Blowing out a mouthful of water, Floyd Milton kicked out and made for the shore.
‘I’m going home!’ he told himself aloud. It could be done. The distance to the great portmatter units that had travelled to Earth was not great; he could walk it. He would smuggle himself aboard, force them to take him back. The call of duty was suddenly absurdly strong.
To get back he would not hesitate to kill. The Solites were alien; even his beloved Amada could not understand. She would not even tell him such a simple thing as how many light years it was to Earth; therefore she could not love him deeply. Amada must be forgotten. Perhaps after the war … if there was an after to follow that terrible holocaust …
He needed a weapon.
A small pier jutted from the beach. Milton swam to it and hauled himself up a ladder. On the pier, red in the eerie moonlight, stood a wooden hut. Milton broke open the door with one heave of his shoulder.
Fortune was with him. Inside the hut hung skin-diving equipment. Fins, goggles, fathometers and waterscopes lay ready for use. And there was one magnificent speargun – a fortunate concession, Milton reflected, considering the peaceable nature of the Solites. Examining it he found it was air-powered, and fired a fearsome-looking barb equipped with a cartridge that would explode upon contact.
Scooping up a belt of spare ammunition, Milton left the hut with the gun. Outside, he stopped sharply. Chun Hwa was coming along the pier towards him.
Yes, of course – they would guess what had happened when a fuse blew and he was no longer anywhere to be found. They would hurry back to get him … Baring his teeth, Milton swung the gun up and took aim. Chun Hwa stopped immediately.
‘Don’t fire!’ he called in Solite. ‘Floyd Milton, please listen to me. I am not your antagonist! You do not understand; quite evidently you have not been told as much about this world as I have.’
‘I don’t want to hear a thing!’ Milton shouted. His blood bellowed like surf in his ears. Through the red night he could discern moving figures on the land; they must be coming to hunt him down.
‘Hear me, Milton! Don’t fire, please! These people have saved us and the animals and plants because the war on Earth will destroy nearly all things. Do you understand, Milton? The Solites are our – ’
Milton cut him off with a savage shout. People were crowding down the cactus-fringed beach. They had reached the pier. A few of them charged into the surf, calling his name. He pressed the trigger of the speargun. Almost at once, the cartridge exploded in its screaming target.
Everything went blank, freezing down into a dull, uniform grey.
For a long moment, the Director sat where he was in the control booth, hands clasped painfully together. Such was the vivid impact of Floyd Milton’s dream that he could almost imagine himself shot by the harpoon gun. When the feeling passed, he jumped up abruptly, recollecting himself to his own world. Something had caused Milton’s dream to be cut off; it should never have stopped so abruptly.
With controlled savagery, the Director plucked off his visor, dialled the dreamery’s Main Ops Room and demanded to know what the trouble was.
‘The wing of Dreamery Five from which you are speaking,’ said a smooth robot voice, ‘has suffered an indirect hit from a cobalt warhead. All blanketers are already in full operation and repair crews are on the job.’
Glancing through the booth’s window into the vault, the Director saw the long line of dreamers stirring uneasily; one or two of them were even sitting up. A giant had come and trodden on their pathetic little magic-lantern slides. Soon they might all be awake, running about in panic; that certainly should be avoided.
The Director turned back to the phone.
‘Inject treble dosage of standard sedative down all feeding tubes in this wing – at once!’ he said. That would make them sleep like the Seven Sleepers, and a little headache would colour their dreams when the circuits were restored. But to his order there had to be one exception.
Hurrying out, the Director went across to the prone figure of Floyd Milton. With one swift gesture, he pulled down the double tubes, the silver and the plastic, that bled into the man’s chest. More gently, he removed Milton’s visor and phones.
‘Floyd!’ he said. ‘Floyd Milton! Wake up!’
Milton’s eyes opened; it was like suddenly looking over an empty ocean, grey and sullen and lost. ‘I’m your friend,’ the Director said, doubting if the other saw him. ‘I know now why you came here, and I know you’re too good a man to waste your life with all these slugs around you. You can face what you have done; you must face it! Men like you are needed on top.’
