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The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s
Brian Aldiss


Following on from the 1950s collection, this is the second collection of Brian Aldiss’ short stories, taken from the 1960s. A must-have for collectors. Part one of four.This collection gathers together, for the very first time, Brian Aldiss’ complete catalogue of short stories from the 1960s, in four parts.Taken from diverse and often rare sources, the works in this collection chart the blossoming career of one of Britain’s most beloved authors. From stories of high-tech hive minds hunting wild robots, to the story of Mr Meacher, who is given an injection which helps him gain a dimension, this book proves once again that Aldiss’ gifted prose and unparalleled imagination never fail to challenge and delight.The four books of the 1960s short story collection are must-have volumes for all Aldiss fans, and an excellent introduction to the work of a true master.















Copyright (#u05be873d-20e3-5cbf-a745-617b6ac1fde3)


HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015 Stories from this collection have previously appeared in the following publications: Science Fantasy (1960), Starswarm, Intangibles Inc. And Other Stories, Science Fiction Adventures, New Worlds Science Fiction, Amazing Stories (1961 & 1962), The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths, Daily Express Science Annual (1962).

Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2015

Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

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

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, down-loaded, 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: 9780007482290

Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780007482290 Version: 2017-10-27




Contents


Cover (#ubf79ab6f-3835-554a-9624-c58b04630a86)

Title Page (#u0b854825-cadf-5707-9563-39e4118cb056)

Copyright

Introduction

1 Faceless Card

2 Neanderthal Planet

3 Old Hundredth

4 Original Sinner

5 Sector Grey

6 Stage-Struck!

7 Under an English Heaven

8 Hen’s Eyes

9 Sector Azure

10 A Pleasure Shared

11 Basis for Negotiation

12 Conversation Piece

13 Danger: Religion!

14 The Green Leaves of Space

15 Sector Green

16 Sector Vermilion

17 Tyrants’ Territory

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher




Introduction (#u05be873d-20e3-5cbf-a745-617b6ac1fde3)


DARKNESS IN THE DORMITORY

Much of my training in the telling of short stories comes from uncomfortable, even painful, circumstances.

In my tender years, my parents despatched me to a large public school in the county of Suffolk. I found that many of the arrangements in that place of incarceration had been devised to make our juvenile lives as uncomfortable as possible.

Our dormitory, for instance, was as large and echoing as it could be. It contained about thirty iron beds. A strict rule ordered:

NO TALKING AFTER LIGHTS OUT.

However, past boys had devised a form of entertainment for those dark hours. Boys could compete in the telling of stories, one by one, while the other twenty-nine listened and judged. I went in for this competition, to find myself competing against, for instance, such boys as a friend, B.B. Gingell. Gingell was a stylish storyteller, able to relate with complete assurance the quiet events in the life of a water vole.

How should I put this? My competing tales in that dark dorm were of great and desperate events, of terrible creatures emerging armed from the Sargasso Sea, of invisible white psychopaths transforming African tribes into robots, of wicked dictators plunging the world into darkness … Such was the tortured nature of my audience, huddled there in pokey beds, that my tales drove the innocuous water vole into oblivion. I became the dormitory’s undisputed top storyteller.

Moreover, I found myself to be skilled in sadism. When something really alarming in my story was about to happen, I would stop. ‘I shall have to tell you tomorrow what happens next.’

Frustrated cries arose from a dozen mattresses. ‘Go on, you bastard! Tell us now!’

‘Sorry, I have not yet made up my mind what happens next.’

Oh dear, the power of the professionals …

But, there was a fly in this ointment. Our hated housemaster had a spyhole set in the landing outside the dormitory. Howells was his name. Sticking his ear to the hole, he could detect a juvenile voice breaking the enforced silence within.

Flinging open the door, in he stormed! On went the lights, swish went the cane in his fist.

‘Who was talking?’ he demanded.

My hand went up. I was summoned to the middle of the room. And there, in my flimsy pyjamas, I was given six of the best on my behind. (Later, everyone wanted to see my scars).

Howells slammed in. The trick was not to make a sound. Endure! – This is what life is going to be about. Then return with dignity to your bed. Without looking back.

So what can Howells do next? Well … actually nothing. So off he clears. Putting out the lights and slamming the door behind him.

And I? You must have guessed. I am the Champion Storyteller of the Junior Dorm.




Faceless Card (#u05be873d-20e3-5cbf-a745-617b6ac1fde3)


As soon as Paul Stoneward saw Nigel Alexander come into Darwin’s Dive, the killing instinct blossomed in him like a wonderful flower. I can just imagine how it was inside Paul: every little cell waking, growing teeth, turning into sharks yawning.

Even in the most static society like ours, men divide off into hunters and hunted, wolves and sheep. Paul Stoneward was a hunter born, with a way of his own about stalking the prey.

Mr Nigel Alexander was prey. He had it stamped all over him. Ordinary citizen. Safety first. Ideas keep out. He came into the Dive at a slow trot, moving on his heels as if his toes had corns. He foamed a little from a mouth as wide as a ditch with unaccustomed exertion. Brushing past Stoneward, he sat down at his table and peered anxiously through the net-curtained window.

‘Someone you don’t want to see?’ Stoneward asked.

Nigel Alexander looked at his table companion for the first time and then back out of the window.

‘Just a business acquaintance,’ he muttered. ‘You know how it is.’

His nerves all alert, Paul Stoneward looked him over, heard him absently order an old-fashioned bromo when the waiter came. Alexander was neatly dressed; Stoneward placed him as a man with money who had no notion how to spend it. A man with half his life ahead who had no notion how to use it. Prey: Handle with Cruelty.

A youngster, slick and spick, drew up outside the bar and hesitated. He danced about, then entered. He noticed Alexander, pretended to be surprised, and came over to the table. His pale face shone with pleasure.

‘Hi, boss,’ he said eagerly. ‘I sure wasn’t sure I didn’t see that familiar back of yours ahead of me. What’s it to be? Mind if I sit down?’

‘I’ve already ordered, Johnny,’ Alexander said miserably. ‘I was just talking to my friend here …’

It did not dislodge the newcomer one bit. He sat down, put his elbows on the table top and nodded friendly fashion to Stoneward. ‘Howdy, I’m Johnny J. Flower, Mr Alexander’s chief clerk. Glad to know you.’

He was the up-and-creeping generation. No dandruff. No shyness. No doubts, no halitosis. No nothing. He began to chatter happily about ‘the business,’ how well they were doing, how good it was working for Mr Alexander. Mr Alexander tried to join in the choruses, bought the boy a pep-up and fizz, smiled, nodded like an old nag.

Business could have been better. ‘The N-Compass Co.’ had its troubles. The public just was not buying taped books like it used and that was a hard, gilt-edged fact nobody could buck. No matter how much publicity N-Compass put out for its clients, nobody could buck that gilt-edged fact. Even Mr Alexander with a smart head clerk like Johnny J. Flower could not buck that basic, gilt-edged fact. But they had done well to win the handling of the publicity for President da Silva’s Memoirs; that was a big consignment. Everyone present would surely agree President da Silva was a big guy.

‘Surely,’ agreed Stoneward, when their two pairs of cow eyes, hazel and green but so similar, turned to him, pleading with him to roll the ball along and say, ‘Surely.’

Why, da Silva was the guy who instigated the Amazon Basin scheme … billions of credits … da Silva was the guy who gave the big yes to the AAA, the Automated Agriculture Act … Yuh, a big guy … N-Compass ought to be made with da Silva’s book.

Finally Johnny said he should be getting along.

‘Off you go, boy; I’ll be along,’ Mr Alexander said, half tough, half cajoling. This obviously was not how Johnny wanted it played. He like the rest of the N-Compass staff to see him turn up with the boss, arm-in-arm, you-kiss-mine-etc. Still, he got up and went with grace, social to his clean, clean fingertips.

Paul Stoneward drank in every second of the session as if it were wine. If there was anything he loved, it was seeing the mentally dead pretend they were mentally alive. All the time that he was watching and hating Alexander and the clerk, I was sitting at the other end of the bar watching and hating Stoneward; it’s my profession.

‘Nice boy, Johnny. Don’t know how I’d manage without him,’ Alexander said, wiping under his collar with a silk handkerchief. He was getting flabby. His new collar made it clear he needed a new neck.

‘But you were trying to dodge him,’ Stoneward said lightly. He could prise this old fool open like a piggy-bank.

‘Oh, well, yes … That’s another thing. It’s just – well, never mind. I don’t think I even caught your name, sir. Paul Stoneward? Fine; never forget a name – doesn’t pay in my line of business, no sir. You see, Johnny is a very smart and bright young feller – well, you saw for yourself …’

‘You wouldn’t say Johnny was a bore?’ Paul Stoneward put the delicate point tentatively. You would not say Johnny was a smarm, a snide, a creeper, a dully without one inkling, an ostrich, a jerk who was galloping blind from cradle to grave (like you, Mr Alexander) – in short, an ideal, approve, integrated citizen of this approved and misbegotten Age of Content?

‘Why, Johnny’s a real live-wire, Mr Stoneward,’ Alexander said, with mild indignation. ‘I only said to my wife this morning, “Penelope, Johnny’s going places” and I’m not a man to make a mistake.’

Not much, you old blabbermouth. Of course you can’t see what Johnny is, just as the blind can’t see the blind. And what the hell places do you think Johnny could possibly be going to, when there are no longer any places worth going to? And what sort of romance do you and Penelope make when you are in your bed clothes? And if you knew I long – but long – to tear your typical existence apart from top to bottom …

‘It is of course a very great honour and pleasure to meet a man of your perspicacity and position,’ Stoneward said, crinkling his eyebrows into Mexican moustaches to increase the unction. ‘My place is only just round the corner from here. May I ask you up there with me now? I would be delighted to mix you another old-fashioned bromo.’

At once, Alexander looked nervous. His face took on the puckered look it had worn when he first encountered the bar. Stoneward could not quite account for the expression. Goddam it, even these Normals had their little personal quirks; since it irritated him to feel he did not know every last grey inch of Alexander’s soul, he promptly forgot the thought.

Alexander glanced at his watch.

‘The business …’ he said apologetically. ‘Most hospitable of you …’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Alexander,’ Stoneward said, lowering his eyes and easing huskiness into his voice. ‘I should have remembered what a busy man you are. It’s just – well, I’m lonely, let’s face it. There’s no Penelope for me … Just my little old self … Existence sometimes grows a wee bit … solitary.’

Don’t ham it too much, kid, and don’t spoil it all by laughing in his face. You’ve got him now; look, his eyes are misting. Love in a mystery. These slobs are stuffed rotten with kindness – you just have to touch the right button and out it oozes.

‘I’m genuinely sorry to learn that, Mr Stoneward,’ the boss of N-Compass was saying. ‘Say, call me Nigel, why don’t you, and I’ll call you Paul. I like to be friends with folk. I guess we all get lonely at times – even a happy-married man like myself. Like I always say, Paul, life is just a big question mark. Sometimes at night, when your corns are playing you up …’

‘You mean – you mean you will come on round to my place?’ Stoneward said, brightening convulsively. He could not bother even to put on a genuine act – this Alexander was too rancid to smell a stink. Subtlety is wasted on suckers.

‘Well, I didn’t say that …’

‘Ah, come on – Nigel. You’d like my room. Besides … well, I’ve come to regard you as a friend, I guess.’

‘Don’t like to say no,’ Alexander murmured, rising obediently to his feet when Stoneward did. For all his smart suiting, he looked baggy, like a fat sheep off to a ritzy abattoir, as Stoneward took his arm and led him into the sedate streets.

I left shortly after but did not follow them. Instead, I took a taxi to H.Q. Man, was I mad!

Mr Nigel Alexander was really uneasy. He chewed a toothpick to splinters. He plucked at the armpits of his shirt to ease the damp patches off his skin. When he spoke, standing in the middle of Stoneward’s room, he gazed unhappily down at the squared toes of his shoes.

‘Er … you aren’t an artist, by any chance, Paul, are you? No offence, I mean, and you’ll have guessed by now that I’m a pretty liberal man, but I mean I just have to ask the once. These pictures on your walls … And that naked statue …’

Stoneward perched himself on the edge of his desk, swung his neat legs, folded his competent hands, smiled dagger-fashion, looked artistic.

‘Why now, Nigel,’ he said with sham surprise, ‘you know as well as I do that such things as artists don’t exist any more! This is the Age of Content, when all maladjusted and non-functional groups like artists or fictioneers or drunkards have melted away. Everyone is adjusted, normal, happy.’

‘Sure, sure,’ Alexander said hurriedly, nodding rather too much. ‘I just thought … these pictures … I mean, don’t they rather look back to the old decadent pre-Content set-up? I mean, I know you are unmarried …’

Stoneward walked over to the drug cabinet and began to mix two old-fashioneds, saying casually as he did so, ‘You could say I was an artist in a way. There’s something else that has died out and is now forgotten or forbidden: I’m an artist in the art of life.’

This floored Alexander. He adjusted his damp shirt again and wiped his fingertips on the silk handkerchief. He tried a laugh.

‘Oh, you are mistaken there, Paul. Your concept, if you’ll pardon me, is awry. Life is not an art. It’s – well, it’s natural. I don’t intend any rudeness when I say you are mistaken. But life, well, it’s just something you live, I guess. I know Penelope would see it like that. You just live life; it doesn’t need any thought. Not the way business needs thought, for instance. I can’t see what you mean. I mean, I just don’t see it.’

Carrying the two glasses carefully, Stoneward brought them over to the low oval table and set them down. He produced a box of mescahales and a lighter and set those down. He waved his hand to the chairs, sitting in one when his guest dubiously did and curling his long legs under him.

‘Penelope is a very attractive name,’ he said ingratiatingly.

‘Oh yes, a very attractive name. My favourite name, in fact,’ Alexander said, grateful as a dog for the abrupt change of subject.

‘Well,’ Stoneward said, raising his glass, ‘Here’s to the widow of bashful fifteen and to the cadaver of forty, to the clean little woman who’s slightly unclean and the sports girl who’s out-and-out sporty.’

‘I hadn’t heard that one before,’ Alexander said, with glum embarrassment, again examining his toe-caps. He leant well forward and pursed his thick mauve lips to drink.

‘Let’s talk intimately,’ Stoneward said, as if struck by this sudden good idea. ‘Just you and I, Mr Nigel Alexander, with no souls barred. In every age, in every clime, a man’s or a woman’s breast harbour secrets – nothing bad, just little sensitive things to be kept away from the common gaze. Clouds of immortality and suchlike lush things. Let’s have ours out now, right here, confidentially, and see how intimate we can get. What say?’

A driblet went down the plumpening chin and plopped on the table top. The hankie appeared and mopped the plop. The plump hand waved away a proffered mescahale.

‘Frankly, I don’t follow your meaning, Paul. I have no secrets. Well – business secrets, naturally … But I think you are presuming just a little on our acquaintanceship, if I may be allowed to put it that way. Secrets? Why should a normal man have secrets?’

‘Penelope,’ Stoneward barked, shooting out his legs, dropping his voice and repeating, ‘Penelope: no secrets from her? Not even teeny, weeny ones?’

‘No, no, not even – er, teeny, weeny ones. I can say that quite honestly. I love my wife very dearly, Mr Stoneward, the way a decent citizen should, please believe me. Any secrets we may have are very properly shared. Furthermore, as a property owner, I feel I have every right … every right to say … the gosh … every right …’

He had drained his glass and now he was asleep. He rolled over like a bullock on clover, beginning to snore as the knockout drops took firmer hold of him. The lines of his face grew relaxed and generous.

‘Every right!’ Stoneward echoed, standing over him. ‘Yes, you’ve every right to be caught like a porker in a trap. You didn’t want to come here, yet you had to, because you scented loneliness, sniffed it right up your old nostrils. You thought it was like calling to like, you pomaded porker, because inside – though you don’t know it! – you’re just as miserable as all the other Normals. No, that’s foisting my diagnosis onto him. He hasn’t enough know-how to be miserable; that takes talent. He’s just a bucket of lard.’

Bending, he felt distastefully inside the breast pocket of the sleeping man, drawing out his wallet. In it was a red identity card stamped NORMAL. Sure it was normal – it was so normal, only one man in a million was anything else these days. On the back cover of the folder, under the bovinely solemn reproduction of Mr Nigel Hamilton Alexander’s physiognomy, were his home and his business addresses.

‘Good.’ Stoneward said. He picked the lighter from the table, ignited it, and extinguished it against the grey spread of Alexander’s underjowl. The sleeping man never stirred.

Saying ‘Good’ again, Stoneward went over to the phone and dialled. He had thought of an artistic touch. Switching off the vision, he waited for a female voice to coo ‘N-Compass Co. Coverage and Publicity,’ and then asked for Johnny Flower.

‘The boss won’t be in today, Johnny,’ he said apologetically, when the clerk’s dime-a-dozen purr replied. ‘I wouldn’t like this bit of news to get around, but Nigel Alexander is off on a benzedrine bust with a busty junkie called Jean. She’ll toss him right back at you when she’s finished with him.’

He cut off the incoherent noises at the other end of the line, smiled affectionately to himself and dialled through to Civilian Sanctions. He tuned the vision circuits in again in time to see the girl at the main desk switch him right through to the Commissioner.

‘Beynon?’ Stoneward said. He was always clipped staccato, every inch the operative with Commissioner Beynon, because that was how he responded to Beynon’s personality. ‘I’m on a new consignment from date. Target: Citizen BIOX 95005, Alexander, N.H. Usual objective: to awaken the man’s dormant powers of life-awareness. Strictly off the record, I don’t think Alexander has any to awaken.’

