The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

Home > Other > The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One > Page 94
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 94

by Aldiss, Brian


  I sat up. I was so confined, the whole idea of movement felt strange to me.

  If they had infra-red apparatus to observe me in the dark, mine was a lost cause, but I guessed that this was unlikely. They had been too careful to immobilise me during the hours of night.

  Two possible ways of escape presented themselves to me. I could either try to slip out between the moving walls of the slideogram when a reshuffle was in progress or I could hide in the corridor and slip out of the door when the ‘doctors’ came in. I never doubted that they would come in, for they had the best of reasons for wanting to examine me: they hated me, and must find the most efficient way of killing me. I did not fancy the chance of being mashed between two slowly closing rooms; I would wait to slip out of the front door.

  Heart beating unsteadily, I climbed out of bed and put my clothes on. Did they feel like blotting paper? It was amazing what a grip I had managed to get on myself; I felt capable of dealing with anything – or anyone. Yet I wondered if I had a body, or what its functions were.

  Then I went into the hall, prepared to deal with hell itself if need be. Standing there in the dark, I readied myself to spring for freedom. I could feel myself growing.

  III

  DECAGRAM

  The two doctors, Siddall and van Buren, straightened up and looked at each other. Clarke Siddall sighed heavily.

  ‘Another crisis due,’ he said. ‘I wonder if either Lazenby or the Other will be able to withstand it. It looks to me like the ultimate one.’

  ‘Better prepare him,’ van Buren said, rising slowly from the chair before the Kensiton screen. He was older, solider, than Siddall, yet the weariness of looking into the screen had told on him as much as on his more impressionable companion.

  The combined aural and visual impressions emitted from the Kensitons were overpowering. Van Buren switched them off as he rose, and the image of the creature waiting by the bolted door vanished. It seemed impossible that the nightmare world of this thing in the slideogram could have been projected at them from the patient who now lay quietly on a nearby bed, his shaven skull covered with the rods and terminals which were the sensory equipment of the Kensiton.

  The patient, Eric Lazenby, stirred as a young nurse came forward at van Burren’s bidding and applied the revivifier. Impulses from the troubled regions of his brain had been tapped, amplified, scanned, decoded, edited and finally broadcast in terms of sight and sound by the big machine into which Siddall and van Buren had been peering. But of all this, Lazenby appeared to know nothing.

  He woke now, wide-eyed, his mouth opening and shutting as if in the mute rehearsal of an angry speech.

  ‘Nothing to worry about, old fellow,’ van Buren said, coming over and looking down at him kindly. ‘You are in the Ferrisway Central Clinic, and Dr Siddall and I are taking care of you.’

  ‘My wife … Lindy …’

  ‘She will come to see you soon,’ van Buren said, soothingly, turning to signal to Clark Siddall.

  The latter quietly left the room, walking down the corridor to the waiting room at the far end. As he opened the door, he saw that, despite her anxiety, Linda Lazenby had been asleep in the chair. But as soon as he entered, she sat up and said, ‘Eric?’

  Siddall smiled, first with professional reassurance, then voluntarily, as he made the delicate transition from brain specialist to young man. He had always enjoyed smiling at Linda, even in the days when she was his father’s secretary. Now, a year of marriage had merely ripened her, making her more beautiful than ever.

  ‘Your husband will be better soon, Linda,’ he said. ‘I hope. His is a strange case, but we can tackle it.’

  She seemed to doubt him.

  ‘He’s not – insane?’ she asked.

  ‘Not in any normal meaning of the word – although he will be if we cannot give him some relief soon.’

  ‘I see. Then … this Other exists?’

  Her voice was faint. Siddall took her hands as he answered, ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, withdrawing her hands.

  ‘Please sit down, Mrs. Lazenby,’ Siddall said, abruptly becoming more professional. ‘Your husband is asking to see you, but before you go in I think it advisable to tell you something about his condition. Dr van Buren and I have seen the Other, and watched it at work. Yes, it is real enough in a sense. We have the means here to send impulses into any part of a patient’s brain; the impulses return and are translated into easily comprehensible sight and sound images. So, we have been able to look at the Other, appreciate its point of view, and even follow its twisted thought processes.’

