A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  Mr Jimmon knew what he was saying, but the sirens and the continuous rustle of the convoy prevented the sound from coming through. Again the cop deviated from the established routine; he did not take the proffered licence and examine it incredulously before drawing out his pad and pencil, but wrote the citation, glancing up and down from the card in Mr Jimmon’s hand.

  Even so, the last of the vehicles – San Jose F.D. – passed before he handed the summons through the window to be signed. ‘Turn around then proceed in the proper direction,’ he ordered curtly, pocketing the pad and buttoning his jacket briskly.

  Mr Jimmon nodded. The officer hesitated, as though waiting for some limp excuse. Mr Jimmon said nothing.

  ‘No tricks,’ said the policeman over his shoulder. ‘Turn around and proceed in the proper direction.’

  He almost ran to his motor-cycle, and roared off, twisting his head for a final stern frown as he passed, siren wailing. Mr Jimmon watched him dwindle in the rear-view mirror and then started the motor. ‘Gonna lose a lot more than you gained,’ commented Jir.

  Mr Jimmon gave a last glance in the mirror and moved ahead, shifting into second. ‘David!’ exclaimed Molly horrified, ‘you’re not turning around!’

  ‘Observant,’ muttered Mr Jimmon, between his teeth.

  ‘Dad, you can’t get away with it,’ Jir decided judicially.

  Mr Jimmon’s answer was to press the accelerator down savagely. The empty highway stretched invitingly ahead; a few hundred yards to their right they could see the northbound lanes antclustered. The sudden motion stirred the traffic citation on his lap, floating it down to the floor. Erika leaned forward and picked it up.

  ‘Throw it away,’ ordered Mr Jimmon.

  Molly gasped. ‘You’re out of your mind.’

  ‘You’re a fool,’ stated Mr Jimmon calmly. ‘Why should I save that piece of paper?’

  ‘Isn’t what you told the cop.’ Jir was openly jeering now.

  ‘I might as well have, if I’d wanted to waste conversation. I don’t know why I was blessed with such a stupid family –’

  ‘May be something in heredity after all.’

  If Jir had said it out loud, reflected Mr Jimmon, it would have passed casually as normal domestic repartee, a little ill-natured perhaps, certainly callow and trite, but not especially provocative. Muttered, so that it was barely audible, it was an ultimate defiance. He had read that far back in pre-history, when the young males felt their strength, they sought to overthrow the rule of the Old Man and usurp his place. No doubt they uttered a preliminary growl or screech as challenge. They were not very bright, but they acted in a pattern; a pattern Jir was apparently following.

  Refreshed by placing Jir in proper Neanderthal setting, Mr Jimmon went on, ‘– none of you seem to have the slightest initiative or ability to grasp reality. Tickets, cops, judges, juries mean nothing any more. There is no law now but the law of survival.’

  ‘Aren’t you being dramatic, David?’ Molly’s tone was deliberately aloof adult to excited child.

  ‘I could hear you underline words, Dad,’ said Erika, but he felt there was no malice in her gibe.

  ‘You mean we can do anything we want now? Shoot people? Steal cars and things?’ asked Wendell.

  ‘There, David! You see?’

  Yes, I see. Better than you. Little savage. This is the pattern. What will Wendell – and the thousands of other Wendells (for it would be unjust to suppose Molly’s genes and domestic influence unique) – be like after six months of anarchy? Or after six years?

  Survivors, yes. And that will be about all: naked, primitive, ferocious, superstitious savages. Wendell can read and write (but not so fluently as I or any of our generation at his age); how long will he retain the tags and scraps of progressive schooling?

  And Jir? Detachedly Mr Jimmon foresaw the fate of Jir. Unlike Wendell, who would adjust to the new conditions, Jir would go wild in another sense. His values were already set; they were those of television, high school dating, comic strips, law and order. Released from civilization, his brief future would be one of guilty rape and pillage until he fell victim to another youth or gang bent the same way. Molly would disintegrate and perish quickly. Erika…

  The station wagon flashed along the comparatively unimpeded highway. Having passed the next crossover, there were now other vehicles on the southbound strip, but even on the northbound one, crowding had eased.

