The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  It astonished her, as she awkwardly prepared a meal, to find how weak she was. After eating, feeling better, she turned her attention to the arm that lay lifelessly beside her plate. Not knowing what to do the best, she untied the tourniquet. Nothing happened.

  The wound looked ugly. She could radio for a doctor, but doctors’ services were alarmingly dear; as the awful bleeding had stopped she was not really worried. Carrying the limb over to the basin, she bathed it in hot water, then wrapped it carefully in bandages.

  All that day she stayed in the living room, not moving very much not clearing up the mess she had made. The arm ached. Royse felt an overwhelming resentment against Tachatale; it had lured her out with a pretence of friendliness and then struck at her cruelly.

  Next day, the arm was very much worse. Royse got up, could eat very little, and sat before a fire nursing her arm to warm it. Stabbing pains forced her to unwrap and examine it. A faint green filigree underlaid its pastry pallor. She saw that one of the creature’s pincers still lay embedded in the flesh.

  Working turn and turn about with knife and scissors, she managed to extract the foreign matter. There was no antiseptic in the house, but again she bathed the wound in hot water. Her surgical effort had made her sweat. She went to lie down. Fever came up and encompassed her.

  Fever was a great sea in which she wallowed. It would seem to grow choppy until her head swam; or it grew rough and her senses were lost in a billowing tide; or it dragged her under until haunted seascapes flowed through her head. Or it became oily calm, so that for a while she would float on its surface idly taking in her surroundings, conscious of a smell which rolled in like fog.

  Throughout all her drifting the arm was with her. Sometimes it was a log moving at her side. Sometimes it was a vast ship and she merely its sail. Or it would assume vegetable consistency, so that when she squeezed it her good hand sunk into rotten marrow.

  The fevers grew darker, blowing her before them into strange territories of illness she had never before visited. Sometimes she cried, sometimes she screamed, sometimes she reasoned with phantoms.

  Then she woke, Royse woke, with the fever gone and two men looking down at her.

  ‘Are you feeling any better?’

  Her tongue was like leather. She did not know these men and was afraid.

  ‘Have a swig of water,’ the big fellow with the beard advised thrusting a cup into her trembling hand. ‘My name’s Aildred A’Alhoorn; I’m your next door neighbour. This here’s Jim Girdlecastle; he’s a veterinary surgeon. He’s a friend of mine – we shipped to Touchdown together.’

  She could hardly understand what A’Alhoorn was saying. Girdlecastle was a tall, spindly man, smiling at her uneasily.

  ‘That’s better,’ she managed to say. ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Sixday, ma’am. We didn’t know where your husband was …’

  ‘He’s out of town. He’ll be back next Eightday.’

  She lay back. Her head was clearing.

  ‘How did you get in?’ she asked.

  A’Alhoorn looked apologetic. ‘You were screaming out something terrible. I broke through your window – you’ll find I repaired it all properly. My wife and me, we came in here to tend you. She brought you some soup. When we saw what the matter was, soon as daybreak came I fetched old Jim here.’

  Girdlecastle spoke for the first time, looking down sadly at her and pronouncing two words. He had a heavy upper lip like a horse. He said, ‘Gangrene, miss.’

  For the first time since regaining her senses, Royse thought of her misadventure by the black and yellow stream. Involuntarily, she pushed back the bedclothes.

  Her arm had been amputated. It finished at the elbow in a neatly bandaged stump.

  She went as cold as lead.

  ‘What have you done with it?’ she asked.

  ‘Uh, well, you see I had to saw it off, miss. Like Aildred here says, I’m a qualified veterinary surgeon. You were in a bad way when I got here, needed something doing quick. Besides, a proper doctor would have set you back five hundred credits for that job and done it no better – ’

  ‘But my arm – ’

  ‘Whereas I’m not charging you a thing, miss. Just call it good neighbour policy – I only live a couple of miles down the monorail.’

  As he spoke, his long face full of apology, Girdlecastle ran one hand nervously along a black bag he rested on the side of the bed; in his other hand he grasped something clumsily wrapped in towelling, with which he gesticulated to emphasise what he was saying. Royse became fascinated by this bundle. It might have contained a cucumber.

