The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  Even Hinton seemed subdued, scanning the sky as if waiting for Shepley to appear. He was careful not to turn his back on Mallory, clearly suspecting that the former NASA physician had been sent to trap him.

  ‘Flight and time, Mallory, they’re bound together. The birds have always known that. To get out of time we first need to learn to fly. That’s why I’m here. I’m teaching myself to fly, going back through all these old planes to the beginning. I want to fly without wings…’

  As the Shuttle’s delta wing fanned out above them, Mallory swayed against the rail. Exhausted by the climb, he tried to pump his lungs. The silence was too great, this stillness at the centre of the stopped clock of the world. He searched the breathless forest and runways for any sign of movement. He needed one of Hinton’s machines to take off and go racketting across the sky.

  ‘Mallory, you’re going… ? Don’t worry, I’ll help you through it.’ Hinton had taken his elbow and steadied him on his feet. Mallory felt the light suddenly steepen, the intense white glare he had last seen as the cheetah sprang towards him. Time left the air, wavered briefly as he struggled to retain his hold on the passing seconds.

  A flock of martins swept across the assembly deck, swirled like exploding soot around the Shuttle. Were they trying to warn him? Roused by the brief flurry, Mallory felt his eyes clear. He had been able to shake off the attack, but it would come again.

  ‘Doctor – ? You’ll be all right.’ Hinton was plainly disappointed as he watched Mallory steady himself at the rail. ‘Try not to fight it, doctor, everyone makes that mistake.’

  ‘It’s going…’ Mallory pushed him away. Hinton was too close to the rail, the man’s manic gestures could jostle him over the edge. ‘The birds –’

  ‘Of course, we’ll join the birds! Mallory, we can all fly, every one of us. Think of it, doctor, true flight. We’ll live forever in the air!’

  ‘Hinton…’ Mallory backed along the deck as Hinton seized the greasy rail, about to catapult himself on to the wind. He needed to get away from this madman and his lunatic schemes.

  Hinton waved to the aircraft below, saluting the ghosts in their cockpits. ‘Lilienthal and the Wrights, Curtiss and Bleriot, even old Mignet – they’re here, doctor. That’s why I came to Cape Kennedy. I needed to go back to the beginning, long before aviation sent us all off on the wrong track. When time stops, Mallory, we’ll step from this deck and fly towards the sun. You and I, doctor, and Anne…’

  Hinton’s voice was deepening, a cavernous boom. The white flank of the Shuttle’s hull was a lantern of translucent bone, casting a spectral light over the sombre forest. Mallory swayed forward, on some half-formed impulse he wanted Hinton to vault the rail, step out on to the air and challenge the birds. If he pressed his shoulders…

  ‘Doctor –?’

  Mallory raised his hands, but he was unable to draw any nearer to Hinton. Like the cheetah, he was for ever a few inches away.

  Hinton had taken his arm in a comforting gesture, urging him towards the rail.

  ‘Fly, doctor…’

  Mallory stood at the edge. His skin had become part of the air, invaded by the light. He needed to shrug aside the huge encumbrance of time and space, this rusting deck and the clumsy tracked vehicle. He could hang free, suspended forever above the forest, master of time and light. He would fly…

  A flurry of charged air struck his face. Fracture lines appeared in the wind around him. The transparent wings of a powered glider soared past, its propeller chopping at the sunlight.

  Hinton’s hands gripped his shoulders, bundling him impatiently over the rail. The glider slewed sideways, wheeled and flew towards them again. The sunlight lanced from its propeller, a stream of photons that drove time back into Mallory’s eyes. Pulling himself free from Hinton, he fell to his knees as the young woman swept past in her glider. He saw her anxious face behind the goggles, and heard her voice shout warningly at Hinton.

  But Hinton had already gone. His feet rang against the metal staircase. As he took off in the Fokker he called out angrily to Mallory, disappointed with him. Mallory knelt by the edge of the steel deck, waiting for time to flow back into his mind, hands gripping the oily rail with the strength of the new-born.

  VI

  Tape 24: August 17.

  Again, no sign of Hinton today.