‘I’m a murderer!’ Milton groaned. He sat up convulsively. ‘Oh God, what I did – ’
‘I know what you did,’ the Director said. ‘I looked in on your dream. You must not call it murder. You did it as a duty, to get away.’
Milton stared at him blankly.
‘The Solites brought you back by portmatter, making a special journey,’ the Director reminded him. ‘I was told that much when you arrived here. That proves they cannot have blamed you; they saw by your act of killing that they did wrong to keep you on Solite any longer, and so they let you come home.’
‘You’re crazy!’ Milton said. For the first time, he looked intelligently at the Director. ‘They didn’t “let me come home”. They exiled me! They wouldn’t have me there one moment longer. They were revolted by me, do you understand? They saw I was a cave man, and obviously I had best go back and die in my own cave man world. It was their civilised way of dealing with a murderer.’
‘But Chun Hwa – he was your enemy,’ the Director protested. ‘When you killed him on the pier, you – ’
A groan burst from Milton. He covered his face in his hands, rocking to and fro.
‘I did not kill Chun Hwa,’ he cried. ‘I killed Amada, my wife …’
Brokenly, he recounted the scene. It was Amada who had come running along the pier in the crimson night. She had tried to take the gun from him, had even pleaded for Chun Hwa when Milton had threatened to shoot him, and at that, an intense stab of jealousy had triggered Milton’s anger. He fired.
Staggering from the dreadful blast, Amada fell over the side of the pier into the sea. The reel on the gun, as the line attached to the harpoon paid out, screeched wildly.
At the memory of it, Milton broke into fresh lamentation. The Director stood helplessly over him, one hand on his shoulder. Beyond the dreamery, more explosions sounded. The governments had promised that this war to end war would be fought mainly on the epic wastes of the moon; well, it was not the first time governments had lied. Just now, the universal tragedy seemed somehow less than Milton’s personal one.
‘So you never found out where Solite is, and why it remains out of reach,’ the Director said. ‘Everybody would have been interested to know that – once.’
Blurrily, Milton looked up.
‘Yes, I know where it is,’ he said. ‘I found out by accident on the journey home; they lent me a technical book on portmatters to pass the time. I was too depressed to try and make it out – threw it aside after opening it once. But one sentence I read there stuck in my memory. It said: “Matter transmission is practicable only where gravity factors can operate effectively on the broadcast mass,” or words to that effect.’
‘Sorry. It doesn’t mean a thing to me,’ the Director said.
‘It has only one implication,’ Milton replied listlessly. ‘It means that the portmatters will not work between planets, where gravitational attractions are low. So you can see that that blood-red moon burned with atomic fires. You can see that it was our moon … When I thought things over I realised – oh – everything: that Solite was what we in English call Earth, that the Solites were only Earthmen, of the same stock we are. That my dear Amada – if I’d only known sooner – was no alien creature at all …’
The Director was deadly pale. Harshly, he broke in on Milton’s groans.
‘If this is so, if they aren�
�t space travellers, you are saying they merely came back in time?’
Milton nodded. ‘Fifteen thousand years,’ he said.
‘Then why did they not tell us? Why did they not tell us? Were they mad?’
‘Only kind,’ Milton said. ‘They knew we stood on the brink of supreme catastrophe, and could not bear to tell us so; they are the descendants of the few survivors of a total war. That’s why, as soon as they had time travel, which was an application of the portmatter formula, they came back to rescue what they could – the birds and plants and things almost extinct from the holocaust.’
A loud explosion outside made the dreamery shake. Dust fell from the ceiling.
‘… from this holocaust,’ he amended.
‘Thank God!’ the Director exclaimed. ‘This – this is staggering news! This changes everything!’
Milton looked up briefly, annihilatingly, then sunk his ravaged face back into his hands.
‘For me it doesn’t change a thing,’ he said.
