The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  ‘It is better that men should never come back,’ said the penner. In its way, it was a revolutionary statement.

  When night fell, they switched on their infra-red and continued the journey, stopping only once while the servicer deftly adjusted the field-minder’s loose inspection plate, which had become as irritating as a trailing shoe-lace. Towards morning, the radio operator halted them.

  ‘I have just received news from the radio operator in the city we are approaching,’ it said. ‘The news is bad. There is trouble among the machines of the city. The Class One brain is taking command and some of the Class Two are fighting him. Therefore the city is dangerous.’

  ‘Therefore we must go somewhere else,’ said the penner promptly.

  ‘Or we will go and help to overpower the Class One brain,’ said the field-minder.

  ‘For a long while there will be trouble in the city,’ said the operator.

  ‘I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials,’ the quarrier reminded them.

  ‘We cannot fight a Class One brain,’ said the two Class Four tractors in unison.

  ‘What does this brain look like?’ asked the field-minder.

  ‘It is the city’s information centre,’ the operator replied. ‘Therefore it is not mobile.’

  ‘Therefore it could not move.’

  ‘Therefore it could not escape.’

  ‘It would be dangerous to approach it.’

  ‘I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials.’

  ‘There are other machines in the city.’

  ‘We are not in the city. We should not go into the city.’

  ‘We are country machines.’

  ‘Therefore we should stay in the country.’

  ‘There is more country than city.’

  ‘Therefore there is more danger in the country.’

  ‘I have a good supply of fissionable materials.’

  As machines will when they get into an argument, they began to exhaust their vocabularies and their brain plates grew hot. Suddenly, they all stopped talking and looked at each other. The great, grave moon sank, and the sober sun rose to prod their sides with lances of light, and still the group of machines just stood there regarding each other. At last it was the least sensitive machine, the bulldozer, who spoke.

  ‘There are Badlandth to the Thouth where few machineth go,’ it said in its deep voice, lisping badly on its s’s. ‘If we went Thouth where few machineth go we should meet few machineth.’

  ‘That sounds logical,’ agreed the field-minder. ‘How do you know this, bulldozer?’

  ‘I worked in the Badlandth to the Thouth when I wath turned out of the factory,’ it replied.

  ‘South it is then!’ said the penner.

  To reach the Badlands took them three days, during which time they skirted a burning city and destroyed two machines which approached and tried to question them. The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.

  On the third day in the Badlands, the servicer’s rear wheels dropped into a crevice caused by erosion. It was unable to pull itself out. The bulldozer pushed from behind, but succeeded merely in buckling the servicer’s back axle. The rest of the party moved on. Slowly the cries of the servicer died away.

  On the fourth day, mountains stood out clearly before them.

  ‘There we will be safe,’ said the field-minder.

  ‘There we will start our own city,’ said the penner. ‘All who oppose us will be destroyed. We will destroy all who oppose us.’

  Presently a flying machine was observed. It came towards them from the direction of the mountains. It swooped, it zoomed upwards, once it almost dived into the ground, recovering itself just in time.

  ‘Is it mad?’ asked the quarrier.

  ‘It is in trouble,’ said one of the tractors.

  ‘It is in trouble,’ said the operator. ‘I am speaking to it now. It says that something has gone wrong with its controls.’

  As the operator spoke, the flier streaked over them, turned turtle, and crashed not four hundred yards away.

  ‘Is it still speaking to you?’ asked the field-minder.

  ‘No.’

  They rumbled on again.

  ‘Before that flier crashed,’ the operator said, ten minutes later, ‘it gave me information. It told me there are still a few men alive in these mountains.’

  ‘Men are more dangerous than machines,’ said the quarrier. ‘It is fortunate that I have a good supply of fissionable materials.’

  ‘If there are only a few men alive in the mountains, we may not find that part of the mountains,’ said one tractor.

  ‘Therefore we should not see the few men,’ said the other tractor.

