From Argentine to Alaska, and all ports in between, the conqueror chromosome failed to conquer.
The massive, massed intellect set itself to work on the problem, soon arriving at the answer. Another chromosome had got there first. Evidence of the truth of this came when the drastic modifications in domestic and public life which had swept the rest of the world swept the linked continents of North and South America. There was a second shared consciousness.
By various deductions, Frank concluded that the long-dead Frank II’s visit to Hispaniola had scattered some of the vital chromosome there. Not properly stable at that time, it had developed its own separate shared consciousness, which had spread through the Americas much as the Frank chromosome had spread round the rest of the world.
It was a difficult situation. The Franks and the Hispaniolas shared the globe without speaking to each other. After a decade of debate, the Franks took an obvious way out of the impasse: they built themselves a fleet of space ships and headed into the solar system.
That, ladies, gentlemen and neuters, is a brief account of the extraordinary race which recently landed on our planet, Venus, as they call it. I think we may congratulate ourselves that our method of perpetuating our species is so vastly different from theirs; nothing else could have saved us from that insidious form of conquest.
No Gimmick
Slurry, blurry sight. The stones of the cell drawn on a tired retina like squares scratched on a pavement. Lack of sleep did it; there was still a corner of Sladden’s mind detached enough to take a scientific interest in the phenomenon. Needing sleep so desperately, he saw it as a warm fluid. It needed to flow again, to fertilise every fibre of his body. Warmth, colour, perspective had gone. He was dying. Deep inside, the little gentle doors were closing – forever.
‘Sit up straight!’ the guard shouted.
Humphrey Sladden pressed his shoulder blades back against the wall. He closed his eyes; the slurred lines still remained, scrawled on his nerves, scribbled on his brain.
Two lights burned in his universe. One was external, a bright, electric thing in the cell roof. It conjured the stones of the cell into existence forcing them to realise themselves inside Sladden’s head. The other light was dim, and burned within. The stones were hostile to it, quenching. It was existence: the only significant thing, the sufferer, the triumpher.
Time passed, pyramidal second by second.
The cell door was kicked shatteringly open and rocked back against its hinges. An armed man entered.
‘Stand up!’ the guard bawled. Sladden stood; he marvelled that the impossible was so easy.
‘Move!’ the guard bawled. His English was limited to these few commands.
In a trance, the marked fog still before his eyes, Sladden moved down the corridor. Turn left at the end, second door on the left. He staggered in, the door closed behind him. As always, his Questioner was waiting for him.
The room was some twelve feet square and uncarpeted. There was a window, which had been boarded up. There were two chairs, on one of which the Questioner already sat. There was a small table, on which stood a coffee pot and two cups. There was a clock on the wall, stopped at four o’clock; that might indeed be the time – four o’clock in the morning, when the tides of human resistance are at their ebb.
‘Come and sit down, Sladden,’ the Questioner said.
So kind was his tone that Sladden began to tremble at once. He sat shakily on the chair.
‘How are you?’
Straining the muscles of his neck, Sladden raised his head and peered at the other. ‘I feel too weak to answer any questions,’ he said.
The Questioner had high cheekbones and a low brow. As always, he looked dishevelled; his air was that of a harassed business man rather than a conqueror. He spoke English almost without accent.
‘I won’t ask you many questions,’ he said. ‘Why are you feeling weak?’
‘I need sleep and food.’
‘Why did you not sleep before you came in here? Are you staying awake deliberately?’
Sladden did not reply.
‘Are you staying awake deliberately?’
‘You know they don’t let me lie down.’
The Questioner sighed.
‘You are lying, Sladden,’ he said.
‘They don’t let me lie down,’ Sladden repeated, closing his eyes.
‘Open your eyes. Look at me, Sladden. That is more honest. I will question your guard on this subject.’
Silence.
‘Sladden’ – with infinite patience – ‘Would you like me to question your guard?’
The tired man in the chair muttered, ‘Do what you like.’
