The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  Cords staggered to his feet. The revolver was instantly aiming at his stomach.

  ‘I can easily find another prophet to cry my name if you play the fool again,’ Ed said. ‘Quickly, Sponge, pull yourself together: the wire, boy.’

  Moving in a daze, Sponge fetched the wire and lashed Cords’ hands behind his back.

  ‘Better,’ Ed approved. ‘We’ll leave him up here, I think, till blast off, out of harm’s way. He may never get nearer to Heaven.’

  ‘My arm,’ Cords protested. ‘It needs attention.’

  ‘Nobody ever bleeds in vain,’ Ed said. He laughed suddenly, an ugly noise like a pitcher breaking. ‘Secure him to that auxiliary door and tie this rag in his mouth.’

  Trembling slightly, Sponge did as he was told. Ed surveyed the handiwork, pronounced it good and led the way out. Cords heard them go through the sleeping chamber and climb the ladder. He heard them pass through the control room and out onto the platform of the lift. He heard a thud, followed by a long and terrible scream, which rose – and ceased with the suddenness of a dream.

  Silence, then a fearful clatter and thump, and Sponge was back in the engine room, standing wildly before him

  ‘I done him,’ he shouted. ‘I clocked him one with my chain. He was mad, real stark, staring, raving crackers! I only just cottoned on. He’d have killed us all soon as look at us. I had to do it, mister.’

  As he spoke, he was tearing Cords’ gag away, wrenching at the looped wire.

  ‘You got to help me!’ he said to Cords. ‘The others – Barney and Chuck and all the lot, will be up for me in a minute. You can talk to them! You got to tell ’em why I did it, how Ed was crazy, how he thought he was God.’

  ‘I’m going to tell them this rocket is crazy,’ Cords said. ‘None of you are anything but amateurs. There must be a thousand factors you will have overlooked. This damn machine will kill you all if you try to raise it. You’ll never reach the first cloud, never mind Venus.’

  He winced as his hands were freed, and headed unsteadily for the ladder.

  ‘The rocket’s got to go,’ Sponge said. ‘It’ll go. We’ll be OK without Ed. We can’t stay here.’

  ‘It won’t go. It’ll blow up, you little fool. Ed was no astronaut. None of you are proper engineers. This is just a dangerous toy you’ve built.’

  He was in the control room now. Looking round, he spotted the shortwave radio. It was Army stock, filched from a Bevan tank. As he sat down in front of it, the lift sank away outside the open hatch; shouts rose from below. The wolf pack was gathering.

  ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’ Sponge cried. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Shut the hatch, man, what are you thinking about?’ Cords said. ‘I’m going to contact Scotland Yard and get the squads here fast.’

  He had not opened up and begun calling before Sponge was on him. The flailing padlock, missing Cords’ skull, cracked against his shoulder. Deliberately, he flung himself backwards, feeling the wind whistle out of Sponge’s lungs with the impact.

  ‘They’ll … kill … us … both,’ Sponge gasped, rolling from under Cords. As he spoke, the grim figure of Barney nursing a Jadder gun rose to a standstill, framed in the oval hatchway.

  ‘Get up, the pair of you!’ he said. He was crying; the light of his world had gone out. ‘Killing’s too good for you!’

  ‘Barney! It wasn’t me! It was him! – It was him – he’s a copper! ‘Sponge shouted, dashing forward, The machine gun barked. He nearly reached Barney’s feet, his fingers groping forward on the deck.

  Cords did not move. He closed his eyes and waited. There was not long to wait.

  The Ark, with Barney in control, blasted off according to schedule with eleven girls and fourteen boys aboard her. As the first space ship, she was a shining example of what fanaticism can achieve. With her take-off, she obliterated almost half the Pit: with her crash landing, five seconds later, she obliterated the other half.

  Blighted Profile

  Yalleranda sat in the Vale of Apple Trees, watching the old man on a horse. She was eight, and rode the treetop branch as gracefully as the old man sat the white stallion. Spying became her; when she was looking at the old man, unsuspected tensions added maturity to her face; an indefinable, alarming, compelling expression of agelessness showed through her childish prettiness. She was in love with something she had only just found, something she saw in the old man, that nobody else in the world could see.