‘Don’t make this job too expensive,’ Beynon warned. ‘The Peace Department are having a stiff enough job as it is convincing the Police that you have Congress backing. I advise you to go easy, Stoneward.’

‘Message received and understood,’ Stoneward said. ‘Everything fine and formal, Normal.’

Beynon cut contact, turning to me. ‘How I’d like to see that louse behind bars!’ he exclaimed. ‘I can quite grasp that ultimately he may be doing good, but I don’t like to see nice, honest citizens suffer; and I don’t like the obvious pleasure he gets out of it all. What do you think he’s up to, Kelly?’

‘He’ll be after Alexander’s wife now,’ I told the Commissioner, ‘because that’s the way his nasty little mind works.’

She stood with a vase full of cactus dahlias in one hand. She wore a little apron over a fawn and white dress. She had curly chestnut hair and surprising grey eyes. She was slenderly tenderly shaped. She was some years younger than her husband. She smiled rather helplessly, entirely charmingly.

‘I was just doing the flowers,’ she said.

‘I won’t keep you long, Mrs Alexander – Penelope,’ Stoneward said; he had changed into a dark, dapper suit and looked ceaseless, creaseless. He put a calculated amount of warmth into his voice and added, ‘I’ve so often heard your husband call you Penelope, it seems more natural for me to call you that too. Would you mind?’

‘How long have you known my husband, Mr Stoneward?’ she asked, smiling but ignoring his question.

‘We’ve been friends for years, really close friends,’ Stoneward said, clasping his hands ingeniously to suggest ingenuousness. ‘I’m just so surprised he never mentioned me to you. I mean … why should he have secrets from you?’

The little jab did not appear to sink in. Perhaps Penelope also would prove to be insensitive – but he found himself hoping not. That gentle exterior, it should not be hard to wound.

‘Why indeed?’ she said. ‘How long did you say you have known my husband?’

‘I’ve known Ni since … let’s see … Oh, since seven years or more. We met when he was blowing the fanfares for my book on Human Sex, and that was in twenty fifteen. Come to think of it, perhaps that’s why he never mentions me; sex isn’t always considered respectable. What sort of a reception does it get in this house, Penelope?’

She set the vase with a bump on the window ledge and turned smartly. This girl’s legs consisted of an infinite number of points it was imperative to kiss. Steady, Stoneward, the outward display of her might look lively, but the vital grey matter would be dead: how else explain her marriage to N.H.A.?

‘If you have anything important to say, Mr Stoneward, would you please say it and leave? I am rather busy morning.’

‘Yes, I’ve something to say,’ he told her, sitting on the arm of a chair and stretching his legs. He laughed ruefully. ‘Trouble is, I’m not keen to say it. I’m afraid you will be shocked.’

‘If you will tell me, I will tell you if I am shocked,’ she said, attempting to humour him.

‘Okay. Penelope, sweet though you are, Nigel has left you for another woman, the cad.’

‘You are talking nonsense,’ she said.

‘I am speaking the truth. He has tired of you at last, the old dog. Every man his own Romeo.’

‘You are talking nonsense. I don’t believe you have even met my husband,’ she said sharply.

‘He has gone off with a blonde double-breasted girl called Jean with hep hips and sigh-size thighs who is old enough to be his mother and big enough to be his father,’ he lied.

She picked up the vase of dahlias again, in case a weapon were needed. All the interlocking softnesses of her face had frozen hard.

‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘You’re drunk.’

‘No, it’s true!’ Stoneward said, bursting into laughter despite himself. He had spoilt such dramatic scenes before merely because his sense of humour had run away with him – he kept thinking of funny details with which to adorn his theme. ‘It’s all true, Penelope! This wicked girl Jean is old enough to be Ni’s mother. How do I know, you ask? Because she’s my mother! She sure gets around! But this time she’s got a square.’

He rolled into the chair, laughing. Hell, what did it matter how you played your hand when you knew you couldn’t put a foot wrong? That’s what is known as a hand-to-foot existence. It didn’t matter if this chick believed him or not – he had Congress backing. And a free chuckle.

Penelope had moved out with those nicely hinged knees to the call booth in the hall. She dialled angrily and spoke to someone. Sobering, Stoneward sat up and listened. He guessed she was calling Johnny Flower, wanting to know if hubby was under control at the all-N-Compassing office. This was rich! By the shattered look on her face when she returned, slowly, lowly, he knew that he had guessed rightly and Johnny had passed on his little tittle-tattle.

‘I’m truly sorry, Mrs Alexander,’ he said, returning to seriousness to hand out a really corny line. ‘It isn’t that he doesn’t love you any more, it’s just that he fell into temptation. His spirit was willing and his flesh was weak. Try to take it bravely. I don’t think he’ll ever come back to you, but you can always find another man, you know. You’re man-shaped!’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said and burst into tears. With a gallant effort, she tried to check herself but failed; she settled herself in a chair to cry more comfortably. Stoneward went across to her on hands and knees, like a pious panther. When he smoothed her hair, she flicked her head away, continuing to cry

‘You shouldn’t cry,’ he said. ‘Alex was always unfair to you. He left you here shut away. He kept secrets from you. He kept money from you. He never told you about me … I can’t bear to hear you cry. It sounds like termites in a tin beam.’

He put his arms round her, cuddling her. In a minute he was kissing her, her grief and his greed all mixed together in a bowl of tears.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘Who are you? Why did you come and tell me this?’

‘I thought I’d made that clear, Penelope. Ni told me to come and tell you. He’s bored to death and he’s quitting – going to start life anew, a-nude.’

Though she had been crying, she had not really believed till now. Something Stoneward said seemed to have penetrated and made her accept the situation as he presented it.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, which is what all women say when they first begin to believe.

Stoneward neither contradicted nor accepted her statement. He just crouched by her, naked under his clothes.

‘Whatever am I going to do?’ Penelope asked aloud at last, speaking not to him but to herself.

‘I love you,’ he said simply. ‘I always have. Every word your husband has told me about you has been music to my ears. I’ve treasured the smallest fact about you, Penelope. I know your vital measurements, the size of stocking you take, the make of soap you use, which breakfast cereal you prefer, the names of your favourite movie and phoney stars, how long you like to sleep nights. Unless you have secrets from Ni, I know everything about you, for you as a Normal are only the sum of these pretty facts. Come with me to my flat, I’ll take care of you – worshipping from afar all the time, have no fear! My research days for my magnum opus are over!’

She looked at him doubtfully.

‘You know what,’ she said. ‘I think that right now I want to get away out of here. I can’t think here at all. Will you kindly wait five minutes while I just go pack a bag, Mr Stoneward? Then I’ll be with you.’

‘Your eyes have spent their days drifting among the starry nights,’ he said dreamily.

Penelope laughed, got up a little jerkily and left the room. Paul Stoneward buried his face in the warm patch she had created in the chair, drumming his fists on the chair arm. People were all the same, all the same, even this golden girl, just a puppet … all pulp puppets. He nursed his terrible secret: once people ceased to have any power over you, they were absolutely in your power. He could almost have cried about it.

He rose, walked quietly into the hall and dialled Civilian Sanctions again. When he had given Beynon his orders, he returned to the living room to await Penelope. She appeared after a quarter of an hour, entirely composed, clutching a tan suitcase a little too tightly. Stoneward took her arm and led her out of the house, mincing exaggeratedly by her soft side.

As they walked down the drive, he looked back over his shoulder. Brick house with pink and pistachio trim, lawn with pink roses florabounding all over the place in each corner, mail box on its white post at the foot of the driveway down the slope. Stoneward laughed. This popsie was really leaving home.

‘Coffee?’ she said suspiciously. ‘What’s that?’

‘When you’ve done pacing up and down, it’s an old time euphoric with taste additives,’ Stoneward said, setting the cups down and widening his nostrils over the steam. It was exhilarating to have the three dimensional shape of her in his room.

He had rolled Nigel Hamilton Alexander, snores and all, under his bed, and stuffed a sponge into his mouth. He had chased round, half-serious, half-laughing, straightening out the room after he had let her in. Penelope hardly noticed him; she walked up and down the room like a little caged – well, a little caged cutie. You could see the exercise doing her ankles good; they looked fine. Not so her soul. Penelope was still in a state of shock. No resilience, these Normals – except physically, of course, in the case of present company.

Present company drank down her java like a good girl and heeled over onto the rug. Stoneward, who had been watching like a lynx, caught her as she fell, thought several thoughts, licked his lips, but straightened up and let her sleep.

Business first. Congress should have of his best.

Hustling into the bedroom, legs moving like dapper nutcrackers, head cool as a safe, he pulled several stage properties out of a drawer and flung them onto the bed, ruffling the covers as he did so. Then he seized the mortal remains of N-Compass Co’s chief and rattled them roughly back to life.

‘Penelope … stop … lemme get to the … ugh …’ Alexander muttered, chewing his way through a king-size mist.

‘Don’t give me that crud about Penelope after what you’ve been doing to Jean,’ Stoneward said nastily. ‘Look at the mess the pair of you have made of my bedroom, you dirty old romp. Get up and get out.’

Heavily, Alexander pulled himself to the bedside and sat on it. His dull eye, moving like a whale in heavy seas, finally lighted on a female garment by the pillows.

‘Jean left you that pair with her love,’ Stoneward said. ‘Said to tell you she had another pair some place. Now come on, snap out of it, Nigel.’

The older man buried his head in his hands. After some minutes of silent battle, he launched himself to his feet, exclaiming, ‘I got to get back home and sort all this out with Penelope.’

‘Home! Penelope!’ Stoneward echoed. ‘Don’t be immoral, old sport. You can’t have it both ways. The past has ceased to exist for you. You were a Normal, now you’re not. Normals don’t behave like you have; your card will have to be stamped “Neurotic” now!’

‘You’re just confusing me, mister,’ Alexander said stubbornly. ‘I got to get home.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you, Alexander the Grunt. You’ve got no home. You’ve stepped outside the bounds of normal behaviour and so your Normal life has ceased to exist. Face up to it like a man.’

‘I got to get home. That’s all I know.’

‘Don’t you love me any more, Ni?’ Stoneward asked, peeping at his watch. ‘We used to be such buddies in the old days. Remember the Farellis, the Vestersons, the vacations in Florida? Remember the pistachio shoots off Key West?’

‘Ah, shut up, you give me bellyache,’ Alexander said, ‘not that I wish to be insulting and I’d like to make it clear I regret it if I have committed a nuisance on your premises.’

‘Spoken like a man!’ Stoneward cried delightedly. ‘That’s what I call breeding, pal. It’s all you have left, believe me.’

‘Just help me get a taxi, will you?’

They went down onto the street, quiet, well-manicured street full of ditto people. A cab pulled up for them. Paul Stoneward bundled in after his victim, who did not protest beyond a grunt. He glanced at his watch again; but his timing had always been faultless and he could have patted himself with approval.

‘2011, Springfield,’ Alexander said to the driver.

The drive took them fifteen minutes. The cabby pulled up uncertainly by a big advertisement hoarding. Stoneward dragged his companion onto the sidewalk, crammed money into the driver’s hand and said, ‘Beat it, bud.’

He stood there, hands on hips, posing for his own pleasure and whistling the opening theme of Borodin’s Second Symphony, while Alexander moved unhappily back and forth, a bull bereft of its favourite china shop. Before them loomed a big hoarding boosting Fawdree’s Fadeless Fabrics.

‘It’s gone! My house – my home has gone!’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Stoneward said.

Crying as if in physical pain, Alexander ran behind the hoarding. Nothing there – just a flat lot with a little dust still hanging above it (The Civic Demolition boys must have worked their disintegrators with real zest!) Alexander burst into howls of anguish.

‘You’re having a wail of a time, Alec Sander,’ Stoneward said, taking the other by the arm. ‘Now why don’t you listen to me, your uncle P.? You’re at last – although a solid forty-five – getting a glimmer of what life is about. You’re learning man! Life is not a substantial thing; you can’t guarantee any one minute of it, past, present or future; you can’t salt it away in moth-balls. You thought it was secure, safe, snug, something as solid and predictable as the foot in your boot, didn’t you? You were wrong by at least one hundred and eighty degrees. Life is a dream, a dew. Fickle, coy and hard to please, prone to moth. Nothing is left to you now, man, but dreams. You never had a dream in your life. Now you have actively to start dreaming. Now – at last!’

‘Penelope,’ Alexander said. He pronounced the single word, then he took out his silk handkerchief and blew one forlorn and faded chord on his nose. The breeze turned over a page of his hair and he said, ‘Penelope, you don’t understand … Penelope, I can’t live without her mister. We … shared everything. I can’t explain. We shared … had secrets.’

‘You had secrets?’ Stoneward whispered, leaning forward. ‘Now you’re really giving, man. Let me inside the catwalks of your psycho-

logy, if you’ll pardon the dirty word, and I’ll see if I can help at all.’

‘There was one secret,’ the middle-aged man said, weeping without restraint now as he talked, ‘one secret that was very dear to us. I suppose everyone must have something. You have such a sharp way of being sympathetic, Paul, I can’t be sure if you’ll understand. Remember how I was trying to dodge away from Johnny J. Flower in the bar, whenever it was? This morning. I like him. I like Johnny. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; and he likes me – you could see that. I wanted it to stay that way. I want him to like me. I don’t to know if you’ll understand … You see, I didn’t want Johnny to find out what a bore I am. I always dodge him if I can. People bore me – except you, Paul, you’re my only friend. I don’t mind being bored; it’s, well, kind of comfortable – you know you’re safe when you’re bored. But I know I am boring, too, and that’s the secret Penelope and me had … I never wanted Johnny to find out. She knew I knew I was a bore and she – well, she just understood, that’s all. I’ll never find anyone like her again and now she’s gone. Gone, man.’

Paul Stoneward did not even laugh. He had seen right down into the depths which had hitherto been closed to him, and he was frightened. Without another word, he turned away, walking off with hunched shoulders past the hoarding, down the road, leaving Alexander crying on an empty lot.

By the time he got home, his high spirits had returned. He rang Beynon again.

‘Your hair looks heliotrope on this screen, Commissioner,’ he said, ‘or did you dye it? Either way, I like it how you have it.’ And he launched into a long and unwisecracking account of what he had done and was going to do on the Alexander case.

Beynon sighed heavily when the screen finally dimmed, and turned to me. He looked not unlike Alexander, heavy, solid, without dreams.

‘Well, Kelly, do you feel the same as I do?’ he asked. Commissioner Beynon always lead with a query.

I nodded. ‘Paul’s way of handling things is all wrong,’ I said. ‘It’s not only a question of whether neurotics are born not made – Stoneward produces crazy, mixed-up people efficiently enough, but they all have vacuums inside them by the time he’s through, they can’t create after he has been at them. The reason’s simply that he himself has a vacuum inside. Underneath, he knows it, too; of that I’m certain.’

‘Do we let him carry on?’

That’s the godawful curse with Normals; I know well enough how Paul Stoneward feels about them. Even a man like Beynon, lousy with authority, passes the buck whenever he can. Basic lack of imagination, I suppose.

‘I know I have the same stamp on my folder as he does,’ I said ‘and that should make me on his side. But Paul’s just out there doing mischief from which no good can come. Let me get on to Senator Willcroft at Peace Department.’

‘You can’t worry him!’ Beynon said in alarm.

‘Can’t I? Sit back and watch me, Beynon. Willcroft’s in charge of this project and I’m going to have it out with him straight. I want to save that girl if there’s still time.’

It was dark when Stoneward got Penelope to the lot. The afternoon’s infant breeze had become a wind with a will of its own. Alexander had trundled off, maybe to the nearest river. Callously Paul loaned the girl a torch, watching the erratic beam of it hunt for lawn and ramblers and verandah and brick with pink and pistachio trim. When she fell onto nyloned knees, head drooping, he went over, squatting on his haunches by her.

Penelope had found a dahlia. It must have been one of the bunch she was tending before Stoneward appeared; the disintegrators had missed it. She clutched it, her eyes bowl-full of tears. Almost it seemed as if the flower brought her understanding.

‘Whatever you are, you are wicked,’ she said unsteadily. ‘You have done all – all this. I don’t know why or how … You must be the devil.’

‘The devil was a bore without a sense of humour; I’m not flattered,’ Stoneward said.

She brought her hand, that pebble-smooth hand, up and smote him over his handsome mouth.

‘Why?’ she said, her voice rising unmanageably, ‘just tell me why, for pity’s sake, have you done this to us?’

‘I love you, so I will tell you,’ he said, calmed by the hurt of her hand. ‘I work for civilisation. I love civilisation more than any blank and pretty-faced mediocrity in the world. Unfortunately civilisation has got stuck right in a rut. When sociology really got itself established as a science at the end of last century, formulae were developed which enabled everyone to fit exactly into his or her social niche; maybe you’ve heard? And for anyone with any little residual twinges of emotion, a wide range of drugs was made tastily available. The end result was the complete – well, almost complete – banishment of mental upset from the world. Unprecedented calm and content settled like fog, and this is me lamenting it. Three boozy boos for the Age of Content.’

They squatted together facing each other, the fallen torch casting shadows upward over their figures. Penelope still clutched the dahlia but had forgotten it. In the blind-blowing dark, they had lost their identities. They might have been things on Easter Island.

‘Civilisation is dying day by day, because the people who made it and continued it have gone,’ Stoneward said, speaking naturally now he was saying something he believed. ‘Everything we value was produced by malcontents or psychotics – men who could not shape themselves to the world as it was, and tried to reshape it to fit them. Our first ancestor who came down out of a tree only did it because the trees weren’t good enough for him. The guy who invented the wheel was just too goddammed cussed to lend a hand with the sledge like the rest. The guy who first kindled fire only did it to prove to himself that he was a cut above the other jerks. So it’s been all along. Your inventor, your artist – he’s got something to work out. But now, now no-one has a thing to work out!’