  Furiously Mr Jimmon determined to preserve the civilization in Erika. (He would teach her everything he knew (including the insurance business?))… ah, if he were some kind of scientist, now – not the Dan Davisson kind, whose abstract speculations seemed always to prepare the way for some new method of destruction, but the… Franklin? Jefferson? Watt? protect her night and day from the refugees who would be roaming the hills south of Monterey. The rifle ammunition, properly used – and he would see that no one but himself used it – would last years. After it was gone – presuming fragments and pieces of a suicidal world hadn’t pulled itself miraculously together to offer a place to return to – there were the two hunting bows whose steel-tipped shafts could stop a man as easily as a deer or mountain lion. He remembered debating long, at the time he had first begun preparing for It, how many bows to order, measuring their weight and bulk against the other precious freight and deciding at last that two was the satisfactory minimum. It must have been in his subconscious mind all along that of the whole family Erika was the only other person who could be trusted with a bow.

  ‘There will be,’ he spoke in calm and solemn tones, not to Wendell, whose question was now left long behind, floating on the gas-greasy air of a sloping valley growing with live-oaks, but to a larger, impalpable audience, ‘There will be others who will think that because there is no longer law or law enforcement –’

  ‘You’re being simply fantastic!’ She spoke more sharply than he had ever heard her in front of the children. ‘Just because It happened to Los Angeles –’

  ‘And Pittsburgh.’

  ‘All right. And Pittsburgh, doesn’t mean that the whole United States has collapsed and everyone in the country is running frantically for safety.’

  ‘Yet,’ added Mr Jimmon firmly, ‘yet, do you suppose They are going to stop with Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, and leave Gary and Seattle standing? Or even New York and Chicago? Or do you imagine Washington will beg for armistice terms while there is the least sign of organized life left in the country?’

  ‘We’ll wipe Them out first,’ insisted Jir in patriotic shock. Wendell backed him up with a machine gun ‘Brrrrr.’

  ‘Undoubtedly. But it will be the last gasp. At any rate it will be years, if at all in my lifetime, before stable communities are re-established –’

  ‘David, you’re raving.’

  ‘Re-established,’ he repeated. ‘So there will be many others who’ll also feel that the dwindling of law and order is licence to kill people and steal cars “and things”. Naked force and cunning will be the only means of self-preservation. That was why I picked out a spot where I felt survival would be easiest; not only because of wood and water, game and fish, but because it’s nowhere near the main highways, and so unlikely to be chosen by any great number.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop harping on that insane idea. You’re just a little too old and flabby for pioneering. Even when you were younger you were hardly the rugged, outdoor type.’

  No, thought Mr Jimmon, I was the sucker type. I would have gotten somewhere if I’d stayed in the bank, but like a bawd you pleaded; the insurance business brought in the quick money for you to give up your job and have Jir and the proper home. If you’d got rid of it as I wanted. Flabby, Flabby! Do you think your scrawniness is so enticing?

  Controlling himself, he said aloud, ‘We’ve been through all this. Months ago. It’s not a question of physique, but of life.’

  ‘Nonsense. Perfect nonsense. Responsible people who really know its effects… Maybe it was advisable to leave Malibu for a few da
ys or even a few weeks. And perhaps it’s wise to stay away from the larger cities. But a small town or village, or even one of those ranches where they take boarders –’

  ‘Aw, Mom, you agreed. You know you did. What’s the matter with you anyway? Why are you acting like a drip?’

  ‘I want to go and shoot rabbits and bears like Dad said,’ insisted Wendell.

  Erika said nothing, but Mr Jimmon felt he had her sympathy; the boy’s agreement was specious. Wearily he debated going over the whole ground again, patiently pointing out that what Molly said might work in the Dakotas or the Great Smokies but was hardly operative anywhere within refugee range of the Pacific Coast. He had explained all this many times, including the almost certain impossibility of getting enough gasoline to take them into any of the reasonably safe areas; that was why they’d agreed on the region below Monterey, on California State Highway I, as the only logical goal.

  A solitary car decorously bound in the legal direction interrupted his thoughts. Either crazy or has mighty important business, he decided. The car honked disapprovingly as it passed, hugging the extreme right of the road.