  ‘Have you got my arm there?’ she demanded.

  Dumbly, he rolled his long lip about, then nodded.

  ‘I want it.’

  ‘Oh, it’s no use to you, ma’am. Let Jim get it out your sight.’

  ‘I want it!’

  ‘Let me take it away, miss. I was just going.’

  ‘Give it to me! It’s mine!’

  Sitting up suddenly, she grabbed it and thrust it beneath the bedclothes. She faced them like a dog guarding a bone.

  Nonplussed, the two men mumbled to one another. A’Alhoorn announced that his wife would be round shortly with soup. He and his friend then beat a retreat, muttering their regrets and shaking their heads. Royse watched them go. When she heard the door close, she began to examine her treasure.

  Twenty minutes later, Mrs. A’Alhoorn entered with a tureen full of delicious-smelling soup. She was surprised to find Royse up and dressed.

  They had very little to say to each other. For one thing the language difficulty stood between them: Mrs. A’Alhoorn’s accent was even thicker than her husband’s. She had already tidied the living room on a previous visit. As she was not a woman to stand idle, she left before Royse had finished the soup.

  Nourishment filled Royse with life. She drank without looking out of the window; she knew for certain Tachatale was her enemy.

  When she had eaten, she looked round for objects of value hurrying round the house. She collected a wedding ring, a brooch, a necklace, and forty-two credits in money. When the articles were sold, she guessed they would raise little more than two hundred credits, being hardly the sort of thing Touchdown pawnbrokers would value. Yet she estimated she needed about another hundred credits for her purpose.

  Her eye lit on the Earth-Tachatale chronometer with its multiple dials. Without hesitation she lifted it down and put it into her bag. She put on her coat, then sat down to scrawl her mother a note.

  Here is my good left arm. Please keep it and preserve it for me till I get home. I shall come back to Earth as soon as I can; Wilfred is under contract but I’m coming back. I cannot bear it here, so he will let me come. Meanwhile, hang onto my poor little arm. I will not let it or any part of me be left behind on this hateful planet.

  Ever your loving

  Royse.’

  She tucked this note in the bag with her arm and other accessories and set off to catch the monorail.

  Touchdown terrified her as usual, but she raised almost four hundred credits on her few items for sale. From a big store she bought a large vacuum flask for seven credits a half, and had it filled with pure ethyl alcohol at a chemist’s for two a quarter. Hiding in a side alley, she unwrapped her severed forearm and pushed it into the flask. Alcohol slopped over her shoes as she screwed the top on again.

  A prefabricator’s yard grudgingly supplied Royse with a box to hold the flask, charging her a half for it. She affixed a label to it and took it to the postal depot.

  The depot mainly handled incoming mail. Rates out to the Seven Planets were ferociously high. Internal mail was almost nonexistent, Big Mines and Touchdown being as yet the only towns on the new planet.

  A clerk handed Royse a long sheet of regulations and prohibitions concerning letters, packages and parcels for shipment by spaceship, as well as half a dozen forms to be filled in. By now she was very tired and longing to climb back into bed. Her arm stump ached.
She filled in the forms as quickly as possible while the clerk weighed her parcel on a hair-fine balance.

  ‘Two hundred and eighty-five credits,’ he announced defiantly, as if daring her to question the sum. It seemed a fortune to pay for the privilege of getting a little box to Earth, but Royse paid gladly; she had, in fact, expected to pay more.

  Clutching a receipt, she struggled back to the monorail to catch the next bullet. As she arrived home, although the world seemed to waver before her, her heart was full of triumph.

  Wilfred returned two days later to find his wife lying in a corner of the bedroom. Concealing her bandaged stump from him, Royse shook with humourless laughter. Frightened, he bent over her but could make no sense of what she said. Even the message screwed up beside her made no sense to him.

  He re-read it as her laughter grew wilder:

  ‘With reference to your parcel for Earth, Register No. A.10088. Customs and regulations forbid shipment of this consignment. Its contents, alcohol and forearm, are both classified as non-exportable from Tachatale, coming under categories of Intoxicants and Foodstuffs respectively. Please collect consignment at your earliest convenience.’