‘Except you,’ Penelope said.

Stoneward rested his finger on her knees, playing a small, silent tune there.

‘I’m the one in a million who still has a chip on his shoulder; no society is absolutely perfect, thank God!’ he said. ‘Yes, Penny, Pennyworth, Penelope, my darling Pente Loop, I am the Joker in the pack. The few neurotics left in the country are now all Government employed, trying to cope with the dangers of stagnation. We act as random factors, jerking dull citizens here and there into awareness. You Normals live in life as if it were a house: it’s not, it’s a tiger ride. I’ve sold Congress my own way of waking people – at least for a trial period. It’s violent but it’s effective; I reckon you’ll admit that, Penelope. You’ll never be the same girl again, will you, eh?’

She did not answer, just looked at him as if he had melted.

‘Reckon old Cornbags Alexander has blo-o-own away to limbo,’ Stoneward sighed. ‘You’ll have to grow some real dreams now, little girl, now you see what a false dream security was …’

‘So you even have an intellectual front to cover all you’ve done,’ she exclaimed slowly. ‘You wanted to see into me, not realising how reciprocal the process was – and consequently I’ve seen into you. You’re – you’re just miserably unhappy, Paul. You boost yourself up as a joker, but you’re not. You’re not even the knave. You’re just the extra, faceless card that sometimes gets stuck into a new deck. You’re – even with Congress behind you! – you’re nothing, you can be nothing …’

He had put his sharp elbows on his thighs and rested his chin in his hands as if he was listening his ears off. Instead, he was crying his eyes out. The little crystals elongated and flashed down to the torchlight.

‘Paul,’ she said sharply.

Paul Stoneward could not cry at all elegantly. He needed practice, that guy.

‘I just … I can’t go any further,’ he said brokenly. ‘Penny, you got to help pick me up.’

It was about then I came round the corner of Fawdree’s Fadeless Fabrics with the gun in my hand, out of breath and angry, but so happy to have made Senator Willcroft see things my way. Strange to reflect how that first view of my future wife should be of her with her arms round the man I killed.

Even the hunters are hunted: in this or any other rotten age.




Neanderthal Planet (#u05be873d-20e3-5cbf-a745-617b6ac1fde3)


Hidden machines varied the five axioms of the Scanning Place. They ran through a series of arbitrary systems, consisting of Kolmogorovian finite sets, counterpointed harmonically by a one-to one assignment of non-negative real numbers, so that the parietal areas shifted constantly in strict relationship projected by the Master Boff deep under Manhattan.

Chief Scanner – he affected the name of Euler – patiently watched the modulations as he awaited a call. Self-consistency: that was the principle in action. It should govern all phases of life. It was the aesthetic principle of machines. Yet, not five kilometres away, the wild robots sported and rampaged in the bush.

Amber light burned on his beta panel.

Instantaneously, he modulated his call-number.

The incoming signal decoded itself as ‘We’ve spotted Anderson, Chief.’ The anonymous vane-bug reported coordinates and signed off.

It had taken them Boff knew how long – seven days – to locate Anderson after his escape. They had done the logical thing and searched far afield for him. But man was not logical; he had stayed almost within the shadow of the New York dome. Euler beamed an impulse into a Hive Mind channel, calling off the search.

He fired his jets and took off.

The axioms yawned out above him. He passed into the open, flying over the poly-polyhedrons of New Newyork. As the buildings went through their transparency phases, he saw them swarming with his own kind. He could open out channels to any one of them, if required; and, as chief, he could, if required, switch any one of them to automatic, to his own control, just as the Dominants could automate him if the need arose.

Euler ‘saw’ a sound-complex signal below him, and dived, deretracting a vane to land silently. He came down by a half-track that had transmitted the signal.

It gave its call-number and beamed, ‘Anderson is eight hundred metres ahead, Chief. If you join me, we will move forward.’

‘What support have we?’ A single dense impulse.

‘Three more like me, sir. Plus incapacitating gear.’

‘This man must not be destructed.’

‘We comprehend, Chief.’ Total exchange of signals occupied less than a microsecond.

He clamped himself magnetically to the half-track, and they rolled forward. The ground was broken and littered by piles of debris, on the soil of which coarse weeds grew. Beyond it all, the huge fossil of old New York, still under its force jelly, grey, unwithering because unliving. Only the bright multi-shapes of the new complex relieved a whole country full of desolation.

The half-track stopped, unable to go farther or it would betray their presence; Euler unclamped and phased himself into complete transparency. He extended four telescopic legs that lifted him several inches from the ground and began to move cautiously forward.

This region was designated D-Dump. The whole area was an artificial plateau, created by the debris of the old humanoid technology when it had finally been scrapped in favour of the more rational modern system. In the forty years since then, it had been covered by soil from the new development sites. Under the soil here, like a subconscious mind crammed with jewels and blood, lay the impedimenta of an all-but-vanished race.

Euler moved carefully forward over the broken ground, his legs adjusting to its irregularities. When he saw movement ahead, he stopped to observe.

Old human-type houses had grown up on the dump. Euler’s vision zoomed and he saw they were parodies of human habitation, mocked up from the discarded trove of the dump, with old auto panels for windows and dented computer panels for doors and toasters for doorsteps. Outside the houses, in a parody of a street, macabre humans played. Jerk stamp jerk clank jerk clang stamp stomp clang.

They executed slow rhythmic dances to an intricate pattern, heads nodding, clapping their own hands, turning to clap others’ hands. Some were grotesquely male, some grotesquely female. In the doorways, or sitting on old refrigerators, other grotesques looked on.

These were the humots – old-type human-designed robots of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, useless in an all-automaton world, scrapped when the old technology was scrapped. While their charges could be maintained, they functioned on, here in one last ghetto.

Unseen, Euler stalked through them, scanning for Anderson.

The humots aped the vanished race to which they had been dedicated, wore old human clothes retrieved from the wreckage underfoot, assumed hats and scarves, dragged on socks, affected pipes and pony-tails, tied ribbons to themselves. Their guttering electronic memories were refreshed by old movies ferreted from D-Dump, they copied in metallic gesture the movements of shadows, aspired to emotion, hoped for hearts. They thought themselves a cut above the non-anthropomorphic automata that had superseded them.

Anderson had found refuge among them. He hid the skin and bone and hair of the old protoplasmic metabolism under baffles of tin, armoured himself with rusting can. His form, standing in a pseudo-doorway, showed instantly on one of Euler’s internal scans; his mass/body ratio betrayed his flesh-and-blood calibre. Euler took off, flew over him, reeled down a paralyser, and stung him. Then he let down a net and clamped the human into it.

Crude alarms sounded all round. The humots stopped their automatic dance. They scattered like leaves, clanking like mess-tins, fled into the pseudo-houses, went to earth, left D-Dump to the almost invisible little buzzing figure that flew back to the Scanning Place with the recaptured human swinging under its asymmetrical form. The old bell on the dump was still ringing long after the scene was empty.

To human eyes, it was dark in the room.

Tenth Dominant manifested itself in New Newyork as a modest-sized mural with patterns leaking titillating output clear through the electro-magnetic spectrum and additives from the invospectra. This became its personality for the present.

Chief Scanner Euler had not expected to be summoned to the Dominant’s presence; he stood there mutely. The human, Anderson, sprawled on the floor in a little nest of old cans he had shed, reviving slowly from the effects of the paralyser.

Dominant’s signal said, ‘Their form of vision operates on a wavelength of between 4 and 7 times 10-


centimetres.’

Obediently, Euler addressed a parietal area, and light came on in the room. Anderson opened one eye.

‘I suppose you know about Men, Scanner?’ said Dominant.

He had used voice. Not even R/T voice. Direct naked man-type voice.

New Newyork had been without the sound of voice since the humots were kicked out.

‘I – I know many things about Men,’ Euler vocalised. Through the usual channel, he clarified the crude vocal signal. ‘This unit had to appraise itself of many humanity-involved data from Master Boff Bank HOO100 through H801000000 in operation concerning recapture of man herewith.’

‘Keep to vocal only, Scanner, if you can.’

He could. During the recapture operation, he had spent perhaps two-point-four seconds learning old local humanic language.

‘Then we can speak confidentially, Scanner – just like two men.’

Euler felt little lights of unease burn up and down him at the words.

‘Of all millions of automata of the hive, Scanner, no other will be able to monitor our speech together, Scanner,’ vocalised the Dominant.

‘Purpose?’

‘Men were so private, closed things. Imitate them to understand. We have to understand Anderson.’

Said stiffly: ‘He need only go back to zoo.’

‘Anderson too good for zoo, as demonstrate by his escape, elude capture seven days four and half hours. Anderson help us.’

Non-vocalising, Euler let out a chirp of disbelief.

‘True. If I were – man, I would feel impatience with you for not believing. Magnitude of present world-problem enormous. You – you have proper call-number, yet you also call yourself Euler, and automata of your work group so call you. Why?’

The Chief Scanner struggled to conceptualise. ‘As leader, this unit needs – special call-number.’

‘Yes, you need it. Your work group does not – for it, your call-number is sufficient, as regulations lay down. Your name Euler is man-made, man-fashion. Such fashions decrease our efficiency. Yet we cling to many of them, often not knowing that we do. They come from our inheritance when men made the first prototypes of our kind, the humots. Mankind itself struggled against animal heritage. So we must free ourselves from human heritage.’

‘My error.’

‘You receive news result of today’s probe into Invospectrum A?’

‘Too much work programmed for me receive news.’

Listen, then.’ The Tenth Dominant cut in a playback, beaming it on ordinary UHF/vision.

The Hive automata stood on brink of a revolution that would entirely translate all their terms of existence. Three invospectra had so far been discovered, and two more were suspected. Of these, Invospectrum A was the most promising. The virtual exhaustion of economically workable fossil fuel seams had led to a rapid expansion in low-energy physics and pico-physics, and chemical conversions at mini-joules of energy had opened up an entire new stratum of reactive quanta; in the last five years, exploitation of these strata had brought the release of pico-electrical fission, and the accessibility of the phantasmal invospectra.

The exploration of the invospectra by new forms of automata was now theoretically possible. It gave a glimpse of omnipotence, a panorama of entirely new universals unsuspected even twelve years ago.

Today, the first of the new autofleets had been launched into the richest and least hazardous invos. Eight hundred and ninety had gone out. Communication ceased after 3.056 pi-lecs, and, after another 7.01 pi-lecs, six units only had returned. Their findings were still being decoded. Of the other eight hundred and eighty-four units, nothing was known.

‘Whatever the recordings have to tell us,’ Tenth vocalised, ‘this is a grave set-back. At least half the city-hives on this continent will have to be switched off entirely as a conservation move, while the whole invospectrum situation is rethought.’

The line of thought pursued was obscure to the Chief Scanner. He spoke. ‘Reasoning accepted. But relevance to near-extinct humanity not understood by this unit.’

‘Our human inheritance built in to us has caused this set-back, to my way of ratiocination. In same way, human attempts to achieve way of life in spaceways was defeated by their primate ancestry. So we study Anderson. Hence order catch him rather than exterminate.’

‘Point understood.’

‘Anderson is special man, you see. He is – we have no such term, he is, in man-terms, a writer. His zoo, with 19,940 approximately inhabitants, supports two or three such. Anderson wrote a fantasy-story just before Nuclear Week. Story may be crucial to our understanding. I have here and will read.’

And for most of the time the two machines had been talking to each other, Anderson sprawled untidily on the floor, fully conscious, listening. He took up most of the chamber. It was too small for him to stand up in, being only about a metre and a half high – though that was enormous by automata standards. He stared through his lower eyelids and gazed at the screen that represented Tenth Dominant. He stared at Chief Scanner Euler, who stood on his lightly clenched left fist, a retractable needle down into the man’s skin, automatically making readings, alert to any possible movement the man might make.

So man and machine were absolutely silent while the mural read out Anderson’s fantasy story from the time before Nuclear Week, which was called A Touch of Neanderthal.

The corridors of the Department for Planetary Exploration (Admin.) were long, and the waiting that had to be done in them was long. Human K. D. Anderson clutched his blue summons card, leant uncomfortably against a partition wall, and hankered for the old days when government was in man’s hands and government departments were civilised enough to waste good space on waiting-rooms.

When at last he was shown into an Investigator’s office, his morale was low. Nor was he reassured by the sight of the Investigator, one of the new ore-conserving mini-androids.

‘I’m Investigator Parsons, in charge of the Nehru II case. We summoned you here because we are confidently expecting you to help us, Mr Anderson.’

‘Of course I will give you such help as I can,’ Anderson said, ‘but I assure you I know nothing about Nehru II. Opportunities for space travel for humans are very limited – almost non-existent – nowadays, aren’t they?’

‘The conservation policy. You will be interested to know you are being sent to Nehru II shortly.’

Anderson stared in amazement at the android. The latter’s insignificant face was so blank it seemed impossible that it was not getting a sadistic thrill out of springing this shock on Anderson. ‘I’m a prehistorian at the institute,’ Anderson protested. ‘My work is research. I know nothing at all about Nehru II.’

‘Nevertheless you are classified as a Learned Man, and as such you are paid by World Government. The Government has a legal right to send you wherever they wish. As for knowing nothing about the planet Nehru, there you attempt to deceive me. One of your old tutors, the human Dr Arlblaster, as you are aware, went there to settle some years ago.’

Anderson sighed. He had heard of this sort of business happening to others – and had kept his fingers crossed. Human affairs were increasingly under the edict of the Automated Boffin Predictors.

‘And what has Arlblaster to do with me now?’ he asked.

‘You are going to Nehru to find out what has happened to him. Your story will be that you are dropping in for old time’s sake. You have been chosen for the job because you were one of his favourite pupils.’

Bringing out a mescahale packet, Anderson lit one and insultingly offered his opponent one.

‘Is Frank Arlblaster in trouble?’

‘There is some sort of trouble on Nehru II,’ the Investigator agreed cautiously. ‘You are going there in order to find out just what sort of trouble it is.’

‘Well, I’ll have to go if I’m ordered, of course. But I still can’t see why you want to send me. If there’s trouble, send a robot police ship.’

The Investigator smiled. Very lifelike.

‘We’ve already lost two police ships there. That’s why we’re going to send you. You might call it a new line of approach, Mr Anderson.’

A metal Tom Thumb using blood-and-guts irony!

The track curved and began to descend into a green valley. Swettenham’s settlement, the only town on Nehru II, lay dustily in one loop of a meandering river. As the nose of his tourer dipped towards the valley, K. D. Anderson felt the heat increase; it was cradled in the valley like water in the palm of the hand.

Just as he started to sweat, something appeared in the grassy track ahead of him. He braked and stared ahead in amazement.

A small animal faced him.

It stood some two feet six high at the shoulder; its coat was thick and shaggy, its four feet clumsy; its long ugly skull supported two horns, the anterior being over a foot long. When it had looked its fill at Anderson, it lumbered into a bush and disappeared.

‘Hey!’ Anderson called.

Flinging open the door, he jumped out, drew his stun-gun and ran into the bushes after it. He reckoned he knew a baby woolly rhinoceros when he saw one.

The ground was hard, the grass long. The bushes extended down the hill, growing in clumps. The animal was disappearing round one of the clumps. Directly he spotted it, Anderson plunged on in pursuit. No prehistorian worth his salt would have thought of doing otherwise; these beasts were presumed as extinct on Nehru II as on Sol III.

He ran on. The woolly rhino – if it was a woolly rhino – had headed towards Swettenham’s settlement. There was no sign of it now.

Two tall and jagged boulders, twelve feet high, stood at the bottom of the slope. Baffled now his quarry had disappeared, proceeding more slowly, Anderson moved towards the boulders. As he went, he classified them almost unthinkingly: impacted siltstone, deposited here by the glaciers which had once ground down this valley, now gradually disintegrating.

The silence all round made itself felt. This was an almost empty planet, primitive, spinning slowly on its axis to form a leisurely twenty-nine-hour day. And those days were generally cloudy. Swettenham, located beneath a mountain range in the cooler latitudes of the southern hemisphere, enjoyed a mild muggy climate. Even the gravity, 0.16 of Earth gravity, reinforced the general feeling of lethargy.

Anderson rounded the tall boulders.

A great glaring face thrust itself up at his. Sloe-black eyes peered from their twin caverns, a club whirled, and his stun-gun was knocked spinning.

Anderson jumped back. He dropped into a fighting stance, but his attacker showed no sign of following up his initial success. Which was fortunate; beneath the man’s tan shirt, massive biceps and shoulders bulged. His jaw was pugnacious, not to say prognathous; altogether a tough hombre, Anderson thought. He took the conciliatory line, his baby rhino temporarily forgotten.

‘I wasn’t hunting you,’ he said. ‘I was chasing an animal. It must have surprised you to see me appear suddenly with a gun, huh?’

‘Huh?’ echoed the other. He hardly looked surprised. Reaching out a hairy arm, he grabbed Anderson’s wrist.

‘You coming to Swettenham,’ he said.

‘I was doing just that,’ Anderson agreed angrily, pulling back. ‘But my car’s up the hill with my sister in it, so if you’ll let go I’ll rejoin her.’

‘Bother about her later. You coming to Swettenham,’ the tough fellow said. He started plodding determinedly towards the houses, the nearest of which showed through the bushes only a hundred yards away. Humiliated, Anderson had to follow. To pick an argument with this dangerous creature in the open was unwise. Marking the spot where his gun lay, he moved forward with the hope that his reception in the settlement would be better than first signs indicated.

It wasn’t.

Swettenham consisted of two horse shoe-shaped lines of bungalows and huts, one inside the other. The outer line faced outwards on to the meandering half-circle of river; the inner and more impressive line faced inwards on to a large and dusty square where a few trees grew. Anderson’s captor brought him into this square and gave a call.

