The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  ‘They’re a lot of parasites!’ Dora exclaimed.

  ‘You mean those things on dogs? Course they’re not! They have to look after us patients all their lives. It’s such a terrible responsibility, that some of the Doctors have to have Doctors, like Doctor Eileen, for instance. Yes, it’s the worst job of all, guarding the sick …’

  ‘You’re not sick, Mark! Nor’s Gavin – nor any of the others!’ Dora protested.

  He let out a howl of injury.

  ‘Me not sick?!’ he exclaimed. ‘My old Doctor carried away three chests full of notes when I was given up at fifty-five. Three chests full! I am a guaranteed perpetual pre-dyspeptic with any number of vulnerable foci in my stomach, and what’s more that’s complicated by a dangerously high vegetable imbalance.’

  ‘Have you ever actually had a tummy ache?’ Dora had to ask, for he looked a picture of fitness.

  ‘Bless you, no! My old Doctor was too smart for that!’

  He obviously thought he had out-argued her there.

  Mrs. Prouse’s breakfast table seated fifteen, which was fortunate, because fifteen people sat down to breakfast round it. Some of them Dora had never seen before, including two brothers of Gavin’s. She fell to wondering how such large families were compatible with so little privacy. Everybody greeted Dora cordially; the strangers were introduced to her and, if they were patients, told her the main features of their mental illnesses.

  Casting an appealing eye round the room, Dora signalled to Gavin to sit next to her; but the young man had already been cornered by his fiancée, Jean, and his Doctor, Eileen. She took some comfort in observing that he was obviously in a state of rebellion against Eileen – and against Jean, if the latter’s angry looks were any indication. Dora was forced to sit between Doctor Prouse and a taciturn woman with wrestler’s shoulders who was at once a distant relation of Mrs. Prouse’s and a near relation of Jean’s (the settlement being relatively small, relationships were slightly involved).

  Despite her priming in the ways of this freak civilisation, Dora found most of the talk round her incomprehensible, the Rabelaisian frankness of Henrietta – whose young and piercing voice was audible above all other voices – always excepted. When the meal was over, they still sat and talked; the notebooks lying beside the plates were freely used.

  From Dora’s point of view, it all looked hopeless. Filled with a sudden rush of courage, she stood up. Somewhat to her surprise, they all stopped chattering and looked at her.

  ‘Friends,’ she said, ‘you have all been very kind to me since I came here. But now I must appeal to you for help.’

  ‘What is the matter?’ Doctor Saul asked at once. His natural air of authority would not have been amiss in a saner setting.

  ‘You might have asked that yesterday, but none of you did,’ Dora said. ‘My horse brought me down here yesterday by accident; the heat of the sun made me faint. I was then on my way back to my own people to fetch help for a friend of mine. He and I were exploring in the mountains when his horse slipped on a rubble slope. He was pitched down into a ravine.’

  ‘Was he killed?’ someone asked.

  ‘No. By luck he fell onto a ledge about fifty feet down. A bush broke his fall; he was shaken but not seriously hurt. He has a water bottle with him but nothing else. There is no chance of climbing up or down.

  ‘He has been there all night on that narrow ledge. He will die if he is not soon rescued. All I ask is two men to ride back with me with ropes and help pull him out.’

  They were silent round the table, looking at each other uneasily and avoiding her eye. Dora could hardly grasp the unwillingness written on their faces. For a moment she pictured the rugged individualists among whom she lived, who would have jumped up straightaway to help a girl in a position like hers.

  ‘He is my husband, not just a friend,’ she told them bitterly. ‘I’m not asking you much, am I?’

  Gavin gave her one piercingly remorseful look and turned away. The others shuffled uneasily.

  ‘Sit down, my girl,’ Doctor Saul said at length. ‘Unfortunately you don’t know how much you are asking of us.’

  ‘I know how little I’m asking,’ she flashed.

  ‘Yah! Old assertion – depression depressive!’ Henrietta called. Her mother slapped her for it and four Doctors made a note of the exchange.

  Ignoring the interruption, Saul rubbed the nape of his neck. It was the gesture Dora had seen last night; she wondered fleetingly whose job it was to take a note of that.

