by Brian Aldiss
So man and machine were absolutely silent while the mural read out Anderson’s fantasy story from the time before Nuclear Week, which was called A Touch of Neanderthal.
The corridors of the Department for Planetary Exploration (Admin.) were long, and the waiting that had to be done in them was long. Human K. D. Anderson clutched his blue summons card, leant uncomfortably against a partition wall, and hankered for the old days when government was in man’s hands and government departments were civilised enough to waste good space on waiting-rooms.
When at last he was shown into an Investigator’s office, his morale was low. Nor was he reassured by the sight of the Investigator, one of the new ore-conserving mini-androids.
‘I’m Investigator Parsons, in charge of the Nehru II case. We summoned you here because we are confidently expecting you to help us, Mr Anderson.’
‘Of course I will give you such help as I can,’ Anderson said, ‘but I assure you I know nothing about Nehru II. Opportunities for space travel for humans are very limited – almost non-existent – nowadays, aren’t they?’
‘The conservation policy. You will be interested to know you are being sent to Nehru II shortly.’
Anderson stared in amazement at the android. The latter’s insignificant face was so blank it seemed impossible that it was not getting a sadistic thrill out of springing this shock on Anderson. ‘I’m a prehistorian at the institute,’ Anderson protested. ‘My work is research. I know nothing at all about Nehru II.’
‘Nevertheless you are classified as a Learned Man, and as such you are paid by World Government. The Government has a legal right to send you wherever they wish. As for knowing nothing about the planet Nehru, there you attempt to deceive me. One of your old tutors, the human Dr Arlblaster, as you are aware, went there to settle some years ago.’
Anderson sighed. He had heard of this sort of business happening to others – and had kept his fingers crossed. Human affairs were increasingly under the edict of the Automated Boffin Predictors.
‘And what has Arlblaster to do with me now?’ he asked.
‘You are going to Nehru to find out what has happened to him. Your story will be that you are dropping in for old time’s sake. You have been chosen for the job because you were one of his favourite pupils.’
Bringing out a mescahale packet, Anderson lit one and insultingly offered his opponent one.
‘Is Frank Arlblaster in trouble?’
‘There is some sort of trouble on Nehru II,’ the Investigator agreed cautiously. ‘You are going there in order to find out just what sort of trouble it is.’
‘Well, I’ll have to go if I’m ordered, of course. But I still can’t see why you want to send me. If there’s trouble, send a robot police ship.’
The Investigator smiled. Very lifelike.
‘We’ve already lost two police ships there. That’s why we’re going to send you. You might call it a new line of approach, Mr Anderson.’
A metal Tom Thumb using blood-and-guts irony!
The track curved and began to descend into a green valley. Swettenham’s settlement, the only town on Nehru II, lay dustily in one loop of a meandering river. As the nose of his tourer dipped towards the valley, K. D. Anderson felt the heat increase; it was cradled in the valley like water in the palm of the hand.
Just as he started to sweat, something appeared in the grassy track ahead of him. He braked and stared ahead in amazement.
A small animal faced him.
It stood some two feet six high at the shoulder; its coat was thick and shaggy, its four feet clumsy; its long ugly skull supported two horns, the anterior being over a foot long. When it had looked its fill at Anderson, it lumbered into a bush and disappeared.
‘Hey!’ Anderson called.
Flinging open the door, he jumped out, drew his stun-gun and ran into the bushes after it. He reckoned he knew a baby woolly rhinoceros when he saw one.
The ground was hard, the grass long. The bushes extended down the hill, growing in clumps. The animal was disappearing round one of the clumps. Directly he spotted it, Anderson plunged on in pursuit. No prehistorian worth his salt would have thought of doing otherwise; these beasts were presumed as extinct on Nehru II as on Sol III.
He ran on. The woolly rhino – if it was a woolly rhino – had headed towards Swettenham’s settlement. There was no sign of it now.
