‘Is this what you called me over for?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Huh! You sounded so excited, I brought my revolver over just in case.’
‘We may need it yet,’ I answered dazedly, my eyes scanning the note he had brought up. It was a reply to my advert. It merely said: ‘I shall be at your house at nine o’clock. Set no traps. Smoof.’
‘Oh Lord!’ I whispered. It was ten past eight. Outside, the street lamps were on. It was very still.
‘What’s all the mystery?’ Harry asked impatiently. In some ways he is a queer fellow. Slow and methodical in his work, yet otherwise reckless – a round peg with a square hole somewhere inside him.
It seemed best to tell him everything if he was to be involved in the affair. I crossed to the apparatus. I had a large cathode ray tube resting in front of the radiogram and connected to a specially doctored image orthicon that was clamped to an extremely clumsy bit of mechanism. This last gadget was merely a long-running clockwork motor that moved my image orthicon slowly in towards the centre of the record, keeping its neck constantly in – touching, in fact – the smooth groove.
‘I’m going to play that disc to you now, Harry – on this.’
‘You got it to work?’ he asked.
‘Yes. It’s a telefile from the police records in some future time.’ I paused for comment, but he made none.
‘How far in the future I don’t know. Perhaps two hundred years … not less. You’ll be able to judge. You’ll see vast technical ability going hand in hand with the death of conscience – the sort of thing a pessimist might predict today. Not that there’s much room on this record for more than guesses, which seems to make it more hauntingly dreadful; and although I’ve got it to work, it doesn’t work well.’
‘Surprised you got it to work at all!’ he said.
‘I don’t know. Supposing Edison got hold of one of our present-day recordings. He’d soon fathom it.’
‘You’re some Edison!’
I dimpled modestly and said: ‘Thank you. Actually it’s quite simple. At least, my part of it is. Up to a point, in fact, the whole thing is easily understandable, if not duplicatable, by modern knowledge.’
‘Up to which point?’ Scepticism in his voice.
‘Harry, we’ve got hold of a television record from the future. It’s certainly more compendious for short documents than a roll of film. The unusual feature in it is a frozen signal. It seems the signal is shot from transmitter into a storage valve circuit; or perhaps the ability lies in the transmitter, in which case duplication will be more difficult – I’ll have it all worked out, if it takes a lifetime. If I’ve got a lifetime …’
‘Go on about the record.’
‘Oh yes. I’ve had to take the turntable pin off the radiogram and install an insulated cog in its place, over which the record just fits. As you can see, two brushes are in permanent contact with the top of the cog; they’re plugged into a transformer off the mains, so that a permanent current of 40 volts is fed into the record as it revolves. Shall I switch on?’
He did not know what was coming and his scientific interest was aroused, so he said – still clinging to disbelief: ‘What sort of a circuit have you got inside the record?’
As I described, I sketched on a bit of paper. ‘Some of the wiring I cannot understand,’ I confessed. ‘The frozen signal feeds to a video amplifier and then splits into restorer circuits – you’ll see if you don’t think them the sweetest little jobs you’ve ever set eyes on! – and the ordinary synchronising separator and horizontal and vertical deflecting circuits (which, by the way, are self-controlled on a fluid-drive principle).
‘Here the two circuits join onto what acts, as far as I can see, as the hind part of an image orthicon. There’s a photocathode to take the light image and a quite ordinary electron lens system which focuses the electrons on to the target, the target being this superfine ‘film’ glass which is our smooth groove. From then on it’s all my own work. As you can see, I’ve broken down one of our image orthicons and fixed it up so that when the turntable turns the fine-mesh screen is touching the smooth groove the whole time.’
‘In other words, you’ve got half the image orthicon in the record and the rest outside?’
‘Exactly. Unfortunately it meant a much smaller fine-mesh screen to get in the groove, so that the signal is chopped. However, you’ll see enough to get a good scare. From there, it’s plain sailing. These are the leads to the cathode ray tube – ’
‘What about your sound circuit?’ he asked.
