The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

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The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 31

by Aldiss, Brian


  And Helen. She was charming, a power behind several thrones in the science fiction world. She knew everyone who was anyone in the genre, and a few more besides. She had ideas, although she did not write. She was an appreciator: a female catalyst in a too male world. But what were they doing with her here? If Helen was here, who else might they not have under their filthy wings? Clarke, Sam Youd, John Brunner, Wyndham, Carnell, Tubb …

  It was twenty-four hours before Sladden spoke to anyone. In that time, surprisingly, he was fed twice. With the nourishment circulating in his veins, his head cleared considerably. He came to certain decisions. Then he was hauled up before his old Questioner.

  ‘Come and sit down, Sladden,’ said the Questioner. He looked dishevelled; he even looked tired. The broken clock still pointed to four o’clock.

  ‘How are you, Sladden?’

  ‘Is the fire out?’

  ‘It was only a few rafters burning.’

  ‘What started it?’

  The Questioner’s untidy eyebrows drew together. It made him look unreal, a silly face painted to scare kids.

  ‘I ask the questions here,’ he said, then added, ‘A wire burnt out in a ceiling, that was all.’

  Sladden forced a laugh, saying nothing.

  ‘What do you find here to amuse you?’ the Questioner asked ominously.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What did you laugh at?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘No doubt you recall the trouble we had at first to get your co-operation? I hope we do not have to go through that stage again.’

  As if the threat drew an answer reluctantly from him, Sladden said, ‘I thought the fire might have been started by pyrokinesis.’

  The Questioner’s face did not change its expression. He merely said, ‘Explain this method to me.’

  Sladden shrugged. ‘You are playing with me again. You must know what pyrokinesis is. It’s a section of ESP – the mental ability to produce fire without physical means.’

  ‘I see. A science fiction.’

  The silence grew, stretching, rolling over, obscuring everything like fog. This perhaps was the Questioner’s chief talent: the power to look as though he would not speak until the sun froze.

  When at last he did speak, it was as though the last part of the conversation had never been.

  ‘We have come to a new phase in our relationship,’ he said. ‘That is why you were moved to a new cell. Why did you write science fiction?’

  Pause. ‘It seemed to express’ – Suddenly Sladden thought, Good God, why am I trying to pick out the truth so carefully for this slab-cheeked little Asian? He finished offhandedly, ‘It’s my view of the world.’

  ‘Is this your view of the world?’

  The Questioner held up a tattered magazine. It was open at a short story entitled ‘It Breathed Down My Necking Session’ by Humphrey Sladden.

  ‘That was my first effort,’ Sladden said apologetically, dropping his head.

  ‘Is this your view of the world?’

  Now the Questioner held New Worlds for December 1957 open at ‘Eternity Express’.

  ‘Yes.’ It was the lead novel, thirty-five thousand words. He had never written better. Crispin had selected it for Best S-F Five.

  ‘Explain it in detail to me,’ the Questioner said.

  Three hours later, both of them were rolling with fatigue. For the first time, the Questioner let his prisoner see his exhaustion; getting up wearily, he punched a bell and the guard came and marched Sladden back to his cell.

  The next night, the Questioner picked up the conversation without preamble exactly where they had left off. It seemed to Sladden that he had spent much of the day poring over a tape recording of their last meeting.

  ‘Now,’ said the Questioner. ‘The Aldebaran Spy, Bajjujit, had altered the mass coefficient of Shuttle 96 on the Eternity Express sufficiently to take him to the year 8059, where he masquerades as a Guilder. So, he escapes the Galactic police, eh?’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ Sladden said.

  ‘Um … But then he gives himself away. The Guild catch him out because he does not know about the expenditure tax. What is an expenditure tax?’

  ‘Well, it presupposes a community with a world-wide balance of gold reserves – or whatever standard you are using? Peanuts, if you like.’

  ‘Nobody uses peanuts for money.’