  Passing through Buellton the clamour again rose for a pause at a filling station. He conceded inwardly that he could afford ten or fifteen minutes without strategic loss since by now they must be among the leaders of the exodus; ahead lay little more than the normal travel. However, he had reached such a state of irritated frustration and consciousness of injustice that he was willing to endure unnecessary discomfort himself in order to inflict a longer delay on them. In fact it lessened his own suffering to know the delay was needless, that he was doing it, and that his action was a just – if inadequate – punishment.

  ‘We’ll stop this side of Santa Maria,’ he said. ‘I’ll get gas there.’

  Mr Jimmon knew triumph: his forethought, his calculations, his generalship had justified themselves. Barring unlikely mechanical failure – the station wagon was in perfect shape – or accident – and the greatest danger had certainly passed – escape was now practically assured. For the first time he permitted himself to realize how unreal, how romantic the whole project had been. As any attempt to evade the fate charted for the multitude must be. The docile mass perished; the headstrong (but intelligent) individual survived.

  Along with triumph went an expansion of his prophetic vision of life after reaching their destination. He had purposely not taxed the cargo capacity of the wagon with transitional goods; there was no tent, canned luxuries, sleeping-bags, lanterns, candles, or any of the paraphernalia of camping midway between the urban and nomadic life. Instead, besides the weapons, tackle, and utensils, there was in miniature the List For Life On A Desert Island: shells and cartridges, lures, hooks, nets, gut, leaders, flint and steel, seeds, traps, needles and thread, government pamphlets on curing and tanning hides and the recognition of edible weeds and fungi, files, nails, a judicious stock of simple medicines. A pair of binoculars to spot intruders. No coffee, sugar, flour; they would begin living immediately as they would have to in a month or so in any case, on the old, half-forgotten human cunning.

  ‘Cunning,’ he said aloud.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing.’

  ‘I still think you should have made an effort to reach Pearl and Dan.’

  ‘The telephone was dead, Mother.’

  ‘At the moment, Erika. You can hardly have forgotten how often the lines have been down before. And it never takes more than half an hour till they’re working again.’

  ‘Mother, Dan Davisson is quite capable of looking after himself.’

  Mr Jimmon shut out the rest of the conversation so completely he didn’t know whether there was any more to it or not. He shut out the intense preoccupation with driving, with making speed, with calculating possible gains. In the core of his mind, quite detached from everything about him, he examined and marvelled.

  Erika. The cool, inflexible, adult tone. Almost indulgent, but so dispassionate as not to be. One might have expected her to be exasperated by Molly’s silliness, to have answered impatiently, or not at all.

  Mother. Never in his recollection had the children ever called her anything but Mom. The ‘Mother’ implied – oh, it implied a multitude of things. An entirely new relationship, for one. A relationship of aloofness, or propriety without emotion. The ancient stump of the umbilical cord, black and shrivelled, had dropped off painlessly.

  She had not bothered to argue about the telephone or point out the gulf between ‘before’ and now. She had not even tried to touch Molly’s deepening refusal of reality. She had been… indulgent.

  Not ‘Uncle Dan’, twitteringly imposed false avuncularity, but striking through it (and the facade of ‘Pearl and’) and aside (when I was a child I… something… but now I have put aside childish things); the wealth of implicit assertion. Ah yes, Mother, we all know the pardonable weakness and vanity; we excuse you for your constant reminders, but Mother, with all deference, we refuse to be forced any longer to be parties to middle-age’s nostalgic flirtatiousness. One could almost feel sorry for Molly.

  … middle-age’s nostalgic flirtatiousness…

  … nostalgic…

  Metaphorically Mr Jimmon sat abruptly upright. The fact that he was already physically in this position made the transition, while invisible, no less emphatic. The nostalgic flirtatiousness of middle-age implied – might imply – memory of something more than mere coquetry. Molly and Dan.

