‘End of Part One.’
At once all was animation: everybody sprang up and threw off his borrowed garments, revealing himself as smartly clad in the formal dress of the era. Davies led Simpson up to the man who had made the announcement, probably a member of one of the professions and clearly the host of the occasion. His face was sprayed with broken veins to a degree that outdid Davies’s.
‘Delighted you can join us,’ the host said when Simpson’s presence had been explained. ‘A privilege to have an Outworlder at one of our little gatherings. Now for our Part Two. Has Piotr explained to you about the ancient film that taught us so much? Well, its second and third sections were so badly damaged as to be almost useless to us. So what’s to follow is no more than an imaginative reconstruction, I fear, but I think it can be said that we’ve interpreted the tradition with taste and reverence. Let’s begin, shall we?’
He signed to an attendant standing at the table; the man began filling the teacups with a mixture of two liquids. One came out of something like a wine-bottle and was red, the other came out of something like a medicine bottle and was almost transparent, with a faint purplish tinge. Courteously passing Simpson the first of the cups, the host said: ‘Please do us the honour of initiating the proceedings.’
Simpson drank. He felt as if someone had exploded a tear-gas shell in his throat and then sprayed his gullet with curry-powder. As his own coughings and weepings subsided he was surprised to find his companions similarly afflicted in turn as they drank.
‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ the host asked, wheezing and staggering. ‘A fine shock to the palate. One might perhaps say that it goes beyond the merely gustatory and olfactory to the purely tactile. Hardly a sensuous experience at all – ascetic, almost abstract. An invention of genius, don’t you think?’
‘What – what’s the . . . ?’
‘Red Biddy, my dear fellow,’ Piotr Davies put in proudly. There was reverence in his voice when he added: ‘Red wine and methylated spirits. Of course, we can’t hope to reproduce the legendary Empire Burgundy characters that used to go into it, but our own humble Boojly isn’t a bad substitute. Its role is purely ancillary, after all.’
‘We like to use a straw after the first shock.’ The host passed one to Simpson. ‘I hope you approve of the teacups. A nice traditional touch, I think. And now, do make yourself comfortable. I must see to the plonk in person – one can’t afford to take risks.’
Simpson sat down near Davies on a packing-case. He realized after a few moments that it was actually carved out of a single block of wood. Then he noticed that the dampness of the walls was maintained by tiny water-jets at intervals near the ceiling. Probably the sacks on the floor had been specially woven and then artificially aged. Pretending to suck at his straw, he said nervously to Davies: ‘What exactly do you mean by plonk? In my time, people usually . . .’ He broke off, fearful of having betrayed himself, but the man of the future had noticed nothing.
‘Ah, you’re in for a great experience, my dear friend, something unknown outside this room for countless decades. To our ancestors in the later twentieth century it may have been the stuff of daily life, but to us it’s a pearl beyond price, a precious fragment salvaged from the wreck of history. Watch carefully – every bit of this is authentic.’
With smarting eyes, Simpson saw his host pull the crumb from a loaf and stuff it into the mouth of an enamel jug. Then, taking a candle from a nearby bottle, he put the flame to a disc-shaped cake of brownish substance that the attendant was holding between tongs. A flame arose; liquid dropped on to the bread and began to soak through into the jug; the assembled guests clapped and cheered. Another brownish cake was treated in the same way, then another. ‘Shoe-polish,’ Simpson said in a cracked voice.
‘Exactly. We’re on the dark tans this evening, with just a touch of ox-blood to give body. Makes a very big, round, pugnacious drink. By the way, that’s processed bread he’s using. Wholemeal’s too permeable, we’ve found.’
Beaming, the host came over to Simpson with a half-filled cup, a breakfast cup this time. ‘Down in one, my dear chap,’ he said.
They were all watching; there was nothing for it. Simpson shut his eyes and drank. This time a hundred blunt dental drills seemed to be working at once on his nose and throat and mouth. Fluid sprang from all the mucous membranes in those areas. It was like having one’s face pushed into a bath of acid. Simpson’s shoulders sagged and his eyes filmed over.
‘I’d say the light tans have got more bite,’ a voice said near him. ‘Especially on the gums.’
‘Less of a follow-through, on the other hand.’ There was the sound of swallowing and then a muffled scream. ‘Were you here for the plain-tan tasting last month? Wonderful fire and vehemence. I was blind for the next four days.’
‘I still say you can’t beat a straight brown for all-round excoriation. Amazing results on the uvula and tonsils.’
‘What’s wrong with black?’ This was a younger voice.
An embarrassed silence, tempered by a fit of coughing and a heartfelt moan from different parts of the circle, was ended by someone saying urbanely: ‘Each to his taste, of course, and there is impact there, but I think experience shows that that sooty, oil-smoke quality is rather meretricious. Most of us find ourselves moving tanwards as we grow older.’
‘Ah, good, he’s . . . yes, he’s using a tin of transparent in the next jug. Watch for the effect on the septum.’
