The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s (Part 1) (The Brian Aldiss Collection)

by Brian Aldiss

  The crane shaped up to the ship like a stork about to fight a torpid seal. Meanwhile, a ladder was stood against the hull, and an officer in dungarees shinned up it to tap smartly on the circular hatch – if hatch it was. As the echoes died across the field, an uneasy silence fell over the onlookers. The majority obviously feared massive retaliation, Helen with them.

  ‘We’ve got the children to think of,’ she said to her husband. ‘The aliens aren’t going to like this a bit. Let’s get out.’

  ‘Put Susie back in the car,’ Herbert said, watching horrified as the officer, receiving no answer to his knock, produced oxy-acetylene equipment and proceeded to try and drill a hole in the hatch. George went pale around the gills. The crowd began to back away. Only the Harwell men stood their ground.

  The little white flame had no effect on the metal. Eventually the officer, having achieved nothing, climbed down the ladder again; he was sweating as he retired to the lorry and dumped his kit.

  Now the rest of the team got to work. They had been well drilled. The ship was hitched about with wire rope and secured. The hook of the crane was lowered and packed into position under the rope. At a signal, the cable tightened and the crane took most of the ship’s weight. Block and tackle from one of the disposal lorries now took over control, swinging the ship’s nose round and down until the crane was able to slide forward with the ship in position over the waiting ‘Queen Mary.’ As it was lowered down, the cable paid out too fast, so that the ship settled on the articulated vehicle with a noise like a herd of lust-maddened antelopes cantering over the Forth Bridge.

  ‘Holy stars!’ exclaimed Herbert. ‘If the aliens don’t interpret that as an act of aggression, they must be mad.’

  Susan woke and started to cry.

  ‘Perhaps they’re all dead inside there,’ George suggested. As he was speaking and Helen was trying to soothe the baby, their friend the policeman came up.

  ‘There you are, sir,’ he said. ‘This rather confirms what I told you. I expect they’ll take it back to Harwell now.’

  ‘My God, Herb, perhaps they are going to take it to Harwell …’

  ‘Don’t be daft, they’ll probably take it to some Army depot and nobody will ever see who or what comes out of it,’ Herbert said.

  By this time, the space ship was being secured to the ‘Queen Mary.’

  George grabbed Helen and Herb by the arm.

  ‘Listen, the powers that be may have a bright idea here, if they’re going to cart the ship away to – well, say to Harwell. Anything they may want will then be on the spot. It’ll be more convenient for the aliens too, and no doubt they are suspending judgment until they see where they’re being taken.’

  ‘You still think they’re reasonable?’ Herb said. ‘And why are you pulling us along like this?’

  ‘I’m getting you to the car. We’re going to get out of here first before the rush starts.’

  ‘Splendid!’ Helen exclaimed. ‘At last you’re coming down to Earth. It’s high time we were getting back.’

  George cocked an eyebrow at her as he fished the car key out of his pocket. He nodded towards the ‘Queen Mary,’ which was already moving slowly across the field with its alien load.

  ‘Honey, I’ll get you home as soon as possible. But before that we’re going to follow that ship and see where it’s taken. I may seem to trust the aliens; maybe that’s only because I don’t know ’em. But I do know our authorities, and I wouldn’t trust ’em further than I could throw ’em. Remember Belloc: “We knew no harm of Bonaparte but plenty of the squire”? If that damned ship disappears, it may disappear for good in a cloud of security.’

  ‘Spoken like a newspaper man!’ Herbert said. ‘Pile in, Helen, and let’s go!’

  They piled in, slamming the doors as they started to bump across the field after the big articulated vehicle. Certainly, as George had planned, they were the first on the move, except for the crane, which bounded recklessly across the field. The ‘Queen Mary’ had by now negotiated the awkward opening and was heading down the farm road.

  ‘What’s that crazy devil doing?’ George growled, as the crane driver slewed up to the opening. Next minute the other vehicle was stuck across the gap.

  ‘Silly ass!’ Herbert cried.

  The crane driver backed, merely getting himself further stuck.

  ‘Bloody amateur!’ George bawled out of the window. ‘Left hand down, man. Wajja think you’re doing?’

  But the crane was in trouble. Other civilian cars edged up to George as it manoeuvred. The Alvis came, honking impatiently. George joined in the chorus.