  ‘We might be able to help,’ he said doubtfully. ‘How far is your husband into the mountains? That range is a pretty big place, I understand.’

  ‘We could get to him in an hour’s riding from the foothills,’ Dora said impatiently.

  ‘What is an “hour”?’ Doctor Eileen asked. It struck Dora like a blow that she had seen no clocks here. A calendar, yes. But no clocks. The subdivision of the day was something else they had jettisoned; naturally, this perpetual analysis business was too slow for any irrelevance such as minutes or hours.

  ‘If two of you could leave with me at once, you’d be back here easily for sun-down,’ she said.

  ‘Leaving at once is quite out of the question,’ Saul said. Agreement echoed all round the table.

  ‘Why?’ Dora challenged. ‘A man’s life is in danger. Does that mean nothing to you?’

  Doctor Prouse placed his hand consolingly over hers. Unperturbed at her angry withdrawal, he said, ‘Young lady, you cannot understand because you do not understand our society. We must hold a conference first and decide what is best to be done. Meanwhile you have our every sympathy, believe me.’

  (‘Stop trying to paw her hand!’ Mrs. Prouse interposed fiercely.)

  ‘Keep your sympathy!’ Dora said. ‘While you sit round this table conferring, my husband will die out there in the noonday.’

  ‘We must weigh carefully who will go,’ Saul told her. ‘Rest assured, we will find someone. Meanwhile, I must ask you to be as patient as possible – and to remember you are Doctor Prouse’s guest, however reluctant.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dora accepted the reproof.

  Gavin was standing up, pale but resolved.

  ‘I will go and help Dora James straightway,’ he said.

  There was an immediate flurry of protest. Genuine admiration for him flooded Dora’s heart. She could guess something of the determination that gesture must have cost. Whenever she was about to despair of these people, one of them did something warm and human. But Gavin had caused an uproar; everyone seemed to be arguing and taking notes. Henrietta hooted with derision. After a struggle, Doctor Eileen and Jean pulled Gavin down into his seat again and the former said, ‘Have you completely lost your senses, Gavin? Have you forgotten the basic tenets of Treatment: “To possess complete data, the Doctor must be present at any significant situation”? Don’t you think dragging a man out of a hole is significant?’

  Her scolding was drowned under the hullabaloo the others were making. But the noise died when old Mark Prouse rose in his place and said roughly the same thing as Gavin had done: ‘I’m willing to lend a hand straightway. I’m beyond the help of Doctors.’

  Dora smiled her thanks, but Saul said sternly, ‘You know the law as well as I do, Prouse. No Fifty-fiver may interfere at all in anyone else’s life: an incurable cannot cure. Sit down and be quiet.’

  Then he turned to Dora and said, ‘Perhaps you would care to leave us while we discuss.’

  Reluctantly she rose.

  ‘Now I’m seeing what you’re all really like, Doctor Saul,’ she said.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said stiffly. ‘A situation like this, calling upon some of us to leave the settlement, has just never arisen before. You are an unfortunate random factor.’

  ‘Mind you make plenty of notes about it, then!’ she snapped, leaving the room with a flounce of skirts.

  The sun climbed to its zenith, scorching the blue from the sky, and then slid gradually towards the west. An inevi
table feeling of despair overcame Dora James; she waited in Gavin’s room almost without thought. She could do nothing but wait. Her future lay with the conversationalists in the next room.

  Only once was her solitude broken. Henrietta, surprisingly enough, appeared with an immense hunk of cold pie on a plate.

  ‘They’re still jabbering!’ she whispered conspiratorially to Dora. ‘I cleared off. I got hungry. I thought you might be hungry too. Their trouble is they suffer from collective verbal fetishistic impulses or something.’

  ‘You’re a funny girl,’ Dora said. ‘I thought you disliked me.’

  ‘Oh, you know me,’ Henrietta said. ‘Little Miss Schizophrenia. Don’t choke yourself on the pie with your wild mountain habits. Bye now!’

  And she had gone.

  The pie was tasty. When you looked impartially at these people, there was plenty of good in them; they were like people everywhere. If only this insane Treatment was not the be all and end all of their existence; yet even in that there was more than a grain of sense.