‘I’m doing this for your benefit,’ said the Questioner sharply.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sladden said. He began to whimper. ‘You are on my side, aren’t you?’
The Questioner made no answer. He went over to the door, opened it, shouted. Sladden’s guard appeared; he and the Questioner exchanged sentences in their native tongue, after which the guard retreated. The door closed.
The Questioner came and stood behind Sladden’s chair, his hands on the back of it.
‘You had five hours uninterrupted horizontal sleep before coming in here,’ he said. His voice held only reproach. ‘The guard timed you, as he had been instructed to do.’
‘The man’s lying,’ Sladden said. Was the man lying? Had he slept? No. No. No sleep.
‘The man is not lying,’ said the Questioner. ‘You are under a delusion. You have this bad dream in your sleep, a stupid dream that you are not sleeping; it is an obsession. Why? I will tell you. Because your conscience is troubling you. You know there is something you should admit to me.’
Sladden groaned. ‘Let’s change the subject!’ he said. He always said ‘Let’s change the subject’ at this point; for this scene had been repeated almost word for word for – how long? – three months? three years?
The Questioner seemed willing to fall in with his wish. Moving away from Sladden’s chair, he said, ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’
‘Keep it,’ Sladden said. But through his bleary eyes he watched the other pour a cup, watched the dark, warm liquid flow, liquid dark and warm as sleep itself.
‘Gimme!’ he said. He could not stop himself saying it, although he knew that whether or not he got it depended entirely on the calculations of the Questioner.
The Questioner smiled, lifted the filled cup, hesitated, then put it down again. When he spoke, his voice was hard.
‘Why should I pamper you? You do nothing for me. Does it never occur to you how much of my time you waste? Don’t you think I’m human, Sladden? Do you think I enjoy these one-sided conversations?’
Sladden said nothing. The silence grew, a dirty thing as tangible as lard.
‘I don’t want to make you angry,’ he said. He bit back a flow of words. I love you, he wanted to say, you treat me as if I were real, you are the only person who speaks to me. You are my sole connection with the surface.
The country had been over-run by the enemy for under a year when Sladden had been picked up by the military. No charges had been made, no explanations given. They had simply taken him off in a lorry and locked him in a dark room. The dark, the silence, had lasted an age. Then this Questioner had come and spoken kindly to him.
Rough treatment, starvation and long spells of enforced standing had followed. In all that long period, he had not seen the Questioner again. Then he was moved to his present cell. The Questioner had reappeared, solicitous as ever; their nightly conversations had begun.
Their nightly conversations … Something about them partook of the sacramental. They were priest and neophyte. The priest, the Questioner, had all the knowledge, all the power, the power of absolution or condemnation; and behind him, quiet as dark wings folded, his agents waited – more terrible for being un-named. The neophyte, Sladden, was nothing, lost in sin and dirt; yet he was courted: in the midst of nothing, he had something, somet
hing precious enough to make the Questioner stoop to him: not his soul, for the people of the Questioner denied the soul, but – a secret. And by the strange etiquette of their relationship, Sladden was not told what the secret was.
This calculated obliquity of attack, coupled with the starvation and cruelty, had generated a peculiar state of mind in Sladden. Though he knew how carefully it had been planned, he was too weak to fight it. All his hours away from the questioning room were spent in a ghastly self-search, as he racked his mind for what they wanted of him. He was busy condemning himself.
For Sladden, these meetings took place far underwater, at intense pressure, in a drowned room. The Questioner wore – to Sladden’s worn brain – a diving suit; he could breathe, he could be hauled to the surface. Sladden was chained to the ocean bed.
A cup of coffee was put into his hands. He nearly upset it, stammering his thanks.
‘Never mind your thanks.’ The Questioner was still stern. ‘Did you hear what I said? You have wasted my time. I have failed to produce any results from you. This will be our last talk together; tomorrow you have a new Questioner.’