  ‘He did it on purpose, George,’ Helen said quietly. ‘You’re not meant to follow that ship.’

  George turned his red face to her.

  ‘Girl, you’re right. We’re framed, and neatly too, I must say. Hang on here, will you? I’m going to phone Ken Gillwood from the farmhouse and get him to follow the ship up on his motor bike. He should be at home by now.’

  Flinging open the car door, George hurried between the other waiting cars and sprinted over the field. Climbing a bank, he pushed through the hedge at its thinnest point and jumped down into the lane.

  The farmer’s wife opened the door to his knock.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, the telephone’s out of order today,’ she said firmly. ‘Such a shame, just when we need it.’

  Before she shut the door in his face, George saw behind her one of the Harwell men, self-possessed and unsmiling.

  Two days later, George phoned his brother from the Mail office again.

  ‘Herbert? That you? George here. Get Helen and the kids rounded up and I’ll collect you in ten minutes.’

  ‘My God, George, not again!’

  ‘Listen, Herb, this is really big! Ken Gillwood’s just been on the blower. Guess what? You know I said we’d never hear of those aliens again? Well, I was wrong …’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first time. What’s happened?’

  ‘Something’s just blown Harwell off the face of the Earth. Tell Helen to get the baby’s bottle ready.’

  Hen’s Eyes

  Mr Norman Fillbrook rubbed the end of his nose between thumb and index finger. The organ thus manipulated, having responded joyously to years of such treatment, was beautifully pliable, beautifully bulbous. Mr Fillbrook drew pleasure from rubbing his nose; his only pleasure at present.

  His new superior in the Colonial Office (Mercury), Secretary Heathercote Thatch, was demonstrating his affinities with new brooms and, in the process of sweeping clean, had raised a cloud of dust about Mr Fillbrook’s head that floated ominously there as if concealing from mortal view a damoclean sword of proven downward tendencies.

  ‘I have been here in this establishment three weeks tomorrow, Mr Fillbrook, is that not so?’ Mr Thatch said, looking monstrous and mottled from behind the barricades of his mustache.

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘Damn it, it’s a fact whether I say so or not. You and I are going to have a clash of wills, Mr Fillbrook, if we are not careful.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘So am I. I’m a forgiving man, Mr Fillbrook, but this office has been grossly mismanaged. I’m not a man to let the sun go down on my wrath –’

  ‘Here on Mercury it can’t, sir.’

  ‘Silence! – but I’m growing tired of deliberate obscurantism. Three weeks less a day I’ve been here and you have not put me in the picture yet.’

  ‘Oh, sir …’ began Mr Fillbrook, a dreadful unease filling him. For Mr Thatch had picked up an earthgram from his desk and was scrutinising it with a glance sufficiently blazing to illuminate half the twilight zone. ‘Oh, sir, I’ve been trying to break you in gradually. … The department has become so large with all these immigrants from Earth and Venus. … Is there something …’

  He halted in dread. Mr Thatch was waving the earthgram before him with the wounded dignity of a man trying to smother a fire with his best waistcoat.

  ‘There is s
omething, Fillbrook, yes. There is, to be precise, this earthgram. It comes, to amplify, from the Celestial Chuckle Ophthalmic Studios in Hong Kong, Earth. It deals, to specify, with the occular powers of one Hengist Mankiloe.’

  Fillbrook gave what is termed ‘a visible start’; its visibility was so great that Mr Thatch momentarily wondered if his Chief Assistant had not contracted the Greater Mercurian Nerverot. Thus deflected from his purpose, he asked in a calmer voice, ‘Do I detect from that monstrous twitch that the name Celestial Chuckle has registered in your memory?’

  Reaching blindly for the reassurance of his nose, Fillbrook said, ‘No, sir, Mr Thatch, it was not that. It was just – the mention of Hengist Mankiloe’s name.’

  ‘And what importance may his ocular abilities hold for you, pray?’

  ‘Mankiloe himself is in our Top Secret classification.’

  ‘He is? Then I should have heard about him on the first day I arrived, not the twenty-first!’

  ‘The twentieth, sir.’

  ‘The twentieth then, you fool! Fetch me Mankiloe’s dossier at once.’

  ‘We don’t have it at the moment. Inspector Thameson of Security has it.’

