The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  ‘Sure you’re well enough for this?’ Brandy asked.

  ‘Start her up,’ Lester said tensely.

  It was a long haul into the territory Sector Six had just taken over. When they left the settled limits of Sector One, the change in landscape was very noticeable. Though the road continued, the ten-mile-wide groove ended; geonivorous machines were chewing out an extension of it now, working in a hell of pulverized rock particles. Beyond the geonivores, it was more peaceful, but bleaker. The two-tonner climbed snarling into low mountains which, on their shattered and sad flanks, bore witness to their exposure to space. Even here, the vital air-furnaces had been built, crouching among their hills of ash. As the vehicle climbed, the air grew thinner, the heavens darker. The wind died to tooth-comb fineness. Yet even here, Lester noticed, life was limping back to sheltered ridges, showing green among the slate-grays.

  They echoed their way through a pass and began to descend. Before them, in a valley, lay the remnants of the capital city of old Risim. It lay split open, like a beached whale, with the massed impedimenta of Sector Six all around it in a wide circle. There was something wrong with the picture.

  ‘You’ve got an unusual grouping down there,’ Lester commented to Brandy, as they looked out of the observation blister.

  ‘It’s not from choice,’ Brandy said. ‘Our stuff is spread around in such a wide circle just because they can’t get in any farther. There’s something in the middle of the city stopping them: a power-damper field, extending half a mile in all directions. It must come from the booby trap the Risimians left.’

  ‘Must?’

  Brandy turned to face his superior squarely.

  ‘What else would it be?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never really understood your attitude to this business, Governor. Angagulalatun, Vicinzo and Cobatt II were booby-trapped; Risim, in its heyday, was as much Earth’s enemy as they were – don’t you think it would have laid the same sort of trap for us as our other enemies?’

  ‘Perhaps I’ve never really faced up to the problem in all the years we’ve been here,’ Lester said. ‘I enjoyed RF work; I’ve never thought of Risim as an enemy planet.’

  ‘You’ll have to face it now.’

  ‘Risim may be different from the other worlds.’

  ‘Why should it be?’ Brandy asked bluntly.

  ‘Because every world is different,’ Lester said, ‘and every race is different, just as every man is different. The traps on Angagulalatun and Cobatt and Vicinzo were themselves all different. Cobatt blew almost as soon as the RF set foot on it. On Angagulalatun, nothing happened until an air pressure of five pounds had been established at sea level. And the trap on Vicinzo must have had some kind of encephalic trigger; the place blew after the RF had been there thirteen years and the population numbered twenty thousand.’

  ‘All right, we die a different way,’ Brandy said gloomily. ‘It’ll feel the same …’

  ‘But we’ve got some kind of a chance here, don’t you see,’ Lester said. ‘On the other RF planets, they never knew what hit them. Here we have something we can tackle.’

  While they were talking, the two-tonner had rolled down to the outskirts of the town. Traffic police directed them amid a chaos of camping; among silent vehicles, tents had been pitched, and silent women stood about in groups. They bumped over rock and rubble to a parking space.

  ‘Another hundred yards forward and the engine would have conked,’ Brandy said, offering Lester a hand down. ‘Nothing functions in the anti-power field.’

  The stillness was eerie. The ionosphere having established itself, the days-long storm had died and the aurora faded into the sky. Now temperatures were falling toward night.

  ‘We’ll tackle the booby trap in the morning,’ Brandy said. ‘Right now, let’s get a drink.’

  ‘I’d like to see it now,’ Lester said.

  Brandy shrugged.

  ‘As you like,’ he said.

  They walked forward together. Beyond the stalled vehicles, the power-damper field began. It manifested itself faintly on their body electricity, making their skins itch. Lester’s head swam and his lame leg dragged, but he knew that only his own physical condition was to blame for that.

  The city closed around them. Of its might, little was left but stone and rubble; great pyramids of crumbling debris told of the millennium in which space, that great sea, had had its high tide over the land. And already on the pyramids, like scraggy hens pecking out a living, weeds grew and a toad crawled. Picking their way through the destruction. Brandy and Lester came to the booby trap.

