Froomb!

by John Lymington

  “All this had begun to take effect before I died. I watched it sickly. The death rate was increasing through a high average age and wholesale slow poisoning that had to go on, and there were few replacements.

  “In the thirty years before I died the population of the United Kingdom had fallen from sixty million to ten, and this without the assistance of atomic bombs, fire sprays, or anything warlike at all.

  “What was more it obviously was going to go on at that rate pro rata.

  “Women were in revolt. It seems that men can stand being rendered impotent provided they are not goaded. It is much more serious for women, with their strong procreative instinct and need for copulation.

  “Pills were then produced which would overcome impotence for short periods. Warnings, I remember, were repeatedly given—not by the manufacturers, but hy worried social workers—that use of these pills would finally render the taker sterile.

  “But if it gave pleasure for a moment, it was taken, and the future could go to the devil.” Bassington shrugged. “Which was, after all, the total creed of the people. So, as the saying was then, what?

  “I still refused to stop my free-run farming. My estate was first put entirely out of bounds by the authorities. They wired it all off and put on guards. They imagined this would ruin me. The money I had was frozen, so that I could not get it. The landlord of the inn—your father’s successor—hanged himself.

  “I still held out. We could live. We were producing everything we wanted here, on the estate. I began to fear they might come in and destroy the crops and cattle. But they didn’t.

  “Instead a high Minister came. He told me that food production was solved. They had resurrected an old idea once put forward by the Parson-Jones Chemicals Group—-that

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  of making food of edible plastic in the shape and color of the original food and flavored with it.

  “The proposition they put to me was that I should use all my produce to give them the flavor extract, which could then be put into the food as it was manufactured.

  “Foolishly, like an old man with pride, arrogance and no sense, I refused to do it. I was arrested and tried secretly for crimes against the state. It was a very small state then, but the smaller it got, the more power came to fewer and was proportionally concentrated. I was duly shot and shoved in the incinerator.

  “As is the way with God, disapproving of so stupid a waste of my life, I was sent back here to wait.

  “I saw the government come in here. But they did not use my cattle and my land to flavor the food of the people outside. What they did was to reserve this whole estate as a recreation place for government officials only. No one else ever gets in. This is now what is secretly known as a Real Area. The rest of the country is weeds and plastic food. They even manufacture the flavor.”

  He laughed, but it was sad.

  John Brunt sat appalled.

  “I can’t believe it!” he said.

  “It was the logical and only outcome,” Bassington said. “You must remember that the beginnings of all these developments were there when you were alive.”

  “I thought it was a joke when people talked about it. I didn’t know—”

  “You didn’t think,” Bassington said sharply. “Nor did anybody else. It was right, what they used to say: ‘Froomb! the damn thing’s running away with us!’ Of course it was. Of course it always will. Man is only a little animal, no better than all the rest. The one thing that man excels in above all other kinds is killing. And having devoted his existence to such an art, his ultimate objective must be—himself.”

  “They aren’t that bad!” John Brunt said.

  “That is to be decided elsewhere,” Bassington replied. “Do you know the purpose of this anteroom visit of yours and mine?”

  “No.”

  “It is quite simply that you come back to the place where you lived, to see for yourself what has happened because of what you did, or didn’t do. I’ve told you what I know.

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  Obviously you’ve learned other things since you’ve been here. You’re getting the idea, aren’t you?”

  “But all these things that happened are nothing to do with me!” John Brunt said. “I didn’t realize the world would—well, get into a mess like this!”

  “You didn’t stay to see, did you?” said Bassington. “You ran from here to Australia, to the Philippines, to Alaska, McMurdo Sound—anywhere—in one endless, indefatigable drive to escape from your world. What kind of contribution was that to its welfare? What kind of guilt lies on you—you who made Joneses envious thinking that you were escaping when they couldn’t? You whom they read about in their millions, and listened to in silent envy, because they thought you had escaped from the thing they were tied to? You who kept looking for something, kept finding it, but didn’t know what it was.

  “When you accepted this offer from Packard, what was in your mind but escape?”

  “You’re not very fair!” John Brunt said. “There was no other way to think, then.”

  “Froomb. dear boy. Froomb!” His voice -rose high in mock- bird imitation. “There is nothing I can do! It’s running away and the brakes have gone! Oh God, why did I start at all? It’s running away with me—precious, irreplaceable Me!"

  His voice died suddenly, and after a while, he chuckled.

  “But what other way could you think? You were never taught any other way. ‘I can be hurt, I can be punished, I can suffer, why can’t I be happy? Isn’t that part of the bargain?’ . . . There’s no bargain, man. You’ll find that out. You’re thrown in. You learn to float or you grovel around on the mud. There’s no promise to teach you anthing.”

  An idea struck John Brunt.

  “Are you judging me?” he asked.

  “I’m what you might call briefing you so you’ll know your weaknesses,” Bassington said. “We do this for each other. A magistrate’s preliminary hearing, if you get the drift. If you’ve been partially tried once, it’s easier when the full session comes along.”

  “Have you—?”