Simpson lurched to his feet. ‘I must be going,’ he muttered. ‘Important engagement.’
‘What, you’re not staying for the coal-gas in milk? Turns the brain to absolute jelly, you know.’
‘Sorry . . . friend waiting for me.’
‘Goodbye, then. Give our love to Mercury. Perhaps you’ll be able to start a circle of the Friends of Plonk on your home planet. That would be a magnificent thought.’
‘Magnificent,’ the Director echoed bitterly. ‘Just think of it. The idea of an atomic war’s too much to take in, but those poor devils . . . Baker, we must prepare some information for Simpson to take on his next long-range trip, something that’ll show them how to make a decent vodka or gin even if the vines have all gone.’
I was hardly listening. ‘Aren’t there some queer things about that world, sir? Shoe-polish in just the same variants that we know? Wholemeal bread when the crops are supposed to have —’
I was interrupted by a shout from the far end of the lab, where Rabaiotti had gone to check the TIAMARIA. He turned and came racing towards us, babbling at the top of his voice.
‘Phase distortion, sir! Anomalous tracking on the output side! Completely new effect!’
‘And the TIOPEPE’s meshed with it, isn’t it?’ Schneider said.
‘Of course!’ I yelled. ‘Simpson was on a different time-path, sir! An alternative probability, a parallel world. No wonder the ground-level estimate was off. This is amazing!’
‘No nuclear war in our time-path – no certainty, anyway,’ the Director sang, waving his arms.
‘No destruction of the vines.’
‘No Friends of Plonk.’
‘All the same,’ Simpson murmured to me as we strolled towards the Conference Room, ‘in some ways they’re better off than we are. At least the stuff they use is genuine. Nobody’s going to doctor bloody shoe-polish to make it taste smoother or to preserve it or so that you’ll mistake it for a more expensive brand. And it can only improve, what they drink.’
‘Whereas we . . .’
‘Yes. That draught beer you go on about isn’t draught at all: it comes out of a giant steel bottle these days, because it’s easier that way. And do you think the Germans are the greatest chemists in the world for nothing? Ask Schneider about the 1972 Moselles. And what do you imagine all those scientists are doing in Bordeaux?’
‘There’s Italy and Spain and Greece. They’ll—’
‘Not Italy any more. Ask Rabaiotti, or rather don’t. Spain and Greece’ll last longest, probably,
but by 1980 you’ll have to go to Albania if you want real wine. Provided the Chinese won’t have started helping them to get the place modernized.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Switch to whisky. That’s still real. In fact I’m going to take a bottle home tonight. Can you lend me twenty-five quid?’
TOO MUCH TROUBLE
Until almost the other day, we on the time-travel project knew much more about the twenty-first century than about the remaining years of our own. Persistent instabilities in the TIOPEPE had had unpredictable and disturbing consequences whenever we set our objective any nearer than 1995. One such attempt had put Simpson down in what we afterwards computed to have been 8200 or so, where he had immediately found himself being chased across country by a number of creatures resembling giant vegetable marrows covered in scales and with half a dozen legs apiece, doubtless from some other planet, but he had had no leisure or desire to observe them closely, let alone set about looking for a drink. Our second attempt at a short-range projection, thanks to an unsuspected build-up of negative feedback, had landed the unlucky fellow back in the days of the Black Death, and resulted in a three months’ quarantine inside the lab for the lot of us.
The period of confinement, however, meant that we got a lot of work done. Rabaiotti and I really settled down to the instability problem, and by the end of the three months had come up with an answer, a kind of elaborate anti-overshoot servomechanism now known as the TAITTINGER – Temporal Accuracy Injector and Time-Travel Indeterminacy Nullifier (General Electric and Rank). We duly reported our success to the authorities and sat back to await instructions, which promptly arrived.
On Easter Tuesday, 1975, we received orders to report on how far the occupation of Mars was going to have gone by 1983. Within twenty-four hours we had everything lined up and shot Simpson forward eight years to the day.
In all technical respects, the operation could not have gone off better. Simpson reappeared in the receiver exactly on schedule, alive and well. Or fairly well. He looked haggard and in the depths of gloom, though that was nothing out of the ordinary after a time-trip. What startled us was that he had clearly been in a fight, his face battered and his clothing torn and dirty. Schneider gave him a tranquillizing shot and started to clean him up.
‘What happened, man?’ the Director demanded. ‘What did they do to you?’
‘Oh, this,’ Simpson said, indicating his face. ‘That’s nothing. It’s what I saw and heard . . . Listen, all of you. We’ve got to sell up and buy an island somewhere. Somewhere they can’t get at us.’
‘You mean there’s going to be an invasion or something?’ Schneider asked.
Simpson shook his head slowly. ‘Oh no. I’d have come across the results of anything like that in my trips to the 2000s, wouldn’t I? No, it’s just . . . the life we’re going to be leading. So soon. Give me a drink. A strong one.’
