“The old man laughed.
“There’s a funeral coming along the road behind me. Have a look! That’s the only way I’ll be cured.’
“The Devil waited where he was, and presently the funeral came up. He climbed into a tree by the roadside, and as the procession passed he looked down into the face of the corpse.
“Although the corpse was that of an old man, he did indeed look more peaceful and less tortured than the old man to whom the Devil had spoken. It seemed as if he was cured, as the old man had said. So the Devil followed the procession to a cemetery to see what would happen next.
“He was surprised to see the body put into a hole and buried. He stayed on the spot until everyone had gone, full of a strange sense of things being wrong. He was still sitting there when one of the servants found him and carried him lovingly home.
“Next day, the Devil escaped over the wall again. He wanted to see if the corpse was properly cured.
“Finding a shovel in the cemetery, he began to dig up the grave. Unfortunately, he had forgotten which was the fresh grave and dug up a lot of older ones. In each hole he found terrible things with very alarming faces full of worms. He decided then that anything was better than the cure called death.
“It was on that day the Devil became sick; on that day, too, he decided what he wanted to be when he grew up.”
I stared at the vile old woman with her closed eyes. Like all the inhabitants of this purgatory, she was beyond my understanding. “And what did the Devil become when he grew up?” I demanded.
She laughed at me. “Why, a townsman!” she said.
The road whirled me on, or else it was the mania in me that pursued me. I seemed to fall down it, and to fall at an increasing rate, so that the other beings there twisted past me like people falling down a cliff. It was confusing, but I felt that I was perhaps asking everyone the wrong questions, or else was making the wrong assumptions, and that this was aggravating my rate of fall.
A small girl was falling beside me, a gaunt child with bright copper locks but a face like parched vellum. I shouted to her above the noise: “How can we find if we are fit for the truth?”
When she smiled at me, she had no teeth, and I took her then for an old dwarf who had dyed her hair.
“There’s a tale about that,” she said. “All about a poor but proud young man who jumped from a hotel window seventeen storeys above the ground. As he was falling, he wondered if his whole life, and the life of almost everyone he knew, was not based upon illusory values. The ground whirled up — ”
“Stop! Stop! Don’t tell me how the story ends! That is my story! I shall die if you tell me any more. Now I can see that I still have the power to choose my own ending!”
Even as I spoke these words, I roused partly out of this strange bout of madness. The old hag whirled past me, and I realized that what I had taken for a street was nothing of the kind. These verticals, these ventilation cowls, these rails and windows — formed part of the Trieste Star. For I was done with Africa, and was sailing fast for home in my own vessel, with all my troubles behind.
Until now, I had not realized that my ship was armoured; I saw that the grey of the street was nothing more than the shielding that covered almost everything, rendering us impervious to anything but a nuclear attack. As I clung to the wheel — we drove through the grey waters at a tremendous pace — it was hard to see our course, so thoroughly were the windows shielded.
When the coast of England loomed up, bells sounded, and the crew began to cheer. I gave her a touch of additional speed; she responded like a woman; and we climbed up a steep launching ramp and ashore without difficulty. Until that minute, I had not realized that I captained an amphibious craft.
In no time, we arrived at the biggest city. It sat on top of its miles-wide platform, with starved land stretching all round it — I saw tiny withered things tending rows and rows of wilting plants before we launched ourselves up on to the platform. Moving more slowly now, I steered the ship down one of the streets.
All the ratings were leaning over the rail, cheering and waving, In my heart too surged an enormous relief that we were back home. But in the streets I saw things that I did not wish to see.
First I saw how the city was constructed. I saw how the serviceways that ran below the base platform had eliminated the need for all the distributive and supply and administrative vehicles that might once have crowded such a street; they were all automated, and ran below ground. All private vehicles, too, had long ago been eliminated in deference to an efficient public transport of bus and tube. As a result the traffic was negligible and the streets were narrow.
On either side of the streets ran the homes of the citizens, the plebs. They were more like barracks than flats. They spread all over the city, were the city, for the city had decentralized itself; divided into districts, no one district took precedence over another. All government and public offices were indistinguishable from the plebeian buildings in which the workers lived. It was only here and there that the brute form of a factory or distributive broke the drab uniformity.
One of the factories we passed, tall and black and windowless, was a soil manufactory, where synthetic micro-organisms were injected into the sand we brought home from Africa’s arid coast.
But the people, the people from whom I had sprung! Eagerly I turned to them, to realize for the first time how brutalized they had become. More and more the faculties of the city were being taken over by machines, and more and more the people were looking like machines. A starved body shows its joints and tendons and stanchions in a manner hardly distinguishable from an ordinary robot.
But robots do not break out with those awful skin diseases. Robots do not develop stomachs and legs distended by beri beri. They never have running sores or scurvy. Their spines do not curve, nor their knees buckle, with rickets. They are unable to walk with a hang-dog look. Their fabrics do not atrophy or their hearts break. I had forgotten, I had forgotten!
