by Brian Aldiss
An hour passed, and still the chair beside him was empty. He sat on and on, submerged in noise. Probably she was somewhere with the drunk who had had his arm around her yesterday. Boom boom boom went the meaningless din, and the chair remained empty beside him.
It was after two in the morning. The mess was emptying again. Then it became suddenly clear. Mary would not come. She would never come. He was just a soldier, there would be an empty chair beside him all his life. No Mary would ever come. In his way of life, the Drallabian way of life, there was no room for Marys. He pressed his face into his hands, trying to bury himself in those hard palms.
This was Sgt Taylor’s dream, and it woke him crying in his hospital bed.
He wept until the shouts of men in nearby beds brought him back to reality. Then he lay and marvelled about his dream, ignoring the pain of his shattered eardrums.
It was a wonderful mixture of reality and superreality. Every detail concerning the raid had been accurately reconstructed. Just like that, he had led his men to success a very few hours ago. The hyperactivity pills had behaved in the dream as in real life.
‘What the hell was you dreaming about?’ asked the fellow in the next bed. ‘Some dame stand you up or something?’
Sgt Taylor nodded vaguely, seeing the man’s lips move. Well, they had said there might be after-effects. Perhaps even now someone was inventing a drug to grow you new eardrums …
Only in two details had his dream transcended reality.
He had never seen nor consciously looked for any Mary. Yet the authority of the dream was such that he knew that through all his life, through all the empty discipline and the empty debauchery, a Mary was what he had been seeking. He knew too that the dream predicted correctly: given the conditions of this war, there would never be a Mary for him. Women there were, but not women like Mary.
The other detail fitted with the first one …
‘Or maybe the way you was squealing, you was above ground playing soldier again, eh?’ suggested the fellow in the next bed.
Sgt Taylor smiled meaninglessly and nodded at the moving lips. He was in a world of his own at present; and he liked it.
Yes, the other detail fitted with the first. In his dream he had promoted himself to colonel. It could be mere oneiric self-aggrandisement: but more likely it was something deeper than that, another slice of prediction matching the first.
Sgt Taylor was a soldier. He had been a soldier since birth, but now he was realising it all through. That made him soldier-plus. Mary was the softer side of life, the unfulfilled, the empty-chair side; now it was ruled out of being, so that he could only grow harder, tougher, more bitter, more callous. He was going to make a splendid soldier.
No love – but bags of promotion!
Sgt Taylor saw it all now, clear as a ray of sunlight. It was good to have shed his sentimental side in a dream. Shakily, he started to laugh, so that the man in the next bed stared at him again.
They should be able to think up some really bizarre missions for a man who was stone deaf …
Stage-Struck!
The Wells Memorial Wing of the library was a long grey room, while by coincidence the under-librarian was a long grey man. His lips looked to be zipped as tightly together as the mouth of a miser’s purse, his eyes were so deeply set in his face that they seemed puddles at the back of twin caves. There was, too, a greyness in his walk that suggested that existence on the Education Satellite was a burden to him. He looked – taking him all in all – a man at once bent and unbending, as if life, in offering too little, had been too much.
Nevertheless, he was smiling indulgently at the young student who so reverently looked through the magazines in his archives.
‘I can tell you’re fond of twentieth century literature,’ he said.
‘Indeed I am,’ the student said. ‘People say that just because it’s five centuries old it holds no further interest, but that’s all nonsense – particularly about all this prophetic literature, which was then at its richest.’
‘Quite so, although personally I prefer the work of the earlier nineteenth century – that’s my period. What are you studying in particular?’
The student was very young. With due sense of his own importance, he tapped the dusty magazines he held and said, ‘I’m doing a research thesis of this type of prophetic literature – science fiction as it was called in its day – with a view to determining how nearly it was later fulfilled. Then when I’m fully qualified, I can go back in the Time Capsule and do actual field research.’
Meditatively, the under-librarian nodded.
‘It needs careful training before one can make the mental adjustments necessary to travel to another age,’ he said. ‘I found this out to my own cost; there are more difficulties in it than just the technical ones.’
‘You’ve extemporated, sir?’ asked the student.
Nodding, the under-librarian picked up one of the magazines and opened it.
‘Look here, here’s a very perceptive story that will support your thesis: “Hide and Seek,” by an author well known in his day. It’s about a man in a spacesuit defeating a crack spaceship.’
‘And this has since really happened?’
‘Not exactly. But the same interestingly unlikely and uneven sort of contest has actually taken place.’ The lined face for a moment relaxed into a glow of memory. ‘I refer, of course, to the race between a spaceship and a stagecoach.’
‘Er – I don’t think I recall …’ said the student, uncertain whether he was expected to do so or not.
‘It was an incident in my personal history. Perhaps I may indulge myself by relating it to you. It must be two years since I last told it to anyone.’
‘Er – will it take long?’ asked the student. ‘I have an appointment with my robotutor that I ought –’
This was nearly half a century ago (began the under-librarian inexorably), before the Time Capsules were as convenient and commodious as they are today. As you know, they are chiefly used today for all sorts of research into the past, but half a century ago this application was new, and it was a very raw and nervous young student of English literature who was ejected from his Capsule into the London of 1835.
