“Dick knows what he’s doing,” Angela confirmed. “I’ll read the inventory with Mme Saunier after lunch. She can take the keys to the agents when we’ve gone.” To Ogden, who was still staring uncertainly at Richard Foster, she said, “A day won’t matter, David. You’ve done nothing all week but play about on the beach by yourself.”
For the next half an hour Ogden tried to find some excuse for them to stay, pacing up and down the sitting room as suitcases were dragged around upstairs. He tried to shut the two women’s voices out of his mind, realizing that his entire scheme was about to fall to pieces. Already he had made his morning visit to the blockhouse, taking coffee, soup and cigarettes. The young German had almost recovered, and had moved the machine-gun closer to the parapet. Now Ogden would have to leave him there. Within days he would realize that the war was over and hand himself in to the French authorities.
Behind him the front door closed. Ogden heard Foster’s voice in the drive, Angela calling to him about something. He watched them from the window, in a flat way admiring their nerve. They were setting off for their last walk together, Foster holding Angela’s elbow in one hand, the shotgun in the other.
Still surprised by the blatant way in which they were advertising their affair—during the past two days they had done everything but get into Angela’s bed together—Ogden pressed his hands against the window. A faint chance still remained. He remembered the almost provocative way in which Angela had watched him across the dining table the previous evening, confident that he would do absolutely nothing Fifteen minutes later Ogden had left the house and an exasperated Mme Saunier, and was running head down, shotgun in hand, through the pools of water which the stiffening sea had swilled across Utah Beach.
“Langsamer! Zu schnell. Langsam . . .”
Trying to calm Ogden, the young German raised a white hand and gestured him away from the parapet. He reached forward and shifted the bipod, swinging the machine-gun to take in the section of beach containing the boathouse, at which Ogden had been gesticulating since his arrival.
Ogden crouched against the wall, only too ready to let the German take command. The young soldier’s recovery in the space of a few days had been remarkable. Though his hands and face retained their albino-like whiteness, he seemed almost to have put on weight. He moved easily around the fire-sill, in complete control of his heavy weapon. The bolt was cocked back, trigger set for automatic fire. A kind of wan smile, an ironic grimace, hung about his cold mouth, as if he too knew that his long wait was about to come to an end.
Ogden nodded encouragingly, holding his shotgun in as military a grip as he could muster. Its fire-power was nothing by comparison with the German’s machine-gun, but it was all he could offer. In some obscure way he felt obligated to this young soldier, and guilty at implicating him in what would in a sense be the last war crime committed during World War II.
“They’re—Look!” Ogden ducked behind the parapet, gesturing frantically. The boathouse door had opened, a cracked glass pane throwing a blade of sunlight at them. Ogden lifted himself on to his knees, the flare-pistol in both hands. The German had come to life, moving with professional command, all trace of his injuries forgotten. He adjusted his rear sight, his bandaged shoulder traversing the heavy weapon. Angela and Richard Foster stepped through the door of the boathouse. They paused in the sunlight, Foster casually inspecting the nearby dunes. The shotgun rested on his shoulder, trigger guard clasped around two fingers.
Unnerved for a moment by this aggressive stance, Ogden raised the flare-pistol, cocked the trigger and fired the fat shell into the air over Foster’s head. The pilot looked up at its weak parabola, then ran forward, shouting to Angela as the shell lost height and fell like a dead bird into the calm sea. “A dud Angry with himself, Ogden stood up in the embrasure, his head and chest exposed. Raising the shotgun, he fired the left barrel at Foster, who was darting through the dunes little more than a hundred yards from the blockhouse. Beside Ogden the young German was taking aim. The long barrel of the machine-gun followed the running figure. At last he opened fire, the violent noise jarring the parapet. Ogden was standing in the embrasure, happily listening to the roar of the machine-gun, when Richard Foster stood up in the long grass ten yards from the blockhouse and shot him through the chest.
“Is he . . .?”
