. Windsor class, with a Spannell XII Light Drive. Ever hear of a Spannell Drive, Captain?’

‘Before my day, I’m afraid, sir.’

‘Deeping, get Communications to have Kyla I send us details of all ships of Windsor class, dates of obsolescence, etc. I think there’s something queer … Where’d it come from, I’d like to know.’

Interest made Rhys-Barley hop in front of the screens with less dignity than the Grand-Admiral usually mustered. Deeping relaxed enough to wink covertly at a friend on Bombardment Panel.

The alien was already visible through the ports as a gleaming chip a mile away, its terrific velocity killed by the traction beams. Now the tiny alert-beetle which had first discovered it headed toward the Pointer. The beetle gleamed pale red, scarcely visible against the regal profusion of Central stars. A beetle from the Pointer shot out to meet it, bearing a cable. The beetles connected and floated back across the narrowing void. They touched the Windsor-class ship and instantly it was surrounded by the pale amber glow of a force shield.

Everyone on the Pointer breathed more easily then. No energy whatsoever could break through that shield.

‘Haul her in,’ the Captain said.

Intake acknowledged the order and gradually the little ship was drawn closer.

Rhys-Barley cast an eye again at the encephalophone reading on the bulkhead panel. Reading still ‘Nil’. But the Nil wavered as if it was unsure of itself. Maybe they had caught a dead ship; thought waves should have registered before now, whether Boux or human.

Tension heightened again as the alien was drawn aboard. Matching velocities was a tricky business, and the manoeuvre always entailed a great deal of noise audible throughout the ship. A pity that super-science had never come up with a competent sound-absorber, Rhys-Barley thought morosely. The deck under him swayed a little.

Deeping handed him a slip from Kyla records. There had been four ships of the Windsor class. Three had gone to the scrap yards over three thousand years ago. The fourth had been abandoned for lack of fuel during the great Boux invasion waves that had resulted in the collapse of the First Empire. Its name: Regalia.

‘That must be our pigeon. Let’s get down to Interrogation Bay, Captain,’ Rhys-Barley suggested. Together the pair adjusted their arm-synchs and stepped into the teleport.

They reappeared instantly beside their captive. Aliens Officer was already there, enjoying a brief spell of glory, supervising the batteries of every type of recorder, scanner, probe and what-have-you the ship possessed in concealed positions about the Regalia. The latter looked like a small whale stranded in a large cave.

The Preacher came first out of the airlock because he always went ahead anywhere. Then followed Calurmo and Aprit, stopping to examine the crystalline formations clinging to the lock doors. After them came Woebee and Little Light. Together they gazed at the severe functionalism and grey metal that surrounded them.

‘This is not a pretty planet,’ the Preacher observed.

‘It is not the one Little Light chose,’ Woebee explained.

‘Don’t be silly, the pair of you,’ Calurmo said, a little sternly. ‘This is not a planet. It is made. Use your senses.’

‘Let’s speak to those beings over there,’ said Little Light, pointing. ‘The ones behind the invisibility screen.’ He wandered over to Rhys-Barley and tapped his rediffusion shield.

‘I can see you,’ he said. ‘Can you see me?’

‘All right, cut rediffusion,’ snarled Rhys-Barley. The crimson on his face was no longer produced by the forces of gravity.

‘No evidence of any energy or explosive weapons, sir,’ Aliens Officer reported. ‘Permission to interview?’

‘OK’

Aliens Officer wore a black uniform. His hair was white, his face was gray. He had a square jaw. The Preacher liked the look of him and approached.

‘Are you the captain of this ship?’ asked the Aliens Officer.

‘That question does not mean anything to me. I’m sorry,’ said the Preacher.

‘Who commands this ship, the Regalia?’

‘I don’t understand that one either. What do you think he means, Calurmo?’

Calurmo was scanning the immense room in which they stood. His attention flicked momentarily to the little brain glands in the ceiling, that computed the lung power present and co-ordinated the air supply accordingly. Then he explored all the minute currents and pulses that plied ceaselessly in the walls and floor, adjusting temperature and gravity, guarding against strain and metal fatigue; he swept the air itself, chemically pure and microbe-proof, rendered non-conductive. Nowhere did he find life, and for a moment he recalled the land they had left, with the fish spawning in its rivers and the walrus sporting in its seas.

He dismissed the vision and tried to answer the Preacher’s question.

‘If he means who made the ship go, we all did,’ he said. ‘Little Light did the direction, Woebee and I did the fuel – ’

‘I don’t like it in here, Calurmo,’ Aprit interrupted. ‘These beings smell of something odd …’

‘It’s fear,’ said Calurmo, happy to be interrupted by a friend. ‘Intellectual and physical fear. I’ll tell you about it later. They’ve got some sort of inertia barrier up and their emotions don’t come through, but their thoughts are clear enough.’

‘Too clear!’ said Woebee with a laugh. ‘They are afraid of anyone who does not look like themselves, and if anyone does look like them – they are suspicious! I say, let’s get back to the snows; that was a more interesting place to explore.’

He made a move toward the ship. Instantly an arrangement of duralum bars and R-rays descended from the roof and held them in five separate cells. They stood temporarily disconcerted in glowing cages.

The Aliens Officer walked among them grimly. ‘Now you’re going to answer questions,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry we are forced to use these methods to secure your attention. The speech-pattern separators that allow us to talk together work through the floor here and are relayed out to me via Main Base. I don’t imagine you can do us much harm over such a system. And nothing can get through the electronic barricade we’ve brought up against you. In other words, you’re trapped. Now let’s have straight answers, please.’

‘Here’s a straight answer for your speech-pattern separator,’ said Aprit. Just for a second he wore a look of concentration. At once smoke rose from the floor of the bay. A dozen different alerts clicked and whirred, relentlessly bearing witness to ruined equipment.

Base signalled a two-day repair job required on language circuits.

‘Now we’ll use our system of communicating,’ Aprit said, mollified.

‘You shouldn’t be destructive,’ the Preacher reproved. ‘Havoc becomes a habit.’ Delighted with the chime of his maxim, he repeated it to himself.

Aliens Officer went a little paler. He recognised a show of force when he saw one. Also, he was still hearing them perfectly despite the smouldering failure of his speech-pattern separators. A subordinate hurried up and conferred with him for a moment. Then the officer looked up and said to the prisoners: ‘At that act of destruction you released typical Boux configurations of thought. Do you admit your origins?’

Pointing to the R-rays, Little Light said: ‘I am beginning to become uneasy, friends. This gadget surrounding us is as impervious as he claims.’

‘I think it would be very wise to withdraw,’ the Preacher agreed. ‘Shall we not have left the Arctic?’

‘That seems the only way,’ agreed Calurmo doubtfully. Redature always upset his stomach.

Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley pushed roughly forward. He was dissatisfied with the conduct of the interrogation. Also, he was worried. There was standard procedure for dealing with Boux; man’s deadly enemy, originating on fast-rotating planets with high-velocity winds, were fluid in form and could easily assume the shape of men. A Boux-man loose on a planet like Kyla I could do an infinite amount of damage – and Bouxmen were not easy to detect. Therefore, once Main Base was satisfied there were Boux aboard Pointer, they were quite likely to signal the flagship to proceed into the nearest sun. Rhys-Barley had other ideas about his future.

He halted pugnaciously before Aprit.

‘What’s your real shape?’ he demanded.

Aprit was puzzled. ‘You mean my metaphysical shape?’ he asked.

‘No, I do not. I mean that my instruments register close to the Boux end of the brain impulse-scale. And Boux can masquerade as anything they like, over limited periods of time. What I’m asking is, who or what are you?’

‘We are brothers,’ said Aprit mildly. ‘As you are our brother. Only you are a very bad-tempered brother.’

The stun was shot into Aprit’s enclosure from the still-smoking floor. It struck with frightening suddenness. Pressure built instantaneously to a peak that would have spread a man uniformly over the walls of the enclosure in a pink paste. It would have forced a genuine Boux into one of his primary shapes. Aprit merely dropped unconscious to the deck.

Little Light pointed crossly at the Grand-Admiral. ‘For that, the instant Aprit returns we shall not have left Arctic at all,’ he said.

‘It was a stupid and ignorant act,’ agreed the Preacher.

Nobody had noticed Deeping. When the Captain and the Admiral had come through the teleport, he had been left to take the long, physical route down to Interrogation Bay. One does not waste six million volts on junior ranks.

Now he walked straight up to Calurmo and said, peering anxiously through the vibrating wall that separated them: ‘I am very sorry we have not made you more welcome here, but we are at war.’

‘Please don’t apologise,’ said Calurmo. ‘It must be very upsetting for you to have a difference with someone. How long has this been happening?’

‘Thousands of years,’ said Deeping bitterly.

‘March that man to the disintegrators,’ Rhys-Barley bellowed. Two guards moved smartly toward Deeping.

‘If you will pardon my venturing to suggest it,’ Aliens Officer said, wobbling at the knees as he spoke, ‘but just possibly, sir, this new approach might … might be effective.’

Faint with his own temerity, he saw Rhys-Barley’s hand flicker and stay the guards.

‘ – a difference we can never settle until we vanquish the enemy,’ Deeping was saying. He was still pale, but stood stiff and resolute, almost as if he drew strength from these strange beings.

‘Oh yes, you can settle it,’ Calurmo said. ‘But you’ve been going about it the wrong way.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Rhys-Barley chimed in. ‘You don’t know the problem – unless you are a race of Boux we have not met before.’

‘My friends are learning of the problem now,’ murmured Calurmo, glancing at Little Light and Woebee, who were unusually quiet. But the Grand-Admiral went ruthlessly on.

‘The enemy has inestimable advantages over Man. It has only been by exerting his military might up to the hilt, by standing continually on his toes, by having one finger perpetually on the trigger, that Man has kept the Boux out of his systems.’

‘That really is the truth,’ said Deeping earnestly. ‘If you have a super-weapon you could let us know about we would be very grateful.’

‘Don’t humour me, please,’ Calurmo said. He turned to Little Light and Woebee, who smiled and nodded. At the same time Aprit opened his eyes and stood up.

‘I had such a funny dream,’ he said. ‘Do we go home now?’

‘We want to readjust these people first,’ the Preacher said. The five of them conferred together for a minute, while Rhys-Barley walked rapidly up and down and Deeping sneezed once or twice; R-rays had that effect on his nose.

Finally Woebee motioned to Deeping and said: ‘You must forgive me if I say your people appear full of contradictions to us, but it is so. One contradiction, however, we could not understand. You pen us in here with impenetrable R-rays, as you term your inertia field, and also with duralum bars. The bars are quite superfluous unless – they are not what they seem; they are another of the machines you so delight in. They are, in fact, categorising grids that transmit almost comprehensive records of the five of us back to your nearest planet. An excellent device! Entire blueprints of us, psychologically and physiobiologically, are fed back to your biggest brain units. You really need complimenting on the efficiency of this machine. It is so good, in fact, that Little Light and I have explored Main Base by it, have sent the rest of your fleet packing, and have broadcast directions to your vice-captain or whatever you call him up in the controls; as a result of which, you are now travelling where we want you to go and this Interrogation Bay is cut off from the rest of the ship.’

He had not finished speaking before Rhys-Barley had flung himself behind a shield and given the Emergency Destruction order. Nothing happened. Buttons, switches, valves, all were dead.

‘You merely waste your time,’ Little Light said, pointing at the Grand-Admiral and stepping through the dying R-rays. ‘The power has gone. Did I not explain that clearly enough?’

‘Where are you taking us?’ Deeping whispered.

‘You are taking us,’ Woebee corrected.

‘Not – not to Earth?’

Woebee smiled. ‘I feel that the word ‘Earth’ has some emotional value for you.’

‘Why, yes, of course. Don’t you see, it’s the only planet we ever lost to the Boux, right at the beginning of our troubles with them. But Man came from there. Earth is Man’s birth planet, and when it fell – that was the end of the First Empire. Since then we’ve grown stronger – but all that old peripheral region of space is dead ground to us now.’

Woebee nodded carelessly. ‘We learned that from our investigation of Main Base. The area is now abandoned by the Boux too.’

‘How awful to think of it stagnating all this time!’ Deeping said.

‘Really, you are as foolish as the rest,’ said the Preacher reprovingly. ‘The stagnation has been here. Why, you’re still clinging to machinery to support you.’ He led his four friends back toward the Regalia. ‘We’ll do the rest of the journey on our own,’ he told them. ‘These soldiers will want to go back to their duties. It’s really none of our concern to hinder them!’

In the lock they paused. The personnel trapped in the Interrogation Bay looked bemused and helpless. Rhys-Barley sat on a step staring at the wall. The Captain bit his nails in an absorbed fashion.

Aliens Officer came forward and said: ‘You have so much you could have taught us.’

‘There’s one piece of knowledge, unlike most of our kind of knowledge, that might be useful to you,’ Aprit said casually. ‘In Man’s hurry to leave Earth because one or two Boux had arrived, some few men and women were left behind. They had no defence against the Boux, so the Boux had no need to attack them. In other words, there was an opportunity for – intermarriage.’

‘Intermarriage!’ echoed Aliens Officer.

‘Yes,’ the Preacher said solemnly. ‘Neither you nor your machines seemed able to diagnose that. So you see our origins are a mixture of Man’s and Boux’s …’

‘That is a priceless piece of knowledge,’ Deeping reflected.

Calurmo smiled a valedictory smile that included even the deflated Admiral.

‘I’m delighted if it proves so,’ he said, ‘but it is only a just return for Man’s priceless gift to the Boux who were our distant ancestors: the gift of rigid form. Fluidity has proved a curse to the Boux. Intermarriage has recommendations for both sides. May I suggest you arrange – a love-match?’

This time he remembered to close the airlock doors. The Regalia slid, apparently of its own volition, into the great lock of the Pointer and out into space. By the time it was heading home, the flagship’s captain was busy roaring at his bridge officers and Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley was speaking apologetically to Base.

Deeping was staring at something that had materialized in his hand: wood sorrel, Oxalis acetosella. A flower from Earth.




Outside (#ulink_fd67ccef-0cf9-53aa-8309-7e4a669493dd)


They never went out of the house.

The man whose name was Harley used to get up first. Sometimes he would take a stroll through the building in his sleeping suit – the temperature remained always mild, day after day. Then he would rouse Calvin, the handsome, broad man who looked as if he could command a dozen talents and never actually used one. He made as much company as Harley needed.

Dapple, the girl with grey eyes and black hair, was a light sleeper. The sound of the two men talking would wake her. She would get up and go to rouse May; together they would go down and prepare a meal. While they were doing that, the other two members of the household, Jagger and Pief, would be rousing.

That was how every ‘day’ began: not with the inkling of anything like dawn, but just when the six of them had slept themselves back into wakefulness. They never exerted themselves during the day, but somehow when they climbed back into their beds they slept soundly enough.

The only excitement of the day occurred when they first opened the store. The store was a small room between the kitchen and the blue room. In the far wall was set a wide shelf, and upon this shelf their existence depended. Here, all their supplies ‘arrived’. They would lock the door of the bare room last thing, and when they returned in the morning their needs – food, linen, a new washing machine – would be awaiting them on the shelf. That was just an accepted feature of their existence; they never questioned it among themselves.

On this morning, Dapple and May were ready with the meal before the four men came down. Dapple even had to go to the foot of the wide stairs and call before Pief appeared, so that the opening of the store had to be postponed till after they had eaten; for although the opening had in no way become a ceremony, the women were nervous about going in alone. It was one of those things …

‘I hope to get some tobacco,’ Harley said as he unlocked the door. ‘I’m nearly out of it.’

They walked in and looked at the shelf. It was all but empty.

‘No food,’ observed May, hands on her aproned waist. ‘We shall be on short rations today.’

It was not the first time this had happened. Once – how long ago now? – they kept little track of time – no food had appeared for three days and the shelf had remained empty. They had accepted the shortage placidly.

‘We shall eat you before we starve, May,’ Pief said, and they laughed briefly to acknowledge the joke, although Pief had cracked it last time too. Pief was an unobtrusive little man, not the sort one would notice in a crowd. His small jokes were his most precious possession.

Two packets only lay on the ledge. One was Harley’s tobacco, one was a pack of cards. Harley pocketed the one with a grunt and displayed the other, slipping the pack from its wrapping and fanning it towards the others.

‘Anyone play?’ he asked.

‘Poker,’ Jagger said.

‘Canasta.’

‘Gin rummy.’

‘We’ll play later,’ Calvin said. ‘It’ll pass the time in the evening.’ The cards would be a challenge to them; they would have to sit together to play, around a table, facing each other.

Nothing was in operation to separate them, but there seemed no strong force to keep them together, once the tiny business of opening the store was over. Jagger worked the vacuum cleaner down the hall, past the front door that did not open, and rode it up the stairs to clean the upper landings; not that the place was dirty, but cleaning was something you did anyway in the morning. The women sat with Pief, desultorily discussing how to manage the rationing, but after that they lost contact with each other and drifted away on their own. Calvin and Harley had already strolled off in different directions.

The house was a rambling affair. It had few windows, and such as there were did not open, were unbreakable, and admitted no light. Darkness lay everywhere; illumination from an invisible source followed one’s entry into a room – the black had to be entered before it faded. Every room was furnished, but with odd pieces that bore little relation to each other, as if there was no purpose for the room. Rooms equipped for purposeless beings have that air about them.

No plan was discernible on first or second floor or in the long, empty attics. Only familiarity could reduce the mazelike quality of room and corridor. At least there was ample time for familiarity.

Harley spent a long while walking about, hands in pockets. At one point he met Dapple; she was drooping gracefully over a sketchbook, amateurishly copying a picture that hung on one of the walls – a picture of the room in which she sat. They exchanged a few words, then Harley moved on.

Something lurked in the edge of his mind like a spider in the corner of its web. He stepped into what they called the piano room, and then he realised what was worrying him. Almost furtively, he glanced around as the darkness slipped away, and then looked at the big piano. Some strange things had arrived on the shelf from time to time and had been distributed over the house; one of them stood on top of the piano now.

It was a model, heavy and about two feet high, squat, almost round, with a sharp nose and four buttressed vanes. Harley knew what it was. It was a ground-to-space ship, a model of the burly ferries that lumbered up to the spaceships proper.

That had caused them more unsettlement than when the piano itself had appeared in the store. Keeping his eyes on the model, Harley seated himself on the piano stool and sat tensely, trying to draw something from the rear of his mind … something connected with spaceships.

Whatever it was, it was unpleasant, and it dodged backwards whenever he thought he had laid a mental finger on it. So it always eluded him. If only he could discuss it with someone, it might be teased out of its hiding place. Unpleasant; menacing, yet with a promise entangled in the menace.

If he could get at it, meet it boldly face to face, he could do … something definite. And until he had faced it, he could not even say what the something definite was he wanted to do.

A footfall behind him. Without turning, Harley deftly pushed up the piano lid and ran a finger along the keys. Only then did he look back carelessly over his shoulder. Calvin stood there, hands in pockets, looking solid and comfortable.

‘Saw the light in here,’ he said easily. ‘I thought I’d drop in as I was passing.’

‘I was thinking I would play the piano awhile,’ Harley answered with a smile. The thing was not discussable, even with a near acquaintance like Calvin because … because of the nature of the thing … because one had to behave like a normal, unworried human being. That, at least, was sound and clear and gave him comfort: behave like a normal human being.

Reassured, he pulled a gentle tumble of music from the keyboard. He played well. They all played well. Dapple, May, Pief … as soon as they had assembled the piano, they had all played well. Was that – natural? Harley shot a glance at Calvin. The stocky man leaned against the instrument, back to that disconcerting model, not a care in the world. Nothing showed on his face but an expression of bland amiability. They were all amiable, never quarrelling together.

The six of them gathered for a scanty lunch, their talk was trite and cheerful, and then the afternoon followed on the same pattern as the morning, as all the other mornings: secure, comfortable, aimless. Only to Harley did the pattern seem slightly out of focus; he now had a clue to the problem. It was small enough, but in the dead calm of their days it was large enough.

May had dropped the clue. When she helped herself to jelly, Jagger laughingly accused her of taking more than her fair share. Dapple, who always defended May, said: ‘She’s taken less than you, Jagger.’

‘No,’ May corrected, ‘I think I have more than anyone else. I took it for an interior motive.’

It was the kind of pun anyone made at times. But Harley carried it away to consider. He paced around one of the silent rooms. Interior, ulterior motives … Did the others here feel the disquiet he felt? Had they a reason for concealing that disquiet? And another question:

Where was ‘here’?

He shut that one down sharply.

Deal with one thing at a time. Grope your way gently to the abyss. Categorise your knowledge.

One: Earth was getting slightly the worst of a cold war with Nitity.

Two: the Nititians possessed the alarming ability of being able to assume the identical appearance of their enemies.

Three: by this means they could permeate human society.

Four: Earth was unable to view the Nititian civilisation from inside.

Inside … a wave of claustrophobia swept over Harley as he realised that these cardinal facts he knew bore no relation to this little world inside. They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behaviour of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?

Uneasily, Harley moved about the room; the parquet floor echoed the indecision of his footsteps. He had walked into the billiard room. Now he prodded the balls across the green cloth with one finger, preyed on by conflicting intentions. The red spheres touched and rolled apart. That was how the two halves of his mind worked. Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should … not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that ‘here’ and ‘not here’ seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances.

The ivory slid wearily into a pocket. He decided. He would not sleep in his room tonight.

They came from the various parts of the house to share a bedtime drink. By tacit consent the cards had been postponed until some other time; there was, after all, so much other time.

They talked about the slight nothings that comprised their day, the model of one of the rooms that Calvin was building and May furnishing, the faulty light in the upper corridor which came on too slowly. They were subdued. It was time once more to sleep, and in that sleep who knew what dreams might come? But they would sleep. Harley knew – wondering if the others also knew – that with the darkness which descended as they climbed into bed would come an undeniable command to sleep.

He stood tensely just inside his bedroom door, intensely aware of the unorthodoxy of his behaviour. His head hammered painfully and he pressed a cold hand against his temple. He heard the others go one by one to their separate rooms. Pief called good-night to him; Harley replied. Silence fell.

Now!

As he stepped nervously into the passage, the light came on. Yes, it was slow – reluctant. His heart pumped. He was committed. He did not know what he was going to do or what was going to happen, but he was committed. The compulsion to sleep had been avoided. Now he had to hide, and wait.

It is not easy to hide when a light signal follows wherever you go. But by entering a recess which led to an unused room, opening the door slightly and crouching in the doorway, Harley found that the faulty landing light dimmed off and left him in the dark.

He was neither happy nor comfortable. His brain seethed in a conflict he hardly understood. He was alarmed to think he had broken the rules, and frightened of the creaking darkness about him. But the suspense did not last for long.

The corridor light came back on. Jagger was leaving his bedroom, taking no precaution to be silent. The door swung loudly shut behind him. Harley caught a glimpse of his face before he turned and made for the stairs; he looked noncommittal, but serene – like a man going off duty. He went downstairs in bouncy, jaunty fashion.

Jagger should have been in bed asleep. A law of nature had been defied.

Unhesitatingly, Harley followed. He had been prepared for something and something had happened, but his flesh crawled with fright. The light-headed notion came to him that he might disintegrate with fear. All the same, he kept doggedly on down the stairs, feet noiseless on the heavy carpet.

Jagger had rounded a corner. He was whistling quietly as he went. Harley heard him unlock a door. That would be the store – no other doors were locked. The whistling faded.

The store was open. No sound came from within. Cautiously, Harley peered inside. The far wall had swung open about a central pivot, revealing a passage beyond. For minutes Harley could not move, staring fixedly at this breach.

Finally, and with a sense of suffocation, he entered the store. Jagger had gone through – there. Harley also went through. Somewhere he did not know, somewhere whose existence he had not guessed … Somewhere that wasn’t the house … The passage was short and had two doors, one at the end rather like a cage door (Harley did not recognise an elevator when he saw one), one in the side, narrow and with a window.

This window was transparent. Harley looked through it and then fell back, choking. Dizziness swept in and shook him by the throat.

Stars shone outside.

With an effort, he mastered himself and made his way back upstairs, lurching against the banisters. They had all been living under a ghastly misapprehension …

He barged into Calvin’s room and the light lit. A faint, sweet smell was in the air, and Calvin lay on his broad back, fast asleep.

‘Calvin! Wake up!’ Harley shouted.

The sleeper never moved. Harley was suddenly aware of his own loneliness and the eerie feel of the great house about him. Bending over the bed, he shook Calvin violently by the shoulders and slapped his face.

Calvin groaned and opened one eye.

‘Wake up, man,’ Harley said. ‘Something terrible’s going on here.’

The other propped himself on one elbow, communicated fear rousing him thoroughly.

‘Jagger’s left the house,’ Harley told him. ‘There’s a way outside. We’re – we’ve got to find out what we are.’ His voice rose to an hysterical pitch. He was shaking Calvin again. ‘We must find out what’s wrong here. Either we are victims of some ghastly experiment – or we’re all monsters!’

And as he spoke, before his staring eyes, beneath his clutching hands, Calvin began to wrinkle up and fold and blur, his eyes running together and his great torso contracting. Something else – something lively and alive – was forming in his place.

Harley only stopped yelling when, having plunged downstairs, the sight of the stars through the small window steadied him. He had to get out, wherever ‘out’ was.

He pulled the small door open and stood in fresh night air.

Harley’s eye was not accustomed to judging distances. It took him some while to realise the nature of his surroundings, to realise that mountains stood distantly against the starlit sky, and that he himself stood on a platform twelve feet above the ground. Some distance away, lights gleamed, throwing bright rectangles onto an expanse of tarmac.

There was a steel ladder at the edge of the platform. Biting his lip, Harley approached it and climbed clumsily down. He was shaking violently with cold and fear. When his feet touched solid ground, he began to run. Once he looked back; the house perched on its platform like a frog hunched on top of a rattrap.

He stopped abruptly then, in almost dark. Abhorrence jerked up inside him like retching. The high, crackling stars and the pale serration of the mountains began to spin, and he clenched his fists to hold on to consciousness. That house, whatever it was, was the embodiment of all the coldness in his mind. Harley said to himself: ‘Whatever has been done to me, I’ve been cheated. Someone has robbed me of something so thoroughly I don’t even know what it is. It’s been a cheat, a cheat …’ And he choked on the idea of those years that had been pilfered from him. No thought: thought scorched the synapses and ran like acid through the brain. Action only! His leg muscles jerked into movement again.

Buildings loomed about him. He simply ran for the nearest light and burst into the nearest door. Then he pulled up sharp, panting and blinking the harsh illumination out of his pupils.

The walls of the room were covered with graphs and charts. In the centre of the room was a wide desk with vision-screen and loudspeaker on it. It was a businesslike room with overloaded ashtrays and a state of ordered untidiness. A thin man sat alertly at the desk; he had a thin mouth.

Four other men stood in the room; all were armed, none seemed surprised to see him. The man at the desk wore a neat suit; the others were in uniform.

Harley leaned on the doorjamb and sobbed. He could find no words to say.

‘It has taken you four years to get out of there,’ the thin man said. He had a thin voice.

‘Come and look at this,’ he said, indicating the screen before him. With an effort, Harley complied; his legs worked like rickety crutches.

On the screen, clear and real, was Calvin’s bedroom. The outer wall gaped, and through it two uniformed men were dragging a strange creature, a wiry, mechanical-looking being that had once been called Calvin.

‘Calvin was a Nititian,’ Harley observed dully. He was conscious of a sort of stupid surprise at his own observation.

The thin man nodded approvingly.

‘Enemy infiltrations constituted quite a threat,’ he said. ‘Nowhere on Earth was safe from them; they can kill a man, dispose of him, and turn into exact replicas of him. Makes things difficult … We lost a lot of state secrets that way. But Nititian ships have to land here to disembark the Non-Men and to pick them up again after their work is done. That is the weak link in their chain.

‘We interrupted one such shipload and bagged them singly after they had assumed human form. We subjected them to artificial amnesia and put small groups of them into different environments for study. This is the Army Institute for Investigation of Non-Men, by the way. We’ve learned a lot … quite enough to combat the menace … Your group, of course, was one such.’

Harley asked in a gritty voice: ‘Why did you put me in with them?’

The thin man rattled a ruler between his teeth before answering.

‘Each group has to have a human observer in its very midst, despite all the scanning devices that watch from outside. You see, a Nititian uses a lot of energy maintaining a human form; once in that shape, he is kept in it by self-hypnosis which only breaks down in times of stress, the amount of stress bearable varying from one individual to another. A human on the spot can sense such stresses … It’s a tiring job for him; we get doubles always to work day on, day off – ’

‘But I’ve always been there – ’

‘Of your group,’ the thin man cut in, ‘the human was Jagger, or two men alternating as Jagger. You caught one of them going off duty.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Harley shouted. ‘You’re trying to say that I …’

He choked on the words. They were no longer pronounceable. He felt his outer form flowing away like sand, as from the other side of the desk revolver barrels were levelled at him.

‘Your stress level is remarkably high,’ continued the thin man, turning his gaze away from the spectacle. ‘But where you fail is where you all fail. Like Earth’s insects which imitate vegetables, your cleverness cripples you. You can only be carbon copies. Because Jagger did nothing in the house, all the rest of you instinctively followed suit. You didn’t get bored – you didn’t even try to make passes at Dapple – as personable a Non-Man as I ever saw. Even the model spaceship jerked no appreciable reaction out of you.’

Brushing his suit down, he rose before the skeletal being which now cowered in a corner.

‘The inhumanity inside always gives you away,’ he said evenly. ‘However human you are outside.’




Panel Game (#ulink_79a8b51e-4fe8-5bdc-ad67-4d5ef00d435c)


It was Christmas. Snow fell by courtesy of Home-Count Climatic.

Rick Sheridan came off shift early, flying his helic deftly through the white clouds, and keeping by long custom between the altitude levels prescribed for his particular consumer-class. As far as he might be said to have a character, his character was cheerful. He exhibited this cheerfulness now by whistling.

The sound filled the little cockpit, competing with the bope music issuing from the 3-inch screen telly strapped on his wrist.

Christmas! It was proverbially the time of festivity and maximum consumption. It was a period when everyone would be happy – except, possibly, he warned himself, his wife, Neata. Her moodiness had become trying of late. The mere thought of it knocked his whistle off key.

For the difficult business of landing, Rick switched on to auto. This luxury had been fitted by Happy Hover Ltd. only two months ago. With the faintest of sighs, the helic leafed down, below the clouds, below the aerial levels, below the rooftops, and squatted in the Sheridan back garden.

The garden was a large one, as gardens went, ten feet by sixteen, and covered by neo-concrete. Rick jumped out and stretched himself. Although he was all of twenty-eight, he suddenly felt young and healthy again. Appetite stirred sluttishly in his stomach.

‘Oh for a bowl of tasty, toothable Cob Corners!’ he cried exultantly, and bounded for the back door.

He was high enough up the consumer hierarchy to own a magnificent two-room dwelling: Walking through the Disposing room, he entered the Gazing room and called: ‘Neata!’

She was sitting quietly at the Relaxtable, laboriously mending a little labour-saving device, her fair head bent in concentration. Her smile of welcome formed easily and naturally round her new teeth, and she jumped up, throwing her arms round him – carefully, so as not to crumple his teddy tie.

‘Ricky, darling, you’re early!’ she exclaimed.

‘I hit my quota ahead of schedule,’ he explained proudly. ‘Thanks to Howlett’s.’

Their only child, Goya, jumped up and ran to greet her daddy. She managed to do it backwards, thus keeping her eyes fixed on the wall screens, where Sobold the Soap King was facing three dirty-looking criminals single-handed.

Rick’s eyes glistened behind their contact lenses. He reflected how affectionate the child was for a three-year-old, but something in the little girl’s actions must have displeased her mother, for Neata said irritably: ‘Why don’t you welcome your father properly?’

‘Wanna see old Sobold slosh the slashers,’ Goya said defiantly.

‘You’re old enough to guess what will happen,’ Neata said crossly. ‘He’ll catch them and make them all wash in that creamy, dreamy lather that only Little Britches Soap provides.’

‘Don’t get angry with her,’ Rick said. ‘Remember, it’s Christmas.’

He took Goya on his knee, and settled down with her to watch Sobold, his hunger forgotten. The wall-screens filled two walls. Before the end of next year, if he worked as well as he was working now, they might be able to afford a third screen. And one day … he blushed with excitement at the thought of being surrounded by an image in quadruplicate on all four walls.

A flicker of interference burst over the bright screens. Rick tutted with annoyance; the terrific technical accomplishment of telly was something upon which every civilised consumer prided himself, but it was nevertheless obvious that just lately there had been more misting than usual on the screens. Rick found himself recalling the rumours, dim and evasive, which he heard while at work; rumours of a vile movement to overthrow the present happy regime, of determined men with new weapons at their command.

Dismissing the idea irritably, he turned full attention on to the screens. Justice and cleanliness having overtaken Sobold’s opponents, the next Quarter of an hour was to be devoted to ‘Mr. Dial’s Dairy’, a comic serial lampooning twentieth-century farm life, presented by the makers of Grinbaum’s Meat Bars.

