The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  ‘Hey!’ the driver yelled. Food supplies were so short in the country, he could be court-martialled and shot if he let that lot go. Running like fury, he flung himself against the back of the lorry. But there was no foothold for him, and as the vehicle gathered speed he fell to the ground.

  ‘It’s the delinks!’ he shouted to the storeman. ‘Grab that other little b–’

  But Chip, the other little b–, was not easily grabbable. At thirteen he was an old hand at this game. He faded like a ghost from the vicinity and was back with the rest of the gang within an hour.

  Sponge and Taggy, meanwhile, sat grimly crushed together in the driver’s seat of the five-tonner, heading round Kensington Gardens, which had now entirely vanished behind gigantic walls, turning the park into a fortress. They drove fast with an appalling mixture of precocious skill and ignorance of death, weaving among the pedshaws and other vehicles. These pedshaws, virtually rickshaws attached to pedal bikes, were an idea imported from the East, forced on the West by stringent petrol-rationing; they swamped London, transforming the nature of its traffic problems. Also moving along like small battleships were the atomic cars which had only appeared since the beginning of the war, top hats or top brass visible through their narrow windows. The two boys skirted them recklessly and turned into the Bayswater Road.

  So they came to the Pit.

  Where the regular road had been replaced by Bailey bridging over broken ground, Sponge flung the steering wheel over and they careered across stubble, bouncing among bushes towards a ragged wall. Here a whole vast perimeter had been wired off by thick entanglements of barbed wire – except at one point where the coils were crushed down and bridged by a dozen thicknesses of linoleum, crudely flung on top of the barbs. Heading smartly for this sudden outburst of patterned red and blue, the lorry bucked over it, thundering into the Pit.

  ‘It’s in the bag!’ Sponge sneered, letting Taggy take over the wheel entirely as he lit himself a pipe of shag. As a fourteen year old, he regarded cigarettes as kid’s stuff. He held a lighted match over the bowl, noting triumphantly that it did not shake. Sponge was tough.

  The Pit stretched West from the Edgware Road almost to Queensway. It was one of the first new landmarks of the third World War, now dragging into its fourth year. The ruins of Paddington station lay within its deep and jagged embrace.

  It was by no means just a very large crater. The close-patterned high explosives which had caused it had created a veritable new landscape, intricate and indefinable. There were crazy hills here, some of which concealed whole blocks of flats; there were valleys, with waterways formed in old underground railways. There were acres of barrenness without two bricks on top of each other; and there were rows of buildings which still stood, though they let in rain and moonlight. The whole was peppered and pocked by stunted greenery, or waste paper which blew endlessly round the Pit as if in search of escape.

  The Pit had its own population. The delinks, young delinquents in revolt against the world, congregated here from all over London. This was their hole, their hell, their home.

  Now it was almost dark. The plundered lorry slowed to walking pace, bumping over debris until it came to a garage with splintered doors. It rolled in, and Taggy switched off the ignition. The two boys jumped out, cold now the excitement was over.

  ‘Nobody didn’t even attempt to follow us,’ Taggy said.

  ‘Course not,’ Sponge said. ‘Even if the cops knew we came in here, they wouldn’t follow. They know the sort of welcome they’d get in the Pit. Until they get enough men to mop this place up proper – and that won’t be till after the war – we’re safe as anything. You aren’t scared are you, Taggers boy?’

  ‘Scared? Me?’ Taggy said, and laughed shortly.

  They dived into a pile of rubble, pushing through two concealed doors covered in sacking and so came into a subterranean tunnel, its roof crudely shored up with timber.

  ‘Sponge and Taggy,’ Sponge announced to the child at the far end of the tunnel who crouched, concealed in a haze of cigarette smoke, behind a sub-machine gun. He ordered them forward. They passed him and went through another door.

  This was the club room. Of all the many and often warring gangs in the Pit, the Ed Gang, to which Sponge and Taggy belonged, was the biggest and best organised. Ten stolen TV sets flickered here, bold beat music sounded, a bar dispensed a variety of drinks. Women were here, dancing and laughing or kissing in corners – hard women of ten and eleven with made-up pans and crumpled nylon underwear. Their bright clothes contrasted with the blacks and khakis worn universally by the male delinks. Their little voices were as ugly sharp as old razor blades.