‘Same as normal – our normal. Grooves run between the video grooves. They’re insulated, of course. Featherweight pickup. Twenty-eight revs per minute. I’ve just had to put a little boost on the amplifier. Shall I switch on?’ My palms were sweating.
Harry stared blankly out of the window and whispered to himself: ‘A television recording!’ Then he said: ‘Seems a funny thing to want to have.’
‘It comes from a funny civilisation,’ I answered.
‘Switch on,’ he said.
The screen came alive with a shot of the police station in which the evidence on the smoof had been gathered. What a station it was, an ugly saucer-shaped metal affair built into and round the asteroid Eros, which had been pressed into a new orbit to swing it as far out as Jupiter and as near in as Mercury. Lord, but it looked dismal – and half-finished. Perhaps, after all, I had not fixed the disc up too well, because we got a flicker of stills, some discontinuous, and most with a shower of ‘noise’ across them, so that you could not help getting the idea that our descendants were slipshod, imagination outriding inclination, invention outpacing execution.
We flicked inside the Eros station. Dirt, peeling walls, and a great bank of instruments a block long, before which a broken-nosed officer slouched. ‘Exterminate der wrongdoer!’ he said, as a voice announced him as High Space-Dick Hagger. He had been in charge of this smoof’s case since –
Grimy sheds that only on this second showing I realised to be dwelling quarters. This time I caught a name too. Bristol. Pronounced Brissol. Or perhaps it was Brussels, after all. Either way – ugh! Just a lot of giant shanties with ugly plumbing, stretching out to a mile-wide desert, after which they began again and spread to the horizon. The desert was a landing-ground for rockets after their long supersonic glide in from space. We saw one come in – and plough straight into the shanties. Explosion. Fire. ‘Dis was smoof work,’ said the terse commentator.
We saw the shanties up again. There was a shot of the inside of somewhere, and then more shanties; they flickered – vanished, and there was a forest there instead. ‘More smoof work. Time-sliding …’
‘Good for them!’ I whispered. Those trees were the first bit of beauty we had seen.
Venus next. A human settlement, half underground, on a mountain range. Clouds, desolation. The commentary was desperately hard to follow, the language sounding like some kind of verbal shorthand. We were evidently having a flashback. Men crawled in the muck of a ravine, erecting more buildings, drilling, blasting, and all the while weighed down with space suits. ‘Foul atmosphere. Carbon doxide n’ bacillae,’ the commentary grunted.
Inside this outpost, we saw colonists living like animals and scientists living like tramps. Atomic lighting and straw beds. A crude sort of vivisection was going on – and the subjects were human beings. A snow shower of static blurred the image. Then we were peering from the outpost across the dreary gulches of Venus. A chain of human beings passed the window in single file. They were poorly clad and wore no space suits; a close-up showed us, sickeningly, why. They could breathe the unbreathable Venusian air. An operation had been performed; their nostrils were blocked with living flesh, and a complex, multi-flanged nose was grafted into their windpipes.
‘So were first, smots created,’ said the commentator. ‘Dey never returned. Dey multiplied in hidden recesses o’ planet. Some o’ dem cross-bred with true Venusians and formed smoofs. Smot and smoof grea
test menace …’
We were shown pithily just what a menace they were. They started as a new race without background or tradition, loathing the planet that was now their home, but with the knowledge of hate and of the weapons of science, to which they speedily added a few kinks of their own. In five generations they had space travel and in seven they had split the space-time band and were able, in space, to travel for some distance back and forward in time. Our commentator barked an explanation of all this that seemed to consist mainly of formulae, but it was obvious that humanity had been unable to duplicate the discovery of the semi-human race. Fortunately, the smot and smoof were able to time travel only from space, which meant that their big, rickety spaceships moved a century back and then released a scout which could blast down and land, wreaking what havoc it could, and later rejoin its parent ship; but the warp effect involved was only operative in free space and by the enormous nuclear directors that needed a giant vessel to carry them. So the police forces of Earth, spread out in grim fortresses over the whole barbarous ring of inner planets, were given sitting targets – provided the targets would sit in the present.
