The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  After a minute, he was able to collect himself enough to stagger back to the dinerette. There, he picked up the detergent advert, which still looked like a cablegram to him. He knew what this meant.

  The Other was growing stronger. It was eating reality from him, remorselessly. He sat at the table, face in hands, until the men came for him from the clinic. Linda stood to one side, pale of face, as he was half-carried into the waiting ambulance.

  II

  SLIDEOGRAM

  The way to the bathroom kept changing. I told myself such things did not happen, I said to myself, ‘It’s all part of whatever is wrong with you, Eric. There is only one way to the bathroom. Your memory is just tangled up. God, let it be that and nothing else!’ In those days I addressed God a lot, almost as much as I talked to myself.

  It was just not the bathroom that moved. The isolation block in which I was confined alone consisted of eleven rooms: a dining room, a living room where I spent most of my time, a games room with a table-tennis table and punch-ball, that bathroom, the lavatory, and six fair-sized single bedrooms, of which mine was the only one occupied. Everything was on one floor – fortunately, for I was too weak at first to climb stairs. As the days passed, I became more and more sure that these rooms and the corridors connecting them formed an ever-changing pattern; either that, or I was mad – and both alternatives sent goose-flesh running like sweat over me.

  Maybe I could have borne madness – had I ever known sanity? Maybe I could have borne stealthily shifting rooms – does not indifference eventually cover everything? But these factors combined with the isolation were too much. The universe was the isolation block, and it had to be something more. There had to be a beyond, a freedom, another place – something more than a shuffling riddle.

  I had to get out. Out. Connive, kick, kill – but get out.

  So I became crafty. After breakfast one day – perhaps my seventh in isolation, although at first my perceptions had been too dim for me to keep count of days – I went into the living room, leaving the door open behind me. Then I angled a chair round slightly, and sat on it so that without appearing to do so I could see one of the bedroom doors just across the corridor. There I sat looking at it, hardly fluttering an eyelid. Nothing happened. I just sat there, growing tenser and tenser, until it felt as if I might suddenly blow apart. I was still sitting there when the nurse came in. She appeared very silently. She scared me so much, I went into peals of nervous laughter. My laughter went on and on; it was something quite outside me or my control, and it frightened me more than the nurse did.

  This nurse, who said her name was Baron, was the first thing I could remember when I regained consciousness seven or however many days ago it had been. There had just been nothing at first, nothing but a meaningless image of a man struggling with invisible forces in mid-air; I did not know who that man was or anything about him, and after some while he faded, allowing me a chance to take in my sick room. One sick room is much like another, and this one was more like them than most, if you follow me. All the same, I was a long time exploring the dull paucity of its detail, because my mind was so painfully sluggish. At first I could not even comprehend what a room was.

  My brain felt as if it had been frozen. The unconsciousness which had enfolded it like deep, Arctic water seemed to have left its print in every cell, fogging over memories, hopes, thoughts, everything. I did not know or care who I was, I was without personality or habits; when Baron came in, her first job was always to change my soiled bed linen. What is surprising is that, although I was at such a low ebb, I was constantly preoccupied with one question, which may be phrased roughly like this: what kind of a state of unconsciousness had I been in and what kind of a state of consciousness was I in now?

  At the time, the question did not present itself in words. It was not as clear-cut as that, but more like a dark cloud over all of my sky. As I lay there, I was a baby born adult, to whom nothing is known. I had all the fears of a baby, without the comfort of a mother. My only comfort was Baron, coming silently to dress the wound on my left leg. And I worried as a baby might have done over where I had come from, and what had been the nature of the darkness which had enclosed me like a womb.

  No, not womb, tomb. The unconsciousness had been cold. That was all I could remember about it, or rather that was what I could not forget about it, as I trembled lest I fell back into it again. Other things than cold had filled that long blackness – dreams, phantasms – but these eluded the dredging hand of my memory.

  The preoccupation with this horrible void which constituted all my past gradually left me. I began to take more notice of Baron. She always wore the traditional nurse’s uniform with a mask which covered all of her face below her eyes. Her eyes frightened me. When I grew well enough to react that much, a gulpy feeling of indefinable dread slid up my throat whenever she approached. When she dressed my wound, I knew the flesh turned cold beneath her efficient touch. By the light creases round her eyes, I judged that she was in her late thirties. She was big and solid; once when she slipped off the rubber gloves she habitually wore, I saw that the fingers of her right hand were spatulate and heavily stained with nicotine.

  What first began to alarm me about Baron was her boots. She wore thick black stockings on her legs and, on her feet, heavy boots; they were like Army boots, except that their soles were of deep and yielding crepe. In my weak state, I found the contrast between her determined aspect and her absolutely noiseless tread unnerving, almost supernatural.

  And then I began to think that she was a man in disguise.

  She – if it was a she – came into the isolation block five times a day: firstly to take my temperature, dress my leg, bring me breakfast; then in mid-morning to tidy up; then briefly to bring me lunch; then briefly to bring me supper; and lastly to close things down for another of those long, sound-proof nights which always left me convinced that the rest of the human race was dead. She spoke very little, in a husky voice. To almost anything I asked, I received short and unsatisfactory answers. ‘Why am I isolated here like this?’ I inquired as soon as I had found my voice.

