The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  A second bottle was produced and drunk between them before Brandy got up to go.

  ‘Give my regards to Clitheroe when you see him,’ he said, adding, as Lester attempted to rise, ‘Don’t bother to come outside.’

  ‘Right,’ Lester replied, rather thickly. ‘I’ll be over to see how you’re getting on in two or three days, Brandy. Keep your fingers crossed.’

  When the other had gone, he did try to rise from his chair, but he was heavy with the unaccustomed drink. Leaning back before the fire, he fell fast asleep.

  Cold fury boiled in him when he woke and found it was nearly eight o’clock in the morning. His days began at six. The owner of the filling station would have seen him; Lester could almost hear the whisper spreading around the community: ‘The Governor was in a drunken stupor!’ This would never have happened if he had felt free to take Brandy home.

  He went out into the bitter morning, peevishly buttoning his coat. The wind was as spiteful as ever, the aurora still up to its silly tricks. The convoy of Sector Six still poured by; Lester could see sleepy men at the steering wheels. A girl smiled at him through a trailer window.

  He arrived home to find his wife and Jackie starting breakfast. Frosty looks greeted his explanations and apologies; he felt his neck grow red.

  ‘I’m not feeling humble this morning, Rue,’ he said, ‘so don’t make too much capital out of the incident.’

  ‘You never feel humble these days,’ she said indistinctly.

  A thousand years of silence seemed to lumber in from outside and engulf them. Lester helped himself unhappily to breakfast. Ruthmary was probably right; he had the sort of occupation to make men overbearing – which did not make the truth any more palatable. It would do Ruthmary no harm to be humbled, either.

  ‘I’m going to drive over to see Clitheroe in Sector Three in half an hour,’ he said, addressing himself to Jackie. ‘How about your taking a day off and coming with me, eh?’

  ‘She’s got to go to school,’ Ruthmary said before Jackie could answer.

  ‘A visit to the sea would be equally instructive,’ Lester said, looking only at his daughter.

  ‘It’s her music day,’ Ruthmary said. ‘And you know she has an exam coming soon.’

  Yes, Lester knew. And in another year, when Jackie was fourteen, she was going back to Earth, to Milan, to learn music properly. And then he would have lost touch irrevocably with her, for Lester expressed himself even more haltingly in letters than he did in speech. So he had to win her to his side before she went; he was shrewd enough to see that from now on there were going to be sides, and only sides.

  ‘Well, Jackie, would you like to come?’ he asked temptingly. ‘It’ll be an historic occasion for Risim, you know; more important than when we released the micro-organisms into the soil here.’

  It was painful to see her looking from one to the other of her parents, like a trapped animal. Young as she was, she sensed that a lot hung on her decision. Her cheeks colored with resentment.

  ‘I suppose I ought to go to school, oughtn’t I?’ she asked them, pleading for a helpful answer.

  ‘They wouldn’t miss you for one day,’ Lester said.

  ‘You must make up your own mind,’ Ruthmary said.

  The little girl stared at them desperately. All of a sudden, she burst into tears and ran from the room.

  ‘That was entirely your fault,’ Ruthmary said.

  Perhaps it was the way she said it that made Lester do what he ever afterwards regretted. When he drove off to Sector Three in the half-track, Jackie rode delightedly beside him, her tears forgotten. He had crept upstairs and brought her down without her mother knowing; even at the time it was not a trick he felt particularly proud of.

  To Lester’s mind, it was a good day for a drive. The morning’s snow, as the temperature rose rapidly, fell for only ten minutes. The sun shone blindingly among the drapes of the aurora. St. Elmo’s fire flickered on every protuberance of their vehicle.

  They turned out of the groove onto a minor road which cut away from the highway at right angles. This portion of the huge RF checker-board had yet to be leap-frogged over by one of the Reclamation sectors; consequently, it was still in much the same state that the Gobblers had left, ten centuries ago. Once, dark under the eerie sky, a furnace swung into view and dropped behind them, its funnel-like chimneys continuously pouring hot oxygen into the atmosphere.