  One of the women, Ilford Lil, called out to Sponge.

  ‘I’ll be back, honey,’ he called, not pausing. ‘I gotta report in to Ed or he’ll shoot me. See you.’

  He had not smiled at Ilford Lil. His face never wore an expression. He was even learning to speak without moving his mouth. He had in his mind a little picture like a cold point of fire of what he was going to do with Ilford Lil when he had seen Ed; Sponge also made love with as little expression as possible.

  Hunching up his shoulders, he pushed a way for himself and Taggy over to a far door, struck it grudgingly with his knuckles, and barged in. The door swung to behind him; carved deep onto it was the single syllable ED and, beneath the syllable, the sign of the cross.

  The pocket corvette Sherbourne Drive lay silent, moored to the lee of Westminster Bridge. When the drunk strolled up to it, humming to himself, and threw a bottle top onto its deck, the noise was startingly loud. The sentry rose from his seat in the bows and said, ‘Hey, you, clear off! How did you get in there? Don’t you know this is a restricted area?’

  ‘Never heard of ’em,’ said the drunk with conviction, although five minutes earlier he had scaled a twenty foot wall with hook and rope. He moved on down the river’s edge. During the brief exchange of words, when from the waterline his body was silhouetted against the dark sky, the sentry had received a heavy, Chinese-type throwing knife in his back.

  As he collapsed onto the deck, three small figures hauled themselves dripping aboard the corvette. The drunk, still busily acting his part, moved further up the embankment and was lost to human ken until he reported back to gang HQ two hours later.

  ‘Nice throwing, Chuck,’ Tom Toolbag whispered.

  Chuck the Chucker nodded without speaking as he retrieved his knife from the sentry’s body. He was a handsome boy of fifteen and a half who had left home to avoid the universal call-up which would otherwise have taken him to the Ural battlefields six months ago. Now he stooped, tried on the naval peaked cap, and dropped it over board disgustedly when it proved too big for him.

  Bent double, the three of them crept to the narrow companionway, plunging down it in a bunch, ready for trouble. But the week’s watch they had previously kept on the corvette had not been for nothing; the ship, as they had suspected, was empty apart from the dead sentry.

  With the blackout door in place behind them, Chuck switched on a torch and found the lights. Tom and Frogseyes, who was nine, looked at each other in evident relief and lit up reefers, puffing deeply.

  ‘Never mind smoking,’ Chuck said, pulling out a large sheet of paper, unfolding it and spreading it on a table. ‘Here’s the list and pictures of all the instruments Ed wants us to collect. Get your blowers out and get cracking. We’ve got … just over a hundred minutes before Barney comes by to pick us up. And if we ain’t ready, Barney won’t wait.’

  They broke up, each producing oxy-acetylene cutters and goggles. Working amateurishly but keenly, they began to demolish various items about the little ship, detectors, indicators, compass, a Hevison heater, signal equipment, even a fuelling pump. As the equipment piled up at the foot of the companionway, the immaculate under-deck order was replaced by chaos.

  Finally, they turned off all illumination bar Chuck’s torch and formed a human chain to move all equipment topside. Their timing was good.
They had the loot stacked on deck and were taking a breather of damp night air when a subdued toot sounded alongside.

  ‘That’s my lovely boy!’ Chuck exclaimed. ‘Good old Barney. He’d slit your throat but he’d never let you down.’

  The shape of a motor boat riding without lights could just be discerned against the oily glimmer of the water. It bumped into the Sherbourne Drive and a line snaked up to them. Frogseyes heard it strike, ran and got his foot on it; Chuck secured it to the rail.

  ‘Let’s have the kitty, kids,’ Barney called to them in a husky whisper. ‘Sharp’s the word. River’s swarming with ruddy patrol boats.’

  They lowered the stuff bit by bit over the side to him. He placed it methodically on sacking at his feet. When they had cleared the deck, the three of them slid over and jumped into the motor boat.

  ‘Sogging good timing,’ Chuck said. ‘Ten minutes before the new sentry comes aboard and discovers the dead ’un. Get her weaving, Barney.’

