by Colin Kapp
The answer was yes. Now he was certain that the change concerned people and not the world at large, he could view things with a more focused perception. Try as he might he could gain no further information from the memory of those pages, but the more he thought about it the more certain he became that the book held vital clues which he had missed. Instinctively he chose a route which would take him in the direction of the raft.
It was past midnight before he gained the seafront at a point well to the west of the town and nearer to the Selsea end of the raft. The first thing he noticed was an unusual amount of police activity, with yellow manu-drives on constant patrol along the raft edge and the introduction of a great quantity of searchlights and floodlights directed towards the strand which separated the floating town from the proper shore. The reason for this activity was not apparent, but effectively the raft had been sealed off from the mainland by a cordon of armed police.
Examining the situation, Manalone found several checkpoints covering the high-water gangways. Nobody was attempting to pass through them, and this was not surprising. In the face of an open police check, most of the raft’s occupants would prefer to wait rather than undergo antagonistic questioning. This was a latitude not available to Manalone. He did not wish to approach the police, but neither could he afford to wait for long.
He recognized that there was no certainty that Kitten still had the book. Furthermore she might be responding to an instruction to call the MIPS if Manalone came back. However, both of these factors were outweighed by the virtual certainty of his commitment to a CALF camp if he failed to find an answer before hunger and exposure laid him on the streets. Police or no police, Manalone decided he had to gain the raft without too many hours’ delay.
His continued and unaccustomed walking, coupled with an insufficiency of food, had brought him to the point of exhaustion. After studying the disposition of the patrols and the lamps he decided it would be unwise to attempt to gain the raft by night. He considered he would stand a better chance amid the gentle confusions of daylight trading along the front. Accordingly he trudged westwards back to where the high banks of shingle rose steeply from the sea beyond the Aldwick Conurbation. Here, on a ledge of large and filthy stones, he trod the mass of accumulated litter into a rough mattress and lay down beneath the stars and slept.
30
Manalone and a Kind of Terror
His awakening was cruel. A chill had entered his whole body, and he felt cold right through to his bones. He was also beset by pains of hunger more acute than any he had experienced before in his life. The two sensations combined to make him feel weak and frail and useless. If this was the reality of defeat, then Manalone knew he was made of the same stuff as the defeated.
He climbed unsteadily to his feet and began to move about, trying to get some warmth into his limbs and torso. Pieces of litter were stuck to his back and neck. Their filthy stickiness as he tore them off made his flesh crawl, and completed his wretchedness. He had not, he reminded himself, quite touched bottom yet. At this moment he still had the energy to climb out of the litter unaided. How many more nights of exposure, he wondered, would it take before the demands of survival were not strong enough to move his limbs.
It was still dark, though the first touch of a grey dawn marked the east. As he moved over the shoulder of shingle, Manalone could see that the cordon lights along the edge of the shore still burned. For a moment there were no patrol vehicles in sight. It was low tide, and the nearer rafts were beached and therefore accessible without having to use the high-water checkpoints. He studied the position carefully, not knowing what observers might be stationed out of sight or whether a burst of gunfire might fetch him down if he attempted to cross the illuminated beach.
A black bar crossing the foreshore to his right gave him an idea. Here, one of the many sewage outfall pipes ran broadly across the sand at a position which lay between the points of maximum illumination of two adjacent searchlights. If he took care not to expose himself in silhouette above the level of the pipe, it was conceivable that he might be able to crawl to the raft in the pipe’s shadow without being observed. However, he must do this before the dawn sky grew too light. It was an opportunity which might not be repeated, and he decided it was worth a chance.
The movement of the large shingle beneath his feet made an uncomfortably loud noise, and he expected at any moment to be challenged as he moved down the ledge. He gained the landward end of the exposed pipe still well clear of the illuminated area, and then went flat on his stomach to worm his way along in the shelter of the iron bulk. The difficulty and noise made by attempting to move in this fashion over the shingle caused him quickly to decide that he had chosen the wrong approach. Having gained the sand, however, it became easier to crawl, and he could progress in relative silence.
Once exposed to the glare of the floodlights, he found the area more brilliantly lit than he had judged from the ledge. However he was forced to rely on the correctness of his original premise that the position was relatively dark in comparison to the bright bands of light which extended on either side. He found it necessary to make several detours in order to avoid some of the deeper pools which had formed around the supports for the pipe. Though several times he heard voices from the direction of the shore, no action was directed against him, and he became fairly certain that he had made the distance unobserved.
On reaching the raft he continued to crawl under the beached drums for a short way before climbing up through what the dim light of the dawn sky told him was a gap in the decking. On the raft itself everything was quiet. Here and there in the shacks and improvised dwellings a dim light showed through grimed glass or gleamed against canvas, but the random corridors between the dwelling-places were deserted and he was able to make his way unchallenged and hopefully unseen.