The Sterile Millennia
The fragment ends. How Floyd Milton’s life continued is not recorded; nor need we think that such a record would necessarily be of interest.
Milton was a broken man – broken not so much by the war as by those conflicts produced by the war in his own mind. The conflicts were beyond his mastering; hence his despair. Despair is one of that curious category of emotions experienced frequently by individuals but rarely by entire communities. Milton despaired; man did not. War continued; man continued.
A point exists in war after which the conflict seems to protract itself almost of its own accord. For when men have lost homes, wives, families, businesses, or whatever else they hold dear, they can see nothing but to fight on, either through hatred or indifference. Year succeeded year. Sometimes the killing was slight, sometimes heavy. The gains were always negligible.
At the same time, the power alignments altered as nations switched allegiances. What had begun as a struggle between opposed ideologies developed into something more ugly: a full-scale colour war.
For four thousand years the colour war lasted, sometimes punctuated by centuries of exhaustion or propagandizing, armistice – or threat-making. At the end, the last strongholds of white resistance were overcome. The white races made their final stand on the moon; in the holocaust that followed, their stock was almost entirely obliterated and the moon converted into a nuclear bonfire which smouldered for the next hundred thousand years.
After this doubtful victory for the blacks there followed a curious period when little exhausted groups of people isolated themselves from their fellows, either intentionally or through indifference. Not only were the dark-skinned races decimated; they were emasculated. Mental and physical exhaustion is the hallmark of the ensuing long Sterile Millennia. Even those drives which up until now had seemed to play a dominant part in man’s affairs – the erotic and the predatory – suffered diminution. Everywhere silence fell.
Various attempts at recovery were made. The tottering economic-agricultural system was propped for several centuries by a vast array of robots, which drew from the land all that the land was capable of yielding. Outlying or self-ruling communities were brought under one stringent control. The notorious Mating Centre was set up, governing all marriages and births; only an age without hope could have tolerated its arid regimen.
But mechanical ingenuity was not enough – as it had never been enough – to ward off disaster.
Time unrolled itself like a long carpet, down which man ambled towards extinction.
It was the last day of summer in the last year of the eighty-third century AD
Humming to itself high in the stratosphere, a vane carried J. Smithlao, psychodynamician, over the 139th sector of Ing Land. It began to dive. It sank down, finally levelling out to hover over Charles Gunpat’s estate, selecting its course without attention from Smithlao.
For Smithlao this was a routine errand. He had come, as Gunpat’s psychodynamician, to administer a hate-brace to the old man. His dark face was bored as he stared at the replica of outside on his telescreens. Oddly enough, as he did so he caught a glimpse of a man approaching Gunpat’s estate on foot.
‘Must be a wild man,’ he muttered to himself.
Under the slowing vane, the landscape was as neat as a blueprint. The impoverished fields made impeccable rectangles. Here and there, one robot machine or another kept nature to its own functional image: not a pea podded without cybernetic supervision; not a bee bumbled among stamens without radar check being kept of its course. Every bird had a number and a call sign, while among each tribe of ants marched the metallic teller ants, telltaling the secrets of the nest back to base. When rain fell, it had its allocated dropping place. The old, comfortable world of random factors had vanished under the pressure of hunger.
Nothing living lived without control. The countless populations of previous centuries and the leechings of war had exhausted the soil. Only the severest parsimony, coupled with ruthless regimentation, produced enough nourishment for a sparse population. Billions had died of starvation; the hundreds who remained lived on starvation’s brink.
In the sterile neatness of the landscape, Gunpat’s estate looked like an insult. Covering five acres, it was a little island of wilderness. Tall and unkempt elms fenced the perimeter, encroaching on the lawns and house. The house itself, the chief one in Sector 139, was built of massive stone blocks. It had to be strong to bear the weight of the servomechanisms which, apart from Gunpat and his mad daughter Ployploy, were its only occupants.