  The Bomb-Proof Bomb

  Monty’s mother and father had moved to another house. Monty was naturally very excited and explored all the rooms as soon as possible. Then he went out to explore the garden.

  The garden looked very big to Monty. It was a summer’s day and the sun shone, and everything growing in the garden was making the best of the weather. There were roses hanging everywhere, and a lawn ankle-deep in daisies, and marigolds shining like car headlights, and all the flowers were puffing themselves up as big as possible.

  Monty pushed his way slowly through the flowers. They had spread over the paths, so Monty had to take care not to tread on them. And when he came to the end of all the flowers and the end of all the paths, and was as far away from the house as he could possibly be, he saw a little tunnel.

  The Tunnel

  The tunnel was quite small to begin with, but somebody had made it still smaller by filling up the entrance with piles and piles of flower pots. Fortunately, some of these piles of flower pots had fallen over; otherwise Monty would never have guessed a tunnel was there at all

  When Monty looked hard, he saw the tunnel was set in a small house with a very thick roof. It was nearly buried under a pile of old leaves, and lavender bushes grew in front of it, and so the little house was quite hidden – all but that mysterious tunnel.

  ‘It must be an air-raid shelter!’ Monty told himself.

  He had heard his father talking about the big war and how, when the planes came over full of bombs, he would take Monty’s mother down into their air-raid shelter.

  Of course, Monty was not born then, and he always felt slightly envious when he heard this story. It must have been exciting in the air-raid shelter, because father kept biscuits in a glass jar there, and they had an oil stove and a gramophone to play music on.

  ‘I wonder what’s in this air-raid shelter?’ Monty asked.

  And since there was no way to answer the question expect by finding out for himself, he decided to crawl into the tunnel.

  In a minute he had cleared away some more flower pots and made a wider gap. Feeling very brave, Monty crawled in.

  It seemed very dark at first, because Monty was blocking out most of the light himself. Then he saw the first five steps leading down, and he climbed carefully down them. At the bottom of the steps was another door, and it was shut.

  Monty stood up and looked at the door. He found he could see quite well now. He no longer felt as brave as he had done, but it seemed a pity to turn back now. He pushed the door open.

  ‘What’s the Time?’

  Now Monty could dimly see into a small room made of stone. As it appeared to be empty, Monty felt disappointed and glad at the same time. He walked into the room.

  ‘I say – hello! Who is that, please?’

  Directly he heard these words, Monty stood still. He did not mind admitting he was frightened, because the voice came so unexpectedly. He could see nobody in the room. But when he began to think about it, Monty realised that the voice sounded a good deal more scared than he was.

  ‘My name is Monty,’ he said, as kindly as he could.

  Now that his eyes were becoming used to the dimness, Monty could see that there was something sitting in the corner farthest from the door. It was a round thing, and did not appear to have hands and legs. Now the thing spoke to Monty again.

  ‘Please, Monty, are you a bomb?’ it said.

  This question sounded rather silly to Monty. As Monty was the name of a little boy, obviously it could not be the name of a bomb. Then Monty remembered he did not know by what names bombs called themselves. Perhaps somewhere in the world there might be a bomb called Monty, but he was sure it was not he, nor he it.

  ‘No, I’m not a bomb,’ he said, as definitely as he could manage.

  ‘Can you tell me the time, please?’ asked the round thing.

  ‘It’ll be teatime next, but it’s not teatime yet because I’ve only just had my dinner,’ Monty told him.

  ‘Can’t you tell me the time more exactly than that?’ the round thing asked.

  It did sound rather an impolite question, but Monty answered as nicely as he could, and said he was sorry but he did not know the time exactly.

  ‘You can’t be a time bomb then,’ the round thing said, breathing a sigh of relief. ‘Thank heavens for that. What are you exactly?’

  All these questions and exactlys tried Monty’s patience.

  ‘I’m exactly a little boy,’ he said sharply. ‘And what are you exactly?’