Two tall and jagged boulders, twelve feet high, stood at the bottom of the slope. Baffled now his quarry had disappeared, proceeding more slowly, Anderson moved towards the boulders. As he went, he classified them almost unthinkingly: impacted siltstone, deposited here by the glaciers which had once ground down this valley, now gradually disintegrating.
The silence all round made itself felt. This was an almost empty planet, primitive, spinning slowly on its axis to form a leisurely twenty-nine-hour day. And those days were generally cloudy. Swettenham, located beneath a mountain range in the cooler latitudes of the southern hemisphere, enjoyed a mild muggy climate. Even the gravity, 0.16 of Earth gravity, reinforced the general feeling of lethargy.
Anderson rounded the tall boulders.
A great glaring face thrust itself up at his. Sloe-black eyes peered from their twin caverns, a club whirled, and his stun-gun was knocked spinning.
Anderson jumped back. He dropped into a fighting stance, but his attacker showed no sign of following up his initial success. Which was fortunate; beneath the man’s tan shirt, massive biceps and shoulders bulged. His jaw was pugnacious, not to say prognathous; altogether a tough hombre, Anderson thought. He took the conciliatory line, his baby rhino temporarily forgotten.
‘I wasn’t hunting you,’ he said. ‘I was chasing an animal. It must have surprised you to see me appear suddenly with a gun, huh?’
‘Huh?’ echoed the other. He hardly looked surprised. Reaching out a hairy arm, he grabbed Anderson’s wrist.
‘You coming to Swettenham,’ he said.
‘I was doing just that,’ Anderson agreed angrily, pulling back. ‘But my car’s up the hill with my sister in it, so if you’ll let go I’ll rejoin her.’
‘Bother about her later. You coming to Swettenham,’ the tough fellow said. He started plodding determinedly towards the houses, the nearest of which showed through the bushes only a hundred yards away. Humiliated, Anderson had to follow. To pick an argument with this dangerous creature in the open was unwise. Marking the spot where his gun lay, he moved forward with the hope that his reception in the settlement would be better than first signs indicated.
It wasn’t.
Swettenham consisted of two horse shoe-shaped lines of bungalows and huts, one inside the other. The outer line faced outwards on to the meandering half-circle of river; the inner and more impressive line faced inwards on to a large and dusty square where a few trees grew. Anderson’s captor brought him into this square and gave a call.
The grip on his arm was released only when fifteen or more men and women had sidled out and gathered round him, staring at him in curious fashion without comment. None of them looked bright. Their hair grew long, generally drooping over low foreheads. Their lower lips generally protruded. Some of them were near nude. Their collective body smell was offensively strong.
‘I guess you don’t have many visitors on Nehru II these days,’ Anderson said uneasily.
By now he felt like a man in a bad dream. His space craft was a mile away over two lines of hills, and he was heartily wishing himself a mile away in it. What chiefly alarmed him was not so much the hostility of these people as their very presence. Swettenham’s was the only Earth settlement on this otherwise empty planet: and it was a colony for intellectuals, mainly intellectuals disaffected by Earth’s increasingly automated life. This crowd, far from looking like eggheads, resembled apes.
‘Tell us where you come from,’ one of the men in the crowd said. ‘Are you from Earth?’
‘I’m an Earthman – I was born on Earth,’ said Anderson, telling his prepared tale. ‘I
’ve actually just come from Lenin’s Planet, stopping in here on my way back to Earth. Does that answer your question?’
‘Things are still bad on Earth?’ a woman enquired of Anderson. She was young. He had to admit he could recognise a sort of beauty in her ugly countenance. ‘Is the Oil War still going on?’
‘Yes,’ Anderson admitted. ‘And the Have-Not Nations are fighting a conventional war against Common Europe. But our latest counter-attack against South America seems to be going well, if you can believe the telecasts. I guess you all have a load of questions you want to ask about the home planet. I’ll answer them when I’ve been directed to the man I came to Nehru to visit. Dr Frank Arlblaster. Will someone kindly show me his dwelling?’
This caused some discussion. At least it was evident the name Arlblaster meant something to them.