‘Time for bed, Goya,’ Neata declared, and despite the young lady’s protests she was whisked into the Disposing room for an encounter with Little Britches, Ardentifrices and Juxon’s (‘Nun-better’) Drying powder. Rick seized this opportunity while he was alone to spend ten minutes looking into his Pornograph, but his attention was recalled by a jolly announcer in the Grinbaum uniform calling out: ‘Well, customers, there we have to leave Mr. Dial for now. Is his prize cow really going to calve? Will Sally Hobkin get that big kiss she deserves? Your guess is as good as mine, suckers. One thing everybody is sure about is the goodness, the sheer brothy, spothy goodness, of Grinbaum’s Meat Bars. A whole carcass goes into each of those chewy little cubes.’

And then leaning, as it seemed, almost out of the screen, the announcer suddenly bellowed harshly: ‘Have you bought your quota of Grinbaum’s Meat Bars today, Sheridan?’

Cut. Screen blank. Ten seconds till next programme.

‘He certainly puts that over well,’ Rick gasped proudly, passing a hand over his brow. ‘It always makes me jump.’

‘It makes me jump too,’ said Neata flatly, leading a night-dressed Goya into the room.

This device whereby consumers could be individually named was the latest, and possibly cleverest, accomplishment of telly. The announcer had actually named no names; instead, at the correct moment, a signal transmitted from the studio activated a circuit at the receiving end which, in every individual home, promptly bellowed out the surname of the head consumer of the family.

Neata pressed the Relaxtable, and a section of it sprang into a bed. Goya was put in, and given her cup of steaming, happy-dreaming Howlett’s. She had hardly drunk the last mouthful before she sank down on the pillow, yawning.

‘Sleep well!’ Neata said gently, pressing the child’s earplugs into place. She felt tired herself, she hardly knew why. It would be a relief when her turn came for Howlett’s and Payne’s Painless Plugs.

There was no switching the screens off and now that telly provided a twenty-four hour service, the aids to sleep were a necessity.

‘This is Green Star, B channel,’ announced the screens. ‘The Dewlap Chair Hour!!!’

‘Must we watch this?’ Neata asked, as three dancing, screaming nudes burst into view, legs waving, bosoms bouncing.

‘We could try Green Star A.’

Green Star A had a play, which had already begun. They tried Green Star C, but that had a travel programme on, and Rick was bored by other countries – and a little afraid of them. They turned back to the Dewlap Hour, and gradually relaxed into semi-mindlessness.

There were three other coloured star systems, each with three channels, at their disposal, theoretically at least. But Green Star was the official consumer system for their consumer-class; obviously it would be wasteful for the Sheridans to watch White Star, which advertised commodities they could not afford, such as shower-purges, stratostruts, tellysolids and bingoproofs.

If they did watch White Star, there was, unfortunately, no guarantee that telly was not watching them. For since the installation of ‘wave-bounce’, some ten years ago, every wall screen was a reciprocal – which meant, in plain language, that every viewer could be viewed from telly. This innovation was the source of some of the very best programmes, for viewers could sit and watch themselves viewing telly.

Dewlap was showing one of the numerous and ever-popular panel games. Three blindfold men and a blindfold woman were being passed patent custards, cake-mixes and detergents; they had to distinguish between the different commodities by taste alone. A compere in shirt sleeves awarded blows over the head for incorrect guesses.

Just tonight – perhaps because it was Christmas – the sight of Gilbert Lardner having his head tapped failed to enthral Rick. He began to walk about the Gazing room, quite an easy matter since, except for the Relaxtable in which Goya lay drugged, there was a complete absence of furniture.

Catching Neata’s curious gaze upon him, Rick moved out into the garden. It was not fair to distract her from her viewing.

The snow still fell, still by courtesy of Home-Count Climatic. He did not feel the cool night air, snug in his Moxon’s Mockwool. Absently, he ran his hand over the helic, its blunt vanes, its atomic motor, its telly suppressor, its wheels. All maintenance, of course, was done by the helic drome: there was nothing he could fiddle with. Indeed, there was nothing he could do at all.

Like a sensible fellow, like all his sensible neighbours – whom he had hardly so much as seen – he went back indoors and sat before the screens.

Five minutes later came the unprecedented knock at the door.

The shortage of arable land in England, acute in the twentieth century, became critical in the twenty-first. Mankind’s way of reproducing himself being what it is, the more houses that were erected on the dwindling acres, the more houses were needed. These two problems, which were really but facets of one problem, were solved dramatically and unexpectedly. After telly’s twenty-four-hour services were introduced, it was realised by those who had the interests of the nation at heart (a phrase denoting those who were paid from public taxes) that nine-tenths of the people needed neither windows nor friends: telly was all in all to them.

A house without windows can be built in any surroundings. It can be built in rows of hundreds or blocks of thousands. Nor need roads be a hindrance to this agglomeration: an airborne population needs no roads.

A house without friends is freed from ostentation. There is no longer any urge to keep up with the Joneses, or whoever may come in. One needs, in fact, only two rooms: a room in which to watch the screens, and a room in which to store the Meat Bars and other items which the screens hypnotize one into buying.

So telly changed the face of England almost overnight. The Sheridan house, like a great many others, was in the midst of a nest of houses stretching for a mile or more in all directions; it could be reached only by something small enough to alight in the garden.

So for many reasons the knock on the door was very much a surprise.

‘Whoever can it be?’ asked Rick uneasily.

‘I don’t know,’ Neata said. She too had heard rumours of a subversive movement; a momentary – and not unpleasing – vision attended her of two masked men coming in and smashing the wall screens. But of course masked men would not bother to knock.

‘Perhaps it’s somebody from Grinbaum’s Meat Bars,’ suggested Rick, ‘I forgot to buy any today.’

‘Don’t be so silly, Rick,’ his wife said impatiently. ‘You know their factory must be purely automatic. Go and see who it is.’

That was something he had not thought of. You had to hand it to women … He got up and went reluctantly to open the door, smoothing his hair and his tie on the way.

A solid-looking individual stood in the drifting snow. His helic was parked against Rick’s. He wore some sort of a cloak over his Mock-wool: obviously, he was of a higher consumer-class than the Sheridans.

‘Er …’ said Rick.

‘May I come in?’ asked the stranger in the sort of voice always hailed on the screens as resonant. ‘I’m an escaped criminal.’

‘Er …’

‘I’m not dangerous. Don’t be alarmed.’

‘The little girl’s in bed,’ Rick said, clutching at the first excuse which entered his head.

‘Have no fear,’ said the stranger, still resonantly, ‘kidnapping is not one of the numerous offences on my crime sheet.’

He swept magnificently past Rick, through the dark Disposing room and into the Gazer. Neata jumped up as he entered. He bowed low and pulled the cloak from his shoulders with an eloquent gesture which scattered snow over the room.

‘Madam, forgive my intrusion,’ he said, the organ note more noticeable than ever. ‘I throw myself upon your mercy.’

‘Ooh, you talk like someone on a panel game,’ Neata gasped.

‘I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart,’ said the stranger, and announced himself as Black Jack Gabriel.

Rick hardly heard. He was taking in the thick-set figure in its smart attire, and the curiously impressive streak of white hair on the leonine head (the fellow must be thirty if he was a day). He also took in the meaningful way Neata and Black Jack were looking at each other.

‘I’m Neata Sheridan, and this is my husband, Rick,’ Neata was saying.

‘A delightful name,’ said Black Jack, bowing at Rick and grinning ingratiatingly.

‘It’s only short for Rickmansworth,’ said Neata, a little acidly.

Black Jack, standing facing but entirely ignoring the screens, began to speak. He was a born elocutionist, and soon even Rick ceased to blush – a nervous habit which manifested itself on the rare occasions when he was face to face with a real human being.

Black Jack had a dramatic tale to tell of his capture by armed police, who had chased him across roofs thirty storeys above ground level. For the last nine years he had been imprisoned in Holloway, condemned to hard labour, knitting hemp mittens for the cameramen of Outside Telly.

Suddenly, only a few hours ago, an opportunity for escape had presented itself. Black Jack had broken into the Governor’s suite, exchanged clothes, and flown off in the Governor’s helic.

‘And here I am,’ he said. ‘I just landed at random – and how lucky I was to find you two.’

Despite some opposition from an outbreak of bope music from the screen, Rick had been listening with great attention.

‘If it’s not a rude question, Mr. Black,’ he said, ‘what did you do wrong?’

‘That’s rather a long story,’ Black Jack said modestly, knitting his eyebrows but positively smiling at Neata. ‘You see, England used to be rather a strange place. In those days – you must have seen so much entertainment you would not remember – there was a government. There were also several industries, and something known as ‘free enterprise’ flourishing. The government used to ‘nationalise’ (as they called it) any industry which looked like getting too big and prosperous.

‘Well, one of these industries was called Television – telly is the modern term. It was getting so big, the government took it over, but it was so big, it took over the government. A case of the tail wagging the dog, you see.

‘Soon, everything was telly. And perpetual entertainment did a lot of good. Now half the people in the country work – directly or indirectly – for telly. It did away with unemployment, overemployment, strikes, neuroses, wars, housing problems, crime and football pools. Perpetual entertainment was here to stay.’

‘You tell it so well,’ Neata said. She was virtually cuddling against him. ‘But what did you do to earn your long prison sentence?’

‘I was the last Prime Minister,’ Black Jack said. ‘I voted against perpetual entertainment.’

Neata gasped.

So did Rick. Drawing himself up, he said: ‘Then we don’t want any of your sort in our house. I must ask you to leave before the H. Brogan’s Watches’ Show comes on.’

‘Oh, don’t make him go,’ pleaded Neata. She suddenly realised that here was the calibre of man she had been waiting for. He might well be leader of the rumoured subversive movement: he might cause interference on every wall screen in the country: but she could forgive – no, applaud! – everything, if he would just roll his eyes again.

‘I said “Go”,’ demanded Rick.

‘I had no intention of staying,’ said Black Jack coolly. ‘I’m on my way to Bali or Spain or India or somewhere without perpetual entertainment.’

‘Then what did you come here for in the first place?’ Rick asked.

‘Merely to borrow some food to sustain me on my journey. The Governor’s helic happened not to be provisioned for a long flight. Surely you’ll do that for me?’

‘Of course we will – if you must go,’ said Neata.

‘Why should we?’ asked Rick. ‘I’ll be a Dutchman if I lift a finger to help a criminal.’ But catching sight of his wife’s clenched fists and suddenly blazing eyes, he muttered miserably: ‘OK, call me Hans,’ and made off into the Disposing room.

Ardently, the self-confessed Prime Minister turned to Neata. ‘How can I ever thank you for your assistance, madam,’ he breathed. ‘It will be useless for you to forget me, for I shall never forget you!’

‘Nor I you,’ she said. ‘I think – oh … I think you’re wonderful, and – and I hate the telly.’

With swimming eyes, she peered up at him. He was pressing her hand: he was pressing her hand. It was the most wonderful moment of her life; her heart told her she was closer to the Meaning of Existence than she had ever been. Now he was leaning towards her – and Rick was back in the room again.

Hardly daring to leave them alone, he had snatched up a bag of dried prunes, two cartons of Silvery Soggmash, a cake, a sackful of Dehydratede Olde Englishe Fishe and Chyps (‘There’s no food like an old food’) and a tin of Grinbaums which had been previously overlooked.

‘Here you are,’ he said ungraciously. ‘Now go.’

Black Jack was meekness itself, now his object had been gained. He seemed, indeed, pleased to be off, Neata thought dejectedly; but doubtless such police as could be spared from viewing would be on his trail, and he could not afford to delay.

Rick followed the intruder out into the snow, which was still falling by courtesy of H-C.C. Black Jack flung the provisions into the boot of his helic and jumped gracefully into the driver’s seat. He raised a hand in ironical salute and called: ‘Happy Christmas!’ The helic lifted.

‘Good-bye!’ Neata called romantically and then, more romantically still: ‘Bon Voyage!’

But already the machine was lost in the whirling white flakes.

‘Come on in,’ Rick grunted.

They exchanged no words indoors. Morosely, Rick glared at the wall screens. Somehow, now, the savour was gone. Even the H. Brogan’s Watches’ Show had lost its appeal. He got up and paced about restlessly, fiddling with his teddy tie.

‘Oh heck,’ he said. ‘Let’s try White Star. I don’t suppose any supervisors are watching us. We need a change, that’s what.’

He flicked the controls over to White Star A, and gasped in astonishment. Neata gasped too, a little more gustily.

A sumptuous lounge showed on the screens. An immaculate announcer and three immaculate guests were leaning back in their chairs to watch a figure enter a door and approach the camera.

The figure, in its swagger cloak, with the distinguished streak of white in its hair, was unmistakable. It bowed to the unseen audience.

Nervously, a little over-heartily, the announcer was saying: ‘Well, consumers, here comes the scallywag of the Bryson Brainbath Hour, safe back in the studio.’ And turning to the newcomer he said: ‘Well, Gervaise McByron – alias Black Jack Gabriel – your forfeit in this special Christmas edition of our popular panel game, “Fifty Queries”, in which you got lowest score, was to go out and talk your way into a green consumer-class home, returning with a souvenir of your visit. You’ve certainly carried out instructions to the letter!’

Popular White telly-star McBryon smiled lavishly, said: ‘I did my best!’ and deposited some prunes, some Soggymash, a cake, Fishe and Chyps and a tin of Grinbaums at the announcer’s feet.

‘Your patter was terribly convincing,’ said the announcer uneasily. ‘I just hope none of our viewers believed a word you said about – er, Big Mother Telly. I almost believed you myself, ha, ha!’

‘You’ll get suspended for this, McByron,’ opined a decorative lady who had been included on the panel for the sake of her undulating façade. ‘You went too far. Far too far.’

‘We watched every moment of your performance in the Sheridan shack via wave-bounce reciprocal,’ said the announcer. ‘I just hope none of our viewers believed a word – ’

‘Tell me, McByron,’ cut in the decorative woman coldly, ‘what did you really think of Mrs. Sheridan?’

‘If you want a frank answer,’ began McByron bluntly, ‘compared with you, Lady Patricia So-and-So Burton, she was an absolute – ’

‘And so ends this special Christmas edition of “Fifty Queries”,’ cried the announcer frantically, jumping up and waving his hands. ‘It was brought to you by courtesy of Bryson’s Brainbaths. Don’t forget: a mind that thinks is a mind that stinks. Good night, consumers, everywhere.’

Cut. Screen black. Ten seconds to next programme.

Slowly, Rick turned to face his wife.

‘There!’ he said. ‘Disgraced! That – that trickster! We were just a spot of amusement on a snob-class panel show. Now are you ashamed?’

‘Don’t say anything, please, Rick,’ Neata said distantly. There was something so commanding in her tone that her husband turned away and abjectly switched back to Green Star.

Neata walked pensively out of the room. She still clutched the wicked little device which McBryon, alias Black Jack, had pressed into her hand. Then, it had been startlingly cold; now, her palm had made it hot. She knew what it was, she knew what she had to do with it.

‘Deadly …’ she whispered to herself. ‘Deadly … The end of civilisation as we know it.’

The metal was a challenge in her grasp.

Ah, but McBryon was clever! She was dizzy at his impudence. Although evidently a leading tellystar, he was nevertheless a saboteur, a member – perhaps the leader! – of the subversives. And he had dared to pass on this weapon and to deliver his inspiring message of doubt in front of thousands of viewers.

‘What a man!’

Neata was out in the snow now. She looked with strained face at the little device. It had to be fitted on to Rick’s helic. Poor Rick – but he would never know! The thought that she was helping in a mighty, silent revolution lent her determination.

Quickly, she bent down and fitted the anti-telly suppressor into Rick’s helic.




Pogsmith (#ulink_b4be1b47-2bc6-51da-985c-59284bdffea5)


Dusty Miller and his wife were lucky. Not lucky to be on a year’s holiday, because everyone higher than esp-inspectors qualified nowadays. Not lucky to be on Mercury, because although the new atmosphere breathed well enough it had not yet stabilized and typhoons were frequent. Not lucky to visit the Galactic Zoo, because its gates were open wide to all who could afford the entrance fee. But lucky because they were the one millionth and one millionth and one (or one million and oneth) human beings to go in.

The celebration of this numerical achievement entailed a lavish lunch, followed by a personally conducted tour round the zoo by the Director.

‘I don’t like him,’ Daisy whispered.

‘Shut up, he’ll hear you,’ Dusty snapped. He had reason for his belief. The Director possessed three of the largest ears Dusty had ever seen. But then the Director had been hatched on Puss II.

Nevertheless, the tour was highly stimulating. Dusty was delighted with every animal he saw. His wife was less happy, but she never enjoyed wearing space suits; by a quirkish, claustrophobic effect, they gave her asthma. Unfortunately, they were highly necessary, since each block of the zoo naturally contained the atmosphere of the planet whose animals it housed – and nine-tenths of them were nothing less than death to human nostrils.

They had visited the Puss II block, whose inmates looked to Daisy and Dusty surprisingly like their distinguished escort, and had traversed the impressive Ogaeiou chain of buildings housing the Knitosaurs, gigantic crabs who weaved their own shells from a natural-nylon seaweed, when they came to a large domed erection.

‘This,’ the Director claimed impressively, ‘is our latest addition to the zoo. Within, we shall find the only extant life form of the newly discovered planet Pogsmith.’

‘Wasn’t that the place there was all that fuss about?’ Daisy asked.

‘There is always a fuss about a newly discovered planet,’ the Director said severely. ‘Territorial rights, etc …’

‘Shall we go in?’ Dusty asked hastily. He had known for years that his wife was dull and provincial; he just happened to love her that way. While for the Director he held every respect – but a growing repulsion.

‘First,’ replied the great man, ‘depress the yellow switch you will feel just in front of the central ridge of your helmets.’ He showed them by example. ‘That will protect us from the thought waves which this creature sends out. It sets in action a dead field about the brain.’

He looked pointedly at Daisy, as if to imply that she was already safeguarded by such means. When they had complied, they entered.

The ground plan was the usual one. A spiralling observation ramp circled an enormous glassite dome which contained the alien species and fragments of its customary surroundings. At the beginning of the ramp was a fortified gate into the dome and a large panel of information, such as details of topography, atmosphere, planetary year, etc.

The lighting was dim.

‘Low angstrom range,’ the Director commented.

‘I can’t see them,’ Dusty said, peering into the bowl of gloom.

‘It,’ said the Director. ‘We only managed to catch one.’

‘What is the name of the species?’

‘Er – Pogsmith.’

‘Oh … After the planet? I thought they only named dominant species after the planet?’

‘This is the only, consequently the dominant, species, Mr. Miller.’

‘I see. Then how do you know they are not – people, rather than animals?’

‘Why, they behave like animals.’

‘I don’t see that that’s any – never mind; where is this creature, Mr. Director? I can see nothing in there but an old bucket.’

‘That, at the moment, is Pogsmith.’

Taking hold of a wheel set in an upright in the glassite, the Director spun it, setting in motion an automatic prodder. It reached out and tipped the bucket gently over. The bucket turned smoothly into a red nose, from which a hand extended in the direction of the Director.

The latter coughed, turned away, and said: ‘Until the creature condescends to turn into its usual shape, you might be interested to hear about the first and only expedition to the strange and remote planet of Pogsmith.’

‘Well, thanks very much,’ Daisy said, ‘but I think perhaps we’d better be – ’

‘It so happens,’ the Director said, ‘I was on the exploratory ship as zoologist at the time. You are singularly fortunate to hear this first-hand account.

‘Pogsmith the planet was so named after Pogsmith, our radio operator – a sort of memorial to the poor fellow. The only thing they had in common were peculiar features. The operator had one eye and a ginger beard, and the planet – well …’ He rotated his claws in the famous Puss gesture of amazement.

‘Pogsmith is the only planet in a system of three giant suns, a red, a yellow and a blue one. It is smaller than Mercury and, containing no heavy metals, has an extremely low density. Yet during a period of its orbit it comes almost within Roche’s Limit of two of the suns. The wonder is that this fragile little world did not disintegrate eons ago! It only seems to survive this perilous part of its course by speeding up its axial revolution tremendously.

‘This we noted as we glided in for a landing. The amazing thing was that the planet held an atmosphere, a pungent mixture of neon and argon that we found stayed electrostatically attracted to the surface, due to the continual absorption through it of random and charged gamma particles which combined – ’ Noting the blank expression on Dusty’s face, the Director cleared both his throats and changed his tack.

‘There were no seas, but the ground was broken and mountainous. We found a plain near the equator and feathered down. The ship immediately rose again. The captain swore, touched the fore jets and set our tail firmly in the dust once more. The ship was immediately flung back into the air. We could not stay down! So we floated and chewed our nails. On other planets, the difficulty is always getting off them; yet here the situation was paradoxically reversed.

‘Everyone was completely baffled, until I came forward with the obvious solution. The planet’s mass was so low and its axial rotation so fast that centrifugal force had overcome gravity at the equator! Following my careful instructions, the captain moved to the north pole, and there we could land in the usual manner. An additional advantage was the lower temperature – only 160°. At the equator it had been about 245°.

‘I only tell you this to make the point that any life on such a world was bound to be eccentric.’

‘Oh quite, Director. Daisy dear, are you all right?’ Dusty Miller bent anxiously over his wife, who was fluttering her eyes.

‘Yes, fine, thank you. Don’t interrupt, dear. You were saying, sir?’

‘We climbed out, the five of us – in space suits, of course. It was eerie to a degree. The sky was nearly black, owing to the tenuous atmosphere, although there were a few very low grey clouds. The blue sun moved from about five to twenty degrees above the horizon, revolving so rapidly round the sky that it looked like an azure spiral. Every now and then, the red sun would appear, climb to zenith and sink again. Unfortunately, we were too far north to see the third sun; I remember feeling vaguely aggrieved about it at the time.

‘What a spectacle, though! We stood amazed. Both visible suns were at least fourteen times as big as a full moon on Earth and their shifting, blending shadow spun a kaleidoscope of stupendous colour. We cried our delight aloud, lifting up hands that had become unpredictable rainbows.

‘Pogsmith had no eye for beauty. He had, as I said, only one eye, and this was on the main chance. He disappeared over that low hill which is always near any spaceship about to encounter danger in all the science-fiction stories I have read. We heard his startled shout, and ran to see what was wrong. A hundred yards ahead of him was a torpedo. It was scampering towards him. It had legs. These changed to wheels, and the wheels to flappers.

‘Abruptly it stopped. It changed again – into something very like a terrestrial pig. That, we have found since, is its natural form. But under the fluctuating conditions that exist on its world it has developed protective and projective mimicry to an extraordinary degree.

‘“Come on,” Pogsmith bellowed. “Let’s capture it!”

‘I was naturally in favour of the idea. But Pogsmith acted first.

‘He flung himself on the creature. It was an unwise thing to do, and I should have behaved differently. Even as he moved, the amazing animal altered its form again. It grew boots, a ginger beard, a space suit. It turned, in fact, into an absolute double of Pogsmith.

‘They fought desperately together. We closed in upon them and pulled them apart – no easy matter for only four of us.

‘Then came a problem. Which of them was Pogsmith? Neither showed any inclination to turn into anything further. The pig, with a good deal of common sense, realised he was safe in his disguise.

‘Both cursed when we prodded them. Both vowed he was the only genuine and original Pogsmith. Both begged to be released.

‘So, at my suggestion, we released them, the idea being that the fake would immediately attempt to escape. But no, both stood tamely there and suggested a return to the ship. Evidently the pig’s curiosity had been roused.

‘We only resolved the deadlock by a brilliant idea of mine. Obviously the creature could only stimulate outward appearances; we had but to take blood slides to tell one Pogsmith from the other.

‘They both came meekly to the air lock. But there a strange thing happened. We stopped. We looked again at the twins. The Captain spoke first.

‘“Silly of us,” he said. “I know which the real Pogsmith is – it’s this one,” and he clapped his hand on the nearer of the two.

‘We all agreed vehemently with him. At the time it was suddenly more than obvious which was which. We pushed away the one we decided was the fake and hurried into the ship, shutting the lock behind us.

‘“Phew!” one of the crew said. “Lucky we suddenly saw sense. Let’s get away from here!”

‘And so we did. We were off and away at once, leaving the planet and its suns far behind. The incident had destroyed a lot of our self-confidence; for one thing, no doubt each of us had the thought: ‘Supposing more of the creatures had come up and joined in the fun? Should we ever have sorted ourselves out?’

‘Pogsmith, always taciturn, was more silent than ever. We did not like to remind him of his unpleasant experience, but finally I asked: “Are you feeling yourself again, Pogsmith?”

‘For reply, he winked his one eye at me and slowly – turned into a pig!

‘We saw it all then. We had been tricked by some form of mass-hypnotism into leaving the real radio op. behind. By then we were three days spaceborne, and poor old Pogsmith had air enough for, at a maximum, thirty-six hours. What could we do? As a memorial to our late friend, we christened the planet Pogsmith, and kept heading for home.

‘The crew were not only furious with the creature, they were frightened of it, and its power. They voted to scoot it out of the airlock at once. But I spoke up in the cause of science, and explained what a valuable zoological discovery we had made. After much argument, the masquerader’s life was saved, and we brought it here, to the zoo.’

There was a short silence in the dome.

‘A very extraordinary tale indeed!’ Dusty Miller exclaimed.

‘The truth is frequently extraordinary,’ the Director said, with emphasis.

‘Do you reckon he’s pulling our legs?’ Daisy whispered to her husband.

‘I don’t know.’

They turned and stared solemnly into the arena. Pogsmith had resumed its natural form. It was decidedly porcine, although its face bore an expression of almost classical serenity seldom noticeable on pig countenances. Seeing it was being observed, it commenced to change shape.

‘Actually, it is rather parrot-like,’ the Director said contemptuously. ‘It never composes its own shape, almost always copies something it has seen. Look, you notice it is doing me now …’

Mrs. Miller let out a loud shriek.

‘When has it seen you naked?’ she asked.

‘Madam, I assure you I’m not – ’

‘Never mind how good the likeness is,’ Dusty said sternly. ‘I did not bring my wife here to be insulted by that obscene creature or anyone else! I suggest we leave this instant.’

‘Very well then,’ snapped the Director angrily, ‘although I am in no way responsible for that thing’s behaviour.’

‘Do let’s get out,’ Daisy said, her face still crimson. ‘Take my arm, Marmaduke.’

‘You go on, dear, with the Director. I won’t be a minute – I just want to read this information panel again.’

He prodded her surreptitiously in the ribs to make sure he was obeyed. As soon as they were out of sight, he tried the inner door. It was merely a portion of the arena wall, indistinguishable from within, but easily movable from without by the turn of a wheel.

‘We’ll soon see whether it wasn’t a pack of nonsense he was telling us,’ Dusty muttered to himself. He never liked to believe anything until he had personally tested its veracity. The next moment he was inside the dome.

The naked Director withered and shrunk into Pogsmith’s natural shape. It turned and faced Dusty inquisitively, snorting quietly.

‘All right, old boy, there, there now, just want to have a proper look at you,’ Dusty said soothingly, making a coaxing noise and extending one hand. For a moment he was alarmed at his temerity. Was the thing carnivorous or not? He halted. They surveyed each other from five yards’ range.

‘The lighting isn’t very good in here,’ Dusty said apologetically. ‘Let’s see some of these stunts from close range.’

As if it understood – how efficient was that dead field round the brain? – the pig, with astonishing speed, grew a ginger beard and arms. It became Pogsmith. One eye glared at Dusty.

‘This is a devil of a predicament,’ it said. With animal savagery, it flung itself at Dusty, catching him a knock-out blow on the jaw, and bolted for the open door.

Feebly, he opened his eyes. An angry face glared down into his; it was the Director.

‘Ah, Miller, conscious at last! Well, your visit to us is over. There’s an auto-rocket here standing by to take you and your wife straight back to Earth.’

‘Pogsmith?’ groaned Dusty.

‘You may very well ask! The unhappy creature must have been almost crazed by boredom from its confinement. It is now hiding among the zoo buildings, having so far eluded all our efforts to recapture it. You’re lucky you weren’t killed. Your infernal curiosity is going to cost us a pretty penny, I can tell you! You’re a mischief-maker, sir, that’s what – a mischief-maker!’

‘You won’t find Pogsmith by raving at me,’ Dusty retorted irritably, brushing dust out of his clothes.

‘Can’t you see the poor man’s had enough, Director?’ Daisy asked, turning nevertheless to the poor man in question to whisper fiercely: ‘A brilliant performance you’ve made of yourself, Marmaduke. Just you wait …’

Dusty rubbed an aching jaw and followed dejectedly along a metal ramp which led to a two-man shuttle. It was a small Mercury–Earth ship that would travel auto all the way: in five minutes he could be away from the scene of his foolishness – and there would be no eavesdroppers on whatever lecture was coming.

The Director followed them to the open hatch. There he caught Dusty’s arm.

‘No ill feelings,’ he said.

Miller shook the Director’s hand and his own head dazedly and passed into the ship. With a quiet click, the door closed behind him. He staggered through the airlock and sank on to an acceleration couch.

Daisy had hardly begun to unload her vocabulary before the growl of blast take-off drowned all other sounds. They hurled upwards, and in two breath-taking minutes stars and darkness showed outside and the bright crescent of Mercury floated below.

‘Now …’ said Daisy. ‘Never in all my life – ’ She stopped, her mouth hung open, her eyes fixed glassily on a point behind Dusty’s head. He turned.

The door of a small luggage store had opened. A figure as like the Director’s as an egg is like an egg stood there glaring at them.

‘How – ’ said Dusty.

‘He’s tricked us,’ said the Director. ‘He bound and gagged me … I’ve only just struggled free … He’s – ooooh!’

He staggered back as Dusty attacked him. His foot slipped and he fell against the wall.

‘Quick, Daisy, quick!’ Dusty bellowed. ‘Help me get him in the airlock. It’s Pogsmith!’

She stood there wringing her hands helplessly. ‘How do you know this is Pogsmith?’ she asked.

‘Of course it is,’ snapped Dusty, glad to be again master of the situation. ‘Isn’t it obvious he’d try and escape like this? I’m not being fooled twice. Now lend a hand, will you?’

Still struggling and protesting, the Director was propelled into the airlock and shut in. Mopping his brow, Dusty pressed the manual switch that opened the outer door. There was a hiss of expiring air – and expiring Director.

At the Galactic Zoo the incident was soon forgotten. The Director quickly recovered his old prestige. But he was never the same man again – he had a tendency, in private, to grow red whiskers and one triumphant eye.




Conviction (#ulink_43dbb1ef-c31c-53dd-be68-eec683e92243)


The four Supreme Ultralords stood apart from the crowd, waiting, speaking to nobody. Yet Mordregon, son of Great Mordregon; Arntibis Isis of Sirius III, the Proctor Superior from the Tenth Sector; Deln Phi J. Bunswacki, Ruler of the Margins; and Ped2 of the Dominion of the Sack watched, as did the countless other members of the Diet of the Ultralords of the Home Galaxy, the entrance into their council chamber of the alien, David Stevens of Earth.

Stevens hesitated on the threshold of the hall. The hesitation was part-natural, part-feigned; he had come here primed to play a part and knowing a pause for awe might be expected of him; but he had not calculated on the real awe which filled him. He had come to stand trial, for himself, for Earth, he had come prepared – as far as a man may prepare for the unpredictable. Yet, as the dolly ushered him into the hall, he knew crushingly that the task was to be more terrible than any he had visualised.

The cream of the Galaxy took in his hesitation.

He started to walk towards the dais upon which Mordregon and his colleagues waited. The effort of forcing his legs to go into action set a dew of perspiration on his forehead.

‘God help me!’ he whispered. But these were the gods of the galaxy; was there, over them, One with no material being and infinite power? Enough. Concentrate.

Squaring his shoulders, Stevens walked between the massed shapes of the rulers of the Home Galaxy. Although it had been expressly stated before he left Earth that no powers, such as telepathy, which he did not possess, would be used against him, he could feel a weight of mental power all round him. Strange faces watched him, some just remotely human, strange robes stirred as he brushed past them. The diversity! he thought. The astounding, teeming womb of the universe!

Pride suddenly gripped him. He found courage to stare back into the multitudinous eyes. They should be made to know the mettle of man. Whatever they were planning to do with him, he also had his own plans for them.

Just as it seemed only fitting to him that man should walk in this hall, it seemed no less fitting that of all the millions on Earth, he, David Stevens, should be that man. With the egotism inherent in junior races, he felt sure he could pass their trial. What if he had been awed at first? A self-confident technological civilisation, proud of its exploration projects on Mercury and Neptune, is naturally somewhat abashed by the appearance of a culture spreading luxuriously over fifty hundred thousand planets.

With a flourish, he bowed before Mordregon and the other Supreme Ultralords.

‘I offer greetings from my planet Earth of Sol,’ he said in a resonant voice.

‘You are welcome here, David Stevens of Earth,’ Mordregon replied graciously. A small object the size of a hen’s egg floated fifteen inches from his beak. All other members of the council, Stevens included, were attended by similar devices, automatic interpreters.

Mordregon was mountainous. Below his beaked head, his body bulged like an upturned grand piano. A cascade of clicking black and white ivory rectangles clothed him. Each rectangle, Stevens noted, rotated perpetually on its longitudinal axis, fanning him, ventilating him, as if he burned continually of an inexorable disease (which was in fact the case).