  ‘Well,’ the round thing said in a reflective voice, ‘I suppose I’m exactly a big, cowardly 500-pound explosive bomb.’

  This surprised Monty very much, but he remembered his manners enough to say, ‘How do you do?’

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ the bomb said. ‘Provided you don’t explode.’

  ‘You’re more likely to do that than I am,’ Monty pointed out.

  ‘Not at all,’ the bomb said hurriedly. ‘I hate loud noises. That’s what makes me so cowardly. The last thing I want to do is go Bang!’

  Whirling Dials

  It rolled its eyes violently to illustrate what it meant. Its eyes were like two big dials, and they ticked and whirled in an extraordinary way. Monty did not like this performance, so to stop it he asked the bomb what it was doing in the air-raid shelter.

  The big eyes rolled once more and then stopped.

  ‘I’m not doing anything,’ the bomb said. ‘I’m just keeping out of the way of the other bombs.’

  ‘There aren’t any other bombs,’ Monty said. ‘The war has stopped long ago.’

  This made the bomb angry.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me so before?’ it demanded. ‘When I asked you what time it was, you could have said ‘Peace-time’.’

  Free at Last!

  Monty considered this remark neither sensible nor polite, so he ignored it and said, ‘Why aren’t you friends with the other bombs?’

  The bomb sighed in a very unbomb-like fashion.

  ‘I’ve been like it ever since I was born,’ it said. ‘I was born in a factory with thousands of other bombs, and all any of them wanted to do was go off “Bang!” It was the only idea in their heads. Perhaps I was naturally nervous, because it scared me to hear a pin drop. Can you imagine such a terrible situation? – They only wanted to go off “Bang!” and I only wanted to get away from them.’

  ‘You did get away from them,’ said Monty, who was now feeling much sympathy for the bomb. He was not keen on very loud bangs himself.

  ‘Yes, I got away,’ the bomb said. ‘They took me up in an aeroplane with several other bombs. One moment we were all lying uncomfortably together, crowded into racks, and the next moment – we were free! We were falling through a wonderful black night sky, and I could see all the stars.’

  �
�Weren’t you frightened then?’ Monty asked.

  ‘No, not then,’ the bomb said. ‘I was so happy to be free. The other bombs who were dropping with me kept calling to each other and boasting about what big bangs they would make when they reached the ground. That’s when I got frightened – I loathe loud bangs more than anything.’

  ‘I hate coffee ice cream more than anything,’ Monty said, but the bomb clearly was not interested. The poor thing has probably never tasted ice cream at all, Monty thought.

  Always ‘Peacetime’

  ‘As fast as I could, I hurried through the night ahead of the other bombs,’ the bomb continued, rolling its eyes again at the recollection.

  ‘I landed in this garden and came straight down here, and here I’ve been ever since.’

  ‘It seems funny, somehow, to think of a bomb hiding down in an air-raid shelter,’ Monty said.

  ‘Why?’ asked the bomb. ‘These places are bomb-proof, aren’t they?’

  ‘Of course,’ Monty said.

  ‘Exactly!’ exclaimed the bomb triumphantly. ‘Then in what safer place could I choose to hide from all those nasty, noisy creatures?’

  And that Monty had to admit, was a very difficult question to answer. So instead of puzzling over it, he asked another instead:

  ‘Now you know the war is over, what are you going to do?’

  The bomb thought a while and rolled one eye slowly, then it said, ‘If you help me up those steps, I could be a sundial for you in your garden. I can’t think of a more peaceful occupation.’

  So that was what the bomb did. He stood on end and looked up at the blue sky, pretending to be a sundial. And although he was never very good at telling the hours accurately, he made sure – as he told Monty every day – that he always pointed to peacetime.

  Fortune’s Fool

  From where he stood, telephone in hand, Dr Norman Weaver could see down into the Inner Quad. Marlborough College, being a research college for post-graduate work, was one of Oxford’s more peaceful institutions. There were few people crossing the Inner Quad – which made the figure of Carroll Breakbane, noticeable at all times, even more noticeable now.