  ‘It … is something in my husband’s mind?’

  ‘Yes. It has no true realisation of its own whereabouts or identity. It imagines itself vaguely to be a man, trapped by unknown and cruel enemies in a slideogram.’

  He went on, elaborating for Linda’s benefit the drama of isolation and anxiety which the doctors had observed through the Kensiton screen.

  ‘And all this happens in Eric’s mind?’ Linda asked.

  ‘Yes, although he is unaware of most of it. You see, the Other is really – ’

  He paused listening. Footsteps clattered down the corridor. The nurse who had been attending Eric Lazenby burst into the waiting room.

  ‘Dr van Buren says please come quickly,’ she breathed. ‘The patient has got out of bed and is growing violent.’

  ‘Coming.’ Siddall sprinted back down the corridor, the nurse just behind him. Through the open door of the single ward, he could see the shadows dancing crazily. Running in, he was in time to see Eric collapse slowly onto the bed, van Buren steadying him.

  ‘I just managed to lay him out in time,’ van Buren said, panting, setting down an hypodermic. ‘Nurse, stand by with the oxygen, will you? I gave him rather a heavy dose, I’m afraid. He pushed me backwards, struck out at the light, and was just going for the Kensitons. I stopped him in the only way I could, before he did irreparable damage.’

  * * *

  With Siddall’s help, the nurse tucked Eric back into bed. Unobserved, Linda had entered the room. She stood now, looking down with compassion at the heavy face and shaven head of her husband; he was scarcely recognisable.

  ‘We’d better try the last stage now,’ Siddall said to van Buren. ‘I’ll have to tell the girl before we turn her out – we need her permission before attempting anything dangerous.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ van Buren said, turning his solid back on Siddall. His hands were trembling.

  ‘Mrs. Lazenby,’ Siddall said, as he saw her behind him, ‘Your husband’s sanity, if not his life, is threatened, and I must operate immediately. I require your sanction before going ahead.’

  ‘Tell me what is wrong with him,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps you know something of cysts. They are bags of morbid matter, often with a hard shell, which appear in the body. When opened, they are sometimes found to contain hair or teeth, or fingernails, or even all three together. A cyst is a bubble of unused embryonic material, isolated from the foetus in which it occurs, and thus unable to develop normally. Often it causes no trouble until the person in whom it lodges reaches – well, your husband’s age, for instance.’

  Linda was leaning against the wall, not looking at Siddall.

  ‘My husband has such a cyst?’ she asked.

  ‘Not exactly. Your husband has a cyst lodged in the silent area of his brain. It is a small thing, weighing perhaps only a decagram. Unfortunately, this cyst contains morbid brain tissue. It has consciousness – life, if you like – of its own. It is about to burst and flood your husband’s brain.’

  She pressed her forehead, as if she could personally feel the weight of the fatal decagram.

  ‘The cyst is presumably the Other?’ she said. ‘He – Eric – told me it was not human.’

  ‘He was quite correct,’ van Buren said, coming forward. ‘This cyst, though so small, is a real monster. It has cunning without conscience, life without responsibility. In sho
rt, it is insane. We have been able to watch its thought processes on the screen here.’

  Clark Siddall gestured him to silence, explaining more gently, ‘The Other could hardly be anything but unbalanced, Mrs. Lazenby. Buried where it is, it has no contact with the external world except through such thoughts and memories as may filter to it from your husband’s brain. The supply of these has recently increased; our observations show that this is because the cyst has recently cracked, possibly because of some worry your husband has been suffering.’

  ‘He is due to blast off for Pluto in four days,’ Linda said. ‘He – we neither of us wanted him to go.’

  ‘That might account for it,’ Siddall admitted. ‘Now, a sort of two-way traffic in distorted ideas is passing between your husband’s and the cyst-brain. They fight each other in total darkness. When Eric has the illusion that he stands outside your house with the Other inside, this is an allegory of the way in which the cyst may dispossess him of his mind. When he thinks he gets a cable signed by himself, this is another warning from within. He is warring with himself.’

  ‘Poor Eric!’ Linda said, looking down at the still face on the pillow, overhung by the great bulk of the silent Kensitons. ‘How does the broadcast you received from the thing in the slideogram fit into it?’