  ‘Hold tight,’ Barney commanded, casting off. With a surge of power, they began to rock up-river. A small police boat, which had lain unobserved in the shadow of the corvette, launched itself sturdily in pursuit of them.

  They flicked under two bridges and spun, under Barney’s show-off expertise, up a muddy side creek, where Barney moored and swarmed up a vertical ladder in the quayside. A crate, lowered on block and tackle, loomed out of the night and settled onto the deck of the motor boat. When the stolen equipment had been piled into it, Chuck the Chucker and his two underlings climbed up the ladder. In a few minutes, the crate was up on the dock and loaded into a waiting convertible.

  The four of them huddled together in the blackness. Barney was a big fourteenager who stunk proudly like an animal.

  ‘We got to wait till we get a flash from the dock gates,’ he said. ‘Lot of ruddy flat feet about tonight.’

  This was one of the very few stretches of the London Thames still remaining in private hands. Most of it had been nationalised under pressure of war and harboured some secret waterborne enterprise. In this strange global conflict where, after four years of war, both sides still hesitated to launch the first hydrogen bombs for fear of immediate reprisals, the sea had grown into more of a battlefield than anyone could have visualised a decade before.

  As they waited, another figure climbed from the riverline and, under cover of darkness, stowed himself efficiently on the luggage rack on the convertible roof.

  ‘Shut up stamping your feet, Frogseyes,’ Chuck commanded. ‘I thought I heard something.’

  ‘I’m cold,’ the young delink complained.

  ‘You’re scared, you mean. This is the last job you come out on, my boy. From now on it’s guarding the perimeter of the Pit for you.’

  ‘Okay, stow the gab, Chuck,’ Barney said. ‘There’s the blinker. Get aboard jildy.’

  They piled in on top of each other. Barney started her up and they purred towards the gates, one of which swung open to let them through. Barney waved to a vaguely glimpsed face and then they were swinging out among a dark line of traffic. Twenty-five minutes later, they bumped into the Pit. Barney edged the vehicle into the shelter of what had once been a cinema and climbed out.

  ‘Tom, you and Frogseyes can mizzle now,’ Chuck said authoritatively. ‘Me and Barney’s going to report to Ed that the mission’s completed. Go on, scarper.’

  The two young delinks began to argue. Barney cut them short.

  ‘Like the gentleman said, badger off,’ he ordered. They faded without another word; Barney’s temper was something one did not care to disturb. The two seniors, not speaking to each other again, headed for the club room. Chuck slicked his hair back with a comb as he went. By the time the detective had climbed off the roof of the convertible and faded into the shadows, Barney and Chuck were pushing through the door with the sign of the cross on it.

  The missions to which Sponge, Chuck the Chucker and Barney had been assigned were mere strolls in a garden compared with the job Tubby Turner had been landed with. He had been one of Ed’s most faithful disciples, and one of the first. On Ed’s prompting, he was one of the few delinks not to evade the call-up. A young man of eighteen, Tubby had now been in Satellite Service for three years, and wore two blazes on each shoulder. Nobody knew of the other outfit he secretly served.

  He stood now, sweat beading his upper lip, in an underground station in Peary Land, North Greenland. This refinery produced, from local minerals, many of the chemicals needed for the handful of men who, in austerity and discomfort, peered down on the warring globe from distances of three hundred to a thousand miles away – the chemicals needed to sustain life in those flimsy metal bubbles, the chemicals to lift the men up there and down again.

  Man had reached space. The satellites Russia had first placed in the sky in 1957 had been superceded by others capable of carrying men. But the men crouched with their eyes turned – not outwards to the moon, the planets, the stars – but down to the battered cities and the enemy positions.

  ‘You can nip off if you like now, Bert,’ Tubby said to his underling. He sat in the seat of a fuelling tractor now being filled from a wall cock labelled ‘H2O2’ in red.

  ‘Well, if you don’t want me … thanks a lot,’ Bert said. He headed off down the corridor towards the living quarters, already fishing in his pocket for the inevitable pack of cigarettes. Tubby Turner waited till he had gone, then slipped from the tractor.

