The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  ‘My father is bombarding the city!’ Chebarbar cried.

  ‘With artillery?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. He has half a dozen good cannons imported from a distant world.’

  ‘I never knew there would be any such weapons on Glumpalt. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  She looked furious. Her mouth tightened at each corner. ‘I didn’t tell you because you never asked me! You ask me nothing about anything but immediate necessities. Though I have followed you and helped you, you have taken absolutely no interest in me. How do you think I feel, eh?’

  By a happy turn of fate I was spared having to reply, for the building collapsed beneath our feet. Though we had suffered nothing like a direct hit, the house was so haphazardly constructed that the distant shock tumbled it. Chebarbar and I were on the first floor; three upper storeys descended upon us.

  It was alarming, but little more dangerous than being bombarded by a pack of cards. The worst part was being half-stifled by dust.

  Dizzily, I sat up, stood up, and then pulled Chebarbar up after me. We climbed from the debris. Another building on our left fell slowly as we passed. Glancing back, I spotted the enemy close behind. In my bones I felt the end was near.

  Pounding through the dust, we rounded another corner.

  Bright, light, trebly blessed, the sweet slender snout of an interplanetary freighter pierced the sky ahead. My heart leaped in joy and astonishment.

  ‘Come on!’ I cried.

  The ship stood behind a wall eight feet high. Double gates bearing the legend TRANSBURST TRADERS were firmly closed. Over them glared a red notice: BLAST OFF IMMINENT.

  The Glumpaltian horde swept around the corner behind us. Wildly emptying all my pockets of stones, I found I had only two sizable chunks of AM matter left. Tucking them under my armpits, I seized Chebarbar again and with an enormous jump cleared the wall.

  Officials – wonderful, symmetrical officials – came up at once. I explained who I was; I gave them my galactic Credit Card, which stood high enough to make them welcome me as an unexpected passenger.

  ‘Well, you’d better get aboard, sir,’ the bursar said. ‘Everything’s ready for countdown. We’ve had clearance.’

  ‘I thought your Glumpaltian-routed freighter only called at Ongustura,’ I remarked.

  He stared at me curiously. ‘This is Ongustura,’ he said.

  I was flabbergasted. ‘But the islands … the lake …’

  ‘Oh, didn’t you recognise the place with the tide out? For about a fortnight after the rising of the Black Sun, Ongustura is left high and dry, as you see it at present. Now you’d better get aboard with your lady.’

  Chebarbar was sobbing. She clung to my dusty shirt, talking almost incoherently.

  ‘I cannot come with you, my dearest. The magic of this ship is too powerful for me. If I entered it, I should die! You know I love you – yet I cannot, cannot come!’

  There was nothing I could say. This was as well, since I had been about to explain tactfully that I was unable to take her. Mutely, I pressed one of the two chunks of AM into her palm; it would help the quick-witted girl to buy her way out of future trouble.

  ‘Weep not, Chebarbar,’ I said, kissing her nose. ‘Time heals all things.’

  Smarting under the cliché, I climbed the freighter’s ramp. The smell of canned air ahead was like perfume. Just before entering the air lock I turned to look back at the weeping Chebarbar.

  Without surprise I noticed that her tears were falling upward towards the tatterdemalion clouds.

  The Lieutenant

  The lieutenant enjoyed commanding. Without any hesitation, he gathered up the fifteen men who were left into a squad, saw that they were armed with the nuclear weapons lying scattered in the area, and then addressed them.

  ‘As you men must realise, the general situation is desperate. Our particular situation, however, can be improved. This part of England must now be regarded as enemy territory, and it is up to us to get out of it as soon as possible. We shall take two abandoned trucks and move roughly West, towards Stow-on-the-Wold and the Cotswold defences. The sooner we start the better; I want us to be well on our way before dark. Rations will be eaten on the move. I shall ride in the front truck, Corporal Bow will ride in the other.’

  Corporal Bow was a stocky man with spectacles and a Geordie accent. He looked hard and resourceful. Although no more than twenty-three, his rare smile revealed two rows of almost whimsically false teeth. Apart from him and the lieutenant, all the other men were infantry privates, most of them very young.