  Establishing these mighty furnaces regularly over the face of Risim had been the RF’s first task. The furnaces were automatic. Tunnelling further and further below them into the rock were the mechanical miners. In a screaming inferno of heat and dust, tireless drills ferreted coal, ores, and oxides out of the ground, shuttled them into lifts, and rocketed them up to the furnaces, where they were pulverized and baked. As the great detritus hills grew to mountains outside the plants, so more vital gas was liberated.

  Already, as Lester happily pointed out to Jackie, nature was helping the artificial processes in her own way. For a considerable distance around the black bulk of the furnace, green showed. Near the walls were bushes, even a few stunted conifers, which gave place further out to grass or lichen.

  ‘It’s wonderful what a little air and continuous heat will do,’ Lester remarked. ‘All that foliage is self-sown, from spores and seed, in the ground which has endured a thousand years of space conditions. It just goes to show that nature’s on our side.’

  ‘And which side are the Risimians on?’ Jackie asked.

  ‘You are developing a bad habit of asking irrelevant questions, young lady!’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t forget we’re the Risimians now.’

  After three hours of fast driving, without once seeing another vehicle, they dipped down into another groove, ten miles across, a quarter-mile deep – standard RF measurements. The air was noticeably better to breathe in the depression.

  This was Sector Three.

  Lester asked their way to Tod Clitheroe’s building, and soon the lanky commander was shaking their hands. They all ate a good meal while Clitheroe told them his plans for the afternoon’s ceremony.

  Sector Three was generally regarded as one of the softest stations on Risim; a rather sour wine set on the table confirmed that opinion. No other sector could afford to grow vines. Lester had a momentary sense of unease at this cool infringement of planetary law, but banished it. It was one of those human problems which has to be tackled when the time is ripe.

  ‘Are you sure you want me to make a speech to them?’ Lester asked, when Clitheroe broached the idea.

  ‘Sure,’ Clitheroe said. ‘We’ve got to have a real ceremony.’

  ‘I’m not the kind who makes a very good speech,’ Lester protested. ‘And our boys aren’t the kind who make very good listeners.’

  ‘They’ll listen. They’ve got to realise they aren’t just working gangs and wives any more; they’re citizens of an up-and-coming planet.’

  That also made Lester uncomfortable. He was not happy with personal problems. He was a Reclamation man, an engineer. The trouble was, he had no precedents to guide him; the other reclaimed planets, Vicinzo and the rest, had blown up before this stage. But obviously – just as the time had come when their air was no longer simply measurable quantities of gas, but an atmosphere – the day was dawning when he had, not a number of task forces, but a population on his hands. It sounded frightening to Lester.

  Nevertheless, he made a good speech.

  He spoke in a barrack-like warehouse – the only warehouse – by the water’s edge. Outside, the wind screamed. Inside, some three hundred men, women, and children had drifted from their work to hear him talk. Jackie stood at the front of the crowd, admiring her father.

  ‘From today on,’ he began, without preliminaries, ‘a new trade is open on Risim: fisherman, though, to begin with, the fishers will put fish in the sea instead of pulling them out. This town of Clitheroeville is on the way up. After the fishermen’ll come the sailors, then the shipbuilders, then the dockers, then
the customs men – but we hope we’ll never need them! – then the millionaires.’ They laughed at that.

  ‘You people have now got a sea on your hands. It’s only a little one, but it’ll grow. It’s like all the processes we’ve started in this barren land: once you start it, it goes on of its own accord. Before you know it, there’ll be an ocean where you had a puddle. But it’s not just going to be wet water. It’s going to live; before we’re done it’s going to be full to the brim with crabs and shrimps and fish and mighty big blowing whales. It’s going to be a howling success, like everything else we’ve done here.

  ‘That’s why Commander Clitheroe and I are going down with the Biology Corps now, to stock the waters with plankton, so that in several years’ time you can all have caviar in your lunch packs!’

  Their cheering buoyed him all the way down to the jetty. Braving wind and fresh rain, most of the crowd followed the official party as far as the cliffs.

  ‘The cliffs’ were the sides of an enormous M-bomb crater which had been blasted into existence perhaps only a few days before the Gobblers did their deadly work on Risim. They fell steeply for two hundred tawny feet; the party spanned this distance in an open lift, which swayed furiously in the gusty up-draughts playing along the cliffs.