‘I am happy to come here in peace,’ Stevens said. ‘And shall be still happier to know why I have been brought here. My journey has been long and partially unexplained.’

At the word ‘peace’, Mordregon made a grimace like a smile, although his beak remained unsmiling.

‘Partially, perhaps; but partially is not entirely,’ Mordregon said. ‘The robot ship told you you would be collected to stand trial in the name of Earth. That seems to us quite sufficient information to work on.’

The automatic translators gave an edge of irony to the Ultralord’s voice. The tone brought faint colour to Stevens’s cheeks. He was angry, and suddenly happy to let them see he was angry.

‘Then you have never been in my position,’ he said ‘Mine was an executive post at Port Ganymede. I never had anything to do with politics. I was down at the methane reagent post when your robot ship arrived and designated me in purely arbitrary fashion. I was simply told I would be collected for trial in three months – like a convict – like a bundle of dirty laundry!’ He looked hard at them, anxious to see their first reaction to his anger, wondering whether, he had gone too far. Ordinarily, Stevens was not a man who indulged his emotions. When he spoke, the hen’s egg before his mouth sucked up all sound, leaving the air dry and silent, so that he was unable to hear the translation going over; he thought, half-hopefully, that it might omit the outburst in traditional interpreter fashion. This hope was at once crushed.

‘Irritation means unbalance,’ said Deln Phi J. Bunswacki. It was the only sentence he spoke throughout the interview. On his shoulders, a mighty brain siphoned its thoughts beneath a transparent skull case; he wore what appeared to be a garishly cheap blue pin-stripe suit, but the stripes moved as symbiotic organisms plied up and down them ceaselessly, ingurgitating any microbes which might threaten the health of Deln Phi. J. Bunswacki. Slightly revolted, Stevens turned back to Mordregon.

‘You are playing with me,’ he said quietly. ‘Do I abuse your hospitality by asking you to get down to business?’

That, he thought, was better. Yet what were they thinking? His manner is too unstable? He seems to be impervious to the idea of his own insignificance? This was going to be the whole of hell: to have to guess what they were thinking, knowing they knew he was guessing, not knowing how many levels above his own their IQ was.

Acidic apprehension turned in Stevens’s stomach. His hand fluttered up to the lump below his right ear; he fingered it nervously, and only with an effort broke off the betraying gesture. To this vast concourse, he was insignificant: yet to Earth – to Earth he was their sole hope. Their sole hope! – And he could not keep himself from shaking.

Mordregon was speaking again. What had he been saying?

‘… customary. Into this hall in the city of Grapfth on the planet Xaquibadd in the Periphery of the Dominion of the Sack are invited all new races, each as it is discovered.’

Those big words don’t frighten me, Stevens told himself, because, to a great extent, they did. Suddenly he saw the solar system as a tiny sack, into which he longed to crawl and hide.

‘Is this place Grapfth the centre of your Empire?’ he asked.

‘No; as I said, it is in a peripheral region – for safety reasons, you understand,’ Mordregon explained.

‘Safety reasons? You mean you are afraid of me?’

Mordregon raised a brow at Ped2 of the Sack. Ped2, under an acre of coloured, stereoscopic nylon, was animated cactus, more beautiful, more intricate than his clothing. Captive butterflies on germanium, degravitized chains turned among the blossoms on his head; they fluttered up and then re-alighted as Ped2 nodded and spoke briefly to the Earthman. ‘Every race has peculiar talents or abilities of its own,’ he explained. ‘It is partly to discover those abilities that you aliens are invited here. Unfortunately, your predecessor turned out to be a member of a race of self-propagating nuclear weapons left over from some ancient war or other. He talked quite intelligently, until one of us mentioned the key word “goodwill”, whereupon he exploded and blew this entire hall to bits.’

Reminiscent chuckles sounded round him as he told the story.

Stevens said angrily: ‘You expect me to believe that? Then how have you all survived?’

‘Oh, we are not really here,’ Ped2 said genially, interlocking a nest of spikes behind his great head. ‘You can’t expect us to make the long journey to Xaquibadd every time some petty little system – no offence of course – is discovered. You’re talking to three-dimensional images of us; even the hall’s only there – or here, if you prefer it (location is merely a philosophical quibble) in a sort of sub-molecular fashion.’

Catching sight of the dazed look on the Earthman’s face, Ped2 could not resist driving home another point. (His was a childish race: theologians had died out among them only some four thousand years ago.)

‘We are not even talking to you in a sense you would understand, David Stevens of Earth,’ he said. ‘Having as yet no instantaneous communicator across light-year distances, we are letting a robot brain on Xaquibadd do the talking for us. We can check with it afterwards; if a mistake has been made, we can always get in touch with you.’

It was said not without an easy menace, but Stevens received at least a part of it eagerly. They had as yet no instantaneous communicator! No sub-radio, that could leap light-years without time lag! Involuntarily, he again fingered the tiny lump beneath the lobe of his right ear, and then thrust his hand deep into his pocket. So Earth had a chance of bargaining with these colossi after all! His confidence soared.

To Ped2, Mordregon was saying: ‘You must not mock our invited guest.’

‘I have heard that word “invited” from you before,’ Stevens said. ‘This has all seemed to me personally more like a summons. Your robot, without further explanation, simply told me it would be back for me in three months, giving me time to prepare for trial.’

‘That was reasonable, surely?’ Mordregon said. ‘It could have interviewed you then, unprepared.’

‘But it didn’t say what I was to prepare for,’ Stevens replied, exasperation bursting into his mind as he remembered those three months. What madness they had been, as he spent them preparing frantically for this interview; all the wise and cunning men of the system had visited him: logicians, actors, philosophers, generals, mathematicians … And the surgeons! Yes, the skilful surgeons, burying the creations of the technologists in his ear and throat.

And all the while he had marvelled: Why did they pick me?

‘Supposing it hadn’t been me?’ he said to Mordregon aloud. ‘Supposing it had been a madman or a man dying of cancer you picked on?’

Silence fell. Mordregon looked at him piercingly and then answered slowly: ‘We find our random selection principle entirely satisfactory, considering the large numbers involved. Whoever is brought here is responsible for his world. Your mistakes or illnesses are your world’s mistakes or illnesses. If a madman or a cancerous man stood in your place now, your world would have to be destroyed; worlds which have not been made free from such scourges by the time they have interplanetary travel must be eradicated. The galaxy is indestructible, but the security of the galaxy is a fragile thing.’

All the light-heartedness seemed gone from the assembly of Ultralords now. Even Ped2 of the Dominion of the Sack sat bolt upright, looking grimly at the Earthman. Stevens himself had gone chill, his throat was as dry as his sleeve. Every time he spoke he betrayed a chunk of the psychological atmosphere of Earth.

During the three months’ preparation, during the month-long voyage here in a completely automatic ship, he had chased his mind round to come only to this one conclusion: that through him Man was to be put to a test for fitness. Thinking of the mental homes and hospitals of Earth, his poise almost deserted him; but clenching his fists together behind his back – what matter if the assembly saw that betrayal of strain, so long as the searching eyes of Mordregon did not? – he said in a voice striving to remain firm: ‘So then I have come here on trial?’

‘Not you only but your world Earth – and the trial has already begun!’ The voice was not Mordregon’s nor Ped2’s. It belonged to Arntibis Isis of Sirius III, the Proctor Superior of the Tenth Sector, who had not yet spoken. He stood like a column, twelve feet high, his length clad in furled silver, a dark cluster of eyes at his summit probing down at Stevens. He had what the others, what even Mordregon lacked: majesty.

Surreptitiously, Stevens touched his throat. The device nestling there would be needed presently; with its assistance he might win through. This Empire had no sub-radio; in that fact lay his and Earth’s hope. But before Arntibis Isis hope seemed stupidity.

‘Since I am here I must necessarily submit to your trial,’ Stevens said. ‘Although where I come from, the civilised thing is to tell the defendant what he is defending, how he may acquit himself and which punishment is hanging over his head. We also have the courtesy to announce when the trial begins, not springing it on the prisoner half-way through.’

A murmur circling round the hall told him he had scored a minor point. As Stevens construed the problem, the Ultralords were looking for some cardinal virtue in man which, if Stevens manifested it, would save Earth; but which virtue did this multicoloured mop consider important? He had to pull his racing mind up short to hear Arntibis Isis’s reply to his thrust.

‘You are talking of a local custom tucked away in a barren pocket of the galaxy,’ the level voice said. ‘However, your intellect being what it is, I shall enumerate the how and the wherefore. Be it known then, David Stevens of Earth, that through you your world is on trial before the Supreme Diet of the Ultralords of the Second Galaxy. Nothing personal is intended; indeed, you yourself are barely concerned in our business here, except as a mouthpiece. If you acquit yourself – and we are more than impartial, we are eager for your success, though less than hopeful – your race Man will become Full Fledgling Members of our great concourse of beings, sharers of our skills and problems. If you fail, your planet Earth will be annihilated – utterly.’

‘And you call that civilised – ?’ Stevans began hotly.

‘We deal with fifty planets a week here,’ Mordregon interrupted. ‘It’s the only possible system – cuts down endless bureaucracy.’

‘Yes, and we just can’t afford fleets to watch these unstable communities any more,’ one of the Ultralords from the body of the hall concurred. ‘The expense …’

‘Do you remember that ghastly little time-swallowing reptile from somewhere in the Magellans?’ Ped2 chuckled reminiscently. ‘He had some crazy scheme for a thousand years’ supervision of his race.’

‘I’d die of boredom if I watched them an hour,’ Mordregon said, shuddering.

‘Order, please!’ Arntibis Isis snapped. When there was silence, he said to Stevens: ‘And now I will give you the rules of the trial. Firstly, there is no appeal from our verdict; when the session is over, you will be transported back to Earth at once, and the verdict will be delivered almost as soon as you land there.

‘Next, I must assure you we are scrupulously fair in our decision, although you must understand that the definition of fairness differs from sector to sector. You may think we are ruthless; but the Galaxy is a small place and we have no room for useless members within our ranks. As it is we have this trouble, with the Eleventh Galaxy on our hands. However …

‘Next, many of the beings present have powers which you would regard as supernormal, such as telepathy, deep-vision, precognition, outfarling, and so on. These powers they are holding in abeyance, so that you are judged on your own level as far as possible. You have our assurance that your mind will not be read.

‘There is but one other rule; you will now proceed with your own trial.’

For a space of a few chilly seconds, Stevens stared unbelievingly at the tall column of Arntibis Isis: that entity told him nothing. He looked round at Mordregon, at the others, at the phalanx of figures silent in the hall. Nobody moved. Gazing round at the incredible sight of them, Stevens realised sadly how far, far from home he was.

‘… my own trial?’ he echoed.

The Ultralords did not reply. He had had all the help, if help it was; now he was on his own: Earth’s fate was in the scales. Panic threatened him but he fought it down; that was a luxury he could not afford. Calculation only would help him. His cold hand touched the small lump at his throat; his judges had, after all, virtually played into his hands. He was not unprepared.

‘My own trial,’ he repeated more firmly.

Here was the classic nightmare made flesh, he thought. Dreams of pursuit, degradation, annihilation were not more terrible than this static dream where one stands before watchful eyes explaining one’s existence, speaking, speaking to no avail because if there is right it is not in words, because if there is a way of delivering the soul it is not to this audience. He thought, I must all my life have had some sort of a fixation about judgement without mercy; now I’ve gone psychopathic – I’ll spend all my years up before this wall of eyes, trying to find excuses for some crime I don’t know I’ve committed.

He watched the slow revolutions of Mordregon’s domino costume. No, this was reality, not the end results of an obsession. To treat it as other than reality was the flight from fear; that was not Steven’s way: he was afraid, but he could face it.

He spoke to them.

‘I presume by your silence,’ he said, ‘that you wish me to formulate both the questions and the answers, on the principle that two differing levels of intelligence are thus employed; it being as vital to ask the right question as to produce the correct answer.

‘This forcing of two roles upon me obviously doubles my chance of failure, and I would point out that this is, to me, not justice but a mockery.

‘Should I, then, say nothing more to you? Would you accept that silence as a proof that my world can distinguish justice from injustice, surely one of the prime requisites of a culture?’

He paused, only faintly hopeful. It could not be as simple as that. Or could it? If it could the solution would seem to him just a clever trick; but to these deeper brains it might appear otherwise. His thoughts swam as he tried to see the problem from their point of view. It was impossible: he could only go by his own standards, which of course was just what they wanted. Yet still he kept silence, trusting it more than words.

‘Your point accepted. Continue,’ said Ped2 brusquely, but he gave Stevens an encouraging nod.

So it was not going to be as easy as that. He pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped his forehead, thinking wildly: ‘Would they accept that as a defence: that I am near enough to the animal to sweat but already far enough away to object to the fact? Do they sweat, any of them? Perhaps they think sweat’s a good thing. How can I be sure of anything?’

Like every other thought to his present state of mind, it turned circular and short-circuited itself.

He was an Earthman, six foot three, well proportioned, he had made good in a tough spot on Ganymede, he knew a very lovely woman called Edwina. Suppose they would be content with hearing about her, about her beauty, about the way she looked when Stevens left Earth. He could tell them about the joy of just being alive and thinking of Edwina: and the prodding knowledge that in ten years their youth would be sliding away.

Nonsense! he told himself. They wouldn’t take sentiment here; these beauties wanted cold fact. Momentarily, he thought of all the other beings who had stood in the past where he stood now, groping for the right thing to say. How many had found it?

Steadying himself, Stevens began to address the Ultralords again.

‘You will gather from what I say that I am hoping to demonstrate that I possess and understand one virtue so admirable that because of it you will, in your wisdom, be able to do nothing but spare me. Since modesty happens to be one of my virtues, I cannot enumerate the others: sagacity, patience, courage, loyalty, reverence, kindness, for example – and humour, as I hope that remark may hint to you. But these virtues are, or should be, common possessions of any civilisation; by them we define civilisation, and you presumably are looking for something else.

‘You must require me to produce evidence of something less obvious … something Man possesses which none of you have.’

He looked at the vast audience and they were silent. That damned silence!

‘I’m sure we do possess something like that. I’ll think of it if you’ll give me time. (Pause.) I suppose it’s no good throwing myself on your mercy? Man has mercy – but that’s not a virtue at all acceptable to those without it.’

The silence grew round him like ice forming over a Siberian lake. Were they hostile or not? He could not tell anything from their attitude; he could not think objectively. Reverse that idea: he thought subjectively. Could he twist that into some sort of a weird virtue which might appeal to them, and pretend there was a special value in thinking subjectively?

Hell, this was not his line of reasoning at all; he was not cut out to be a metaphysician. It was time he played his trump card. With an almost imperceptible movement of a neck muscle, he switched on the little machine in his throat. Immediately its droning awoke, reassuring him.

‘I must have a moment to think,’ Stevens said to the assembly.

Without moving his lips, he whispered: ‘Hello, Earth, are you there, Earth? Dave Stevens calling across the light-years. Do you hear me?’

After a moment’s pause, the tiny lump behind his ear throbbed and a shadowy voice answered: ‘Hello, Stevens, Earth Centre here.We’ve been listening out for you. How are you doing?’

‘The trial is on. I don’t think I’m making out very well.’ His lips were moving slightly; he covered them with his hand, standing as if deep in cogitation. It looked, he thought, very suspicious. He went on: ‘I can’t say much. For one thing, I’m afraid they will detect this beam going out and regard our communication as infringing their judical regulations.’

‘You don’t have to bother about that, Stevens. You should know that a sub-radio beam is undetectable. Can we couple you up with the big brain as pre-arranged? Give it your data and it’ll come up with the right answer.’

‘I just would not know what to ask it, Earth; these boys haven’t given me a lead. I called to tell you I’m going to throw up the game. They’re too powerful! I’m just going to put them the old preservation plea: that every race is unique and should be spared on that account, just as we guard wild animals from extinction in parks – even the dangerous ones. OK?’

The reply came faintly back: ‘You’re on the spot, feller; we stand by your evaluation. Good luck and out.’

Stevens looked round at the expressionless faces. Many of the beings present had gigantic ears; one of them possibly – probably – had heard the brief exchange. At that he made his own face expressionless and spoke aloud.

‘I have nothing more to say to you,’ he announced. ‘Indeed, I already wish I had said nothing at all. This court is a farce. If you tried all the insects, would they have a word to say in their defence? No! So you would kill them – and as a result you yourself would die. Insects are a vital factor. So is Man. How can we know our own potentialities? If you know yours, it is because you have ceased to develop and are already doomed to extinction. I demand that Man, who has seen through this stunt, be left to develop in his own fashion, unmolested.

‘Gentlemen, take me back home!’

He ended in a shout, and carried away by his own outburst expected a round of applause. The silence was broken only by a polite rustling. For a moment, he thought Mordregon glanced encouragingly at him, and then the figures faded away, and he was left standing alone, gesticulating in an empty hall.

A robot came and led him back to the automatic ship.

In what was estimated to be a month, Stevens arrived back at Luna One and was greeted there by Lord Sylvester as he stepped from the galactic vessel.

They pumped each other heartily on the back.

‘It worked! I swear it worked!’ Stevens told the older man.

‘Did you try them with reasoning?’ Sylvester asked eagerly.

‘Yes – at least, I did my best. But I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, and then I chucked it up. I remembered what you said, that if they were masters of the galaxy they must be practical men to stay there, and that if we dangled before their variegated noses a practical dinkum which they hadn’t got they’d be queuing up for it.’

‘And they hadn’t got an instantaneous communicator!’ Sylvester exclaimed, bursting into a hoot of laughter.

‘Naturally not, the thing being an impossibility, as our scientists proved long ago! But the funny bit was, Syl, they accidentally told me they hadn’t got one. And I didn’t even have to employ that argument for having no mind-readers present.’

‘So that little bit of recording we fixed up behind your ugly great ear did the trick?’

‘It sounded so absolutely genuine I almost believed it was the real thing,’ Stevens said enthusiastically. ‘I’m convinced we’ve won the day with that gadget.’

And then, perversely, the sense of triumph that had buoyed him all the way home deserted him. The trick was no longer clever: to have duped the Ultralords gave him suddenly nothing but disappointment. With listless surprise at this reaction, he realized he knew himself less well than he had believed.

He glanced at the gibbous Earth, low over Luna’s mountains: it was the colour of verdigris.

All the while, Sylvester chattered on excitedly.

‘Phew! You knock at least nine years off the ten I’ve aged since you left! When do we get the verdict, Dave? – the mighty Yea or Nay!’

‘Any time now – but I’m convinced the Ultralords are in the bag. Some of the mammoth ears present must have picked your voice up.’

Sylvester commenced to beat Stevens’s back again. Then he sobered and said: ‘Now we’ll have to think about stalling them when they come and ask for portable sub-radios. Still, that can wait; after all, we didn’t actually tell them we had them! Meanwhile, I’ve been stalling off the news-hounds here – the Galactics can’t prove more awkward than they’ve been. Then the President wants to see you – but before that there’s a drink waiting for you, and Edwina is sitting nursing it.’

‘Lead the way!’ Stevens said, a little more happily.

‘You look a bit gloomy all of a sudden,’ Sylvester commented. ‘Tired, I expect?’

‘It has been a strain …’

As he spoke, the door of his transport slammed shut behind him and the craft lifted purposefully off the field, silent on its cosmic drive. Stevens waved it a solemn farewell and turned away quickly, hurrying with Sylvester across to the domes of Luna One. A chillness was creeping over him again.

Our Council of the Ultralords must be certain it pronounces the correct verdict when aliens such as Stevens are under examination; consequently, it has to have telepaths present during the trials. All it asks is, simply, integrity in the defendants – that is the simple touchstone: yet it is too difficult for many of them. The men of Earth tortured themselves chasing phantoms, cooking up chimeras. Stevens had integrity, yet would not trust to it. Those who are convicted of dishonesty perish; we have no room for them.

The robot craft swung away from Luna and headed at full speed towards Earth, the motors in its warhead ticking expectantly, counting out the seconds to annihilation.

And that, of course, would be the end of the story – for Earth at least. It would have been completely destroyed, as is usual in such distressing cases, but Mordregon, who was amused by Stevens’s bluff, decided that, after all, the warped brains of Earthmen might be useful in coping with the warped brains of the enemy Eleventh Galaxy. He called it ‘an expedient war-time measure’.

Quietly, he deflected the speeding missile from its target, ordering it to return home. He sent this message by sub-radio, of course; dangerous aliens must necessarily be deluded at times.




Dumb Show (#ulink_62cf500c-5a92-5a86-b8c5-ad3ee30eabaf)


Mrs. Snowden was slowly being worn down. She had reached the stage now where she carried about with her a square of card on which the word DON’T was written in large letters. It was kept tucked inside her cardigan, ready to be produced at a moment’s notice and flashed before Pauline’s eyes.

The ill-matched pair, the grubby girl of three and the shabby-elegant lady of fifty-eight, came up to the side door of their house, Pauline capering over the flagstones, Mrs. Snowden walking slowly with her eyes on the bare border. Spring was reluctantly here, but the tepid earth hardly acknowledged it; even the daffodils had failed to put in an appearance this year.

‘Can’t understand it at all,’ Mrs. Snowden told herself. ‘Nothing ever happens to daffodils.’ And then she went on to compile a list of things that nevertheless might have happened: frost – it had been a hard winter; soil-starvation – no manure since the outbreak of hostilities, seven years ago; ants; mice; cats; the sounds – that seemed most likely. Sound did anything, these days.

Pauline rapped primly on the little brass knocker and vanished into the hall. Mrs. Snowden paused in the porch, stopping to look at the houses on the other side of her high brick wall. When this house had been built, it had stood in open fields; now drab little semi-detacheds surrounded it on three sides. She paused and hated them. Catching herself at it, she tried instead to admire the late afternoon light falling on the huddled roofs; the sunshine fell in languid, horizontal strokes – but it had no meaning for her, except as a sign that it was nearly time to blackout again.

She went heavily into the house, closing the door. Inside, night had already commenced.

Her granddaughter marched round the drawing-room, banging a tin lid against her head. That way, she could hear the noise it made. Mrs. Snowden reached for the DON’T card, then let her hand drop; the action was becoming automatic, and she must guard against it. She went to the gram-wire-TV cabinet, of which only the last compartment was now of use, and switched on. Conditions at home were a little better since the recapture of Iceland, and there were now broadcasts for an hour and a half every evening.

Circuits warmed, a picture burned in the half-globe. A man and woman danced solemnly, without music. To Mrs. Snowden it looked as meaningless as turning a book of blank pages, but Pauline stopped her march and came to stare. She smiled at the dancing couple; her lips moved; she was talking to them.

DON’T, screamed Mrs. Snowden’s sudden, dumb card.

Pauline made a face and answered back. She jumped away as her grandmother reached forward, leaping, prancing over the chairs, shouting defiance.

In fury, Mrs. Snowden skimmed the card across the room, crying angrily, hating to be reminded of her infirmity, waving her narrow hands. She collapsed onto a music stool – music, that dear, extinct thing! – and wept. Her own anger in her own head had sounded a million cotton-wool miles away, emphasizing the isolation. At this point she always crumpled.

The little girl came to her delicately, treading and staring with impertinence, knowing she had the victory. She pulled a sweet face and twizzled on her heel. Lack of hearing did not worry her; the silence she had known in the womb had never left her. Her indifference seemed a mockery.

‘You little beast!’ Mrs. Snowden said. ‘You cruel, ignorant, little beast!’

Pauline replied, the little babblings which would never turn into words, the little noises no human ear could hear. Then she walked quietly over to the windows, pointed out at the sickening day, and began to draw the curtains. Controlling herself with an effort, Mrs. Snowden stood up. Thank goodness the child had some sense; they must blackout. First she retrieved her DON’T card from behind the ancient twentieth-century settee, and then they went together through the house, tugging the folds of black velvet across the glass.

Now Pauline was skipping again. How she did it on the low calories was a matter for wonder. Perhaps, thought Mrs. Snowden, it was a blessing to be responsible for the child; so, she kept contact with life. She even caught an echo of gaiety herself, so that they hurried from room to room like bearers of good news, pulling blackness over them, then sweeping on the sonic lights. Up the stairs, pausing at the landing window, racing into the bedrooms, till new citadels were created from all the shabby darknesses. Pauline collapsed laughing on her bed. Seizing her, tickling now and again, Mrs. Snowden undressed her and tucked her between the fraying sheets.

She kissed the girl good night, put out the light, closed the door, and then went slowly round, putting out all the other lights, downstairs, putting all the lights out there.

Directly she had gone, Pauline climbed out of bed, stamped into the bathroom, opened the little medicine cupboard, took out the bottle with the label ‘Sleeping Pills’. Unscrewing the top, she swallowed a pill, pulling a pig’s eyes face at herself in the looking-glass as she did so. Then she put the bottle back on its shelf and slammed the little door, hugging to herself this noisy secret.

None of these things had names for her. Having no names, they had only misty meanings. The very edges of them were blurred, for all objects were grouped together in only two vast categories: those-that-concerned-her and those-that-did-not-concern-her.

She trailed loudly back to her bed in the silence there was no breaking, making pig’s eyes all the way to ward off the darkness. Once in bed, she began to think; it was because of these pictures she stole her grandmother’s pills: they fought the pictures and turned them eventually into an all-night nothing.

Predominant was the aching picture. A warmth, a face, a comforting – it was at once the vaguest yet most vivid picture; someone soft who carried and cared for her; someone who now never came; someone who now provoked only the water scalding from her eyes.

Elbowing that picture away came the boring picture. This tall, old-smelling person who had suddenly become everything after the other had gone; her stiff fingers, bad over buttons; her slowness about the stove; her meaningless marks on cards; all the dull mystery of who she was and what she did.

The new picture. The room down the road where Pauline was taken every morning. It was full of small people, some like her, in frocks, some with short hair and fierce movements. And big people, walking between their seats, again with marks on cards, trying with despairing faces to make them comprehend incomprehensible things by gestures of the hand and fingers.

The push picture. Something needed, strange as sunlight, something lost, lost as laughter …

The pill worked like a time-bomb and Pauline was asleep where only the neurosis of puzzlement could insidiously follow.

Mrs. Snowden switched the globe off and sank into a chair. They had been showing a silent film: the latest scientific advances had thrown entertainment back to where it had been in her grandfather’s young days. For a moment she had watched the silent gestures, followed by a wall of dialogue:

‘Jean: Then – you knew he was not my father, Denis?

‘Denis: From the first moment we met in Madrid.

‘Jean: And I swore none should ever know.’

Sighing, Mrs. Snowden switched the poor stuff off, and sank down with a hand over her forehead. TV merely accentuated her isolation, everyone’s isolation. She thought mockingly of the newspaper phrase describing this conflict, The Civilised War, and wished momentarily for one of the old, rough kind with doodlebugs and H-bombs; then, you could achieve a sort of Henry Moore-ish anonymity, crouching with massed others underground. Now, your individuality was forced on to you, till self-consciousness became a burden that sank you in an ocean of loneliness.

Right at the beginning of this war, Mrs. Snowden’s husband had left for the duration. He was on secret work – where, she had no idea. Up till two years ago, she received a card from him each Christmas; then he had missed a year; then, in the paper shortage, the sending of cards had been forbidden. So whether he lived or not she did not know; the question now raised curiously little excitement in her. Heart-sickness had ceased to be relevant.

Mrs. Snowden had come to live here in her old home with her parents after she had been declared redundant at the university, when all but the practical Chairs closed down. In the lean winters, first her mother, then her father died. Then her married daughter was killed in a sound raid; Pauline, a tiny babe, had come to live with her.

It was all impersonal, dry facts, she thought. You stated the facts to explain how the situation arose; but to explain the situation …

Nobody in the world could hear a sound. That was the only important fact.

She jumped up and flicked aside an edge of curtain. A rag of dirty daylight was still propped over the serried chimney-tops. The more those houses crowded, the more they isolated her. This should be a time for madness, she said aloud, misting the pane; something grand and horrid to break the chain of days. And her eyes swept the treble row of old textbooks over her bureau: Jackson’s Eighteen Nineties, Montgomery’s Early Twentieth Century Science Fiction, Slade’s Novelists of the Psychological Era, Wilson’s Zola, Nollybend’s Wilson … a row of dodos, as defunct as the courses of Eng. Lit. they had once nourished.

‘Dead!’ she exclaimed. ‘A culture in Coventry!’ she whispered, and went to get something to eat.

‘Tough old hag,’ she told herself. ‘You’ll survive.’

The food was the usual vibro-culture, tasteless, filling, insubstantial. The hospitals of England held as many beri-beri cases as wounded. Sound ruled the whole deaf world. It wrecked the buildings, killed the soldiers, shattered the tympanums and ballooned synthesized proteins from mixtures of amino acids.

The Sound Revolution had come at the dawn of this new century, following thirty years of peace. Progress had taken a new direction. It had all been simple and complete; you just flushed the right electrostatic stress through the right quartz plates and – bingo! You could do anything! The most spectacular result was a global conflict.

The Powers warred under certain humane agreements: gas, fission and fusion weapons were forbidden. It was to be, indeed, a Civilised War. VM (vibratory motion) had the field to itself. It learnt to expand living vegetable cells a thousand-fold, so that a potato would last for two years’ dinners; it learnt to pulverize brick and metal, so that cities could comfortably be turned to a thin dust; it learnt to twist the human ear into an echoing, useless coil of gristle. There seemed no limit to its adaptability.

Mrs. Snowden ate her blown-up yeast with dignity, and thought of other things. She thought – for lately she had been straining after wider horizons – of the course of human history, its paradoxical sameness and variety, and then something made her look up to the tube over the mantelpiece.

The tube was a piece of standard equipment in every home. It was a crude ear, designed to announce when the local siren was giving a sound raid alarm.

She glanced indifferently at it. The lycopodium seed was stirring sluggishly in its tube; damp must be getting in, it was not patterning properly. She went on eating, gloomily wondering about the future generations: how much of the vital essence of tradition would be lost through this blanket of deafness?

Correct procedure would have been for her, at the stirring of the seed, to collect Pauline and stand out in the open. When the siren went, everyone else left their homes and stood patiently under the bare sky; then, if the sounds swept their buildings, they would be temporarily smothered by dust as the building vanished, but suffer no other harm. Mrs. Snowden could no longer be bothered with this nonsense.

To her mind, it was undignified to stand in the chill air, meekly waiting. If enemy planes circled overhead, she would have had defiance to spur her out; but nowadays there was only the quiet sky, the eternal silence and the abrupt pulverization – or the anti-climax, when everyone filed sheepishly back to bed.

She took her plate into the kitchen. As she came back into the living-room, a reproduction of Mellor’s ‘Egyptian Girl’ fell silently onto the floor, shattering frame and glass.

Mrs. Snowden went and stared at it. Then, on impulse, she hurried over to the window and peered out. The encircling houses had gone.

Letting the curtain fall back into place, she rushed from the room and up the stairs. She was shaking Pauline before she regained control of herself, and then could not tell whether panic or exultation had sent her scurrying.

‘The houses have gone! The houses have gone!’

Silence, in which the little girl woke sluggishly.

Mrs. Snowden hustled her downstairs and out on to the front lawn, letting a bright swathe of light cut across the empty flower-beds. Somewhere, high and silent overhead, a monitor might be hovering, but she was too excited to care.

By a freak of chance, their house stood alone. Around them for miles stretched a new desert, undulant, still settling. The novelty, the difference, of it was something wonderful: not a catastrophe, a liberation.

Then they saw the giants.

Vague in the distance, they were nevertheless real enough, although incredible. They were tall – how tall? – ten, fifteen feet? More? With horror Mrs. Snowden thought they were enemy troops. This was the latest application of the sound: it enlarged the human cell now, as easily as it enlarged vegetable cells. She had the brief idea she had read that human giants could not survive, or were impossible or something, and then the thought was gone, swept away in fear.

The giants were still growing. They were taller than a house now, thirty feet or more high. They began to mop and mow, like drunken dancers.

Unreality touched her. Pauline was crying.

A coolness swept her limbs. She trembled involuntarily. A personal alarm now, terror because something unknown was at her blood. She raised a hand to her eyes. It loomed away from her. Her arm extended. She was growing.

She knew then that the giants were no enemy troops; they were victims. You get everyone out of their houses. One type of VM levels the houses. Another inflates the people, blowing them up like grotesque rubber dummies. Simple. Scientific. Civilised.

Mrs. Snowden swayed like a pole. She took a clumsy step to keep her balance. Dizzily, she peered at her blank bedroom window, staggering away to avoid falling into the house. No pain. The circuits were disrupted. Only numbness: numbness and maniac growth.

She could still crazily see the dancing giants. Now she understood why they danced. They were trying to adapt. Before they could do so, their metabolism burnt out. They sprawled into the desert, giant dusty corpses, full of sound and silence.

She thought: It’s the first excitement for years, amusedly, before her heart failed under its giant load.

She toppled; the DON’T card fluttered gaily from her bosom, spinning and filtering to the ground.

Pauline had already overtopped her grandmother. The young system was greedy for growth. She uttered a cry of wonder as her head rocked up to the dark sky. She saw her grandmother fall. She saw the tiny fan of sonic light from their tiny front door. She trod into the desert to keep her balance. She started to run. She saw the ground dwindle. She felt the warmth of the stars, the curvature of the earth.

