Cryptozoic!

by Brian Aldiss

  "No more rapes?"

  "Don't let's start on that again."

  "What has Bolt done to the Institute?"

  "It's prospering, by all accounts. Of course, I know nothing. It's nothing to do with me. It's run on more military lines, I hear."

  "I ought to report. I'll go first thing tomorrow, or they'll sack me."

  "You're not going back into the past again? The new government will organize all that. Now there are so many people mind-traveling, crime rates are rising back there. Two fellows got murdered in the Permian last week, so the grocer told Mrs. Annivale. General Bolt has set up a Mind-Travel Police Patrol to keep order."

  "It's orderly enough. I didn't see any crime. A few thousand people spread over millions of years -- what harm can it do?"

  "People don't stay spread, do they? Still, if you are bent on going back, I can't stop you. Why don't you settle down here and do some more groupages and that, make some real money? Your stuff's all in the studio. You can live here."

  Bush shook his head. He couldn't talk about his work. The drink was making his neck throb again. His ear ached. Perhaps what he most wanted was a good sleep. At least he could do that here; there seemed to be few invasions of his father's privacy.

  Just as he settled his glass down on the wide arm of his chair, there was a thunderous knocking at the front door.

  "It says 'Ring and Walk In' clearly enough, doesn't it?"

  But his father had gone pale. "That's no patient. It's probably the military. We'd better go and see. Ted, you come down too, won't you? It may be for you. I haven't done anything. I'll just hide this bottle under the chair. They're getting very anti-black market, damn them! What can they want? I've done nothing. I hardly ever go out . . ."

  Muttering, he went downstairs with Bush close behind him. The peremptory hammering came again before they were down. Bush pushed past his father into the waiting room and went and flung the front door open.

  Two armed men in uniform stood on the step. They wore steel helmets and looked far from peaceful. A truck waited behind them in the street, its engine running noisily.

  "Edward Lonsdale Bush?"

  "That's me. What do you want?"

  "Failure to report to Wenlock Institute after over-staying term of mind-travel. You're in trouble and you'll have to come along with us."

  "Look, Sergeant, I'm on my way to the Institute now!"

  "Short cut, is it? You've been boozing -- smell it a yard off! Come on!"

  He reached back and grabbed his pack off the magazine-strewn table.

  "My notes are all here. I tell you, I'm on my way -- "

  "No arguing, or we'll charge you with riot and you'll find yourself looking at the wrong end of a firing squad. Quick march!"

  He looked round despairingly, but his father had shrunk back into the gloom and was not to be seen. They ushered Bush down the path, past the crumbling brick wall where the rape had been committed, hustled him into the waiting truck, and shut the door on him. The truck moved away.

  Chapter 5

  A NEW MAN AT THE INSTITUTE

  He found it odd that on the journey he did not waste his time in tension but instead thought lovingly of his father. The old boy had his back against the wall, was to be pitied. His days of dubious power were over; now the situation was reversed -- or, would be if Bush ever got back to that dingy little house.

  Although family grievances were irreparable, that very fact meant that there were unaccountable lulls between the storms, lulls full of the best peace of all, the peace of indifference, when all the horrid things had been said. That was like the incest theme which was popularly supposed to underlie all family quarrels: a mixture of the forbidden best and sweetest and the worst.

  He started to think about his mother's death then, testing his reactions. He was still at it when the truck drew to a violent halt and he slid along the bench and landed with a smack against the rear doors. They were flung open, and he half-tumbled out.

  While his hands were still on the ground, before he had straightened up between his captors, he took in the dreary surroundings behind the truck. They had driven through a barrier, now closing again, set in a high concrete wall. There were guards rigid at the gate and lounging at a couple of shacks that stood under the wall. The ground, as if recently cleared, was littered with rubble.

  The two soldiers led him round past the truck and towards an entrance in a large but unimposing building. With disbelief, Bush recognized it as the Wenlock Institute.

  The confusion latent in anyone's mind who has moved between different times and experienced yesterday as tomorrow and tomorrow as yesterday sprang up and overwhelmed him. For a while, he could not believe he was in the right year. The Institute had stood in a quiet side street, with a car park on one side of it, and buildings on the other side and opposite it; it had faced across to an insurance office which had done good business with mind-travelers.

  He was marched into the Institute before he had the simple answer. Under the regime of the worthy General Peregrine Bolt, the Institute had been advanced in status; his father had told him that. They had simply demolished the rest of the street and built a wall about the premises, so that the Institute could now be easily defended and everyone who entered or left could be accounted for.

  Inside, the Institute had changed very little. Indeed, it seemed to have entered on a period of prosperity; the lighting was better, the flooring improved; closed-circuit television had been installed, its bowls transmitting colored messages steadily. The reception desk had been greatly extended -- there were now four uniformed men behind it. The boredom and unease generated by their uniform did more to transform the once unpretentious atmosphere than all the other alterations.

