Chronocules

by D. G. Compton

  “Some people do.”

  “But do you?”

  Out in the dark street a party of guards marched by. Out in the dark street the Village was secure. David reminded himself of scientific fact. Forward time travel had been proved feasible: he was no physicist, but for every force was there not another, equal and opposite? There was a law here, and all Sir Edwin’s talk about philosophical impossibilities could not change it.

  168

  CHRONOCULES

  Sir Edwin let him have his little think. His wriggle on the hook. Then—

  “Consider another aspect, O.S. If it is possible to travel backward in time, then it is possible to return beyond the point of departure, to a point sooner than that from which you left. What then? Two representations of yourself walking the earth at the same time? Yourself existing in your own past? Changing it perhaps so that you do not make the journey that gets you back where you are ... ?”

  Sir Edwin spread his hands, pityingly.

  No. David Silberstein closed his eyes. When he opened them again the night would be over, would never have been necessary. No. Sir Edwin was by profession a manipulator—of ideas, but more particularly of words. He was a subversive. All his excuses, all his reasons, were ingenious treachery. . . . David opened his eyes, and nothing had changed.

  The night was still with him. Two men talking in an over-lighted office. He left Sir Edwin’s excuses, his reasons, was finished with them. Finished with them.

  “Did you really think there’d be a place for you in the outside world?” he said, only a rational, practical interrogator.

  “I had to hope. There were plans. Money will buy a lot of things.”

  “Will it? In the immediate future I’d have thought what was needed was a gun and a quick eye to go with it.”

  “Those too can be bought.”

  “And the fever? You were prepared to face that as well?”

  “When the raid was planned that hadn’t started. But I have my Village inoculation. It was just one more necessary risk among all the others.”

  169

  CHRONOCULES

  "Necessary?”

  “Necessary to me. This place is living on false hope. I needed to get out before the final disillusionment. It will be too painful.”

  At last, something David could fight. Cowardice, self- pity, cruelty.

  “Why have you told me all this?”

  “Because you asked me.”

  “You can’t shrug off your responsibility so easily. If I believed what you’ve just told me”—he didn’t, he didn’t —“I’d be without hope. You’d have taken hope away from me. Why?”

  “I’ve taken nothing away from you. You’re like me, O.S., a man without a future. A spectator. And you know it So there’s nothing I could take away from you.”

  A man without a future. . . Sir Edwin made clever noises, but they meant nothing. David could deny it, of course, and by doing so convince nobody, not even himself. Convincing people, even himself, was irrelevant. The truth, if there was a single truth, would emerge slowly, of itself. He felt no pity for Sir Edwin now, but no dislike either. He leaned his elbows on the desk and met the older man’s eyes. As was right.

  “You must go now,” he said. “There was never anything I could have done for you. But you knew that. I had you brought here because I wanted to be sine I understood.” And did he? “You must go now.”

  Sir Edwin rose and went out to his guards in the corridor, knowing, but not knowing when. They shot him at once, accurately, from very close quarters. The noise came dully through the closed door. To have talked so to a dead man, an inadmissible, was obscene. David Silberstein sat on for a long time at his desk, not thinking. As befitted a man without hope.

  Then he found himself an occupation, words, things

  170

  C H R O NO CULES

  to do with his hands. It was his duty, in any case of inadmissibility, to inform the Founder at once. Rousing the old man from his bed at such an uncomfortable hour gave David Silberstein a slight, malicious pleasure.

  Over in the hospital Roses and Liza had been awakened by the sounds of fighting. Roses was alarmed. He got out of bed, in the dark, put on his trousers, and got back into bed again. He wanted to put the light on then, but Liza said no: if there was shooting, the fewer lights there were to shoot at the better. Roses saw the sense of this. He curled up in bed in the dark, his arms around his knees, watching the flashes throw shadows that lingered brightly in the immediate blackness. They drew him back into his never-distant childhood—thunderstorms, his mother covering mirrors, closing the curtains tight, hurrying around to open all the inside doors, dousing the fire in case a thunderbolt should come down the chimney. The bare hospital room left him so vulnerable. If he could have got safely to his kitchen between flashes he would have run there. He covered his head with the blankets.

