The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  There was something about the way she did it … I sat in my chair staring at her, the first terrible suspicions growing in my mind. Supposing … No, it couldn’t be … But supposing … I fought with the idea, but in the end it beat me. After all, you never know with women.

  It seemed an unworthy suspicion to hold of one’s wife. As I see it, though, the menace is a very real one, and the more sinister because the suspect herself may have no knowledge of her true identity. Ask yourself this question: if you were an android robot, how would you know you were?

  For hours on end, I worried about the matter. It obsessed me. I lay wakeful all night, not even falling into that light, exhausting sleep which only lack of H*rl*cks can bring. Finally I decided that anything was better than not knowing the truth about my wife. So the next day I carried out certain tests designed to settle the fearful question conclusively one way or the other.

  For the benefit of anyone confronted by the same sort of dilemma, a report of this experiment follows.

  Aldiss stands uneasily just inside the front door, fingering his tie and peering through the frosted glass panel in the door. His wife, who has popped out to the grocer’s to buy some flour, is just coming back through the front gate. Aldiss has taken advantage of her absence to conceal a weighing machine under the front door mat.

  If she trips lightly in and clocks up five tons while wiping her feet, he is going at once to phone up Interpol.

  The wife enters, very smiling and bonny. She weighs no more than a human might be expected to weigh. Nevertheless, Aldiss’s fears remain: he knows about the wonders wrought with light metal alloys these days. The more he thinks about it, the more incriminating it seems that she should weigh only a usual amount; she obviously has something to hide.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, dear?’ she asks.

  Aldiss nods dumbly, not helping her to remove her coat. His wife is looking very attractive, her complexion flawless and not a hair out of place. The total effect is a little unnatural – after all, a high wind is blowing outside. He resolves to try the second test.

  ‘You are looking lovely this afternoon,’ he says, grinning with feral cunning. ‘Do come over here to the light, and let me examine your beautiful skin under this microscope.’

  ‘I can’t stop now, snooks,’ the wife replies brightly. ‘I’m just going to make some scones for tea. You can lay the tea things, if you like.’

  This speech has been recorded on the tape recorder which Aldiss craftily concealed behind a cushion and a copy of the Radio Times. Aldiss plays it back to himself several times when his wife has left the room. He thinks he detects in it a hint of alien psychology; surely no human being would suggest that laying a tea table was something a man might like doing?

  Creeping to the kitchen door, he peeps round it to see whether sultanas or iron filings are going into the scone mix, and then leaps out on his wife with what would be a bloodcurdling yell if one had blood.

  ‘Oh,’ she exclaims, dropping the bag of flour, ‘you really frightened me!’

  ‘Yes, indeed. And did I not hear a relay or two click as you jumped?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ the wife exclaims indignantly. ‘It must have been the fridge ticking over.’

  Beyond pulling a doubtful face, Aldiss makes no reply to this. He hangs about in the kitchen, pretending to look for woodworm in the wallpaper, until his wife takes the scones over to the oven. Selecting a point of vantage, he scrutinises this operation carefully.

  Unnerved by the sight of her husband glaring at her from on top of the draining board, the wife burns her finger as she lights the gas. Aldiss jumps down, instantly solicitous.

  ‘Your synchronisation must have gone off phase just for a second,’ he observes, sympathetically. ‘Let me look at your finger. Do I smell burning rubber?’

  He examines her finger doubtfully, finally biting it.

  ‘You callous wretch!’ the wife exclaims, pushing him away. ‘I’ve asked you before not to try the old Adam on me when I’m busy. Don’t you ever think about anything else? Now please get out of the kitchen until tea’s ready.’

  Aldiss retreats, crestfallen but undeterred. He thinks he almost has his wife where he wants her; the next hour will decide. By the time the tea is served, he has the final part of his campaign all planned.

  Standing on a chair behind the dining room door, he tips itching powder down his wife’s back as she enters with the teapot.

  ‘You lunatic! Now what are you up to?’ she exclaims angrily, spilling scalding tea down Aldiss’s leg.