Angela waited in the dim light by the stairway, the collar of her fur coat pressed against her cheeks. Avoiding the body on the floor of the barbette, she watched Foster rest his shotgun against the wall and kneel on the floor.
“Stand back as far as you can.” Foster waved her back. He examined the body, then touched the flare-pistol with a blood-stained shoe. He was still shaking, both from fear and from the exhaustion of the past week. By contrast, Angela was completely calm. He noticed that with characteristic thoroughness she had insisted on climbing the stairway.
“It’s a damn lucky thing he fired that first, I might not have had time otherwise . . . But where the hell did he find it? And all this other equipment?”
“Let’s leave and call the police.” Angela waited, but Foster was still searching the floor. “Dick! An hour from now I may not sound very convincing.”
“Look at this gear—World War II webbing, machine-gun ammunition, primus stove, German phrase-book and all these cans of soup . . .”
“He was camping here. I told you it would take a lot to provoke him.”
“Angela!” Foster stepped back and beckoned her towards him. “Look at him . . . For God’s sake, he’s wearing a German uniform. Boots, tunic, the whole thing.”
“Dick!”
As they made their way from the blockhouse, the alarmed figure of Mme Saunier was hurrying along the beach towards them. Foster held Angela’s arm.
“Now. Are you all right?”
“Of course.” With a grimace, Angela picked her way down the grimy concrete steps. “You know, he must have thought we were coming ashore. He was always talking about Utah Beach.”
BRIAN W. ALDISS
A Chinese Perspective
I
The tanks were of glass, a metre deep and almost as generous in their other dimensions. Each table contained eight tanks, and the laboratory contained ten tables. A constant temperature of 18.5 degrees Centigrade was maintained in every tank. And in every tank, oxygenators blew a chain of bubbles up their sides.
The water was of a different green in each of the tanks on a table, ranging from a pale stramineous yellow to a deep mid-viridian. The tanks were lit in such a way that watery reflections moved across the ceiling of the lab.
This perpetual underwater movement was lethargic. It lent the room a drowned and drowsy aspect in contrast with the dance taking place in all eighty tanks, where marine creatures of graded size underwent the capers of growth, performing such antics as their limited gene-patterns allowed.
Among this incarcerated activity went the Chinese girl who was known here as Felicity Amber Jones, neat in her orange lab coat, content because at present absorbed completely in her work.
The laboratory of which Felicity Amber Jones had charge was a part of the great institution of Fragrance Fish-Food Farms Amalgamated. The FFFFA, whose premises, buried deep into the plastic core of Fragrance II, produced one of the chief exports of the planetoid—a range of marine food-products famed all round the Zodiacal Planets. Those exports, packed in glass, plastic, or palloy, circulated in their various forms throughout the artificial worlds much as the free-swimming forms of oysters travelled through Felicity’s ranged algae tanks on their way to maturity.
When it was time to go off duty, she registered the event on the computer-terminal in her office. Although she had plenty of other interests, Felicity always left this, her Main Job, with some regret. There was more peace here than at home in her cramped pile-apt. She switched off the overhead lights. The tanks, vats, and separators still glowed, spreading a languid jade reflection through the room.
At the changing-lockers, she removed
her coat, standing naked for a moment before assuming a saffron overall, sokdals, and flesh mask. She called farewell to some passing colleagues as she made for the nearest exit.
Outside, someone had scrawled BANISH IMPERMANENCE on the wall. Felicity made a moue at it and caught a petulent. In the moments of travel, she tried some astro-organic thought, but was too highly strung. It was almost time for her weekly assignation with Edward Maine, the great inventor.
II
In a homapt near the heart of Fragrance II, Fabrina Maine and her friend Anna Kavan stood before a small mock-fire. Its patterns cast themselves upon the legs of the two women in scarlet and gold, although they were over-shadowed by the gleaming wall-screen which Fabrina was now addressing.