You will naturally have heard of London. It was the capital city of a small island which disappeared under the sea in the Atlantic Shift of the late twenty-second century, and in 1835 it was one of the most important cities on the globe.
Picture then our young student, whom we will call Smith, making his way one raw November morning down Gracechurch Street to the Spread Eagle. He is in a panic. So much so that his young travelling companion, Bassy, can hardly keep up with him – although Bassy is in almost as great a panic. They have just emerged from the Capsule and are angry with each other and life.
The Spread Eagle Inn was a scene of much coming and going, a confusion and a profusion of people, bright or drab, but never a two alike. Everyone was making very good use of tongue and elbows, spitting freely, laughing, weeping, breathing the sharp air in and out – all the things universal education has rid us of. They filled the cobble street, they flocked under the archway, they jostled about the coachyard, adding their own flavour to the scents of cooking and horses. And the inn itself they crowded till the old structure bulged at its timbers. Round its galleries, in its rooms, in its parlours – bellowing for service – they milled, the Londoners of the pre-Victorian age.
‘My God!’ exclaimed Bassy. ‘How do we get through this lot?’
Oh, the place was not really so crowded, but what makes a crowd is not its numbers so much as its individuals – and this was in the days before conformity. Some of these individuals now surrounded Smith and Bassy; a wizened boy selling lead pencils; a one-armed seaman hawking ‘The Public and Private Life of Madame Vestris’; a Jew with a gold tooth pressing fifty-bladed penknives; an aged lady with a moustache crying nosegays; a scarecrow begging ale money; a rotund merchant under four capes offering ferrets for sale; a Spaniard disp
laying patent leather straps; a cripple advertising his sister; a placard boy advertising a play – with others of that ilk, besieging the travellers’ ears in their attempts to reach their purses.
Twenty-fifth century sensibilities go down before this kind of assault. Smith and Bassy felt themselves sinking under the mob’s determination.
What saved them was the cracked high note of a key bugle. Though this sound held no meaning for them, its effect on the crowd was magical. It began to flow like a tide, to part in the middle like a Red Sea, carrying the two travellers along with it. They were borne through the coach yard and into one of the tavern rooms.
Again the bugle sounded. Full tilt, a canary-bright coach rattled under the archway, its wheel hubs missing the near wall by inches. It drew to a splendid halt in the yard as stable boys ran out to hold its wheels and horses. A cheer went up from the onlookers, a sigh from the passengers, both holding the tableau only for a moment before the former group attempted to swarm onto the coach and the latter off it.
Bassy gazed at this scene in some delight until Smith pulled his sleeve.
‘This is no time for sightseeing,’ he said. And indeed it was not. In some eight hours, they would be cut off from their home epoch for ever. As I will presently explain, they were really in a mess.
They had been rushed into a small room of the Spread Eagle. Frankly inhospitable, it was the travellers’ room, its bare plaster relieved only by the pencilled comments of earlier occupants. It contained benches, on which a beggar slept and a woman suckled twins, and a fireplace, the heat of which was barricaded in by four men standing round it with their stomachs to the flames.
One corner of the room was partitioned off; behind its flimsy barrier, a waiter of bleached aspect washed tankards and glasses in a bowl of something resembling gravy, wiped them on his apron, and passed them through a hatch into another room. Since he looked the least formidable creature present, Smith went across to him.
‘We want to get to Birmingham,’ he said. ‘Can you tell us how it’s done?’
The waiter fixed an eye on him, then squinted at him through the glass bottom of a tankard.
‘It’s done on foot by some, on nag’s back by others, and I dassay by swimming up the canals by others,’ he said, unsmiling.
‘We’re in a hurry. When does the next stage coach leave?’
‘Stage struck, are you? You certainly don’t sound like old stagers.’ While indulging in this humour, the waiter never ceased his dipping and wiping act, for every ten seconds as regular as a cuckoo from a cuckoo clock, a snipey woman’s face would pop through the hatch and cry savagely for glasses.
‘Could you oblige me with a sensible answer, please?’ Smith asked impatiently.
‘Why, if it’s sensible answers you want, cocker, you’d better ask at the booking office, hadn’t you? You don’t think I’d be doing this job if I had any sense, do you? Coming, you old bloodsucker!’
This last shouted reassurance was addressed to the proboscis which had just launched itself pecking through the hatch again. At the same time, the waiter jerked his left shoulder blade towards a rear door. Taking this as a sign, Smith and Bassy hurried through it, to find themselves in a long, low room, part of which was barricaded off to form a booking office.
When they had waited their turn behind an army subaltern and his lady, they confronted the clerk, a patriotically coloured gentleman with red cheeks, white hair and blue jowls.
He informed them that the Tally-Ho! would be leaving for Birmingham on the next quarter hour. Two outside seats were available, cost 3d per mile, or twenty seven shillings for the hundred and eight mile journey. Arrival, subject to acts of God or vagaries of horseflesh, seven and one half hours precisely after leaving the Spread Eagle.