‘The man you want will not see you yet,’ someone announced.
‘Direct me to his house and I’ll worry about that. I’m an old pupil of his. He’ll be pleased to see me.’
They ignored him for a fragmentary argument of their own. The hairy man who had caught Anderson – his fellows called him Ell – repeated vehemently, ‘He’s a Crow!’
‘Of course he’s a Crow,’ one of the others agreed. ‘Take him to Menderstone.’
That they spoke Universal English was a blessing. It was slurred and curiously accented, but quite unmistakable.
‘Do you mean Stanley A. Menderstone?’ asked Anderson with sudden hope. The literary critic had certainly been one of Swettenham’s original group that had come to form its own intellectual centre in the wilds of this planet.
‘We’ll take you to him,’ Ell’s friend said.
They seemed reluctant to trade in straight answers, Anderson observed. He wondered what his sister Kay was doing, half-expecting to see her drive the tourer into the settlement at any moment.
Seizing Anderson’s wrist – they were a possessive lot – Ell’s friend set off at a good pace for the last house on one end of the inner horseshoe. The rest of the crowd moved back into convenient shade. Many of them squatted, formidable, content, waiting, watching. Dogs moved between huts, a duck toddled up from the river, flies circled dusty excreta. Behind everything stood the mountains, spurting cloud.
The Menderstone place did not look inviting. It had been built long and low some twenty years past. Now the stresscrete was all cracked and stained, the steel frame windows rusting, the panes of glass themselves as bleary as a drunkard’s stare.
Ell’s friend went up to the door and kicked on it. Then he turned without hurry or sloth to go and join his friends, leaving Anderson standing on the step.
The door opened.
A beefy man stood there, the old-fashioned rifle in his hands reinforcing his air of enormous self-sufficiency. His face was as brown and pitted as the keel of a junk; he was bald, his forehead shone as if a high polish had just been applied to it. Although probably into his sixties, he gave the impression of having looked just as he did now for the last twenty years.
Most remarkably, he wore lenses over his eyes, secured in place by wires twisting behind his ears. Anderson recalled the name for this old-fashioned apparatus: spectacles.
‘Have you something you wish to say or do to me?’ demanded the bespectacled man, impatiently wagging his rifle.
‘My name’s K. D. Anderson. Your friends suggested I came to see you.’
‘My what? Friends? If you wish to speak to me you’d better take more care over your choice of words.’
‘Mr Menderstone – if you are Mr Menderstone – choosing words is at present the least of my worries. I should appreciate hospitality and a little help.’
‘You must be from Earth or you wouldn’t ask a complete stranger for such things. Alice!’
This last name was bawled back into the house. It produced a sharp-featured female countenance which looked over Menderstone’s shoulder like a parrot peering from its perch.
‘Good afternoon, madam,’ Anderson said, determinedly keeping his temper. ‘May I come in and speak to you for a while? I’m newly arrived on Nehru.’
‘Jesus! The first “good afternoon” I’ve heard in a lifetime,’ the woman answering to the name of Alice exclaimed. ‘You’d better come in, you poetical creature!’
‘I decide who comes in here,’ Menderstone snapped, elbowing her back.
‘Then why didn’t you decide instead of dithering on the step? Come in , young man.’
Menderstone’s rifle barrel reluctantly swung back far enough to allow Anderson entry. Alice led him through into a large miscellaneous room with a stove at one end, a bed at the other, and a table between.
Anderson took a brief glance round before focusing his attention on his host and hostess. They were an odd pair. Seen here close to, Menderstone looked less large than he had done on the step, yet the impression of a formidable personality was more marked than ever. Strong personalities were rare on Earth these days; Anderson decided he might even like the man if he would curb his hostility.
As it was, Alice seemed more approachable. Considerably younger than Menderstone, she had a good figure, and her face was sympathetic as well as slightly comical. With her bird-like head tilted on one side, she was examining Anderson with interest, so he addressed himself to her. Which proved to be a mistake.