  The guards presented a scrap of paper. A uniformed receptionist talked into a silenced phone. They all waited. Finally, the receptionist nodded, hung up, and said "Room 3." The guards marched Bush over to Room 3 -- a cubicle on the main corridor -- and left him.

  The room was empty except for two chairs. Bush stood in the middle of the room, clutching his pack, listening. It seemed as if he had got off lightly; all the horrors he had had in mind, the punches in the teeth, the kicks in the testicles, those characteristic gestures of a totalitarian regime, receded a little. Perhaps his captors had merely had orders to deliver him here as speedily as possible to make his report. He hoped Howells was still here; Howells always took his report and -- Bush had recognized the symptoms long ago -- secretly admired and envied him.

  Anxiety made him breathe fast and shallowly. The room was like a little box, and they were keeping him waiting a suspiciously long time.

  He would be in trouble. If only they would not mention the year he had over-stayed -- if they could understand he had meant to come back, to work properly, to report. He was their star minder.

  Or -- his brain ran along another track -- if it wasn't old Howells but a new man, who did not know he had over-stayed his allotted period. But a new man . . . a totalitarian . . . one of Bolt's men . . .

  Knowing absolutely nothing about the current political situation beyond the few words his father had dropped, Bush began to weave a terrible plot in his head, in which he was subjected to brutality and in his turn inflicted humiliation on others. It was as if, with the passing of his mother, his mind had to find other complications to stuff itself with. Recent events, the brush with Lenny's gang, the unexpected blow from Stein, the shock of finding how Borrow had so effortlessly achieved what he hoped to do, the news that his mother was dead by some months, were too much for him. He feared he could endure nothing more.

  Sinking back onto a corner chair, Bush took his head in his hands and let the universe thump and rock about him.

  Indescribable things rushed through him. As though galvanized by a shock, he jumped up, rigid. The flimsy door was open and a messenger stood there. Something was the matter with Bush's eyes; he could not make the man out clearly.

  "Do you want me to make my report
now?" Bush asked, jumping forward.

  "Yes, if you'll follow me."

  They took the elevator up to the second floor, where Bush usually went to report. A macabre terror gripped him, a premonition of great ill. It seemed to him that the very interior of the Institute had altered in some way, its perspectives and shadows grown more inhuman, its elevators more cruel, while the metal grill of the elevator closed over Bush like fangs. He was sweating when he leaped out into the upper corridor.

  "Am I seeing Reggie Howells?"

  "Howells? Who's Howells? He doesn't work here any more. I've never heard of him."

  The report room looked as he recalled it, except for the telebowl and one or two additional installations which gave it a sly and watchful atmosphere. There were chairs on either side of the table, report pads, the speech-picture humming idly in one corner. Bush was still standing there, clenching and unclenching his fists, when Franklin entered.

  Franklin had been Howells' deputy; he was a porky, pale man with goosey flesh and poor eyesight. His eyes swam behind little steel-rimmed glasses. Not a prepossessing man, and Bush recalled now that he had never much liked the man or tried to ingratiate himself with him. He greeted him rather effusively now -- it was an unexpected relief to see anyone he knew, even Franklin. Franklin looked puffier, bigger -- a foot taller.

  "Sit down and make yourself comfortable, Mr. Bush. Put your pack down."

  "I'm sorry I didn't report at once, but my mother -- "

  "Yes. The Institute is being run more efficiently than when you were last here. In the future, you will report here directly you return to the present. As long as you obey the rules you can come to no harm. Get it?"

  "Yes, quite, I see. I'll remember. I hear Reggie Howells has left. So the messenger was telling me."

  Franklin looked at him and closed his eyes slightly. "Howells was shot, to tell you the truth."

  Bush could not exactly say why, but it was the phrase "to tell you the truth" that upset him; it was too colloquial to follow the content of the rest of the sentence. He decided it might be safer not to say anything more on the subject of Howells; at the same time, he concluded that the most ill-advised thing he could possibly do would be what he most desired: to bust Franklin one on his piggy nose.

  To hide his confusion, he put his shabby old pack on the table and started to unzip it.

  "I'll open that," Franklin said, pulling the pack towards him. He pushed it under a machine by his right hand, looked at a panel above it, grunted, and ripped it open, tipping its contents out between them. Together, they eyed the poor bric-a-brac that had accompanied Bush over such a great span of time.

  Chilled by apprehension, Bush felt his bowels contract. His time sense was awry, too, as it had been when Stein hit him. Franklin was reaching out towards the rubbish on the table, his arm moving perfectly under control, a multi-dimensional figure for a series of intricate reactions between nervous and muscular systems and terrestrial gravitational forces, in which air pressure and optical judgements were also involved. It was a textbook case of anatomical mechanics; as Bush watched it, be could see the crude sub-structure of the gesture. As the humerus swung slightly forward, ulna and radius levered from it, wrist bent, finger bones extended like, the maimed wing of a bird. Under the blue serge sleeve, lymph chugged.