  His name was Turan Hwa. This much Yalleranda had heard from the people of the village. Anything else she knew about him, she knew only through observation.

  The white stallion had climbed Blighted Profile every morning of the last week, picking its way among boulders still seared by the ancient heat of devastation. It climbed until the black stretch dropped away to one side, while on the other, a hollow wave full of sweetness, rose the Vale. Here the stallion halted, cropping grass, leaving Turan Hwa perched in the big saddle like a pulpit, able to look over the two worlds of good and bad earth.

  On these occasions, Yalleranda climbed higher up the slope, moving as silently as blue moonlight among the apple trees, until she came to the last apple tree, whose embryo fruits, as yet no bigger than tonsils, were the loftiest in the Vale. Here she was so near to the old figure cut out of the blue sky above the Profile that she could hear his robes rustle in the breeze. She could almost hear his thoughts.

  Young men think about the women they will love, old men about the women they have loved; but Turan Hwa was older than that, and he thought about Philosophy.

  ‘I have lived ninety years,’ he thought, ‘and my bones are growing thin as smoke. Yet something remains to be done. An essence of me still remains inside: my innermost heart; and that is as it was when I was a child. It is wonderful to think that after all the wars and cataclysms of my life, I am yet myself; a continuity has been preserved. Yet what am I? How can I know? I only know that when I think of what I am, I am disturbed and dissatisfied. If only I could round off my life properly …’

  He looked about him, screwing up his withered cheeks to assist the stiff muscles of his eyes.

  Falling away to his left lay the Vale of Apple Trees. Turan Hwa saw the stream at the bottom of it, pushing brooks like snail trails up the slope; a village grew and twittered and slumbered beside the stream. This, Turan Hwa liked to think of as the present.

  Falling away to his right were the burned lands, and these he thought of as the past. The naturally fertile landscape had had the fertility burned irreparably out of it, as the bottom is burned out of a pot. The weapons of man had become as fearsome as the Hand of God. Nothing lived, except two giant machines which had met in the black valley; they lay now, locked together, sides streaked with rust, each slowly and hatelessly demolishing the other.

  This was the good thing for which Turan Hwa rode to sit on the very nose of Blighted Profile; he could see from here both past and present. It was like looking at the two sides of the nature of man, the black and the green.

  ‘Existence has become too terrible,’ he thought. ‘The bad side must never emerge again. Never.’

  But he had no means of knowing how long ‘never’ might be. That was why he wanted to go into the future.

  So he sat there for a long time, wondering about life and death. The little girl watched him, like a bird looking at a stone, wondering why it is a stone.

  There is no answer to the bird’s problem.

  Turan Hwa eventually ate a small meal from porcelain bowls packed in a china box.

  ‘Hup, now, Leg of Leather!’ he called, when he had packed the bowls away, and the stallion began at once to carry him back home. The Vale sank below the high ridge. They jogged down the black side of Blighted Profile, jogged among the hard-boiled boulders, through the little landslides of dust and crystals, down, down, onto the arid plain.

  The ground was like a scab. Occasionally Leg of Leather’s hoofs went through the crust. Skirting the machines locked in frigid b
attle, the stallion crossed the width of desolation, climbed a low slope, and came among trees. Far behind – cautiously and involuntarily – Yalleranda followed. This was the first time she had ever left the Vale of the Apple Trees so far behind.

  ‘Nearly home now, Leg of Leather,’ Turan Hwa said, as they emerged from the wood.

  Ahead, the country grew green, parkland as trim and bright as a sunshade. When Turan Hwa approached, a section of it about an acre in extent appeared to change. Curious illusions grew in the air, shapes formed, mists moved. Curtains of molecules lifted higher and higher into the air, like fountains newly switched on; the molecules twisted, misted, glittered, frosted – and formed mirrors, one behind the other, interpenetrating, weaving, defining the rooms of Turan Hwa’s summer home.