  ‘That broadcast came from the cyst itself,’ Siddall explained, moving to the instrument panels and switching several toggles over. ‘We were observing its actual interpretations of its peculiar environment. Professionally speaking, they were highly interesting. The Other’s inability to fend for itself is symbolised by its bed-soiling and need to invent a nurse. This nurse, Baron, also symbolises its inability to master the concepts of two sexes which filter through to it from the surrounding brain. It is baffled by the idea of having a body; it asks of clothes, “Do they feel like blotting paper?”

  ‘Many of its problems it has rationalised. The drifting lines of thought round it, which the cyst cannot penetrate or comprehend, have become the moving walls of its prison through which it now plans to slip.’

  ‘Don’t say any more!’ Linda cried, abruptly covering her face. ‘I can’t understand it! This – this Other, this cyst – it’s part of Eric, after all! It lives in him, it is him. Did you not say it knew itself to be an astrogator, like Eric?’

  Siddall put his arm round her shoulder, comfortingly.

  ‘Yes, I said that,’ he agreed. ‘The cyst, rebelling against your husband’s supremacy, is nevertheless forced to take on part of his identity, since it has no identity of its own. After all, it has little imagination – witness the way it scales down the idea of “outside”, which is too big for it to cope with: a distant view from a window becomes a model it could easily destroy. In fact, all it really knows is that it is in a spot, and will do anything to get free.’

  ‘It’s hateful!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m sorry for Eric, of course – but I can’t help pitying this trapped thing too!’

  Van Buren moved restlessly on the other side of the bed.

  ‘There is no room for pity,’ he said. ‘This cyst is malignant, paranoid, a killer. You must give us leave at once to deal with it if we can, and kill it before it kills your husband’s brain.’

  Distraught, she looked up at Clark Siddall.

  ‘Is there no alternative?’

  ‘None,’ he said gently. ‘The cyst is about to burst and take over your husband’s mind. The matter is urgent.’

  ‘You must do what you must,’ she said listlessly. ‘Are you going to operate?’

  ‘That is impossible,’ Siddall replied. ‘The cyst is too deeply buried in the brain to be accessible. We have our own way of dealing with it.’

  He beckoned to the nurse, who stood nearby, biting her lip.

  ‘Take Mrs. Lazenby to the waiting room,’ he said. ‘I will come for her when it’s all over.’

  IV

  KILLOGRAM

  The little ward was filled with the low notes of the machine. Siddall lay on a couch, his head enveloped by a metallic helmet connected to the Kensiton. Van Buren stood anxiously over him.

  ‘This is reckless, Clark,’ he said, ‘Once I have projected your mind into Lazenby’s, you are on your own, and I can’t help you. You’ll be facing a killer single-handed – and empty-handed.’

  ‘I have to go in there,’ Siddall replied. ‘Lazenby is helpless: he doesn’t know what he’s up against. Plug me through and keep your fingers crossed!’

  Shrugging his massive shoulders, van Buren went to the machine, sat down, tuned in. On the deep screen, the grey shadows moved and twisted. A feeling of perspective formed, warped in closer, seemed to rise up and enfold the doctor. Siddall gave a low cry from his couch. Then his identity was swept into Eric Lazenby’s brain …

  It was like a physical shock.

  Siddall stood in a whirling mist, over a bottomless pit, under a fathomless sky. Of his own agonised volition, he pressed forward. The world darkened and solidified round him. A murmur as of tortured waters filled his ears.

  Although there could be no sense of direction where he was, something drew him on. A whiff of evil. An aroma of menace. He was drawing towards the Other.

  As he drew nearer, the power of the Other grew. He ceased – gradually and confusedly – to think of it as a cyst. It was a killer, capable of taking any shape, waiting to overcome him, blast him flat.

  Tensely, he moved forward. Now he could see the Other’s stronghold. From within, Siddall knew, it was a slideogram; from outside, it was an amorphous mass, big as a mountain, its heights hidden in mist. Nothing, in this never-never-land of the mind, could be viewed objectively. To him it was one thing, to the adversary another.

  Siddall moved in. But his emanations must have penetrated the Other’s fortress. Before he was ready, the Other struck. The whole thing was over in a flash, a thunderclap of terror.