  ‘They might in 8059!’ Sladden said.

  ‘It’s not in the story?’

  ‘No … The idea of an expenditure tax is not new. It occurred to Hobbes three hundred years ago that taxes might be adjusted to what people consume rather than what they earn.’

  ‘Hobbes is real?’ asked the Questioner.

  ‘Hobbes is real. So is John Stuart Mill; he toyed with the same idea.’

  ‘To tax, not income, but expenditure?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The Questioner sighed heavily.

  ‘How does this fit in with your story, Sladden?’

  ‘Well, the world before 8059 had been profligate and spendthrift. The new tax exempted savings; this was the government’s method of curing the popular attitude to life. It was poetic justice – I fitted that bit in rather well – that the spy, Bajjujit, was betrayed by his ignorance of the tax, because, if you remember, right at the beginning he smuggled himself off the Eternity Express in the year 7900 and sold them the secret of orgy-life, which caused the profligacy in the first place.’

  ‘Explain orgy-life. Is it real?’

  ‘Not actually,’ Sladden said. ‘It works on a sociological principle of release …’

  ‘Economics, sociology …’ the Questioner muttered. ‘Well – continue!’

  They continued for a long while.

  When Sladden was shut back in his cell a faint light lay already over the ruined world outside. He was tired but serene. These fools were wasting their time; it seemed obvious that, with their own technology choked by adherence to party lines, they were dipping into science fiction, that melting pot of ideas, trying to find a new lead, fresh beginnings. Presumably they had heard of the prediction of atomic power by an s-f writer and were now looking for something else. What? Pyrokinesis? Perhaps some poor devils in a State clinic had already been ordered to produce a pyrokineticist – or else!

  Sladden slept horizontally and woke still cheerful, to find a tolerable meal awaiting him. They could not starve him while they thought he had ideas. It was clearly his business to have a steady flow of ideas. He could go on discussing his own stories for nights; the gimmick in ‘Dark Lady of the Sonics’ would be especially good to explain.

  So he was marched once more into the questioning room … but this time there was a difference: two men were awaiting him.

  The Questioner was against the far wall, carefully setting the hands of the clock back on to four o’clock. When he turned and saw Sladden observing his task, he shouted angrily at the guard who had brought the prisoner in. One other significant change of detail caught Sladden’s eye: there was blood on the floorboards. (Whose? McIntosh’s? One of the Whites’? Russell’s? Burke’s?)

  The irrelevant business of the clock so nagged Sladden, the sight of the blood set up such an uneasy churning in his stomach, that some time elapsed before he could properly examine the new man. He was striking enough to attract attention in gaudier places than prison cells. He was – it was the vital thing of him – heavy. Not over-tall, nor over-plump, he managed, in his black suit, to look as impenetrable as lead. His face, which sported a dark fluff of beard along the jowl, partook of the same weight. Only the eyes survived the gravity of the rest; they were light, blue, and penetrating. He spoke.

  ‘You’ve been fooling around, Sladden. I’ve come to beat some straight answers out of you.’

  Sladden thought, incongruously, how that vibrant tone might be modulated in courting a woman.

  ‘I’ve tried to answer everything I was asked,’ he said.

  The hand caught him low on the side of h
is face, its knuckles grazing his lip. He stepped back; an unnoticed guard pushed him forward again.

  ‘Don’t be rude,’ said the heavy man, wiping his hand.

  ‘Pyrokinesis is a lie,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Sladden hesitated, watching the hand.

  ‘It – ’ he began.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It is a theoretical possibility.’

  He was struck again.

  ‘It is a lie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes – at present.’

  The hand came up and caressed Sladden’s unshaven cheek; its touch was more dreadful than a blow.

  ‘And all the stuff in your stories is lies, isn’t it, Sladden?’

  He fought the fear surging just below the surface of his skin.

  ‘Some – some is true,’ he said. The hand continued at his jaw, and he added, ‘Most is possible.’