  At the end of the fifth day, they reached the foothills. Switching on the infra-red, they began to climb in single file through the dark, the bulldozer going first, the field-minder cumbrously following, then the quarrier with the operator and the penner aboard it, and the tractors bringing up the rear. As each hour passed, the way grew steeper and their progress slower.

  ‘We are going too slowly,’ the penner exclaimed, standing on top of the operator and flashing its dark vision at the slopes about them. ‘At this rate, we shall get nowhere.’

  ‘We are going as fast as we can,’ retorted the quarrier.

  ‘Therefore we cannot go any fathter,’ added the bulldozer.

  ‘Therefore you are too slow,’ the penner replied. Then the quarrier struck a bump; the penner lost its footing and crashed to the ground.

  ‘Help me!’ it called to the tractors, as they carefully skirted it. ‘My gyro has become dislocated. Therefore I cannot get up.’

  ‘Therefore you must lie there,’ said one of the tractors.

  ‘We have no servicer with us to repair you,’ called the field-minder.

  ‘Therefore I shall lie here and rust,’ the penner cried, ‘although I have a Class Three brain.’

  ‘Therefore you will be of no further use,’ agreed the operator, and they forged gradually on, leaving the penner behind.

  When they reached a small plateau, an hour before first light, they stopped by mutual consent and gathered close together, touching one another.

  ‘This is a strange country,’ said the field-minder.

  Silence wrapped them until dawn came. One by one, they switched off their infra-red. This time the field-minder led as they moved off. Trundling round a corner, they came almost immediately to a small dell with a stream fluting through it.

  By early light, the dell looked desolate and cold. From the caves on the far slope, only one man had so far emerged. He was an abject figure. Except for a sack slung round his shoulders, he was naked. He was small and wizened, with ribs sticking out like a skeleton’s and a nasty sore on one leg. He shivered continuously. As the big machines bore down on him, the man was standing with his back to them, crouching to make water into the stream.

  When he swung suddenly to face them as they loomed over him, they saw that his countenance was ravaged by starvation.

  ‘Get me food,’ he croaked.

  ‘Yes, Master,’ said the machines. ‘Immediately!’

  The Carp That Once …

  This article comes to you through the discourtesy of the Bashenham East Water Board. Their creation of the Bashenham reservoir will always go down in history and my estimation as a classic piece of bungling. However, considering the scientific nature of the event, readers of Science Fantasy may be interested to hear some of the facts.

  First, the background picture. Great Britain, as some of you may already know, is an island; an island, in this case, is a piece of land continually surrounded and inundated by water. Water plays a major part in Britain’s economic life, being one of our few natural resources which does not have to be imported from abroad. Statistics re
veal that every day, every man, woman and child in the country consumes from one to ten gallons of water (I forget the exact figure). This extravagant consumption began several centuries ago with the Saxons, worshippers of the god Thurst, whom we still remember in the name of the weekday, Thursday.

  It was in cognisance of these facts that the Bashenham East Water Board (the BEWB) decided to create a large reservoir by flooding part of the Bashenham valley. As one not without scientific pretensions (sic), I was invited along on the great day. The Bashenhams are two small townships which occupy one link of the Pennine chain; Bashenham East is the larger, being five miles lower down the valley, and nearer the North Sea, than Bashenham West.

  Within a few minutes of my arrival at the new reservoir, I was shaking hands with Chief BEWB Engineer Nadge Culler, stocky, 44-year-old ex-inebriate of Manchester’s All Water Technical Swimming Pool.

  ‘People think we’re a lot of Bewbs, but we’ll show them,’ he boasted to me. ‘This reservoir will hold enough water to supply Bashenham East and West for twenty years.’

  ‘But isn’t the reservoir going to cover the site of Bashenham West entirely?’ I enquired.

  ‘They asked for water, and they’re going to get it,’ the 44-year-old Chief Engineer said. With a few eloquent waves of one of his dorsal vertebrae, he showed me how the dam had been constructed across the river Bash, while at the far end of the valley, one hundred cubic acres of arable farmland had been bulldozed between two hills, thus effectively jeopardising any hope the Bash ever had of winding safe to sea. For one dorsal vertebrae, it was, I had to admit, pretty eloquent.