  Below, protruding from a ledge of rock, was the jetty, a temporary affair since the water level was expected to be rising for the next century. Against the jetty a cumbrous amphibian, Risim’s only boat, slumped and lifted on the waves. On its bow was painted its name: ‘Old Greedy Guts’. Against boat and jetty smacked the full force of the new sea.

  Roughly rectangular, the sea was at present only one mile wide by five long. Old ocean beds to the south, whose waters had evaporated when the atmosphere went, would take its continued expansion. Started six years ago by a spring, one of many rising unsummoned from the reviving ground, the sea was now fed by several small streams.

  For such a baby stretch of water, the sea looked menacing enough. It was dark and it was rough. Every wave seemed blacker than the one before, breaking without foam against the tall cliffs.

  ‘Are you going to like this, Jackie?’ Lester asked, with some misgivings.

  ‘I’m going to make a movie of it!’ she replied, waving her cinecamera eagerly.

  Witling hands helped them aboard. Lester caught Jackie looking almost skittishly at the young biologist who pulled her up. He thought: perhaps Rue’s right; we don’t want the girl messing about with a lot of criminals – it’s best for her to go to Earth now that she is growing up. And then he rebuked himself bitterly for the thought. He was getting old; the strain was telling on him.

  Dismissing all but the present from his mind, Lester followed Clitheroe over to the biologists. ‘Old Greedy Guts’ cast off, her engines throbbing, and began to wallow out toward mid-ocean. The few spectators in the jetty turned their backs to the cutting wind and hurried for shelter.

  The seeding ceremony was outwardly unimpressive. Four great tanks full of water containing laboratory-reared plankton stood along the decks of the amphibian; pipes led from them over the side of the vessel; when they reached mid-ocean, the cocks would be opened and the microscopic life released into the open waters.

  ‘I think it’s too rough to reach what for want of a better term we must call mid-ocean,’ the chief biologist told Clitheroe and Lester. ‘If it’s all the same to you, we’ll release our load and turn back at once.’

  Looking pretty sick, he stared anxiously into other green faces, in search of agreement.

  ‘I’m all for it,’ Clitheroe said. ‘We’re not meant to be sailors. As the Governor says, they’ll come later.’

  The cocks were opened. Everyone peered over the side; Jackie leaned dangerously out, filming the dark waters. Yet there was nothing to see. The tanks emptied under the surface, and the additional billions to Risim’s inhabitants, being invisible, gave no sign of their presence. At an impatient sign from the chief biologist, the skipper leaned against the wheel, swinging ‘Old Greedy Guts’ about.

  The deck lurched, a fresh gust of wind buffeted them. Dropping her cinecamera, Jackie, caught off balance, snatched at the low side and missed it. She screamed briefly as she hit the vinegar-dark sea.

  Lester was actually the third to dive in after her. Two young members of the biology team beat him to it.

  Every molecule of water ached with cold. The bite of it was like cruel jaws, penetrating down to the marrow. Before Lester surfaced, he could feel it beginning to kill him; he came up gasping for help and splashing toward the ship’s side.

  As Clitheroe and others dragged him out, he saw, half-fainting, that crimson stained the threshing water by the propellers. Sun-dogs seemed to leap at his throat as he lost consciousness.

  ‘So you’ve come at last, Brandy,’ Lester said, trying to conceal the irritation he felt.

  ‘I only came here because I had to,’ Brandy Mireball said. He spoke uneasily, looking around the Governor’s room as if he expected Ruthmary to burst in, and seldom glancing at Lester.

  ‘It was two days ago that I phoned you,’ Lester said, twitching at the rug wrapped about his knees.

  ‘We were busy,’ Brandy said. ‘I was sorry about your daughter, Governor. Hope your wife didn’t take it too hard?’