  Bassington shook his head and chuckled at his waistcoat.

  “No. I’m waiting for the announcer. ‘Call Robert James Maidment Bassington!’ Just as in a court of law. I suppose it comes that way because that’s the way we know. You see,

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  things are rather generously fed into our poor brains in

  words and ideas we have always known. The authorities don’t ask too much of us. Which is fortunate. We aren’t very intelligent, perhaps.”

  “It’s terrifying,” John Brunt said. “Can you imagine what to expect?”

  “I hope,” said Bassington quietly, “that I shall see my wife again.”

  Helen started violently.

  “Oh. I thought I was going to kick my foot against something. I must have been asleep.” She looked round toward the stairs. “Is he still there?” she whispered. “I thought I saw him just now.”

  Bassington stood up.

  “That body worries me,” he said. “I don’t know if I should talk to you or not. If you go back, will you remember, and if you remember, will you tell?”

  “Does it make any difference?” John Brunt said. “We’ve got to find out some day.”

  Bassington grinned.

  “But if you look around you, you’ll see that they never did find out,” he said.

  “There’s something I must know,” John Brunt said urgently.

  He hesitated, and felt Helen pressing drowsily against him again.

  “I don’t know everything,” Bassington warned. “I’m still waiting like you.”

  “I realize that now,” John said. “But the question is this: If I get back and tell them what I know, what you’ve told me, what I’ve read—could I stop it all happening?”

  Bassington thought a long time.

  “It would be interesting, wouldn’t it, to try?” he said at last. “After all, re
ality is only in an animal’s senses. Once he dies there’s nothing solid left to him . . . I don’t know the answer to your question. Could you stop the world heading the way it’s going? Well, can you stop a drunkard, or a drug addict? I seem to remember a lot of warnings about the danger of smoking when I was alive, but I don’t remember they made any difference. Yet people can be saved. Some can be frightened into saving themselves—no I don’t know what success you’d have, John.”

  “But there is a possibility I could do it?”

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  “I suppose there is.”

  ‘Then the world would never become as it is now?”

  “I think it would, but perhaps at a later time.”

  “That isn’t very cheerful.”

  “It never was cheerful.” Bassington moved slowly up and down the hall, thumbs in his pockets, looking at the floor as he went. “What have you seen outside this estate?”

  “Weeds. Rust. I came to about a mile out on the Glaston- bury-Bath road—or what was the Glastonbury road. Why? Is the rest like that?”

  “When you died there were nearly sixty million people, and accommodation and means of living were commensurate. But now there’s only four million. What that was the score in earlier times men were plowing their furrow to suit an expansion. Now they have nothing to do. There will be shrinkage only. The towns have withered, the cities only one-tenth occupied, the rest of them broken up by weeds and decay. The little factories make edible plastic and flavorings, and so people sit there and eat. They don’t travel; there’s nowhere to go. Transport gave up when there were too few people to maintain roads and railways, flying was banned. In any case, there wasn’t any oil. When you feel death coming on like that, you tend to lie down.”

  “But doesn’t anyone go and see what’s happened in America and the other places? Surely—”

  “Why go there? Things are bad enough here. This is the devil they know. There has been no answer to radio messages outside Europe for as long as I remember. You see, this world of men is dying. In other days, it was young, eager to find out, to discover, as you were. It made itself like what it found; perhaps that was the trouble. I don’t know. Then when discovery proved to be poisonous when joined with human greed, I suppose subconsciously they realized there was nothing to be done.”

  “But I can’t believe they wouldn’t do something if they knew now!” John Brunt protested. “I’m sure they would! They wouldn’t just sit down and let this happen!”

  “They’re not letting it happen. They’re making it hap- pen.”

  “You’re a. defeatist!”

  Bassington laughed. “Surely it’s hardly my time to be that? I’ve been through it. The Gods loved you. You died young.

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  . . . That body worries me. Could you be killed again

  here?”

  “No!”

  “The body, I mean. The spirit is on its way, but the body?

  There’s been some freak transmission of the flesh. If you can cuddle that girl, and be hurt and hungry and short of breath then surely you can be killed again?”

  She started awake.

  “What’s the matter, love?”

  “If that’s possible, and I was killed again—just physically I mean—then, oh God! Packard couldn’t get me back!”

  Bassington shook his head very slowly. He stared at John Brunt.

  “I don’t know, of course,” he said. “This is just the place where we wait, and I’m no more important than you. But I can’t see how they—” he made a wide gesture with his hand toward the stars at a window, “—how they will let you go back to life. You see, you’re dead. The fact that, by a scientific trick, you’ve brought a body is unusual but it’s not insoluble. To my way of thinking—and only mine, don’t forget—I think you’ll have to lose that body, and I don’t see that you can go right back to where you were in order to lose it. I think your body must go back there, but I don’t think that you will.”

  “But I’ve got to try!”