  Dodging under the thick pipe which carried the hydrogen peroxide from the great reserve tank, Tubby unlatched a small inspection cover from the wall. Inside, the pumping equipment gleamed. Tubby hoisted his little time bomb from the tractor and set it down carefully beside the pumps. He activated it, glancing at his wrist watch. It was 0414 hours. He had twenty minutes before the place went up.

  Putting the cover back in place, he glanced at the tractor gauges; the mobile fueller was now over three-quarters full. Tubby broke the cocks and disconnected the feed, not stopping to watch the piping snap back into the wall. Travelling at the regulation 10 miles per hour, he moved down the corridor and rounded the corner in the direction of the vehicle exit. The sentry at the double doors nodded to Tubby and swung them back on their hinges. The tractor forged ahead up a long sloping tunnel. Snorting, it emerged above ground and pulled onto the level.

  It was a fine, still night, thirty below, the stars gliding overhead like wolf eyes. Infra-red kept the great landing field clear of ice, mock-window rendered it undetectable from the air. Three planes of the Moonwatch Patrol stood on the tarmac, awaiting only their cargoes of H2O2 before they set off for the Arctic base codename Baby Bengal up by the pole. At Bengal, the cargo they unshipped would shoot another observer up to those metal ledges high above the world.

  Those metal ledges, falling perpetually at three miles a second or faster, maintained the perilous status quo below. Their observers watched and waited to order instant retaliation should hydrogen bombs be dropped. So the nations killed one another slowly with explosive bombs instead.

  Tubby drove the fuelling tractor out to the further plane, an Arnheim, sounding his hooter as he drew up by the loading bay. 0428 hours.

  The bay half-opened, and the solitary guard looked out. His mouth gaped in a luxuriously vulgar yawn.

  ‘Where’s Bert?’ he asked.

  ‘He didn’t feel so good. I sent him off,’ Tubby replied.

  ‘Crafty devil. He owed me a quid. No wonder he felt bad. He knew I was on here tonight.’

  ‘Open her up, will you?’ Tubby said, unable to keep a note of tension from his voice. 0430 hours. Four minutes more.

  The doors rolled open about him, the ramp uncurled. The guard came down the slope, shivering and buttoning up his snug suit, yawning again, scratching his skull.

  ‘Take-off isn’t till six-thirty,’ he said. ‘You’re early, Tubby. Funny how everything you do in the services has to take place at some ungodly hour of the night. What a bloody ill-organised war it is, to be sure!’


  Tubby let in the clutch, taking the tractor up the slope and moving into the aircraft. Here, he had only to back the massive tanks on the rear of the tractor into the great wall clips and secure them. This done, he paused; on this flight, the tractor was needed too, or would be at the other end. He looked out of the door. The guard was stretching, indulging in one last jaw-cracking yawn.

  0434 hours. The explosion sounded muffled. From the distant mound under which the buildings lay came a languid black puff of smoke. It subsided for a moment, then began to roll out with increased vigour. The damage, in actual fact, would not be great, and was intended merely as a diversion but from here it looked impressive.

  ‘Hey, serious trouble over there!’ the guard shouted. ‘Look! Someone’s dropped a fag end in the fuel.’

  ‘Or the enemy have got our range at last,’ Tubby suggested, running down the slope. As he came up to the other, he hit him smartly over the head with his service revolver. Then he turned and doubled back into the Arnheim.

  He rolled in the ramp, he closed the doors, he roughly secured the tractor in place by jamming it to one side and tying it with webbing. He raced forward and climbed into the pilot’s seat.

  The rest was comparatively simple for him. He had flown these jobs in his training days. As he roared down the take-off lane, a flicker of fire caught his eye in the speeding dark outside: it looked as if his little bomb had been effective.

  At two thousand feet, he switched on the missile warp, rendering him safe from interception. His heart began to clatter less furiously. Wiping his face, Tubby headed South, climbing all the time. He had a rendezvous with Ed – a rendezvous it had taken three years and a lot of faith to keep.

  ***

  Detective sergeant ‘Cords’ Corduroy plodded into his superior’s office, a file under his arm, with only the most perfunctory of taps on the door. He drew up short. Talking to Inspector Arundall was a neat, severe man in a suit so deeply grey it was black; as Cords entered, he turned his head and fixed Cords with a harpoon-like stare.