  ‘The disease from which you suffer is a rare one, and highly infectious,’ she said. ‘If other people had contact with you, they would die.’

  ‘Why do no doctors come to visit me?’

  ‘People come and see you when you are asleep,’ she said. She said it quietly; it struck me as being the most sinister thing yet. I just shut my eyes and did not dare to ask any more questions. I was a monster, tended by monsters.

  That night, I was more afraid of the dark than I had ever been – and afraid of myself.

  I put out the bedside light, determined not to sleep. For half an hour I lay awake, until an imagined sound outside my door made me fumble for the light again. The switch worked, but the room remained dark. With dry, open mouth I sat there propped on one arm, right hand extended, not daring to move. As the tension in me slowly, slowly relaxed, I thought again of what Baron had said; I asked myself what the disease might be from which I suffered.

  That was when I knew for sure that things were grossly wrong. A man can tell certain facts about his body; I knew from the feel of mine that it was not diseased. Apart from a minor knock on the leg, nothing was wrong with me. And since knocks on the leg are not infectious, I ought not to be in isolation. I was not a patient; I was a victim.

  As if against my own will, I fell asleep.

  I woke to find Baron marching soundlessly into the bedroom. Morning had come again. Humbly, I asked for cigarettes and matches. To my surprise, she produced them. Now I should have some sort of illumination for the coming night; pursuing this line of thought, I tried my bedside lamp when the nurse had gone: it worked perfectly.

  By this time, I was able to walk about easily enough. Leaving my breakfast untouched on its tray, I got out of bed and went to the door.

  There was another door, closed, facing me across the corridor. Swinging my dead leg, I booted it open. It was the ba
throom. Yesterday the bathroom had been up the corridor, and an empty bedroom had faced mine. You don’t make mistakes over things like that, not unless you’re mad. Not unless you’re mad.

  God, don’t let me be mad. Here is something easily checked, if brain can be pressed to function as required. Draw a plan of the room layout, keep it under your pillow, compare tomorrow morning. There are pencils and paper in the living room.

  I ran down the passage, turned left – and there was another turn in the corridor that I could have sworn was not there yesterday. It was another left turn; doggedly, I took it. It was a cul de sac containing only one door. I opened it. There was the living room. Before I got the paper and pencil, I went to look out of the window.

  The isolation block was badly provided with windows, which seemed to exist on only one side of the building. Outside, there was nothing to see but a bleak and featureless plain, with a blue conifer forest and what looked like a lake on the horizon. Never once had I seen a human figure out there, never a living thing moving.

  I collected a pencil and a sheet of paper, on the top of which I had written my name five times: Eric Lazenby Eric Lazenby Eric Lazenby Eric Lazenby Eric Lazenby. It was almost the only item worth knowing that I had gleaned from Baron.

  It seemed to me I could construct my plan of the block most easily by beginning from my bedroom. I went back up the passage, turned right – and there was not a second right turn at all. Yet I distinctly recalled making two left turns going, which would mean two right ones coming back. I stopped dead, facing a blank wall. I got the cigarettes out and put one in my mouth, steadying myself with my other hand because I suddenly felt a little dizzy.

  I lit the cigarette with a precious match and tentatively opened the door on my right. It was the living room I had just left down the corridor. The dead plain stared in through the window at me.

  Suddenly, I was no longer afraid. Fury ran in my veins, my head became surprisingly clear. As I stubbed out the cigarette, I realised I had never smoked one before.

  With the aid of my tie, I began making measurements of corridors and rooms. As I had suspected, the proportions bore a definite relationship to each other. As I worked, reassurance came back to me – not only because I now was sure I had not been having hallucinations, but because at last something of my past was beginning to seep through to me.

  I knew that much of my life had been spent measuring, probing, looking for relationships. To do the same thing now – although crudely and with my tie – brought back an inescapable sense of familiarity. I had been something called an astrogator. I had gone into somewhere called space. Everything seemed remote, as if these partial memories were someone else’s.

  It is an odd feeling to have one’s world return, link by link. I was like a runner with a flaming torch, speeding through a honeycomb; cell after cell lit up as I appeared, staying lit after I had gone.

  With renewed vigour, I assailed the problem immediately before me. When I thought I had all the components of it, I went into the living room and sat down to concentrate on putting them methodically together into a solution. Method: that and perseverance serve almost as well as genius.

  They did this time. I felt sure I could see the kind of predicament I was in. Now a test to make sure.

  If my theory was right, I was being watched. Accordingly, all the time I was thinking, I slumped myself over a table and heaved my shoulders as if I was crying. But through my intertwined fingers I watched the corridor. Watched it like grim death.

  And in a little while it changed shape. The room opposite slid away and another took its place.

  It made my stomach quiver, although I had been expecting it. Nobody likes to see his house shuffled round like a pack of cards. Now what about the madness, the horrible disease? Had that just been a nasty bluff, partly designed to give another shake to my nerves? For this was not an isolation block at all. It was a torture chamber. Someone was riding me.