  He could see himself on fifty planes, approaching himself on his own white horse.

  By the time he came up to the house, all of its walls were entirely opaque, as they would appear to any visitor. Coaxing the stallion, Turan Hwa rode in. Without pausing at his own quarters, he rode slowly through the house to see his wife, Wangust Ilsont.

  She was busily integrating with two servants when he appeared. Dismissing them, she came toward him as they clicked off. Her leopard, Coily, was beside her; she rested a hand on it for support. Age had her in its web. Only her eyes were not grey.

  ‘I have not seen you for a week, husband,’ she said gently, taking the bridle in her hand as Coily and Leg of Leather touched muzzles. ‘At our time of life, that is too long. What have you been doing?’

  ‘Thinking, my love, only thinking and regretting. In this weather, it’s an agreeable enough pastime.’

  ‘Please dismount, Hwa,’ Wangust said anxiously.

  When he had climbed down beside her, she said, ‘You are unsettled in yourself. This should never be, now. We have no reason or time to be anything but at peace with ourselves. For a decade, we have had only tranquillity; you must allow me to do what I can to remedy the change in you.’

  Turan Hwa led her to a bank which shaped itself comfortably about them as they sat down.

  ‘There has never been a woman like you in any age, Wangust,’ he said gently. ‘What we have been to each other can never be told. I can speak out to you now as freely as ever, because we shall not allow ourselves to drift away from each other just because we sense the approaching hounds of death.’

  He had no way of guessing how these words played on a hidden listener, the small girl who had felt compelled to follow him across the plain.

  ‘My dear, I feel we have been too absorbed in each other,’ Turan Hwa said gravely. ‘It is a fault.’

  ‘We live in a difficult time,’ his wife replied, ‘Our love has always been our strength.’

  ‘Yes; the blind man sees no danger. I have spent the last few mornings up on Blighted Profile, overlooking my own life. I discover that I have been a refugee from reality. Your life has been an inspiration, an adventure; mine has been a walk in your shadow. In your time machines, you went back to the period before the great war, rescuing animals and plants – and me. You almost certainly saved my life by transporting me from my own terrible age. You worked heroically, while I … hid … hid … from the first obligation of man, which is to face the evil of his own time – in which evil he must always be to some extent involved.’

  ‘This has become your time,’ Wangust said. ‘Besides, a man has no obligations, except to fulfil the best side of his nature. Who would have instructed our ten children if you had not done so? Where would I have drawn the strength to do what I have done, if not from you? We have worked together, my husband, accomplishing much.’

  ‘If I have been of use, it has been accidentally,’ Turan Hwa said, a note of querulousness in his voice. ‘You cannot deceive me, Wangust, however lovingly you try. While I still have breath, I must justify myself. Though I am old, there must still be something I can grasp. I am a poor thing in my own eyes.’

  He stood before her, his feet apart, hands clasped behind his back. Wangust recalled his standing like that when his hair was black, long ago. The attitude, she thought, expressed something steadfast in him; she wanted to tell him, ‘You are Turan Hwa; you do not have to do, only be,’ but she knew that in his present mood he would dismiss this with scorn. Men could be harder than leopards to handle.

  She stood up.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said simply, laying a hand on his arm.

  Bidding the leopard stay where it was, she led Turan Hwa through the house to their flying machine. She coaxed him in.

  ‘We are going to fly,’ she said, smiling.

  He shook his head impatiently, still rather petulant.

  ‘You know I wish to talk, my dear. I have not even told you what I am intending to do. I intend to try and travel into the future.’

  She sighed. ‘One can only travel into the past, and come back only to the present. There is no future; it is unmade, a bridge unbuilt. Tomorrow does not exist until tomorrow. This has been proven.’

  He set his lips. The Solites, the tribe into which he had married, could be a stubborn people. But he could be stubborn too; it was, he found, one of the few abilities which did not fade with age.

  ‘I shall visit the future,’ he repeated.

  Wangust laughed. ‘Let us fly a little before you go.’