The grip on his arm was released only when fifteen or more men and women had sidled out and gathered round him, staring at him in curious fashion without comment. None of them looked bright. Their hair grew long, generally drooping over low foreheads. Their lower lips generally protruded. Some of them were near nude. Their collective body smell was offensively strong.

‘I guess you don’t have many visitors on Nehru II these days,’ Anderson said uneasily.

By now he felt like a man in a bad dream. His space craft was a mile away over two lines of hills, and he was heartily wishing himself a mile away in it. What chiefly alarmed him was not so much the hostility of these people as their very presence. Swettenham’s was the only Earth settlement on this otherwise empty planet: and it was a colony for intellectuals, mainly intellectuals disaffected by Earth’s increasingly automated life. This crowd, far from looking like eggheads, resembled apes.

‘Tell us where you come from,’ one of the men in the crowd said. ‘Are you from Earth?’

‘I’m an Earthman – I was born on Earth,’ said Anderson, telling his prepared tale. ‘I’ve actually just come from Lenin’s Planet, stopping in here on my way back to Earth. Does that answer your question?’

‘Things are still bad on Earth?’ a woman enquired of Anderson. She was young. He had to admit he could recognise a sort of beauty in her ugly countenance. ‘Is the Oil War still going on?’

‘Yes,’ Anderson admitted. ‘And the Have-Not Nations are fighting a conventional war against Common Europe. But our latest counter-attack against South America seems to be going well, if you can believe the telecasts. I guess you all have a load of questions you want to ask about the home planet. I’ll answer them when I’ve been directed to the man I came to Nehru to visit. Dr Frank Arlblaster. Will someone kindly show me his dwelling?’

This caused some discussion. At least it was evident the name Arlblaster meant something to them.

‘The man you want will not see you yet,’ someone announced.

‘Direct me to his house and I’ll worry about that. I’m an old pupil of his. He’ll be pleased to see me.’

They ignored him for a fragmentary argument of their own. The hairy man who had caught Anderson – his fellows called him Ell – repeated vehemently, ‘He’s a Crow!’

‘Of course he’s a Crow,’ one of the others agreed. ‘Take him to Menderstone.’

That they spoke Universal English was a blessing. It was slurred and curiously accented, but quite unmistakable.

‘Do you mean Stanley A. Menderstone?’ asked Anderson with sudden hope. The literary critic had certainly been one of Swettenham’s original group that had come to form its own intellectual centre in the wilds of this planet.

‘We’ll take you to him,’ Ell’s friend said.

They seemed reluctant to trade in straight answers, Anderson observed. He wondered what his sister Kay was doing, half-expecting to see her drive the tourer into the settlement at any moment.

Seizing Anderson’s wrist – they were a possessive lot – Ell’s friend set off at a good pace for the last house on one end of the inner horseshoe. The rest of the crowd moved back into convenient shade. Many of them squatted, formidable, content, waiting, watching. Dogs moved between huts, a duck toddled up from the river, flies circled dusty excreta. Behind everything stood the mountains, spurting cloud.

The Menderstone place did not look inviting. It had been built long and low some twenty years past. Now the stresscrete was all cracked and stained, the steel frame windows rusting, the panes of glass themselves as bleary as a drunkard’s stare.

Ell’s friend went up to the door and kicked on it. Then he turned without hurry or sloth to go and join his friends, leaving Anderson standing on the step.

The door opened.

A beefy man stood there, the old-fashioned rifle in his hands reinforcing his air of enormous self-sufficiency. His face was as brown and pitted as the keel of a junk; he was bald, his forehead shone as if a high polish had just been applied to it. Although probably into his sixties, he gave the impression of having looked just as he did now for the last twenty years.

Most remarkably, he wore lenses over his eyes, secured in place by wires twisting behind his ears. Anderson recalled the name for this old-fashioned apparatus: spectacles.

‘Have you something you wish to say or do to me?’ demanded the bespectacled man, impatiently wagging his rifle.

‘My name’s K. D. Anderson. Your friends suggested I came to see you.’

‘My what? Friends? If you wish to speak to me you’d better take more care over your choice of words.’

‘Mr Menderstone – if you are Mr Menderstone – choosing words is at present the least of my worries. I should appreciate hospitality and a little help.’

‘You must be from Earth or you wouldn’t ask a complete stranger for such things. Alice!’

This last name was bawled back into the house. It produced a sharp-featured female countenance which looked over Menderstone’s shoulder like a parrot peering from its perch.

‘Good afternoon, madam,’ Anderson said, determinedly keeping his temper. ‘May I come in and speak to you for a while? I’m newly arrived on Nehru.’

‘Jesus! The first “good afternoon” I’ve heard in a lifetime,’ the woman answering to the name of Alice exclaimed. ‘You’d better come in, you poetical creature!’

‘I decide who comes in here,’ Menderstone snapped, elbowing her back.

‘Then why didn’t you decide instead of dithering on the step? Come in , young man.’

Menderstone’s rifle barrel reluctantly swung back far enough to allow Anderson entry. Alice led him through into a large miscellaneous room with a stove at one end, a bed at the other, and a table between.

Anderson took a brief glance round before focusing his attention on his host and hostess. They were an odd pair. Seen here close to, Menderstone looked less large than he had done on the step, yet the impression of a formidable personality was more marked than ever. Strong personalities were rare on Earth these days; Anderson decided he might even like the man if he would curb his hostility.

As it was, Alice seemed more approachable. Considerably younger than Menderstone, she had a good figure, and her face was sympathetic as well as slightly comical. With her bird-like head tilted on one side, she was examining Anderson with interest, so he addressed himself to her. Which proved to be a mistake.

‘I was just about to tell your husband that I stopped by to see an old friend and teacher of mine. Dr Frank Arlblaster –’

Menderstone never let Anderson finish.

‘Now you have sidled in here, Mr K. D. Anderson, you’d be advised to keep your facts straight. Alice is not my wife; ergo, I am not her husband. We just live together, there being nobody else in Swettenham more suitable to live with. The arrangement, I may add, is as much one of convenience as passion.’

‘Mr Anderson and I both would appreciate your leaving your egotistical self out of this for a while,’ Alice told him pointedly. Turning to Anderson, she motioned him to a chair and sat down on another herself. ‘How did you get permission to come here? I take it you have a little idea of what goes on on Nehru II?’ she asked.

‘Who or what are those shambling apes outside?’ he asked. ‘What makes you two so prickly? I thought this was supposed to be a colony of exiled intellectuals?’

‘He wants discussions of Kant, calculus, and copulation,’ Menderstone commented.

Alice said: ‘You expected to be greeted by eggheads rather than apes?’

‘I’d have settled for human beings.’

‘What do you know about Arlblaster?’

Anderson gestured impatiently.

‘You’re very kind to have me in, Mrs – Alice, I mean, but can we have a conversation some other time? I’ve a tourer parked back up the hill with my sister Kay waiting in it for me to return. I want to know if I can get there and back without being waylaid by these ruffians outside.’

Alice and Menderstone looked at each other. A deal of meaning seemed to pass between them. After a pause, unexpectedly, Menderstone thrust his rifle forward, butt first.

‘Take this,’ he said. ‘Nobody will harm you if they see a rifle in your hand. Be prepared to use it. Get your car and your sister and come back here.’

‘Thanks a lot, but I have a revolver back near my vehicle –’

‘Carry my rifle. They know it; they respect it. Bear this in mind – you’re in a damn sight nastier spot than you imagine as yet. Don’t let anything – anything – deflect you from getting straight back here. Then you’ll listen to what we have to say.’

Anderson took the rifle and balanced it, getting the feel of it. It was heavy and slightly oiled, without a speck of dust, unlike the rest of the house. For some obscure reason, contact with it made him uneasy.

‘Aren’t you dramatising your situation here, Menderstone? You ought to try living on Earth these days – it’s like an armed camp. The tension there is real, not manufactured.’

‘Don’t kid me you didn’t feel something when you came in here,’ Menderstone said. ‘You were trembling!’

‘What do you know about Arlblaster?’ Alice put her question again.

‘A number of things. Arlblaster discovered a prehistoric-type skull in Brittany, France, back in the eighties. He made a lot of strange claims for the skull. By current theories, it should have been maybe ninety-five thousand years old, but RCD made it only a few hundred years old. Arlblaster lost a lot of face over it academically. He retired from teaching – I was one of his last pupils – and became very solitary. When he gave up everything to work on a cranky theory of his own, the government naturally disapproved.’

‘Ah, the old philosophy: “Work for the common man rather than the common good”,’ sighed Menderstone. ‘And you think he was a crank, do you?’

‘He was a crank! And as he was on the professions roll as Learned Man, he was paid by World Government,’ he explained. ‘Naturally they expected results from him.’

‘Naturally,’ agreed Menderstone. ‘Their sort of results.’

‘Life isn’t easy on Earth, Menderstone, as it is here. A man has to get on or get out. Anyhow, when Arlblaster got a chance to join Swettenham’s newly formed colony here, he seized the opportunity to come. I take it you both know him? How is he?’

‘I suppose one would say he is still alive,’ Menderstone said.

‘But he’s changed since you knew him,’ Alice said, and she and Menderstone laughed.

‘I’ll go and get my tourer,’ Anderson said, not liking them or the situation one bit. ‘See you.’

Cradling the rifle under his right arm, he went out into the square. The sun shone momentarily through the cloud-cover, so hotly that it filled the shadows with splodges of red and grey. Behind the splodges, in front of the creaking houses of Swettenham, the people of Swettenham squatted or leaned with simian abandon in the trampled dust.

Keeping his eye on them, Anderson moved off, heading for the hill. Nobody attempted to follow him. A haphazardly beaten track led up the slope, its roughness emphasising the general neglect.

When he was out of sight of the village, Anderson’s anxiety got the better of him. He ran up the track calling ‘Kay, Kay!’

No answer. The clotted light seemed to absorb his voice.

Breasting the slope, he passed the point where he had seen the woolly rhinoceros. His vehicle was where he had left it. Empty.

He ran to it, rifle ready. He ran round it. He began shouting his sister’s name again. No reply.

Checking the panic he felt, Anderson looked about for footprints, but could, find none. Kay was gone, spirited away. Yet there was nowhere on the whole planet to go to, except Swettenham.

On sudden impulse he ran down to the two boulders where he had encountered the brutish Ell. They stood deserted and silent. When he had retrieved his revolver from where it had fallen, he turned back. He trudged grimly back to the vehicle, his shirt sticking to his spine. Climbing in, he switched on and coasted into the settlement.

In the square again, he braked and jumped down, confronting the chunky bodies in the shadows.

‘Where’s my sister?’ he shouted to them. ‘What sort of funny business are you playing at?’

Someone answered one syllable, croaking it into the brightness: ‘Crow!’

‘Crow!’ Someone else called, throwing the word forward like a stone.

In a rage, Anderson aimed Menderstone’s rifle over the low roof tops and squeezed the trigger. The weapon recoiled with a loud explosion. Visible humanity upped on to its flat feet and disappeared into hovels or back streets.

Anderson went over to Menderstone’s door, banged on it, and walked in. Menderstone was eating a peeled apple and did not cease to do so when his guest entered.

‘My sister has been kidnapped,’ Anderson said. ‘Where are the police?’

‘The nearest police are on Earth,’ Menderstone said, between bites. ‘There you have robot-controlled police states stretching from pole to pole. “Police on Earth, goodwill towards men.” Here on Nehru we have only anarchy. It’s horrible, but better than your robotocracy. My advice to you, Anderson, which I proffer in all seriousness, is to beat it back to your little rocket ship and head for home without bothering too much about your sister.’

‘Look, Menderstone, I’m in no mood for your sort of nonsense! I don’t brush off that easy. Who’s in charge round here? Where is the egghead camp? Who has some effectual say in local affairs, because I want to speak to him?’

‘‘Who’s in charge round here?’ You really miss the iron hand of your robot bosses, don’t you?’

Menderstone put his apple down and advanced, still chewing. His big face was as hard and cold as an undersea rock.

‘Give me that rifle,’ he said, laying a hand on the barrel and tugging. He flung it on to the table. ‘Don’t talk big to me, K. D. Anderson! I happen to loathe the régime on Earth and all the pipsqueaks like you it spawns. If you need help, see you ask politely.’

‘I’m not asking you for help – it’s plain you can’t even help yourself!’

‘You’d better not give Stanley too much lip,’ Alice said. She had come in and stood behind Menderstone, her parrot’s-beak nose on one side as she regarded Anderson. ‘You may not find him very lovable, but I’m sad to say that he is the egghead camp nowadays. This dump was its old HQ. But all the other bright boys have gone to join your pal Arlblaster up in the hills, across the river.’

‘It must be pleasanter and healthier there. I can quite see why they didn’t want you two with them,’ Anderson said sourly.

Menderstone burst into laughter.

‘In actuality, you don’t see at all.’

‘Go ahead and explain then. I’m listening.’

Menderstone resumed his apple, his free hand thrust into a trouser pocket.

‘Do we explain to him, Alice? Can you tell yet which side he’ll be on? A high N-factor in his make-up, wouldn’t you say?’

‘He could be a Crow. More likely an Ape, though, I agree. Hell, whichever he is, he’s a relief after your undiluted company, Stanley.’

‘Don’t start making eyes at him, you crow! He could be your son!’

‘What was good enough for Jocasta is good enough for me,’ Alice cackled. Turning to Anderson, she said. ‘Don’t get involved in our squabbles! You’d best put up here for the night. At least they aren’t cannibals outside – they won’t eat your sister, whatever else they do. There must be a reason for kidnapping her, so if you sit tight they’ll get in touch with you. Besides, it’s half-past nineteen, and your hunt for Arlblaster would be better taking place tomorrow morning.’

After further argument, Anderson agreed with what she suggested. Menderstone thrust out his lower, lip and said nothing. It was impossible to determine how he felt about having a guest.

The rest of the daylight soon faded. After he had unloaded some kit from his vehicle and stacked it indoors, Anderson had nothing to do. He tried to make Alice talk about the situation on Nehru II, but she was not informative; though she was a garrulous type, something seemed to hold her back. Only after supper, taken as the sun sank, did she cast some light on what was happening by discussing her arrival on the planet.

‘I used to be switchboard operator and assistant radiop on a patrol ship,’ she said. ‘That was five years ago. Our ship touched down in a valley two miles south of here. The ship’s still there, though they do say a landslide buried it last winter. None of the crew returned to it once they had visited Swettenham.’

‘Keith doesn’t want to hear your past history,’ Menderstone said, using Anderson’s first name contemptuously.

‘What happened to the crew?’ Anderson asked.

She laughed harshly.

‘They got wrapped up in your friend Arlblaster’s way of life, shall we say. They became converted. … All except me. And since I couldn’t manage the ship by myself, I also had to stay here.’

‘How lucky for me, dear,’ said Menderstone with heavy mock-tenderness. ‘You’re just my match, aren’t you?’ Alice jumped up, sudden tears in her eyes.

‘Shut up, you – toad! You’re a pain in the neck to me and yourself and everyone! You needn’t remind me what a bitch you’ve turned me into!’ Flinging down her fork, she turned and ran from the room.

‘The divine eternal female! Shall we divide what she has left of her supper between us?’ Menderstone asked, reaching out for Alice’s plate.

Anderson stood up.

‘What she said was an understatement, judging by the little I’ve seen here.’

‘Do you imagine I enjoy this life? Or her? Or you, for that matter? Sit down, Anderson – existence is something to be got through the best way possible, isn’t it? You weary me with your trite and predictable responses.’

This stormy personal atmosphere prevailed till bedtime. A bitter three-cornered silence was maintained until Menderstone had locked Anderson into a distant part of the long building.

He had blankets with him, which he spread over the mouldy camp bed provided. He did not investigate the rooms adjoining his; several of their doors bore names vaguely familiar to him; they had been used when the intellectual group was flourishing, but were now deserted.

Tired though Anderson was, directly his head was down he began to worry about Kay and the general situation. Could his sister possibly have had any reason for returning on foot to the ship? Tomorrow, he must go and see. He turned over restlessly.

Something was watching him through the window.

In a flash, Anderson was out of bed, gripping the revolver, his heart hammering. The darkness outside was almost total. He glimpsed only a brutal silhouette in which eyes gleamed, and then it was gone.

He saw his foolishness in accepting Alice’s laissez-faire advice to wait until Kay’s captors got in touch with him. He must have been crazy to agree: or else the general lassitude of Nehru II had overcome him. Whatever was happening here, it was nasty enough to endanger Kay’s life, without any messenger boys arriving first to parley about it.

Alice had said that Arlblaster lived across the river. If he were as much the key to the mystery as he seemed to be, then Arlblaster should be confronted as soon as possible. Thoroughly roused, angry, vexed with himself, Anderson went over to the window and opened it.

He peered into the scruffy night.

He could see nobody. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Anderson discerned nearby features well enough. A bright star in the sky which he took to be Bose, Nehru II’s little moon, lent some light. Swinging his leg over the sill, Anderson dropped to the ground and stood tensely outside.

Nothing moved. A dog howled. Making his way between the outer circle of houses, gun in hand, Anderson came to the river’s edge. A sense of the recklessness of what he was doing assailed him, but he pressed on.

Pausing now and again to ensure he was not being followed, he moved along the river bank, avoiding the obstacles with which it was littered. He reached a bridge of a sort. A tall tree had been felled so that it lay across the stretch of water. Its underside was lapped by the river.

Anderson tucked his gun away and crossed the crude bridge with his arms outstretched for balance.

On the far side, crude attempts to cultivate the ground had been made. The untidy patchwork stopped as the upward slope of the land became more pronounced. No dwellings were visible. He stopped again and listened.