  Without fuss, the squad divided into two and climbed up into the 3-tonners. The lieutenant watched them professionally, judging their morale. Some of these men had actually faced the enemy. They spoke little now, but gave no sign of apprehension. One of them called out ‘Tickets please’ as his mates climbed aboard.

  Love and pride rose in the lieutenant. He did not analyse these emotions, beyond knowing that they made him happy by rendering him beyond fear – or at least beyond cowardice. Still in his late twenties, he was full of that idealism which the Army either fosters strongly or stamps out entirely. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was 5.30. The month was September; in an hour it would be growing dark. He allowed himself to dwell briefly on the coming midnight, when he would halt the trucks; in his mind’s eye he saw himself directing the men to comfortable houses to sleep, while he sat studying a map by torchlight, finally rolling himself in a blanket to sleep on the floor of one of the trucks.

  Putting this sentimental vision of service away, clapping his map case cheerfully against his leg, the lieutenant walked round to speak to the driver of the rear truck.

  ‘Keep us always in sight,’ he ordered. ‘If you wish to attract our attention, use your horn. Remember, at any sign of the enemy we shall stop at once; so don’t run into us.’

  As he went round to the front of his own truck, he called into the back of it, ‘Everyone comfortable in there?’ and received cries of assent.

  ‘Alright!’ he said, swinging himself up beside his driver, ‘let her roll!’ The phrase was – inwardly he admitted it – a concession to the drama of the situation.

  The driver, a dark, gipsyish little fellow with a wreath tattooed on his wrist, kept his eyes on the road ahead and did not speak for half an hour. The two trucks moved down the deserted highroads steadily, reassuringly, the rear one always keeping the other’s tailboard in sight. Soothed by their progress, the lieutenant relaxed a little. As his mind shifted from the clear path of duty, he began to worry over small things he could less easily deal with. Even the driver’s silence began to trouble him; he liked to feel in rapport with his men.

  Beyond the window, evidences of the enemy’s depredations accumulated. Sometimes their guide lines lay coiled by the side of the road, or entangled in trees, or stretched for miles across the dulling countryside. As they turned onto the A41, a village confronted them which had been almost consumed by fire. Parts of it still smouldered; a small band of men ran behind a smoking wall as the lorries appeared. Presumably the place had begun to burn in a panic caused by the invaders.

  ‘Nice smell here – supper cooking, I wouldn’t wonder,’ the driver grunted to the lieutenant a little later when they passed a small hamlet. This was his oblique way of referring to the stench of human corruption, suddenly so strong it nearly curdled the air. Slowing his truck, the driver leant out of his window, looking for bodies.

  They saw enemy bodies too, disintegrating rapidly. At one small town they made a detour through side roads, the main road being completely under the enemy’s netting. At other points along the route they met human survivors, walking, listlessly waiting, thumbing a lift. Some villages were unharmed, some completely unaltered except for barricades at windows and doors. Everything emphasised the randomness of the enemy’s attack.

  Evening drew in. The sun disappeared behind a hill. Darkness was like a positive quality radiated by the ground, a primitive thing opposing the
senses.

  ‘Shall I switch our lights on?’ the driver asked; his voice was reluctant, even surly – though whether through habit, as the lieutenant suspected, or because he recognised in himself a dread of night, it would be hard to determine.

  ‘Wait a bit longer,’ the lieutenant replied, and as he spoke they saw the enemy. The driver killed his engine; the truck stopped dead. Behind it, the other truck did the same.

  Round the lieutenant’s neck hung a pair of service binoculars. Opening his door, he stood with his feet inside the cab, and peered through the binoculars over the roof of the lorry.

  The enemy were flying on a course that would eventually bring them across the road. There were fifteen of them by the lieutenant’s count. They were high, in sunlight, the sun glinting on their retracted forward blades, glinting on the fifteen guide lines spread out behind them.

  Removing the binoculars from his eyes, the lieutenant looked about him. The second truck was a few yards down the road, within shouting distance. Men in both trucks peered out to see why they had stopped.