  Clusters of men stood beside it, eyeing it without speaking. Their faces were stiff with tension; their expressions seemed to have been written indelibly across their skulls.

  Once, before the defeat of Risim, the booby trap had stood in an open square; now rubble covered half of it. It was a featureless dome, rising at its highest point to less than eight feet. It looked no more impressive than an eskimo’s igloo.

  The grim-faced men were turning to go.

  ‘We’d better be going, too,’ Brandy said. ‘There’s nothing else to see. We’ll tackle the problem tomorrow.’

  They followed the silent groups back through the dusk. Everyone was hurrying now; even torches would not burn in the power-damper field. Tomorrow, men would come with spades and uncover the rest of the dome, seeking an entrance. And then … and then it was anybody’s guess what happened, Lester thought.

  Despite all his other worries, he found himself thinking of the way he had left Ruthmary, with matters unresolved between them. He did not want to be blown to hell with their affairs in that state. At the time, Lester’s leaving home with Brandy had seemed fine: he was going to show them all he was no coward; now, in among the ruins, he knew he would have been braver to have stayed with Ruthmary and let everyone else think what he would.

  He climbed early into the bunk Brandy provided in his four-room trailer, hoping for sleep to cover his weakness. Sleep did not come. Instead, his mind floated back to the last days of the Risimians, and he pictured the terrible weapon with which Earth had crushed them. The Gobblers: that was the universal name for what were officially called aerdetergands; half a dozen of them could wipe an atmosphere clean off a planet in half an hour.

  The Gobblers were big. At the height of the Hub Wars, Earth owned no more than six of them; but six were all that were needed. They hurtled in upon their victims on low, intra-atmospheric orbits. They leeched air through their great bodies, dis-bonding it as it went, and spraying it far out into space, whence it could never return. This implacable and terrifying ingestion of atmosphere produced the typical Gobbler noise, a sustained belch, audible all around the globe. When the belch rose to a howl and the howl to a scream and the scream to an echo of a shriek, the Gobblers had finished their ugly meal – and a planet lay dead beneath them.

  The Gobblers were the most evil weapon ever produced. They won the Hub Wars for Earth; but the harvest of hatred they sowed had still to be fully reaped. No wonder most of the vanquished enemy races had seen to it that any world the Gobblers stripped remained forever uninhabitable.

  After the Wars, Earth herself had been so weakened that a thousand years had lapsed before she could stretch forth her hand and touch the fruits of her victory – only to find them fruits of death.

  In the blind dark, hopelessness gripped Lester. For fifteen years, he had been putting this vision away from him. So busy had he been recreating a world, he had not realised on what it was he built. Others, less absorbed, had known all along – and feared.

  Ruthmary had feared.

  He had been so obtuse. He remembered how clumsily he had tried to console her for Jackie’s death. He had said: ‘From the sea comes life. Now Jackie is there, as imperishable as the plankton, starting a whole new chain of life.’

  At that, Ruthmary had wept more bitterly, and Lester had not understood why.

  He was glad when the frozen dawn came and he climbed out of bed to escape fro
m the past.

  The ambiguous dome lay exposed to the sky. About it, shuffling uneasily on the rubble they had cleared, stood a crowd of RF men; a hopeless instinct for flight competed in them with curiosity.

  The dome was featureless. Built of a strange, semi-translucent metal, it was untouched by time or heat or cold. Lester limped around it twice and then returned to Brandy. They stood silent. Silence lay like a malediction over everything.

  Brandy licked his numb lips.

  ‘Looks as if it won’t hurt us if we don’t hurt it,’ he said, speaking in a low voice. ‘How about evacuating this sector for good? We’ve got the rest of the planet to work on.’

  ‘As long as this remains,’ Lester said, ‘we’ve got nothing. It would always mock our safety.’

  ‘Right, Governor, tell us what we do about it then,’ Brandy said. ‘Don’t forget, as long as it transmits this power-damper, we can’t bring up anything more ferocious than a spade against it.’

