Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

  “It happens I’m reading your novel at present, Mr. Stoker—and it terrifies me. I don’t know how you think of such terrible events. Though I suppose we should pity the poor vampires, doomed to such a miserable existence. They’re really one more oppressed minority, aren’t they?”

  “Er, well, my dear young lady, I hadn’t thought of them in that regard. I simply thought of them as a bad lot—a disease, in short.”

  “May I ask if you believe in Heaven and Hell?”

  Stoker looked about rather helplessly and said that after all he’d been through he ought to have a ready answer to that question.

  Kylie smiled and said, “I see you believe that if a thing shouldn’t exist it doesn’t exist, Mr. Stoker. That’s why all of us have trouble believing in the fact of Dracula or the Devil. Yet Dracula must be the invention of an Almighty God along with everything else.”

  He pulled at his hairy cheek and said to Bodenland, “This pretty daughter-in-law of yours raises questions which never entered my mind. I’ll need a little time to think about the matter. My brain doesn’t seem to work too well in 1999.”

  “How is your hotel?” asked Mina, coming to the rescue. “You must find everything very odd, after what you’ve been used to. We’ve all been turned upside-down recently.” She laughed with some uncertainty, giving Kylie a sidelong look.

  “It’s a pleasant hotel, for sure,” Stoker said, in answer to Mina’s question. “The ice machine is a remarkable invention. But I miss the friendly attentions of servants such as we have at home. One thing I do enjoy is your clever cards instead of money. Abolishing money is the finest idea I ever heard of.”

  “What have you bought?”

  Stoker looked cautious. “Well, I discovered magazines with pictures of pretty girls divested of every last stitch of clothes. And we took the liberty of buying a nice pair of coffins we saw in Nieman Marcus—a His and Hers—you know, for the remains of Bella and that driver of yours. And we shall have a capital Christian burial of their remains in the cemetery the day after tomorrow.”

  “Fine idea, but there’s no time for that,” said Bodenland briskly. “You can have your fun later, Brain. This very night we’re leaving again in the time train. You know why, and I think you know where.”

  The immensities of the Mesozoic plains. A broken line of hills and cliffs lay to the south. From their skirts the land rolled northward, to dense forests of deciduous trees. A river had once meandered through the plain, and died, leaving a series of oxbow lakes. Otherwise, no landmarks stood out. Tall grasses grew, interspersed here and there with clumps of small white daisies.

  One particular area of this plain, between two lakes, was becoming crowded with figures. They were dwarfed by the great landscape which contained them, and by the cumulus clouds piling up on the horizon.

  These figures walked like men. They were dressed in black garb, and closely resembled men. Others circled overhead, flying on widespread leathery wings. And with these fliers went others who accompanied and in some ways resembled them. But these others had more distinctively reptilian faces, with long cruel mouths filled with sharp teeth.

  They were watched with eager fascination by the hidden human viewers on the ground. This was the first time the humans had seen any prehistoric creatures, except for Joe Bodenland, whose untimely excursion to the Carboniferous, when he had lost Clift’s body to the amphibian, remained in his mind.

  The time train was concealed under low palm trees growing in a depression on the crumbling hills which terminated the great plain. Standing outside it, and watching the gathering ahead of them, were Joe, Mina, Kylie, and Bram. Nearby, Larry was giving Spinks a hand to bury the two coffins, and grumbling at the task.

  “Why don’t we just junk them? There’s nothing sacred about burial in the Cretaceous, even in a Nieman Marcus coffin.”

  “Master Larry,” said Spinks gravely, “time makes little difference to a corpse. The important thing for all concerned is that they get a proper burial.”

  “What, vampires? That’s rubbish.”

  Spinks continued stolidly to dig.

  “They may be vampires, and that’s why I have carved the vampire sign on both coffins, but they’ve paid for their crimes. They were human once, don’t forget, Master Larry. There’s still a right and a wrong, even in this outlandish dump.”

  “Don’t preach to me!”

  “The intention behind preaching, Master Larry, if you excuse me saying so, is to do someone good in the spirit.”