  Disgusted, Bush looked up at the man. The little astigmatic eyes were still staring at him, isolated behind their glasses, but the face was a bare diagrammatic example of a skull, part of the flesh cut away to reveal teeth, palate, and the intricacies of the inner ear. A series of small red arrows sprayed from the gaping jaws into the air towards Bush, indicating the passage of the organism's breath as it said, "Family Group."

  It was reading from a sheet of paper it had retrieved from the debris on the table. The paper had been screwed up. The organism had flattened it out and was examining it.

  The paper bore a crude sketch in color, showing a deserted landscape with a metal sea; from a sun, from a tree, faces protruded. Slowly, Bush realized it was something he had executed in the Devonian; he had scrawled on it the title the organism had read out.

  He closed his eyes and moved his head from side to side. When he looked again, Franklin appeared normal once more, his anatomy decently covered by his suit. He had crumpled up the drawing again and thrown it aside in disgust. Now he was examining more sketches, a series Bush had made on a pad. These sketches were of cryptic forms that never entirely transmuted into any recognizable shape. Bush had piled them up on the page, trying to make them ungraspable, defying unidirectional sense, violating all durations.

  "What are these?" Franklin asked.

  Perhaps I will just clear my throat, Bush thought. He experienced a certain tension there. This was all very unpleasant. No point, of course, in explaining. . . . He cleared his throat, enjoyed some relief as the mucus ceased its tiny pressure. It was erroneous to assume that events in space-time could be rendered by symbols onto paper -- a cardinal error that had stood mankind in good stead ever since the first cave paintings. Perhaps you could invent a way to translate the symbols into space-time. But that was constantly done. A piece of music . . .

  "My notebooks . . ."

  Nodding, Franklin accepted this as an adequate answer. He put the pad carefully on a side tray, a deliberate gesture. For a moment, he threatened to dissolve into a motor-energy diagram, and Bush fought the feeling back.

  "I -- my notebooks . . ."

  The illusion, whatever it was, was over. Time snapped back to normal. He could smell the dull atmosphere of the room again, hear noises, the slight sound of Franklin scuffling about in his equipment.

  Franklin picked out the notebooks and the wrist camera, sweeping the rest of the stuff into a side tray, a woman's photograph among it.

  "Your personal possessions will be returned to you later." He clipped the first book into the miniscanner on the wall and let it run. Bush's taped voice filled the room, and the recorder behind Franklin redigested it.

  Franklin sat where he was without expression, listening. Bush began to drum with his fingers on the table, then pulled them onto his knees. The books took twenty-five minutes each to play and there were four and a half of them full of his reports, spaced over his long months away. When one book was emptied, Franklin inserted the next without comment. He had been trained to make people uneasy; two or three years ago, he would have coughed and twitched in the unpleasant atmosphere; now Bush did it for him.

  The reports had been designed for Howells' ear, genial Howells who welcomed any chitchat. They contained little new information about the past, although there was a reassuringly solid bit on the phragmoceras, and Bush had genuinely researched into the length of earlier years, which increased the farther one progressed back in time, through the decreased effect of the Moon's braking effect on the Earth by tidal friction. He had confirmed that in the early Cambrian Period, a year consisted of about 428 days. He had also carefully noted the psychological effects of CSD and mind-travel. But too much of the report now seemed like idle chatter about the people he had met on his wanderings through time, interspersed with artistic notes. When the last book drew to its end, after almost two hours of playback, he could hardly bring himself to look at Franklin, who seemed to have been expanding all this time, as Bush himself was shrinking.

  Franklin spoke mildly enough. "What would you conceive the objectives of this Institute to be, Bush?"

  "Well . . . It began as a research center for mental analysis, enlarging the discovery of the undermind -- the theory of it. I'm not scientifically trained. I'm afraid I can't phrase it too precisely. But Anthony Wenlock and his researchers discovered the uses of CSD and opened up the new avenues of the mind that have enabled us to overcome the barriers our ancient ancestors put up to protect themselves from space-time, and so mind-travel was developed. That's simplified. I mean, I understand there are still paradoxes to be unraveled, but . . . . Well, anyhow, now the Institute is the HQ of mind-travel, devoted to
a greater scientific understanding of . . . well, of the past. As I say, I -- "

  "How would you say you have served that 'devotion to a greater scientific understanding,' as you put it?"

  The recorder was still growling away, holding on for posterity to the insincerity in his voice. He knew he was being trapped. Making an effort, he said, "I've never pretended to be a scientist. I'm an artist. Dr. Wenlock himself interviewed me. He believed artistic insights were needed as well as strictly -- well, scientific ones. Also, they found that I was a particularly good subject for mind-travel. I can go farther and faster than most travelers, and get closer to the present. You know all this. It's on my cards."

  "But how would you say you serve the 'devotion to greater scientific understanding' you talk so much about?"

  "I suppose you think not very well. I've said, I'm not a scientist. I'm more interested -- well, I've done my best, but I'm more interested in people. Damn it, I've done the job I was paid for. In fact, there's quite a bit of back-pay owing."