  Now the hand gripped. It took the flesh beside Sladden’s lip, it twisted, it slid a thumb into his mouth, digging deep between his gum and his lower lip. Cunning as a pianist’s fingers, it extracted arpeggios of pain.

  Sladden was on the floor, writhing, the hand still unshakably there, exploring every nodule of hurt, as the heavy man knelt over him. The heavy man was saying, ‘You must tell us which are lies, which are truths, mustn’t you?’

  He was screaming, ‘Yes, yes, I must!’ but a silent part of him was thinking elatedly, ‘Whatever they do, they still want to be told … If I’m on their hook, they’re on mine.’

  When, several hours later, two guards dragged him back and dumped him in his cell, Sladden lay on the ground moaning. He had been mauled and questioned until he was half-dead.

  They had only dealt with ‘Eternity Express’, offering the prospect of nights’ more interrogation about his other stories. He had had to explain every single simple device in the story; never before had he realised how many there were. The wretched business of the Aldebaran spy’s space globe had been investigated, the parts about time travel had been thoroughly gone into.

  Oh, the enemy knew there was no such thing as space or time travel. They just required every drop of fact and speculation Sladden had on those topics. Sladden, of course, knew nothing of time travel; in his story he had simply supposed its existence, knowing readers would go with him. That was not good enough for the heavy man: his mind was too factual for that – or he pretended it was too factual. He pretended he could not understand someone writing a story involving the use of something the writer did not understand. His heavy hands assisted Sladden’s explanation, extracting each word like a bad tooth.

  Finally, Sladden pulled himself on to the bench, resting his face against the cold stone. He groaned to think of the nights of questioning ahead.

  It occurred to him that these brutes had read John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, in which – after the catastrophe – the central characters had known of a safe refuge; or Cyril Kornbluth’s Christmas Eve, in which, after the invasion, a rocket hidden in a mountain had helped defeat the enemy. The conquerers feared some similar plot against them, and were searching for a hint of it in recent science fiction: a space ship in the Mendips, a time machine under Whitehall.

  Sladden laughed through his tortured mouth. Alas, this was reality, not science fiction. There was no gimmick. There was no way of beating them now they had won.

  He lay there hopelessly. A minute insect climbed up the wall; watching it took an age, until it vanished into a crevice under the window – and then ages more billowed through Sladden’s mind. Time for a captive takes on all the solidity it does for a mental sufferer: massive pyramids of it, each a second long, fill the world from horizon to horizon.

  And then the guards came again and he was taken back to the questioning room. The heavy man was there with the Questioner, and he again did most of the talking, and torturing. This time they had a recorder with them, playing back to him his own remarks made in previous interviews. After a short while they were joined by a tall, authoritative man who evidently spoke no English.

  The proceedings went much as before. The first blow across Sladden’s painfully stiff mouth was unendurable. He struck back at the heavy man and received a terrific blow on the jaw which knocked him out. When he revived, he was at the point of drowning, with a hose gushing water into his mouth. Choking and coughing, he was hauled up and forced to answer more questions.

  By the time it was over, they were all exhausted.

  The heavy man’s final words rang in Sladden’s ears as he was dragged off: ‘Every one of you will have your minds bled dry of knowledge before you leave here!’

  Every one of you … Meaning, doubtless, all the science fiction writers.

  Still coughing slightly, Sladden lay in the merciful dark, nursing the thought. They must have seized even the minor writers, Hawkins, Aldiss, Morgan. They were afraid.

  He could see, the sudden knowledge cooling his pain, why they were afraid. Under their regime, speculation was forbidden: orthodoxy was all they knew. In this country they had conquered, they had found something new: science fiction! Science fiction was the most glorious mixture of fact and bunkum ever devised by man. The enemy knew this, but could not leave it alone. They had to investigate it all to discover the possible new lines of scientific thought their regime so badly needed.