  ‘The damper field must be there for something more than just to draw our attention to the dome,’ Lester said thoughtfully. He fell silent, trying to work it out. This thing, he knew, was something different from that which the other RF worlds had yielded; this was no efficient but crude time bomb, such as had shattered the ill-fated Angagulalatun and Vicinzo. The Risimians had been more subtle in their gesture of farewell.

  Obviously, they had intended that no power should be used to break open the dome. What, then, was the key required to open what a thousand years of silence had kept locked?

  There could be only one answer …

  Lester turned to the anxious phalanxes of men. He had no need to attract their attention; every eye was on him. Stiffly, he raised his right hand above his head.

  ‘When I drop my hand,’ he said in a clear voice, ‘I want you all to shout ‘Hey’ as loudly as possible. Right?’

  He dropped his hand.

  The response, from two hundred choked throats, was negligible.

  ‘Louder!’ Lester called. ‘We’ve got to waken the dead!’

  He raised his hand and dropped it again.

  The answering shout was frighteningly loud.

  A section of the dome slid open.

  A great sigh rose from the crowd. Brandy gripped Lester’s arm as if he would break it.

  ‘You see,’ Lester said, ‘the Risimians had this place ready for emergencies. The bellowing of the Gobblers closing in overhead would activate the power-damper field and lock the dome in readiness. Outside, silence would fall forever – or until another atmosphere was established. Then another sound was needed to unlock the door.’

  Brandy nodded blankly, almost as if he had not heard. He was shaking like a leaf.

  ‘N – now what?’ he managed to ask.

  ‘Now we go in,’ Lester said.

  He looked around. The onlookers had vanished. Silently, ashamedly, they had scrambled away. The inherited impulses of fear had been too much for them. Only the Commander of Sector Six and the Resident Governor stood under the iron sky; but a woman was approaching them. It had, of course, been an easy matter for her to follow Lester; a Resident Governor’s wife can appropriate any vehicle in an emergency.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid, Rue?’ Lester asked huskily.

  ‘The doctor says you ought to be at home in bed!’ she exclaimed, as she came up to him.

  At Lester’s side, Brandy Mireball began to laugh, fitfully and without humor. In a crisis, anything that is not the crisis releases laughter. But Lester thought he understood: Rue was concentrating on him, as he had previously concentrated on the reclamation, to exclude the chilling threat of reality. Taking her hand, he led her into the dome.

  Immediately, the movable section of wall swung back into place, imprisoning them. The two of them were alone – as they had always been.

  A soft yellow light illuminated the interior of the dome. The room seemed tiny, and was as featureless as the exterior, apart from a small grille five feet from the floor; and below the grille, projecting from the wall, was an open cube large enough for a man to poke his head into.

  Husband and wife had barely had time to look around before a voice spoke to them through the grille. Though it was clear, it had the quality of a recording. It spoke slowly, in Prime Galactic.

  ‘You are the new possessors of Risim,’ it said. ‘You walk on our world. It was our world, and we loved it. But all that we loved – so it must be if you hear our voice – is now gone, obliterated. Our enemies have terrible powers; our enemies are evil. But to every race falls a time of evil and a time of good, a time of weakness and a time of strength, a time for destruction and a time for construction.

  ‘We are prepared to leave what remains of our loved planet even to our enemies if, by the time they hear our voice, they have turned from their old ways. Accordingly, we have devised this test, to see if they are fit to possess Risim. For know that it was fair and can be made fair again.

  ‘But we would rather that our world were dissolved into its component molecules than that it became a stronghold of evil. So we have arranged that, far below this dome, mighty engines of retribution lie ever ready to split our once fair world into the atoms from which it was created.

  ‘The closing of the door behind you activated those engines. Even now, miles below your feet, critical conditions are slowly building up.

  ‘This is the simple test we have devised. Five seconds – five seconds only – after our voice has stopped, the engines of retribution will be geared so that nothing whatsoever can keep them from destroying Risim. But the fusion will not take place until twenty-eight days from today. We make that humane delay so that everybody now on Risim will have time to escape – but Risim will not escape. Its end is foredoomed five seconds after our voice ceases unless someone present loves this World enough to lay down his life for it immediately.