Having gained the raft at this unusual point, he now found difficulty in determining the way to Kitten’s shack. He knew that it lay seaward and rather to the left of his present position, but apart from this vague reasoning he was unable to gain a bearing. In the uncertain light his journey was more than usually precarious because of the gaps and faults in the decking. Twice he nearly fell, and once he twisted an ankle before the growing light became sufficient to enable him to choose his way more carefully.
It finally took him an hour to reach the shack. Somehow he had gone hopelessly off course, and it was not until the daylight was more advanced that he was able to use features on the shore to correct his reckoning. Already some of the occupants of the raft were beginning to stir, and some early-risers peered at him curiously as he made his quiet way past their homes. With the police cordon separating the raft from the mainland, the raft’s inhabitants were more than usually suspicious.
He knocked cautiously on Kitten’s door. There was no reply. He knocked again, a little louder, but still gained no response. Trying the latch, he found the door would open. This was an unlikely circumstance, but he put his head inside the door and called.
‘Kitten!’
No answer.
‘Kitten, it’s me – Manalone …’
Closing the door behind him, he went inside.
The wrongness of the situation clawed instantly at his nerves. The shack was empty, bare except for one small table. There was no sign of Kitten or her children or her furnishings. Four items only remained to catch his eye: the scrubbed wooden table, a silvery candleholder, a lighted candle and the big old book. Warily he explored the rest of the shack. It had not only been cleared but scrupulously cleaned also. Not another trace remained of its former occupants.
Suspecting an MIPS trick, Manalone peered out of the windows but saw no signs of an ambush. He turned back to the table, wondering why the object he most urgently wanted to find should have been so prominently displayed.
‘You’ve been anticipated, Manalone. Not only do you want to see this book, but somebody else wants you to see it also. Perhaps it’s examination day for the “test”. Well, you�
��ve already lost control of your own destiny, so you might as well read on.’
The long, slim candle was one of the most expensive kind he had ever seen. The candleholder was a modest faceted orb, but from the whiteness of its polished faces Manalone guessed it was silver. The stark simplicity of the setting in which he found the book seemed curiously symbolic; though what it was a symbol of, he found difficult to define.
Carefully he turned the pages of the book, trying to draw new information out of the paper, desperately seeking a new perspective. He found himself hampered by an appreciation of the fact that the drawings were subjective impressions, interpretations of life seen through another person’s mind. Constantly he was making allowances for the colour of the unknown artist’s thoughts. But was he compensating too much, or not enough? How much was caricature and how much artistic licence – and how many of the lines spoke the literal truth?
‘And what would the implications be, Manalone, if you accepted the whole lot at face value?’
A few seconds later his face was ashen with a kind of terror. Before his eyes the pictures reformed themselves into a mutually consistent representation of something he had hoped could not have been true. His mind rebelled even though he had the evidence before him, and his knees complained about the weight of his body. However, a thousand previously unrelated facts crowded in to support his new-formed fears. No matter how he tried, he could not reestablish his old viewpoint. Having seen what lay beyond the holes in reality, he became totally committed to the view.
‘The bastards!’ he said.
Tears of some rageless passion made the pages swim before his eyes. The loss of vision was unimportant: the element of clarity was now within him. It tasted bitter on his tongue, and made his ears buzz and caught at his stomach with cold fingers of sick surmise. After that moment of revelation, nothing about his world could ever be quite the same again.
31
Manalone and the Minor Revolution
‘Pull yourself together, Manalone! You’ve found an answer, but is it the right answer?’
The more he considered the proposition the more certain he became that he now could see the complete puzzle from which his isolated pieces had been drawn. As he fitted the elements back, he knew that for him at least, reality had changed irrevocably.
‘You’ve seen all this before, Manalone. One night at Cain’s, just after Paul’s death. You attributed it then to chemically-induced depression. What’s your excuse this time?’
This time he had no excuses. Although he fought it, the new perspective remained firm. He could not blame this new and bizarre view of reality on any human weakness. The nightmare itself had become a fact.
Suddenly the unreal old film was unreal no longer. The observed effects of gravity and momentum made a new and scary kind of sense. Here too was the reason why the past had to be obliterated. Without that precaution, Manalone’s world could not have existed. The statistics on pollution, population and the protein famine lost their paradox. The doomsday had been both inevitable and yet had not arrived: and the reasons why were cruelly plain.
‘And the teapot handle, Manalone, you even recognize that now. How many times did you turn it over, only to miss the obvious? There’s no blindness so absolute as a preconception of what you think is true. You didn’t see it for what it was, because you didn’t want to think it possible. You don’t want to think it possible now, but you don’t have much choice in the matter.’
He closed the book and blew out the candle. One drama was finished, but he knew a greater one had already begun. The advancing light of morning was brightening the windows, and the bare shack with its solitary table seemed a fitting prelude to the tragedy whose terrifying plot was starting to unfold, even though the exact words remained to be written.