Smith and Bassy gazed at each other in dismay.
‘We’ll hardly make it, even if they run to time. Why, that’s not fifteen miles an hour!’
‘It’s the swiftest, safest, cheapest journey in the world. Take it or leave it, masters, as you please.’
In the end they took it. There was no option. Shrugging, the colourful clerk entered their names on the way-bill.
The yard had emptied considerably now, most of its previous occupants having dispersed after the last coach had arrived. Round the Birmingham coach, which had just been pulled from its stabling, was a swarm of ostlers, stable-boys, shoe-blacks, and other hangers-on, some of whom were harnessing – or interfering with the harnessing of – four recalcitrant black horses, while others loaded up luggage under the careful supervision of the guard. A small knot of passengers attended by a pair of porters had already assembled, stamping their feet or slapping themselves to keep warm.
All these preparations would ordinarily have delighted the hearts of the visitors from the future, had they not been only too aware that through their own foolishness this bit of the past might have to serve as their perpetual present.
At least there was no delay. Amid an orgy of tipping, the passengers were heaved aboard the stage, four of them inside, seven outside, Smith and Bassy being placed in the front, behind the box.
‘Mind your ear’oles, one and all!’ cried the guard, and blew a blast on the key bugle.
The coachman appeared, raising a cheer from the stable-boys and the freshly gathered crowd.
I wish you could have seen him! Young, dapper, well clad, under a mulberry-coloured many-caped benjamin and a fine, shining top hat. Birmingham Basil was a famous man on his ground, with a following as enthusiastic as any of your space jockeys of today.
He never mounted his box until he had inspected every buckle and rein of the team’s harness, paying special attention to the coupling reins and curb-chains. Then he leapt lightly up, flung a rug round his kness, cracked the whip, and they were off!
A brave sight it was, the bright-painted coach with the coachmaster’s name, William Chaplin, bold on the door, and the wheels and the harness twinkling, and the horses stepping high and fresh on their toes, and not a grain of dust anywhere! Tra-tra-tra went the key bugle, ‘Watch your skulls, gents!’ cried Basil to the outsiders, and they clipped smartly under the low arch of the Spread Eagle onto the stones of London.
Their pace even in the narrow alleys was spanking – yet what could Smith and Bassy do but despair to think that the spaceship they had to race to Birmingham could equal in one second the distance they could cover in one hour?
That spaceships should be required to take people back in time seemed a lot more novel fifty years ago than it does today. Then, the full implications of the Zope Pupa Equations had only just dawned. If I may indulge in a little background history, the facts were something like this.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, interplanetary flight was a going but limited concern. It was only two centuries later, with the discovery of the unified field theory and the subsequent development of ships part-powered by anti-gravity, that vacuum-borne traffic really multiplied and interstellar travel was contemplated.
During the trial runs of starships – K-Capsules as the prototypes were called – out of the solar system and back, discrepancies in the unified field theory were observed. Professor Zope was the first to announce that time was as much a part of the true field as gravity, electricity, or magnetism, and that there existed right round the solar system a sort of neutral layer where, the other three factors reaching equilibrium, time itself became multi- instead of uni-directional.
These new facts did not remain merely academic marvels. T. X. Pupa, aided by Zope himself, produced those equations which postulate that having reached the neutral layer a spaceship may – under suitable motivation – choose its temporal value as readily as it does its velocital one to coast back to Earth on.
The suitable motivation, when turned from theory into technological fact, was the anticelerator. When fitted into a spaceship, the first Time Capsule was ready for its maiden voyage through time! Unfortunately, the bulk of the early anticelerators – ‘time engine
s’ in popular parlance – was so great that a Capsule, remotely controlled from a satellite, could only hold two passengers.
When Smith and Bassy made their journey, there were only six Capsules in operation, one of them belonging to UN University.
Their horrible mistake had been this: when the ship, after its journey through space and time, had landed them in London 1835, they had emerged excitedly; only when its doors had closed automatically behind them and it had vanished silently up into the pale dawn air, did they realise that they had left behind in the craft an essential piece of luggage.
The Capsule would return out of space for them in six months. But so that it did not fall into unlawful hands it would open its doors only to the signal of their psi-beacon. If it received no signal, it would return to UN University empty. And Smith and Bassy had left the psi-beacon behind!
‘You fool!’ Bassy gasped, his cheeks chalky white. ‘How could you have left it behind?’
‘You left it behind,’ Smith said, growing very red. ‘I thought you had it.’
‘I was sure you had it.’
‘You suicidal idiot!’
‘You inept clot!’
They had scarcely fallen to blows when Smith remembered Melluish.
Melluish was a sound but stodgy economic historian who had graduated from UNU in the same year as Smith. Although Melluish’s study of the Chartist movement and Smith’s study of Charles Dickens gave them an interest in the same distant period of time, they had little else in common: except for the fact that Melluish also was using the University Capsule to do field research.
The Capsule, having shed Smith and Bassy, was batting out to the neutral layer, switching into the present, returning to Earth to collect Melluish, and then doing the journey over again to drop him and his partner Joseph in the past.