  Anne is asleep. An hour ago, when I returned from the drugstore, she looked at me with focused eyes for the first time in a week. By an effort I managed to feed her in the few minutes she was fully awake. Time has virtually stopped for her, there are long periods when she is clearly in an almost stationary world, a series of occasionally varying static tableaux. Then she wakes briefly and starts talking about Hinton and a flight to Miami she is going to make with him in his Cessna. Yet she seems refreshed by these journeys into the light, as if her mind is drawing nourishment from the very fact that no time is passing.

  I feel the same, despite the infected wound on my shoulder – Hinton’s dirty finger-nails. The attacks come a dozen times a day, everything slows to a barely perceptible flux. The intensity of light is growing, photons backing up all the way to the sun. As I left the drugstore I watched a parakeet cross the road over my head, it seemed to take two hours to fly fifty feet.

  Perhaps Anne has another week before time stops for her. As for myself, three weeks? It’s curious to think that at, say, precisely 3.47 p.m., 8 September, time will stop for ever. A single micro-second will flash past unnoticed for everyone else, but for me will last an eternity. I’d better decide how I want to spend it!

  Tape 25: August 19.

  A hectic two days, Anne had a relapse at noon yesterday, vaso-vagal shock brought on by waking just as Hinton strafed the hotel in his Wright Flyer. I could barely detect her heartbeat, spent hours massaging her calves and thighs (I’d happily go out into eternity caressing my wife). I managed to stand her up, walked her up and down the balcony in the hope that the noise of Hinton’s aircraft might jolt her back on to the rails. In fact, this morning she spoke to me in a completely lucid way, obviously appalled by my derelict appearance. For her it’s one of those quiet afternoons three weeks ago.

  We could still leave, start up one of the abandoned cars and reach the border at Jacksonville before the last minutes run out. I have to keep reminding myself why we came here in the first place. Running north will solve nothing. If there is a solution it’s here, somewhere between Hinton’s obsessions and Shepley’s orbiting coffin, between the space centre and those bright, eerie transits that are all too visible at night. I hope I don’t go out just as it arrives, spend the rest of eternity looking at the vaporizing corpse of the man I helped to die in space. I keep thinking of that tiger. Somehow I can calm it.

  Tape 26: August 25.

  3.30 p.m. The first uninterrupted hour of conscious time I’ve had in days. When I woke 15 minutes ago Hinton had just finished strafing the hotel – the palms were shaking dust and insects all over the balcony. Clearly Hinton is trying to keep us awake, postponing the end until he’s ready to play his last card, or perhaps until I’m out of the way and he’s free to be with Anne.

  I’m still thinking about his motives. He seems to have embraced the destruction of time, as if this whole malaise were an opportunity that we ought to seize, the next evolutionary step forward. He was steering me to the edge of the assembly deck, urging me to fly, if Gale Shepley hadn’t appeared in her glider I would have dived over the rail. In a strange way he was helping me, guiding me into that new world without time. When he turned Shepley loose from the Shuttle he didn’t think he was killing him, but setting him free.

  The ever-more primitive aircraft – Hinton’s quest for a pure form of flight, which he will embark upon at the last moment. A Santos-Dumont flew over yesterday, an ungainly box-kite, he’s given up his First World War machines. He’s deliberately flying badly designed aircraft, all part of his attempt to escape from winged aviation into absolute flight, poetical rather than aeronautical structures.<
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  The roots of shamanism and levitation, and the erotic cathexis of flight – can one see them as an attempt to escape from time? The shaman’s supposed ability to leave his physical form and fly with his spiritual body, the psychopomp guiding the souls of the deceased and able to achieve a mastery of fire, together seem to be linked with those defects of the vestibular apparatus brought on by prolonged exposure to zero gravity during the space flights. We should have welcomed them.

  That tiger – I’m becoming obsessed with the notion that it’s on fire.

  Tape 27: August 28.

  An immense silence today, not a murmur over the soft green deck of Florida. Hinton may have killed himself. Perhaps all this flying is some kind of expiatory ritual, when he dies the shaman’s curse will be lifted. But do I want to go back into time? By contrast, that static world of brilliant light pulls at the heart like a vision of Eden. If time is a primitive mental structure we’re right to reject it. There’s a sense in which not only the shaman’s but all mystical and religious beliefs are an attempt to devise a world without time. Why did primitive man, who needed a brain only slightly larger than the tiger in Gale’s zoo, in fact have a mind almost equal to those of Freud and Leonardo? Perhaps all that surplus neural capacity was there to release him from time, and it has taken the space age, and the sacrifice of the first astronaut, to achieve that single goal.