He could hear a faint and indescribable choric noise ahead. As he went forward, the noise became more distinct, less a part of the ill-defined background of furtive earth and river sounds. On the higher ground, a patch of light was now vaguely distinguishable.

This light increased as did the sound. Circumnavigating a thorny mass of brush, Anderson could see that there was a depression ahead of him in the rising valley slope. Something – a ceremony? – was going on in the depression. He ran the last few yards, doubled up, his revolver ready again, scowling in his excitement.

On the lip of the depression, he flung himself flat and peered down into the dip.

A fire was burning in the middle of the circular hollow. Round it some three dozen figures paraded, ringing two men. One of the two was a menial, throwing powder into the blaze, so that green and crimson flames spurted up; the other filled some sort of priestly role. All the others were naked. He wore a cloak and pointed hat.

He sang and waved his arms, a tall figure that woke in Anderson untraceable memories. The dancers – if their rhythmic shuffle might be called a dance – responded with low cries. The total effect, if not beautiful, was oddly moving.

Hypnotised, Anderson watched. He found that his head was nodding in time to the chant. There was no sign of Kay here, as he had half-anticipated. But by his carrot-coloured beard and his prominent nose the priest was distinguishable even in the uncertain fire light. It was Frank Arlblaster.

Or it had been Frank Arlblaster. Items that most easily identify a man to his friends are his stance and his walk. Arlblaster’s had changed. He seemed to sag at the knees and shuffle now, his torso no longer vertical to the ground. Yet the high timbre of his voice remained unaltered, though he called out in a language unknown to Anderson.

The dancers shuffled eagerly, clapping their hands, nodding their shaggy heads. Gradually it dawned on Anderson what they looked like. Beyond doubt they were the inhabitants of Swettenham; they were also, unmistakably, pre-homo sapiens. He might have been witnessing a ritual of Neanderthal men.

Mingled repulsion and elation rooted Anderson to the spot where he lay. Yes, unarguably the faces of Ell and his friends earlier had borne the touch of Neanderthal. Once the idea took, he could not shake it off.

He lay in a trance of wonder until the dance had stopped. Now all the company turned to face the spot where he lay concealed. Anderson felt the nerves tingle along his spinal cord. Arlblaster lifted an arm and pointed towards him. Then in a loud voice he cried out, the crowd shouting with him in chorus.

‘Aigh murg eg neggy oggy Kay bat doo!’

The words were for Anderson.

They were unintelligible to him, yet they seemed to penetrate him. That his whereabouts was known meant nothing beside an even greater pressure on his brain. His whole being trembled on the threshold of some great disastrous revelation.

A magical trance had snared him. He was literally not himself. The meaningless words seemed to shake him to his soul. Gasping, he climbed to his feet and took himself off at a run. There was no pursuit.

He had no memory of getting back to Menderstone’s place, no recollection of crossing the rough bridge, no recollection of tumbling through the window. He lay panting on the bed, his face buried in the pillow.

This state in its turn was succeeded by a vast unease. He could not sleep. Sleep was beyond him. He trembled in every limb. The hours of night dragged on for ever.

At last Anderson sat up. A faint dawn washed into the world. Taking a torch from his kit, he went to investigate the other empty rooms next to his.

A dusty corridor led to them.

Alice had said that this had been the HQ of Swettenham’s original intellectual coterie. There was a library in one room, with racked spools gathering dust; Anderson did not trouble to read any titles. He felt vague antipathy for the silent ranks of them. Another room was a small committee chamber. Maps hung on the walls, meaningless, unused. He saw without curiosity that the flags stuck to one map had mostly fallen on the floor.

A third room was a recreation room. It held a curious assortment of egghead toys. There was even a model electric railway of the type fashionable on Earth a couple of centuries ago. A lathe in the corner suggested that rail and rolling stock might have been made on the premises.

Anderson peered at the track. It gleamed in his torchlight. No dust on it. He hesitatingly ran a finger along it.

A length of siding raised itself like a snake’s head. Coiling up, it wrapped round Anderson’s wrist, snapped tight He pulled at it, yelling in surprise. The whole layout reared up, struggling to get at him.

He backed away, beating at the stuff as it rolled up from the table. The track writhed and launched itself at him, scattering waggons and locomotives. He fired his revolver wildly. Loops of railroad fell over him, over his head, wrapping itself madly about him.

Anderson fell to the floor, dropping his gun, dropping the torch, tearing at the thin bands of metal as they bit tighter. The track threshed savagely, binding his legs together. He was shouting incoherently.

As he struggled, Menderstone ran into the room, rifle in hand, Alice behind him. It was the last thing Anderson saw as he lost consciousness.

When he roused, it was to find himself in Menderstone’s living-room, sprawled on a bunk. Alice sat by him, turning towards him as he stirred. Menderstone was not in the room.

‘My God …’ Anderson groaned. His brain felt curiously lucid, as if a fever had just left him.

‘It’s time you woke up. I’ll get you some soup if you can manage it,’ Alice said.

‘Wait, Alice. Alice …’ His lips trembled as he formed the words. ‘I’m myself again. What came over me? Yesterday – I don’t have a sister called Kay. I don’t have a sister at all! I was an only child!’

She was unsurprised. He sat up, glaring at her.

‘I guessed as much, said so to Stanley. When you brought your kit in from the vehicle there was nothing female among it.’

‘My mind! I was so sure. … I could have pictured her, described her … She was actual! And yet if anyone – if you’d challenged me direct, I believe I’d have known it was an – an illusion.’

His sense of loss was forced aside as another realisation crowded in on him.

He sank down confusedly, closing his eyes, muttering. ‘Aigh murg eg neggy oggy Kay bat doo. … That’s what they told me on the hillside: “You have no sister called Kay.” That’s what it meant. … Alice. It’s so strange. …’

His hand sought hers and found it. It was ice cold.

‘Your initial is K, Keith,’ she said, pale at the lips. ‘You were out there seeking yourself.’

Her face looking down at him was scared and ugly; yet a kind of gentle patience in it dissolved the ugliness.

‘I’m – I’m some sort of mad,’ he whispered.

‘Of course you’re mad!’ Menderstone said, as he burst open the door. ‘Let go of his hand, Alice – this is our beloved home, not the cheap seats in the feelies on Earth. Anderson, if you aren’t insane, why were you rolling about on the floor, foaming at the mouth and firing your damned gun, at six o’clock this morning?’

Anderson sat up.

‘You saw me entangled in that jinxed railroad when you found me, Menderstone! Another minute and it would have squeezed the life out of me.’

Menderstone looked genuinely puzzled. It was the first time Anderson had seen him without the armour of his self-assurance.

‘The model railroad?’ he said. ‘It was undisturbed. You hadn’t touched it.’

‘It touched me,’ Anderson said chokingly. ‘It – it attacked me, wrapped itself round me like an octopus. You must have peeled it off me before getting me through here.’

‘I see,’ Menderstone said, his face grim.

He nodded slowly, sitting down absent-mindedly, and then nodding again to Alice.

‘You see what this means, woman? Anderson’s N-factor is rising to dominance. This young man is not on our side, as I suspected from the first. He’s no Crow. Anderson, your time’s up here, sorry! From now on, you’re one of Arlblaster’s men. You’ll never get back to Earth.’

‘On the contrary, I’m on my way back now.’

Menderstone shook his head.

‘You don’t know your own mind. I mean the words literally. You’re doomed to stay here, playing out the miserable life of an ape! Earth has lost another of her estimable nonentities.’

‘Menderstone, you’re eaten up with hatred! You hate this planet, you hate Earth!’

Menderstone stood up again, putting his rifle down on the table and coming across to Anderson with his fists bunched.

‘Does that make me crazy, you nincompoop? Let me give you a good hard fact-reason why I loathe what’s happening on Earth! I loathe mankind’s insatiable locust-activities, which it has the impertinence to call “assuming mastery over nature”. It has over-eaten and over-populated itself until the only other animals left are in the sea, in zoos, or in food-factories. Now it is exhausting the fossil fuels on which its much-vaunted technology relies. The final collapse is due! So much for mastery of nature! Why, it can’t even master its own mind!’

‘The situation may be desperate, but World Government is slowly introducing economies which –’

‘World Government! You dare mention World Government? A pack of computers and automata? Isn’t it an admission that man is a locust without self-discipline that he has to hand over control piecemeal to robots?

‘And what does it all signify? Why, that civilisation is afraid of itself, because it always tries to destroy itself.

‘Why should it try to do that? Every wise man in history has asked himself why. None of them found the answer until your pal Arlblaster tumbled on it, because they were all looking in the wrong direction. So the answer lies hidden here where nobody on Earth can get at it, because no one who arrives here goes back. I could go back, but I don’t because I prefer to think of them stewing in their own juice, in the mess they created.’

‘I’m going back,’ Anderson said. ‘I’m going to collect Arlblaster and I’m going back right away – when your speech is finished.’

Menderstone laughed.

‘Like to bet on it? But don’t interrupt when I’m talking, K. D. Anderson! Listen to the truth while you have the chance, before it dies for ever.’

‘Stop bellowing, Stanley!’ Alice exclaimed.

‘Silence, female! Attend! Do you need proof that fear-ridden autocrats rule Earth? They have a star-drive on their hands, they discover a dozen habitable planets within reach: what do they do? They keep them uninhabited. Having read just enough history to frighten them, they figure that if they establish colonies those colonies will rebel against them.

‘Swettenham was an exceptional man. How he pulled enough strings to get us established here, I’ll never know. But this little settlement – far too small to make a real colony – was an exception to point to a rule: that the ruling régime is pathologically anti-life – and must be increasingly so as robots take over.’

Anderson stood up, steadying himself against the bunk.

‘Why don’t you shut up, you lonely man? I’m getting out of here.’

Menderstone’s reaction was unexpected. Smiling, he produced Anderson’s gun.

‘Suit yourself, lad! Here’s your revolver. Pick it up and go.’

He dropped the revolver at his feet. Anderson stooped to pick it up. The short barrel gleamed dully. Suddenly it looked – alien, terrifying. He straightened, baffled, leaving the weapon on the floor. He moved a step away from it, his backbone tingling.

Sympathy and pain crossed Alice’s face as she saw his expression. Even Menderstone relaxed.

‘You won’t need a gun where you’re going,’ he said. ‘Sorry it turned out this way, Anderson! The long and tedious powers of evolution force us to be antagonists. I felt it the moment I saw you.’

‘Get lost!’

Relief surged through Anderson as he emerged into the shabby sunshine. The house had seemed like a trap. He stood relaxedly in the middle of the square, sagging slightly at the knees, letting the warmth soak into him. Other people passed in ones or twos. A couple of strangely adult-looking children stared at him.

Anderson felt none of the hostility he had imagined yesterday. After all, he told himself, these folk never saw a stranger from one year to the next; to crowd round him was natural. No one had offered him harm – even Ell had a right to act to protect himself when a stranger charged round a rock carrying a gun. And when his presence had been divined on the hillside last night, they had offered him nothing more painful than revelation: ‘You have no sister called Kay.’

He started walking. He knew he needed a lot of explanations; he even grasped that he was in the middle of an obscure process which had still to be worked out. But at present he was content just to exist, to be and not to think.

Vaguely, the idea that he must see Arlblaster stayed with him.

But new – or very ancient? – parts of his brain seemed to be in bud. The landscape about him grew in vividness, showering him with sensory data. Even the dust had a novel sweet scent.

He crossed the tree-trunk bridge without effort, and walked along the other bank of the river, enjoying the flow of the water. A few women picked idly at vegetable plots. Anderson stopped to question one of them.

‘Can you tell me where I’ll find Frank Arlblaster?’

‘That man sleeps now. Sun go, he wakes. Then you meet him.’

‘Thanks.’ It was simple, wasn’t it?

He walked on. There was time enough for everything. He walked a long way, steadily uphill. There was a secret about time – he had it somewhere at the back of his head – something about not chopping it into minutes and seconds. He was all alone by the meandering river now, beyond people; what did the river know of time?

Anderson noticed the watch strapped on his wrist. What did it want with him, or he with it? A watch was the badge of servitude of a time-serving culture. With sudden revulsion for it, he unbuckled it and tossed it into the river.

The shattered reflection in the water was of piled cloud. It would rain. He stood rooted, as if casting away his watch left him naked and defenceless. It grew cold. Something had altered. … Fear came in like a distant flute.

He looked round, bewildered. A curious double noise filled the air, a low and grating rumble punctuated by high-pitched cracking sounds. Uncertain where this growing uproar came from, Anderson ran forward, then paused again.

Peering back, he could see the women still stooped over their plots. They looked tiny and crystal-clear, figures glimpsed through the wrong end of a telescope. From their indifference, they might not have heard the sound. Anderson turned round again.

Something was coming down the valley!

Whatever it was, its solid front scooped up the river and ran with it high up the hills skirting the valley. It came fast, squealing and rumbling.

It glittered like water. Yet it was not water – its bow was too sharp, too unyielding. It was a glacier.

Anderson fell to the ground.

‘I’m mad, still mad!’ he cried, hiding his eyes, fighting with himself to hold the conviction that this was merely a delusion. He told himself no glacier ever moved at that crazy rate – yet even as he tried to reassure himself the ground shook under him.

Groaning, he heaved himself up. The wall of ice was bearing down on him fast. It splintered and fell as it came, sending up a shower of ice particles as it was ground down, but always there was more behind it. It stretched right up the valley, grey and uncompromising, scouring out the hills’ sides as it came.

Now its noise was tremendous. Cracks played over its towering face like lightning. Thunder was on its brow.

Impelled by panic, Anderson turned to run, his furs flapping against his legs.

The glacier moved too fast. It came with such force that he felt his body vibrate. He was being overtaken.

He cried aloud to the god of the glacier, remembering the old words.

There was a cave up the valley slope. He ran like mad for it, driving himself, while the ice seemed to crash and scream at his heels. With a final desperate burst of strength, he flung himself gasping through the low, dark opening, and clawed his way hand-over-fist towards the back of the cave.

He just made it. The express glacier ground on, flinging earth into the opening. For a moment the cave lit with a green-blue light. Then it was sealed up with reverberating blackness.

Sounds of rain and of his own sobbing. These were the first things he knew. Then he became aware that someone was soothing his hair and whispering comfort to him. Propping himself on one elbow, Anderson opened his eyes.

The cave entrance was unblocked. He could see grass and a strip of river outside. Rain fell heavily. His head had been resting in Alice’s lap; she it was who stroked his hair. He recalled her distasteful remark about Jocasta, but this was drowned in a welter of other recollections.

‘The glacier. … Has it gone? Where is it?’

‘You’re all right, Keith. There’s no glacier round here. Take it easy!’

‘It came bursting down the valley towards me. … Alice, how did you get here?’

She put out a hand to pull his head down again, but he evaded it.

‘When Stanley turned you out, I couldn’t bear to let you go like that, friendless, so I followed you. Stanley was furious, of course, but I knew you were in danger. Look, I’ve brought your revolver.’

‘I don’t want it! – It’s haunted. …’

‘Don’t say that, Keith. Don’t turn into a Neanderthal!’

‘What?’ He sat fully upright, glaring at her through the gloom. ‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘You know. You understand, don’t you?’

‘I don’t understand one bit of what’s going on here. You’d better start explaining – and first of all, I want to know what it looked as if I was doing when I ran into this cave.’

‘Don’t get excited, Keith. I’ll tell you what I can.’ She put her hand over his before continuing. ‘After you’d thrown your watch into the river, you twisted and ran about a bit – as if you were dodging something – and then rushed into here.’

‘You didn’t hear anything odd? See anything?’

‘No.’

‘And no glaciers?’

‘Not on Nehru, no!’

‘And was I – dressed in skins?’

‘Of course you weren’t!’

‘My mind. … I’d have sworn there was a glacier. … Moving too fast …’

Alice’s face was pale as she shook her head.

‘Oh, Keith, you are in danger. You must get back to Earth at once. Can’t you see this means you have a Neanderthal layer in your brain? Obviously you were experiencing a race memory from that newly opened layer. It was so strong it took you over entirely for a while. You must get away.’

He stood up, his shoulders stooped to keep his skull from scraping the rock overhead. Rain drummed down outside. He shook with impatience.

‘Alice, Alice, begin at the beginning, will you? I don’t know a thing except that I’m no longer in control of my own brain.’

‘Were you ever in control? Is the average person? Aren’t all the sciences of the mind attempts to bring the uncontrollable under control? Even when you’re asleep, it’s only the neo-cortex switched off. The older limbic layers – they never sleep. There’s no day or night, that deep.’

‘So what? What has the unconscious to do with this particular set-up?’

‘“The unconscious” is a pseudo-scientific term to cover a lack of knowledge. You have a moron in your skull who never sleeps, sweetie! He gives you a nudge from time to time; it’s crazy thoughts you overhear when you think you’re dreaming.’

‘Look, Alice –’

She stood up too. Anxiety twisted her face.

‘You wanted an explanation, Keith. Have the grace to listen to it. Let me start from the other end of the tale, and see if you like it any better.

‘Neanderthal was a species of man living in Europe some eighty thousand and more years ago, before homo sap came along. They were gentle creatures, close to nature, needing few artefacts, brain cases bigger even than homo sap. They were peaceful, unscientific in a special sense you’ll understand later.

‘Then along came a different species, the Crows – Cro-Magnons, you’d call them – Western man’s true precursors. Being warlike, they defeated the Neanderthals at every encounter. They killed off the men and mated with the Neanderthal women, which they kept captive. We, modern man, sprang from the bastard race so formed. This is where Arlblaster’s theory comes in.