  ‘Nothing, nothing; just dusting the picture rail.’ His innocent expression is a masterly disguise, but she is not to be mollified.

  ‘Really, you treat me sometimes as if I wasn’t human!’ she says.

  ‘You can say that again,’ he remarks, so softly that she does not hear. She sets the hot scones on the table, and then begins to scratch her back. The itching powder is taking effect. Aldiss is disappointed at this; he thought her plastic back would be insensitive to tickles. She says she must go upstairs and change her clothes.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Aldiss insinuates challengingly. ‘Has a fuse blown or something?’

  ‘Your imagination is overheated,’ his wife replies. ‘You have been reading too much science fiction, my boy. Only the night before last you woke up screaming something about Pohl and Kornbluth.’

  ‘No, no,’ he says quick-wittedly. ‘I was saying “Poland corn bluff.” It was a sort of political-agricultural nightmare; I’ve had a whole lot of that kind lately.’

  The wife goes upstairs to change her clothes; Aldiss begins to follow, but she stops him. He protests that he only wants to see if she still has that mole on her left hip, but she says she has heard that one before. Aldiss returns to the tea table and slips a steel scone onto his wife’s plate.

  His wife enters five minutes later, wearing the pink twin set he gave her last Christmas. Sitting down, she immediately detects the spurious scone.

  ‘Joke buns at your age!’ she exclaims. ‘What is the matter with you? I think you need an overhaul from the – er – the doctor.’

  Aldiss jumps up.

  ‘Ha! You nearly gave yourself away then. You nearly said “mechanic”, didn’t you?’

  His wife is alarmed now. ‘Darling, have you got some extraordinary idea that I am – well, a robot or something? You have, haven’t you? You’ll have to go into a mental home if this goes on.’

  ‘Yes, anything to keep me quiet. Don’t think I don’t see through your game. I dare you to eat one of these scones you cooked!’

  Angrily, the wife picks up one of the scones and begins munching it.

  ‘You see,’ she says, with her mouth full, ‘I have every intention of eating my own – ’

  A fit of choking and coughing makes her break off. Aldiss is triumphant. He thinks he has revealed her in her true colours at last.

  ‘A crumb has gone down into your soundbox and amplifying circuits, hasn’t it?’ he gloats, reaching for the phone and dialling Scotland Yard. Between coughs, his wife implores him to put the receiver down, but he is adamant.

  ‘Why not admit it?’ he asks her. ‘Say “I am a robot”.’

  Hopelessly, she repeats ‘I – am – a –’ and at once springs apart. Nearly five thousand, four hundred miscellaneous parts, including valves, transistors, skin, sprockets and wires, burst about the room. The scones are ruined.

  ‘Is that Scotland Yard?’ Aldiss asks into the phone, when a metallic voice speaks. ‘I want you to come round here at once.’

  ‘You’ll never get away with this, Aldiss,’ the voice at the other end whispers. ‘We haven’t kept tabs on you for nothing! You’re surrounded. We know who you are.’

  ‘You mean,’ he says in puzzlement, ‘you mean I – am – a – ’

  Aldiss springs apart.

  The Arm

  At the last moment, as he was about to leave the front door, Royse lost her dignity and clung to hi
m weeping.

  ‘Oh, please don’t leave me, I beg you, Wilfred, don’t leave me.’

  ‘It’s only for a week, darling,’ he said, torn between sympathy and exasperation; they had been through all this last night.

  ‘Weeks here have nine days in them!’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said, and then he was gone, moving hastily over to the monostop, where a bullet was already preparing to leave. Helplessly, Royse turned back into her house and closed the door. She could not bear to wait and wave to him.

  Her tears dried on her face; no more fell. A month – a long Tachatale month – had to be faced alone, except for the four brief weekends in which Wilfred would be back. Wilfred’s post as governmental neostatistician had so far kept him in Touchdown, the nearby capital of the planet Tachatale. Now he had been ordered out to Big Mines, the new townstead half a world away.