Many of these tragic people carried charms with which to ward off illness. Most of them had developed weird cults and religions. Among the more simple-minded, orgies formed a vital if occasional part of their lives; the shedding of seed was strongly linked with the vital fertility of the soil from which they were for ever cut off. Among the élite — for every ant hill has its aristocrats — was an austere cult that forbade sexual intercourse on the grounds that already the world groaned under too many people; “Let the Earth bring forth a decrease!” was its legend.
All this I saw: and I wept, so that I gave up the wheel, and another of the crew stood by my shoulder and took it. He steered a wilder course than I. He sailed us to city after city, not only in England; we moved up to Scotland, and then across to the lands of Scandinavia, down to Europe, across the wilds of Russia, over to China, over to America. City after city poured beneath our keel like cobbles under a fleet foot, and each city in its misery and lack of distinction could hardly be told from the next. In all of them the people, the endless people, starved and died and hoped and starved. It was as if that anxious jerking of the loins by which they begot duplicates of themselves was a part of a universal death agony.
“Enough!” I cried.
At once the cities vanished, and were replaced by the sea, the sea at night, a dark and gently breathing expanse of water, grumbling in its bed. Full of relief, I turned to the dark figure at the wheel. It was the doppelgänger, the Figure!
Our eyes met. It had eyes if not face — and yet it had face, for I saw for the first time that it was myself, a reflection of myself trapped as it might be in a pool of oil, imprisoned behind some terrible surface of guilt.
Its suffering — this I knew in that first glance when our gazes locked — was inseparable from mine, its damnation was mine, and as it was a lost spirit so was my spirit. Yet for this I felt no compassion, only hate. I leapt at the foul thing.
Even as I seized it by the throat, so it seized me, fighting back savagely. In those anguishe
d seconds, it looked nothing like me. Its fangs gleamed in my face, and I wrestled so that it would not bite off my lips. Now I had a better grip, and tightened it, and tightened it, until I felt the seams of my robe rip. It fought back, clinging to me so that a bloody cloud settled before my eyes and would not shake away. Yet I kept that crazed grip on him, and gradually the light died from his eyes. I gave him a final shake, and we fell together into the pool of oily water.
His figure, his dread face, was below me. Slowly it slid down, away from the surface. One hand came up as the rest sank; its fingers touched my fingers, then it all was lost in the rippling dark of the sea.
I still stood looking, long after what had seemed my reflection had shrunk and gone from the water. Our most profound moments come in such periods of inactivity. From the ocean of myself, I knew something had evaporated. Almost for the first time, I was conscious of the way in which my life had been dogged by illness and delusion. What sort of phantom the Figure was, I still could not say; perhaps it has been my mind’s projection of a wish to escape from my own wretched circumstances, its best endeavour to create the free being I was not. However that might be, I realized that it was gone now; peace stole over me like a rising tide, as I understood that I should never again hand over the wheel to it.
Philosophy is not my strong point, though I have tried many a time to make sense of my life, and of the killing drag of history, but I tried then to review the phantasies that my sickness had inflicted on me. Some I have set down in this narrative. At the time, they held as firm a place in my understanding as parts of the real world, and the continents of delusion through which I had been forced to march were no more fantastic than Africa or England.
But the ocean that linked all continents forced itself on to my attention. Slopping round my body, it reminded me that I was cold and had better crawl out of it.
The mere thought of the effort made me feel terribly ill. Darkness whirled inside and outside my head.
I trod water, gasping. Slowly, a different sort of awareness came back to me. The pounding in my head seemed to bring it back. I caught a smell of onions frying, and flowers, but so faint...and then lost in my bursting head. So intense was the migraine for some while that I could not look out of my eyes to find where I was. At last the cloud lifted. I looked about me. There lay the half-finished, half-ruinous city of Walvis Bay. I was staring at it through the dark of night and from a strange angle; I stood up to my chest in the sea, under a pier that jutted out from the main promenade. I was back in my right mind at last, and someone was stalking me nearby.
Chapter Twelve
I made no attempt to evade whoever was after me. My will was directed to wading ashore, so that the low swells rolling up the beach did not bowl me off my feet and drown me.
The pillars of the pier were encrusted with seaweed. I leant against them with the water swilling round my ankles, trying to reorient myself. Although I was tired, I felt extraordinarily well, now that my head stopped pounding — had I not conquered my own personal devil? But what did that mean, how had it improved me, morally, spiritually, physically? As yet I could not tell, unless the lack of fear I felt for the man lurking in the shadows was a portent.
The last thing I recalled of the external world was my plunge to the ground with the anti-gravity unit. That I lived was proof that it had carried me safely down to the street. But what had that cathartic plunge done to me, and could it have had some tonic effect on my nerves and glands to the extent that the scintillating scotoma with which I was afflicted was at last cured? Again, I could not tell; but the uncharacteristic quality of my recent delusions, and their intensity, led me to hope so.
Of course I wondered what I had been doing during the hours that obviously had elapsed since I jumped from the hotel window. I had escaped detection by Peter Mercator’s forces — that was clear; nothing else was. What was Justine doing now, where was Thunderpeck?
But I was weary of questions.