  “God!” exclaimed Larry. He hurled down his spade, threw up his hands, and walked away. In any event, the coffins were never buried, for Bodenland called everyone over to witness a strange phenomenon.

  The sky was changing hue, the cloud layers were congealing. The masses of vapor curdled and writhed as if in pain.

  It was evident this peculiarity had been observed by the population on the plain.

  Until now, the Un-Dead had been busily driving herds of hadrosaurs and other related genera across the wastes and into pens of thorn. The duckbilled monsters went docilely enough, though their melancholy hoots filtered up even to the distant viewers. The reason for this docility could be discerned; one or two of the lead dinosaurs had been saddled and domesticated and were being used as bellwethers which the rest of the great reptiles followed.

  Some of the Un-Dead were already in the pens, feasting on their captives.

  Now the feasting was over and the herding ceased. Every being on the plain became immobile, gazing upward. Stoker crossed himself. “Faith, it’s like the Second Coming and all,” he exclaimed.

  “Don’t forget He hasn’t come the first time yet,” said Mina, dryly. “The Mesozoic wasn’t exactly Jesus territory.”

  All six crouched in their place of concealment and peered at the clouds on the distant horizon. The clouds were moving rapidly together, growing darker as they went, while lightning curdled their stomachs. The sky itself grew dim with an ocher light as the cloud mass rose to obscure the sun.

  A great pillar of shadow fell across the plain. And the pillar became a ramp, on which was seen the figure of Count Dracula, descending.

  Dracula alighted on the plain, took on almost human form, and raised his arms. The hordes on the plain began to converge slowly toward him, obedient to his sign.

  “Okay,” Bodenland said. “Their conference is going to start. I want us to hold a quick conference too.”

  His face was lined and drawn as he looked from one to the other.

  “You’re all very dear to me. I know I’ve been autocratic in the past. The family has its troubles—which I hope to remedy. Now here’s a momentous issue and I want us all to be in on it together—”

  Stoker snorted with disgust. “Come on, Joe. The Duke of Wellington didn’t write his wife a sonnet on the battlefield at Waterloo.”

  “Just a minute, Bram. There’s more responsibility here than I can shoulder alone. You all have to be a part of this. We hold here an F-bomb, the greatest destructive force we know of, and the possibility exists to drop it on Dracula and his cohorts. We think that will finish him off once and for all. I need your agreement. Do we drop the bomb?”

  “That’s what we’ve come to do,” said Stoker at once. “Let’s get on with it, Joe. This destruction is foretold in the Scriptures.”

  “But by so doing, we also become mass killers. We become no better than the other side. I have found before now that if you kill someone you are destined to take his place. What do the rest of you think?”

  The two women spoke together. Kylie smiled at her mother-in-law, nodding to her to go ahead. “I say you should not drop it, Joe, since you are asking,” Mina said. “For a simple practical reason. The vampires are not going to be destroyed. You told me that they faded out as a reproductive species long before mankind came on the scene—Bernard’s two graves are their only memorial we’ve found—”

  “Well?” he said impatiently.

  “Well, the F-bomb won’t work
. It’s untested. You drop it, then Dracula knows we are here, and we all get killed.”

  “No, Birdie, the F-bomb will work.”

  “You don’t know that, Joe.”

  “I do. We have the proof. Every map of Canada in the modern world depicts that proof. The great circle of Hudson Bay—filled with sea in our time—that’s the ancient F-bomb crater. It’ll work just fine. Kylie, your objection?”

  The girl looked levelly at him. “Mine is a religious objection, as you might expect. Yet it goes with your hesitation. An evil weapon like your F-bomb cannot destroy evil. It can only propagate it.”

  “Kylie, dear, despite all I’ve been through I still can hardly credit the existence of these malign supernatural beings. My intellect rebels against accepting them! I’d much rather regard them as a disease. But there they are, down there in their thousands, from all times and climes. We would destroy two evils at once—them and the F-bomb. Think again. Larry, how do you feel on this issue?”

  Larry gestured dismissively.