  The great mountain screamed, splitting clean down the middle. The interior blazed like a furnace. Prancing like a horse, the Other emerged savagely, a ghastly monster of hair and teeth and errant eyeballs, high as a house, deep as a dynamo. The screaming grew, not coming only from the gaping mountain, but pouring out from everywhere.

  Sickened, Siddall barely kept his wits. Then, as the charging thing was almost on him, he spread, changed, flowed. His imagination labouring, he became a landscape, wide, dreary, all-encompassing. It was the one thing of which the Other could have no knowledge, could not face. Mile on mile, Siddall spread himself out, a planet-full of desolation.

  The Other dwindled, rolled itself into a globe, shrunk – and vanished. The horrible screaming died away.

  Weakly, Siddall drew himself together. His strength was utterly spent. For a second, he lost consciousness; everything faded about him. When he was aware of himself once more, he was back in his own prone body, and the hum of the Kensitons, which had brought him safely back, was sinking into nothingness. Van Buren was leaning over him anxiously.

  ‘Lazenby?’ Siddall managed to ask.

  ‘He’ll be fine. What about you?’

  ‘I’ll be okay. What happened to the Other?’

  Van Buren spread wide his palms.

  ‘On the screen, it was difficult to see,’ he said. ‘Everything happened so fast; your images were fused with his. Directly the Other was confronted by a wide open space, it was attacked – as you so cleverly guessed it would be – by its own major weakness: agoraphobia. It dwindled into a ball and bounced over the horizon. That should have finished it, I imagine.’

  Eric Lazenby groaned and stirred as he finished speaking. Van Buren went over to him. The patient was not yet conscious, but already he looked better, less haggard.

  Gathering his strength, Siddall sat up.

  ‘The Other … bounced over the horizon – my horizon?’ he said interrogatively.

  ‘Yes,’ van Buren replied, without turning from the bed. ‘At that point, the cyst vanished from Lazenby’s mind. I checked that on the Kensiton. You … exorcised it, Clark!’
<
br />   ‘I see,’ Siddall murmured. He stood up, cautiously. He felt oddly weak.

  On the bed, Eric coughed and opened his eyes.

  ‘I’ll go and get Linda – Mrs. Lazenby,’ Siddall said.

  He went out, walking unsteadily down the corridor, the recent horror still swirling over his mind like an angry sea. His vision was blurred. A sudden feeling of nausea overcame him at the door of the waiting room. Groaning, he clutched at the knob for support.

  Hearing the noise, Linda jumped up and ran to the door. When she opened it, Siddall appeared, shaking his head.

  ‘Eric …?’ she said questioningly.

  ‘Yes?’ Siddall answered. ‘Here I am. You want me? I want you! I’ve come for you.’

  He slammed the door behind him. She backed away, mouth open in terror, but he ran at her. As his hands went round her throat, she heard what he was shouting.

  ‘Baron! Baron! Got you at last, you devil!’

  Safety Valve

  Dashiell Whiteley shut the door of his Baltimore flat behind him, leant on it and sighed. From the flat above came a sound of stamping and castanets and cries of ‘Ole’; the van Hoosens were still trying to capture a mystical something they had found on their summer vacation in San Domingo.

  Whiteley sighed again and headed for the shower. He needed a freshener. Since qualifying two years ago, at the age of forty, for an executive post in Civil Service, Whiteley had done almost no manual work. In fact, his hardest job had been signing the interminable parade of forms. Changing offices today from one floor to another, he had given a hand carrying furniture and books; the unaccustomed effort had tired him.

  ‘Old age a-creeping on!’ he told himself, stripped off his singlet, and walked into the shower. Under the warm deluge he relaxed, broke into a discordant whistle that got fouled up every so often in a jet of water.

  He shut off the attempt at the tune abruptly when he noticed a bearded man staring at him round the bathroom door. The man’s presence was unexpected enough, but something in his gaze was particularly unnerving. He was looking at Whiteley not so much the way a snake looks at a rabbit as the way a rabbit, in a wish-fulfilment dream, thinks he looks at a snake. Cold. Invincible. The worm, turned through one-eighty degrees.

 

‹ Prev