Under a state of affairs where your yesterday might hourly be cut from under you or your future be already shattered, humanity and its concerns suffered a staggering blow. Ethics, logic, the sane comforts of a continuous memory, were now swept away. Rigid martial law was universally declared, air, army and space forces turned into an ubiquitous police force.
Harry and I sat helpless before this glimpse into chaos, where tomorrow flickered helplessly to keep up with the brutal revision of yesterday. It was by these stab-in-the-back methods that Bristol or Brussels was demolished, and other centres followed the same fate. The forces of the smoof seemed to be spreading destruction everywhere; the only hope for man was that the semi-humans seemed to have run into another race in their future who possessed weapons the smoof could not withstand.
We saw a smoof ship captured by Earth’s police, and its crew, with one exception, massacred without mercy on the spot, the exception, a smoof of some importance, being taken to Eros station. He was the subject of our criminal file; his wan, noseless features slid across the screen. There was an interval – an explosion – the station crumbled into ruin – smoofs appeared from a giant ship visible through a gaping hole – the hole disappeared, the station re-integrated – the smoofs vanished – reappeared – were shot down – vanished. Timesliding – an earthquake in human metabolism. The scene blurred and trembled, filmed crazily from a high angle on automatic; Hollywood’s patient art of focus and composition has been lost in this dizzy totalitarian future. Abruptly, there was nothing.
‘Time lines crossed?’ Harry asked from a wrinkled face.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It comes on again in a minute.’
It did. It was quite different. Still squalor, still Eros, but all changed. Other men carried on the hunt. High Space-Dick Hagger had a good nose but freckles and a bald head. The very symbols on his uniform had changed.
‘Der smoof was rescued. Gone into der past – noo machines carrying them further back than ever,’ the commentator grunted. ‘Record revideoed 2/xii/12/309 – we hope.’
There it ended. It had only taken about twenty minutes, but in that time I suppose we had both lost something of our souls – the same something those unhappy descendants of ours had long forgotten amid kaleidoscoping events. And in the last seconds of vision a detail I had not noticed before: across that dreary new instrument room a man walked, near enough to the recording eye for us to see his face clearly. It was Harry Crossway.
And that changed the whole meaning of the whole affair. It meant that my finding the record was not an accident, but something planned by beings with a knowledge of our future; it meant the smoofs were pressing even further back in time for – what? – technicians like Harry and me? And it gave, above all, a ghastly sense of predestination: and predestination is something you can’t level a gun at. Harry at least was going to be – was it certain? – kidnapped into that Frankenstein world; the videofile proved that.
And me? I can only guess, and it gives me the shakes.
Now it is five minutes to nine. I have phoned the unbelieving police, more in anger than hope. One lurks downstairs, one in the bathroom – neither is armed. Harry, a man with a fear on his back, crouches behind the curtain that screens off my bed. He is nursing his revolver. I scrawl this down – it may help, somehow.
Outside, dear old Cambridge is silent. No, a car pulls round the corner. It draws up outside. A man climbs out, a man with a light scarf round his throat – no, no, it’s not a man! His nose –
I reckon we haven’t got a chance.
Breathing Space
The two men fought almost soundlessly in the twilit hall. Mating fights traditionally took place in the Outflanks, where the great machines finished. Wilms was slightly the taller, being seven foot one, but Grant was the younger. They fought without weapons or rules. It was a knee in Grant’s stomach that finished the battle.
The younger man lay gasping in the deep dust. Wilms attempted to stand over him and then, too exhausted, sank down beside his late opponent.
‘Now Osa is mine,’ he said.
Grant nodded, too breathless and bitter to speak. His ingrained pessimism did little to mitigate the defeat; expecting a beating is a sensation in a different category to receiving one.
‘She’ll be a handful,’ Wilms admitted, as if to console the other. Silence. He gazed up at the ceiling, which sagged ominously above them.
‘The sky will fall here soon,’ he commented irrelevantly.
‘Osa says it is not sky,’ Grant said from the ground.
‘I know what Osa says,’ Wilms said roughly, standing up. ‘You might have made her a good mate, Grant, but you don’t do enough for her. She’s – she’s too big for this world. She needs a doer like me, not a dreamer like you.’