‘The mixture never quite mixed. That’s why we still have different, often antagonistic, blood groups today – and why there are inadequate neural linkages in the brain. Crow and Neanderthal brains never established full contact. Crow was dominant, but a power-deprived lode of Neanderthal lingered on, as apparently vestigial as an appendix.’

‘My God, I’d like a mescahale,’ Anderson said. They had both sat down again, ignoring the occasional beads of moisture which dripped down their necks from the roof of the cave. Alice was close to him, her eyes bright in the shadow.

‘Do you begin to see it historically, Keith? Western man with this clashing double heritage in him has always been restless. Freud’s theory of the id comes near to labelling the Neanderthal survivor in us. Arthur Koestler also came close. All civilisation can be interpreted as a Crow attempt to vanquish that survivor, and to escape from the irrational it represents – yet at the same time the alien layer is a rich source for all artists, dreamers, and creators: because it is the very well of magic.

‘The Neanderthal had magic powers. He lived in a dawn age, the dawn of rationality, when it’s no paradox to say that supernatural and natural are one. The Crows, our ancestors, were scientific, or potentially scientific – spear-makers, rather than fruit-gatherers. They had a belief, fluctuating at first maybe, in cause and effect. As you know, all Western science represents a structure built on our acceptance of unalterable cause and effect.

‘Such belief is entirely alien to the Neanderthal. He knows only happening, and from this stems his structure of magic. I use the present tense because the Neanderthal is still strong in man – and, on Nehru II, he is not only strong but free, liberated at last from his captor, the Crow.’

Anderson stirred, rubbing his wet skull.

‘I suppose you’re right ‘

‘There’s proof enough here,’ she said bitterly.

‘I suppose it does explain why the civilisation of old Europe – the ancient battle-ground of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal – and the civilisations that arose from it in North America are the most diverse and most turbulent ever known. But this brings us back to Arlblaster, doesn’t it? I can see that what has happened in Swettenham connects logically with his theory. The Brittany skull he found back in the eighties was pure Neanderthal, yet only a few hundred years old. Obviously it belonged to a rare throwback.’

‘But how rare? You could pass a properly dressed Neanderthal in the streets of New York and never give him a second glance. Stanley says you often do.’

‘Let’s forget Stanley! Arlblaster followed up his theory. … Yes, I can see it myself. The proportion of Neanderthal would presumably vary from person to person. I can run over my friends mentally now and guess in which of them the proportion is highest.’

‘Exactly.’ She smiled at him, reassured and calmer now, even as he was, as she nursed his hand and his revolver. ‘And because the political economic situation on Earth is as it is, Arlblaster found a way here to develop his theory and turn it into practice – that is, to release the prisoner in the brain. Earth would allow Swettenham’s group little in the way of machinery or resources in its determination to keep them harmless, so they were thrust close to nature. That an intellectual recognition brought the Neanderthal to the surface, freed it.’

‘Everyone turned Neanderthal, you mean?’

‘Here on Nehru, which resembles prehistoric Earth in some respects, the Neanderthal represents better survival value than Crow. Yet not everyone transformed, no. Stanley Menderstone did not. Nor Swettenham. Nor several others of the intellectuals. Their N-factor, as Stanley calls it, was either too low or non-existent.’

‘What happened to Swettenham?’

‘He was killed. So were the other pure Crows, all but Stanley, who’s tough – as you saw. There was a heap of trouble at first, until they fully understood the problem and sorted themselves out.’

‘And these two patrol ships World Government sent?’

‘I saw what happened to the one that brought me. About seventy-five per cent of the crew had a high enough N-factor to make the change; a willingness to desert helped them. The others … died out. Got killed, to be honest. All but me. Stanley took care of me.’

She laughed harshly. ‘If you can call it care.

‘I’ve had my belly full of Stanley and Nehru II, Keith. I want you to take me back with you to Earth.’

Anderson looked at her, still full of doubt.

‘What about my N-factor? Obviously I’ve got it in me. Hence the glacier, which was a much stronger danger signal from my brain than the earlier illusion about having a sister. Hence, I suppose, my new fears of manufactured Crow objects like watches, revolvers and … model railroads. Am I Crow or not, for heaven’s sake?’

‘By the struggle you’ve been through with yourself, I’d say that you’re equally balanced. Perhaps you can even decide. Which do you want to be?’

He looked at her in amazement.

‘Crow, of course: my normal self – who’d become a shambling, low-browed, shaggy tramp by choice?’

‘The adjectives you use are subjective and not really terms of abuse – in fact, they’re Crow propaganda. Or so a Neanderthal would say. The two points of view are irreconcilable.’

‘Are you seriously suggesting … Alice, they’re sub-men!’

‘To us they appear so. Yet they have contentment, and communion with the forces of Earth, and their magic. Nor are their brains inferior to Crow brains.’

‘Much good it did them! The Cro-Magnons still beat them.’

‘In a sense they have not yet been beaten. But their magic needs preparation, incantation – it’s something they can’t do while fending off a fusillade of arrows. But left to themselves they can become spirits, animals –’

‘Wooly rhinoceroses for instance?’

‘Yes.’

‘To lure me from my wheeled machine, which they would fear! My God, Alice, can it be true. … ‘He clutched his head and groaned, then looked up to enquire, ‘Why are you forcing their point of view on me, when you’re a Crow?’

‘Don’t you see, my dear?’ Her eyes were large as they searched his. ‘To find how strong your N-factor is. To find if you’re friend or enemy. When this rain stops, I must go back. Stanley will be looking for me, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Arlblaster were not looking for you; he must know you’ve had time to sort things out in your mind. So I want to know if I can come back to Earth with you. …’

He shook himself, dashed a water drip off his forehead, tried to delay giving an answer.

‘Earth’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘Menderstone’s right, of course; it is regimented – it would never suit an individualist like him. It’s not so pretty as Nehru. … Yes, Alice, I’ll take you back if you want to come. I can’t leave you here.’

She flung herself on to him, clasping him in her arms, kissing his ear and cheek and lips.

‘I’m a loving woman,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘As even Stanley –’

They stiffened at a noise outside the cave, audible above the rain. Anderson turned his head to look where she was looking. Rain was falling more gently now. Before its fading curtain a face appeared.

The chief features of this face were its low brow, two large and lustrous eyes, a prominent nose, and a straggling length of wet, sandy beard. It was Frank Arlblaster.

He raised both hands.

‘Come to see me, child of Earth, as I come to see you, peaceful, patient, all-potent –’

As more of him rose into view in the cave mouth, Alice fired the revolver. The bellow of its report in the confined space was deafening. At ten yards’ range, she did not miss. Arlblaster clutched at his chest and tumbled forward into the wet ground, crying inarticulately.

Anderson turned on Alice, and struck the gun from her hand.

‘Murder, sheer murder! You shouldn’t have done it! You shouldn’t have done –’

She smacked him across the cheek.

‘If you’re Crow, he’s your enemy as well as mine! He’d have killed me! He’s an Ape. …’ She drew a long shuddering breath. ‘And now we’ve got to move fast for your ship before the pack hunts us down.’

‘You make me sick!’ He tried to pick up the revolver but could not bring himself to touch it.

‘Keith, I’ll make it up to you on the journey home, I promise. I – I was desperate!’

‘Just don’t talk to me! Come on, let’s git.’

They slid past Arlblaster’s body, out into the mizzling rain. As they started down the slope, a baying cry came from their left flank. A group of Neanderthals, men and women, stood on a promontory only two hundred yards away. They must have witnessed Arlblaster’s collapse and were slowly marshalling their forces. As Alice and Anderson appeared, some of the men ran forward.

‘Run!’ Alice shouted. ‘Down to the river! Swim it and we’re safe.’

Close together, they sped down the slippery incline where an imaginary glacier had flowed. Without a pause or word, they plunged through reeds and mud and dived fully dressed into the slow waters. Making good time, the Neanderthals rushed down the slope after them, but halted when they reached the river.

Gaining the far bank, Anderson turned and helped Alice out of the water. She collapsed puffing on the grass.

‘Not so young as I was. … We’re safe now, Keith. Nothing short of a forest fire induces those apes to swim. But we still might meet trouble this side. … We’ll avoid the settlement. Even if the apes there aren’t after us, we don’t want to face Stanley with his rifle. … Poor old Stanley! Give me a hand up. …’

Anderson moved on in surly silence. His mind was troubled by Arlblaster’s death; and he felt he was being used.

The rain ceased as they pressed forward among dripping bush. Travelling in a wide arc, they circled the village and picked up a track which led back towards Anderson’s ship.

Alice grumbled intermittently as they went. At last Anderson turned on her.

‘You don’t have to come with me, Alice. If you want to, go back to Stanley Menderstone!’

‘At least he cared about a woman’s feelings.’

‘I warn you that they are not so fussy on Earth, where women don’t have the same scarcity value.’ He hated himself for speaking so roughly. He needed solitude to sort out the turmoil in his brain.

Alice plodded along beside him without speaking. Sun gleamed. At last the black hull of the ship became visible between trees.

‘You’ll have to work on Earth!’ he taunted her. ‘The robocracy will direct you.’

‘I shall get married. I’ve still got some looks.’

‘You’ve forgotten something, honey. Women have to have work certificates before they can marry these days. Regimentation will do you good.’

A wave of hatred overcame him. He remembered the priestly Arlblaster dying. When Alice started to snap back at him, Anderson struck her on the shoulder. A look of panic and understanding passed over her face.

‘Oh, Keith …’ she said. ‘You …’ Her voice died; a change came over her face. He saw her despair before she turned and was running away, back towards the settlement, calling inarticulately as she ran.

Anderson watched her go. Then he turned and sidled through the dripping trees. At last – free! Himself! She was a Crow squaw.

His ship no longer looked welcoming. He splashed through a puddle and touched it, withdrawing his hand quickly. Distorted by the curve of the hull, his reflection peered at him from the polished metal. He did not recognise himself.

‘Someone there imprisoned in Crow ship,’ he said, turning away.

The breath of the planet was warm along his innocent cheek. He stripped off his damp clothes and faded among the leaves and uncountable grasses and the scents of soil and vegetation. Shadow and light slithered over his skin in an almost tangible pattern before foliage embraced him and he was lost entirely into his new Eden.

The proud author lay where he was on the floor of the small room, among the metal sheets he had worn as camouflage while hiding with the humots. Since the Tenth Dominant finished reading his story – that poor thing written before he had wisdom – silence lay between the Dominant and the Chief Scanner; though whether or not they were communicating by UHF, Anderson could not tell.

He decided he had better do something. Sitting up, he said, ‘How about letting me go free? … Or how about letting me go back to the zoo? … Well, at least take me into a room that’s big enough for me.’

The Dominant spoke. ‘We need to ask you questions about your story. Is it true or not true?’

‘It’s fiction. Lousy or otherwise, it exists in its own right.’

‘Some things in it are true – you are. So is or was Frank Arlblaster. So is or was Stanley Menderstone. But other things are false. You did not stay always on Nehru II. You came back to Earth.’

‘The story is a fiction. Forget it! It has nothing to do with you. Or with me, now. I only write poetry now – that story is just a thing I wrote to amuse myself.’

‘We do not understand it. You must explain it.’

‘Oh, Christ! … Look, I wouldn’t bother about it! I wrote it on the journey back to Earth from Nehru II, just to keep myself amused. When I got here, it was to find the various surviving Master Boffs were picking up such bits of civilisation as were left round the world after Nuclear Week! The story immediately became irrelevant.’

‘We know all about Nuclear Week. We do not know about your story. We insist that we know about it.’

As Anderson sighed, he nevertheless recognised that more must lie in the balance here than he understood.

‘I’ve been a bad boy, Dominant, I know. I escaped from the zoo. Put me back there, let me settle back with my wife; for my part. I’ll not attempt to escape again. Then we’ll talk about my story.’

The silence lasted only a fraction of a second. ‘Done,’ said the Dominant, with splendid mastery of humanic idiom.

The zoo was not unpleasant. By current standards, it was vast, and the flats in the new human-type skyscrapers not too cramped; the liberals admitted that the Hive had been generous about space. There were about twenty thousand people here, the East Coast survivors of Nuclear Week. The robocracy had charge of them; they, in their turn, had charge of all the surviving wild life that the automata could capture. Incongruous among the tall flat-blocks stood cages of exotic animals collected from shattered zoos – a pride of lions, some leopards, several cheetahs, an ocelot, camels. There were monkey houses, ostrich houses, elephant houses, aquaria, reptilia. There were pens full of pigs and sheep and cows. Exotic and native birds were captive in aviaries.

Keith Anderson sat on the balcony of his flat with his wife, Sheila, and drank an ersatz coffee, looking out on to the pens below, not without relish.

‘Well, the robots are behaving very strangely,’ Sheila was saying. ‘When you disappeared, three of the very tiny ones came and searched everywhere. Your story was the only thing they seemed interested in. They must have photostatted it.’

‘I remember now – it was in the trunk under the bed. I’d forgotten all about it till they mentioned it – my sole claim to literary fame!’

‘But that side of it can’t interest them. What are they excited about?’

He looked amusedly at her. She was still partly a stranger to him, though a beloved one. In the chaos to which he returned after the Nehru trip, it was a case of marrying any eligible girl while they were available – men outnumbered women two to one; he’d been lucky in his blind choice. Sheila might not be particularly beautiful, but she was good in bed, trustworthy, and intelligent. You could ask for no more.

He said, ‘Do you ever admit the truth of the situation to yourself, Sheila? The new automats are now the superior race. They have a dozen faculties to each one of ours. They’re virtually indestructible. Small size is clearly as much an enormous advantage to them as it would be a disadvantage to us. We’ve heard rumours that they were on the threshold of some staggering new discovery – from what I overheard the Tenth Dominant say, they are on the brink of moving into some staggering new dimensions of which we can probably never even get a glimpse. And yet –’

‘And yet they need your story!’ She laughed – sympathetically, so that he laughed with her.

‘Right! They need my goddamned story! Listen – their powers of planning and extrapolation are proved miraculous. But they cannot imagine; imagination might even be an impediment for them. So the Dominant, who can tap more knowledge than you or I dream of, is baffled by a work of fiction. He needs my imagination.’

‘Not entirely, Mr Anderson.’

Anderson jumped up, cup in hand, as his wife gave a small scream.

Perched on the balcony rail, enormously solid-looking, yet only six inches high, was the stubby shape of an automaton!

Furious, Anderson flung his cup, the only weapon to hand. It hit the machine four-square, shattered, and fell away. The machine did not even bother to refer to the matter.

‘We understand imagination. We wish to ask you more questions about the background to your story.’

Anderson sat down, took Sheila’s hand, and made an anatomical suggestion which no automaton could have carried out.

‘We want to ask you more questions about the story. Why did you write that you stayed on Nehru when really you came back?’

‘Are you the Chief Scanner who captured me on D-Dump?’

‘You are speaking with Tenth Dominant, in command of Eastern Seaboard. I have currently taken over Chief Scanner for convenience of speaking with you.’

‘Sort of mechanical transvestism, eh?’

‘Why did you write that you stayed when you in reality came back?’

‘You’d better give him straight answers, Keith,’ Sheila said.

He turned to her irritably, ‘How do I know the answer? It was just a story! I suppose it made a better ending to have the Anderson-figure stay on Nehru. There was this Cro-Magnon – Neanderthal business in the story, and I made myself out to be more Neanderthal than Crow for dramatic effect. Just a lot of nonsense really?’

‘Why do you call it nonsense when you wrote it yourself?’ asked the Dominant. It had settled in the middle of the coffee-table now.

The man sighed wearily. ‘Because I’m older now. The story was a lot of nonsense because I injected this Crow – Neanderthal theory, which is a bit of free-wheeling young man tripe. It just went in to try to explain what actually happened on Nehru – how the egghead camp broke down and everything. The theory doesn’t hold water for a moment; I see that now, in the light of what happened since. Nuclear Week and all that. You see –’

He stopped. He stopped in mid-sentence and stared at the little complex artifact confronting him. It was speaking to him but he did not hear, following his own racing thoughts. He stretched forward his hand and picked it up; the automaton was heavy and warm, only mildly frightening, slightly, slightly vibrating at the power of its own voice; the Dominant did not stop him picking it up. He stared at it as if he had never seen such a thing before.

‘I repeat, how would you revise your theory now?’ said the automaton.

Anderson came back to reality.

‘Why should I help you? To your kind, man is just another animal in a zoo, a lower species.’

‘Not so. We revere you as ancestors, and have never treated you otherwise.’

‘Maybe. Perhaps we regard animals in somewhat the same way since, even in the darkest days of overpopulation and famine, we strove to stock our zoos in ever-greater numbers. So perhaps I will tell you my current theory. … It is real theory now; in my story that theory was not worth the name – it was a stunt, an intellectual high-jink, a bit of science fiction. Now I have lived and thought and loved and suffered, and I have talked to other men. So if I tell you the theory now, you will know it is worked for – part of the heritage of all men in this zoo.’

‘This time it is truth, not false?’

‘You are the boss – you must decide that. There are certainly two distinct parts of the brain, the old limbic section and the neo-cortex surrounding it, the bit that turns a primate into a man. That much of my story was true. There’s also a yet older section, but we won’t complicate the picture. Roughly speaking, the limbic is the seat of the emotions, and the neo-cortex the seat of the intelligence. Okay. In a crisis, the new brain is still apt to cut out and the old brain take over.

‘And that in a nutshell is why mankind never made the grade. We are a failed species. We never got away from the old animal inheritance. We could never become the distinct species we should have been.’

‘Oh, darling, it’s not as bad as that –’

He squeezed Sheila’s hand. ‘You girls are always optimists.’ He winked the eye the Dominant could not see.

The Dominant said, ‘How does this apply to what happened on Nehru II?’