  Kill Hinton… How, though?

  Tape 28: September 3.

  Missing days. I’m barely aware of the flux of time any longer. Anne lies on the bed, wakes for a few minutes and makes a futile attempt to reach the roof, as if the sky offers some kind of escape. I’ve just brought her down from the staircase. It’s too much of an effort to forage for food, on my way to the supermarket this morning the light was so bright that I had to close my eyes, hand-holding my way around the streets like a blind beggar. I seemed to be standing on the floor of an immense furnace.

  Anne is increasingly restless, murmuring to herself in some novel language, as if preparing for a journey. I recorded one of her drawn-out monologues, like some Gaelic love-poem, then speeded it up to normal time. An agonized ‘Hinton… Hinton…’

  It’s taken her twenty years to learn.

  Tape 29: September 6.

  There can’t be more than a few days left. The dream-time comes on a dozen stretches each day, everything slows to a halt. From the balcony I’ve just watched a flock of orioles cross the street. They seemed to take hours, their unmoving wings supporting them as they hung above the trees.

  At last the birds have learned to fly.

  Anne is awake…

  (Anne): Who’s learned to fly?

  (EM): It’s all right – the birds.

  (Anne): Did you teach them? What am I talking about? How long have I been away?

  (EM): Since dawn. Tell me what you were dreaming.

  (Anne): Is this a dream? Help me up. God, it’s dark in the street. There’s no time left here. Edward, find Hinton. Do whatever he says.

  VII

  Kill Hinton…

  As the engine of the Yamaha clacked into life, Mallory straddled the seat and looked back at the hotel. At any moment, as if seizing the last few minutes left to her, Anne would leave the bedroom and try to make her way to the roof. The stationary clocks in Titusville were about to tell the real time for her, eternity for this lost woman would be a flight of steps around an empty elevator shaft.

  Kill Hinton… he had no idea how. He set off through the streets to the east of Titusville, shakily weaving in and out of the abandoned cars. With its stiff gearbox and unsteady throttle the Yamaha was exhausting to control. He was driving through an unfamiliar suburb of the town, a terrain of tract houses, shopping malls and car parks laid out for the NASA employees in the building boom of the 1960s. He passed an overturned truck that had spilled its cargo of television sets across the road, and a laundry van that had careened through the window of a liquor store.

  Three miles to the east were the gantries of the space centre. An aircraft hung in the air above them, a primitive helicopter with an overhead propeller. The tapering blades were stationary, as if Hinton had at last managed to dispense with wings.

  Mallory pressed on towards the Cape, the engine of the motorcycle at full throttle. The tracts of suburban housing unravelled before him, endlessly repeating themselves, the same shopping malls, bars and motels, the same stores and used-car lots that he and Anne had seen in their journey across the continent. He could almost believe that he was driving through Florida again, through the hundreds of small towns that merged together, a suburban universe in which these identical liquor stores, car parks and shopping malls formed the building blocks of a strand of urban DNA generated by the nucleus of the space centre. He had driven down this road, across these silent intersections, not for minutes or hours but for years and decades. The unravelling strand covered the entire surface of the globe, and then swept out into space to pave the walls of the universe before it curved back on itself to land here at its departure point at the space centre. Again he passed the overturned truck beside its scattered television sets, again the laundry van in the liquor store window. He would forever pass them, forever cross the same intersection, see the same rusty sign above the same motel cabin…

  ‘Doctor… !’

  The smell of burning flesh quickened in Mallory’s nose. His right calf was pressed against the exhaust manifold of the idling Yamaha. Charred fragments of his cotton trousers clung to the raw wound. As the young woman in the black flying suit ran across the street Mallory pushed himself away from the clumsy machine, stumbled over its spinning wheels and knelt in the road.