  In the dark, Sladden gave a small grunt of satisfaction. His pulpy face contorted into a smile.

  If he could not understand their logic, they could not understand his stories. But they would keep on trying; that was their way. They would keep on trying, until someone they had not managed to capture invented … say, pyrokinesis.

  The longer they talked, the surer their ultimate fate. Sladden had, after all, his gimmick: staying alive.

  The War Millennia

  To begin then – though it is certainly no beginning – the first fragment is of a strange past world, where clouds of nationalism have gathered and broken into a storm of war. Over the forgotten continents – Asia, America, Africa – missiles of destruction fly. The beleaguered people of that day have not fully comprehended the nature of the struggle in which they are engulfed.

  Those simple blacks, whites and greys which constitute the political situation are grasped readily enough with a little application. But behind these issues lie factors scarcely understood in the council chambers of Peking, London, Cairo or Washington – factors which stem from the long and savage past of the race; factors of instinct and frustrated instinct; factors of fear and lust and dawning conscience; factors inseparable from the adolescence of a species, which loom behind all man’s affairs like an insurmountable mountain chain.

  So men fought each other instead of wrestling with themselves. The bravest sought to evade the currents of hatred by turning outward to the nearest planets in the solar system; the cowardly, by sleeping away their lives in vast hives called dreameries, where the comforts of fantasy could discount the depredations of war. Neither course ultimately offered refuge; when the earthquake comes, it topples both tower and hovel …

  It is fitting that the first fragment should start with a man sitting helplessly in a chair, while bombs fall.

  The Director of Dreamery Five slid out of his chair before the silent control panels, the question of Floyd Milton making him ungovernably restless. Every so often a distant crump outside announced that the enemy attack was still on; that made the Director no more easy. Although he would be safer down in the vaults, peering into Floyd Milton’s dreams, other considerations caused him to take the elevator and sink to the cool depths of Dreamery Five. He had seen Milton’s face when he came in that afternoon. Milton had looked like death.

  The sleep levels were as humid as usual, and reeked of the spirit used by the robot masseurs.

  ‘You slugs!’ the Director said aloud in the direction of the rows of sleepers.

  They lay dormant, heads concealed in the feedback phones. Occasionally, a sleeper would be rolled up until his toes rested on his shoulders and his
behind pointed into the air; rubber-covered machinery would flick up and pummel him. Then it stretched him out again and pummelled his chest, carefully avoiding the intravenal feed pipes which hung from the ceiling. Whatever their mental state, sleepers were maintained in good physical condition. And all the time they slept and dreamed their dark dreams.

  ‘Slugs!’ the Director said again. It would never have done to have a director who loved the sleepers in his charge; alone in the vast, automated dreameries, he would have been too likely to pry into the reveries of these hopeless introverts.

  Apart from a few young people moved by genuine curiosity, only psychopaths and misfits lay in the dreameries, playing out their lives in useless reverie. Unfortunately, they accounted for a fair percentage of the population; the sixty-years cold war – now broken into something horribly hot – had produced an amazing number of mental invalids who were only too glad to retreat by the escape route of the dreameries into their own fantasy world.

  Floyd Milton had not looked the type, nor had he looked like one of the tough spacers who, after the ardours of a long run to Mars or Ganymede, came here sometimes to recuperate for a while. He looked like a man who had betrayed himself – and knew it.

  That was why the Director had to see his dreams. Sometimes men – real men – could be saved from themselves before they sank too low.

  The Director paused in front of Milton’s bed. The latest arrival was silent, breathing shallowly, his face hidden under the visor and feedback phones. Noting his number, the Director hurried into the nearest control booth and dialled it. He assumed a visor and phones himself.

  In a moment he would be plugged automatically into Milton’s reveries; from the look on Milton’s face when he had entered Dreamery Five, it would not be pleasant, but tuning circuits insured that the Director could always modulate the empathy effect enough to retain his own consciousness.

 

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