  ‘Can we have a shot at the blighters if they come nearer?’ one of the men in the lieutenant’s truck called to him.

  ‘We will not bother them if they don’t bother us,’ the lieutenant said.

  Everyone watched in silence then, and the enemy sailed on in silence. As they got higher in the sky, they swerved in perfect unison, bodies glinting gold. The great arc they moved on took them eastwards. They dwindled, dulled as they lost the sun. In a minute more they were hidden from view by cloud.

  Slowly the lieutenant climbed back into his seat, conscious of anticlimax.

  ‘Move on?’ the driver enquired. He got a nod for an answer.

  Twilight was thick about them and their pace had dropped to a crawl as they entered Aylesbury. Glancing at his wrist watch, the lieutenant saw that they had made good progress. He decided abruptly on an alteration of plans, abandoning the idea of travelling on till midnight.

  ‘We are going to turn off the main road,’ he announced. ‘This will be where we halt for the night. Go slow.’

  The driver grunted. Moving at a crawl, still without lights, they came on a left turn between neat semi-detached houses.

  ‘Turn in here.’

  They swung round carefully, past an overturned and deserted milk van. The road curved until it ran parallel with the main road. Discreet little houses with their own gardens, shielded from the public gaze by shrubs and ornamental trees, stood on both sides of them.

  ‘Good. Stop here,’ said the lieutenant.

  Jumping down as soon as his driver braked, the lieutenant walked back to meet the second truck. In the first, the men were restless, and he told them to stay where they were. As the other vehicle drew up, Corporal Bow jumped out. He saluted.

  ‘I have decided we will stay here for the night,’ the lieutenant said. ‘There seems to be some enemy activity, and our headlights might easily give us away. We should be able to find rations here without breaking into our own.’

  ‘Aylesbury ducklings,’ reminded the corporal. It was his only comment: the lieutenant had hoped for something more explicit in the way of approval.

  ‘Everyone out of the trucks,’ he said sharply. ‘Fall in in threes. Corporal Bow, take charge of the squad. I am going to see if this house is occupied.’

  The garden was trim, even prim. The garage had been hidden away behind trellis on which honeysuckle grew. An ornamental pool the size of a pudding basin lay in the lawn. Each side of the front door, concrete dwarfs stood coyly. Ignoring a luminous bell-push, the lieutenant tried the door. It was locked. He banged on it.

  In the middle of the door was a long narrow panel of frosted glass. The lieutenant kicked it in, knocking the shards away with his side arm. A sense of power and elation filled him. Keeping the gun in one hand and a torch in the other, he squeezed through the middle of the door. Breathing rapidly he stood in the hall listening. Silence.

  Everything was neat here. The sense of desertion, as the lieutenant moved from downstairs room to downstairs room, was complete: but the people had left without panic or fuss. Everything was beautifully tidy, even the ashtrays emptied.

  The lieutenant, not an imaginative man, amused himself by visualising the owner of the house, the man who had built the ornamental pool, ushering his wife and children quietly and methodically out of the house. He must have said, ‘Better pack the kettle, darling,’ for no kettle now stood on the kitchen stove. The gas had been cut off, though the electric light still worked.

  In the hall stood one suitcase. Opening it with eagerness, the lieutenant found only clothes, women’s clothes over which he felt no interest. At the last minute, this suitcase must have proved too much, and had been left behind.

  ‘Typical English family,’ the lieutenant muttered, feeling both love and contempt. He ought now to rejoin his squad, but the urge to explore was on him. Kicking the suitcase aside, he went upstairs. He used his torch, not switching on the overhead lights: that way was safe – and more dramatic.

  The front bedroom, the bathroom with its toothbrushes gone from the chromium rack, were what he had expected. In one of the back bedrooms he found a dead woman.