  “I’m with you, Joe, all the way.”

  Taking a step forward, Spinks said, “If I might also have a say in this, Mr. Bodenland …”

  “Of course. Make it fast.”

  Spinks glanced at his employer, then went ahead. “All right. Suppose you don’t drop this bomb. Do we just all go home to our proper centuries? That’s no way to win a war, not to my way of thinking. There’s a time comes to all of us when we are forced to do something we’d rather not, in the hope and prayer that it will bring about a greater good. There’s good wars and bad wars, good causes and bad causes. I say this is a good war in a good cause. Drop the bloody thing and let’s go home.”

  He blushed crimson to see that everyone was looking at him.

  “Four against two, ladies,” said Joe. “Want to change your minds?”

  “No,” said Kylie.

  “Yes,” said Mina. “If the bomb will work, drop it, I say. I wouldn’t want what happened to me to happen to another soul. I don’t—I can’t figure out all the moral niceties, but those things are evil right enough, so, yes, let’s drop it on them right now.”

  Without speaking, Bodenland looked at Kylie. She looked back, then looked down.

  “Joe, dear, I know I’m the new member of the family, but I just can’t say yes to this. I was brought up to believe that human beings shouldn’t have power of life and death over others. I stick with that. Besides … well, look, if I said okay, wouldn’t it be kind of sick for a family to all agree, yes, fine, let’s kill off thousands. A family! Isn’t that sick?”

  A growl came from Stoker.

  “What family could ever agree among itself? Little lady, it’s my belief that all of us understand your scruples. But it’s five against one. You’ll go to Heaven, the rest of us will depart for elsewhere. Come on, Joe, Larry—the bomb.”

  With a sign, Bodenland said, “You are outvoted, Kylie, my dear. Five to one.”

  “That’s democratic,” Larry said, going to embrace her, but she turned away.

  “You didn’t support me,” she said. “Don’t you see there’s evil within us?”

  “And also right out there, Kylie,” he said, pointing to the rolling plain.

  They got rapidly down to work.

  Pteranodons were still passing overhead on their featherless wings, so everything had to be done under cover of the palms. Mina and Stoker kept watch at either end of the train while Kylie wept inside it. Bodenland and his son squatted on the ground and secured the F-bomb to the underside of his new radio-controlled plane.

  “It’s a replica of a nineteen-forties Flying Fortress, Joe,” Larry said enthusiastically. “It goes like a bomb.”

  “The F-bomb does not detonate on impact. When you’re ready, I shall turn this red dial.” He indicated the casing. “A contained fission process then begins, and only when the temperature is raised to many thousand degrees is the essential fusion process triggered. The detonation will be several score times the power of any bomb the US can command in the twentieth century, despite its small size.”

  “What I can’t understand,” said Spinks, who was looking on, “is how these vampire creatures all appear as bold as brass in broad daylight. Remember how they all crumbled when I switched on the lights in that there plant factory, and—”

  “No time for these minor puzzles now, Spinks,” said Bodenland, standing up. Larry lifted the plane, with the red and green bomb wired on underneath it. He shook his head, raised an eyebrow, and looked at his father. Both were thinking the same thing: though the plane had a fifteen-foot wingspan, the bomb was almost too heavy for it.

  Then began the next phase of the nightmare. All their psychic energies were focused on the launching of the plane—and Larry had misgivings. He said he would go forward to the very brink of the cliffs, to gain the advantage of the updraft. His father protested it was too dangerous. Nevertheless, he went, running forward, doubled over the body of his plane.

  “As soon as it gets airborne, come back, right?” Joe called.

  Larry did not answer.

  “Want me to go with him?” asked Spinks.

  “No. Get everyone else in the train, Spinks, will you? We have to be away before the strike, or we’re all dead ducks.”

  It seemed that everyone was milling about. The great leather lizards still winged grandly overhead like angels from Hell, to circle about the distant figure of Count Dracula.

  Stoker climbed out of the train toting a bulky pistol.

  “It’s an Edward Very light,” he said excitedly. “Lights up the whole sky.”