It was as Smithlao dropped below tree level that he saw the human figure plodding towards the estate. For a multitude of reasons, this was a very unlikely sight. Since the great material wealth of the world was now shared among comparatively few people, no one was poor enough to have to walk anywhere. Man’s increasing hatred of Nature, spurred by the notion that it had betrayed him, would make such a walk purgatory unless the individual were insane, like Ployploy.
Dismissing the figure from his thoughts, Smithlao dropped the vane on to a stretch of stone in front of the building. He was glad to get down; it was a gusty day, and the piled cumulus through which he had descended had been full of turbulence. Gunpat’s house, with its sightless windows, its towers, its endless terraces, its unnecessary ornamentation, its massive porch, glowered at him like a forsaken wedding cake.
His arrival stimulated immediate activity. Three wheeled robots approached the vane from different directions, swivelling light weapons as they drew near.
Nobody, Smithlao thought, could get in here uninvited. Gunpat was not a friendly man, even by the unfriendly standards of his time; the disgrace of having a daughter like Ployploy had served to accentuate the morose side of his melancholy temperament.
‘Identity?’ demanded the leading machine. It was ugly and flat, vaguely resembling a toad.
‘I am J. Smithlao, psychodynamician to Charles Gunpat,’ Smithlao replied; he had to go through this procedure every visit. As he spoke, he revealed his face to the machine. It grunted to itself, checking picture and information with its memory. Finally it said, ‘You are J. Smithlao, psychodynamician to Charles Gunpat. Purpose?’
Cursing its monstrous slowness, Smithlao told the robot, ‘I have an appointment with Charles Gunpat for a hate-brace at ten hours,’ and waited while that was digested.
‘You have an appointment with Charles Gunpat for a hate-brace at ten hours,’ the robot finally confirmed. ‘Come this way.’
It wheeled about with surprising grace, speaking to the other two robots, reassuring them, repeating mechanically to them, ‘This is J. Smithlao, psychodynamician to Charles Gunpat. He has an appointment with Charles Gunpat for a hate-brace at ten hours,’ in case they had not grasped the facts.
Meanwhile, Smithlao spoke to his vane. The part of the cabin containing him detached itself and lowered wheels to the ground. Carrying Smithlao, it followed the other robots towards the big house.
Automatic
screens came up, covering windows, as Smithlao moved into the presence of other human beings. He could only see and be seen now via telescreens. Such was the hatred – (equals fear) – man bore for his fellow man, he could not tolerate their regarding him directly.
One following another, the machines climbed along the terraces, through the great porch, where they were covered in a mist of disinfectant, along a labyrinth of corridors, and so into the presence of Charles Gunpat.
Gunpat’s dark face on the screen of his sedan showed only the mildest distaste for the sight of his psychodynamician. He was usually as self-controlled as this; it told against him at his business meetings, where the idea was to cow one’s opponents by splendid displays of rage. For this reason, Smithlao was always summoned to administer a hate-brace when something important loomed on the day’s agenda.
Smithlao’s machine manoeuvred him within a yard of his patient’s image, much closer than courtesy required.
‘I’m late,’ Smithlao began, matter-of-factly, ‘because I could not bear to drag myself into your offensive presence one minute sooner. I hoped that if I left it long enough, some happy accident might have removed that stupid nose from your – what shall I call it? – face. Alas, it’s still there, with its two nostrils sweeping like rat holes into your skull.’
Observing his patient’s face carefully, Smithlao saw only the faintest stir of irritation. No doubt about it, Gunpat was a hard man to rouse. Fortunately, Smithlao was an expert in his profession; he proceeded to try the insult subtly.
‘Why, when it was your turn to go to the Mating Centre, you didn’t even realise that it’s the one time a man has to come out from behind his screen. You thought you could make love by TV! And the result? One dotty daughter – one dotty daughter, Gunpat! Doesn’t it make you weep? Think how your rivals at Automotion must titter at that. “Potty Gunpat and his dotty daughter,” they’ll be saying. “Can’t control your genes,” they’ll be saying.’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 33