Fabrina was a small plump lady whose wispy fair hair stood out unfashionably round her head; but she had a certain dignity. In an effort to improve that dignity, or otherwise express herself, she was currently studying Tease Structure, the psycho-dynamics of altered body-image. She adopted a vernal sacrifice position and said to the reporter on the screen, “Yes, of course I can provide referents of my brother Edward’s behavioural drives—none better than I—but that may not be convenient. First, you should introduce yourself. Which zeepee are you from?”
The reporter, looming easily on the screen and dwarfing the apartment she shared with her brother, said, “My name’s Sheikh Raschid el Gheleb, and I represent the UAS Daily Modesty. I’ve come up from Earth to investigate new technophilosophical developments in the zeepees. So of course
your brother ranks highly on the list of those people whom I hope to interview for my scatter.”
She frowned. Edward’s increasing success brought increasing interruptions to their snugly predictable lives.
“Your Main Job?” she asked the reporter.
“On Earth, we don’t have that same concept, although the World State Employment Council is studying its possibilities. I’m just the Modesty‘s technophilosophical correspondent—though I do also lecture in Predestination at Cairo University. I hope you don’t feel xenophobic about me just because I’m from Earth; we’re very interested in the zeepees, you know.”
She sniffed. “We manage very well without outside interference. Edward will be back later. Ring another time. You’d better speak to him direct. In any case, he has an Internal booked as soon as he gets home.”
She switched off and turned to Anna Kavan, leaning slightly towards the defile stance to show contrition. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have been sharp with him, but I’m uneasy about the thought of the World State meddling in our affairs, and so is Edward.”
“It’s at least five years before the World State comes into being officially,” Anna said, extending her hands to the fake flames. “Besides, the Chinese are very scrupulous.”
“Why should I care about the World State or the state of the world when I have my little lin with me?” Fabrina asked. She turned and petted the animated ornament by her side. “Tell me something funny, Lin.”
“We are all radioactive particles in the mind of God,” said the lin. The women laughed.
“Now tell me a new story,” Fabrina said.
And the lin said, “Here’s one called ‘High Courts’. There were high ideals in the courts upon the mountains. Photographers were scarce under the towering appletrees. No snails any longer laid their eggs among the eyes of the goats in the market. The Lady Cortara, that dinosaur of royal line, said, ‘Life is like death by drowning: it feels good when you cease to struggle.’ So worldly regiments failed to close the entanglement of minds.”
“You’ll be able to afford a better model lin now, Fabrina,” Anna said. “Edward will be rich from now on.”
“I happen to like mad old stories,” said Fabrina. “And my little linikin’s tales have the advantage of being original and sounding familiar.”
III
In the boardroom of Smics Callibrastics, high in the Fragrance II urbstak, they were celebrating Maine’s achievement. Wine flowed, as well as the more customary aphrocoza, mitrovits, pam-and-lime, and other good things. The prototype of Maine’s prediction machine stood at one end of the chamber; Edward Maine stood meekly by it, allowing the press to photograph him, and his colleagues to congratulate him.
“. . . and furthermore, I’d like to say, Edward, what a pleasure it has been to have you under our wing here at Smics for all these years,” Marvin Stein-Presteign told him. Stein-Presteign was Managing Director, and built for the job, with plenty of meat separating him from the rest of the world, topped by a florid enough countenance to remind that world that blood pressure and work pressure often run in alliance. “Everyone enjoys working with you, Edward.”
“You’re very kind, sir,” Maine said, smiling so energetically that his untidy fair hair, which stood out wispily all round his head, trembled in response. He was a small, plump man in his early thirties—clever but not very good at talking. Certainly not very good at talking to his meaty managing director.
Having shaken hands with Maine, Stein-Presteign moved away and said to Sheila Wu Tun, the Personnel Manager, “There’s no cynicism about Edward—he surely is a thoroughly admirable little man.”
“It’s kind of funny the way everyone calls him Edward,” Sheila said. “Never an Ed or a Ted or a Teddy . . . It’s a factor of his rather remote personality, I suppose.”
“What’s his private life like? Lives with his sister, doesn’t he?”