In her brain, the delighted thoughts were wasps in a honey pot, bees in a hive, flies in a chapel, gnats in a factory, midges in a Sahara, sparks up an everlasting flue, a comet falling for ever in a noiseless void, a voice singing in a new universe.




The Failed Men (#ulink_336584f5-5488-571d-810a-0f7fd2e87776)


‘It’s too crowded here!’ he exclaimed aloud. ‘It’s too crowded! It’s too CROWDED!’

He swung around, his mouth open, his face contorted like a squeezed lemon, nearly knocking a passer-by off the pavement. The passer-by bowed, smiled forgivingly and passed on, his eyes clearly saying: ‘Let him be – it’s one of the poor devils off the ship.’

‘It’s too crowded,’ Surrey Edmark said again at the retreating back. It was night. He stood hatless under the glare of the New Orchard Road lights, bewildered by the flowing cosmopolitan life of Singapore about him. People: thousands of ’em, touchable; put out a hand gently, feel alpaca, silk, nylon, satin, plain, patterned, or crazily flowered; thousands within screaming distance. If you screamed, just how many of those dirty, clean, pink, brown, desirable or offensive convoluted ears would scoop up your decibels?

No, he told himself, no screaming, please. These people who swarm like phantoms about you are real; they wouldn’t like it. And your doctor, who did not consider you fit to leave the observation ward – he’s real enough; he wouldn’t like it if he learned you had been screaming in a main street. And you yourself – how real were you? How real was anything when you had recently had perfect proof that all was finished? Really finished: rolled up and done with and discarded and forgotten.

That dusty line of thought must be avoided. He needed somewhere quiet, a place to sit and breathe deeply. Everyone must be deceived; he must hide the fused, dead feeling inside; then he could go back home. But he had also to try and hide the deadness from himself, and that needed more cunning. Like alpha particles, a sense of futility had riddled him, and he was mortally sick.

Surrey noticed a turning just ahead. Thankfully he went to it and branched out of the crowds into a dim, narrow thoroughfare. He passed three women in short dresses smoking together; farther on a fellow was being sick into a privet hedge. And there was a café with a sign saying ‘The Iceberg’. Deserted chairs and tables stood outside on an ill-lit veranda; Surrey climbed the two steps and sat wearily down. This was luxury.

The light was poor. Surrey sat alone. Inside the café several people were eating, and a girl sang, accompanying herself on a stringed, lute-like instrument. He couldn’t understand the words, but it was simple and nostalgic, her voice conveying more than the music; he closed his eyes, letting the top spin within him, the top of his emotions. The girl stopped her singing suddenly, as if tired, and walked onto the veranda to stare into the night. Surrey opened his eyes and looked at her.

‘Come and talk to me,’ he called.

She turned her head haughtily to the shadows where he sat, and then turned it back. Evidently, she had met with that sort of invitation before. Surrey clenched his fists in frustration; here he sat, isolated in space and time, needing comfort, needing … oh, nothing could heal him, but salves existed … The loneliness welled up inside, forcing him to speak again.

‘I’m from the ship,’ he said, unable to hold back a note of pleading.

At that, she came over and took a seat facing him. She was Chinese, and wore the timeless slit dress of her race, big daisies chasing themselves over the gentle contours of her body.

‘Of course I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘But I can see in your eyes … that you are from the ship.’ She trembled slightly and asked: ‘May I get you a drink?’

Surrey shook his head. ‘Just to have you sitting there …’

He was feeling better. Irrationally, a voice inside said: ‘Well, you’ve been through a harsh experience, but now that you’re back again you can recover, can’t you, go back to what you were?’ The voice frequently asked that, but the answer was always No; the experience was still spreading inside, like cancer.

‘I heard your ship come in,’ the Chinese girl said. ‘I live just near here – Bukit Timah Road, if you know it, and I was at my window, talking with a friend.’

He thought of the amazing sunshine and the eternal smell of cooking fats and the robshaws clacking by and this girl and her friend chattering in a little attic – and the orchestral crash as the ship arrived, making them forget their sentences; but all remote, centuries ago.

‘It’s a funny noise it makes,’ he said. ‘The sound of a time ship breaking out of the time barrier.’

‘It scares the chickens,’ she said.

Silence. Surrey wanted to produce something else to say, to keep the girl sitting with him, but nothing would dissolve into words. He neglected the factor of her own human curiosity, which made her keen to stay; she inquired again if he would like a drink, and then said: ‘Would it be good for you if you told me something about it?’

‘I’d call that a leading question.’

‘It’s very – bad ahead, isn’t it? I mean, the papers say …’ She hesitated nervously.

‘What do they say?’ he asked.

‘Oh, you know, they say that it’s bad. But they don’t really explain; they don’t seem to understand.’

‘That’s the whole key to it,’ he told her. ‘We don’t seem to understand. If I talked to you all night, you still wouldn’t understand. I wouldn’t understand …’

She was beautiful, sitting there with her little lute in her hand. And he had traveled far away beyond her lute and her beauty, far beyond nationality or even music; it had all gone into the dreary dust of the planet, all gone – final – nothing left – except degradation. And puzzlement.

‘I’ll try and tell you,’ he said. ‘What was that tune you were just singing? Chinese song?’

‘No, it was Malayan. It’s an old song, very old, called “Terang Boelan”. It’s about – oh, moonlight, you know, that kind of thing. It’s sentimental.’

‘I didn’t even know what language it was in, but perhaps in a way I understood it.’

‘You said you were going to tell me about the future,’ she told him gently.

‘Yes. Of course. It’s a sort of tremendous relief work we’re doing. You know what they call it: The Intertemporal Red Cross. It’s accurate, but when you’ve actually been … ahead, it seems a silly, flashy title. I don’t know, perhaps not. I’m not sure of anything any more.’

He stared out at the darkness; it was going to rain. When he began to speak again, his voice was firmer.

The IRC is really organized by the Paulls (he said to the Chinese girl). They call themselves the Paulls; we should call them the technological élite of the Three Thousand, One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Century. That’s a terribly long way ahead – we, with our twenty-four centuries since Christ, can hardly visualise it. Our ship stopped there, in their time. It was very austere: the Paulls are austere people. They live only on mountains overlooking the oceans, and have moved mountains to every coast for their own edification.

The Paulls are unlike us, yet they are brothers compared with the men we are helping, the Failed Men.

Time travel had been invented long before the age of the Paulls, but it is they who perfected it, they who accidentally discovered the plight of the Failed Men, and they who manage the terrific business of relief. For the world of the Paulls, rich as it is – will be – has insufficient resources to cope with the task without vitiating its strength. So it organised the fleet of time ships, the IRC, to collect supplies from different ages and bear them out ahead to the Failed Men.

Five different ages are co-operating on the project, under the Paull leadership. There are the Middle People, as the Paulls call them. They are a race of philosophers, mainly pastoral, and we found them haughty; they live about twenty thousand centuries ahead of the Paulls. Oh, it’s a long time … And there are – but never mind that! They had little to do with us, or we with them.

We – this present day, was the only age without time travel of the five. The Paulls chose us because we happen to have peace and plenty. And do you know what they call us? The Children. The Children! We, with all our weary sophistication … Perhaps they’re right; they have a method of Gestalt reasoning absolutely beyond our wildest pretensions.

You know, I remember once on the voyage out ahead, I asked one of the Paulls why they had never visited our age before; and he said: ‘But we have. We broke at the nineteenth century and again at the twenty-sixth. That’s pretty close spacing! And that’s how we knew so much about you.’

They have so much experience, you see. They can walk around for a day in one century and tell you what’ll be happening the next six or seven. It’s a difference of outlook, I suppose; something as simple as that.

I suppose you’ll remember better than I when the Paulls first broke here, as you are actually on the spot. I was at home then, doing a peaceful job; it hadn’t been so peaceful I might not have volunteered for the IRC What a storm it caused! A good deal of panic in with the excitement. Yes, we proved ourselves children then, and in the adulation we paid the Paulls while they toured the world’s capitals. During the three months they waited here while we organised supplies and men, they must have been in a fury of impatience to be off; yet they revealed nothing, giving their unsensational lectures on the plight of the Failed Men and smiling for the three-dee cameras.

All the while money poured in for the cause, and the piles of canned food and medical supplies filled the holds of the big ship. We were like kids throwing credits to street beggars; all sorts of stuff of no earthly use went into that ship. What would a Failed Man do with a launderer or a cycloview machine? At last we were off, with all the world’s bands playing like mad and the ship breaking with noise enough to drown all bands and startle your chickens – off for the time of the Failed Men!

‘I think I’d like that drink you offered me now,’ Surrey said to the Chinese girl, breaking off his narrative.

‘Certainly.’ She snapped her fingers at arm’s length, her hand in the light from the restaurant, her face in the gloom, eyes fixed on his eyes.

‘The Paulls had told you it was going to be tough,’ she said.

‘Yes. We underwent pretty rough mental training from them before leaving the here and now. Many of the men were weeded out. But I got through. They elected me Steersman. I was top of their first class.’

Surrey was silent a moment, surprised to hear pride in his own voice. Pride left, after that experience! Yet there was no pride in him; it was just the voice running in an old channel, the naked soul crouching in an ancient husk of character.

The drink arrived. The Chinese girl had one too, a long one in a misty glass; she put her lute down to drink it. Surrey took a sip of his and then resumed the story.

We were travelling ahead! It was a schoolboy’s dream come true. Yet our excitement soon became blunted by monotony. There is nothing simultaneous in time travel, as people have imagined. It took us two ship’s months to reach the Paulls’ age, and there all but one of them left us to continue on alone into the future.

They had the other ages to supervise, and many organisational problems to attend to; yet I sometimes wonder if they did not use those problems as an excuse, to save their having to visit the age of the Failed Men. Perhaps they thought us less sensitive, and therefore better fitted for the job.

And so we went ahead again. The office of Steersman was almost honorary, entailing merely the switching off of power when the journey was automatically ended. We sat about and talked, we chosen few, reading or viewing in the excellent libraries the Paulls had installed. Time passed quickly enough, yet we were glad when we arrived.

Glad!

The age of the Failed Men is far in the future: many hundred millions of years ahead, or thousands of millions; the Paulls would never tell us the exact number. Does it matter? It was a long time … There’s plenty of time – too much – more than anyone will ever need.

We stepped out onto that day’s Earth. I had childishly expected – oh, to see the sun stuck at the horizon, or turned purple, or the sky full of moons, or something equally dramatic; but there was not even a shadow over the fair land, and the earth had not aged a day. Only man had aged.

The Failed Men differed from us anatomically and spiritually; it was the former quality which struck us first. They looked like a group of dejected oddities sitting among piles of supplies, and we wanted to laugh. The humorists among us called them ‘the Zombies’ at first – but in a few days there were no humorists left among us.

The Failed Men had no real hands. From their wrists grew five long and prehensile fingers, and the middle digit touched the ground lightly when they walked, for their spines curved in an arc and their heads were thrust far forward. To counter this, their skulls had elongated into boat shapes, scaphocephalic fashion. They had no eyebrows, nor indeed a brow at all, nor any hair at all, although the pores of their skin stood out flakily, giving them a fluffy appearance from a distance.

When they looked at you their eyes held no meaning; they were blanked with a surfeit of experience, as though they had now regained a horrible sort of innocence. When they spoke to you, their voices were hollow and their sentences as short and painful as a child’s toothache. We could not understand their language, except through the electronic translator banks given us by the Paulls.

They looked a mournful sight, but at first we were not too disturbed; we didn’t, you see, quite grasp the nature of the problem. Also, we were very busy, reclaiming more Failed Men from the ground.

Four great aid centres had been established on the earth. Of the other four races in the IRC, two managed sanatoria construction and equipment; another, nursing, feeding and staffing; and the fourth, communication, rehabilitation and liaison between centres. And we – ‘the Children’! – our job was to exhume the Failed Men and bring them to the centres: a job for the simple group! Between us we all had to get the race of man started again – back into harness.

All told, I suppose there are only about six million Failed Men spread over the earth. We had to go out and dig them up. We had specially made tractors with multiple blades on the front which dug slowly and gently into the soil.

The Failed Men had ‘cemetery areas’; we called them that, although they had not been designed as cemeteries. It was like a bad dream. Working day and night, we trundled forward, furrowing up the earth as you strip back a soiled bed. In the mould, a face would appear, an arm with the long fingers, a pair of legs, tumbling into the light. We would stop the machine and get down to the body, digging with trowels around it. So we would exhume another man or woman – it was hard to tell which they were.

They would be in coma. Their eyes would open, staring like peek-a-boo dolls, then close again with a click. We’d patch them up with an injection, stack them on stretchers and send them back in a load to base. It was a harrowing job, and no pun intended.

When the corpses had had some attention and care, they revived. Within a month they would be up and walking, trundling about the hospital grounds in that round-shouldered way, their great boat-heads nodding at every step. And then it was I talked to them and tried to understand.

The translator banks, being Paull-made, were the best possible. But their limitations were the limitations of our own language. If the Failed Men said their word for ‘sun’, the machine said ‘sun’ to us, and we understood by that the same thing the Failed Men intended. But away from the few concrete, common facts of our experience, the business was less easy. Less synonyms, more overtones; it was the old linguistic problem, but magnified here by the ages which lay between us.

I remember tackling one old woman on our first spell back at the centre. I say old, but for all I know she was sweet sixteen; they just looked ancient.

‘I hope you don’t mind being dug – er, rescued?’ I asked politely.

‘Not at all. A pleasure,’ the banks said for her. Polite stereotypes. No real meaning in any language, but the best machine in the world makes them sound sillier than they are.

‘Would you mind if we discussed this whole thing?’

‘What object?’ the banks asked for her.

I’d asked the wrong question. I did not mean thing-object, but thing-matter. That sort of trip-up kept getting in the way of our discussion; the translator spoke better English than I.

‘Can we talk about your problem?’ I asked her, trying again.

‘I have no problem. My problem has been resolved.’

‘I should be interested to hear about it.’

‘What do you require to know about it? I will tell you anything.’

That at least was promising. Willing if not co-operative; they had long ago forgotten the principle of co-operation.

‘You know I come from the distant past to help you?’ The banks translated me undramatically.

‘Yes. It is noble of you all to interrupt your lives for us,’ she said.

‘Oh no; we want to see the race of man starting off again on a right track. We believe it should not die away. We are glad to help, and are sorry you took the wrong track.’

‘When we started, we were on a track others before us – you – had made.’ It was not defiant, just a fact being stated.

‘But the deviation was yours. You made it by an act of will. I’m not condemning; obviously you would not have taken that way had you known it would end in failure.’

She answered. I gathered she was just faintly angry, probably burning all the emotion in her. Her hollow voice spanged and doomed away, and the translator banks gave out simultaneously in fluent English. Only it didn’t make sense.

It went something like this: ‘Ah, but what you do not realise, because your realising is completely undeveloped and unstarted, is how to fail. Failing is not failing unless it is defeat, and this defeat of ours – if you realise it is a failing – is only a failure. A final failure. But as such, it is only a matter of a result, because in time this realisation tends to breed only the realisation of the result of failure; whereas the resolution of our failure, as opposed to the failure – ’

‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘No! Save the modern poetry or the philosophical treatise for later. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m sorry. We’ll take it for granted there was some sort of a failure. Are you going to be able to make a success of this new start we’re giving you?’

‘It is not a new start,’ she said, beginning reasonably enough. ‘Once you have had the result, a start is no longer a result. It is merely in the result of failing and all that is in the case is the start or the failure – depending, for us, on the start, for you on the failure. And you can surely see that even here failure depends abnormally on the beginning of the result, which concerns us more than the failure, simply because it is the result. What you don’t see is the failure of the result of the result’s failure to start a result – ’

‘Stop!’ I shouted again.

I went to the Paull commander. I told him the thing was beginning to become an obsession with me.

‘It is with all of us,’ he replied.

‘But if only I could grasp a fraction of their problem! Look, we come out here all this way ahead to help them – and still we don’t know what we’re helping them from.’

‘We know why we’re helping them, Edmark. The burden of carrying on the race, of breeding a new and more stable generation, is on them. Keep your eye on that, if possible.’

Perhaps his smile was a shade too placating; it made me remember that to him we were ‘the Children’.

‘Look,’ I said pugnaciously. ‘If those shambling failures can’t tell us what’s happened to them, you can. Either you tell me, or we pack up and go home. Our fellows have the creeps, I tell you! Now what – explicitly – is or was wrong with these Zombies?’

The commander laughed.

‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘We don’t know, and that’s all there is to it.’

He stood up then, austere, tall. He went and looked out of the window, hands behind his back, and I could tell by his eyes he was looking at Failed Men, down there in the pale afternoon.

He turned and said to me: ‘This sanatorium was designed for Failed Men. But we’re filling up with relief staff instead; they’ve let the problem get them by the throats.’

‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘I shall be there myself if I don’t get to the root of it, racing the others up the wall.’

He held up his hand.

‘That’s what they all say. But there is no root of it to get at, or none we can comprehend, or else we are part of the root ourselves. If you could only categorise their failure it would be something: religious, spiritual, economic …’

‘So it’s got you too!’ I said.

‘Look,’ I said suddenly. ‘You’ve got the time ships. Go back and see what the problem was!’

The solution was so simple I couldn’t think how they had overlooked it; but of course they hadn’t overlooked it.

‘We’ve been,’ the commander said briefly. ‘A problem of the mind – presuming it was a mental problem – cannot be seen. All we saw was the six million of them singly burying themselves in these shallow graves. The process covered over a century; some of them had been under for three hundred years before we rescued them. No, it’s no good; the problem from our point of view is linguistic.’

‘The translator banks are no good,’ I said sweepingly. ‘It’s all too delicate a job for a machine. Could you lend me a human interpreter?’

He came himself, in the end. He didn’t want to, but he wanted to. And how would a machine cope with that statement? Yet to you and me it’s perfectly comprehensible.

A woman, one of the Failed Men, was walking slowly across the courtyard as we got outside. It might have been the one I had already spoken to, I don’t know. I didn’t recognise her and she gave no sign of recognising me. Anyhow, we stopped her and tried our luck.

‘Ask her why they buried themselves, for a start,’ I said.

The Paull translated and she doomed briefly in reply.

‘She says it was considered necessary, as it aided the union before the beginning of the attempt,’ he told me.

‘Ask her what union.’

Exchange of dooms.

‘The union of the union that they were attempting. Whatever that means.’

‘Did both “unions” sound the same to you?’

‘One was inflected, as it was in the possessive case,’ the Paull said. ‘Otherwise they seemed just alike.’

‘Ask her – ask her if they were all trying to change themselves into something other than human – you know, into spirits or fairies or ghosts.’

‘They’ve only got a word for spirit. Or rather, they’ve got four words for spirit: spirit of soul; spirit of place; spirit of a non-substantive, such as “spirit of adventure”; and another sort of spirit I cannot define – we haven’t an exact analogy for it.’

‘Hell’s bells! Well, try her with spirit of soul.’

Again the melancholy rattle of exchange. Then the commander, with some surprise, said: ‘She says, Yes, they were striving to attain spirituality.’

‘Now we’re getting somewhere!’ I exclaimed, thinking smugly that it just needed persistence and a twenty-fifth-century brain.

The old woman clanged again.

‘What’s that?’ I asked eagerly.

‘She says they’re still striving after spirituality.’

We both groaned. The lead was merely a dead end.

‘It’s no good,’ the Paull said gently. ‘Give up.’

‘One last question! Tell the old girl we cannot understand the nature of what has happened to her race. Was it a catastrophe and what was its nature?’

‘Can but try. Don’t imagine this hasn’t been done before, though – it’s purely for your benefit.’

He spoke. She answered briefly.

‘She says it was an “antwerto”. That means it was a catastrophe to end all catastrophes.’

‘Well, at least we’re definite on that.’

‘Oh yes, they failed all right, whatever it was they were after,’ the Paull said sombrely.

‘The nature of the catastrophe?’

‘She just gives me an innocent little word, “struback”. Unfortunately, we don’t know what it means.’

‘I see. Ask her if it has something to do with evolution.’

‘My dear man, this is all a waste of time! I know the answers, as far as they exist, without speaking to this woman at all.’

‘Ask her if “struback” means something to do with a possible way they were evolving or meaning to evolve,’ I persisted.

He asked her. The ill-matched three of us stood there for a long time while the old woman moaned her reply. At last she was silent.

‘She says struback has some vague connection with evolution,’ the commander told me.

‘Is that all?’

‘Far from it, but that’s what it boils down to! “Time impresses itself on man as evolution,” she says.’

‘Ask her if the nature of the catastrophe was at least partly religious.’

When she had replied, the commander laughed shortly and said: ‘She wants to know what “religious” means. And I’m sorry but I’m not going to stand here while you tell her.’

‘But just because she doesn’t know what it means doesn’t mean to say the failure, the catastrophe, wasn’t religious in essence.’

‘Nothing means to say anything here,’ the commander said angrily. Then he realised he was only talking to one of the Children; he went on more gently: ‘Suppose that instead of coming ahead, we had gone back in time. Suppose we met a prehistoric tribe of hunters. We learn their language. We want to use the word “luck”. In their superstitious minds the concept – and consequently the word – does not exist. We have to use a substitute they can accept: “accident”, or “good-happening”, or “bad-happening”, as the case may be. They understand that all right, but by it they mean something entirely different from our intention. We have not broken through the barrier at all, merely become further entangled in it. The same trap is operating here.

‘And now, please excuse me.’

Struback. A long, hollow syllable, followed by a short click. Night after night, I turned that word over in my tired mind. It became the symbol of the Failed Men, but never anything more.

Most of the others caught the worry. Some drifted away in a kind of trance, some went into the wards. The tractors became undermanned. Reinforcements, of course, were arriving from the present. The present! I could not think of it that way. The time of the Failed Men became my present, and my past and future, too.

I worked with the translator banks again, unable to accept defeat. I had this idea in my head that the Failed Men had been trying – and possibly involuntarily – to turn into something superior to man, a sort of super-being, and I was intensely curious about this.

‘Tell me,’ I demanded of an old man, speaking through the banks, ‘when you all first had this idea, or when it came to you, you were all glad then?’

His answer came: ‘Where there is failure there is only degradation. You cannot understand the degradation, because you are not of us. There is only degradation and misery and you do not comprehend – ’

‘Wait! I’m trying to comprehend! Help me, can’t you? Tell me why it was so degrading, why you failed, how you failed.’

‘The degradation was the failure,’ he said. ‘The failure was the struback, the struback was the misery.’

‘You mean there was just misery, even at the beginning of the experiment?’

‘There was no beginning, only a finish, and that was the result.’

I clutched my head.

‘Wasn’t burying yourself a beginning?’

‘No.’

‘What was it?’

‘It was only a part of the attempt.’

‘What attempt?’

‘You are so stupid. Can you not see? The attempt we were making for the resolution of the problematical problem in the result of our united resolve to solve the problem.’

‘Which problem?’

‘The problem,’ he said wearily. ‘The problem of the resolution of this case into the start of failure. It does not matter how the resolution is accomplished provided all the cases are the same, but in a diversity of cases the start determines the resolution and the finish arbitrarily determines the beginning of the case. But the arbitrary factor is itself inherent in the beginning of the case, and of the case itself. Consequently our case is in the same case, and the failure was because of the start, the start being our resolution.’

It was hopeless. ‘You are really trying to explain?’ I asked weakly.

‘No, young man,’ he said. ‘I am telling you about the failure. You are the struback.’

And he walked away.

Surrey looked hopelessly across at the Chinese girl. She tapped her fingers on the table.

‘What did he mean, “You are the struback”?’ she asked.

‘Anything or nothing,’ he said wildly. ‘It would have been no good asking him to elucidate – I shouldn’t have understood the elucidation. You see it’s all either too complex or too simple for us to grasp.’

‘But surely – ’ she said, and then hesitated.

‘The Failed Men could only think in abstractions,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that was a factor involved in their failure – I don’t know. You see, language is the most intrinsic product of any culture; you can’t comprehend the language till you’ve understood the culture – and how do you understand a culture till you know its language?’

Surrey looked helplessly at the girl’s little lute with its own trapped tongue. Suddenly, the hot silence of the night was shattered by a great orchestral crash half a mile away.

‘Another cartload of nervous wrecks coming home,’ he told her grimly. ‘You’d better go and see to your chickens.’





Non-Stop (#ulink_a96f3b7d-495f-578f-842e-595be9c20515)

I


Brandyholm, eyes tensed into slits, peered down through the ceaselessly moving stalks before him. He lay on the edge of Sternstairs with Gwenny close behind him, his hand clutching the dazer: somewhere below them, a herd of pigs moved stealthily in search of food. He glanced back at the girl for a second, motioning her to stay where she was; that was the last time he saw her. Her bright eyes flashed an encouragement that, with the fever of the hunt upon him, he scarcely bothered to take notice of.

Slowly he worked his way down the great slope, the ponics separating stiffly at his touch. A pig squeaked a short distance away. The hunter paused. This herd was approaching, he had only to wait for them. Crouching like a sprinter, he rested the dazer on one knee and watched.

Gwenny called his name once: ‘Tom!’ There was a scuffle and the sound of men crashing through the ponic tangle above him. The pigs took fright at once and darted away to safety. Brandyholm was already blundering swiftly back up Sternstairs.

As he reached the spot where he had left his woman, an arrow twanged angrily past his shoulder. He dropped to his face in a fury. The Forwards had struck again. It was useless to try and pursue them down the corridors; he would be impaled as soon as he came up to them.

Immediately, impotent rage boiled up in Brandyholm. It was spiced with fear, fear of what the Lieutenant would say when he learnt the tribe had lost another female to the enemy, but Brandyholm let it wash through him almost with pleasure. He thrashed on the ground, kicking and tearing at the earth, his face distorted.

At last this state of mindlessness left him. Weak and abandoned, he lay in a shallow ditch he had worked round him. As he breathed less rapidly, his face regained its normal pallor. Idly, he rubbed at the hard ridges under him; their existence dawning on him, he knelt up and studied them. Regularly spaced ledges of metal … no reason existed to doubt that they ran from top to bottom of the great incline of Sternstairs, covered by the needly humus formed of countless dead ponic leaves.

‘More fuel for the ship theory,’ he muttered, sullenly kicking the soil level again; little he cared one way or the other for the ship theory. Shouldering his dazer, he turned back to Quarters to make his humiliating report. The ponic seeds clicked like beads as he roughly parted their slender stems and barged his way home.

Once Brandyholm was past the barricades, it was only a short while before he stood in front of the aged Lieutenant. The latter, guard-flanked, concealed his eyes carefully beneath bushy white eyebrows.

‘Expansion to your ego, sir,’ Brandyholm said humbly.

‘At your expense,’ came the stock response, and then Lieutenant Greene asked sternly, ‘Why are you back in Quarters at this time, hunter?’

Brandyholm explained how his woman had been taken. As he listened, the Lieutenant’s nostrils filled with mucus, his mouth slowly elongated and overflowed with saliva until his chin glistened. At the same time, his eyes widened and his frame began to shake violently. Through his fear, Brandyholm had to admit it was a splendid, daunting performance.

Its climax came when the Lieutenant fell to the floor and lay limp. Two guards, faces twitching, stood protectively over his body.

‘He’ll kill himself doing that, one day soon,’ Brandyholm thought, but it gave him little reassurance for the present.

At length the Lieutenant climbed slowly to his feet, his rage dispersed, and said as he brushed his clothes down, ‘This woman, Gwenny Tod – did she not bear you a child?’

‘Many periods ago, sir. It was a girl child and died of crying soon after it was born. She is little use as a child-bearer.’

‘She is another woman lost to the Forwards,’ said Lieutenant Greene sharply. ‘We have not so many people here that we can afford to give them away, fertile or not.’

‘I didn’t give – ’

‘You should have been more alert. You should have known they were trailing. Six lashes before sleep!’

The sentence was duly administered under the angry eyes of most of the Greene tribe. Back paining, but mind greatly eased by its degradation, Brandyholm slouched back to his room. There, Carappa the Priest awaited him, sitting patiently on his haunches with his big belly dangling. He rarely called at this late hour, and Brandyholm stood stiffly before him, waiting for him to speak first.

‘Expansion to your ego, son.’

‘At your expense, father.’

‘And turmoil in my id,’ capped the priest piously, making the customary genuflection of rage, without however troubling to rise.

Brandyholm sat down on his bunk and cautiously removed the shirt from his bloody back. It took him a long time. When it was off, he flung it on the floor and spat at it, missing. He said nothing.

‘Your sentence was an unfair one?’ the priest asked.

‘Eminently,’ Brandyholm said with surly satisfaction. ‘Crooner received twice as many strokes yesterday for a much more trivial matter – working too slowly in the gardens.’

‘Crooner is always slow,’ said the priest absently.

The other made no reply. Outside his room, the bright expanse of Quarters was deserted; it was sleep, all but the guards were in bed. And beyond the barricades, beyond the ponic tangle, Gwenny was in bed … somebody else’s bed.

Carappa came over to him, leaning heavily against the bunk.

‘You are bitter, son?’

‘Very bitter, father. I feel I would like to kill somebody.’

‘You shall. You shall. It is good you should feel so. Never grow resigned, my son; that way is death for us all.’

Brandyholm glanced in the priest’s direction, and saw with horror that Carappa’s eyes were seeking his. The strongest tabu in their society was directed against one man looking another straight in the eyes; honest and well-intentioned men gave each other only side glances. A priest especially should have observed this rule. He shrank back on the bed when Carappa gripped his shoulder.

‘Do you ever feel like running amok, Tom?’

Brandyholm’s heart beat uncomfortably at the question. Several of the best and most savage men of Quarters had run amok, bursting through the village with their dazers burning, and afterwards living like solitary man-eaters in the unexplored areas of ponic tangle, afraid to return and face their punishment. He knew it was a manly, even an admirable thing to do; but it was not a priest’s business to incite it. A priest should unite, not disrupt his village, by bringing the frustration in men’s minds to the surface, where it could flow freely without curdling into neurosis.

‘Look at me, Tom. Answer me.’

‘Why are you speaking to me like this?’ he asked, with his face to the wall.

‘I want to know what you are made of.’

You know what the litany teaches us, father. We are the sons of cowards and our days are passed in fear.’

‘You believe that, Tom?’

‘Naturally. It is the Teaching.’

‘Then would you follow me where I led you – even out of Quarters, into Dead Ways?’

He was silent, wondering, thinking not with his brain but with the uneasy corpuscles of his blood.

‘That would require courage,’ he replied at last.

The priest slapped his great thighs and yawned enthusiastically. ‘No, Tom, you lie, true to the liars that begot you. We should be fleeing from Quarters – escaping, evading the responsibilities of grown men in society. It would be a back-to-nature act, a fruitless attempt to return to the ancestral womb. It would be the very depth and abysm of cowardice to leave here. Now will you come with me?’

Some meaning beyond the words lit a spark in Brandyholm. Had there not always been a lurking something he could not name, something from which he cried to escape? He raised himself on one elbow.

‘Just us two?’

‘No! We are too timid to go on our own,’ roared the priest heartily. ‘Crooner and Wantage are also coming. It is all planned! I wanted only a hunter like you to join us.’

‘Crooner is slow, you said so yourself,’ Brandyholm complained, his heart sinking now he was committed.

‘But he is big. Come! We can leave now.’

‘During this sleep?’

‘But of course. We must skulk out unseen. If you will come, I promise – what I promise you I cannot tell. Power … Chiefly power, my son …’

It was a well-worn precept to be rash, not to think ahead, to act on the spur of the moment. Doing otherwise meant inertia, degenerating into the brooding state of inaction which constantly threatened to overwhelm them all. Brandyholm seized up a fresh shirt, his antique jacket and his pack, and followed the bulky figure of the priest out of the door.

Crooner and Wantage were rounded up. Neither of them had women at present. They gave Brandyholm reassuringly guarded looks and fell in beside Carappa. Their features were uniformly sullen; only the priest’s meaty-chops betrayed anything like excitement.

‘Tomorrow’s sleep will be dim. Would it not have been safer to have waited till then?’ asked Wantage complainingly. He had pale hair to match his face, and a long jaw; he could look as cruel as anybody in Quarters. As a child he had been known to the other children as Rockface.

‘We might all be dead at the end of another sleep-wake,’ the priest said in reply.

‘True,’ Wantage admitted grudgingly. The Teaching taught that antagonism was a man’s best armour against oblivion; Wantage was commonly reckoned to be a natural survivor-type.

One sleep-wake in every four was almost totally dark. Universally, lighting dipped to dimness; nobody in Quarters could explain why – it was just a natural phenomenon in their lives – although some philosophical spirits used it to reinforce the ship theory.

Carappa led them away from the barricades to a solid metal bulkhead at the far end of Second Corridor. A guard stood there relaxed but alert. As the four approached, he raised his dazer, calling out the usual challenge: ‘I should be glad to fire!’

‘And I to die!’ responded Carappa amiably. ‘Put your weapon down, Zwemmer. No blood for you tonight. Would you shoot me, the instrument of your doubtful sanity?’

‘I’d shoot anybody,’ the guard said ferociously.