  He had stopped at an intersection half a mile from the centre of Titusville. The vast planetary plain of parking lots had withdrawn, swirled down some cosmic funnel and then contracted to this small suburban enclave of a single derelict motel, two tract houses and a bar. Twenty feet away the blank screens of the television sets stared at him from the road beside the overturned truck. A few steps further along the sidewalk the laundry van lay in its liquor store window, dusty bottles of vodka and bourbon shaded by the wing-tip of the glider which Gale Shepley had landed in the street.

  ‘Dr Mallory! Can you hear me? Dear man…’ She pushed back Mallory’s head and peered into his eyes, then switched off the still clacking engine of the Yamaha. ‘I saw you sitting here, there was something – My God, your leg! Did Hinton… ?’

  ‘No… I set fire to myself.’ Mallory climbed to his feet, an arm around the girl’s shoulder. He was still trying to clear his head, there was something curiously beguiling about that vast suburban world… ‘I was a fool trying to ride it. I must see Hinton.’

  Doctor, listen to me…’ The girl shook his hands, her eyes wide with fever. Her mascara and hair were even more bizarre than he remembered. ‘You’re dying! A day or two more, an hour maybe, you’ll be gone. We’ll find a car and I’ll drive you north.’ With an effort she took her eyes from the sky. ‘I don’t like to leave Dad, but you’ve got to get away from here, it’s inside your head now.’

  Mallory tried to lift the heavy Yamaha. ‘Hinton – it’s all that’s left now. For Anne, too. Somehow I have to… kill him.’

  ‘He knows that, doctor –’ She broke off at the sound of an approaching aero-engine. An aircraft was hovering over the nearby streets, its shadowy bulk visible through the palm leaves, the flicker of a rotor blade across the sun. As they crouched among the television sets it passed above their heads. An antique autogyro, it lumbered through the air like an aerial harvester, its free-spinning rotor apparently powered by the sunlight. Sitting in the open cockpit, the pilot was too busy with his controls to search the streets below.

  Besides, as Mallory knew, Hinton had already found his quarry. Standing on the roof of the hotel, a dressing gown around her shoulders, was Anne Mallory. At last she had managed to climb the stairs, driven on by her dream of the sky. She stared sightlessly at the autogyro, stepping back a single p
ace only when it circled the hotel and came in to land through a storm of leaves and dust. When it touched down on the roof the draught from its propeller stripped the gown from her shoulders. Naked, she turned to face the autogyro, lover of this strange machine come to save her from a time-reft world.

  VIII

  As they reached the NASA causeway huge columns of smoke were rising from the space centre. From the pillion seat of the motorcycle Mallory looked up at the billows boiling into the stained air. The forest was flushed with heat, the foliage glowing like furnace coals.

  Had Hinton refuelled the Shuttle’s engines and prepared the craft for lift-off? He would take Anne with him, and cast them both loose into space as he had done with Shepley, joining the dead astronaut in his orbital bier.

  Smoke moved through the trees ahead of them, driven by the explosions coming from the launch site of the Shuttle. Gale throttled back the Yamaha and pointed to a break in the clouds. The Shuttle still sat on its platform, motors silent, the white hull reflecting the flash of explosions from the concrete runways.

  Hinton had set fire to his antique planes. Thick with oily smoke, the flames lifted from the glowing shells slumped on their undercarts. The Curtiss biplane was burning briskly. A frantic blaze devoured the engine compartment of the Fokker, detonated the fuel tank and set off the machine-gun ammunition. The exploding cartridges kicked through the wings as they folded like a house of cards.

  Gale steadied the Yamaha with her feet, and skirted the glowing trees two hundred yards from the line of incandescent machines. The explosions flashed in her goggles, blanching her vivid make-up and giving her blonde hair an ash-like whiteness. The heat flared against Mallory’s sallow face as he searched the aircraft for any sign of Hinton. Fanned by the flames that roared from its fuselage, the autogyro’s propeller rotated swiftly, caught fire and spun in a last blazing carnival. Beside it, flames raced along the wings of the Wright Flyer, in a shower of sparks the burning craft lifted into the air and fell on to its back upon the red-hot hulk of the Sopwith Camel. Ignited by the intense heat, the primed engine of the Flying Flea roared into life, propelled the tiny aircraft in a scurrying arc among the burning wrecks, setting off the Spad and Bleriot before it overturned in a furnace of rolling flame.