  Mr Thatch’s mustache bristled until he bore more than a passing resemblance to a bull peering over a thorn hedge.

  ‘So? Letting a Top Secret dossier go out of this office, eh, Fillbrook? Men have done ten years in the curry mines for less.’

  ‘I got the Inspector’s signature, sir,’ Fillbrook said, trying to take cover behind his nose.

  ‘And I’ll have his blood!’

  ‘If you please, Mr Thatch, Mankiloe is rather a special case. This communication about his eyes –

  ‘What have his eyes to do with it, man?’

  ‘The gravitic plexuses – I mean plexi. No, I think plexuses is correct. That’s what they’re to do with.’

  As he floundered, on the other side of the desk the record for the Reddest Faced Man on Mercury was broken by Mr Thatch with several blood vessels in hand.

  ‘Optics! Plexi – I mean plexuses! Fillbrook, what do you think you’re standing there saying? Are you pulling the wool over my eyes? What’s this all about?’

  Desperately, waving his hands with the vigour of a Lars Porsena doing his stuff on that bridge where even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to register approval, Fillbrook cried, ‘It’s the paintings, Mr Thatch, the paintings, you know. Of course I wouldn’t dream of wooling – of pulling your wool, but this Mankiloe business is a very strange affair, very strange indeed. If I didn’t tell you about it before, it was only because I thought you might laugh at me.’

  Drawing himself up until he was practically levitating, Mr Thatch took firm control of himself and said in an icy voice, ‘Have no fear of that; it is highly unlikely you will ever occasion me any merriment, Mr Fillbrook. But I must point out that your elucidations are merely dragging us further into the mud. Pull yourself together and tell me – what paintings are you referring to?’

  ‘Why, the ones Inspector Thameson is holding.’

  ‘Inspector Thameson again? What’s the man doing, running a secondhand shop?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge, sir –’

  A bell pinged, interrupting them with its delicate chime as successfully as one mosquito can spoil a summer night’s amour in a garden. Grunting, Thatch lumbered over to the communicator to see what it offered. He punched it and it put out its tongue of paper. Reading it with a brow of thunder and more than a hint of forked lightning, he passed it over to Fillbrook.

  It came from one of the biggest stores in Wyndham, the domed city on Mercury in which the Colonial Office was established. It stated that two hundred and thirty yards of coarse second grade calico had been purchased some ten days before with a cheque drawn on a British bank. The cheque had proved un-negotiable; it was signed Hengist Mankiloe.

  In an inspired attempt to avoid his superior’s eyes, Fillbrook read the message through thirty-two times. So opaque a silence fell during this marathon performance, that when he did finally look up it was with the faint hope of finding that Mr Thatch had tiptoed out of the room and – for preference – tiptoed all the way back to Earth.

  Alas, Mr Thatch had no intention of performing any such feat. He appeared, in fact, to be trying to qualify once more for the final round of the Most Crimson Man in the Universe championship. When he spoke, it was as if the massive slab of Old Red Sandstone which he so much resembled had given voice.

  ‘The plot appears to thicken, Mr Fillbrook.’

  ‘We have everything in hand, sir, Inspector Thameson and I. This communication was not entirely unexpected.’

  ‘Mr Fillbrook. Optics, plexi, paintings, dud cheques, yards of drapery, a man called Mankiloe … forgive me if I trespass on your treasured privacy, but WHAT THE DEVIL IS THIS ALL ABOUT?’

  ‘O dear, not so loud, sir – the secretaries will hear you! It – It’s the RODS, sir, the Research into Other Dimensions. These things all tie up … there’s a perfectly logical explanation.’

  Secretary Thatch struggled for supremacy with a frog in his throat. Finally he said, ‘There’s been gross mismanagement in this department, Fillbrook. Your explanation must be not only perfect, not only logical – it must be forthcoming at once. I want no more dimensions than there is legislation to cover.’

  ‘Then I think, sir, you ought to invite Inspector Thameson across. You might find Inspector Thameson’s explanation more acceptable than mine.’

  Thatch looked Fillbrook over from head to foot in grave irony, his eyebrows twitching up and down like two squirrels playing tag round an oak bole.

  ‘It could hardly be less acceptable,’ he said, adding in a voice fresh off a Plutonian glacier, ‘Ring for Thameson immediately. I’ll speak to him.’