  ‘We must have a sacrifice for the wrong done us.

  ‘If a head is placed in the metal box below this grille within five seconds, it will be instantly pulverized; but Risim will be preserved to grow beautiful again, and the engines of destruction stopped forever.’

  The voice ceased – and before it had done so, Ruthmary was clinging to Lester.

  ‘You can’t do it!’ she screamed. ‘No, Lester, no, you’re all I’ve got left now! I love you, Lester! For God’s sake, Lester – Lester, no, let’s all leave this damned – ’

  His clothes ripped as he pulled himself away from her. Something about not deserting Jackie, something about a man’s lifework …

  Instantly after the flash which neatly sliced his neck, the grille announced, coolly, ‘Risim is yours now. Tend it lovingly. Farewell!’

  The section of wall slid open again. Choking with tears, Ruthmary hardly saw Brandy on his knees outside, or, far behind him, the ravaged slopes with their touch of green.

  The Ice Mass Cometh

  My bags are packed, my family issued with iron rations. We have acquired an ex-W.D. amphibious vehicle and bought shotguns in St. Ebbes. We are all fixed up with fuel and penicillin and filter-tipped cigarettes. In short, one crack out of that ice and we take to the hills or oceans, as the case may be. What beats me is the way the rest of you are managing to keep so calm, so unprepared, so British. You are flirting with death, don’t you realise?

  Or did you just not read about the ice in the papers? Truth to tell, I nearly did not. Newspaper men are an odd lot: they have the worst, most exciting news since Suez and then they hide it on a back page. So if you missed it – I don’t want to worry you, but I think you ought to know. We are a continent short.

  To be frank, friends, the Antarctic has gone. This great land mass, to which we have so long been accustomed, is no longer with us. There it was, something solid and substantial, something like pay day, which we rely on and take for granted: till now. Now it is no more. And who did this thing? It was the Russians.

  Yet no questions are being asked about it in Parliament, nobody is up and fighting mad in the
UN, even Cuba is not protesting, Nehru is keeping quiet. To my way of thinking, there is only one answer to this crazy state of affairs: everyone is too blinded by science to dare to say a word. Except me. I’m saying 900 words here, and much good may it do me.

  Here are the facts. Under the auspices of the International Geophysical Year, some Russians, heavily disguised as a glaciological expedition, have been poking about with the South Polar ice. They have discovered that there is no land underneath it; the whole thing is a monstrous fraud. Then this Professor G. A. Avsyuk, who is described as Head of Soviet Glaciological Researches, declares – presumably to cover himself – that there was land there once, but that it has been pushed down under the earth’s crust.

  There you have it: I haven’t minced matters. Consider this: there may be twice as much ice on the globe as we previously thought. Now consider this: the Antarctic is just a big iceberg. Rub these two considerations together. It is the only way to keep warm. You cannot convince me that the matter is going to be allowed to rest there. Look at it this way.

  This ice could be towed. It just needs a couple of resourceful Russian destroyers and some strong towline; in January, when the South East trades are blowing, you could slip that great chunk into the Benguela Current as easily as anything, and before we knew where we were, bingo, there it would be, jammed from one side of the North Atlantic to the other.

  Shipping would be finished. Air travel would fare little better; blizzard, fog, polar conditions, would see to that. And in all the atmospheric turmoil which would follow, radio would be equally a dead loss. No, your only contact with the New World will be by the New York–Penzance Sledge Service. If I were you, I’d start getting my mink out of mothballs.

  I have already been in contact with the Government to ask them how they intend to cope with the catastrophe. They assure me that H-bombs will be dropped and the bank rate raised again. But a lot of bombs will have to be dropped to disperse that ice. It is anything up to two miles thick in places; the most shattering bank rate will hardly shatter that! And maybe you can suggest what we are going to do with that terrific volume of water when the ice is melted. We cannot all live on the top of Snowdon.