  ‘He could have taken me with him,’ Royse said to the empty hall. It was untrue. She knew it was untrue. Transport and accommodation were everywhere scarce: nobody travelled unless forced to do so on a planet struggling to become self-sufficient. Wilfred loved his wife; he did not wish to go to Big Mines; he would have taken her had it been humanly possible.

  ‘All the same, he will not appreciate how much I loathe Tachatale.’ She walked into the living room, talking to herself, consoling herself. This was a new habit.

  The house, like almost every other house on the planet, was prefabricated and single storey. It was divided roughly into three: kitchen-hall, living room, bedroom and other offices; concertina doors allowed for slight variations in this basic plan. In the living room was a long window. Instinctively, Royse was drawn to it.

  ‘My God, what a place to end up in!’ Royse sighed. The front door faced other houses, only the monotrack dividing them; this back window faced out onto Tachatale, primitive and unaltered Tachatale. No sign of human habitation existed beyond a pile of clayey rubble just outside the window. Royse’s was the last house in the long line of houses stretching out of Touchdown.

  She began to sniff again.

  ‘Why not get to know your neighbours?’ Wilfred had suggested rather curtly the evening before, when the subject of his departure had arisen. It was not a helpful suggestion. In the next house lived a Mr. and Mrs. A’Alhoorn; Royse had met Mrs. A’Alhoorn once in the three months they had been on Tachatale. Beyond gathering that the woman worked in the capital like her husband, Royse could glean little from their conversation. The A’Alhoorns came not from Earth but from Parker’s Planet, and their accent was all but incomprehensible.

  Experimentally – more for the purpose of testing how lonely she felt in the house than for any other reason – Royse unlocked the long window and stepped outside. She took a few paces from the house. Now she could see all the other houses, the backs of them stretching unbroken along the monorail towards Touchdown. But they formed only a slender peninsula pointing out into the vast unknown of Tachatale.

  Though she hated the ugly houses, it was the planet she feared.

  The terrain rose behind the houses to a low peak some four hundred yards away. The peak was crowned by trees with strange corkscrew branches. Away on her right, away from Touchdown, grass yielded to desolate moorland. Where moor met sky a group of black and purple hills gathered like sores on a withered skin.

  Shivering, Royse returned indoors.

  Somehow she wasted the day. In the evening she tuned in to the local station. The programme now lasted an hour every day, with promise of extensions as soon as circumstances permitted. Every offering was the crudest possible, truncated vision tapes made long ago in defunct studios on the Seven Planets. The only live bit of broadcasting came at the end, in a five minute peroration from Touchdown. This was considered a fitting end to most evening’s entertainment.

  ‘Tachatale grows every day,’ the announcer declared. ‘Another four hundred colonists arrived from Alpha today. Welcome, friends! We are all united here on Tachatale, and we welcome you. Ten years ago, Tachatale was undiscovered. Ten years more, and she will stand out as the greatest – ’

  Royse cut him off in full spate and went to bed.

  Next morning, the personal circuit of her vision set flashed her a letter. Royse took it excitedly out of its slot, examining with love the radio-facsimile of Earth stamps and Richmond postmark. It was from her mother.

  Mother, however, was less consoling than usual. She wrote:

  ‘Your letters begin to worry me, my dear. If you love Wilfred, you should be happy doing what he wants you to do. You are not giving him or yourself a chance. Nor are you giving your beautiful new planet a chance. (Remember, your father and I have seen solids of Tachatale.) Why don’t you try to go out a little more? Of course I understand that to a girl of your quiet disposition Touchdown itself may seen rough and even vulgar (although you must not be too critical), but why not explore the country? Go out for walks and forget yourself. You will remember how fond your Uncle Ernest was of botany.’

  Putting the flimsy down, Royse busied herself about the house. As she worked, the implications of the letter seemed to ferment within her. She hated to think her mother might be in some measure right; for the first time in weeks she recalled how, on the colonist ship coming out, she had regarded the whole business as a romantic adventure. The raw reality of Touchdown, with its giant factories and brothels, had been a shock.