  Inspector Manson Thameson was an old Mercury hand. He had known Wyndham when it was a couple of air-inflated igloos. He was a small stout man with a bad complexion and ginger hair; but being a redhead with blackheads in no way spoilt his megalomaniac vision of Mercury as a fair planet and himself as its chief Sir Galahad.

  Accordingly, he became piqued as the voice of the new Colonial Office Secretary barked in his ear when he lifted his receiver. Holding the instrument at arm’s length hardly remedied matters; Thameson’s arms were incredibly short.

  ‘I can’t come,’ he said conversationally when there was a break in transmission. ‘I’m busy. You come over here. I know you Colonial wallahs have nothing to do but sit on your reports all day.’

  The sounds of a mature adult Thatch erupting were faithfully transmitted to him.

  ‘Please yourself, of course,’ Thameson said, and put the receiver down gently. ‘We’ve other things to attend to.’

  ‘Mmm of course we have, dawling,’ said Diana Cashfare, adjusting herself more securely on her boss’s knee. ‘Who was it?’

  Thameson ran his hand so amorously through her hair that she nearly screamed.

  ‘Dawling, you’ve been getting so wonderfully blonde lately. … What’s that? Oh, some fellow from the Colonial Office. The new man, old Fillbrook’s boss, Heathercote Thatch, you know. He won’t bother us.’

  Some few hundred milliseconds later, the door opened. Thatch entered.

  The Matterhorn could not have put in an appearance with more dignity; nor would the Matterhorn have had the advantage of being attended by an obsequious Mr Fillbrook. Unfortunately the awe-inspiring effect of this visitation seemed lost on Inspector Thameson, who said, with only a cursory glance round, ‘Stand back from this unfortunate woman. She is radioactive. I am searching her for Strontium 90 particles.’

  Reluctantly concluding his topographical survey for the time, Thameson bustled the girl off-stage, and turned to put Secretary Thatch in his place.

  This proved less easily done than said, and perhaps better left unsaid. At the end of quarter of an hour the two men were forced to acknowledge inwardly that if Thatch was an irresistible force personified then Thameson was an immovable
object in human form. From then on they treated each other with the respect that grows between irreconcilables.

  ‘So you’ve come to seek a little enlightenment on the Mankiloe affair,’ Thameson said, when it was obvious they had sparred to a standstill.

  ‘A little explanation …’ Thatch emended impatiently.

  ‘Quite so, quite so, always glad to help a newcomer, Mr Thatch. It must be terrible to feel like a fish out of water. Well, first we’ll go next door to the old police station.’

  ‘Is that necessary?’

  ‘Oh, it is necessary, sir,’ Mr Fillbrook said, glad to be able to prove his existence verbally. ‘You see the Inspector keeps his paintings in there.’

  ‘So, you are an artist, Inspector?’ Thatch said, surveying his opponent’s carroty skull as if comprehending its significance for the first time.

  ‘Fillbrook meant Mankiloe’s paintings. You’ve heard of Mankiloe, I suppose?’

  ‘He paints.’ It was Thatch’s bid at a punchy answer.

  Shaking his head as if he had freshly taken on a wager to get one of his ears loose by Christmas, Thameson gathered up a bunch of keys and led the way outside.

  Evidently hoping to remedy the ignorance of the air before him, he said, ‘Hengist Mankiloe is a great painter. It may be that he is the greatest painter alive today. That hardly matters. What matters is that he still paints old-fashioned traditional style, with brush and canvas and pigment. His pictures fetch money – one of them would cover a colonial officer’s salary for the thick end of three mercurian years.

  ‘Mankiloe is known throughout the system – by anyone with any cultural pretensions. But how many people have any cultural pretensions these days? Not people like Mr Thatch and Mr Fillbrook.’

  ‘Nonsense, Inspector, I know what I like and what I don’t as well as the next man.’

  ‘Well, that’s true humility for you, when you consider the next man,’ admitted Thameson, glancing at Fillbrook. ‘But all I was saying is that Mankiloe, who is a complete crook in just about every other way, has integrity when it comes to art. He won’t compromise. He has remained his own man. That’s why few people care for his work; it clashes with their piddling milk-fed vision of the world.’