I looked towards the promenade, where strings of bright lights burned. Music was playing, and I saw numerous people in silhouette, shadows within shadows, walking along the front. Walvis Bay was filling up for the President’s opening ceremony. I could also see the outline of the man who watched me, dimly lit as he stood on the beach and half-concealed by the supports of the pier.
Something was wedged in the angle of the uprights against which I rested. It had been stuck where it was for some while, for the action of the sea had worn most of it smooth and barnacles clung to it. When I pulled it free, it proved to be a length of a thin beam, with an iron bolt in one end; perhaps it had once formed part of a native boat, lost along the coast; in any case, it made a useful if cumbersome weapon. Concealing my movements, I tucked it into the top of my trousers under the bedraggled robe I wore.
“What do you want with me?” I called.
The outline at once stood away from the pier, with no attempt at camouflage.
“Are you in your right mind at last?” he asked. I knew the voice.
“Is that you, Mercator? We’d better have a talk.”
“That’s what I’ve been hoping for.”
I waded heavily out of the water. Mercator was no longer a figure of fear to me; it behoved me to discover what I could from him.
So we met on the beach, with the ocean grumbling behind us. When we had stared at each other long enough in the pale illumination cast by the lights on the distant promenade, we sat down facing one another. His face looked lined and ghastly, and I felt mine was too.
“How long have you been following me?”
“Not for very long, although I have been looking for you for several hours — ever since you hit me on the jaw and left the hotel with more ingenuity than sense.” His voice was husky; I could hardly hear him above the noise of the surf breaking.
“I did not disappear effectively enough.”
“Certainly you didn’t. When you jumped out of the window in that foolhardy way, you landed in a side street and then began to walk about openly, peering into people’s faces and talking to yourself. Israt and I would certainly have caught you again, had we not had other troubles.”
“What other troubles?” The sand was sticky and unpleasant between my hands as I sat there.
“We are being watched. Everyone is against everyone else here. They are particularly suspicious of a foreigner like me with an acquaintance like you. You know the anti-grav unit you borrowed? It belonged to the Prime Minister of Algeria, General Ramayanner Kurdan. Old Kurdan makes a dangerous enemy. Algeria’s history over the past two or three hundred — ”
“Never mind their history, Mercator. Of course they will be against you, if you plan to assassinate the President of Africa tomorrow. I am against it, and heaven knows I’m politically uncommitted. Isn’t el Mahasset generally known as the most capable statesman Africa has ever thrown up, a mixture of Nehru, Chou En-lai, and Churchill?”
“Yes, yes, Noland, I agree with you, but you see that’s just the point — ” He stopped suddenly and clutched his chest. He sagged forward, until his brow almost touched the sand. When he pulled his torso upright again, his face was harsh and strained, and his voice when he spoke was shaky. “You’re by no means the only sick man on the beach. Crisis — I came away without my pills. Do you realize that the ideal of health is gone from the world? It’s patriotic to be sick nowadays.”
“Look, Mercator, I don’t need your lecture. I’m sorry if you’re ill now but I want nothing to do with you. I never intended to get involved with your affairs in the first place.”
“Don’t talk like that, Knowle. You are involved, and you know it. This issue concerns you and everyone.” The spasm was over now and he pulled himself together. “Listen, I followed you patiently because I have to ask you to do something.”
“Where’s your pet thug, Israt?”
He let anger ride into his voice. “Israt overcame your Doctor Thunderpeck and joined me, but got separated from me in the crowds in the
streets. I just hope he is safe. In any case, he is not my pet thug; we happen to belong to the same religion — we are both Abstainers. Neither of us have done you any harm.”
“Ha! What about those wretched years I spent on your wretched farm?”
“Oh, use a little sense. Forget about that! Besides, I was only nominally in control of the farm. You can see how throughout the last centuries farmers have slowly become divorced from their land. It was inevitable when the farms, under pressure from so-called efficiency, grew larger and larger. When I retired this year, I was nothing more then a man who handled vast amounts of records and paperwork; I was as much shackled to my job as you were to yours.”
“You should try a few years in one of your stinking villages before you say that.”
“I am not responsible for the punitive system, Noland. I had no say in who worked the land. I am not trying to exonerate myself from blame, and certainly I am not trying to defend a system I in fact found more offensive than you did.” He dug his fingers into the sand and I saw that he was in pain again. “Listen, Noland, for God’s sake! I want your help, I beg you to help, before it is too late.”
“Sorry, no. Now let’s get you back to your doctor.”
“That can wait. Listen, I must trust you — not so much because you are a fellow countryman as because I can trust no African on an emotional topic such as this.”
“You’re mad, Mercator. Come on, let me get you back to the hotel.” As I bent to try and pick him up, he was protesting all the while, but I cut him off. “I ought to hand you over to the police — I would if I did not want to get involved. This idea you have of shooting el Mahasset is pure craziness.”
He was resisting my attempts to lift him. “It’s about that I have to speak to you. Noland, I know you’re pretty tough and unscrupulous. I want you to shoot el Mahasset for me. Believe me, I’ll make it worth your while.”
In sheer surprise, I let go of him. He pulled himself up on to his knees, coughing and clutching himself.
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