  She gave it up and continued to wait. The next diversion occurred outside. Slowly, from all corners of the settlement, men and women were coming to the Prouse home. In about half an hour, the whole population had gathered and stood talking and gesturing.

  Impatiently, Dora turned her back on them.

  It was late afternoon when five men came into her room. She sat up flushing, guiltily pushing back her hair, aware she had dozed off on Gavin’s bed. Knocking on doors was another little adjunct of civilisation which had died out here. The only one of the men she recognised was Saul; courteously, he introduced the others as his fellow Coordinate Doctors. They bowed to her.

  ‘We are sorry if we have kept you in suspense,’ Saul said. ‘It is our unanimous decision that we should help you rescue your husband. We start at dawn tomorrow.’

  Torn between a desire to express the gratitude they obviously expected from her and a wish to grumble because they would not start at once, Dora confined herself to saying neutrally, ‘Who comes with me?’

  ‘Everyone,’ Saul said.

  He might as well have hit her. She floundered for a moment, and then could only echo, stupidly, ‘Everyone?’

  ‘What else do you expect, my dear girl?’ a long haired man who had been introduced as Doctor Maycock said. ‘Obviously, it was all or none of us. Has Doctor Saul not already explained our way of life to you? Here, I am proud to say, we are all each other’s keepers. To leave the settlement voluntarily is absolutely unheard of; it would produce goodness knows what repercussions in the psyche. Therefore, we must take what precautions we can. “A complete cure cannot develop without complete data.” We are all coming tomorrow.’

  When the banners of dawn were red in the sky, the trek of the four thousand started. Their organisation was most impressive; so tight-knit were they that every stage of preparation took only a minimum of time. Plenty of preparation had gone on in the dark hours: apart from Dora’s Big Jim, the settlement possessed only twenty mounts – a term including a couple of donkeys – used for local haulage, so that the expedition would move on foot. An appropriate stock of refreshment and provisions had therefore to be carried.

  Only a few of the more ancient Fifty-Fivers and a handful of babes-in-arms remained behind to keep an eye on the farms. They stood helplessly in a thin line, waving good-bye.

  It was an impressive sight. The people, for once almost silent, heading out for the foothills, their united footsteps creating an andante accompaniment. The sun, entangled in a net of cloud as it rose, splashed them with beige light. Dora was reminded of the migrations of the lemmings; these people were answering a call just as instinctive: the urge to help.

  To the lowest hills was a distance of no more than eight miles. But their pace was slow, so that it was nearly noon before the first slopes were reached. At a signal from the five Coordinate Doctors, who trudged in front with Dora, men, women and children sat down where they were and made a light meal. Obviously they enjoyed the picnic, laughing and chattering and looking far too fit to need any sort of Treatment.

  Dora, meanwhile, looked grimly up at the slopes above them.

  ‘You are not eating,’ said Saul gently.

  ‘No,’ Dora said. ‘I – ’

  ‘She’s worried, of course,’ Henrietta said. ‘Who wouldn’t be? She reckons the buzzards may have got her husband by now. It’s enough to give the lot of us the death-wish, I say!’

  ‘Young lady, you are beginning to manifest typical aggression syndrome,’ Doctor Saul said severely. ‘Go and sit down before I place you under observation.’

  Dora said nothing. Henrietta faded quietly away.

  The meal finished, they began to climb. The way rapidly grew steeper and more rugged. Trees were frequent enough to impede their progress without affording them sufficient shade. Heat reeled back off boulders, and they were all bathed in sweat.

  ‘We’re nearly there now,’ Dora said. Gavin had worked his way ahead of Doctor Eileen and was now close beside Dora. He gave her a reassuring smile, to which she was too anxious to respond. Now that they neared the end of their journey, her heart hammered painfully.

  They scrambled together up a narrow fault between two formidable outcrops of rock, whose level tops formed a plateau. A helicopter stood on the plateau, a tent pitched beside it. Three men armed with light machine guns stood guarding the fault through which Dora and Gavin now appeared, the rest of the party pressing close behind.

  One of the three men, a magnificent brute in his early forties with a moustache eighteen inches across, waved his gun and shouted to Dora.