‘No!’ Sladden said. ‘No! No! Not that, please not that. Tell me what you want of me and I’ll say anything I can!’
He was on his knees, half the coffee upset. The Questioner avoided him and repeated a speech he had made many times before. This time Sladden listened desperately to it.
‘I have tried to grow close to you and understand you. Nothing you have said or ever could say would shock me or make me despise you. You never had a friend in your life to whom you could unburden yourself as you can to me. You may use me as your father confessor or your dustbin, and nothing you lay bare shall go beyond these walls.
‘In exchange, I want one small thing. Among all your personal secrets you have what I will call a public secret. That I need. It will help my people to govern your people more wisely. It may be a material fact – say, a knowledge of some secret dump of arms – or an insight into your national character, or a philosophical position. It does not matter what it is, provided it helps.
‘I can prompt you, but I cannot reveal it for you. You must bring it out voluntarily. Then you can go free.’
Sladden heard it through dejectedly and then said, as he had so often said, ‘Supposing I don’t have such a secret?’
‘Everyone has such a secret,’ said the Questioner. ‘Get up on your chair again.’ His tone was harsh, full of dislike, and then instantly full of solicitude as he added, ‘And you upset your coffee. I’ll pour you some more.’
Half way to the table with Sladden’s cup, pausing, turning with all the timing of an actor, he said quietly, ‘You know, don’t you, that I know what your secret is?’
‘Tell me!’ Sladden begged.
‘It must come from you,’ the Questioner said. ‘Why not let it, as this is our last talk together?’
Sladden’s mind tottered on the edge of temptation and fell.
‘It’s something to do with my being a science fiction writer, isn’t it?’ he said.
The corners of the Questioner’s trimuphant smile seemed to stretch and stretch into a full circle, whirling away to darkness with everything else in the defeated world.
* * *
The little scratched squares, when Sladden awoke, were back in place. Something different about them nagged at his attention, but he was too pre-occupied with other aspects of the situation.
He had lost consciousness before in the Questioner’s room; but the privilege of being insensible had always been withdrawn as soon as possible and he had wakened with his head in a bucket or matchsticks under his nails. This time, they had left him in a faint, left him to recover naturally.
They had left him lying down. The richness of having his tired bones horizontal on a bench was the first note of his waking.
Sladden, of course, knew what it all meant. He had betrayed himself. They were so pleased with themselves about it that they were also pleased with him. But the respite was gained not only as a reward: it was a chance to recuperate before they started on him again. And this time they had something to work on.
His bones ached with weariness, but the weariness was nothing to the shame in him. The shame was no less because he could not find a concrete reason for it. He only knew it was better to give up a secret under torture than have it bribed out of him. Yet the secret was no secret: they had known he was a science fiction writer when they arrested him.
Their tortuous logic was beyond him. They might just as well have been aliens from another planet. In those endless interrogations, Sladden had talked of his childhood, his father’s electrical company, his own joining the company – and then the sudden eye trouble which had eventually forced him to leave the city. He had told the Questioner of how he had gone to work in a stone quarry, and how his regrets had unexpectedly been lost in enjoyment of a hard, rewarding job. After three years at the quarry, his sight improved; he began to write. A dozen stories only had been published before the hail of bombs from the East.
It was an ordinary enough life story. Only the Questioner’s insistence on ‘the public secret’ hidden behind the facts gave it a sort of sinister undercurrent. He had been left to worry, during the bleak days in his cell, about what they were after in his particular case.
He had worried. He had gnawed himself into a honeycomb of worry; and when he had ruined himself, he had virtually whistled to them to set the dogs on him. They could not leave him now. Though he had no secret, they would find one before throwing him out to the offal cart.
The shakes began deep down in his body, a little generator submerged in his bowels. Its vibrations grew. Sladden was so thin he rattled on the bench, his protruding bones knuckling the wood. He thought he had known terror; now he recognised it for a newcomer.