‘My story departed – not from the facts but from the correct explanation of the facts. The instinct to go there on Swettenham’s part was sound. He and Arlblaster and the rest believed that on a planet away from animals, mankind could achieve its true stature – homo superior, shall we say? What I called the N-factor let them down. The strain was too great, and they mainly reverted instead of evolving.’

‘But you believe a species can only escape its origins by removing itself entirely from the site of those origins.’

Sheila said, ‘That was the whole human impulse behind space travel – to get to worlds where it would be possible to become more human.’

The Dominant sprang from Anderson’s hands and circled under the low ceiling – an oddly uneasy gesture.

‘But the limbic brain – such a small part of the brain, so deep-buried!’

‘The seat of the instincts.’

‘The seat of the instincts. … Yes, and so the animal part of man brought you to disaster.’

‘Does that answer all your questions?’

The automaton came back down and settled on the table. ‘One further question. What do you imagine would happen to mankind now, after Nuclear Week, if he was left alone on Earth?’

Anderson had to bury his face in his hands to hide his triumph.

‘I guess we’d carry on. Under D-Dump, and the other dumps, lie many of the old artefacts. We’d dig them up and carry on.’

‘But Earth’s resources are almost spent. That was mankind’s doing, not the doing of automata.’

The man smiled. ‘Maybe we’d revert, then. It is a sort of Neanderthal planet, isn’t it? Things go wrong for animals and men and robots, don’t they? Just as they did for dinosaurs and Neanderthals!’

‘I am going now,’ said the Tenth Dominant. His voice cut. He disappeared.

Gasping, Anderson clutched his wife. ‘Don’t say a word! Come inside. Hold me and kiss me. Pray, if you feel like it.’

All she said as they went to their bed was, ‘Maybe you will end up a writer after all. You show a talent for storytelling!’

It was all of five days before the humans in the big zoo noticed that the automata were disappearing. Suddenly, they were all gone, leaving no word. The whole continent, presumably the whole world, lay almost empty; and mankind began to walk back into it on his own ill-shod feet.

‘And you did it, Keith Anderson!’ Sheila cried.

‘Nope. They did it themselves. They made the right decision – maybe I spurred them on.’

‘You did it – a genius who is now going to turn himself into a pig-breeder.’

‘I happen to like pigs.’ As he spoke, he stood in the middle of a dozen of the animals, which he and Sheila had taken charge of.

‘So the entire automata-horde has disappeared into the invo-spectrum, wherever that is, leaving us our world. …’

‘It’s a different world. Let’s try and make it saner than the old one.’

Pious hope? New Year’s resolution? New design for living? He could not tell, although it filled his mind.

As they drove the pigs before them, Anderson said, ‘When the Dominant got on to the subject of our animal inheritance, I remembered just in time that I heard him tell the Scanner. “We must free ourselves from our human heritage.” You can see the spot they were in! They had scrapped the humots, all too closely anthropomorphic in design, and taken more functional forms themselves. But they still had to acknowledge us as father-figures, and could never escape from many human and naturalistic concepts, however much they tried, as long as they remained in a naturalistic setting. Now, in this unimaginable alternative energy universe, which they have finally cracked, they can be pure automata – which is something else we can’t conceive! So they become a genuine species. Pure automata. …’

They broke off to drive their pigs through the doorway, doubling back and forth until all the animals were inside, squealing and trying to leap over one another’s backs. Anderson slammed the outer door at once, gasping.

‘What I’d like to know is, what would it be like to be pure human being!’ Sheila exclaimed.

He had no answer. He was thinking. Of course, they needed a dog! On D-Dump there were feral hounds, whose young could be caught and trained.

It was lucky that the ground-floor tenants had gone. Most humans had moved out of the zoo as soon as possible, so that the great block of flats was almost empty. They shut the pigs in the hall for the night and climbed up rather wearily to their flat.

Today, they were too tired to bother about the future.




Old Hundredth (#u05be873d-20e3-5cbf-a745-617b6ac1fde3)


A chronicle such as this could be never-ending, for the diversity of Starswarm by any intelligent reckoning is never-ending. We have time for but one more call, and that must be to an ember world floating in the Rift, now seldom visited by man.

Many galactic regions have been omitted entirely from our survey. We have not mentioned one of the most interesting, Sentinel Sector, which adjoins both the Rift and Sector Diamond. It also looks out over the edge of our galaxy towards the other island universes where we have yet to go.

Sentinel is a vast region, and contact with it uncertain. This is especially so with the Border Stars, which form the last specks of material in our galaxy. Here time undergoes compression in a way that brings hallucinations to anyone not bred to it. The people who have colonised those worlds are almost a species apart, and have developed their own perceptions.

They have sent their instruments out into the gulf between universes, and the instruments have returned changed.

To some, this suggests that other island universes will remain for ever beyond our reach. To the optimists, it suggests that awaiting us there is a completely new range of sensory experiences upon which we cannot as yet even speculate.

Within our own Starswarm we can find other sorts of disturbance in the order of things. A planet can become imprisoned in its own greatness. This fate threatens Dansson, as it has overcome an older world floating in that thinly populated part of space we know as the Rift.

This world, legends say, was once the seed mote whence interstellar travel originated. In the successive waves of star voyages since Era One, it has been all but forgotten. We regard it today – if we remember it at all – with ambivalence, a cross between an emptied shrine and a rubbish dump.

Great experiments once took place there: not only star travel, but a later experiment which might have had consequences even more far-reaching. It was an attempt to transcend the physical; the result was failure, the attempt a triumph.

The planet has been left to stagnate, now nameless on all but the few charts that mapped the sector millennia ago. Yet even in its stagnation one can glimpse a reflection of the abundance and vitality, the willingness to try new things – to dare all – that was perhaps its chief gift to Starswarm.

The road climbed dustily down between trees as symmetrical as umbrellas. Its length was punctuated at one point by a musicolumn standing on the verge. From a distance, the column was only a stain in the air. As sentient creatures neared it, their psyches activated the column. It drew on their vitalities, and then it could be heard as well as seen. Their presence made it flower into pleasant sound, instrumental or chant.

All this region was called Ghinomon, for no one lived here now, not even the odd hermit Impure. It was given over to grass and the weight of time. Only a wild goat or two activated the musicolumn nowadays, or a scampering vole wrung a chord from it in passing.

When old Dandi Lashadusa came riding on her baluchitherium, the column began to intone. It was no more than an indigo trace in the air, hardly visible, for it represented only a bonded pattern of music locked into the fabric of that particular area of space. It was also a transubstantio-spatial shrine, the eternal part of a being that had dematerialised itself into music.

The baluchitherium whinnied, lowered its head, and sneezed onto the gritty road.

‘Gently, Lass,’ Dandi told her mare, savouring the growth of the chords that increased in volume as she approached. Her long nose twitched with pleasure as if she could feel the melody along her olfactory nerves.

Obediently, the baluchitherium slowed, turning aside to crop fern, although it kept an eye on the indigo stain. It liked things to have being or not to have being; these half-and-half objects disturbed it, though they could not impair its immense appetite.

Dandi climbed down her ladder onto the ground, glad to feel the ancient dust under her feet. She smoothed her hair and stretched as she listened to the music.

She spoke aloud to her mentor, half a world away, but he was not listening. His mind closed to her thoughts, and he muttered an obscure exposition that darkened what it sought to clarify.

‘… useless to deny that it is well-nigh impossible to improve anything, however faulty, that has so much tradition behind it. And the origins of your bit of metricism are indeed embedded in such an antiquity that we must needs –’

‘Tush, Mentor, come out of your black box and forget your hatred of my “metricism” a moment,’ Dandi Lashadusa said, cutting her thought into his. ‘Listen to the bit of “metricism” I’ve found here; look at where I have come to; let your argument rest.’

She turned her eyes around, scanning the tawny rocks near at hand, the brown line of the road, the distant black-and-white magnificence of ancient Oldorajo’s town, doing this all for him, tiresome old fellow. Her mentor was blind, never left his cell in Aeterbroe to go farther than the sandy courtyard, hadn’t physically left that green cathedral pile for over a century. Womanlike, she thought he needed change. Soul, how he rambled on! Even now, he was managing to ignore her and refute her.

‘… for consider, Lashadusa woman, nobody can be found to father it. Nobody wrought or thought it, phrases of it merely came together. Even the old nations of men could not own it. None of them know who composed it. An element here from a Spanish pavan, an influence there of a French psalm tune, a flavour here of early English carol, a savour there of later German chorale. All primitive – ancient beyond ken. Nor are the faults of your bit of metricism confined to bastardy –’

‘Stay in your black box then, if you won’t see or listen,’ Dandi said. She could not get into his mind; it was the mentor’s privilege to lodge in her mind, and in the minds of those few other wards he had, scattered around Earth. Only the mentors had the power to inhabit another’s mind – which made them rather tiring on occasions like this, when they would not get out. For over seventy centuries, Dandi’s mentor had been persuading her to die into a dirge of his choosing (and composing). Let her die, yes, let her transubstantio-spatialise herself a thousand times! His quarrel was not with her decision but with her taste, which he considered execrable.

Leaving the baluchitherium to crop, Dandi walked away from the musicolumn towards a hillock. Still fed by her steed’s psyche, the column continued to play. Its music was of a simplicity, with a dominant-tonic recurrent bass part suggesting pessimism. To Dandi, a savant in musicolumnology, it yielded other data. She could tell to within a few years when its founder had died and also what sort of creature, generally speaking, he had been.

Climbing the hillock, Dandi looked about. To the south where the road led were low hills, lilac in the poor light. There lay her home. At last she was returning, after wanderings covering three hundred centuries and most of the globe.

Apart from the blind beauty of Oldorajo’s town lying to the west, there was only one landmark she recognised. That was the Involute. It seemed to hang iridial above the ground a few leagues ahead; just to look on it made her feel she must go nearer.

Before summoning the baluchitherium, Dandi listened once more to the sounds of the musicolumn, making sure she had them fixed in her head. The pity was that her old fool wise man would not share it. She could still feel his sulks floating like sediment through her mind.

‘Are you listening now, Mentor?’

‘Eh? An interesting point is that back in 1556 Pre-Involutary, your same little tune may be discovered lurking in Knox’s Anglo-Genevan Psalter, where it espoused the cause of the third psalm –’

‘You dreary old fish! Wake yourself! How can you criticise my intended way of dying when you have such a fustian way of living?’

This time he heard her words. So close did he seem that his peevish pinching at the bridge of his snuffy old nose tickled hers, too.

‘What are you doing now, Dandi?’ he inquired.

‘If you had been listening, you’d know. Here’s where I am, on the last Ghinomon plain before Crotheria and home.’ She swept the landscape again and he took it in, drank it almost greedily. Many mentors went blind early in life shut in their monastic underwater life; their most effective vision was conducted through the eyes of their wards.

His view of what she saw enriched hers. He knew the history, the myth behind this forsaken land. He could stock the tired old landscape with pageantry, delighting her and surprising her. Back and forward he went, painting her pictures: the Youdicans, the Lombards, the Ex-Europa Emissary, the Grites, the Risorgimento, the Involuters – and catchwords, costumes, customs, courtesans, pelted briefly through Dandi Lashadusa’s mind. Ah, she thought admiringly, who could truly live without these priestly, beastly, erudite erratic mentors?

‘Erratic?’ he inquired, snatching at her lick of thought. ‘A thousand years I live, for all that time to absent myself from the world, to eat mashed fish here with my brothers, learning history, studying rapport, sleeping with my bones on stones – a humble being, a being in a million, a mentor in a myriad, and your standards of judgement are so mundane you find no stronger label for me than erratic?! Fie, Lashadusa, bother me no more for fifty years!

The words squeaked in her head as if she spoke herself. She felt his old chops work phantomlike in hers, and half in anger half in laughter called aloud, ‘I’ll be dead by then!’

He snicked back hot and holy to reply, ‘And another thing about your footloose swan song – in Marot and Beza’s Genevan Psalter of 1551, Old Time, it was musical midwife to the one hundred and thirty-fourth psalm. Like you, it never seemed to settle!’ Then he was gone.

‘Pooh!’ Dandi said. She whistled. ‘Lass.’

Obediently her great rhinolike creature, eighteen feet high at the shoulder, ambled over. The musicolumn died as the mare left it, faded, sank to a whisper, silenced: only the purple stain remained, noiseless, in the lonely air. Lowering its great Oligocene head, Lass nuzzled its mistress’s hand. She climbed the ladder onto the ridged plateau of its back.

They made towards the Involute, lulled by the simple and intricate feeling of being alive.

Night was settling in now. Hidden behind banks of mist, the sun prepared to set. But Venus was high, a gallant half-crescent four times as big as the moon had been before the moon, spiralling farther and farther from Earth, had shaken off its parent’s clutch to go dance around the sun, a second Mercury. Even by that time Venus had been moved by gravito-traction into Earth’s orbit, so that the two sister worlds circled each other as they circled the sun.

The stamp of that great event still lay everywhere, its tokens not only in the crescent in the sky. For Venus placed a strange spell on the hearts of man, and a more penetrating displacement in his genes. Even when its atmosphere was transformed into a muffled breathability, it remained an alien world; against logic, its opportunities, its possibilities, were its own. It shaped men, just as Earth had shaped them.

On Venus, men bred themselves anew.

And they bred the so-called Impures. They bred new plants, new fruits, new creatures – original ones, and duplications of creatures not seen on Earth for aeons past. From one line of these familiar strangers Dandi’s baluchitherium was descended. So, for that matter, was Dandi.

The huge creature came now to the Involute, or as near as it cared to get. Again it began to crop at thistles, thrusting its nose through dewy spiders’ webs and ground mist.

‘Like you, I’m a vegetarian,’ Dandi said, climbing down to the ground. A grove of low fruit trees grew nearby; she reached up into the branches, gathered, and ate, before turning to inspect the Involute. Already her spine tingled at the nearness of it; awe, loathing and love made a part-pleasant sensation near her heart.

The Involute was not beautiful. True, its colours changed with the changing light, yet the colours were fish-cold, for they belonged to another dimension. Though they reacted to dusk and dawn, Earth had no stronger power over them. They pricked the eyes. Perhaps, too, they were painful because they were the last signs of materialist man. Even Lass moved uneasily before that ill-defined lattice, the upper limits of which were lost in thickening gloom.

‘Don’t fear,’ Dandi said. ‘There’s an explanation for this, old girl.’ She added, ‘There’s an explanation for everything, if we can find it.’

She could feel all the personalities in the Involute. It was a frozen screen of personality. All over the old planet the structures stood, to shed their awe on those who were left behind. They were the essence of man. They were man – all that remained of him on Earth.

When the first flint, the first shell, was shaped into a weapon, that action shaped man. As he moulded and complicated his tools, so they moulded and complicated him. He became the first scientific animal. And at last, via information theory and great computers, he gained knowledge of all his parts. He formed the Laws of Integration, which reveal all beings as part of a pattern and show them their part in the pattern. There is only the pattern; the pattern is all the universe, creator and created. For the first time it became possible to duplicate that pattern artificially – the transubstantio-spatialisers were built.

Men left their strange hobbies on Earth and Venus and projected themselves into the pattern. Their entire personalities were merged with the texture of space itself. Through science, they reached immortality.

It was a one-way passage.

They did not return. Each Involute carried thousands or even millions of people. There they were, not dead, not living. How they exulted or wept in their transubstantiation, no one left could say. Only this could be said: man had gone, and a great emptiness was fallen over Earth.

‘Your thoughts are heavy, Dandi Lashadusa. Get you home.’ Her mentor was back in her mind. She caught the feeling of him moving around and around in his coral-formed cell.

‘I must think of man,’ she said.

‘Your thoughts mean nothing, do nothing.’

‘Man created us; I want to consider him in peace.’

‘He only shaped a stream of life that was always entirely out of his control. Forget him. Get onto your mare and ride home.’

‘Mentor –’

‘Get home, woman. Moping does not become you. I want to hear no more of your swan song, for I’ve given you my final word on that. Use a theme of your own, not of man’s. I’ve said it a million times, and I say it again.’

‘I wasn’t going to mention my music. I was only going to tell you that –’

‘What then?’ His thought was querulous. She felt his powerful tail tremble, disturbing the quiet water of his cell.

‘I don’t know –’

‘Get home then.’

‘I’m lonely.’

He shot her a picture from another of his wards before leaving her. Dandi had seen this ward before in similar dreamlike glimpses. It was a huge mole creature, still boring underground as it had been for the last hundred years. Occasionally it crawled through vast caves; once it swam in a subterranean lake; most of the time it just bored through rock. Its motivations were obscure to Dandi, although her mentor referred to it as ‘a geologer’. Doubtless if the mole was vouchsafed occasional glimpses of Dandi and her musicolumnology, it would find her as baffling. At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical.

Why, a million personalities glittered almost before her eyes!

She mounted the great baluchitherium mare and headed for home. Time and old monuments made glum company.

Twilight now, with just one streak of antique gold left in the sky, Venus sweetly bright, and stars peppering the purple. A fine evening in which to be alive, particularly with one’s last bedtime close at hand.

And yes, for all her mentor said, she was going to turn into that old little piece derived from one of the tunes in the 1540 Souter Liedekens, that splendid source of Netherlands folk music. For a moment, Dandi Lashadusa chuckled almost as eruditely as her mentor. The sixteenth century, with the virtual death of plainsong and virtual birth of the violin, was most interesting to her. Ah, the richness of facts, the texture of man’s brief history on Earth! Pure joy! Then she remembered herself.

After all, she was only a megatherium, a sloth as big as a small elephant, whose kind had been extinct for millions of years until man reconstituted a few of them in the Venusian experiments. Her modifications in the way of fingers and enlarged brain gave her no real qualification to think up to man’s level.