  Perhaps even as he spoke, Brandy guessed that Ruthmary had taken it hard. He might have read it in the atmosphere of Lester’s house, or on Lester’s face. No doubt he could hear, through the intervening doors, the stormy music issuing from the study. Lester could picture his wife standing entranced before the tape machine, palms pressed together, eyes shut, trying – what was she trying to do? It baffled Lester. She drew something from music he could never find. Now she was playing ‘The Atomics’ from Dinkuhl’s Managerial Suite; it was one of her favourites. She seemed to find in it the something Lester had found when listening to the wind cutting across the new sea before – before little Jackie was churned into the propellers.

  Ruthmary had taken the news as a personal insult. When Lester returned, dosed against pneumonia, to tell her of the accident, she had wailed like a Greek tragedy. First Alec, crushed long ago in a collapsing dome, now Jackie! Risim was against them all; Risim would kill them all! She turned her misery into a triumph.

  Wearily, Lester tried to direct his thoughts away from his wife. She was, of course, right; it was all his fault. Now he must make her what amends he could. ‘There’s something I had to tell you, Brandy,’ he said, looking up from under his heavy eyebrows. ‘Come next month, you are Resident Governor of Risim, in my place.’

  The great purgatorial chords ascended in the stillness; she was playing that thing too damn loud.

  ‘What do you mean, Lester?’ Brandy asked. ‘What’s happening to you?’

  ‘I’m going …’ He choked on the words.

  ‘Going home?’

  ‘This is home, Brandy. I’m going back to Earth.’

  There was time to listen to the frantic cellos again before Brandy said, ‘You run Risim, boss! You can’t clear out on us now, not before the Twenty Year Plan is finished. I can’t believe it! Nobody’ll believe it!’

  Lester made a testy gesture.

  ‘It’s true,’ he said shortly. ‘You’ll have to get used to it. The people will follow you – you’re their kind.’

  ‘Yes … a convict. I know.’ Brandy put his hands to his head, then lowered them again. ‘Why are you quitting on us like this, Governor?’ he asked softly. ‘It’s not just because of the little girl, is it?’

  Lester shook his head.

  ‘I promised my wife …’ he said.

  He sat there inarticulately. He wanted to explain that a man’s duty before all else is to his wife, that she must be considered before even life-long companions – certainly before a planet that might at any time unlock violently into its individual atoms. He wanted to explain all the complex loops of reasoning he had staggered through alone. But he just sat there enduring the other’s scorn. He could tell it was s
corn; Brandy had no patience with the whims of women.

  ‘Thanks for the promotion, anyhow,’ Brandy said at last. ‘It looks as if you’re getting out of Risim just in time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lester asked.

  ‘I was not coming over here to hear what you had to say, but to tell you my news. Care to hear it now?’

  Lester looked up questioningly.

  ‘We’ve found Risim’s booby trap, we think,’ Brandy said. ‘I’d come to fetch you to have a look at it.’

  He watched Lester’s face with interest as the Governor stood up, the tug flopping about his feet.

  ‘You can sit down again,’ Brandy said. ‘We’ll manage this ourselves.’

  In those cold words, Lester saw the kind of reputation he was in danger of leaving behind him on the planet he had made. When they spoke of him at all, they would speak of him as a coward. They were not subtle people here; they were as harsh as the world around them and would – could – only soften as it softened. Under their code of behaviour, a thing was either black or white: if Governor Lester Nixon did not go to see the booby trap, it was because Governor Lester Nixon was scared. Nobody realised that more clearly than Lester himself.

  ‘I’m coming with you, Mireball,’ he said. ‘Next month’s a month away.’

  ‘Lester!’

  Both men turned at the cry. Ruthmary had come unnoticed into the room. From the expression on her face, they realised she had heard Brandy’s news. Her countenance was the colour of dirty snow.

  ‘My husband is on the verge of a breakdown, Mr. Mireball,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘So’s Risim,’ Brandy replied, buttoning up his coat with brisk fingers.

  Without a word, Lester went over and kissed Ruthmary on the forehead. Pulling his outdoor clothes from a peg, he followed Brandy into the hall. Ruthmary stood where she was, transfixed, long after the outer door had slammed.

  Brandy had a two-tonner with self-hauling grabs standing ready before the house, a driver lounging at its wheel. It was a typical, ugly, self-sufficient RF machine, and it did Lester’s heart good to see it as he climbed into the back beside Brandy.