  She lay comfortably in bed with her jaw wide open, her mouth a hole into which the lieutenant did not care to shine his torch. From the evidence, she had been a chronic invalid; her age suggested she might have been the mother of the house owner. Medicine bottles and pill boxes were stacked on top of a tallboy. The paraphernalia of illness lay about the room: an invalid tray, spare pillows, a bedpan. And on a bedside table stood a bottle of sleeping pills, almost empty. The old lady had been too ill to travel; the family had taken care of her in the only possible way.

  For some minutes the lieutenant stood there, his last muttered remark coming back to him. At length he went out of the room, closing the door behind him, and descended the stairs. Sliding sideways through the front door, he walked down the drive.

  The squad was standing about on the pavement, talking and smoking with half a dozen civilians, men and women. When their officer appeared, they shuffled uneasily.

  ‘Corporal Bow, what’s going on here?’

  As Bow came up, he ground the tip of a cigarette against the butt of his nuc-gun and slipped the unsmoked inch of it into a pocket.

  ‘These folk live in this road, sir. They’ve not evacuated like the rest. They’re staying on, sir. They were just putting us in the picture, like, sir.’

  ‘Alright, corporal. Fall your men in again.’

  As the men reluctantly formed up, the lieutenant counted them. One man was missing. At the last moment, he came running across from the other side of the road. With a sudden spurt of anger, the lieutenant discerned a woman in the shadows. Always women to interfere with soldiers’ business! He was about to issue a reprimand when one of the civilians came over and interrupted.

  ‘I understand you are about to install your men in this house here, lieutenant?’

  The speaker was a tall man in his sixties, wearing an overcoat and an oilskin hat which somehow failed to make him look ridiculous. He carried a sporting gun tucked comfortably under one arm.

  ‘We shall be camping here for one night, yes,’ the lieutenant replied.

  ‘My name is Ropeness, lieutenant. This house belongs to Ivor Merdock, and he has asked me to keep an eye on it for him while he is away. By law you have no right to enter it.’

  ‘The country is under military law now.’ The lieutenant’s voice was absolutely adamant. Skilfully, Ropeness changed his tactics slightly.

  ‘Nevertheless, sixteen men could do considerable damage to a small house, even in one night. Merdock was a friend of mine – I’d hate to see his place spoilt. Why not put yourself up at the church hall, quarter of a mile down the road? They’ll probably have blankets and a bit of food for you there.’

  ‘We’re staying here, thank you,’ the lieutenant said sharply. ‘You might feel a little less solicitous for your frien
d if you knew he’d left the corpse of an old woman behind. He’s a murderer, nothing more or less.’

  Dismissing the man, he turned back to his troops. Under his direction, they ran the trucks into the drive of Merdock’s house and shut the ornamental white drive gates on which was printed the house name: ‘Apres Midi’. A search in the empty garage revealed a ladder, which was secured across the gates to reinforce them. Two men were sent to reconnoitre in the back garden.

  All the while, the little knot of people who still remained in the road stood outside, watching and discussing the matter in low voices. The lieutenant was surprised at the hatred he felt for civilians and their aimlessness. They seemed a more immediate threat to his men than did the enemy.

  One sentry was posted in the front garden, one in the back. Everyone else went inside. When the curtains were drawn, the lieutenant allowed the light to be switched on. Grinning and joking, the men climbed over armchairs and sofa, lighting cigarettes or poking in corners. One man peered into the coal bin.

  ‘Shall I get us a fire, sir?’

  ‘Do. Make yourselves as comfortable as possible.’ He saw he was already beginning to know their faces, to differentiate between them. He allowed himself to smile and one or two of them grinned back; all were curiously delighted by the contrast they offered to the domesticity about them.

  ‘I shall sleep in the bedroom above this. The rest of you will sleep in here or in the dining–room next door. Make fires in each room – good ones, because you’ll be short of blankets. Use the furniture if necessary.’

  This suggestion appealed to them. He must beware of turning the whole thing into an adventure. In colder tones, he gave them other instructions and then called for two volunteers to accompany him in search of food and information.

  Two men stepped forward, a curly-haired Welshman called Davies and a bony lad with a cast in one eye who said his name was Hogg. Giving the corporal strict instructions to let nobody in or out, the lieutenant set off with his patrol.