“Yes. He’s diffident with women, bless him. Although he has established a tentative relationship with a young woman who goes to his homapt once a week for an Internal.”
“Well, we have your little treat in store for him. Perhaps we can step up his fun-level there.”
“That’s a thought—but Maine’s entitled to be remote,” Curmodgely from Statistics said. “After all, the man is undeniably a genius.” He was rarely so bold with the Managing Director, but he disliked the patronizing way Stein-Presteign and Wu Tun spoke. He added with a note of apology, “I mean, his damned machine works. The future is now foreseeable, more or less. It’s going to change the history of mankind.”
Stein-Presteign said to Sheila, ignoring Curmodgely, “I’ll see Edward in my office tomorrow.” He moved on, leaving the lower echelons, who pressed admiringly if unavailingly round Sheila Wu Tun, to carry on the conversation.
Gryastairs of Kakobillis, who was heavy and eager, said, “Luckily it was our organization which employed Maine and not the opposition. I suppose you all know that Gondwana of Turpitude have a patent on a destimeter which gives reliable predictions for up to thirty-six hours ahead?”
“It won’t work as efficiently as our PM, Mr Gryastairs,” said a minor technician who had just joined the group. “Our chance theories are much more sophisticated than theirs, for a start. The destimeter uses only superficial biochemical and physiological manifestations. There’s no hormonal print-out. It was Maine’s genius that he accepted right from the start that alpha-wave intensity is the key to reliable prediction, and for that you need constantly updated information-flow regarding hormonal activity and related data such as glucose-breakdown. The destimeter doesn’t even take account of blood sugar levels, which to my way of thinking—”
“Quite so, quite so,” said Gryastairs heavily. “Given the Chinese proof that Predestination can be the basis of an exact science, obviously you are going to get a number of approaches to the problem. Machines follow theory, as I always say. My point is simply that it was Smics Callibrastics who had the good sense to employ Edward Maine when everyone else regarded him as a crank. Now, we should have a marketable PM at least two years before the opposition. There’s no ceiling to our potential selling platform.”
“I must talk to you about that,” said little Hayes of Marketing. “It is going to be hellishly more difficult to promote and sell the product when the World State is established on Earth, and all their piddling new regulations and tariffs come into force—”
“Let’s leave the World Stat
e out of the conversation just for tonight,” Curmodgely said.
While his confreres were talking shop, Edward Maine shook all the extended hands and smiled his simple smile. Occasionally he brushed his hair from his face, which was pink from several glasses of wine. With all the compliments ringing in his ears, he was very much the picture of a successful inventor; a slightly complacent smile hovered round his lips, while his manner was a little abstracted, as if even now he was elaborating his theory of non-randomness which lay behind the prototype PM.
The prototype resembled one of de Chirico’s metaphysical figures mated with a small battery car. Maine was gazing not at it but at an immense painting which hung on the wall behind it.
The painting was the sole ornament on the walls of the Smics boardroom. It showed a strange feast taking place in the market square in a terrestrial country which might be Mexico or South America or Spain. A drunken peasant girl lay sprawled on a crude wooden table among the dishes; several men were feeling her while they ate and drank. Other people, men and women, stood round the table, laughing as they fed. Some of the men wore old raincoats. A skeleton was present, dressed as a monk.
Maine was interested in this central tableau. He also liked the way in which the picture was crowded with barrels and bright costumes and pots. The cobbles of the market square were vividly depicted. At the corners were further perspectives, a white-walled lane leading downhill, a cobbled stair leading up. The houses had tiles on their roofs. Maine supposed that such places must still exist on Earth, or else why paint them? Real things were amazing enough without inventing any more.
Out of habit, he began visualizing all the possible parameters of action implicit in the situation depicted on the canvas.
The skeleton might signify that plague was about and that all present would soon die. Or further indignities might be heaped upon the drunken girl. Or the men might fight. Graphs of non-randomness flowed in his mind; where they intersected lay points of maximum possibility.
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