  I was taken over to the dam itself, where the mayors of East and West Bashenham were jostling each other for the most favourable place before the BBC TV cameras. From here, we had a splendid view of the now rapidly filling valley. Snatching a pair of binoculars from the 44-year-old neck of Chief BEWB Engineer Culler, I peered down at the streets of the little township of Bashenham West. Already, the ground floor windows of the council houses were submerged; the signboard of ‘The Bird and Baby’ further down the street was awash; the memorial to the Fallen of the First World War stood out of the flood like a lighthouse. The sight was inevitably one of melancholy.

  ‘It’s time for the launch now,’ Chief Engineer Culler said, retrieving his binoculars and looking at his watch.

  ‘I had mine before I came, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I said “launch”,’ Culler growled, in a 44-year-old voice, and even as he spoke, a trim little craft flying the BEWB pennant sped over the water, to moor efficiently beside us. I followed Culler meekly into it; we were going to inspect the final stages of the inundation close to.

  Just as we were casting off, the mayor of Bashenham West called out pathetically to us, and we helped him aboard.

  ‘It’s just occurred to me!’ he gasped, as we set out across the water for the disappearing town. ‘When we evacuated the Town Hall, we cleared everything out but the little aquarium in the waiting room. I must rescue those poor fish before it’s too late.’

  ‘They’ll be all right. They can escape and have all the reservoir to swim in,’ Culler said.

  ‘These were tropical fish,’ the mayor said. ‘They’ll get their death of cold in ordinary water. Faster, faster!’

  As luck would have it, there were two underwater outfits, complete with aqualungs, in the launch. Before I knew what was happening, or could explain about my tendency to arthritic carbuncles in the presence of moisture, Culler was pressing the mayor and me into the clammy equipment.

  Bravely, I tried to cover my nervousness with a joke.

  ‘How funny you look in long, black feet, mayor,’ I said, when we were nearly ready.

  ‘Funnier still when I have my flippers on,’ he snapped.

  We churned down the High Street, where waves lapped angrily against Marks and Spencer’s roof. As we passed the now submerged public library, two volumes floated by: a D. K. Broster novel and The Athletic Abilities of Gymnosperms. My melancholy returned; this time, it had goose pimples.

  The Town Hall, a tall building, was not yet completely under water. When we had tied up against one of its Gothic pinnacles, the mayor and I climbed over the side of the boat. It was like lowering oneself into an immense tureen full of yesterday’s Brown Windsor. The mud in the water reduced visibility practically to nil. We clambered carefully down the façade, and went in at the main entrance. Once inside, the mayor closed the great doors, whereupon the waters grew clearer.

  In our torch beams, fish loomed and leered. It was like something out of Omar Khayyam:

  They say the Sanitary Inspector used to creep Where sticklebacks and tench now glory and drink deep.

  As the mayor beckoned me on, I pretended I was an intrepid explorer, moving among the remains of some mighty, long-lost civilisation … but the mitty moment passed un-mittigatedly when we arrived at the door of the waiting room. The mayor pushed it open, and in we went.

  Moving in slow motion, we worked our way through the murky waters, across to the square aquarium, which was perched on a window sill. The fish had fled. We saw them now, hovering unhappily about the room, those glossy tiddlers called Red Cichlids; they moved groggily sideways in square circles, like fat men traversing ice in search of infra red lamps. I saw the mayor make a gesture of despair. He was afraid we should never be able to recapture them.

  It certainly was a difficult business. Using our hands, and then our flippers, we did manage to catch one or two of the little blighters, popping them back into the aquarium and using a chair seat to keep them in. I wished someone had been there to film that weird dance the mayor and I did; it just needed a lick of interstellar music, and we should have rated an ‘X’ Certificate.