  “Try, of course. I could be wrong. You’re the first man to die and bring his carcass along with him. There must always be a first time, and that may start a chain-reaction, as they used to call it. Try. If you get back, I would wager that nothing you could do would change the way the world will go. For some reason they won’t listen. For some accident, you won’t get to the right man in time. By some speck of dust in the machine, you will find the doors locked against you when you try to get in and stop the experiment. That’s what I’d wager, but it’s up to you to try. I can’t tell. I’m only waiting—”

  He looked away suddenly, as if listening. John felt a movement in the air, as if it had begun to flow past him.

  Helen pressed tightly against John.

  “I want to go!” she whispered. “I’m frightened, love! I want to go!”

  Suddenly Bassington’s face changed. His eyes opened wider, and he turned to look behind him. John began to hear

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  a confusion of noise; a thousand sounds adding up to one strange hushing. Bassington raised a hand in signal and looked back briefly over his shoulder. The dusky hall faded and there was nothing around John Brunt at all, but a vast space of blue that was so deep it was like looking into a billion miles of translucent darkness. Stars of gold floated in endless movement, one ten million miles behind another as they passed, and shimmering streams of cosmic dust moved at measureless depths beneath his feet. The terror of the vastness gripped him, and then suddenly a wild exhilaration flowed in him. The rushing of the great sound lifted him through the vast moving universe of stars, as if he traveled among them so that he would have to brush them aside from his face.

  “Johnny, love!”

  The machine stopped; the universe was gone. They were huddled together in the shadowy hall, alone together in a dim edged bowl of yellow light.

  “You went queer, love! Oh, don’t do that! I’m scared, Johnny. Let’s go! Please let’s go!”

  He stood up, hugging Helen to him.

  “Yes, we’ll go,” he said, breathlessly. “I wonder what questions they’re—asking him? Or will he go straight in now?”

  “Come on, love!” she whispered.

  He watched the shadow edges on the wall moving with the little flame of the lantern.

  The little history book had been right. Bassington knew. He had lived through it. It had all happened as Packard had feared it would.

  But could it be stopped? Could history be put into reverse, or redirected? Was Time really something that did not follow a man-made rule laid out on the ground, but something beyond his simple understanding? Was the progress along a path of time inevitable? Could it be diverted?

  Yes. Perhaps it was possible. But only by a new sense in man himself. But he was blind. If he were given the chance, might he have the power to redirect?

  “Yes, he could! He would recognize humility without being blown apart! He’s not that bad!”

  “Johnny! Don’t go on! Pm frightened for you!”

  He squeezed her trembling arm against his side, but his thoughts were trying to follow Bassington. Bassington had not

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  known for sure, but he had admitted that he and his kind could contact certain people in life. If John Brunt concentrated now, might he get some contact with Packard? Enough to make him act sooner?

  Or was he too set in the rules of his experiment. Was there someone else who could act as a trigger on him? Ann Gill? Could she—?

  “Put out the light!” Helen hissed in a panic. “Somebody’s outside the door!”

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  She came into the laboratory, the paper in her hand. Packard stood at the end of the steel avenue, his tie undone, his hair ragged, his head hanging forward aggressively. His quick eyes caught sight of her, gleamed, and his mouth began to open. Then to cover any expression of delight or relief, he wiped his face down with a great open hand.

  “I’ve been foole
d,” he said hoarsely. “It was so real I thought I was talking to him. But it was a dream. I slept in the chair.”

  She went slowly toward him.

  “What kind of dream?” she said.

  “I was here—” he waved his hand, gesturing around him, “—and all the lights were out, and there was only a candle. He was sitting the other side of a table, a wooden table, and he kept saying to me, ‘I have something to tell you; you must listen!’ And I kept shouting, just to hear my own voice echoing in this room we were in, and he couldn’t tell me, but he kept on saying. ‘I have something to tell you!’ and I wanted to hear, but in spite of myself I kept shouting to hear my own voice resounding from the walls—”

  He broke off and drew a long breath.

  “You’re shook up,” she said, pressing the paper against her bosom in sudden alarm. “What did you shout about?”

  She knew how to lead him, but for a moment he just stared at her hands holding the paper without seeing any meaning there.

  “It was odd, a dream within a dream,” he said hoarsely.

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  “I was speaking to him but I could see something that was happening as well. It was a big landscape. You could see for miles, and the sky very high, you know the feeling of terrifying emptiness. And then the earth turned black, and started to glow inside, so the black became veins on red hot coals, as if the inside of the earth was bursting with fire. And people came running toward me, shouting and yelling, all smoky black as if they’d come through the fire and I could smell their flesh burning . . . And then the earth burst. It burst in a long line and the flames ran right up into the sky, miles high, like a great paling fence of fire, and at the top it spread outward until there was no sky, only a dome of flame, and I saw people going upward in the fire pillars, their limbs burning off and flying up in debris as they disintegrated with the heat . . .

  “And he kept calling out. ‘This is what I mean! I must tell you!’ But I went on shouting and shouting, describing what I could see happening—”

  He shook his head and ran his hands down his face. "That’s all. Just that scene. I’ve been trying to remember. What’s that? A morning paper? What’s the time? Three a.m.? What are you doing here at this time?”