‘Well, save it for a better target. I have something important to show you.’ During this interchange, Carappa had never faltered in his advance. The guard, Zwemmer, hesitated uncertainly; other guards were within call, but a false alarm might mean lashes for him and he was anxious to preserve his present state of misery. In those few seconds of hesitation, the priest was up to him. Drawing a knife swiftly from under his short robe, Carappa sunk it deep into the other’s stomach, twisted it, and caught the body neatly over his shoulder as it doubled forward.

‘That was smartly done, father,’ Wantage exclaimed, respect in his voice. It was good to see a priest who so ably practised what he preached.

‘A pleasure,’ the priest grunted, wiping his knife. He passed his burden to Crooner who, being five foot eight and a head higher than the others, could manage it more easily. A metal grill stood in the wall before them. Carappa produced a pair of metal cutters from a capacious pocket, snicked at a connection, and calmly slid the grill back into the wall. A plain sheet of metal was now revealed; Carappa pressed a button on it and it also rolled back.

The others jumped away involuntarily. A dark, gaping hole stood before them.

‘Fear not, fearful ones,’ Carappa said. ‘It’s only a man-made shaft. A carriage of some sort once ran up and down it. Pitch the guard down there for a start, Crooner.’

The body was hurled into the gap and they listened with some satisfaction to a heavy thud a moment later.

‘Now follow me. We follow Zwemmer, but at a less furious speed.’

Cables hung in the middle of the opening. Carappa seized them and climbed down fifteen feet to the next level. The lift shaft yawning below him, he swung himself onto a narrow ledge and manipulated the double gates open. One by one, the others followed him into a rustling twilight. The ponic tangle grew here as everywhere. Carappa closed the gates neatly behind them and then faced forwards, squaring his shoulders and adjusting his robe.

‘Great discoveries are before us, friends!’ he announced, adding, ‘So first let us sleep to be fresh to meet them.’

‘If we sleep here, will the tribe not come and find us?’ Crooner asked slowly.

Wantage caught him smartly across the face with the back of his hand. The blow opened Crooner’s lower lip and sent a slow line of blood coursing down his chin. He stood there mutely, working his mouth and swinging his fists in a dull anger.

‘That’s for questioning the priest’s leadership,’ Wantage said. ‘You must know they will not waste a search party on us. Dreams tell us ourselves.’

‘And a blow may forestall murder.’ Crooner growled the prescribed answer of the formula for avoiding a duel.

They settled down where they were, eating frugally and saying little. The priest promised to tell them his plans tomorrow. Round them as they slept were the changeless, draughtless heat and the unending rustle of the ponics. Their lean stems were the last things Brandyholm saw before he closed his eyes; so rapidly did they grow, the young ones would be feet taller and the old ones dead by the time he woke. He failed to see in this frenetic jostling a parallel with the human lives about him.




II


Despite his swollen lip, Bob Crooner was cheerful enough to whistle when they got up. Carappa seemed in a mood of pleasurable grimness; doubtless he gained satisfaction from knowing the others waited for what he had to say. Brandyholm and Wantage preserved their usual dour silence; the world affronted them, and they had sense enough to show it.

Nourishment was their first and hasty consideration. Neat slashes at the joints of two young ponic poles produced enough of the gooey white miltex for their requirements. It could be assimilated raw, and they munched it down quickly.

‘You believe the ship theory?’ Carappa suddenly challenged Wantage.

‘Yes. I’ll fight the man who says I’m wrong.’

The priest nodded his question at Crooner.

‘No. How can it be right?’ Crooner said.

The priest nodded his question at Brandyholm.

‘I don’t know. What does it matter either way to us?’

‘Fool!’ the priest said. ‘It matters in a million ways.’ He picked vigorously at a decaying tooth. ‘I, of course, am interested only in the theological aspects of this question. If this is a ship, it has come from somewhere and will arrive somewhere. If this is not a ship, I can only presume we are figments of the unconscious of some singularly beastly creature.’

They looked at him in alarm. He sneered into their faces and continued, ‘Fortunately, there can be little rational doubt that this is a ship – which brings up the question: Why should there be a conspiracy to keep us in ignorance of the fact?’

‘Something’s gone wrong somewhere,’ Wantage suggested eagerly. ‘That’s what I always say: something’s terribly wrong.’

‘Well, cease to say it in my presence,’ said Carappa smoothly. ‘There is a more likely explanation: that the driver or captain of this ship is a madman punishing us for some wrong our fore-fathers committed.’

‘Punishing us for a wrong,’ echoed Brandyholm, in whom the words struck a familiar chord. ‘Yes, that is why we are suffering. You make me believe the theory, father, for we all sin.’

‘Now this is my plan, and unfortunately I need your aid,’ continued Carappa, ignoring Brandyholm. ‘We are going to find out this captain, hunt him down. He is concealed somewhere behind a locked door. When we get to him and kill him, we – we will be in control of the ship!’

‘And where shall we go to with it?’ asked Crooner.

For a moment the priest looked blank. ‘We’ll find somewhere,’ he said confidently. ‘Leave that to me.’

He stood up and with a flourish pulled a book from his pocket. He thrust the title under their eyes, but they could hardly read; a few syllables were intelligible, but they were unable to decipher unaccustomed words. Carappa explained condescendingly to them that it was called Manual of Electrical Circuits of Starship. Until two days ago it had reposed in a trunk among other official and unused regalia of the Lieutenancy; happening upon it, the priest had appropriated it. Now it would show them the way they had to go; they were in the rear of the ship and must proceed to the front, to a spot in the nose marked ‘Control’ in the manual.

Feeling rather dazed by this entire concept, Brandyholm muttered, ‘Then we venture into Forwards territory.’

‘Expecting to find Gwenny again?’ Wantage asked laughingly.

‘No, not expecting to see anyone again, if we get among them, Rockface,’ Brandyholm said, using the other’s childhood nickname without consciously feeling the urge to irritate him. Wantage flared up almost automatically in response.

‘I don’t suppose Forwards are as terrible as we make them out to be,’ Crooner interrupted mildly.

‘Of course they aren’t,’ the priest agreed. ‘They are feared because they are unknown. That’s how superstitions are born, through ignorance. That’s how men go mad. That’s how the idea of being in a ship grows strange to us. Deep down in a man’s mind lurks elemental evil; if he forgets about it or does not acknowledge it, it swallows his knowledge and his sense. That is why so many of us become mad – ’

‘Cut the cackle, priest, and let’s move if we must,’ Wantage interrupted. He had no real desire to go on, his desire was merely to interrupt. The hatred of others had constantly to be expressed if a man was to stay healthy: that was a basic tenet of the Teaching. What was more difficult was to express one’s hatred of oneself.

Their progress was slow. The ponics grew thickly. It was difficult to keep moving straight; once or twice they worked themselves into rooms and were finally confronted with black walls. Gradually, spilt miltex covered their bodies, adhered and hardened. At one stage, after their mid-wake snack, the growths mercifully thinned, and they found themselves in a clear corridor with a bend just ahead.

With a whoop of pleasure, Brandyholm bounced round the corner, and then stopped abruptly. A man was just sliding silently down a rope into a wide gash in the floor in front. Dropping onto hands and knees, Brandyholm peered down into a vast room full of partitions with metal frames in. There was no sign of the man: he had already merged into twilight.

A short council was held, after which they went on, carefully skirting the hole. A few yards further on, another hole stopped them, and this one was unbridgeable. An explosion from below had ripped out floor, one wall and bulkhead. The edges of the torn metal were smooth, as if great heat had melted what it sundered. The lighting had also been disrupted.

They looked at each other uncertainly, quick to feel nonplussed.

‘We can’t jump across this gap,’ the priest said. ‘We must push through this hole in the wall and get back onto the corridor as soon as possible.’

This, however, proved impracticable. Some sort of machinery blocked the other side of the hole and sealed it effectively. They were only left with the option of climbing through the overhead bulkhead, and this they did as speedily as possible, frequently glancing back to make sure nobody was creeping up on them. When Crooner, the last and the heaviest, was hauled up, they started slowly forward by the light of Carappa’s torch, the artificial lighting still being defunct.

Gaping doorways of disordered rooms slid threateningly by. Dust stirred beneath their feet. When they saw light again ahead, Carappa flicked off the torch and their approach was wary.

The light came from a side door which bore the legend Dining Hall. Summoned into being by the light, more ponics grew, rooted in the litter dropped by themselves and the tiny insects that crawled among them. Their outer ranks were puny blades which seemed to grow from the deck itself, but they increased so in stature that two yards from the doorway they curled against the ceiling.

Wantage, Crooner, Brandyholm and the priest stared in disgust at the tangle, for it was obvious that their way lay through it. Great doors with the words Panic Valve stencilled on them in yellow sealed off the corridor. Reluctantly, with hardly a word to each other, they moved in and commenced hacking.

The jungle was more than usually impenetrable. Caught among the growth, sometimes on the ground, sometimes chest high, sometimes suspended above their heads, were an almost infinite number of metal tables and chairs. It was like cutting one’s way slowly through a nightmare.

And it grew worse. They came upon clusters of ponics which had collapsed under the extra weight and rotted in slimy bundles, while other plants grew out of them. The air became thick and sickly, and soon every stem about them was attacked by blight and they moved through a stippled wall of disease.

Brandyholm glanced at Wantage, who was next to him hacking in silence. The man’s face was grey, his eyes and nose streaming, and his mouth working. Seeing Brandyholm’s eye upon him, he began to curse monotonously.

Finally they came up against a blank wall. Wantage attacked it wildly with his knife, until Crooner downed him with a blow at the back of his ear.

‘Pity to spoil a good blade,’ Crooner said, pulling a hand across his dark, grimy face. ‘Now what do we do, priest?’

As if in answer to his question, the lights went out. It was dim-sleep, the dark time that came once in every four sleeps and would bring a dim-wake after it. Night came billowing in on them like a hot breath.

‘Nothing is left but self-confession,’ Carappa cried in desperation. He fell to his knees and began to recite the General Belief, the others coming in half-heartedly with the responses. Their voices rose and fell; by the end of it they all felt slightly better.

‘… And by so discharging our morbid impulses we may be freed from inner conflict,’ he intoned.

‘And live in psychosomatic purity,’ they replied.

‘So that this unnatural life may be delivered down to journey’s end.’

‘And sanity propagated.’

‘And the ship brought home.’ The priest had the last word.

Carappa scuffled round in the dark, shaking their hands and wishing expansion to their egos. Brandyholm pushed him roughly away.

‘After the mumbo jumbo, perhaps you’ll tell us how you’re going to get us out of here,’ he said. ‘I see now why all this sector was called Dead Ways.’

‘There will be another door near here. After sleep, we will hack our way round the wall till we find it. We can endure a little inconvenience, Tom, for the sake of the power to come.’

In the little clearing they had made, ponic seedlings would already be thrusting up. Even as they lay, the little stems were pushing through all round them. High over their heads, the dead and dying foliage curled against the ceiling and hung down. Although vibrant with the tiny sub-noises of rapid growth, the air was almost unbreathable: the wall of diseased plants cut off the oxygen released by the living ones beyond.

Nevertheless, Brandyholm slept. A nightmare trailed behind his eyes, a nightmare he was unable to recall afterwards, however hard he tried – for the religious held it a sign of ill-health not to remember and confess a bad dream. He only knew that an infinite menace was bearing down upon him, and then he awoke with Bob Crooner’s cries coming thickly to his ears. Rolling over half-drugged by sleep, he came upon two bodies fighting desperately with their bare hands. By the sounds they made, he knew they were Crooner and Wantage, and Wantage was on top. He flung himself at the latter, tearing at his shoulders.

Wantage sent a wild punch behind him; Brandyholm caught his wrist and twisted his arm back cruelly until the man rolled away from Crooner, kicking and shouting. They were all shouting by now. After what seemed an endless period of struggle, a light came on and Carappa stood over them, flashing his torch. In the brightness, Wantage’s knife was revealed. He dived for it, and Crooner pinned his wrist to the ground with a heavy foot.

Breathing heavily, Wantage lay as he was. His face was almost unrecognisable; normally pale and thin, it was now suffused with blood and so puffy his eyes were almost closed. He lay in a pulp of ponic leaves and miltex, looking at them like a beaten animal.

‘He suddenly set on me in the dark,’ Crooner said. ‘Thanks for the help, Tom.’ He was shaking violently.

Brandyholm smiled in pleasure at the gratitude, so unexpected because it was hardly considered manly to admit one ever stood in need of help. The smile nearly cracked his face. His head throbbed as if it would split.

The priest was on his hands and knees in front of Wantage, prodding him and speaking swiftly to him. At length he said to the other two, ‘I’ve seen a good many go like this. Wantage is insane. He is suffering from what we priests know as hyper-claustrophobia; actually we all have it in some degree. It causes forty-five per cent of Greene tribe deaths.’

‘Never mind the statistics, Carappa,’ Crooner said angrily. ‘What are we going to do with him?’

‘You don’t appreciate what an interesting case he is,’ the priest reproved. ‘Funny to observe how like a man’s beginning his end often is. Wantage’s mother was an outcast living in Dead Ways with a man; both of them had been turned out of Forwards or one of the minor Midway tribes. The man was killed hunting and the woman sought refuge with us. She could not live in the tangle alone. Wantage was then about eighteen months old, and his mother became – as the unattached females frequently do – one of our women. She was killed in a drunken brawl when he was fourteen.’

‘What’s this to do with Wantage going mad now?’ Crooner asked contemptuously. Priests were too fond of talking.

‘He deliberately submerged the memory of his mother because she was a bad lot,’ said Carappa triumphantly. ‘But being back in the tangle brought back the shame of her. He was overwhelmed by infantile fears of darkness and insecurity.’

‘Now that our little object lesson in the benefits of religion is over – ’ Crooner began, but at that instant Wantage sprang up, striking out right and left. A chance blow on the priest’s cheek sent him spinning round into Brandyholm. Wantage snarled in triumph and burst through the ponics in the direction he had come.

‘Leave him!’ Carappa snapped angrily, although neither Brandyholm nor Crooner had made any attempt to follow. ‘We shan’t see him again.’

He was wrong. Wantage could hardly have got twenty yards from them when he stopped suddenly. They heard him give a curious whistling sigh. He turned, staggered back towards them through the tangle, collapsed, and crawled back into the torchlight on hands and knees.

When he rolled over and lay still, they saw an arrow sticking squarely out of his solar plexus.

They were still peering stupidly at the body when the armed guards of Forwards slid from the shadows and surrounded them.




III


The Forwards official in front of whom they were dragged received them standing. Her hands hung calmly by her side and she made no movement of interest when they came in. She was young, her hair cut short to reveal the contour of her proud head, and her brow and eyes created an impression of magnificence. Only when one’s gaze dropped to her mouth and jaw was there a hint that it might be undesirable to know her too well.

She said her name was Viann. She questioned them, they answered. They might have been three performing dogs hustled before her, so detachedly did she regard the two more silent figures and the third figure, that of Carappa, slightly ahead of his companions, gesticulating, talking, throwing his weight first onto one leg, then the other. They were, indeed, to her only random elements in a problem that must be solved.

‘So your plea that your lives should be saved – ’ already it had come to that – already they were begging for their breath ‘– rests on your idea that you have knowledge which could be useful to us here in Forwards?’ Viann said to them.

‘I said I have the knowledge,’ suggested Carappa craftily. ‘If you also deign to spare the lives of my poor, ignorant friends I should, of course, be grateful, but they can tell you nothing.’

‘So?’ She permitted herself a frosty smile.

‘If we have not knowledge, we have strength to serve you with,’ Brandyholm offered. The sick feeling which had possessed him ever since they were captured in the ponic tangle showed no sign of weakening its grip on his intestines.

She said to him, without really bothering to look at him, ‘Your “priest” has the right idea: intelligence only can bribe me – not muscle.’

Turning to Bob Crooner, she asked, ‘What have you to say for yourself? You have not spoken yet.’

Crooner looked steadily at her before dropping his eyes and replying, ‘We have no ladies like you in our little tribe. My silence was only a mask for disturbed thoughts.’

‘That sort of thing is not acceptable as a bribe either,’ Viann said levelly. ‘You will all three be taken to a cell now; I shall question you individually, at my convenience.’

Guards appeared, and despite Carappa’s protests they were marched away to a featureless room close at hand. Groaning, Brandyholm lay down on a thin rug and propped himself on one elbow.

‘These people are more civilised than we,’ he said to the priest. ‘They will be sure to kill us. Had you promised us this when we set out, you would have set out alone.’

Carappa came over to him, squatted on his haunches and seized Brandyholm’s shirt front with two large hands. His voice was as thick as cool treacle.

‘Did not the Teaching tell you that a man without backbone is a ponic without miltex? What is your wretched, sordid life to care a curse over? Where in your mind is anything so precious that it should not be carelessly extinguished? Are we not where we desired to be, Tom Brandyholm – in Forwards, near Control? You sick, dispirited thing! I am a man, and like a man I will lie and cheat my way out of this situation. I advise you to do likewise.’

Brandyholm made no answer. The priest’s outburst meant little to him under the circumstances. It was one thing to tell this woman that the ship had a hidden control room with a captain in, and to bluff that they alone knew the way to it; whether or not that would save their lives was quite another thing.

‘Nothing to say?’ the priest asked, still gripping his shirt.

Before Brandyholm could attempt an answer, the door was flung open, and a man stood there calling for Carappa. Neatly, unobserved, as if he had rehearsed it, Carappa slipped the electrical circuits book out of his own shirt front and down Brandyholm’s. Then he got up slowly and left them without a word.

He was escorted to a room with two chairs in which sat Viann and a man who announced himself as Master Scott. His cadaverous face bore an expression which might be construed either as integrity or intransigence; a glance at the long fingers which tapped against one cheekbone suggested that if he was a cruel man, he would be cruel with artistry.

Eloquently, and in suitably vague terms, the priest explained his theory to them.

‘If you will trust me,’ he said, ‘trust me and give me power, I will set this ship – for such I assure you it is – at its destination, and we will be free of it and its oppression altogether.’

He continued falteringly, for it was obvious even to him that his small audience was full of derision and harsh amusement. Silence fell. Under their gaze he fidgeted and rubbed his jowls and muttered to himself. They continued to stare, lips curled with contemptuous enjoyment of his growing discomfiture.

‘Because I come of a small tribe you have no faith in me,’ he grumbled.

‘Not that,’ said Master Scott, almost with kindness. ‘You have at least proved something we were anxious to know – that you are a true native of this ship. I may explain that remark later.’

‘You see, in Forwards we have known for generations that this is a ship,’ Viann said. Her manner was more human now. ‘This control room you speak of in such indefinite fashion was actually found some while ago. But the controls are wrecked, ruined, and there was no captain – nor anyone we could train as captain. These facts are not common knowledge: it is better people should remain in ignorance of the world in which they live.’

‘I will be captain! I will see us all safe!’ burst out Carappa.

‘You are talking like a fool, man,’ said Master Scott. ‘You are unaware of the vast issues involved. It might possibly be instructive for you to see this control room. Come along with us.’

As they made their way along a corridor – the corridors here were immaculately clean and free of all ponic plants – Viann sketched in a few facts she thought Carappa was capable of understanding. ‘The blackness of Nothingness, Written upon the manuscript of the Universe, And punctuated with Stars’ was a sentence from a religious poem which he knew. This Viann tried to translate into scientific terms for him, told him of suns and planets, of the distances between planetary systems and of a metal ship constructed to travel between them.

She spoke of the planet Earth, where the ship was built. She spoke of the launching of the ship and of its travelling at a velocity a twentieth that of light towards the planetary system Procyon.

‘How do you know all this?’ cried Carappa. As he listened the tears had begun to stream from his eyes, and now he flung up his hands in dismay. The world was suddenly more awesome than he dreamed: something too big ever to control.

‘You must understand that some terrible catastrophe happened in the ship, thwarting the ideas and ideals of its launchers,’ the slender girl told him.

‘That indeed I know … some terrible wrong of our forefathers.’

‘Some records have survived. You understand that less than a quarter of the ship is accessible to us. All the same, we have pieced these facts together.’

The priest passed a hand over his grey face. ‘But – ’ he began. ‘No, it doesn’t matter …’

‘Here is the control room,’ Master Scott said quietly. Producing a sonic key, he slid open a panel door; as they passed through it, it closed behind them.

The control room was not large, although it had once been impressive in its functionalism. It was shaped much like a segment of orange, the long curve before them from ceiling to floor being ribbed vertically at intervals. Carappa swung his head slowly from side to side like an animal in pain, as he took it in.

‘And where are the stars?’ he asked.

‘Behind there, we think.’ Viann indicated the ribbed wall. ‘But if those are shutters we no longer have the power to withdraw them. They are firmly locked in place.’

‘No longer have the power …’ Carappa echoed. His tears were running again as he paced up and down. ‘I am only a poor provincial priest and I feel very humble – ’

‘Stop dramatising yourself, man,’ Scott said sharply. ‘Take your mind off your own ego and look instead at these.’

He swept a hand eloquently over the semi-circular bank of controls. The whole structure was a ruinous, coagulated mass; it had been destroyed by heat and acid till not a switch or dial remained intact.

‘This can never be repaired,’ he said gravely.

They stood isolated together in the middle of the floor, a sense of their helplessness suddenly giving them a need for kinship.

‘It is worse than you thought, priest?’ Viann asked.

He nodded dumbly, and finally said, ‘This voyage to Procyon – it would take several generations?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many?’

‘The seventh generation would be young and fit to colonise any planet they reached.’

‘Only seven? Should the ship – how should I say – ’ He paused. He was weary. Again he dragged a heavy hand across his face. ‘Should we not be at Procyon now?’

Master Scott said, ‘We have a log book of an early captain of the ship we could show you. The ship reached the Procyon system and actually found a habitable planet.’

‘Then?’

‘It landed half the people as colonists, took in fresh stocks of water – which had apparently run short – and began back for home, for Earth, again.’

Once more the silence.

As if compelled to probe into something he had no wish to discover, the priest said, ‘And this journey back – another seven generations?’

‘Yes.’

Slowly he rephrased a question he had already asked: ‘Should we not be back at Earth now?’

‘We should,’ said the girl. Her face tilted up towards his as she added through clenched teeth, ‘We have evidence that twenty-two generations have passed since the ship left Procyon.’

For a moment he did not grasp her meaning, asking, ‘Then where are we?’

In the wide room her quiet answer, ‘Lost,’ was almost lost.

Steadying himself, Carappa said dully, ‘You may ask your men to kill me now.’




IV


For some while after the priest was taken from them, Tom Brandyholm and Bob Crooner sat quietly in their cell. Trepidation pinned Brandyholm where he was, slumped against one wall; his entire fibre seemed to have dissolved into a sort of watery paralysis. He did not recognise a form of nervous disease which had carried off a number of his acquaintances; in the unprecedented conditions of the ship, its circumscribed inhabitants perished easily from inner tensions.

He looked hopelessly at the book Carappa had left. Most of it consisted of unreadable diagrams and instructions, obviously of a technical nature. Here and there was a sentence – such as ‘The daily six-hour dim-down of all inessential lighting, established to give an illusion of night, will be the period normally devoted to routine maintenance’ – which seemed to make sense without being really comprehensible. Realising how little he understood of the world, Brandyholm began to pace rapidly up and down. Confinement! It was killing him.

He flung himself violently at the door, hammering and scratching on it, screaming.

In a kind of daze, he felt Crooner pull him over onto his back.

‘Got to get away, got to get away, Bob!’ he cried. ‘Can’t we escape – get back to the tribe?’

‘Lie quiet and shut up,’ Crooner advised grimly. ‘Wait your chance. It’ll come, with luck.’

They waited, Brandyholm in a kind of stupor. When the guards came again and called for him, they had to haul him to his feet. He was dragged roughly along corridors and finally pushed into a small room. A uniformed man with a lean face confronted him.

‘I am Master Scott,’ the man said. ‘Expansion to your ego.’

Brandyholm, trying to focus on him through swimming vision, did not reply. A swung hand, catching him sharply on the cheek, cleared his head with remarkable efficiency.

‘Expansion to your ego,’ Master Scott repeated menacingly.

‘At your expense,’ replied Brandyholm feebly.

‘That’s better. What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?’

‘Migraine.’

‘You confess regularly?’

‘When my priest, Carappa, is at liberty.’

‘Then you should not suffer guilt-attacks which produce migraines,’ answered Scott, ignoring Brandyholm’s thrust. Changing his tone, he said, ‘I have to ask you some questions. It would be wise to answer carefully. First: where were you born?’

‘In Quarters.’

‘Proof of that?’

‘What do you call proof? Go and catch my mother: she’s still alive: she’ll tell you.’

‘Have you any reasons why your life should be spared?’

‘What reason have you to kill me?’

Master Scott made an impatient gesture. ‘I’m trying to be patient. Reasons, quickly. Have you any knowledge?’

‘What if I have?’

The words were hardly out of his mouth when his mouth was slammed shut by a palm under his chin. He was pinned against the wall, struggling, while a long finger flicked unpleasantly against his windpipe.

‘Understand this,’ Scott said, synchronising words with flicks, ‘Everyone on shipboard is in a damn beastly situation. It’s a ship, see, and it’s headed hell-knows-where, and there are some queer things going on aboard – never mind that – you wouldn’t understand. What you can understand, is that we’re all expendable, and if you can’t show you’re any use you’re bound for the Long Jump. Now – talk.’

Sick, sweating, Brandyholm said the first thing that came into his head: ‘The daily six-hour dim-down of all unessential lighting, established to give a delusion of night, will be the period devoted to maintenance.’

He was instantly released. Instantly, he slumped to the floor.

‘What’s that?’ Scott asked, stirring him slightly with one foot. He wrote it down in a notebook while Brandyholm repeated it.

‘Is it important?’ Brandyholm asked.

‘Could be. Where did you get it from?’ He listened intently while the other explained about the book of circuits, which he had left in the cell.

The silence which followed was broken by the entry of an excited man who grabbed Scott’s arm and said, ‘You’re needed at once at the barricades! An attack is developing. Everyone is wanted.’

‘I’m coming,’ Scott said. Without another glance at Brandyholm, they ran from the room. The latter took no advantage of their disappearance beyond arranging himself more comfortably on the floor. So deeply had a feeling of defeat crept into him that he scarcely realised he was alone; when he did realise it, he was at first unable to do anything about it. Gradually, however, he fostered a strengthening rage in himself. He had been tricked, trapped, maligned, persecuted, bullied, he who deserved only kindness … Tears stood in his eyes, and he hauled himself to his feet. He was going to show them. An exhilarating urge to clamp his hands round somebody’s throat seized him.

The door by which Scott and the other man had left proved to be locked. The opposite wall also had a door, which opened into a sort of ante-room. Passing through this, Brandyholm came into a deserted corridor, at the far end of which, beyond a gap, he could see ponics growing. He had never been so grateful for the sight of those growths in his life. Once in among them, escape should be easy, and he could find his way back to Quarters. Here was the luck Crooner had spoken of.

He began to run down the corridor. There was one room to pass with an open door; he sprinted past it, glancing in as he did so. What he saw made him halt and turn back. Lying on a couch just inside the room, relaxed as if he were merely sleeping, lay Carappa. His huge body sprawled untidily, his legs were crossed, and face bore the expression of a well-fed bulldog – and blood was clotted over his hair and temple.

‘Carappa!’ Brandyholm exclaimed, leaning forward and touching the priest’s arm. It was stone cold.

The teaching laid down strict instructions on the ceremony to be observed over the dead. Death has a sting, said the Teaching, for those who observe it; it strikes fear into their hearts. This fear must not be allowed to permeate the subconscious: it must be acted out of the system at once, in a complex ritual of expressions of terror. So firmly had this principle been instilled into Brandyholm that, abandoning all thought of escape, he snapped straight away into the first gesture of prostration.

‘I’m afraid we must interrupt,’ said a cool female voice behind him. He jumped round. Viann and two guards with levelled dazers confronted him. Her lips were beautiful but her smile was unnerving.

‘Well, warrior?’ Crooner asked defiantly, looking up at the man who stood on the threshold of his cell, his thumbs tucked theatrically in his belt.

‘Your turn for interrogation. Look lively,’ the man said. He was an ugly looking brute: Crooner thought it wise to jump to his feet at once.

He was marched along the course Carappa and Brandyholm had taken earlier. Now he too faced Master Scott. They exchanged greetings in surly fashion as the guard left them to confront each other

‘Where were you born?’ Scott snapped.

‘Somewhere in the tangles.’

‘Why?’

‘My parents were fugitives from their tribe – one of the little Midway tribes. My father ran amok, I believe. It often happens. I was fully grown when I joined the Greene tribe.’

‘Have you proof of all that?’ Scott asked, elongating his mouth to a mere slit.

‘Why do you need to ask these questions?’

Scott caught him a ringing slap across the face and repeated in the same dead level tone, ‘Have you proof of all that?’

Crooner put his hand up to his cheek, and then suddenly pounced with arms extended. He was not quick enough. Master Scott chopped his arms expertly and ducked to one side; as he ducked, he produced a short rubber cosh, with which he smashed a blow behind Crooner’s knee. Crooner collapsed onto the floor.

‘Your reflexes are too slow,’ Scott said. ‘You should easily have been able to take me by surprise then.’

‘I was always called slow in Quarters.’

‘How long have you been with the Greene tribe?’ Scott demanded, standing over Crooner and waggling the cosh as if eager to use it again.

‘Oh – twice a hundred dozen sleep-wakes.’

‘We do not use your primitive method of calculating time here. We call four sleep-wakes one day. That would make your stay in Quarters six hundred days. A long time in a man’s life.’

Crooner made no reply to this. At that juncture an excited man burst into the room and grabbed Scott by the arm.

‘You’re needed at once at the barricades!’ he exclaimed. ‘An attack is developing. Everyone is needed.’

‘Right, I’m coming,’ Scott said. Without another glance at Crooner, they hurried from the room, leaving him sprawled on the floor.

In some alarm, Brandyholm looked up from the spyhole through which he had been observing this interview.

‘So the business about the attack at the barricades is just bluff to get Master Scott out of the room?’ he asked Viann.

She nodded. ‘There are no barricades.’

‘Why?’

She closed her spy-hole before answering. When she did reply, her voice was slow and held none of the confidence her appearance suggested. ‘For the final part of this rough test we have devised for you, of course. Now that you have passed this test, I can explain.’

‘It was not – not a bravery test, was it?’

‘If it was you would hardly have passed it, would you?’ Viann was inspecting him closely, and he found himself looking reluctantly into her eyes. They were very clear and held an alertness which sent nervous excitement through him. Finally she said, ‘Listen, Tom Brandyholm, this ship has been travelling a long time – too long, far too long. It is slowly becoming a ghost ship. Two chief problems confront us; one you can guess: how to control the ship, and make it stop somewhere. If it does not stop, only death can await us.’ She stopped there, her eyes brooding, and finally said, ‘That problem seems insuperable … But the other problem is one we can deal with. There is a strange race on this ship – a new race that was not here before.’

‘You mean – a new tribe, like the Greene tribe?’ he asked, looking anxiously at her strained beauty (so much more desirable than Gwenny had ever been).

‘No, nothing like that!’ she said impatiently. ‘A super-natural race, masquerading as men! You know the ponic tangles, don’t you?’

Brandyholm nodded dumbly, recalling the thickets they had ploughed through before being captured.

‘In those tangles,’ Viann continued, ‘a new race has generated itself, or so I believe. Half the ship is filled with that silent, impenetrable ponic growth, and somewhere, somewhere this race has been born. They come in from their secret centre to spy upon us and learn our ways. But although they try to, they do not and cannot behave like us in all respects. All strangers who are found near Forwards are now subjected to tests, devised to weed out these aliens. You have just undergone your test. Crooner has now almost finished his.’

How do you tell these – aliens?’ Brandyholm asked.

‘For one thing, they seem to be longer lived than we; consequently, their actions are slower. They seem calmer in manner, more phlegmatic.’

She would have said more, but Master Scott entered the room. Triumph lent his face an unaccustomed liveliness. He looked searchingly at Brandyholm, and then said, ‘Your friend Bob Crooner is proved to be an alien. It is definite.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Brandyholm.

‘I suspected as much,’ Viann said. ‘We watched his interview from the spyholes here.’

‘How did you prove it?’ Brandyholm asked.

‘We’ve just had the final proof. When I left him alone, he made out by the other door, just as you did. He saw Carappa, but hardly paused. Instead, he hurried on and escaped into the ponic tangle.’

‘How does that prove anything?’

‘You, when you were escaping, still had to stop and perform the fear ceremony over the dead. Why? Because from birth all of us on the ship are taught that ceremony as routine. Not so Crooner! He scarcely broke his stride. You see, his upbringing has been – different. He is of the alien company.’

‘He was always different,’ Brandyholm muttered reflectively. ‘Cheerful … slow … saying little.’ Then he bowed his head, shaken to think he had lived with the man and cautiously liked him.

‘Crooner is now being followed by our men,’ Scott continued. ‘He will lead them to the secret haunts of the aliens. And then – we will hunt them out and slay them all. My mouth waters at the thought of that killing. You will help us, Brandyholm?’

Silence. Viann’s eyes upon him.

‘No,’ Brandyholm said. ‘You killed my priest, who was no alien. To the devil with you all.’

He did not look up, hunched tensely, waiting to be struck. The blow never came. Instead, footsteps came over to him, and a heavy hand fell on his shoulder.