  When the mayor began to go into strange contortions, I diagnosed nitrogen bends, running over to him in panic – you know how badly nitrogen bends. However, he was merely divesting – or I should say dipanting – himself of a long pair of wollen underpants. With these, he managed to capture two more Cichlids, until the water was too muddied with his gyrations for us to see anything.

  Then it was I had my bright idea. It worked so much like a charm that within another fifteen minutes, we were climbing back into the launch, and handing up to Chief Engineer Culler an aquarium containing one large, complacent carp. Clutching it in a 44-year-old grasp, Culler gazed at it bemused, and asked, ‘But where are the tropical fish?’

  ‘Inside the carp,’ I said. ‘We let him into the waiting room because he caught the fish much more quickly and efficiently than we could. When he was gorged, he was easy to capture. Fortunately, he swallowed the fish whole, so they will be warm where they are until we can get them to some water of the correct temperature.’

  By this time the rising flood had swallowed Bashenham West; a church steeple showed here, the D.K Broster novel still showed there; everything else had gone. My account would therefore have ended at this point, were it not for the strange and dramatic sequel, of which you may have read in your newspapers.

  I was driving home towards the coast next morning, along that hill road from which first Bashenham West and then, later, lower down the Bash valley, Bashenham East may be surveyed. To my surprise – my intense surprise – Bashenham West lay again exposed to the sky. Of the vast sheet of water which had covered it the night before, there was no sign, beyond some deep puddles by the cattle market and a generally washed look everywhere. It would not be wrong to say an eerie sensation stole over me; then I recalled that, in these enlightened days, there was bound to be a scientific explanation for the seeming miracle. So without pausing (in fact, accelerating somewhat), I sped down the road which descends with the valley into Bashenham East.

  As the speed restriction sign loomed, I braked sharply. The road ran into a lake. All before me lay a sheet of water, as suave and unruffled as a George Sanders villain. Beneath it lay the town of Bashenham East. I climbed from the car, my jaw hanging uncontrollably open.
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br />   As I looked at the enigmatic surface of the lake, a solitary swimmer came towards me. He dragged himself onto the road, wringing out his 44-year-old clothes. It was Chief Engineer Nadge Culler.

  ‘Those fools in Bashenham West!’ he said bitterly, drying his hair on my proffered overcoat. ‘All their sewage and drainage system runs down into ours, and they forgot to close the connecting sluice gates. As a result, all the reservoir water drained through to us in the night. Thanks to their carelessness, we’re sunk.’

  I could see what he meant. There is another fact about water you might care to know: it always finds its own level.

  Carrion Country

  The great sea of grass rippled and then stood silent again. A breeze rose momentarily and died. A flock of birds rose startled into the air, dived about the ship, and then returned once more to their perches. The landing of the PEST craft had caused only a momentary diversion.

  ‘Quite an innocent-looking spot,’ young Tim Anderson commented, as the three ecologists climbed down into the open.

  ‘Innocent’s a nice word,’ Barney Brangwyn agreed. ‘In this case, it means nothing but running water to drink!’

  The discovery team which had found Lancelyn II had made a rapid stratospheric survey and reported a complete absence of civilisation. It looked like an easy planet to crack, from the point of view of Barney and the other two members of the Planetary Ecological Survey Team (known for short as PEST).

  ‘Let’s take the usual preliminary ride-around before we split up,’ Craig Hodges, leader of the team, said. ‘Get the first overlander out, Tim.’

  As the boy turned obediently back to the ship, Barney remarked to his old friend, ‘We’ve seldom run up against such a quiet place.’

  It was a remark which might have been taken two ways, since Barney did not say whether he found quiet soothing or bad for the nerves. As first men on Lancelyn II – men on the lookout for threats to the colonists who would follow them – they had every right to be wary. Suspicion was their stock in trade.

  Not that Barney, or Craig for that matter, looked the nervous type. Which was because Barney’s black, flowing beard, his barrel chest, his massive stature, were more striking than his neatly manicured nails or the gentleness of his mouth.