‘I was just about to tell your husband that I stopped by to see an old friend and teacher of mine. Dr Frank Arlblaster –’
Menderstone never let Anderson finish.
‘Now you have sidled in here, Mr K. D. Anderson, you’d be advised to keep your facts straight. Alice is not my wife; ergo, I am not her husband. We just live together, there being nobody else in Swettenham more suitable to live with. The arrangement, I may add, is as much one of convenience as passion.’
‘Mr Anderson and I both would appreciate your leaving your egotistical self out of this for a while,’ Alice told him pointedly. Turning to Anderson, she motioned him to a chair and sat down on another herself. ‘How did you get permission to come here? I take it you have a little idea of what goes on on Nehru II?’ she asked.
‘Who or what are those shambling apes outside?’ he asked. ‘What makes you two so prickly? I thought this was supposed to be a colony of exiled intellectuals?’
‘He wants discussions of Kant, calculus, and copulation,’ Menderstone commented.
Alice said: ‘You expected to be greeted by eggheads rather than apes?’
‘I’d have settled for human beings.’
‘What do you know about Arlblaster?’
Anderson gestured impatiently.
‘You’re very kind to have me in, Mrs – Alice, I mean, but can we have a conversation some other time? I’ve a tourer parked back up the hill with my sister Kay waiting in it for me to return. I want to know if I can get there and back without being waylaid by these ruffians outside.’
Alice and Menderstone looked at each other. A deal of meaning seemed to pass between them. After a pause, unexpectedly, Menderstone thrust his rifle forward, butt first.
‘Take this,’ he said. ‘Nobody will harm you if they see a rifle in your hand. Be prepared to use it. Get your car and your sister and come back here.’
‘Thanks a lot, but I have a revolver back near my vehicle –’
‘Carry my rifle. They know it; they respect it. Bear this in mind – you’re in a damn sight nastier spot than you imagine as yet. Don’t let anything – anything – deflect you from getting straight back here. Then you’ll listen to what we have to say.’
Anderson took the rifle and balanced it, getting the feel of it. It was heavy and slightly oiled, without a speck of dust, unlike the rest of the house. For some obscure reason, contact with it made him uneasy.
‘Aren’t you dramatising your situation here, Menderstone? You ought to try living on Earth these days – it’s like an armed camp. The tension there is real, not manufactured.’
‘Don’t kid me you didn’t feel something when you came i
n here,’ Menderstone said. ‘You were trembling!’
‘What do you know about Arlblaster?’ Alice put her question again.
‘A number of things. Arlblaster discovered a prehistoric-type skull in Brittany, France, back in the eighties. He made a lot of strange claims for the skull. By current theories, it should have been maybe ninety-five thousand years old, but RCD made it only a few hundred years old. Arlblaster lost a lot of face over it academically. He retired from teaching – I was one of his last pupils – and became very solitary. When he gave up everything to work on a cranky theory of his own, the government naturally disapproved.’
‘Ah, the old philosophy: “Work for the common man rather than the common good”,’ sighed Menderstone. ‘And you think he was a crank, do you?’
‘He was a crank! And as he was on the professions roll as Learned Man, he was paid by World Government,’ he explained. ‘Naturally they expected results from him.’
‘Naturally,’ agreed Menderstone. ‘Their sort of results.’
‘Life isn’t easy on Earth, Menderstone, as it is here. A man has to get on or get out. Anyhow, when Arlblaster got a chance to join Swettenham’s newly formed colony here, he seized the opportunity to come. I take it you both know him? How is he?’
‘I suppose one would say he is still alive,’ Menderstone said.
‘But he’s changed since you knew him,’ Alice said, and she and Menderstone laughed.
‘I’ll go and get my tourer,’ Anderson said, not liking them or the situation one bit. ‘See you.’
Cradling the rifle under his right arm, he went out into the square. The sun shone momentarily through the cloud-cover, so hotly that it filled the shadows with splodges of red and grey. Behind the splodges, in front of the creaking houses of Swettenham, the people of Swettenham squatted or leaned with simian abandon in the trampled dust.