  ‘Come no further! What’s going on, Dora James? Some form of double-cross? We’ve been watching this mob ever since they left the township. What’s the big idea?’

  ‘I can explain it all, Lew,’ Dora said wearily. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘Afraid nothing!’ one of the armed men shouted. ‘We just aim to start shooting at any minute, that’s all. Have you gone mad?’

  ‘Quiet, Fred,’ the moustached Lew said. ‘This rabble looks harmless enough. We said for you to bring two, Dora, not the whole population, you damn crazy little … Why, I’ve a good mind to …’

  Suddenly he broke off into peals of laughter. As he laughed, he punched himself furiously in an effort to stop. He dropped his gun and clutched his sides. ‘She’s brought the whole goddam population!’ he cried, going off into fresh convulsions. He finally managed to pull an angry face and say, ‘I may be laughing, but I’m damned angry all the same.’

  The settlers, meanwhile, urged from behind, were pressing up the fault. Doctor Saul appeared, digested the scene, and turned to Dora. His big face had its Stonehenge look back.

  ‘Is this hilarious man your husband?’ he asked.

  She shook her head, avoiding his eyes, wondering why she felt so responsible for these people.

  ‘I haven’t got a husband,’ she said. ‘I got you out here under false pretences. I’m not married and there’s no one stuck on a ledge. I only wanted two of you to come, as you know. It was all a put-up job. I hadn’t really got sunstroke and I came into your town with ulterior motives. I’m sorry, Doctor Saul, really.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be explaining to me, not him,’ said Lew, who had now mastered his amusement and picked up his gun.

  ‘You are both owed an explanation. These people are not the hopeless fools we took them for, Lew.’ She turned back to Saul and touched his arm. ‘Forgive the deception, if you can,’ she said. ‘We are one wing of the Regrowth Force. We’re only small and ill-equipped – this is one of the very first helicopters we’ve got back into service – but we’re growing. We believe the future depends on our growth. We’ve just completed an air survey of the country, and it’s covered with settlements like yours, just as you said. It means we – the Regrowth Force – have a lot to fight against.

  ‘Or we thought we had. We figured man had stagnated enough, and it was time he was up
and doing again. There are more important things in the world than cosy village life.’

  ‘So you came to spy on us to see what made us so cosy,’ Saul said. He put his hands in his pockets and sauntered to the edge of the rock, looking down upon his people, silent now and wondering. ‘And I suppose the two poor fellows you wanted to lure up here were to be shot, to let us know the outside world was creeping up on us?’

  ‘We aren’t that sort at all,’ Lew said angrily. ‘If you start calling us a lot of thugs there’ll be trouble.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Saul coldly. ‘You can’t very well shoot all of us?’

  He was sounding Lew, testing him and through him the Regrowth Force; Dora, realising this, sighed with relief when Lew, instead of indulging in further threats, simply muttered, ‘That’s true I suppose.’

  ‘The men weren’t going to be shot,’ Dora said. ‘They were going to be told about some of the material and spiritual things you’ve completely lost; they were going to be sent back and told we should return in a year to check if any progress had been made towards recapturing those things our ancestors accepted as commonplace.’

  ‘And if we’d made no progress?’ Saul prompted.

  ‘If you hadn’t,’ Lew said, ‘we’d have shown you some of the things we can do that you can’t – blowing up a river bed, for instance.’

  Saul rubbed the nape of his neck and said, ‘I see. You’ve got it all planned. Unfortunately you are wrong. Of course, I don’t know what these things are we are supposed to have lost, but I do know we’ve managed without them, and I also know this. Progress reached its culmination in Desplansi’s Treatment; when man has adjusted, he has no further to go.’

  ‘But that’s where you are wrong!’ Dora told him vehemently. ‘The whole scheme of your so-called Treatment is deadly plausible, but it panders to the sloth in man. It’s cost you your souls and left you nothing but your complexes. It’s death, it’s unscientific – ’

  ‘That’s just what it’s not,’ Saul contradicted. ‘It’s the apotheosis of science, the merging of medicine, sociology and psychology. “Doctor, Disease and Patient: the name of this trio is Health” – it took men thousands of years to arrive at that! It’s the profoundest of all truths!’