The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I found the way,’ Tayder said defiantly.

  She stared imperiously at him.

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

  She strode forward.

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

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

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

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

  The Great Time Hiccup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The tall man gave him a level, tolerant stare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Across the page he drew a horizontal line.

  ‘That’s our flow of consciousness.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He held it up for Dick’s inspection.

  ‘Pretty,’ Dick commented cautiously.

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Yes, food,’ Dick said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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