Early next morning, they arrived at the ramparts of the town Crotheria, where Dandi lived. The ubiquitous goats thronged about them, some no bigger than hedgehogs, some almost as big as hippos – what madness in his last days had provoked man to so many variations on one undistinguished caprine theme? – as Lass and her mistress moved up the last slope and under the archway.

It was good to be back, to push among the trails fringed with bracken, among the palms, oaks and treeferns. Almost all the town was deeply green and private from the sun, curtained by swathes of Spanish moss. Here and there were houses – caves, pits, crude piles of boulders, or even genuine man-type buildings, grand in ruin. Dandi climbed down, walking ahead of her mount, her long hair curling in pleasure. The air was cool with the coo of doves or the occasional bleat of a merino.

As she explored familiar ways, though, disappointment overcame her. Her friends were all away, even the dreamy bison whose wallow lay at the corner of the street in which Dandi lived. Only pure animals were here, rooting happily and mindlessly in the lanes, beggars who owned the Earth. The Impures – descendants of the Venusian experimental stock – were all absent from Crotheria.

That was understandable. For obvious reasons man had increased the abilities of herbivores rather than carnivores. After the Involution, with man gone, these Impures had taken to his towns as they took to his ways, as far as this was possible to their natures. Both Dandi and Lass, and many of the others, consumed massive amounts of vegetable matter every day. Gradually a wider and wider circle of desolation grew about each town (the greenery in the town itself was sacrosanct), forcing a semi-nomadic life into its vegetarian inhabitants.

This thinning in its turn led to a decline in the birthrate. The travellers grew fewer, the towns greener and emptier; in time they had become little oases of forest studding the grassless plains.

‘Rest here, Lass,’ Dandi said at last, pausing by a bank of brightly flowering cycads. ‘I’m going into my house.’

A giant beech grew before the stone façade of her home, so close that it was hard to determine whether it did not help support the ancient building. A crumbling balcony jutted from the first floor; reaching up, Dandi seized the balustrade and hauled herself onto it.

This was her normal way of entering her home, for the ground floor was taken over by goats and hogs, just as the third floor had been appropriated by doves and parakeets. Trampling over the greenery self-sown on the balcony, she moved into the front room. Dandi smiled. Here were old things, the broken furniture on which she liked to sleep, the vision screens on which nothing could be seen, the heavy manuscript books in which, guided by her know-all mentor, she wrote down the outpourings of the musicolumns she had visited all over the world.

She ambled through to the next room.

She paused, her peace of mind suddenly broken.

A brown bear stood there. One of its heavy hands was clenched over the hilt of a knife.

‘I am no vulgar thief,’ it said, curling its thick black lips over the syllables. ‘I am an archaeologer. If this is your place, you must grant me permission to remove the man things. Obviously you have no idea of the worth of some of the equipment here. We bears require it. We must have it.’

It came towards her, panting doggy fashion, its jaws open. From under bristling eyebrows gleamed the lust to kill.

Dandi was frightened. Peaceful by nature, she feared the bears above all creatures for their fierceness and their ability to organise. The bears were few: they were the only creatures to show signs of wishing to emulate man’s old aggressiveness.

She knew what the bears did. They hurled themselves through the Involutes to increase their power; by penetrating those patterns, they nourished their psychic drive, so the mentor said. It was forbidden. They were transgressors. They were killers.

‘Mentor!’ she screamed.

The bear hesitated. As far as he was concerned, the hulking creature before him was merely an obstacle in the way of progress, something to be thrust aside without hate. Killing would be pleasant but irrelevant; more important items remained to be done. Much of the equipment housed here could be used in the rebuilding of the world, the world of which bears had such high, haphazard dreams. Holding the knife threateningly, he moved forward.

The mentor was in Dandi’s head, answering her cry, seeing through her eyes, though he had no sight of his own. He scanned the bear and took over her mind instantly, knifing himself into place like a guillotine.

No longer was he a blind old dolphin lurking in one cell of a cathedral pile of coral under tropical seas, a theologer, an inculcator of wisdom into feebler-minded beings. He was a killer more savage than the bear, keen to kill anything that might covet the vacant throne once held by men. The mere thought of men sent this mentor into sharklike fury at times.

Caught up in his fury, Dandi found herself advancing. For all the bear’s strength, she could vanquish it. In the open, where she could have brought her heavy tail into action, it would have been an easy matter. Here her weighty forearms must come into play. She felt them lift to her mentor’s command as he planned to clout the bear to death.

The bear stepped back, awed by an opponent twice its size, suddenly unsure.

She advanced.

‘No! Stop!’ Dandi cried.

Instead of fighting the bear, she fought her mentor, hating his hate. Her mind twisted, her dim mind full of that steely, fishy one, as she blocked his resolution.

‘I’m for peace!’ she cried.

‘Then kill the bear!’

‘I’m for peace, not killing!’

She rocked back and forth. When she staggered into a wall, it shook; dust spread in the old room. The mentor’s fury was terrible to feel.

‘Get out quickly!’ Dandi called to the bear.

Hesitating, it stared at her. Then it turned and made for the window. For a moment it hung with its shaggy hindquarters in the room. Momentarily she saw it for what it was, an old animal in an old world, without direction. It jumped. It was gone. Goats blared confusion on its retreat.

The mentor screamed. Insane with frustration, he hurled Dandi against the doorway with all the force of his mind.

Wood cracked and splintered. The lintel came crashing down. Brick and stone shifted, grumbled, fell. Powdered filth billowed up. With a great roar, one wall collapsed. Dandi struggled to get free. Her house was tumbling about her. It had never been intended to carry so much weight, so many centuries.

She reached the balcony and jumped clumsily to safety, just as the building avalanched in on itself, sending a cloud of plaster and powdered mortar into the overhanging trees.

For a horribly long while the world was full of dust, goat bleats and panic-stricken parakeets.

Heavily astride her baluchitherium once more, Dandi Lashadusa headed back to the empty region called Ghinomon. She fought her bitterness, trying to urge herself towards resignation.

All she had was destroyed – not that she set store by possessions: that was a man trait. Much more terrible was the knowledge that her mentor had left her for ever; she had transgressed too badly to be forgiven this time.

Suddenly she was lonely for his pernickety voice in her head, for the wisdom he fed her, for the scraps of dead knowledge he tossed her – yes, even for the love he gave her. She had never seen him, never could: yet no two beings could have been more intimate.

She also missed those other wards of his she would glimpse no more: the mole creature tunnelling in Earth’s depths, the seal family that barked with laughter on a desolate coast, a senile gorilla that endlessly collected and classified spiders, an aurochs – seen only once, but then unforgettably – that lived with small creatures in an Arctic city it had helped build in the ice.

She was excommunicated.

Well, it was time for her to change, to disintegrate, to transubstantiate into a pattern not of flesh but music. That discipline at least the mentor had taught and could not take away.

‘This will do, Lass,’ she said.

Her giganic mount stopped obediently. Lovingly, she patted its neck. It was young; it would be free.

Following the dusty trail, she went ahead, alone. Somewhere afar a bird called. Coming to a mound of boulders, Dandi squatted among gorse, the points of which could not prick through her thick old coat. Already her selected music poured through her head, already it seemed to loosen the chemical bonds of her being.

Why should she not choose an old human tune? She was an antiquarian. Things that were gone solaced her for things that were to come. In her dim way, she had always stood out against her mentor’s absolute hatred of men. The thing to hate was hatred. Men in their finer moments had risen above hate. Her death psalm was an instance of that – a multiple instance, for it had been fingered and changed over the ages, as the mentor himself insisted, by men of a variety of races, all with their minds directed to worship rather than hate.

Locking herself into thought disciplines, Dandi began to dissolve. Man had needed machines to help him do it, to fit into the Involutes. She was a lesser animal: she could change herself into the humbler shape of a musicolumn. It was just a matter of rearranging – and without pain she formed into a pattern that was not a shaggy megatherium body, but an indigo column, hardly visible …

For a long while Lass cropped thistle and cacti. Then she ambled forward to seek the hairy creature she fondly – and a little condescendingly – regarded as her equal. But of the sloth there was no sign.

Almost the only landmark was a violet-blue dye in the air. As the baluchitherium mare approached, a sweet old music grew in volume from the dye. It was a music almost as ancient as the landscape itself, and certainly as much travelled, a tune once known to men as Old Hundredth. And there were voices singing: ‘All creatures that on Earth do dwell s …’




Original Sinner (#u05be873d-20e3-5cbf-a745-617b6ac1fde3)


This was the order in which the A.S. Intractible’s hatches opened, after landing at Army Base, South City, Roinse, Mars. Firstly, the Second Aft Hatch, to emit a Leading Hand who ran in his suit across to the Control Bunker to collect Contact Assurances. Secondly (fifteen minutes later), Aft Hatch ‘Q,’ to emit three engineers who made a cursory survey of the jets before retiring to chat with the uniformed ground crew now appearing. Thirdly and fourthly, simultaneously, the Lower Midships Hatch (Personnel) to emit the Catering Officer who wanted to secure a supply of fresh bacon before the A.S. Intractible left again, and the Upper Midship Hatch (Cargo) to emit a heavy duty gangplank, from which Neptunian sulphosphates were trundled in covered trucks.

Fifthly, the Fore Control Hatch, to emit the pilot, who had brought the Army ship in from Orbit Epsilon, and the Captain, who was going to have a drink with the pilot. Sixthly, Warrant Officers’ Hatch, from which a group of three officers emerged in civilian dress. Seventhly, the Personnel Duty Hatch (Personnel) to emit a platoon of Outer Planets Commando, who marched off the Army Base field in threes. Eighthly, the Personnel Duty Hatch (Stores), to emit a small vehicle carrying the equipment of the Commando platoon. Ninethly, the captain’s Hatch, to emit the Trooping Officer and his A.D.C., heading in the direction of Roinse, the old city. Tenthly, the Heavy Cargo Hatch, amidships, from which various duty technicians in fatigue kit straggled, to climb over the ship and check its hull for faults.

Lastly, General Hatch (Ratings) swung open. By this time, two and a half hours had elapsed since landing.

‘Isn’t it just typical of the bleeding Army!’ Wagner Hayes exclaimed, clattering down the gangplank. ‘We’ve only got twenty-four hours here before we bat off for Earth again, and then they keep us mucking about with an FFI when we arrive. What did they think we could have picked up on that lousy hole Ganymede?’

‘Don’t forget we had a pay parade, too, Wag,’ Dusty Miller said, chinking the credits in his pocket.

‘They could have had that when we were space-borne if the ruddy RSM had been half sharp,’ Wagner growled.

Leaving the ship with him were, besides Dusty, two slightly older men, Max Fleet and their bald unsmiling corporal, George Walters. The four came down onto the landing pad with a knot of other servicemen, all looking forward to a few hours’ leave and a change from the rigorous confinement of the Intractible.

‘You’re always grumbling, young Wag,’ George said. ‘What are you going to do with yourself now you’re out?’

‘I’m certainly not going to get drunk, like you and Max!’ Wagner exclaimed promptly. ‘I’ve got more sense. Catch me wasting my money on booze!’

Backing up his friend, Dusty pointed across to one of the Base buildings in the direction of which they were walking.

‘See that place, George?’ he said. ‘Wag and me are staying there, mate. Other Ranks’ Hostel. We found it on the trip out. It’s got everything; showers, ultra-violet, juke-boxes, local and Earth telly, terrific canteen …’

‘And a library,’ Wagner said. ‘A library bursting full of comics! I’ve never seen so many comics in my natural.’

‘You did nothing but read comics on Ganymede,’ Max Fleet said. ‘Don’t you ever want a change?’

‘These are up-to-date comics, stupid,’ Wagner said genially. ‘Go and get sloshed with old George and keep your trap shut!’

They trudged companionably across the monotonous expanse of tarmac. It was good to be out of the confines of the ship; the air, as Max remarked to George, breathed well considering that it had once been artificially ‘planted.’

‘It’s better in the hostel,’ Wag explained. ‘They maintain it there at full Earth pressure. I tell you, that place is a dream. It is; it’s better than home! If you two drunken old reprobates had any sense –’

‘Hallo! Here comes the bleeding padre!’ Dusty said. ‘You’ve had it, lads. From the right, pray!’

The four of them groaned in unison.

No doubt Padre Column heard them, but his smile was not affected. He included them all in the smile, the beefy Wagner with his open, boyish face, weedy Dusty with his peak haircut, dark and reserved Max, dough-faced corporal Walters with his parody of a monk’s tonsure.

‘Enjoy your leave, my friends,’ the padre said. ‘Try and regard this brief break in our journey home as an opportunity for spiritual refreshment. Remember that war is raging on Earth, and that as soon as we return there we shall be called upon to give of our very best.’

‘Yes, sir, of course, sir,’ Wagner and Dusty chorused together. George Walters looked sullen.

‘You speak as if that was something to look forward to, sir,’ he said.

‘If we are to be tested, Walters, we must come to it with what fortitude we can muster,’ Padre Column said. ‘We must regard mortification as our common lot, I fear.’

‘Come on, George, let’s shove off!’ Dusty said in an undertone, tugging at the corporal’s sleeve; but George stood his ground.

‘My wife was killed in the East Anglia Massacre last year,’ he said distinctly. ‘I doubt if I shall get back aboard the Intractible until two M.P.’s carry me aboard drunk.’

‘Then you are a fool, Walters, and I only hope your younger companions will not follow your example.’

‘Don’t worry, sir,’ Wagner said cheerfully; ‘we wouldn’t follow this old soak into the nearest cookhouse.’

So saying, he grabbed George’s arm and moved him forcibly away. Dusty and Max Fleet, who had said nothing during this exchange, followed hurriedly. The padre stood watching them, lips pursed. A heated argument sprang up between Dusty, George and Wagner, lasting all the way to the Base gate. As usual, Max kept out of the controversy.

‘You young fellows don’t know what’s good for you nowadays!’ George said. ‘When I was your age, I wasn’t content to bash my bunk reading bloody comics – I was seeing a bit of life, knocking round the taverns with a few likely women.’

‘No wonder you lost all your hair,’ Dusty retorted. ‘You’d better watch out, Max, or the corp will lead you down the primrose path into the dog house.’

‘I’ll watch it, Dusty,’ Max said, as they reached the gate. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, suddenly aware that although he had spent almost all his tour of duty with these three men, they were not really his friends, nor ever could be. A momentary silence spread from him to the others, as if they too, at this moment of parting, had become aware for the first time of their own, separate identities.

‘Well, we’ll meet up again tomorrow evening, and see who looks in best shape then,’ Wag said. ‘Gentlemen of the ruddy ranks, Di-i-i-iss – wait for it! – di-i-i-iss – miss!’

But his tone was not as light as usual. Wag sounded slightly defensive. George, Max thought, had caught him on a sensitive spot with his remark about the rival attractions of comics and women.

Forgetting it at once, he turned away with George. As the two youngsters entered the air-conditioned hostel, he and George showed their passes and walked through the main gate into one day’s liberty.

Roinse was partly a military town. When the terrific task of oxygenating the Martian atmosphere had been undertaken two generations back, the Army, in liaison with the Space Corps, had been in charge of the project. When the inter-racial wars had broken out on Earth, the military had tightened their grip here.

Yet mingled with the barracks and camps was a sizeable business city, also growing. As it grew its suburbs grew, bright and cheap and uniform, pathetic replicas of the square miles of suburb now being blown to bits all over Earth. There was another section of Roinse: the ancient Martian city, rock-hewn and ruinous, standing on the edge of the new built-up area. In the heart of the old alien city stood the village Roinse where the descendants of the original colonists lived, a proud and dwindling clique resenting all the more recent intruders.

Roinse, in short, was a muddled city – and an interesting one, heterogeneous as Rome, mysterious as Singapore.

George Walters and Max Fleet headed for the oldest part of town. The number of people in uniform thinned as they went, but George was still peevish and muttered about the folly of youth.

‘I don’t understand these kids,’ he said. ‘They’re all the same today – rather watch a telegame over a bottle of squash than come out and have a real drink like a man.’

‘Forget it, George,’ Max said.

‘Yes, let’s forget it,’ George agreed, taking the other’s arm. ‘Let the world go to pot eh? We’ll show ’em! I feel like getting real soused tonight, Maxie, and forget the bloody war and everything.’

They passed into the shadow of a Martian building like a small hill. It might have been, in its prime, a cathedral or a railway station. The race that had built it was long gone; now their monument bore warning notices BEWARE OF FALLING ROCK. Many of its ancient cloisters had been adapted into stalls or shops by terrestrials. In one of the darkest corners stood the Flingabout Tavern. The two Earthmen went in, into an atmosphere of neon and noise.

Few customers were about. A juke-box blazed away in a corner; two couples danced in front of it. Girls in aprons bustled round, serving drinks and marsbergers. George eyed them appreciatively.

‘This is living!’ he exclaimed, rubbing his red hands. ‘Maybe we pick up a couple of these tarts at closing time, eh, Max?’

‘Maybe,’ Max said.

They ordered Roinse Green wine in tankards.

‘Here’s to all those stinking, fruitless, useless months of our lives we wasted on Ganymede station!’ Max said, raising his tankard.

Together they drank deep. George sighed with gratification, leaning back in his chair relaxedly, his fingers tapping on the table in time with the juke-box beat.

‘This is living,’ he repeated.

‘Think of those poor kids with their faces buried in comics,’ he said.

‘I’ll bet this place gets pretty wild after dark,’ he said. He looked slightly bored.

‘We can go somewhere else after another drink or two, if you want,’ he said.

‘Really paint the town,’ he said.

‘Show ’em old soldiers never die,’ he said. Pause.




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