  It all fitted together so perfectly it was impossible to believe it untrue. The impecunious young lovers, equally devoted to Dan’s genius, realizing marriage was out of the question (he had never denied Molly’s shrewdness; as for Dan’s impracticality, well, impracticality wasn’t necessarily uniform or consistent. Dan had been practical enough to marry Pearl and Pearl’s money) could have renounced…

  Or not renounced at all?

  Mr Jimmon smiled; the thought did not ruffle him. Cuckoo, cuckoo. How vulgar, how absurd. Suppose Jir were Dan’s? A blessed thought.

  Regretfully he conceded the insuperable obstacle of Molly’s conventionality. Jir was the product of his own loins. But wasn’t there an old superstition about the image in the woman’s mind at the instant of conception? So, justly and rightly Jir was not his. Nor Wendy, for that matter. Only Erika, by some accident. Mr Jimmon felt free and light-hearted.

  ‘Get gas at the next station,’ he bulletined.

  ‘The next one with a clean rest room,’ Molly corrected.

  Invincible. The Earth-Mother, using men for her purposes: reproduction, clean rest rooms, nourishment, objects of culpability, Homes and Gardens. The bank was my life; I could have gone far but: Why, David – they pay you less than the janitor! It’s ridiculous. And: I can’t understand why you hesitate; it isn’t as though it were a different type of work.

  No, not different; just more profitable. Why didn’t she tell Dan Davisson to become an accountant; that was the same type of work, just more profitable? Perhaps she had and Dan had simply been less befuddled. Or amenable. Or stronger in purpose? Mr Jimmon probed his pride thoroughly and relentlessly without finding the faintest twinge of retrospective jealousy. Nothing like that mattered now. Nor, he admitted, had it for years.

  Two close-peaked hills gulped the sun. He toyed with the idea of crossing to the northbound side now that it was uncongested and there were occasional southbound cars. Before he could decide the divided highway ended.

  ‘I hope you’re not planning to spend the night in some horrible motel,’ said Molly. ‘I want a decent bath and a good dinner.’

  Spend the night. Bath. Dinner. Again calm sentences formed in his mind, but they were blown apart by the unbelievable, the monumental obtuseness. How could you say, It is absolutely essential to drive till we get there? When there were no absolutes, no essentials in her concepts? My dear Molly, I.

  ‘No,’ he said, switching on the lights.

  Wendy, he knew, would be the next to kick up a fuss. Till he fell mercif
ully asleep. If he did. Jir was probably debating the relative excitements of driving all night and stopping in a strange town. His voice would soon be heard.

  The lights of the combination wayside store and filling-station burned inefficiently, illuminating the deteriorating false-front brightly and leaving the gas pumps in shadow. Swallowing regret at finally surrendering to mechanical and human need, and so losing the hard won position; relaxing, even for a short while, the fierce initiative that had brought them through in the face of all probability; he pulled the station wagon alongside the pumps and shut off the motor. About half-way – the worst half, much the worst half – to their goal. Not bad.

  Molly opened the door on her side with stiff dignity. ‘I certainly wouldn’t call this a clean station.’ She waited for a moment, hand still on the window, as though expecting an answer.

  ‘Crummy joint,’ exclaimed Wendell, clambering awkwardly out.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Jir. ‘No time for niceties.’ He brushed past his mother who was walking slowly into the shadows.

  ‘Erika,’ began Mr Jimmon, in a half-whisper.

  ‘Yes, Dad?’

  ‘Oh… never mind. Later.’

  He was not himself quite sure what he had wanted to say; what exclusive, urgent message he had to convey. For no particular reason he switched on the interior light and glanced at the packed orderliness of the wagon. Then he slid out from behind the wheel.

  No sign of the attendant, but the place was certainly not closed. Not with the lights on and the hoses ready. He stretched, and walked slowly, savouring the comfortably painful uncramping of his muscles, towards the crude outhouse labelled MEN. Molly, he thought, must be furious.

  When he returned, a man was leaning against the station wagon. ‘Fill it up with ethyl,’ said Mr Jimmon pleasantly, ‘and check the oil and water.’

  The man made no move. ‘That’ll be five bucks a gallon.’ Mr Jimmon thought there was an uncertain tremor in his voice.

  ‘Nonsense; I’ve plenty of ration coupons.’