  She considered the suggestion that she should go for a walk. The idea repelled her, until she looked into the future and saw her days forever circumscribed and herself forever boxed into this characterless house. In a panic Royse came to that point that all must reach at some time: the point where it is recognised that life is not expanding limitlessly any more but dwindling already, its promise spent. Dropping a metal tray, she ran out of the back of the house.

  ‘Oh mother, it’s a ghastly place!’ she said aloud ten minutes later.

  From her vantage point among the corkscrew trees she could see all round. Behind her lay the incongruous strip of houses, following the contours of the land into Touchdown; it occurred to Royse now that she had never seen anyone leave those houses to explore the country.

  The country spread all round her, ample and unending and enduring, full of an oppressive silence emphasised by the perpetual blanket of cloud overhead. Resigning herself to it all, Royse ran down the other side of the peak. Immediately, the houses were hidden and it seemed as if she had the whole planet to herself.

  The blackness of a wide swathe of land ahead was caused by a close-growing clover, she found. The unshining sootiness of the leaves intrigued her. Wandering on, no longer so scared, she came to a stream. Though narrow, it was. surprisingly deep, its weedless sides streaked with curious yellow bands of rock. Royse lay under a tasselled tree and gazed into the water. It was as clear as glass. She remained there a long time, happy, remembering her childhood by other little rivers.

  On the next day she went there again. The creature appeared when she had only just arrived.

  Like the river bed, it was striped black and yellow. It roughly resembled a terrestrial lobster although it was no more than four centimetres long. One minute Royse was alone and peaceful, the next the little lobster was scuttling over her bare left arm.

  She screamed.

  Leaping to her feet, she attempted to knock the creature off. It dug in its sharp feet and clung tightly. Its little jointed tail flicked over its head, nipping her hard.

  ‘I’m stung!’ she cried, blindly chopping at the creature. It fell away onto the ground, stomach upwards. One of its pincers remained embedded in Royse’s lower arm.

  She was full of all those fears habitual city-dwellers experience when touched by strange insect life. Groaning, hardly seeing, she stamped frantically about her until nothing was left of the frail body under her feet. Then she turned and ran home.

  Once indoors, her arm plunged under a cold jet, new terrors seized her. She felt breathless and weak, inclined to faint; the arm seemed to pain her.
The notion that she was now filled with deadly poison took her, and from then on she was lost.

  With a vision of herself dying in agony on the floor, Royse grabbed up a bread cutter. She flinched – then brought it rapidly across her arm, over the centre of a small puffy patch which had appeared. The cut gaped, turned red. Blood started to flow into the sink and over the floor. Whimpering, she applied her mouth to the wound and began, with memories of tales of snake bite, to suck at the place.

  At last, exhausted, nauseated, she flopped into a chair, wrapping a towel round the gash.

  Faintness overcame her again. Her stomach quaked, specks floated before her eyes. She sat there limply, sure she was going to die. When she opened her eyes again she saw that her rough bandage had turned red. Blood was soaking into the chair.

  Royse was immediately convinced she was dying from loss of blood. Rummaging messily in a drawer, she found another towel, tore a long strip off it, and bound a tourniquet tightly above her elbow. As she tied the last knot, she slipped in blood and fell over. In a weak rage she threw the contents of the drawer across the room before subsiding into tears. After that storm was over, she fell asleep with her face in the rug.

  She woke and it was dark. She was cold; her injured left arm was numb. Glancing at the Earth/Tachatale chronometer (a parting present from Mother) she saw she had been insensible for over eight hours. Although her head was again clear, her whole being seemed to lack cohesion.

  Miserably she climbed up and turned a light on. Her arm was the colour of old linen but at least the bleeding had ceased. She was afraid to remove the tourniquet in case it started again. The feel of it, cold and heavy, terrified her. Like a cornered animal she gazed at the chaos inside and the night without.

  ‘Wilfred! Oh, Wilfred!’ she said. Feebly she went through into the bedroom and flung herself onto the bed. For a long while she lay there, too exhausted to sleep or get up again. At last she dozed, waking to find dawn outside and hunger cramps in her stomach.