‘Well, you’ve got your answer, Manalone. Now what are you going to do with it? You have to find the Masterthinkers – because they’re the ones in charge. Effects like that have to be supranational. No single government could tackle it alone. And for some reason the Masterthinkers wanted you to know …’
He sensed that finding the Masterthinkers was going to be the greatest challenge of his career. He would have welcomed an end to the gnawing in his stomach, but his mind was crystal clear, and his imagination fully receptive. He recognized, however, he was not starting this new quest with a headful of clues. He would have to pick up his leads as he went along – and if he missed any or failed to recognize them, he was lost.
‘This room, Manalone, what does it tell you? It’s a set-piece designed to bring you to the point of understanding. The interesting thing about set-pieces is that someone has to set them. Who? Kitten was involved, certainly. Men just move things about, they don’t go round and clean up the cobwebs after.’
He retreated to the wall and walked right round, viewing the table from all angles.
‘Somehow the design of the setting also has the feel of the hand of Colonel Shears. Kitten for sure didn’t own a candle-holder like that. Nor would she have left it if she did. There’s an attribute they share which you’ve not associated before. Both of them give you the feeling of being significant people. So what’s the significance of that?’
Manalone removed the candle and took the candleholder over to the window. As he had guessed, it was solid silver. It was old and fully hall-marked and had been lovingly and carefully preserved. He wrapped it in his handkerchief and dropped it into his pocket. It lay there uncomfortably heavy and bulky, but he retained it in case it might yield a clue or else could be sold to buy food.
Nothing else about the shack seemed to offer any further information, and nothing indicated which way he should start to go. The hint of a connection between Kitten and Shears was his only lead, and the more he considered it the more sure he became that Kitten herself was a special kind of MIPS agent. The MIPS, or at least some, like Colonel Shears, appeared to be functioning as the effective working arm of the Masterthinkers. Kitten’s precise role was not obvious, but it was clear that this phase of her job was now ended.
‘Ended? Manalone, how blind can you get? How long before you arrived do you think that candle was lit? Not more than half an hour – and by that time you were already on the raft. She was probably waiting for you to come, and may well be waiting for you to leave. If she’s as involved in this affair as she appears to be, she must know some of the answers, perhaps all of them. For a start, find Kitten.’
He left rapidly then. The MIPS activity which must have taken place in and around the shack earlier in the night should have attracted some attention from the other occupants of the raft. This was especially likely because the police blockade would have rendered everyone nervous and suspicious. Somebody was sure to have seen Kitten go, and would know the circumstances of her leaving. Manalone decided to ask questions of a few of her neighbours.
To his surprise, even at this early hour the raft was alive with people. Most were clad in their outdoor garments, and were struggling to carry as many of their personal belongings as they could hold. Slowly and complainingly they were all making their way towards the shore.
Emerging into the centre of this unexpected exodus, Manalone stopped in amazement. At first he was unable to explain why he should meet so untypical a scene. Then his eyes followed theirs towards the east, where, under the grey lead of the sky, vast clouds of black smoke billowed landward from the fringes of the raft. His heart sank with helpless anger as he now realized the purpose of the police cordon along the seafront. The Authorities were forcing the evacuation of the raft, and burning it as soon as they gained possession, to prevent re-occupation.
What, he speculated, would happen to the thousands of families who had made their homes on the raft? He feared that no alternative provision had or could be made. The local bureaucracy had always resented the raft’s poverty and its autonomy. Now they had grown strong and bold enough to make a determined attempt to end the raft’s existence. They had a doubtful chance of completing th
e job. It was a manoeuvre which had been tried and had failed several times before. Sheer population pressure always brought about the raft’s reinstatement. In the meantime the wastage of even substandard accommodation was enormous.
‘It’s all so futile, Manalone. Why bother to persecute a few unfortunates when civilization itself is falling apart? Why deprive men of their shelters now, when a few generations will see the last of mankind fighting over caves clawed in the hillside? It can only be that those responsible haven’t been given your perspective, and if you tried to tell them, they’d think you were a liar or else that you were mad. The irony is that those best adapted to the primitive conditions of the raft are those best fitted to survive when the machines stop.’
The long trail of refugees moved slowly past. Theirs was a fatalism he could not share, being able to see the larger scene.
‘So what are you going to do, Manalone? Watch the people who will inherit tomorrow be crushed by the tail-end of a faltering machine today?’
Part of his new dilemma was the passive acceptance of their plight by the great majority of this displaced population. In a way he could understand their resignation. They were mainly people who had been pushed and ignored by the Establishment all their lives. They had committed the cardinal sin of not being able to obtain or hold one of the nearly unobtainable jobs. They lingered on the fringes of society like a bad conscience, an embarrassing reminder that society itself had failed. For this crime they were again to be persecuted.
The slow movement of the raft occupants towards the checkpoints was already well advanced, and Manalone found to his dismay that those who had been resident near to Kitten’s shack during the night had already joined the drift and thus become unidentifiable. With his only plan thus thwarted, Manalone thought about his own position. He considered picking up a few pieces of discarded belongings with which the decking was littered, and posing as a refugee himself. However a calculation of the pace of the evacuation cautioned him that the police were probably being systematic at the checkpoints, and that without his CI card he was almost certain to be detained for further enquiries. He needed to find another exit rout.