  Soon he felt Liza approach and sit on the bed beside him. He felt her stroke his head, then draw down the bedclothes. Eyes closed tightly, he pushed his head hard against her. She made safe noises. He stopped trembling. There was a milky warmth about her, and he hung onto it. Outside in the Village the noises died down. Liza shifted her position but he held her fast, needing her warmth against the new silence. She eased the blankets down, got her feet under them, and slid in beside him. A conflict between then and now, for there was no ruckled flannel nightdress, no smell of yellow soap. The voice was wrong, the hands too soft. Too soft. ...

  171

  CHRONOCULES

  His body responded while his mind was still stumbling on the threshold. Every nerve she touched had an end that leaped instantly in his belly. A dog had licked his ear once—it was like that, only all over. His skin was electric. And inside his trousers his penis grew till he could have cried with the ache in it.

  The girl in his bed was naked, nakedly stroking his head. His body was his own, his private shame. He wrenched away from her, turned over, drew up his knees, trembled again.

  “Get off,” he said. “Get off.” Heady, if she moved, if she went away, if she moved a muscle, to tear her, to punish her for his shame.

  Liza ran her tongue over the inside of her lips. His elbow had struck her mouth as he turned—she thought her lips were bleeding. She lay still, trying to understand his desperation. She was in his bed because she was cold, because she wanted to comfort him. Why could he not accept her comfort? She stared at the ceiling, dimly visible in the beginnings of the dawn. No, she was fooling herself. For his sake, making herself acceptable to him, she had constructed a he, and believed it. No, his fear was merely something she had used. She was in his bed to feel him against her. She was in his bed to sex.

  And why not? She had never wanted a man, a particular man, so much. And he had rejected her. He was repressed to the point of insanity. She tried to feel distaste for the lumpy halfwit still tense beside her, his coarse clothes hvurting her skin. To want him was faintly disgusting, a perversity, crying after the unattainable for no other reason than that it was. Unattainable. He was an emotional cripple. At his age he was probably incurable. He went to bed in his clothes, and he smelled. She was mad to be anywhere within ten feet of him.

  172

  CHRONOCULES

  His rigidity eased. After a further long pause he began to hug himself tunelessly to himself, opening her heart. She didn’t hug him. She didn’t take his great foolish head in her hands. But it was something just to lie there, just to lie there up against his shirt

  “I wonder what all that banging was,” she said. “I hope nobody got hurt.”

  She expected no answer. She was prepared to go on, to say anything, just in order to make a friendly noise. But—“You has banging and you has people getting hurt Stands to reason.” He moved, pushed his legs down into the bed.

  They thought about it. “Might have been a practice,” Liza said.

  “A bang’s a bang, idn’ it?”

  �
��You can have bangs that don’t hurt people. Like fireworks, for example.”

  “Thacky lot weren’t no fireworks.”

  She let him win. “I expect you’re right,” she said. And she didn’t really think a practice was very likely.

  He moved again, half turning over to face her. But he kept his arms close down by his sides.

  “I reckon it were old Pete and Harry. I reckon they’s friends don’ like what we done.”

  “What you done, Roses.” She met him, even in his grammar.

  “Ar. You’m right there, all right.” She felt him smile. “Couldn’ of done nothing without you, though. Other girls might of run.”

  “There was nowhere to run to.”

  “That’s right.” He sighed happily at the memory. He moved his arm, tried it across his chest, found that uncomfortable, and put it up above the bedclothes. It rested on the pillow by her head.

  “That were a night all right, that were. . . . Though

  173

  CHRONOCULES

  the old swan didn’ have no call to go dying.” He turned his head to look at Liza in the near darkness. “What was it you said her died of?”