‘Mourning for me is not only forbidden but premature, Tom,’ a familiar voice said. ‘Get up, you worm, and spit the world in the face.’

He looked up, and it was Carappa. He exclaimed the priest’s name, clutching his arm in his incredulity.

‘Yes, I, Tom, and confoundedly cold. This witch doctor, Scott here, painted me with rat’s blood and laid me out with some beastly drug to stage a death bed scene for you and – the other.’

‘A slight overdose of chloral hydrate,’ said Scott.

‘How are you feeling, priest?’ Viann inquired, with scientific curiosity rather than womanly sympathy in her voice.

‘Desolate, madam. And what would that beastly antidote be that your men shot into me?’

‘Strychnine, I believe it’s called.’

‘Very unpleasant. They also condescended to give me a hot coffee; I never tasted anything so good in Quarters.’ He caught Brandyholm’s eye still upon him and said, ‘I’m no ghost, you see Tom. Ghosts don’t drink coffee.’

‘I still can’t believe you’re alive!’ Brandyholm gasped.

‘Then you are persisting in a particularly irritating brand of foolishness,’ Viann said, moving towards the door. ‘Try to realise that you are no longer a yokel in a jungle outpost; pull yourself together if you wish to live in Forwards. We need wits here. Come on below, everyone. We will eat, and then await a report from Crooner’s trackers. After that, we shall be busy.’




V


The meal was excellent, not only in the standard of the food, but in the blessed absence of the swarms of flies which attended every mouthful back in Quarters. It was slightly marred for Brandyholm and Carappa by the presence of the Council of Five, the rulers of Forwards, who came to hear what Master Scott and Viann had discovered. These five worthies paid no attention whatsoever to the two strangers.

‘It is just a custom,’ Scott explained airily to Carappa, when the priest commented on this insult after the Five had again withdrawn.

‘They should have acknowledged me at least,’ snorted Carappa. ‘Look here, Master Scott, my interest in this whole business is purely theological, but what I want to know is – what do I get out of it?’

Viann answered the question, smiling sourly.

‘So far, you have retained your life, priest: a doubtful benefit, possibly. What other advantages you – and we – everyone – will extract from the situation remains to be seen. But it seems that the electric wiring manual you tried to hide from us – it has been recovered from your erstwhile cell – will be useful. We have what we lacked before: a plan of the ship.’

‘You are a man of vigour and brain, priest,’ Scott added. ‘To keep those virtues at our service it is necessary to retain your tongue in your head; please try and keep it to the immediate problem as much as possible.’

Brandyholm, tired of sitting quietly, said, ‘Why are there no plans of the ship, no controls? How did the ship leave without them?’

He received a withering glare from the priest. ‘An accident happened,’ the latter said tersely.

‘It seems likely the ship left Procyon without the present ponic tangle,’ said Viann. ‘We believe all parts of the ship were clear and could communicate with each other.’

Carappa struck his fist on the table, rattling the empty dishes. ‘Some terrible wrong of our forefathers!’ he exclaimed.

There was a brief knock at the door and a messenger entered, giving the customary greeting, which Master Scott returned. He said he was a runner who had gone with the warriors deputed to follow Bob Crooner. Crooner had dived into the ponic tangle but had gone only a few yards before stopping in a side corridor. There he had pulled the ponic stalks aside with his bare hands, torn out their roots and scooped away the nine inches or so of decayed vegetable matter which covered the floor. After a little searching, he located what he was looking for, and opened up a circular hatch. He rapidly climbed down into this and disappeared, closing the hatch after him.

‘Well?’ Scott demanded of the runner. ‘And then?’

‘I was then despatched with this report, sir,’ said the runner. ‘The warriors stayed guard over the place. In a day, it would be covered by new ponic sprouts.’

‘The aliens cannot live under the floor between levels,’ Scott said, frowning. ‘We had better go there straightaway and investigate. What say you, Viann?’

‘Ready,’ she said, throwing her head up as if scenting battle, and patting her dazer. ‘You two had better come with us,’ she added to the priest and Brandyholm. The latter looked dubiously at Carappa, who nodded eagerly.

‘Take your report to the Council of Five, tell them we have gone ahead and ask them to hold men in readiness,’ Scott snapped to the messenger.

He left the room at the double, the others following. They ran along a short passage, clattered down a companionway and branched thence into the corridor along which Crooner had escaped. The trail of broken ponics was easy to follow, and in five minutes they stood beside three armed men, gazing down at the round bolt hole.

‘Whoever enters there first risks getting shot,’ Viann remarked speculatively.

‘Alas that the hole is too small for me to enter at all,’ Carappa said hastily.

‘Open it up, you, and go and see what’s down there,’ Master Scott motioned to one of the men.

‘Er – yes, sir. Can’t we put the lights out along here?’ the man said, rubbing his hands nervously together.

‘We shall see if that will be necessary. Hurry!’

Reluctantly, the man dropped onto hands and knees, pulled up the hatch, and instantly fell onto his face. Nothing happened. He picked himself up sheepishly and dangled one leg into the aperture. It remained attached to his body, and encouraged by an expletive from Scott he lowered himself down. From above, his unkempt head could be seen to bob down and disappear. Then it reappeared, he tilted his face up and called, ‘He’s not here. This is a sort of corridor, about two feet high. Now can I come up?’

At Scott’s signal, the fellow’s companions hauled him roughly out. Unhooking a flat torch from his belt, Scott looked briefly at his companions.

‘Coming?’ he asked, with a crooked smile, and climbed down into the bolt-hole.

This spot was actually a kind of crossroads for two of the inspection walks which were concealed beneath every floor of the ship. Sandwiched here, between deck and deck, were the vessel’s vital parts, the countless miles of wire and cable and pipe and air channel which made life possible. Sealed away, these shallow, essential areas had escaped the spreading menace of the ponics; and so a sort of survival had been possible.

Scrutinising the four low walks stretching away from him, Scott instantly determined the way Crooner had taken: only one walk had its thin layer of dust disturbed by a pattern of hands, knees and feet created by a hurrying man. Dim lights lit each walk. Scott sheathed his torch and started off on all fours, without bothering to wait for the others. Viann followed him, then Brandyholm, then Carappa, who slipped in nimbly enough when he looked like being left behind.

Progress, being on hands and knees, was not rapid; but Scott forged grimly ahead, ignoring the colour codes painted on the various bulky casing which hemmed their route. The scuffled pattern in the dust stretched encouragingly before him. Once, following this trail, they turned through ninety degrees and still proceeded.

‘I never realised before how confoundedly big this ship was,’ grumbled Carappa.

The trail ended at last, in a dead end – at the outer skin of the ship, although they could not realise that. Feeling above his head, Scott located another trap door. This was a more complicated affair than the one by which they had entered the system of subterranean walks, possessing a double, self-closing hatch.

‘Well?’ Scott asked Viann, sliding round to face her. ‘Do we go up?’

‘Wait!’ she gasped. ‘I’m exhausted. No stomach or breath to fight!’

‘You do well for a woman,’ he said harshly, and kissed her shining face in a gesture which held more encouragement than tenderness.

It felt to Brandyholm as if a knife had been twisted in his heart. He was suddenly swamped with jealousy and hatred of this man Scott.

‘Let’s get on with the work!’ he said thickly.

‘Hark, the yokel!’ Viann said amusedly, but slid to one side as Brandyholm wriggled past her. He pushed past Scott and, reaching up his arms, flung back first the lower then the upper hatch. Then he thrust his head up.

They heard him give an inarticulate cry, and then he slithered back among them, gasping. Viann caught his shoulders and held his head in the crook of her arm.

‘Dazers!’ snapped Scott. ‘Come on, or they’ll murder us down here!’

With a bound, he was out of the walk, his weapon thrust before him. He too gave a strangled cry. As they scrambled out to him, they heard his dazer drop from a suddenly limp hand and clang on the metal floor. Then they too saw what he saw, and knew.

The ship’s starboard emergency escape lock was empty but for the four of them. Large enough to house a half-dozen lorries, it was furnished only with escape equipment stored along one wall. Dominating everything, compelling their owed gaze, was the window by the outer door: beyond it, plumbless, eternal, stars tossed into it like pebbles into an immeasurable sack, was space.

They were the first inhabitants of the ship for many generations to look into that mighty void. Together, they sank to their knees and stared. Everything was forgotten but that spectacle.

To one side of the window from where they were, riding majestically in space, was a bright crescent. Upon its surface, although sheathed under a veil of silver, continents and sea were visible. To their unaccustomed eyes, it was a thing of magnificent terror – yet in the terror was a wild gong beat of hope.

For a lifetime of seconds, the four absorbed that panorama together. Viann was the first to recover. She walked slowly over to the window and said, ‘So we have, after all, arrived somewhere!’

Looking at her proud head outlined against the brilliant sweep of that crescent, Brandyholm thought feverishly to himself that both contained a magic he desired: woman and world, for a moment both were the same thing, a joy unattainable, a hope out of reach, symbols merely of all opportunities denied.

‘Our man went out there somewhere,’ the practical Scott said, pointing to the line of Crooner’s footprints which went right up to the outer door. ‘If we want to follow him, we have to go out there too. What say you, Viann?’

‘Why did they not construct more ports in this ship? This is the first to be found, except for the shuttered ports in the control room.’

‘Let’s cope with one problem at a time,’ Scott said testily. ‘Do we or do we not go out after Crooner?’

‘Of course we go out, Master Scott,’ she answered. ‘Who could think of staying with that to lure them?’

Carappa was rummaging in the escape equipment. This emergency lock had been designed to cope with people much like themselves: veritable novices who had never seen a space suit before. Consequently full instructions were given for the precautions to be taken before the outer door was opened. Carappa read everything carefully out.

‘Let me put on a suit and go out first,’ he said shakily. ‘If it’s alright, you can follow. This is the moment foretold in the Teaching: “That this unnatural life may be delivered down to journey’s end. And sanity propagated. And the ship brought home.” It is fitting a priest should go first.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Brandyholm said suddenly. ‘I’ll be by your side, priest. Nobody shall stop me!’

‘Nobody intends to,’ Scott said coolly. ‘I was about to suggest myself that our two most expendable members should lead the way.’

‘May your ego die on you,’ offered Carappa insultingly. ‘Here Tom, help me into this suit. It is heavy for a poor old man.’

Getting the suits properly adjusted was a slow and irritating business. Long before it was over, Brandyholm cursed the false bravado which had made him thrust himself forward. At last, however, they were ready. With a final repetition of his instructions to reconnoitre and then hurry back, Master Scott ushered Viann through the manhole in the deck, retreating after her. The self-sealing double lid closed down over his head. Carappa instantly stomped over to the air valve and activated it according to instructions.

Then he clapped Brandyholm on the back, and his voice over the suit-to-suit R/T crackled with triumph. ‘Well, Tom, boy, we’ve won through. This fellow Scott is a fool! – He’s played right into my hands. Once this outer lock door is open, none of them can reach us – they’ll be killed. Space is lethal! The non-stop voyage is over for us at least.’

‘What about the aliens?’ Brandyholm asked.

‘Faint heart hath never won foul fiend,’ the priest quoted. He waved a dazer before Brandyholm’s eyes. ‘I took the opportunity of removing this from our lady friend’s holster. I can deal with Crooner well enough. Trust me, boy!’

An amber light winked over the outer door; the air was exhausted. Without another word, Carappa depressed the exit switch. A red light flicked on and burnt steadily, and all space lay open before them. With a mounting sense of awe, they moved to the brink of the aperture. They looked out.

The great cylinder of the ship stretched to either side of them, lustreless and solid. Before them, the planet rode mysteriously, its dark side cutting a black semi-circle from the brocade of stars.

From where they stood, the sun was hidden by the flanks of the ship.

Stretching out a gloved hand, Carappa pointed. To their left, the smooth expanse of metal was broken by an ungainly accretion; even to their inexperienced eyes, it was obviously no integral part of the ship. Square and cumbrous, it was attached by metal braces and bore an air of improvisation. A circular port set in its near side emitted light.

‘The aliens must be there,’ Carappa said. A hawser stretching from the lock towards this strange construction reinforced his opinion.

Grasping the hawser, Carappa pulled himself out over the edge of the lock and climbed onto the outside of the ship. He waited patiently until Brandyholm had hauled himself up too. For a moment they stood silent, side by side. The lock door slid to behind them. Then, holding tightly to the hawser, they moved along towards the square outbuilding.

‘Stop!’ Brandyholm gasped. He stood, slumped in his suit, while the universe wheeled about him. He wondered crazily what it would sound like to Carappa if he were sick in his suit. Then the moment of dizziness passed, and they moved on again.

They stood at last among the stanchions of the outbuilding, which towered some fourteen feet over their heads. The simplicity of the structure was now apparent: it consisted simply of a room from which an air lock protruded like a porch. Peering cautiously through the small window, Brandyholm saw that the room was mainly occupied with a variety of equipment, although it obviously served too as an at least temporary living quarter, for in a hammock stretched across one corner lay Crooner. He was alone.

Obeying Brandyholm’s gesture, Carappa also looked in.

‘How do we get in without disturbing him? It’s hopeless,’ Brandyholm said.

‘The human predicament apart,’ said the priest decisively, ‘Nothing is hopeless. Obviously, we must use guile. It is against my principles, but we must use guile. We must get in under pretence of friendship; once we’re in, he’s ours. Leave it to me.’

With that, he hammered on the thick glass before him. Crooner looked up, and climbed slowly out of his hammock; he still wore his heavy space suit, although he had removed his helmet. Carappa made frantic and unmistakeable signs towards the airlock. Crooner nodded.

‘Gullible fool!’ the priest exclaimed with relish.




VI


They were in the air lock when Crooner’s voice, from a speaker overhead, said, ‘What on earth are you two doing outside the ship?’

‘We managed to escape just after you did.’

‘How did you find your way here?’

‘We’ll give you the details when we get inside,’ Carappa retorted, holding the stolen dazer ready and winking at Brandyholm.

Air sighed in about them, double doors began slowly to open, Carappa moved forward, and a steel bar descended sharply onto the barrel of the dazer, sending it flying from Carappa’s grasp. Then Crooner appeared from behind the lock doors, the bar in one hand, and in the other a sharp and dangerous looking weapon they did not recognise; it pointed without waver at the priest’s heart.

‘Come out,’ Crooner said grimly, his face as lined and motionless as a tree trunk. ‘There’s no room for a scuffle in here. If I so much as suspect you of being about to rush me, I shall shoot you dead with this revolver.’

‘Bob, Bob,’ Carappa said, trying to force a note of reproach into his voice, ‘Why turn on your old friends like this? We mean you no harm. As a priest I’m bound to say – ’

‘Say nothing, Carappa. From your point of view it is unfortunate that these ship’s suit radios were so devised that unwary novices could not shut themselves off from contact with each other – they’re always at Transmit. In other words, I’ve heard every word you both said since you put the suits on. You always talked too much, Carappa, it’s a sort of poetic justice.’

‘Justice!’ Carappa growled, ‘I loathe its very name. Shoot me if you must, but don’t babble of justice!’

These words came indistinctly to Brandyholm. Uncertainty, danger and fear were having a cumulative effect on him. A kind of palsy took him, and without warning he collapsed. Crooner let him fall.

When Brandyholm’s brain cleared and he opened his eyes again, he was lying prone on the floor. Crooner stood over him. He could see enough of Carappa to observe that the big priest now had his hands lashed firmly behind his back. The two were talking, and did not notice Brandyholm’s recovery.

‘I don’t understand,’ the priest was saying – words rarely heard on his lips – ‘You are not an alien or you are? Which?’

‘The term “alien” is subjective,’ Crooner said patiently. ‘As I say, I am from Earth, just as your ancestors were, generations ago. Earth is only a couple of thousand miles away – you saw it outside, a gleaming crescent.’

‘Then the ship got back after all?’

‘The ship got back after all. Yes. It was watched for and sighted long before it reached the skirts of the solar system. When it radiated answers to Earth’s signals, a fast pilot was sent out with a boarding party. The party found the ship’s controls partially ruined, but managed to pull it into an orbit round Earth. That was three of your generations ago. They then completely destroyed the controls – you say you saw their wreckage – and left the ship.’

‘But why, why – ’ Carappa sounded as if he were choking, ‘ – what form of warped cruelty made you leave us there? You could see how things were – all out of hand, death stalking us, the ponic tangle threatening to overwhelm us …’

His voice died. He saw too vividly the heroism of that terrible flight across the light years and back. The survivors, if only for the sake of the generations who had died, should have been saved and honoured.

‘Why were we left?’ Carappa asked brokenly.

‘There was a reason,’ Crooner said. His voice, suddenly full of compassion, became lost on Brandyholm for a moment. Brandyholm’s eye, when he turned his head only slightly on the hard floor, rested on an object he could not at first identify. With a shock, he realised it was the priest’s dazer, about a foot from his face. When Crooner knocked it flying, it had wedged between two cased pieces of equipment and he had not bothered to retrieve it. Brandyholm had only to lift his hand to grasp it.

‘… Procyon V was the only possible planet,’ Crooner was saying. ‘And surface gravity there was one and a half Gs. So there was not as much trouble as had been feared to get volunteers to start the home run. As I’ve said, the outer journey nearly ended in famine and asphyxiation. But they took off again with a stock of new carbohydrates and amino acids. That was where the trouble began. And it began almost at once, as far as we can tell.

‘Giantism began in the hydroponic tanks. It spread rapidly. A virus-borne infection swept through the crew like wild fire. Few died, but almost all were prostrated for weeks. When they recovered strength, the ship was rapidly becoming as you know it – bulging from stem to stern with the giant hydroponics, ponics as you call them.

‘You might almost suspect them of possessing intelligence, so rapidly did they adapt. Low gravity had suddenly given them a tremendous fillip. They destroyed everything, they created their own humus, partly by a rapid fruition cycle, partly by an almost symbiotic use of tiny insects, whose bodies paved the way for further growth.

‘The people of the ship lived in isolated groups among this entanglement. And they too changed. Some of the domestic animals – the ship’s piggery for instance – escaped the tangle and became wild. Others died. Soon almost the only source of food was the ponics themselves. And then men, too, began to speed up. Their life expectation eventually became not eighty years, but twenty.’

‘You mean – you live four times as long as we in the ship?’ said Carappa.

‘It is so. Which is why I always appeared slow to you. Which is why, too, one sleep-wake in four was dim. You see – ’

‘Yes, I see,’ Carappa said. ‘The daily six-hour dim-down of lighting,’ he quoted. ‘Six hours has become a whole day to us! We thought we were human beings, and we’re not. We’re – monsters, pigmies, things out of order, mechanical toys which flail their arms and legs too fast …’

He broke off, subsiding into mountainous sobs which were more impressive than his spoken outburst. Unable to raise his hands to his face, he sat shaking with internal strife while the tears burst down his crumpled countenance.

The sight roused Brandyholm to action. With one continuous, flowing movement, he seized the dazer and was on his feet. Fast as he was, Crooner could have shot him before he was on his knees: but a fatal hesitancy delayed the Earthman, a sense of compunction the others would neither have understood nor appreciated, and next moment he dropped the gun and nursed his paralysed arm to his side.

Brandyholm blew on his warm dazer triumphantly; he felt better again, more a man. The effect of the action on Carappa, too, was swift. His tears dried and he was again in command.

‘Expansion to your ego, Tom,’ he shouted. ‘I didn’t guess you had it in you! Come and undo me quickly, and we’ll settle for this fellow.’

When he was free, he grunted in satisfaction and lumbered over to Crooner, who leant, deathly white, against a radio panel.

Seizing him by the armpits, and propping him roughly up until his head rattled against the metal, Carappa said, ‘Now, Crooner, we want some information from you before Tom and I leave for Earth. You must instruct us how to get there. But first I want to know what you were doing on the ship at all.’

‘You can’t get back to Earth, Carappa,’ Crooner said. Then, as the priest’s grip tightened, he said hurriedly, ‘I’m an anthropologist. Although you are human, you people have become – owing to your environment – a completely separate race. It is doubtful if you could even inter-marry with Earthmen. When the ship first returned, it was decided you were all unfit to leave your environment: you would have died. You had already adapted to the ship’s nightmare conditions. It was decided we should not interfere with you, that your journey should continue non-stop until further speeding up and degeneration in the metabolism of your descendants brought the inevitable end.’

‘And you?’ growled Carappa.

‘I was sent as an anthropologist, to live among and observe what is, to us, a strange race. It’s a three year stretch – tough, but engrossing and – well paid. I am not the first, nor the only anthropologist. We have to undergo long training; then we are slipped in the emergency hatch, and find our way through the ponics either to Quarters or Forwards, or one of the other tribes. But they have some good brains in Forwards. The Council of Five caught one or two of my earlier colleagues, and although they gave as little as possible away, suspicions are aroused, as you know. I was lucky to get away as I have.’

‘That luck may not last,’ Carappa said threateningly. ‘You have to get Tom and me safely to Earth before you can be sure you have survived.’

Still gripping his right elbow, Crooner straightened himself.

‘That’s not in my hands,’ he said. ‘Directly I got here, I radioed to Satellite One, told them of my plight and asked them to pick me up. A rocket’s on its way over now, to take me down Earthside. My spell of field work was nearly over anyway – by Jove, won’t civilisation be good, to say nothing of a decent drink! But whether or not you come down with me is not for me to say; the boys on the rocket’ll decide that.’

‘I can shoot ’em all!’ Brandyholm snapped suddenly. He waved the gun demonstratively.

Crooner just laughed. ‘I suppose you might be able to, little man. And what good would that do you?’

There was silence, accompanied by some lip chewing from the priest.

‘The rocket’ll be here in about twenty minutes,’ Crooner announced casually. He looked more confident now.

‘It does seem rather a deadlock, Carappa,’ Brandyholm said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we went back into the ship?’

Carappa ignored the suggestion, and said smoothly to Crooner, ‘It seems, Bob, as if we shall need your help after all. As you realise, we intend you no harm, otherwise we should have shot you like a pig long before this. And don’t forget how Tom here saved your life when Wantage went beserk in the tangle.’

‘It’s useless whining at me,’ Crooner said. ‘I’m not your judge. I told you, it’s all up to the boys on the rocket.’

‘Now don’t get me wrong, Bob. Why are we not free – why is not everyone on shipboard free – to return to Earth?’

Crooner paused. ‘Do you really want an answer?’ he asked.

‘What is the answer?’

‘It’s the answer to everything, as far as you are concerned,’ Crooner said sadly. ‘You are valuable to Earth for only one reason: you are an insane society. For that we study you, and by that study learn to control ourselves. Fortunately, you are too isolated up here to be a menace; but if you were an Earthbound tribe, you would have to be exterminated to the last babe among you. You are all dangerously mad.’

He let the words sink in, and then said, ‘When the ponics overwhelmed the ship, a few men saw the terrible dangers of a return to primitivism. Madness, fighting, even cannibalism were rampant; the controls were wrecked. That’s when the Teaching was formulated. Unfortunately it was based, not on any long-tried religious creed, but on some half-truth of a psychological theory which happened to be current at that time. It became diverted and perverted in the hands of so-called priests like yourself, until the ship was full of maniacs whose avowed object in life was to humiliate their associates. You’re death-obsessed. That’s why you aren’t fit to walk on Earth! You’re tainted, mephitic, contagious! Earth’s too lovely for you! You’re only fit to live in a coffin like this ship! Nothing’s too foul – Ahhh!’

Reeling away from Carappa’s blow, he brought his good hand up to his mouth, covering it as if to hide the pain. He shook his head and squeezed his eyes, groaning.

‘Quickly, Tom,’ Carappa said. ‘There’s no time to lose. If that’s how things stand, we’ve no hope but to warn the others in the ship – Master Scott and the Council of Five. This fellow comes back with us.’

‘No!’ Crooner cried. ‘Shoot me, do anything, but don’t take me back in there!’

Carappa paused, his eyes widening. Slowly over his face a crafty smile dawned. He had struck accidentally on Crooner’s weak spot.

‘A bargain then, Crooner,’ he said gently. ‘You come back to face the Council of Five with us now – or else you guarantee to get us two to earth, as patients, or subjects for further study, or whatever excuse you wish. Well? Choose quickly.’

‘Let’s get him back to the ship,’ Brandyholm urged.

Crooner looked from one to another of them like a man peering at wild animals. The blood from his mouth had been brushed over his jaw, giving him a dirty, beaten look. He licked his lips with a dry tongue.

‘I daresay I could get you down,’ he said.

‘That’s more like it!’ Carappa said. ‘Now we’ll forget all differences between us, Crooner – but remember I shall have this gun trained on you.’

‘If you don’t mind,’ Brandyholm said, ‘I’d rather return to the ship, Carappa. I think Earth’s going to be too big for me.’

‘Oh no you don’t,’ Carappa said. ‘We’ve been together in this all along, Tom; I won’t let you desert me now. You’re coming too.’

‘I couldn’t face it,’ Brandyholm pleaded. ‘Please let me go. I’m a different kind from you – I belong to the ship.’

As he watched, Carappa’s face hardened dangerously. The priest’s fist doubled and came slowly up. His lips gradually thrust out, as if in relish at the weakness in Brandyholm’s features. Then he shrugged, and said in a flat voice, ‘Get out, then.’ He turned his broad back in contempt.

That there should be no trust between men was an integral part of the Teaching. It seemed a miracle to Brandyholm to be standing again in the peppered night of space: he had momentarily expected a bullet in the back from the priest’s gun.

He squared his shoulders inside the space suit and began to walk slowly back to the escape lock in the giant hull. His feeble bluff had succeeded; liars like Carappa can easily be taken in by lies. Without a doubt Crooner would trick the priest sooner or later, whereas he, Tom Brandyholm, had escaped by returning; he had the power that lay in knowledge. His was the victory.

He came to the lock. Remembering Carappa could hear over the suit-to-suit, he said, ‘Good-bye, priest. I’m just going back into the rat run. Only it’s going to be a different rat run from now on. The Council of Five is going to be a Council of Six. Or if I don’t like their manners, it may just be a Council of One. You thought I was weak, but I’m not. I’m going to show ’em all.’

He clung to a hand-grip to steady himself. Ambition seemed suddenly to consume his very bones.

‘And remember Master Scott, Carappa?’ he continued. ‘He’ll be the first to go to the wall. And that girl Viann – ’ as he spoke her name, she seemed at that instant to be the reason for his return ‘– Viann might well be all that Gwenny never could be.’

The priest flung back an obscene answer which Brandyholm scarcely heeded. He activated the lock. Slowly the panel slid back. The ship! It always had been his world and always would: its confinement, its jungles, its foetid corridors, its taboos and terrors; but now he would be more than a mere hunter – he would be a ruler. Eagerly, he stepped inside.

A dozen figures awaited him. He drew up in amazement. Although they all wore suits and helmets, he recognised Viann at once. And another face that he knew was Master Scott’s. Master Scott, as did many of the others, held a weapon levelled at Brandyholm’s heart.

‘Yes, we’ve been listening carefully over the suit radios,’ Master Scott said. ‘You came back inopportunely, didn’t you?’

‘Uh – uh,’ Brandyholm began, but no words came. His last bolt had been shot. Now the journey was over. The pressures in his brain burst out against their artificial dam, flooding and breaking their neural paths. He tried to summon rage to his aid, to help and strengthen him, but it would not come. He reeled blindly in the semi-dark.

‘We were waiting quietly here to rush the relief rocket when it arrives,’ Scott said levelly. ‘And then in you come, with your big ideas. Well, I think there’s still time to finish you.’

He turned to look at Viann, who had rested a hand on his suit. She shook her head.

‘Leave him,’ she said. ‘He’s harmless now.’

Indeed, Brandyholm had slumped to his knees, almost in an attitude of prayer. The great stars beyond him were suddenly blotted out by the dark, arriving shape of the relief rocket.




Psyclops (#ulink_3f9820a9-8b10-548e-8885-45c2b27f9794)


Mmm I.

First statement: I am I. I am everything. Everything, everywhere.

The universe is constructed of me, I am the whole of it. Am I? What is that throbbing that is not of me? That must be me too; after a while I shall understand it. All now is dim. Dim mmmm.

Even I am dim. In all this great strangeness and darkness of me, in all this universe of me, I am shadow. A memory of me. Could I be a memory of … not – me? Paradox: if I am everything, could there be a not-me?

Why am I having thoughts? Why am I not, as I was before, just mmmm?

Wake up! It’s urgent!

No! Deny it! I am the universe. If you can speak to me you must be me, so I command you to be still. There must be only the soothing mmmm.

… you are not the universe! Listen!

Louder?

Can you hear at last?

Non-comprehension. I must be everything. Can there be a part of me, like the throbbing, which is … separate?

Am I getting through? Answer!

Who … are you?

Do not be frightened.

Are you another … universe?

I am not a universe. You are not a universe. You are in danger and I must help you.

Mmmm. Must be mmmm …

… If only there were a psychofoetalist within light-years of here … Well, keep trying. Wake up! You must wake up to survive!

Who are you?

I am your father.

Non-comprehension. Are you the throbbing which is not me?

No. I am a long way from you. Light-years away.

You bring me feelings of … pain.

Don’t be afraid of it, but know there is much pain all about you. I am in constant pain.

Interest.

Good! First things first. You are most important.

I know that. All this is not happening. Somehow I catch these echoes, these dreams.

Try to concentrate. You are only one of millions like you. You and I are of the same species: human beings. I am born, you are unborn.

Meaningless.

Listen! Your ‘universe’ is inside another human being. Soon you will emerge into the real universe.

Still meaningless. Curious.

Keep alert. I will send you pictures to help you understand …

Uh …? Distance? Sight? Colour? Form? Definitely do not like this. Frightened. Frightened of falling, insecure … Must immediately retreat to safe mmmm. Mmmm.

Better let him rest! After all, he’s only six months; at the Pre-natal Academies they don’t begin rousing and education till seven and a half months. And then they’re trained to the job. If only I knew – my leg, you blue swine!

That picture …

Well done! I’m really sorry to rouse you so early, but it’s vital.

Praise for me, warm feelings. Good. Better than being alone in the universe.

That’s a great step forward, son. I can almost realise how the Creator felt, when you say that.

Non-comprehension.

Sorry, my fault; let the thought slip by. Must be careful. You were going to ask me about the picture I sent you. Shall I send again?

Only a little at once. Curious. Shape, colour, beauty. Is that the real universe?

That was just Earth I showed you, where I was born, where I hope you will be born.

Non-comprehension. Show again … shapes, tones, scents … Ah, this time not so strange. Different?

Yes, a different picture. Many pictures of Earth. Look.

Ah … Better than my darkness … I know only my darkness, sweet and warm, yet I seem to remember those – trees.

That’s a race memory, son. Your faculties are beginning to work, now.

More beautiful pictures please.

We cannot waste too long on the pictures. I’ve got a lot to tell you before you get out of range. These blue devils –

Why do you cease sending so abruptly? Hello? … Nothing. Father? … Nothing. Was there ever anything, or have I been alone and dreaming?

Nothing in all my universe but the throbbing. Is someone here with me? No, no answer. I must ask the voice, if the voice comes back. Now I must mmmm. Am no longer content as I was before. Strange feelings. … I want more pictures; I want … to …

Mmmm.

Dreaming myself to be a fish, fin-tailed, flickering through deep, still water. All is green and warm and without menace, and I swim forever with assurance … And then the water splits into lashing cords and plunges down, down, down a sunlit cliff. I fight to turn back, carried forward, fighting to return to the deep, sure dark –

– if you want to save yourself! Wake if you want to save yourself! I can’t hold out much longer. Another few days across these mountains –

Go away! Leave me to myself. I can have nothing to do with you.

You must try and understand! I know it’s agony for you, but you must stir yourself and take in what I say. It is imperative.

Nothing is imperative here. And now my mind seems to clear. Yes! I exist in the darkness where formerly there was nothing. Yes, there are imperatives; that I can recognise. Father?

What are you trying to say?

Confused. Understanding better, trying harder, but so confused.

Do not worry about that. It is your twin sister. The Pollux II hospital diagnosed twins, one boy and one girl.

So many concepts I cannot grasp. I should despair but for curiosity prodding me on. I’m one of a pair?

There you have it. That is a little girl lying next to you: you can hear her heart beating. Your mother –

Stop, Stop! Too much to understand at once. Must think to myself about this.

Keep calm. There is something you must do for me – for us all. If you do that, there is no danger.

Tell me quickly.

As yet it is too difficult. In a few days you will be ready – if I can hang on that long.

Why is it difficult?

Only because you are small.

Where are you?

I am on a world like Earth which is ninety light-years from Earth and getting farther from you even as we communicate together.

Why? How? Don’t understand. So much is now beyond my understanding; before you came everything was peaceful and dim.

Lie quiet and don’t fret, son. You’re doing well; you take the points quickly, you’ll reach Earth yet. You are travelling toward Earth in a spaceship which left Mirone, planet where I am, sixteen days ago.

Send that picture of a spaceship again.

Coming up …

It is a kind of enclosure for us all. That idea I can more or less grasp, but you don’t explain distances to me satisfactorily.

These are big distances, what we call light-years. I can’t explain them for you properly because a human mind ever really grasps them.

Then they don’t exist.