In an effort to still himself, Sladden looked again at the grey stones opposite him, attracted by that different quality in them.
The light on them had some quality … then Sladden knew. Instead of being lit by the dim bulb burning eternally in his cell roof, the stones were washed by daylight. He struggled up into a sitting position, still shaking. Daylight; they had temporarily un-drowned him.
A small window with a grill was set in the stone above his head. He had been moved to another cell.
For a long while, so deeply had the inertia of his confinement sunk into him, he was overwhelmed by strangeness. That other cell was his home. It had his blood on the floor, his tears soaked into its bench; it stank of him. Here was nothing of his history, only – yes – a faint smell of smoke. Then it dawned on him that if he stood on the bench he could see out of the window.
Stiffly, like a dragonfly dragging itself from its ugly larva, Sladden pulled himself up and put his face to the daylight.
His cell was high enough for him to see over a fortified wall. Beyond it was part of a row of buildings. He read a notice over a shuttered shop window which said MUSIC TROVE! CLASSICS. JAZZ. DANCE. Through the ugly gap in the row, Sladden saw other ruins, craters, piles of debris, the muck of ruined London. A hint of green showed here and there among the desolation; there was not a sign of reconstruction anywhere. Rats are happiest living in rubble.
Over the wretchedness stretched an almost cloudless sky. Just looking at that sky could break the proudest heart. It was beyond all battles: pure, indifferent.
A fraction of roof, the eaves of the building, was also visible from Sladden’s cell. Tiny flames crawled almost noiselessly among peeling paintwork.
Sladden stared at them unbelievingly. Then a gust of wind fanned smoke into his eyes. He began to shout! Climbing down from his vantage point, he went to the door and hammered on it, still shouting. Growing dizzy, he rested against the thick wood, leaning on one shoulder. A scud of smoke into the room overcame his weakness, and he started shouting and banging again.
When there was no answer and he had exhausted himself, Sladden pressed his ear against the door; it was virtually soundproof, but
some faint sounds of movement reached him. Trying to soothe himself by telling himself that perhaps the fire was not serious, he climbed back up to the window. The flames seemed to be gaining; from the ground he could not see came shouts in the beastly barbarian tongue, and he guessed the fire brigade had arrived.
At that moment the cell door was unlocked and pushed open.
A minute guard with a Boskonian countenance and a big gun motioned Sladden into the corridor. A little smoke hung about. Two men slowly unwound a hose, dragging it along behind them, Two other prisoners were being released from cells; one of them was a woman. Sladden caught a glimpse of her face; it was pale and streaked with dirt, but to Sladden’s surprise he recognised her. She was Helen Quinnick.
Sladden only had time to notice this because the progress of him and his guard was momentarily blocked by two men with a trolley. They were wheeling this trolley, piled high with books, out of a room into which Sladden had time to glance. There, other men were piling books onto a second trolley; the room was stacked with books and magazines. Evidently it was being evacuated in case the fire spread.
So preoccupied was Sladden with having seen Helen that he almost neglected to glance at the piles of literature on the first trolley, but as the guard thrust him past it, he did so. The trolley was loaded with science fiction magazines. On the top he saw a cover he had particularly admired, a Ken MacIntyre for Borderland SF, early in 1958.
Nostalgia overcame him as he was prodded on down the passage; that cover called to mind all the old normal world which had gone up in smithereens. They descended a staircase. Within another two minutes, Sladden was shut in another cell, alone.
A small bed covered by two blankets stood in this cell. Sladden sank down onto it, tired from the brief exercise. His brain spun. Helen … Borderland … It could mean only one thing: this place, this prison the enemy had taken over, was dedicated to investigating science fiction.
But why? Heavens above, when the fen gathered at ‘The Globe’ they always insisted that science fiction was important. So it was. But only to them. They were just a tiny minority, misfits, dreamers, off-centre thinkers. It could all mean nothing to the enemy. Nothing meant anything to them except the insane ideology of expansion.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 30