  Escape. And the best time for that, I knew, was after dark, when the unseen watchers had switched off the electricity and the silent ‘doctors’ came to see me.

  So I waited for night, with a sick feeling for company. I tried to do the little things I usually did – take a doze, play patience – to fool the unseen watchers, but covertly I was observing the view out of the window. I wanted to watch it get dark. You see, if my theory was correct, that was not a view at all: it was a mock-up of plaster and plastic such as you see in museums when stuffed birds are exhibited in their natural habitat.

  If it was a mock-up, it was the best ever. Grey clouds flitted across the sky, the light changed on the distant lake.

  Only when dark began to fall did I think the creators of the panorama had made a mistake. It seemed to me, although I had nothing to time the process with, that it grew dark too quickly. They should have taken longer sliding the rheostat over, I thought triumphantly. I’d kill them if I ever got to them.

  The windows would not open, or I was sure I could have leant out and plucked those little trees by the ‘far away’ sheet of water.

  This was how I viewed the situation. You will have seen those sliding number puzzles schoolboys carry about. They are, say, two inches square and contain fifteen little squares, each a half inch by a half inch and numbered ‘1’ to ‘15’. The sixteenth square is left blank so that the others can be slid round. The trick is to get the numbers in the right order. Slideograms, they used to call them.

  I was in a big slideogram. Diner, living room, games room, bathroom, lavatory, six bedrooms: these accounted for eleven of the squares, and the rest was occupied by corridor space. The Watchers could slide them about into any combination at will – just to shake me into the frame of mind they needed me in, just for the joy of seeing me suffer.

  The view from the window was a fake: otherwise it would have changed as the position of the room changed, and that would have made the game too obvious.

  Claustrophobia attacked me as I visualised myself being switched about inside the slideogram by invisible machinery. And although I had worked it all out so coolly, I was trembling like a leaf most of the time.

  I knew someone had gone to an awful lot of trouble over me. Why? What had I done to deserve this? Why had I even been granted life? Suddenly, I hated life. It means you spend your days and nights nearly wetting your pants in fright.

  Well, they had me now. I was trapped. By the thoroughness of the preparations, I could see I was never intended to live normally.

  I heard the bolts go back, one, two, three, on the outside of the door, and then Baron entered my room. She had brought my supper. If I overpowered her, I could run out of the door; but I guessed there would be guards outside. Besides, I did not know if I could overpower her – if it was a her. Just to touch her (him?) might bring down fifty screaming killers upon me.

  ‘My leg is bad again,’ I said. ‘May I have a sedative to make me sleep tonight?’

  ‘I will bring one on my next round, when you are in bed,’ she said.

  She left the room to go and get my bed ready; she did not hesitate over which way to go. There was no need for her to hang about and watch me gulp my bread and milk down. In the ceilings of each room would be spy holes through which little piggy eyes could regard my every movement. I swore to eat those eyes one day.

  Carefully, leaning forward and shielding my forehead with my hand as if it ached, I spooned the bread and milk down inside my collar. It felt disgusting; I could trace the path of the sloppy cubes of bread slithering grandly down my ribs, soaking into shirt and trousers, or whatever it was I wore. At least nobody watching from overhead could see I was not eating the stuff properly. I had guessed that this, my last bit of nourishment of the day, would be well soused with sleeping draught. Otherwise, with all the worries I had, I should never have slept at all. As far as I knew, I had not eaten a meal since coming to this trap.

  When Baron came back last thing, I was snuggled down in bed, still with dried chunks of bread clinging to
my stomach. She brought three sleeping pills and a glass of water, as she did once before when I had complained of a headache. She left my room as I was preparing to swallow them – that way, I should be off guard, and the Watchers would see what I did when unsuspecting.

  Putting the pills up to my mouth, I palmed them like a conjuror, swallowed, sipped water, gulped convincingly. This was my little artistic touch, intended to lull any extra interest they might have in me over my earlier performance with the tie. I guessed that if they saw me doing anything unusual they would come down and kill me.

  Lying back on the pillow, I closed my eyes and gradually regularised my breathing. I rolled onto one side and let my mouth fall open. There I lay, to all intents fast asleep, until Baron came back into the room. By then I was dangerously near a self-induced sleep.

  I opened one eyelid a crack.

  Baron had finished her few chores round the block. Now, after the most cursory glance at me, she was ready to go off duty. Obviously, she had not a doubt in her ugly skull I was out cold for eleven hours. She had undone her gauze mask, letting it dangle round her neck, and was lighting a cigarette, flooding the room with smoke.

  Baron had blue jowls and a heavy moustache.

  It did not surprise me, but it shocked me.

  At least it showed this: that the enemy was not vigilant all the time. They had their moments of relaxation and inattention. Perhaps they did not watch at all at night. They had weaknesses through which I could strike back at them.

  After several deep draws on his cigarette and a casual tidy of the objects in my room, Baron came over to the bedside and flipped off the light. Then he went out, down the corridor, and left by the front door. I listened to the bolts go to on the outside.