Unfortunately they exist all right. But they are only comprehensible as mathematical concepts. OHHH! My leg …

Why are you stopping? I remember you suddenly stopped before. You send a horrible pain thought, then you are gone. Answer.

Wait a minute.

I can hardly hear you. Now I am interested, why do you not continue? Are you there?

… this is all beyond me. We’re all finished. Judy, my love, if only I could reach you …

Who are you talking to? This is frustrating. You are so faint and your message so blurred.

Call you when I can …

Fear and pain. Only symbols from his mind to mine, yet they have an uncomfortable meaning of their own – something elusive. Perhaps another race memory.

My own memory is not good. Unused. I must train it. Something he said eludes me; I must try and remember it. Yet why should I bother? None of it really concerns me, I am safe here, safe forever in this darkness. This whole thing is imagination. I am talking to myself. Wait! I can feel projections coming back again. Do not trouble to listen. Curious.

… gangrene, without doubt. Shall be dead before these blue devils get me to their village. So much Judy and I planned to do …

Are you listening, son?

No, no.

Listen carefully while I give you instructions.

Have something to ask you.

Please save it. The connection between us is growing attenuated; soon we will be out of mind range.

Indifferent.

My dear child, how could you be other than indifferent! I am truly sorry to have broken so early into your foetal sleep.

An unnamable sensation, half-pleasant; gratitude, love? No doubt a race memory.

It may be so. Try to remember me – later. Now, business. Your mother and I were on our way back to Earth when we stopped on this world Mirone, where I now am. It was an unnecessary luxury to break our journey. How bitterly now I wish we had never stopped.

Why did you?

Well, it was chiefly to please Judy – your mother. This is a beautiful world, around the North Pole, anyhow. We had wandered some way from the ship when a group of natives burst out upon us.

Natives?

People who live here. They are sub-human, blue-skinned and hairless – not pretty to look at.

Picture!

I think you’d be better without one. Judy and I ran for the ship. We were nearly up to it when a rock caught me behind the knee – they were pitching rocks at us – and I went down. Judy never noticed until she was in the airlock, and then the savages were on me. My leg was hurt; I couldn’t even put up a fight.

Please tell me no more of this. I want mmmm.

Listen, son! That’s all the frightening part. The savages are taking me over the mountains to their village. I don’t think they mean to harm me; I’m just a … curiosity to them.

Please let me mmmm.

You can go comatose as soon as I’ve explained how these little spacecraft work. Astrogating, the business of getting from one planet to another, is far too intricate a task for anyone but an expert to master. I’m not an expert; I’m a geohistorian. So the whole thing is done by a robot pilot. You feed it details like payload, gravities and destination, and it juggles them with the data in its memory banks and works out all the course for you – carries you home safely, in fact. Do you get all that?

This sounds complicated.

Now you’re talking like your mother, boy. She’s never bothered, but actually it’s all simple; the complications take place under the steel panelling where you don’t worry about them. The point I’m trying to make is that steering is all automatic once you’ve punched in a few co-ordinates.

I’m tired.

So am I. Fortunately, before we left the ship that last time, I had set up the figures for Earth. OK?

If you had not, she would not have been able to get home?

Exactly it. Keep trying! She left Mirone safely and you are now heading for Earth – but you’ll never make it. When I set the figures up, they were right; but my not being aboard made them wrong. Every split second of thrust the ship makes is calculated for an extra weight that isn’t there. It’s here with me, being hauled along a mountain.

Is this bad? Does it mean we reach Earth too fast?

No, son. IT MEANS YOU’LL NEVER REACH EARTH AT ALL. The ship moves in a hyperbola, and although my weight is only about one eight-thousandth of total ship’s mass, that tiny fraction of error will have multiplied itself into a couple of light-years by the time you get adjacent to the solar system.

I’m trying, but this talk of distance means nothing to me. Explain it again.

Where you are there is neither light nor space; how do I make you feel what a light-year is? No, you’ll just have to take it from me that the crucial point is, you’ll shoot right past the Earth.

Can’t we go on?

You will – if nothing is done about it. But landfall will be delayed some thousands of years.

You are growing fainter. Strain too much. Must mmmm

The fish again, and the water. No peace in the pool now. Cool pool, cruel pool, pool … The waters whirl toward the brink.

I am the fish-foetus. Have I dreamed? Was there a voice talking to me? It seems unlikely. Something I had to ask it, one gigantic fact which made nonsense of everything; something – cannot remember.

Perhaps there was no voice. Perhaps in this darkness I have taken a wrong choice between sanity and non-sanity.

… thank heavens for hot spring water …

Hello! Father?

How long will they let me lie here in this pool? They must realize I’m not long for this world, or any other.

I’m awake and answering!

Just let me lie here. Son, it’s man’s first pleasure and his last to lie and swill in hot water. Wish I could live to know you … However. Here’s what you have to do.

Am powerless here. Unable to do anything.

Don’t get frightened. There’s something you already do very expertly – telemit.

Non-comprehension.

We talk to each other over this growing distance by what is called telepathy. It’s part gift, part skill. It happens to be the only contact between distant planets, except spaceships. But whereas spaceships take time to get anywhere, thought is instantaneous.

Understood.

Good. Unfortunately, whereas spaceships get anywhere in time, thought has a definite limited range. Its span is as strictly governed as – well, as the size of a plant, for instance. When you are fifty light-years from Mirone, contact between us will abruptly cease.

How far apart are we now?

At the most we have forty-eight hours more in contact.

Don’t leave me. I shall be lonely!

I’ll be lonely too – but not for long. But you, son, you are already halfway to Earth, or as near as I can estimate it you are. As soon as contact between us ceases, you must call TRE.

Which means?

Telepath Radial Earth. It’s a general control and information centre, permanently beamed for any sort of emergency. You can raise them. I can’t.

They won’t know me.

I’ll give you their call pattern. They’ll soon know you when you telemit. You can give them my pattern for identification if you like. You must explain what is happening.

Will they believe?

Of course.

Are they real?

Of course. Tell TRE what the trouble is; they’ll send out a fast ship to pick Judy and you up before you are out of range.

I want to ask you –

Wait a minute, son … You’re getting faint … Can you smell the gangrene over all those light-years? … These blue horrors are lifting me out of the spring, and I’ll probably pass out. Not much time …

Pain. Pain and silence. All like a dream.

… distance …

Father! Louder!

… too feeble … Done all I could …

Why did you rouse me and not communicate with my mother?

The village! We’re nearly there. Just down the valley and then it’s journey’s end … Human race only developing telepathic powers gradually … Steady, you fellows!

The question, answer the question.

That is the answer. Easy down the slope, boys, don’t burst this big leg, eh? Ah … I have telepathic ability but Judy hasn’t; I couldn’t call her a yard away. But you have the ability … Easy there! All the matter in the universe is in my leg …

You sound so muddled. Has my sister this power?

Good old Mendelian theory … You and your sister, one sensitive, one not. Two eyes of the giant and only one can see properly … the path’s too steep to – whoa, Cyclops, steady, boy, or you’ll put out that other eye.

Cannot understand!

Understand? My leg’s a flaming torch – Steady, steady! Gently down the steep blue hill.

Father!

What’s the matter?

I can’t understand. Are you talking of real things?

Sorry, boy. Steady now. Touch of delirium; it’s the pain. You’ll be OK if you get in contact with TRE. Remember?

Yes, I remember. If only I could … I don’t know. Mother is real then?

Yes. You must look after her.

And is the giant real?

The giant? What giant? You mean the giant hill. The people are climbing up the giant hill. Up to my giant leg. Goodbye, son. I’ve got to see a blue man about a … a leg …

Father! Wait, wait, look, see, I can move. I’ve just discovered I can turn. Father!

No answer now. Just a stream of silence. I have got to call TRE.

Plenty of time. Perhaps if I turn first … Easy. I’m only six months, he said. Maybe I could call more easily if I was outside, in the real universe. If I turn again.

Now if I kick …

Ah, easy now. Kick again. Good. Wonder if my legs are blue.

Kick.

Something yielding.

Kick …




T (#ulink_18b65875-02ad-51bb-9e11-4809e94b15d2)


By the time T was ten years old, his machine was already on the fringes of that galaxy. T was not his name – the laboratory never considered christening him – but it was the symbol on the hull of his machine and it will suffice for a name. And again, it was not his machine; rather, he belonged to it. He could not claim the honourable role of pilot, nor even the humbler one of passenger; he was a chattel whose seconds of utility lay two hundred years ahead.

He lay like a maggot in the heart of an apple at the centre of the machine, as it fled through space and time. He never moved; the impulse to move did not present itself to him, nor would he have been able to obey if it had. For one thing, T had been created legless – his single limb was an arm. For another, the machine hemmed him in on all sides. It nourished him by means of pipes which fed into his body a thin stream of vitamins and proteins. It circulated his blood by a tiny motor that throbbed in the starboard bulkhead like a heart. It removed his waste products by a steady siphoning process. It produced his supply of oxygen. It regulated T so that he neither grew nor wasted. It saw that he would be alive in two hundred years.

T had one reciprocal duty. His ears were filled perpetually with an even droning note and before his lidless eyes there was a screen on which a dull red band travelled forever down a fixed green line. The drone represented (although not to T) a direction through space, while the red band indicated (although not to T) a direction in time. Occasionally, perhaps only once a decade, the drone changed pitch or the band faltered from its green line. These variations registered in T’s consciousness as acute discomforts, and accordingly he would adjust one of the two small wheels by his hand, until conditions returned to normal and the even tenor of monotony was resumed.

Although T was aware of his own life, loneliness was one of the innumerable concepts that his creators arranged he should never sense. He lay passive, in an artificial contentment. His time was divided not by night or day, or waking or sleeping, or by feeding periods, but by silence or speaking. Part of the machine spoke to him at intervals, short monologues on duty and reward, instructions as to the working of a simple apparatus that would be required two centuries ahead. The speaker presented T with a carefully distorted picture of his environs. It made no reference to the inter-galactic night outside, nor to the fast backward seepage of time. The idea of motion was not a factor to trouble an entombed thing like T. But it did refer to the Koax in reverent terms, speaking also – but in words filled with loathing – of that inevitable enemy of the Koax, Man. The machine informed T that he would be responsible for the complete destruction of Man.

T was utterly alone, but the machine which carried him had company on its flight. Eleven other identical machines – each occupied by beings similar to T – bore through the continuum. This continuum was empty and lightless and stood in the same relationship to the universe as a fold in a silk dress stands to the dress: when the sides of the fold touch, a funnel is formed by the surface of the material inside the surface of the dress. Or you may liken it to the negativity of the square root of minus two, which has a positive value. It was a vacuum inside a vacuum. The machines were undetectable, piercing the dark like light itself and sinking through the hovering millennia like stones.

The twelve machines were built for an emergency by a nonhuman race so ancient that they had abandoned the construction of other machinery eons before. They had progressed beyond the need of material assistance – beyond the need of corporal bodies – beyond the need at least of planets with which to associate their tenuous egos. They had come finally, in their splendid maturity, to call themselves only by the name of their galaxy, Koax. In that safe island of several million stars they moved and had their being, and brooded over the coming end of the universe. But while they brooded, another race, in a galaxy far beyond the meaning of distance, grew to seniority. The new race, unlike the Koax, was extrovert and warlike; it tumbled out among the stars like an explosion, and its name was Man. There came a time when this race, spreading from one infinitesimal body, had multiplied and filled its own galaxy. For a while it paused, as if to catch its breath – the jump between stars is nothing to the gulf between the great star cities – and then the time/space equations were formulated; Man strode to the nearest galaxy armed with the greatest of all weapons, Stasis. The temporal mass/energy relationship that regulates the functioning of the universe, they found, might be upset in certain of the more sparsely starred galaxies by impeding their orbital revolution, causing, virtually, a fixation of the temporal factor – Stasis – whereby everything affected ceases to continue along the universal time-flow and ceases thereupon to exist. But Man had no need to use this devastating weapon, for as on its by-product, the Stasis drive, he swept from one galaxy to another, he found no rival, nor any ally. He seemed destined to be sole occupant of the universe. The innumerable planets revealed only that life was an accident. And then the Koax were reached.

The Koax were aware of Man before he knew of their existence, and their immaterial substance cringed to think that soon it would be torn through by the thundering drives of the Supreme Fleet. They acted quickly. Materializing onto a black dwarf, a group of their finest minds prepared to combat the invader with every power possible. They had some useful abilities, of which being able to alter and decide the course of suns was not the least. And so nova after nova flared into the middle of the Supreme Fleet. But Man came invincibly on, driving into the Koax like a cataclysm. From a small, frightened tribe a few hundred strong, roaming a hostile earth, he had swelled into an unquenchable multitude, ruling the stars. But as the Koax wiped out more and more ships, it was decided that their home must be eliminated by Stasis, and ponderous preparations were begun. The forces of Man gathered themselves for a massive final blow.

Unfortunately, a Fleet Library Ship was captured intact by the Koax, and from it something of the long, tangled history of Man was discovered. There was even a plan of the Solar System as it had been when Man first knew it. The Koax heard for the first time of Sol and its attendants. Sol at this time, far across the universe, was a faintly radiating smudge with a diameter twice the size of the planetary system that had long ago girdled it. One by one, as it had expanded into old age, the planets had been swallowed into its bulk; now even Pluto was gone to feed the dying fires. The Koax finally developed a plan that would rid them entirely of their foes. Since they were unable to cope in the present with the inexhaustible resources of Man, they evolved in their devious fashion a method of dealing with him in the far past, when he wasn’t even there. They built a dozen machines that would slip through time and space and annihilate Earth before Man appeared upon it; the missiles would strike, it was determined, during the Silurian Age and reduce the planet to its component atoms. So T was born.

‘We will have them,’ one of the greatest Koax announced in triumph when the matter was thrashed out. ‘Unless these ancient Earth records lie, and there is no reason why they should, Sol originally supported nine planets, before its degenerate stage set in. Working inwards, in the logical order, these were – I have the names here, thanks to Man’s sentimentality – Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury. Earth, you see, is the seventh planet in, or the third that was drawn into Sol in its decline. That is our target, gentlemen, a speck remote in time and space. See that your calculations are accurate – that seventh planet must be destroyed.’

There was no error. The seventh planet was destroyed. Man never had any chance of detecting and blasting T and his eleven dark companions, for he had never discovered the mingled continuum in which they travelled. Their faint possibility of interception varied inversely with the distance they covered, for as they neared Man’s first galaxy, time was rolled back to when he had first spiralled tentatively up to the Milky Way. The machines bore in and back. It was growing early. The Koax by now was a young race without the secret of deep space travel, dwindling away across the other side of the universe. Man himself had only a few old-type fluid fuel ships patrolling half a hundred systems. T still lay in his fixed position, waiting. His two centuries of existence – the long wait – were almost ended. Somewhere in his cold brain was a knowledge that the climax lay close now. Not all of his few companions were as fortunate, for the machines, perfect when they set out, developed flaws over the long journey (the two hundred years represented a distance in space/time of some ninety-five hundred million light-years). The Koax were natural mathematical philosophers, but they had long ago given up as mechanics – otherwise they would have devised relay systems to manage the job that T had to do.

The nutrition feed in one machine slowly developed an increasing rate of supply, and the being died not so much from overeating as from growing pains – which were very painful indeed as he swelled against a steel bulkhead and finally sealed off the air vents with his own bulging flesh. In another machine, a valve blew, shorting the temporal drive; it broke through into real space and buried itself in an M-type variable sun. In a third, the guide system came adrift and the missile hurtled on at an increasing acceleration until it burned itself out and fried its occupant. In a fourth, the occupant went quietly and unpredictably mad, and pulled a little lever that was not then due to be pulled for another hundred years. His machine erupted into fiery, radioactive particles and destroyed two other machines as well.

When the Solar System was only a few light-years away, the remaining machines switched off their main drive and appeared in normal space/time. Only three of them had completed the journey, T and two others. They found themselves in a galaxy now devoid of life. Only the great stars shone on their new planets, fresh, comparatively speaking, from the womb of creation. Man had long before sunk back into the primeval mud, and the suns and planets were nameless again. Over Earth, the mists of the early Silurian Age hovered, and in the shallows of its waters molluscs and trilobites were the only expression of life. Meanwhile T concentrated on the seventh planet. He had performed the few simple movements necessary to switch his machine back into the normal universe; now all that was left for him to do was to watch a small pressure dial. When the machine entered the atmospheric fringes of the seventh planet, the tiny hand on the pressure dial would begin to climb. When it reached a clearly indicated line on the dial, T would turn a small wheel (this would release the dampers – but T needed to know the How, not the Why). Then two more gauges would begin to register. When they both read the same, T had to pull down the little lever. The speaker had explained it all to him regularly. What it did not explain was what happened after; but T knew very well that then Man would be destroyed, and that that would be good.

The seventh planet swung into position ahead of the blunt bows of T’s machine, and grew in apparent magnitude. It was a young world, with a future that was about to be wiped forever off the slate of probability. As T entered its atmosphere, the hand began to climb the pressure dial. For the first time in his existence, something like excitement stirred in the fluid of T’s brain. He neither saw nor cared for the panorama spreading below him, for the machine had not been constructed with ports. The dim instrument dials were all his eyes had ever rested on. He behaved exactly as the Koax had intended. When the hand reached the top, he turned the damper wheel, and his other two gauges started to creep. By now he was plunging down through the stratosphere of the seventh planet. The load was planned to explode before impact, for as the Koax had no details about the planet’s composition they had made certain that it went off before the machine struck and T was killed. The safety factor had been well devised. T pulled his last little lever twenty miles up. In the holocaust that immediately followed, he went out in a sullen joy.

T was highly successful. The seventh planet was utterly obliterated. The other two machines did less brilliantly. One missed the Solar System entirely and went on into the depths of space, a speck with a patiently dying burden. The other was much nearer target. It swung in close to T and hit the sixth planet. Unfortunately, it detonated too high, and that planet, instead of being obliterated, was pounded into chunks of rock that took up erratic orbits between the orbits of the massive fifth planet and the eighth, which was a small body encircled by two tiny moons. The ninth planet, of course, was quite unharmed; it rolled serenely on, accompanied by its pale satellite and carrying its load of elementary life forms.

The Koax achieved what they had set out to do. They had calculated for the seventh planet and hit it, annihilating it utterly. But that success, of course, was already recorded on the only chart they had had to go by. If they had read it aright, they would have seen … So, while the sixth was accidentally shattered, the seventh disappeared – Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, the Asteroid planet, T’s planet, Mars, Earth, Venus, Mercury – the seventh disappeared without trace.

On the ninth planet, the molluscs moved gently in the bright, filtering sunlight.




There is a Tide (#ulink_927d35bc-f2e8-5dfd-bb4f-b5fe156bb294)


How infinitely soothing to the heart it was to be home. I began that evening with nothing but peace in me: and the evening itself jellied down over Africa with a mild mother’s touch: so that even now I must refuse myself the luxury of claiming any premonition of the disaster for which the scene was already set.

My half-brother, K-Jubal (we had the same father), was in a talkative mood. As we sat at the table on the veranda of his house, his was the major part of the conversation: and this was unusual, for I am a poet.

‘… because the new dam is now complete,’ he was saying, ‘and I shall take my days more easily. I am going to write my life story, Rog. G-Williams on the World Weekly has been pressing me for it for some time; it’ll be serialised, and then turned into audibook form. I should make a lot of money, eh?’

He smiled as he asked this; in my company he always enjoyed playing the heavy materialist. Generally I encouraged him: this time I said: ‘Jubal, no man in Congo States, no man in the world possibly, has done more for people than you. I am the idle singer of an idle day, but you – why, your good works lie about you.’

I swept my hand out over the still bright land.

Mokulgu is a rising town on the western fringes of Lake Tanganyika’s northern end. Before Jubal and his engineers came here, it was a sleepy market town, and its natives lived in the indolent fashion of their countless forefathers. In ten years, that ancient pattern was awry; in fifteen, shattered completely. If you lived in Mokulgu now, you slept in a bed in a towering nest of flats, you ate food unfouled by flies and you moved to the sound of whistles and machinery. You had at your black fingertips, in fact, the benefits of what we persist in calling ‘Western civilisation’. If you were more hygienic and healthy – so ran the theory – you were happier.

But I begin to sound sceptical. That is my error. I happen to have little love for my fellow men; the thought of the Massacre is always with me, even after all this time. I could not deny that the trend of things at Mokulgu and elsewhere, the constant urbanisation, was almost unavoidable. But as a man with some sensibility, I regretted that human advance should always be over the corpse of Nature. That a counterblast was being prepared even then did not occur to me.

From where we sat over our southern wines, both lake and town were partially visible, the forests in the immediate area having been demolished long ago. The town was already blazing with light, the lake looked already dark, a thing preparing for night. And to our left, standing out with a clarity which suggested yet more rain to come, stretched the rolling jungles of the Congo tributaries.

For at least three hundred miles in that direction, man had not invaded: there lived the pygmies, flourishing without despoiling. That area, the Congo Source land, would be the next to go; Jubal, indeed, was the spearhead of the attack. But for my generation at least that vast tract of primitive beauty would stand, and I was selfishly glad of it. I always gained more pleasure from a tree than population increase statistics.

Jubal caught something of the expression on my face.

‘The power we are releasing here will last for ever,’ he said. ‘It’s already changing – improving – the entire economy of the area. At last, at long last, Africa is realising her potentialities.’

His voice held almost a tremor, and I thought that this passion for Progress was the secret of his strength.

‘You cling too much to the past, Rog,’ he added.

‘Why all this digging and tunnelling and wrenching up of riverbeds?’ I asked. ‘Would not atomics have been a cheaper and easier answer?’

‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘This system puts to use idle water; once in operation, everything is entirely self-servicing. Besides, uranium is none too plentiful, water is. Venus has no radioactive materials, I believe?’

This sounded to me like an invitation to change the subject. I accepted it.

‘They’ve found none yet,’ I assented. ‘But I can speak with no authority. I went purely as a tourist – and a glorious trip it was.’

‘It must be wonderful to be so many million miles nearer the sun,’ he said. It was the sort of plain remark I had often heard him make. On others’ lips it might have sounded platitudinous; in his quiet tones I caught a note of sublimity.

‘I shall never get to Venus,’ he said. ‘There’s too much work to be done here. You must have seen some marvels there, Rog!’

‘Yes … Yet nothing so strange as an elephant.’

‘And they’ll have a breathable atmosphere in a decade, I hear?’

‘So they say. They certainly are doing wonders … You know, Jubal, I shall have to go back then. You see, there’s a feeling, er – something, a sort of expectancy. No, not quite that; it’s hard to explain – ’ I don’t converse well. I ramble and mumble when I have something real to say. I could say it to a woman, or I could write it on paper; but Jubal is a man of action, and when I did say it, I deliberately omitted emotional overtones and lost interest in what I said. ‘It’s like courting a woman in armour with the visor closed, on Venus now. You can see it, but you can’t touch or smell or breathe it. Always an airtight dome or a space suit between you and actuality. But in ten years’ time, you’ll be able to run your bare fingers through the sand, feel the breezes on your cheek … Well, you know what I mean, er – sort of feel her undressed.’

He was thinking – I saw it in his eye: ‘Rog’s going to go all poetic on me.’ He said: ‘And you approve of that – the change over of atmospheres?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yet you don’t approve of what we’re doing here, which is just the same sort of thing?’

He had a point. ‘You’re upsetting a delicate balance here,’ I said gingerly. ‘A thousand ecological factors are swept by the board just so that you can grind these waters through your turbines. And the same thing’s happened at Owen Falls over on Lake Victoria … But on Venus there’s no such balance. It’s just a clean page waiting for man to write what he will on it. Under that CO


blanket, there’s been no spark of life: the mountains are bare of moss, the valleys lie innocent of grass; in the geological strata, no fossils sleep; no amoebae move in the sea. But what you’re doing here …’

‘People!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve got people to consider. Babies need to be born, mouths must be fed. A man must live. Your sort of feelings are all very well – they make good poems – but I consider the people. I love the people. For them I work …’

He waved his hands, overcome by his own grandiose visions. If the passion for Progress was his strength, the fallacy inherent in the idea was his secret weakness. I began to grow warm.

‘You get good conditions for these people, they procreate forthwith. Next generation, another benefactor will have to step forward and get good conditions for the children. That’s Progress, eh?’ I asked maliciously.

‘I see you so rarely, Rog; don’t let’s quarrel,’ he said meekly. ‘I just do what I can. I’m only an engineer.’

That was how he always won an altercation. Before meekness I have no defence.

The sun had finished another day. With the sudden darkness came chill. Jubal pressed a button, and glass slid round the veranda, enclosing us. Like Venus, I thought; but here you could still smell that spicy, bosomy scent which is the breath of dear Africa herself. On Venus, the smells are imported.

We poured some more wine and talked of family matters. In a short while his wife, Sloe, joined us. I began to feel at home. The feeling was only partly psychological; my glands were now beginning to readjust fully to normal conditions after their long days in space travel.

J-Casta also appeared. Him I was less pleased to see. He was the boss type, the strong arm man: as Jubal’s underling, he pandered wretchedly to him and bullied everyone else on the project. He (and there were many others like him, unfortunately) thought of the Massacre as man’s greatest achievement. This evening, in the presence of his superiors, after a preliminary burst of showing off, he was quiet enough.

When they pressed me to, I talked of Venus. As I spoke, back rushed that humbling – but intoxicating – sense of awe to think I had actually lived to stand in full possession of my many faculties on that startling planet. The same feeling had often possessed me on Mars. And (as justifiably) on Earth.

The vision chimed, and an amber light blinked drowsily off and on in Jubal’s tank. Even then, no premonition of catastrophe; since then, I can never see that amber heartbeat without anxiety.

Jubal answered it, and a man’s face swam up in the tank to greet him. They talked; I could catch no words, but the sudden tension was apparent. Sloe went over and put her arm round Jubal’s shoulder.

‘Something up,’ J-Casta commented.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘That’s Chief M-Shawn on the Vision – from Owenstown, over on Lake Victoria.’

Then Jubal flashed off and came slowly back to where we were sitting.

‘That was M-Shawn,’ he said. ‘The level of Lake Victoria has just dropped three inches.’ He lit a cheroot with clumsy fingers, his eyes staring in mystification far beyond the flame.

‘Dam OK, boss?’ J-Casta asked.

‘Perfectly. They’re going to phone us if they find anything …’

‘Has this happened before?’ I asked, not quite able to understand their worried looks.

‘Of course not,’ my half-brother said scornfully. ‘Surely you must see the implications of it? Something highly unprecedented has occurred.’

‘But surely a mere three inches of water …’

At that he laughed briefly. Even J-Casta permitted himself a snort.

‘Lake Victoria is an inland sea,’ Jubal said grimly. ‘It’s as big as Tasmania. Three inches all over that means many thousands of tons of water. Casta, I think we’ll get down to Mokulgu; it won’t do any harm to alert the first aid services, just in case they’re needed. Got your tracer?’

‘Yes, boss. I’m coming.’

Jubal patted Sloe’s arm, nodded to me and left without relaxing his worried look. He and J-Casta shortly appeared outside. They bundled into a float, soared dangerously close to a giant walnut tree and vanished into the night.

Nervously, Sloe put down her cheroot and did not resume it. She fingered a dial and the windows opaqued.

‘There’s an ominous waiting quality out there I don’t like,’ she said, to explain our sudden privacy.

‘Should I be feeling alarmed?’ I asked.

She flashed me a smile. ‘Quite honestly, yes. You don’t live in our world, Rog, or you would guess at once what has happening at Lake Victoria. They’ve just finished raising the level again; for a long time they’ve been on about more pressure, and the recent heavy rains gave them their chance. It seems to have been the last straw.’

‘And what does this three-inch drop mean? Is there a breach in the dam somewhere?’

‘No. They’d have found that. I’m afraid it means the bed of the lake has collapsed somewhere. The water’s pouring into subterranean reservoirs.’

The extreme seriousness of the matter was now obvious even to me. Lake Victoria is the source of the White Nile; if it ceased to feed the river, millions of people in Uganda and the Sudan would die of drought. And not only people: birds, beasts, fish, insects, plants.

We both grew restless. We took a turn outside in the cool night air, and then decided we too would go down to the town. All the way there a picture filled my head: the image of that great dark lake emptying like a wash-basin. Did it drain in sinister silence, or did it gargle as it went? Men of action forget to tell you vital details like that.

That night was an anticlimax, apart from the sight of the full moon sailing over Mount Kangosi. We joined Jubal and his henchman and hung about uneasily until midnight. As if an unknown god had been propitiated by an hour’s sleep sacrificed, we then felt easier and retired to bed.

The news was bad next morning. Jubal was already back in town; Sloe and I breakfasted alone together. She told me they had been informed that Victoria had now dropped thirteen and a half inches; the rate of fall seemed to be increasing.

I flew into Mokulgu and found Jubal without difficulty. He was just embarking on one of the Dam Authority’s survey floats with J-Casta.

‘You’d better come, too, Rog,’ he shouted. ‘You’ll probably enjoy the flight more than we shall.’

I did enjoy the flight, despite the circumstances. A disturbance on Lake Tanganyika’s eastern fringes had been observed on an earlier survey, and we were going to investigate it

‘You’re not afraid the bed will collapse here, too, are you?’ I asked.

‘It’s not that,’ Jubal said. ‘The two hundred miles between us and Victoria is a faulty region, geologically speaking. I’ll show you a map of the strata when we get back. It’s more than likely that all that runaway subterranean water may be heading in our direction; that’s what I’m afraid of. The possibility has been known for a long while.’

‘And no precautions taken?’

‘What could we do but cross our fingers? The possibility exists that the Moon will spiral to Earth, but we don’t all live in shelters because of it.’

‘Justifying yourself, Jubal?’

‘Possibly,’ he replied, looking away.

We flew through a heavy rain shower, which dappled the grey surface of the lake. Then we were over the reported disturbance. A dull brown stain, a blot on a bright new garment, spread over the water, from the steep eastern shore to about half a mile out.

‘Put us down, pilot,’ Jubal ordered.

We sank, and kissed the lake. Several hundred yards away rose the base of Mount Kangosi. I looked with admiration up the slope; great slabs of rock stood out from the verdure; crouching at the bottom of this colossus was a village, part of it forced by the steepness of the incline to stand out on piles into the lake.

‘Leave everything to me, boss,’ J-Casta said, grabbing a hand asdic from the port locker and climbing out on to the float. We followed. It seemed likely that the disturbance was due to a slight subsidence in the side of the lake basin. Such subsidences, Jubal said, were not uncommon, but in this case it might provide a link with Lake Victoria. If they could pin-point the position of the new fault, frogmen would be sent down to investigate.

‘We’re going to have company,’ Jubal remarked to me, waving a hand over the water.

A dozen or so dugouts lay between us and the shore. Each bore two or three shining-skinned fishermen. The two canoes nearest us had swung round and were now being paddled towards our float.

I watched them with more interest than I gave to the asdic sweep. Men like these sturdy fishermen had existed here for countless generations, unchanged: before white men had known of them, before Rome’s legions had destroyed the vineyards of Carthage, before – who knows if not before the heady uprush of civilisation elsewhere? – such men had fished quietly in this great lake. They seem not to have advanced at all, so rapidly does the world move; but perhaps when all other races have fallen away, burnt out and exhausted, these steady villages will come into a kingdom of their own. I would elect to live in that realm.

A man in the leading canoe stood up, raising his hand in greeting. I replied, glancing over his shoulder at the curtain of green behind him. Something caught my eye.

Above some yards of bare rock, a hundred feet up the slope, two magnificent Mvules – African teak trees – grew. A china blue bird dipped suddenly from one of the trees and sped far and fast away over the water, fighting to outpace its reflection. And the tree itself began to cant slowly from the vertical into a horizontal position.

Jubal had binoculars round his neck. My curiosity aroused, I reached to borrow them. Even as I did so, I saw a spring of water start from the base of the Mvules. A rock was dislodged. I saw it hurtle down into bush below, starting in turn a trail of earth and stones which fell down almost on to the thatched roofs of the village. The spring began to spurt more freely now. It gleamed in the sun: it looked beautiful but I was alarmed.

‘Look!’ I pointed.

Both Jubal and the fisherman followed the line of my outstretched arm. J-Casta continued to bend over his metal box.

Even as I pointed, the cliff shuddered. The other Mvule went down. Like an envelope being torn, the rock split horizontally and a tongue of water burst from it. The split widened, the water became a wall, pouring out and down.

The sound of the splitting came clear and hard to our startled ears. Then came the roar of the water, bursting down the hillside. It washed everything before it. I saw trees, bushes and boulders hurried down in it. I saw the original fissure lengthen and lengthen like a cruel smile, cutting through the ground as fast as fire. Other cracks started, running uphill and across: every one of them began to spout water.

The fishermen stood up, shouting as their homes were swept away by the first fury of the flood.

And then the entire lower mountainside began to slip. With a cumulative roar, mud, water and rock rolled down into the lake. Where they had been, a solid torrent cascaded out, one mighty wall of angry water. The escaping flow from Lake Victoria had found its outlet!

Next moment, our calm surface was a furious sea. Jubal slipped and fell on to one knee. I grabbed him, and almost went overboard myself. A series of giant waves plunged outwards from the shore. The first one rocked us, the second one overturned our flimsy craft completely.