  “Pollution. Dirt in the water. All the birds are going. Hadn’t you noticed?”

  There was a law. There were dozens. What was needed was a law to stop people crapping.

  “Roses ... aren’t you sleepy?”

  “Not yet. Couple of minutes, maybe. Always know when, ’cause it’s then I catches myself thinking rummage. That’s how I know, see?”

  His arm came down easily under her head and she moved very slightly closer, fitting exactly against his side. They talked for a few minutes longer, then trailed off into thinking rummage. Finally they slept.

  When they woke it was bright morning. Liza crossed back to her own bed. She didn’t want Roses worrying about what the nurse might say when she looked in the ward viewing screen.

  It was on that morning’s tide that the first of the corpses, monitored all the way up the Pill, arrived off Penheniot quay. The first of the many, as the sea became sewer, mortuary, burying ground. David Silber- stein—he was everywhere these days—had the area already cordoned off and the doctor waiting. The body, that of an elderly woman, only mildly bloated, was sealed and taken to the path, lab., where the doctor made his examination under totally sterile conditions and was able to isolate a mutant strain of enteric fever. It was a disease that had not existed in Western Europe for decades—at least, not outside government (anti-) biological warfare research stations. And there were sev- veral of these in southwest England. From which fact the Mrs. Lamptons of the nation, once they knew, would

  174

  CHRONOCULES

  be quick to draw their own agitators’ conclusions. Across the length and breadth of the land stable doors would be slammed upon a no longer containable horse. And— irrelevantly—a government might fall.

  Dr. Meyer, however, made no such apocalyptic pronouncements. The fever, he said, although virulent, came within the range controlled by the blanket immunization he had made up. Its incubation period was short and, unless there were unpleasant developments, he would be able to release all Village 'personnel being held in quarantine at the end of a further twenty-four hours. He further observed that since the dead old woman was wearing only her nightdress it seemed likely that she had died in one of the houses overlooking the river, and had been dumped by her panicky relatives. In order to protect themselves from infection, Dr. Meyer concluded, they should have dumped her at least three days before death.

  David Silberstein heard the report with little surprise. It indicated a breakdown of control in precisely the two areas, national and intimately personal, that the Village regime had been designed to resist. Law and order had been on the way out for years—he was busy with practicalities now, with making things work. He ordered the cadaver’s immediate committal to the Village incinerator. Then he got through to the St. Kinnow health authorities with great difficulty and told them what he had done. They seemed too busy to care.

  He tried ringing the Founder in London again, and was told, predictably, that no lines were available. With the BBC still making calming noises (although the travel limitations had now been extended to include industrial complexes around Bristol and Salisbury), obviously control of long-distance communications was inevitable. He wondered how long the fiction of a per-

  175

  CHRONOCULES

  fectly well-ordered situation could be maintained—by now millions of people on the ground must know the real truth.

  It was, naturally enough, Mrs. Lampton who broke

  through the layers of official censorship and thereby— from the best of motives—brought about a situation eventually far outside the control of all concerned. At midday, Regional TV (which was always less susceptible to central control) featured an interview with the Secretary of the Committee for Moral Responsibility in Science. The O.S. watched her with growing distaste.

  She said that the last thing she wanted to do was to appear hysterical. (Her hysteria had always been internal anyway, a mental screaming, a mental running around in circles.) But, she said, the public had a right to be told the truth. (The public, in its blind self-interest, had a right to be told nothing at all.) What was this mysterious fever? she asked. What was its extent, and exactly how infectious was it? Communications were being interrupted—were there indeed plans to cut off all southwest England by a cordon sanitaire? And if so, where was this cordon sanitaire to be situated? (She liked the phrase: she used it several times more.) And exactly what would happen to the people behind this cordon sanitaire? The public had a right to know. Furthermore, she said, was it pure coincidence that the fever had begun in the vicinity of various research centers? She named five, including Penheniot. (Saying this, she gave the people in each locality something, somebody to blame. Somebody to blame for everything that had ever gone wrong in the past, or would ever go wrong in the future.) She wondered if what her Committee had been fighting against for so long had now happened. She reminded viewers that the possibility of human error was always present. She suggested that—

  176

  C.HRONOCULES

  But the O.S. had heard enough, and turned her off.