  On Yalleranda, listening, Turan Hwa’s statement had a different effect. She slid discreetly but excitedly away. Now she knew how to catch her marvellous old man when next he rode over to Blighted Profile. As she hurried off, the flying machine rose silently into the air.

  It rose vertically, like an elevator.

  As Wangust and Turan Hwa watched, the great house faded beneath them, ebbing into invisibility. More and more landscape came to view. In a moment they were stationary, five miles up. To one side, the square of green below them was chopped by the black tract of the burned lands, but to the other, a stretch of fertile land extended into the distance.

  Wangust pointed down at the fertile landscape.

  ‘That is our work,’ she said quietly. ‘When we came here, that land was virtually dead. Do you remember it, as black as desert? In the midst of it, we established seeds, insects, birds, animals. Slowly they have carried that green wave farther and farther out. Death has been turned into life. We turned it. One day soon, that green fringe will join with the green fringe from the coast, where the new city is. Looking at it, can you still say we have accomplished nothing? Could we have accomplished anything better?’

  He said nothing. Suddenly he felt tired and peevish.

  Knowing him well enough not to press him, Wangust moved away, sighing. At once, as she had anticipated, he turned to her and apologised for his rudeness.

  ‘Let there be no breach between us,’ Wangust said. ‘Look, a ship is coming up from the coast!’

  They watched through unkeen eyes the oblate spheroid which grew in the sky. It flashed a recognition signal at them, flicked into a change of course, dived, and unrolled behind it one long, white vapour breaker down the clean air. Then it touched them, and was motionless.

  Next second, Cobalt Illa projected herself before her grandparents. They were merely irritated by her exhibition of airmanship.

  ‘I was on my way to visit you,’ Cobalt declared, kissing the topmost wrinkle on Turan Hwa’s forehead.

  ‘Then why not come decently by transmatter, instead of indulging in acrobatics?’ Turan Hwa asked.

  ‘Flying’s all the rage in New Union, granf,’ Cobalt said airily. She was thirty. She was beautiful, but with the unforgiving look of an actress who has played Cleopatra too often.

  ‘How’s the city coming along?’ Wangust asked dutifully.

  ‘You should come and see for yourself,’ replied Cobalt sternly, relenting at once to add, ‘because it is going to be so fine; it will be the greatest city in the world. The bad days are gone. The Solites can cease to think of themselves as savages; by the end of this season, the first reading schools will be in opera
tion.’

  Turan Hwa turned sadly away. It seemed he had spent his life turning sadly away, but now all the confidence and drive manifest in his granddaughter daunted him.

  ‘Reading is a two-edged weapon,’ he muttered.

  ‘Our people must read,’ Cobalt said. ‘Less than one per cent of the population is literate.’

  ‘A semi-literate population falls prey to any petty dictator who arises,’ Turan Hwa said.

  ‘An illiterate population falls prey to itself,’ Cobalt said.

  She stood confronting him, feet slightly apart, hands clasped behind her back, in an unconscious imitation of one of his attitudes. ‘She might look impressive to anyone who did not know her,’ the old man thought. Of all his granddaughters, this was the one he found most trying – for this was the one who had most of himself in her.

  ‘You are mouthing parroted phrases,’ he said. ‘The Solites are a happy people, Cobalt.’

  ‘New Union will be a happy city – creatively happy. We are barbarians with inherited machines; should we try to be nothing more?’ She turned to her grandmother for agreement. ‘What do you say? Haven’t we all vegetated long enough? Someone must rebuild the world.’

  ‘Don’t bring me into it, dear,’ Wangust said. ‘The future is with your generation. You must decide.’

  ‘We have decided. Power has been with the indolent for too long. In New Union, everyone will live, and learn – and dance!’

  ‘Then let us go home and not argue,’ Wangust said.

  They went home, but they argued. It was a time of transition. Between the generations lay gulfs of age and outlook. The old thought that the young were reckless; the young, that the old were hidebound. The same pattern had appeared down the ages. No agreement was possible, only truce; change was in the air, manifesting itself as discomfort.