I came to the surface coughing and snorting. J-Casta rose at my side. We were just in time to see the float slip completely under: it sank in no time, carrying the pilot with it. I had not even seen his face, poor fellow.

Jubal came up by the fisherman, who had also overturned. But dugouts do not sink. We owe our lives to those hollowed tree trunks. They were righted, and Jubal and his henchman climbed into one, while I climbed into the other. The waves were still fierce, but had attained a sort of regularity which allowed us to cope with them.

The breakthrough was now a quarter of a mile long. Water poured from it with unabated force, a mighty waterfall where land had been before. We skirted it painfully, making a landing as near to it as we dared.

The rest of that day, under its blinding arch of sky, passed in various stages of confusion and fear.

It was two and a half hours before we were taken off the strip of shore. We were not idle in that time, although every few minutes Jubal paused to curse the fact that he was stranded and powerless. Miraculous as it seems, there were some survivors from the obliterated village, women mostly; we helped to get them ashore and built fires for them.

Meanwhile, Dam Authority planes began to circle the area. We managed to attract the attention of one, which landed by our party. Jubal changed at once; now that he had a machine and men who, unlike the villagers, were in his command, he worked with a silent purpose allowing of no question.

Over the vision, he ordered the rest of the floats to attend to the villagers’ needs. We sped back to Mokulgu.

On the way, Jubal spoke to Owenstown. They took his news almost without comment. They reported that Victoria was still sinking, although the rate had now steadied. A twenty-four-hour a day airlift was about to go into operation, dropping solid blocks of marble on to the lake bed. There, a fault about three miles square had been located; four frogmen had been lost, drowned.

‘It’s like tossing pennies into the ocean,’ Jubal said.

I was thinking of the frogmen, sucked irresistibly down the fault. They would be swept through underground waterways, battered and pulped, to be spat out eventually into our lake.

Vision from Mokulgu, coming on just before we landed there, reported a breach in the lake banks, some twenty miles north of the town. At a word from Jubal, we switched plans and veered north at once to see just how extensive the damage was.

The break was at a tiny cluster of huts dignified by the name of Ulatuama. Several men, the crew of a Dam Authority patrol boat, were working furiously at a widening gap. The damage had been caused by the very waves which had swamped us, and I learnt that a small, disused lock had stood here, relic of an earlier irrigation scheme; so the weakness had been of man’s making. Beyond the lock had been a dried-up channel some twenty yards wide; this was now a swollen, plunging river.

‘Is this serious?’ I asked Jubal. ‘Isn’t it a good way of getting rid of surplus water?’

He gave me a withering look. ‘Where are we if we lose control?’ he demanded. ‘If this thing here runs away with us, the combined waters of Victoria and Tanganyika will flood down into the Congo.’

Even as he spoke, the bank to the south of the escaping waters crumbled; several yards were swept away, their place instantly taken by the current.

We flew back to Mokulgu. Jubal visioned the mayor and got permission to broadcast to the city. I did not hear him speak; reaction had set in, and I had to go and sit quietly at home with Sloe fussing daintily round me. Although you ‘know’ from a child that Earth is a planet, it is only when you drift towards it from space, seeing it hang round and finite ahead, that you can realise the fact. And so, although I had always ‘known’ man was puny, it was the sight of that vast collapsing slab of mountain which had driven the fact into my marrow.

To guess the sort of sentiments Jubal broadcast to the city was easy. He would talk of ‘rallying round in this our time of crisis’. He would speak of the need for ‘all hands uniting against our ancient enemy, Nature’. He would come over big on the tanks; he would be big, his fists clenched, his eyes ablaze. He was in touch with the people. And they would do what he said, for Jubal carried conviction. Perhaps I envied my half-brother.

Labour and supplies began to pour north to mend the damaged bank. Jubal, meanwhile, thought up a typically flamboyant scheme. Tilly, one of the lake steamers, was pressed into service and loaded full of rock and clay by steam shovel. With Jubal standing on the bridge, it was manœuvred into the centre of the danger area and scuttled. Half in and half out of the rushing water, it now formed a base from which a new dam could be built to stem the flood. Watched by a cheering crowd, Jubal and crew skimmed to safety in a motor boat.

‘We shall conquer if we have to dam the water with our bodies,’ he cried. A thousand cheering throats told him how much they liked this idea.

The pitch of crisis which had then been engendered was maintained all through the next two days. For most of that time it rained, and men fought to erect their barrier on clinging mud. Jubal’s popularity – and consequently his influence – underwent a rapid diminution. The reason for this was two-fold. He quarrelled with J-Casta, whose suggestion to throw open the new dam to relieve pressure elsewhere was refused, and he ran into stiff opposition from Mokulgu Town Council.

This august body, composed of the avariciously successful and the successfully avaricious, was annoyed about Tilly. Tilly belonged to the local government, and Jubal had, in effect, stolen it. The men from the factories who had downed tools to fight the water were summoned back to work: the Dam Authority must tend its own affairs.

Jubal merely sneered at this dangerous pique and visioned Leopoldsville. In the briefest possible time, he had the army helping him.

It was at dawn on the morning of the third day that he visioned me to go down and see him. I said adieu to Sloe and took a float over to Ulatuama.

Jubal stood alone by the water’s edge. The sun was still swathed in mist, and he looked cold and pinched. Behind him, dimly outlined figures moved to and fro, like allegorical figures on a frieze. He surveyed me curiously before speaking.

‘The work’s nearly done, Rog,’ he said. He looked as if he needed sleep, but he added energetically, pointing across the lake: ‘Then we tackle the main job of plugging that waterfall.’

I looked across the silent lake. The far shore was invisible, but out of the layers of mist rose Mount Kangosi. Even at this distance, in the early morning hush, came the faint roar of the new waterfall. And there was another sound, intermittent but persistent: beyond the mountain, they were bombing fault lines. That way they hoped to cause a collapse which would plug Victoria’s escape routes. So far, they had had no success, but the bombing went on, making a battlefield of what had once been glorious country.

‘Sorry I haven’t seen anything of you and Sloe,’ Jubal said. I disliked his tone.

‘You’ve been busy. Sloe called you on the vision.’

‘Oh that. Come on into my hut, Rog.’

We walked over to a temporary structure; the grass was overloaded with dew. In Jubal’s hut, J-Casta was dressing, smoking a cheroot as he dexterously pulled on a shirt. He gave me a surly greeting, whose antagonism I sensed was directed through me at Jubal.

As soon as the latter closed the door, he said: ‘Rog, promise me something.’

‘Tell me what.’

‘If anything happens to me, I want you to marry Sloe. She’s your sort.’

Concealing my irritation, I said: ‘That’s hardly a reasonable request.’

‘You and she get on well together, don’t you?’

‘Certainly. But you see my outlook on life is … well, for one thing I like to stay detached. An observer, you know, observing. I just want to sample the landscapes and the food and the women of the solar system. I don’t want to marry, just move on at the right time. Sloe’s very nice but – ’

My ghastly inability to express the pressure of inner feeling was upon me. In women I like flamboyance, wit and a high spirit, but I tire quickly of it and then have to seek its manifestation elsewhere. Besides, Sloe frankly had had her sensibilities blunted from living with Jubal. He now chose to misunderstand my hesitations.

‘Are you standing there trying to tell me that you’ve already tired of whatever you’ve been doing behind my back?’ he demanded. ‘You – you – ’ He called me a dirty name; I forgot to make allowances for the strain he had been undergoing, and lost my temper.

‘Oh, calm down,’ I snapped. ‘You’re overtired and overwrought, and probably over-sexed too. I’ve not touched your little woman – I like to drink from pure streams. So you can put the entire notion out of your head.’

He rushed at me with his shoulders hunched and fists swinging. It was an embarrassing moment. I am against violence, and believe in the power of words, but I did the only possible thing: spring to one side and catch him a heavy blow over the heart.

Poor Jubal! No doubt, in his frustration against the forces of nature, he was using me only as a safety valve. But with shame, I will now confess what savage pleasure that blow gave me; I was filled with lust to strike him again. I can perceive dimly how atrocities such as the Massacre came about. As Jubal turned on me, I flung myself at him, breaking down, his defences, piling blows into his chest. It was, I suppose, a form of self-expression.

J-Casta stopped it, breaking in between us and thrusting his ugly face into mine, his hand like a clamp round my wrist.

‘Pack it up,’ he said. ‘I’d gladly do the job myself, but this is not the time.’

As he spoke, the hut trembled. We were hard pressed to keep our feet, staggering together like drunken men.

‘Now what – ’ Jubal said, and flung open the door. I caught a rectangular view of trees and mist, men running, and the emergency dam sailing away on a smooth black slide of escaping water. The banks were collapsing!

Glimpsing the scene, Jubal instantly attempted to slam the door shut again. He was too late. The wave struck us, battering the cabin off its flimsy foundations. Jubal cried sharply as he was tossed against a wall. Next moment we were floundering in a hell of flying furniture and water.

Swept along on a giant sluice, the cabin turned over and over like a dice. That I was preserved was a merest accident. Through a maze of foam, I saw a heavy bunk crashing towards me, and managed to flounder aside in time. It missed me by a finger’s width and broke straight through the boarding wall. I was swept helplessly after it.

When I surfaced, the cabin was out of sight and I was being borne along at a great rate; and the ugly scene in the cabin was something fruitless that happened a million years ago. Nearly wrenching my arm off in the process, I seized a tree which was still standing, and clung on. Once I had recovered my breath, I was able to climb out of the water entirely, wedge myself between two branches and regain my breath.

The scene was one of awesome desolation. I had what in less calamitous circumstances might have been called ‘a good view’ of it all.

A lake spread all round me, its surface moving smartly and with apparent purpose. Its forward line, already far away, was marked by a high yellow cascade. In its wake stretched a miscellany of objects, of which only the trees stood out clearly. Most of the trees were eucalyptus: this area had probably been reclaimed marsh.

To the north, the old shore-line of the lake still stood. The ground was higher there and solid rock jutted stolidly into the flood.

To the south, the shore-line was being joyously chewed away. Mokulgu had about half an hour left before it was swamped and obliterated. I wondered how the Mokulgu Town Council were coping with the situation.

Overhead, the sun now shining clear, bars of pink, wispy cloud flecked the blue sky. The pink and the blue were of the exact vulgar tints found in two-colour prints of the early twentieth century AD – that is, a hundred years before the Massacre. I was almost happy to see this lack of taste in the sky matching the lack of stability elsewhere. I was almost happy: but I was weeping.

‘They visioned me that one of the floats had picked you up – and not Jubal. Is there any hope for him, Rog, or is that a foolish question?’

‘I can’t give you a sensible answer. He was a strong swimmer. They may find him yet.’

I spoke to Sloe over the heads of a crowd of people. Mokulgu, surely enough, had been washed away. The survivors, homeless and bereaved, crowded on to high ground. Sloe had generously thrown open most of her house as a sort of rest-camp-cum-soup-kitchen. She superintended everything with a cool authority which suitably concealed her personal feelings. For that I was grateful: Sloe’s feelings must be no affair of mine.

She smiled at me before turning to address someone behind her. Already the light was taking on the intensity of early evening. Above the babble of voices round me came the deep song of speeding water. It would continue for months yet: Africa was ruptured at her very heart, beyond man’s mending.

Instead of flowing northward, fertilizing its old valley, Victoria crashed into our lake, adding its burden to the weight of water rolling west. While twenty-one million people perished of drought in Egypt, as many perished of flood and typhoid in the Congo.

I seemed to know what was coming as I stood in the crowded room, knowing Jubal dead, knowing the nation of Africa to be bleeding to death. We were dying of our own wounds.

The ten years to follow would be as terrible as the ten years of the Massacre, when every member of the white race had been slain.

Now we negroes, in our turn, stood at the bar of history.




Tradesman’s Exit (#ulink_04140692-3a39-5e88-94d1-1e954e05b851)


When it comes to human nature, there’s nobody to beat Henshaw. He has the humanest nature I have ever met: how he kept it intact working 33 years for old Sowerby, I don’t know. He once told me that his secret was that he suffered fools gladly; however that may be, we always get on splendidly together.

‘Nick your chin every morning to let him see you’ve shaved, say “Morning, sir” when he comes in, and you’ll be OK’, Henshaw told me, the day I started work at Sowerby’s. The ‘he’ he referred to was Sowerby; the way Henshaw pronounced it, it was a fitting epithet.

Apart from an almost faceless woman who came from ten till one each day, to add up figures in the ledgers, Henshaw and I were Sowerby’s only staff. Sowerby’s is a poky bookshop and stationers the Chancery Lane end of High Holborn. Its aspect is prim but seedy; it is surrounded by piles of masonry too loud to be called building and too lewd to be called architecture. (That’s what I once heard an intellectual say; we used to get them in from the insurance offices nearby.)

I stared at Henshaw; thin and dry, 54, with a poor head of hair that made him look like a shabby eagle. He wore dim, stately suits. He was a tradesman and a gentleman, but a tradesman first, and being a gent did not stop him being a good sort.

Henshaw stared at me; thin but shiny, 24, with thick, rimless glasses and a detestably round face. My ice-blue suit was my only suit, and my digs were in Tabernacle Place. I was miraculously ignorant then.

For some reason, Henshaw liked me. Now I’ve cultivated my intelligence a bit with correspondence schools he might not like me so much.

The business of his getting the sack did not crop up until I had been 18 months at Sowerby’s. Henshaw was a permanent fixture sort of chap; only an old swine like Sowerby could have thought of sacking him at all.

Not that Sowerby was a nuisance. Each day, he came in, passed around the stands and tables to the back of the shop, climbed up three steps and entered a tiny cubicle lined with dirt and leather. There he stayed till closing. At a misty window set in his wall we occasionally saw his beer-coloured eyes watching us.

‘I don’t believe he is anyone at all,’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘I think he’s empty.’

‘You shouldn’t say that,’ Henshaw advised, turning his head away from the misty peephole to add, ‘because the little ferret probably lip-reads.’

‘I don’t believe he exists,’ I said, likewise turning away and pretending to polish a cobweb.

‘He’s just terribly shy. When we’ve gone and the shop’s closed and the blind’s down, he whips off all his clothes and dances in the window.’

People sometimes entered Sowerby’s and bought pencils, or books on primitive peoples. In the lunch hour, while I gutsed a bun in the background, we were sometimes quite crowded. The customers would scrape their bodies round our trays, picking up volumes here and there. Occasionally I would have to serve. I’d put on a really crack Foyles accent and say, ‘Out of stock’, or ‘Out of print’, or ‘Banned as obscene’, just as Henshaw had taught me.

To him I owe my wealth of book lore.

It was during these rush hours that the disappearances started. Something about jurisprudence went missing on Monday, and on Wednesday it was a marked copy of Atrocities in China. On Friday it was a first edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Westward Ho!, if my memory serves me right.

‘How do you know they’ve been pinched?’ I asked Henshaw.

‘That Westward Ho!’s been there longer than me: it was always too pricey,’ Henshaw said. ‘As for the others, you didn’t sell them, nor did I. Ergo, old chum, some fly boy’s whipped ’em.’

It was the very next morning, Saturday, and I was in our packing room (8 by 6) smarming back my hair in the mirror; Henshaw came in and said, ‘Hey, Nobby, guess what. I’ve got the push.’

‘You’re kidding!’ I exclaimed, wiping the brilliantine off my comb. But when I looked up I could perceive like a flash he was serious. For one thing, he was out of puff; that’s how it takes you, poor devil, when you are 54.

Apparently, Sowerby had popped out of his cubicle on Friday night as Henshaw was getting his raincoat on. He said that Henshaw was in charge of the shop: it was his responsibility to see those three books were replaced. If they weren’t back by Monday night, Henshaw must leave the following Saturday.

‘Silly little B, what’ll he do without you?’ I asked. ‘If you leave, Mr. Henshaw, I come too.’

He was touched at this, and found us some chewing gum in one of his pockets.

‘That may not be necessary,’ he said. ‘I reckon I know the thief. If I spotted him and phoned the police, could you tackle him, Nob?’

Bravely refraining from asking the thief’s size, I said I would. Henshaw told me to look out for a cadaverous chap with bow tie and plastic mack.

On Monday morning I had to deliver a fat account book at Lincoln’s Inn, a heavy affair with blank pages, which cost about five times as much as any book with printed pages. As I re-entered Sowerby’s, my place of rightful employment, at eleven-thirty hours – sorry, I’m talking like the statement I had to make later! As I nipped in, there was this cadaverous fellow with a bow tie and plastic mack, picking over the erotica.

Henshaw was up a ladder, innocent as you please, dusting a run of Hellenic Journal; who Helen was I couldn’t care less, but she had never been given such a going over. He slipped me down a note which read ‘Thief (q.v.) – with Accomplice – are here. Police phoned for – two plain clothes also in shop now – watching suspect (cf.) – awaiting false move. Don’t let on’.

Looking innocuous, I barged round the shop slapping books into place. Several so-called customers were about, but I soon decided which the two coppers were. Once was spotty with huge black glasses, loitering by Travel; the other was cheery and clean-looking, and standing quite near Cadaverous, looking about. He winked at me, a gesture I returned.

The thief’s accomplice was also easy to guess. He stood over by the Art case, face buried in A Hundred Further Studies; he was well set up, with polish or something on his shoes – the confidence type.

Drama! My young life took on a new aspect. I winked at Plain Clothes again, and he winked back. Henshaw was making faces at me and my head was reeling. Here was a chance for me to do some jurisprudence in my own right.

Cadaverous moved to the further wall of the shop. Seizing my chance, I sidled up to Plain Clothes and said out of the corner of my mouth, ‘If you’re going to make an arrest, I’m here to help.’

‘Thanks’, he said, conferring a warm glow on me.

After a moment, which he evidently spent thinking, he asked, ‘Who was it you wanted arrested, kid?’

So they had not even got that far! I pointed to Cadaverous with my elbow.

‘Supposing me and you manoeuvre him outside?’ Plain Clothes said. ‘We could tackle him out there. Are you game?’

Nodding my head dumbly, I watched him go over to Cadaverous and mutter something. What it was I’ll never know, but I can guess. Then they approached, Cadaverous smiling enough to split his face, and we left the shop arm in arm.

Directly we were outside, they both bashed me on the head, sending me sprawling, and ran like mad in the direction of Gamage’s.

It pains me to say that the two real plain clothes men, the spotty one with glasses and the one with shiny shoes, were very rude as they helped Henshaw drag me back into Sowerby’s. Even now, after Henshaw and I have been doing this quiet packing job at the Lane auctioneer’s for three months, what they said still pains me. I had cost old Henshaw his job, but Henshaw was too human to fly off the handle.

‘The way he walked up to that accomplice like a kid asking for toffee,’ one copper sneered to the other, glancing carnivorously at me.

‘What’s the good of carrying on like that?’ Henshaw asked them. ‘Can’t you see it’s a case of arrested development?’

That was a puzzling remark; you might almost think he meant me.

‘But they weren’t arrested,’ I said.

‘It’s not exactly what I meant,’ said Henshaw.




With Esmond in Mind (#ulink_f8685444-b715-5d69-8cc0-e842430412c4)


The autofly sank deeper and deeper into the layers of buildings – its motor humming at steady pitch. Uneasily, Laurie Roberts trimmed his muon screen to avoid an upcoming fly. The traffic in these buildings was getting worse.

With London’s population now close on seventy million, that was hardly surprising. Year by year, more strata of houses were added to the existing layers. Everybody said it couldn’t go on any longer, yet it did. London, centre of world trade, blessed with its sunny climate, attracted population irresistibly from all over the Seven Systems.

Laurie glanced at his dials. He was just sinking through Stratum 17A, Square 80. It might be the Grand Bank of Neptune, it might be some pretty girl’s bedroom. Laurie wished he could materialise and see, but lowering the muon screen would instantly pulverise him; besides, he hadn’t far to go now, and he was really in a hurry.

He could not recall a time when he had not been in a hurry. Everyone in the seventeenth A-century was in a hurry: that was the inevitable result of a competitive way of living. Laurie’s one man illusion-repair outfit was a pretty hand-to-mouth job, allowing no time for relaxation.

He scythed forward now, cutting through Stratum 20. There was romance for you! Stratum 20 had been the old pre-muon age London, when people had had to build on the ground. Then intrapenetrability had been discovered, and progress had really gone ahead. The old existing thoroughfares (built for their quaint old automobiles and railways) had been filled in with new buildings; nothing and nobody could get anywhere without a muon screen – but power was reasonably cheap and everyone had them. After that the erection of new layers above and below the city began. London expanded like a self-fertilizing bun. The result was a capital worthy of a galactic race.

Not that that concerned Laurie particularly at present. He was too intent on finding his way down to Strata 29, where a client, Granville Esmond, awaited his services. An autobeam stopped him at 28 – that would be more upcoming traffic – and then he filtered the fly down and sent it clicking along to the appropriate square in which Mr. Esmond lived.

As soon as he arrived, Laurie dialled Esmond’s number. It came up, interlocked, and the muon screen was safely released. Laurie climbed out, glancing at once over his little vehicle with its proud sign: ‘Roberts’ Radiopsi Repairs. I’ll Mend Your Illusions.’ The new paint had been slightly scratched, presumably by a proton shower which had sneaked through his screen; the port projector needed retuning, and Laurie made a mental note to attend to it in the morning.

Mr. Esmond’s materialising hall was as small as the statues of the realm would allow. The tiny autofly filled it. Which was all you could expect if you knew this end of Strata 29; it was decidedly a shabby-genteel neighbourhood.

Mr. Esmond himself stood at the inner, muon-proof door. Although he was a complete stranger to Laurie, his type was familiar.

He wore green flannel shorts, a trylon sneaking-jacket and leather shirt with twill plugging pieces. His boots were aluminium retreads equipped with the standard speakers, leakers and signature keys. His hair, greying now, was worn in a snood. It was, in fact, a thoroughly old-fashioned outfit.

‘Please come in, Mr. Roberts,’ Esmond said in a sad voice. ‘Although I’m afraid you’ll find the flat rather untidy. I’ve had to manage by myself ever since my wife died.’

Laurie surveyed the old man’s face with interest. He hardly looked the type who would marry; the lines of his mouth were prim and ascetic; his face was the face of a self-denier.

There was a green fleck to his withered flesh which Laurie could not account for until he saw the rest of the house. Then he had Esmond placed: he was a retired Venusian civil servant. About him and his home was the air, at once conservative and eccentric, of one who has travelled far and got nowhere.

In the middle of a light years’ wide sphere of civilisation, incorrigible Venus lay, a frontier planet after sixteen centuries of more or less continuous occupation. The transformation of planetary atmosphere had never been a success and the hardy natives – who survived in any atmosphere – were difficult to rule. Venusian jurisdiction could point to thousands of men like Granville Esmond, who spent the greater part of their lives keeping order in remote provinces, far from their own kind.

The walls of Esmond’s poor little living room were covered with framed stereos, the cheap, motionless kind: views of the desolate land, the subterranean villages, groups of local Earthmen in sports kit, a close up of Mrs. Esmond in a sixties hat, looking strangely like her husband. And there were other mementos, a smogwood carving, a chunk of venustone, a native weave rug on the floor.

‘I spent twenty-nine years on our sister planet,’ Esmond said proudly, seeing Laurie’s glance.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘Oh, don’t apologise, it’s nice to have someone to see my – ah, trophies: I’m very much alone.’ The words seemed wrenched out of him; he immediately covered the confession by adding, ‘My illusion room’s through here, if you’d come, please.’

He gestured to a door and then said hurriedly, ‘I’m afraid it’s rather worn … The upkeep’s very expensive, you know. But I couldn’t bear to be without it: it helps remind me of happier times.’

He stood there as if barring the door, smiling in a weak, apologetic way.

‘I’ll put it right if I can,’ Laurie said, and pushed gently past him into the room.

The sky was a tawny overcast, moving slowly like curdled milk. A line of smogtress, part of an afforestation scheme, stretched from the horizon until the boughs of the nearest ones waved overhead. A large cabin dwelling with ‘District Commissioner’ over the door stood close beside a series of monolithic slabs. Laurie recognised the slabs as entrances to the warrenlike villages of the Venusians.

On the verandah of the cabin a middle-aged man sat smoking his pipe. He was lean and alert, his face tanned green by the perpetual breezes. It was Commissioner Esmond.

Through him, through the trees, through the sky, through the bleak land, the shadowy walls of the illusion room were visible. The recording was indeed worn.

‘As I explained to you on the pscreen,’ the present Esmond said, coming up from behind a tree, ‘the illusions keep changing without my switching them over. I’ve only got three illusions, but they keep changing …’

‘It happens sometimes on old circuits,’ Laurie said, hefting his repair kit. ‘I’ll soon fix it. The activator keys probably need rebuilding.’

‘They’ve been flickering a lot lately. It’s very disconcerting. But it probably won’t happen now you’re here.’

But even as Esmond spoke, there was a rush of ghostly figures into the Venusian clearing. The monoliths and trees faded and the two men were standing in a crowded club room. There were trophies on the wall, and flags, and bright flowers in vases, and somewhere a piano was being autoplayed.

People moved to and fro, talking, men and women in gay clothes. To one end of the room there was dancing. The hostess, glorious in yards of white extanza, was followed by a retinue of young men; one of the eager faces was twenty-year-old Granville Esmond.

‘The year is 1629 A-C,’ said old Esmond in a tremulous voice. ‘What a summer that was! Everything still before me … Do you see I was just growing my very first moustache? To be so very young … You’ll see my wife-to-be in a moment; she comes in that green door at the end, and I don’t notice her for some time. Shall we go and stand there and wait for her?’

He stepped forward to let a phantom pass and caught the look in Laurie’s eyes. He dropped his own.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Your time’s money, son. You’d better go and switch the illusions off and see what’s gone wrong with them. I don’t mind.’

Feeling callow and hard-hearted, Laurie made his way to the master switch. As he bent down to it, a girl with the palest countenance hurried towards him from a shadowy green doorway; her eyes, dark and dedicated, looked nervously through him, and for a second their lips seemed to touch: then the switch went over. The ghosts died.

‘That was my wife! That was Muriel!’ Esmond said. He stood in the middle of a bare chamber, his gesticulating hands drawing mirages; then he stuffed them in the pockets of his sneaking-jacket.

Pulling out a magnetic key, Laurie knelt and opened the illusion hood. This was an old model, probably acquired secondhand, and the interior looked vastly complicated to a layman, although it presented no special difficulties to Laurie. The illusion unit was bigger than a small refrigerator: current ones were the size of a small suitcase.

Laurie checked swiftly over the emanation circuits with his teller. There was considerable leakage, although not enough to be critical.

‘I shall have to re-earth to be safe,’ he said over his shoulder to the old man.

‘I’m afraid these technical terms don’t convey anything to me at all,’ Esmond apologised. ‘You see, I had a classical education. It would be – oh, right back in nineteen – no, eighteen, the year the Centauri team won the Ashes, when I started at French Foundation …’

And as Laurie worked, the old man began to tell his life story. Laurie did not bother to listen at first. He could see the equipment was worn out, and was wondering what was the least he could charge for an adequate job. The amplification transistors in colour, feeler and solidity circuits would all have to be renewed, and they’d cost a cool two hundred each.

This model had racks for only three illusion spools; more expensive ones had racks running into thousands. Most people preferred to record their own memories for the illusion, as Esmond had done; ultimately, they were most satisfying. But there were professional memorisers, some of whose memory types sold by the million. Laurie unclipped Esmond’s three memories from the prong that held them, and bent further into the entrails of the machine.

Gradually, he found himself absorbed in the other’s account of his life. On Esmond’s own showing, it had been dull, filled with a timid integrity and ended with a tiny pension. It contrasted strangely with Laurie’s existence, in which mad sessions of work alternated with women and the gay dives of the higher strata.

‘I hope you don’t mind listening to all this!’ Esmond exclaimed suddenly, interrupting himself. ‘You see, it’s eighteen months since a real live person was in my flat. All my food and supplies are automatically delivered through the muon-chute. And I hardly ever go out into the country these days – it costs so much to get out of London now, you know.’

It certainly did. All movement could only be by muon in the built-up area, and present rates for that were five and a half per cubic foot per yard.

‘You ought to get around more,’ Laurie said, tugging at the cover of the twitch plate. ‘You must be lonely here.’

‘Lonely!’ There was such a high note in the old man’s voice that Laurie involuntarily turned to look at him. As he did so, his temples made contact with the twin prongs of the record rack.

Sparks flew, sparks so cool they hardly singed his skin. Current flowed, current so slight it hardly made his scalp crawl. Air crackled with a noise so slight you would never think to call it sinister or world-shattering, or any of the things it really was.

After a long pause, Laurie completed the gesture he had begun and turned to look at Esmond. The old fellow stood in the centre of the bare illusion room in an expectant attitude.

Laurie was instantly reminded of a scene long ago, when he was a boy of ten. He was in the woods of Berkshire with his sister Lena, and they had run into a clearing and discovered an old man standing in just the same position, as if listening enchanted.

‘Hello,’ the old man said when he saw them. ‘Don’t be frightened – I’m only standing here listening to the cuckoo.’

‘Pooh, they’re commoner than pigeons at this time of year,’ thirteen year old Lena said. ‘If you heard them in winter, that would be something to listen to!’

‘They don’t have seasons in London, or cuckoos on Venus,’ the old man told her. ‘That’s why they’re wonderful to me – for years I’ve lived only in those two places.’

‘Then you’re lucky,’ Lena said – she was at a very contradictory stage at present. ‘Daddy’s going to take us to Venus when Laurie’s bigger, isn’t he, Laurie?’

Laurie did not answer. He was frightened; this strange man with the green flecks on his cheek reminded him of something – something too big and threatening to be grasped. He tugged urgently at Lena’s hand.

She accepted his signal and burst into a run, dragging him down a bank deep in last year’s leaves and this year’s bluebells. Laurie looked back over his shoulder: the man had disappeared, very suddenly, very oddly.

But he couldn’t just have gone like that, Laurie thought. It was against nature.

He called, ‘Mr. Esmond!’

No answer, only the mighty beech trees humming in their new green.

Nobody in sight.

‘Funny,’ Laurie commented aloud, running his dusty hands down his overalls. And it was funny; it was queer; his head felt queer and his stomach queasy.

He was suddenly glad he had no need to linger further. The illusion machine was working beautifully: these beeches looked so solid that he hesitated to walk into them. He felt his way to the door and let himself back into Mr. Esmond’s living quarters. For a moment he paused, looking back.

The woods were irresistibly real. You could not convince yourself they were mere projections. As he closed the door, he heard a distant call: ‘Cuckoo.’

Something would not come clear in Laurie’s mind, would not focus. He shook his head vaguely, trying to puzzle things out. For a long while he stood gazing at his little repair fly, not seeing it.

Finally, deciding he would never solve any problem if he could not think what the problem was, he climbed into the vehicle. For a second he sat in the driver’s seat looking out at the minute hall, and then switched on the muon screen and cleared his engagement board.

At once his thoughts were more certain. Everything was bathed in a new lucidity, as if his IQ had suddenly been stepped up.

‘Yes,’ he said to himself, ‘I must find out what’s happened to old Granville Esmond. Of course I must.’

As he drifted up through the strata of buildings, he tried to remember the last time he had seen the old boy. He was not too clear on that point – possibly he had been drinking too heavily when Esmond had left. He could recall the old fellow at Betty Hulcoup’s party the week before, standing looking on as always. Esmond rarely did anything but look on, yet, when you thought about it, he was a real sociable type. Why, looking back, Laurie could remember him at almost any spot of high-life you might name.

Even when Laurie had that wonderful three days with Pauline Dent, Esmond had been looking on. Odd they hadn’t been offended by him at the time, when you thought about it, considering how they –

Laurie stopped with a jolt at the traffic autobeam at 12th. He was nearly home already. Thinking about old Ezzie, as they called him, made time pass quickly. Good old Ezzie!

A warm glow of pleasure ran through Laurie as he realised he had no memory of any pleasant time in which Ezzie did not also feature, just standing by, looking on, smiling, ‘taking it all in,’ as the saying was.

‘Good old Ezzie!’ Laurie said aloud. ‘He must be my lucky mascot. I must look him up when I get back to the shop.’

He shuttled along 11th until he was in his home square, dialled his number, was accepted, clicked off the muon screen and materialised.

‘Hullo, boss!’ a voice called, and Tom Fenwick appeared. He was a friend of Laurie’s, and only put in an hour or so on the bench when business was particularly pressing, as at present.

‘Hullo, Tom,’ Laurie said.

‘Something wrong? Client engaged? You look worried.’

‘I was just trying to think what I was thinking of,’ Laurie said blankly.

‘Oh, it’ll come back if you stop worrying about it, as Freud said to the lady who’d lost her nervous complaint. Did you find Mr. Esmond in, I asked you.’

‘Oh … er, Mr. Esmond?’ With an effort, Laurie pulled him self together. His brain almost seemed to be clicking. ‘Do you mean old Ezzie? I haven’t seen him for some time.’

‘Who are you talking about?’ Tom asked in puzzlement. ‘Are you ill?’

He placed his hand in assumed consternation on Laurie’s brow and went on, ‘What about old Ezzie? Did you say you hadn’t seen him?’

‘Not since last week,’ Laurie said.

‘I went out with the Baer boys last night and we saw him then,’ Tom said.




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