  Few others would do the same. Whether she knew it or not, hers had been a call to battle.

  The O.S. left his office and went down the sunny main street, past the laboratory garden where men from Workshops were busy clearing the path and replanting the flowers. He was going to see Color Sergeant Cole. He wanted to be sure that, at least here in Penheniot, Mrs. Lampton’s call to battle would be adequately met.

  In the vegetable patch above the hospital the chrono- nauts had been burying their Training Supervisor, Sir Edwin. Such events, such inadmissibilities, were always awkward. They planted him decently among the cabbages and his fellow inadmissibles, offering a short prayer which if he were wrong in his atheism he’d be grateful for, and if he were right wouldn’t matter. Then they marched back down to the crew room, hot in the dark clothes that funerals still irrationally seemed to demand. The thought was not considered suitable for voicing, but all of them were grateful to Sir Edwin for delaying his deviations at least until their training program was nearly over. From now on there was little more to be done, and Sir Edwin’s deputy, the Village psychiatrist, would be perfectly well able to cope. This unvoiced thought was the best—and indeed the only —obituary that Sir Edwin would ever receive.

  Professor Rravchensky watched the chrononauts greedily as they marched past the laboratory. In a very few days now they would be his. His. . . . That morning, brave in the absence of the minatory Liza, he had successfully, if prematurely, transmitted a beetle and two of Roses Varco’s extremely unwilling cats. First, live matter, and now genuinely sensate organisms. Unfortunately, before he could go any further he needed Liza back to help him with the elaborate calculations

  177


  CHRONOCULES

  necessary to the transmission of the larger mammals. He squashed his ancient, fleshless nose against the glass of the window as the larger mammals in question, happily unaware of his lustful gaze, marched smartly away across the Village Green, bulging with health and trained intelligence, and disappeared through the door of the training complex.

  When they ware gone Professor Kravchensky straightened, put on a wide-brimmed hat against the August sun, and set out proudly (no more scuttling for him now, Kravchensky the famous, Kravchensky of the magnificent Chronomic Theorem) for the hospital. He needed Liza, and he was going to get her.

  Dr. Meyer was unimpressed. He let the professor contact his assistant over the TV ward network. Professor Kravchensky stared at her image pathetically, so near and yet so far.

  “I need you, Liza." His voice conveyed along wires. He suddenly feared that she might not approve of the reason. “The live-matter experiments are proceeding excellently,” he said, with a hopeful, upward intonation. “I . . . er . . . I shall soon be ready for a human transmission. I think you ought to be present.”

  A human transmission. . . . Liza was appalled. Crosschecking was needed, lengthy observation, weeks of preparation. For the professor to dispense with all this was intolerable, criminal . . . and (his being the responsibility) very tempting.

  “I shall be out of here tomorrow,”, she said. “If I’ve shown no signs of infection by then.”

  “Tomorrow? As late as that, child? I was hoping you could talk to Dr. Meyer, get him to release you sooner.” Twenty-four hours was nothing. His unreasonable urgency pushed her conscience into action.

  178

  CHRONOCULES

  “You’ve transmitted other mammals, I suppose. You have records of the post c.u. reactions?”

  “Of course, child. The vet tells me they’re in excellent health. No aftereffects at all.”

  She wondered how many mammals, of what size, under what conditions. But she didn’t ask because she didn’t want to know. She offered moderation, safe in the knowledge that it would be a waste of time.

  “You ought to wait at least a week, Professor. There might be a deterioration.”