  “We don’t need it. The bomb will light up the whole world. Get inside. Be ready to go as soon as Larry gets back.”

  But Stoker was carried away by the excitement of the moment. He began to recite in ringing tones: “‘For behold, the day cometh that shall burn as an oven. / And all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble …!’”

  Kylie came up behind him and said, “And what else will the bomb kill besides the vampires? How about the animals, who are innocent, the trees, the land itself? Perhaps you aren’t so ecologically conscious as we are in 1999.”

  “That’s what the Bible says, my dear. ‘Ye shall tread down the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet.’”

  “Perhaps you’d like to come inside and sit quietly with me, Mr. Stoker. I don’t think it is up to us to use punishments which are devastating enough to belong to a higher power.”

  He looked into her normally sunny face, and scratched his beard.

  “You’re a very attractive young lady, for a liberal,” he said, “but I’m not going to miss this bang for anything or anyone.”

  Bodenland had gone forward, leaving the shelter of the palms. He was anxious for his son. Larry had disappeared behind low hills. The pteranodons overhead were capable of attacking and killing a man, in Bodenland’s consideration.

  Larry had reached a bluff where the ground was crumbling and sandy. He dropped to his knees, out of breath. Just ahead, the cliffs in a flurry of broken rock sloped down to the wide plain. This was as far as he could go, although the concourse of the Un-Dead was still a distance away. He could only hope that his model would fly that far.

  He started the engines of the model Flying Fortress. They gave no trouble and caught at once. Just for a moment he paused, unable to bring himself to let go of the plane. Then he launched it. It dropped steadily, caught the updraft from the cliffs, and began slowly to climb, heading straight for the unhallowed congregation.

  Larry stood looking, marveling at the Boeing’s beauty and strength. The bomb glinted below its fuselage. The fission process was already taking place.

  The plane was still climbing gradually as it flew. The entire sky was clear of cloud now. He had no trouble following its path, and little need to guide it. The sound of its engines became faint. Then he saw a flight of three pteranodons moving in toward it, like fighter planes on the attack.

&nbs
p; The danger was at once apparent. Dropping the control box, Larry turned and began running back to the time train. The going was rough. He stumbled once, and fell full length. He looked back. One of the flying lizards had caught hold of the plane’s wing. It was about to fall out of the sky.

  And at that moment, a great brightness filled the air above the plain.

  Picking himself up, he ran on. His father had come to meet him, and was beckoning him on.

  He fell into his father’s arms.

  “Bravely done,” Joe said. “Quick—we’ve only got a minute. We must get away.”

  Bram Stoker, who had insisted on firing his Very pistol, jumped into the train before them. The others were already standing there. Still red-eyed, Kylie clung fiercely to Larry as he entered.

  Bodenland triggered the door shut behind them and turned to the controls.

  The detonation of the F-bomb was an event on an immense scale. The first fronts of heat and sound to belly out obliterated the plain and all life on it. They were followed by wave after wave of radioactive emission.

  The pillar of fire that rose into the stratosphere resembled a solid thing—a massive tree that would forever remain. From its topmost branches wastes grew, spreading layer after layer of dirt round among the new winds born in the upper atmosphere. The sky grew dark—and would stay so for many days, like a filthy lung ceasing to breathe, eclipsing the sun.

  The ensuing cold, the devastation of the climate of the Northern Hemisphere, would have a lasting effect, the death of the Cretaceous dinosaurs, and would be forever graven in Earth’s rocks, to be discovered by scientists millions of centuries later and christened the K/T boundary.

  Of all this havoc, its instigators saw nothing. The time train had elongated itself and disappeared into the recurrent pattern of years.

  13

  It was, in a sense, a family reunion—and spiced, like all such reunions, with memories of what had happened in the past. But this was a family reunion with its own allotted time and place. They were safely back on the Gondwana estate in A.D. 1999, and the time train was standing, with all the appearance of an ancient monument, where once children, Joe’s grandchildren, had played. The family gathered by the poolside, where Mina was pouring them celebratory drinks.