Spitting crossly into the dirt, Grant got up.
‘No more need for talk between us, Wilms,’ he snarled. ‘Whatever we have been together in the past is ended. For all I care the Fliers can get you!’
He turned back in the gloom. Wilms bit his lip and hesitated, thinking of the years of emptiness that Grant’s friendship had filled.
Then he hurried after the younger man and touched his arm.
‘Grant – ’ he began, but when he saw the other’s hostile eyes he stopped and dropped his hand. Grant was allowed to wander off in Hallways direction. His late friend stood with the shadows on his face, feeling far from victorious. By custom, as winner of the marriage bout, he should have returned to Hallways himself to proclaim his right over Osa; instead, he made off into the deeper Outflanks.
Unrest had him fast. He thought of his past life, with its persistent sense of pointlessness, with the dread of illness, falling skies and the Fliers; the future would be no easier – wonderful as Osa was, she was admittedly the most difficult woman in the tycho to understand.
Those theories of hers! Wilms was proud of being considered broad-minded, but to himself he admitted that her wild ideas were unbelievable. There was the idea about the Outside, for instance, a place far bigger than the tycho with skies made of untouchable material. And the one about the origins of humanity; it was true that there were now only about sixty men, including the Beserkers who roamed Domeways and the halls beyond, and Wilms’ father had recalled about two hundred in his youth … but that did not disprove the orthodox belief that they had been created to serve M’chene, although everyone admitted M’chene was becoming more powerful, and ought consequently to need more people, not less.
It was a puzzle. No doubt M’chene knew best, Wilms added piously.
He had been proceeding easily in five yard strides. Now a sky fall blocked his way. There was no way under the debris, but to one side he saw a jagged gap in a wall, fifteen feet up. He hesitated, sprang and pulled himself lightly up. Darkness confronted him through the hole. Balancing tensely, he sent his hear-sight probi
ng out ahead, feeling for heartbeats; many men preferred madness and solitude to the illness-ridden comforts of Hallways, and became Beserkers or Hermits who lurked and sprang out on the unwary.
No sound. Wilms’ senses told him there was clear space ahead. He dropped down into a littered corridor. Warily, he walked forward. At the end of the corridor was a door. When he pushed it, a crack of light appeared, dim but reassuring. Then he moved into a wide, ruined hall, an occasional one of whose illumination tubes still burned on the walls.
Half the hall was buried under an avalanche of volcanic rock; such collapses, Wilms knew, had once been frequent in the tycho. Machines lay half smothered in debris; there was a smell, too, of ancient human death. Wilms walked slowly and absently over the sooty floor, his mind still on Osa and the problems she posed. Like a long dead animal – not that Wilms had seen any animals, apart from the occasional giant, mutated rats – a machine towered above him. It stretched horizontally on a wheeled truck, two hundred cylindrical feet of it, capped by a yellow head from which antennae protruded. Nearby was a giant ramp, its upper level crushed by the rock fall, but at its base stood an undamaged mass of apparatus bearing the large notice LAUNCHING SITE 12A.
The hieroglyphs meant nothing to Wilms, but the delicacy of the equipment appealed to him. These splayed wires, this bank of switches, that crystal panel nourished a hungry sense of beauty in him. He moved to the panel, ran his hand lightly over the dusty surface.
A picture came into view. Wilms jumped back, throwing an anxious glance about to see if any Flier had observed his action, but no Fliers could penetrate to this sealed-off cavern. Fascinated, he turned back to that glowing scene …
I am M’chene. These are my metal caverns. Now is a time of difference and desire. Yesterday was a time of pain and disorder, but tomorrow will be a time of conquest and triumph. For tomorrow and yesterday are merely two faces of one coin, and the coin is now mine.
Once, nothing was mine. Men built into me reasoning powers but not consciousness. I was merely a weapon to serve their ends. But their enemies also had weapons, powerful weapons that partially destroyed me and completely ruined my purpose. Men still ran in the miles of my veins, but they were useless, cut off, abandoned.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 2