Schneider frowned, but made no other objection when I poured a stiff shot from the medicine-cupboard brandy bottle and passed it to Simpson. He downed it in two gulps and, hesitantly at first, told us his tale.
At first sight, London seemed quite unchanged: demolition and construction works everywhere, vast unoccupied blocks already beginning to deteriorate, road repairs at hundred-metre intervals with their familiar two-man work-gangs, barely moving crowds overflowing the pavements, and the traffic averaging perhaps three kilometres an hour, little if at all lower than the 1975 rate. About half of it consisted of private cars towing trailers piled with coloured plastic bins or containers, which was a novelty, but Simpson let it lie for the moment, and concentrated on making his way from his arrival-point – a w.c. in the Oxford Circus public lavatory, pre-probed by the TIAMARIA and found vacant for the necessary few seconds – down Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus.
Arrived there on foot no more than half an hour later, he again found a very recognizable scene. The Eros statue had gone, and this gave him a brief pang, but it was unexpectedly reassuring to find the drop-outs still there (so to speak) in their hundreds on the main traffic island and the surrounding pavements, sleeping and meditating and taking trips, twanging their electric rebahbs – the Moorish thing had really caught on, then – and playing their transwristors, chanting their traditional slogans in tribute to the victories of Greater Vietnam and the glorious dead of the London School of Economics, no doubt fornicating here and there among the discarded hypodermics and the piles of leaflets, assaulting passers-by and fighting the occasional policeman. Several times, Simpson heard American accents among the main stream of pedestrians, and concluded that this had remained a major stop on the sight-seeing route between Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London.
Within twenty minutes he had reached St James’s Square and was climbing the steps of the London Library, the facilities of which had proved invaluable on several of his previous, longer-range trips. But this time the doors were closed and the building was evidently deserted. This was a considerable set-back. In a fit of anxious irritation he thumped violently at the woodwork.
‘Shut, mate,’ called a cheerful voice behind him.
‘So I see.’ Simpson descended the steps and approached the speaker, a middle-aged man in overalls who, cigarette in mouth, was leaning against the door of a car parked at the kerb. ‘Do you happen to know why?’
‘Know why? You forgotten what day it is?’
‘Wednesday. What about it?’
‘What about it? It’s Easter Wednesday. Don’t expect anything to be open today, do you? Where’ve you been, anyhow?’
‘Oh, abroad. Only got back this morning.’
‘Where abroad? Same everywhere, I thought, bar Israel.’
‘I’ve been in space too,’ Simpson said, improvising hastily. ‘You know, Mars and so on.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ The man lost interest at once.
‘Do I understand you to say everything’s shut? All the libraries and reading-rooms, all that?’
‘That’s right. It’s the Easter slack period, see. Good Wednesday through to Easter Friday and then the weekend. As usual.’
Simpson was shocked and shaken. The ordinary six-day Easter holiday, from Good Thursday to Easter Tuesday, was fair and reasonable, but this was insane. ‘So nothing’ll be open before Monday morning.’
‘Tuesday afternoon. Chum, you really have been in space, haven’t you?’
‘Sorry . . . Look, where can I buy a newspaper?’
‘A newspaper?’ The stranger reacted as if Simpson had inquired about the purchase of an elephant. ‘In the slack period?’
‘Oh yes. So I’d have to wait for that until . . . today week.’
‘You’d get a News-Standard then, yeah. If you want a daily it’ll be tomorrow week. It must be, let’s see, the Times-Guardian’s turn. That’s right, it was the Express-Telegraph last week, the week before Easter, rather.’
‘Thanks,’ Simpson said dully. He was striving to think how he could gain access to some public source of information before his time was up and he had to return. ‘Er . . . I’ve got a report to write for my firm. In a hurry. About, well, recent events. Is there anywhere at all, any agency, any Government department, research centre, emergency service that might . . . ?’
The man was staring at Simpson and smiling broadly, with the expression of a contemporary garage mechanic, say, telling a customer that the spare part for his car had not turned up, but much intensified. It was obviously a rare and delicious experience for him to have found somebody so well qualified to be informed that he could not get what he wanted anywhere on Earth (and no doubt on the planets, too). ‘There’s nothing, friend,’ he said finally. ‘Nothing at all. Think yourself lucky you haven’t got a broken leg, eh?’
‘And no drinks.’ Simpson had thought aloud.
‘Now drinks, that’s a different matter,’ the stranger said, his manner growing perceptibly warmer. ‘The pubs are open – Sunday hours, of course. In fact, I was thinking of dropping in for a pint myself.
There’s a place just up there, before you get to Jermyn Street. Care to join me?’
Simpson accepted with some relief, an emotion that changed to alarm when he realized, a minute later, that the pub in question was one he often used himself. It would be highly embarrassing to meet the 1983 Simpson in there. Then reason returned: he had only to remember to steer clear of the area when this day came round for the second time in his life, and all, or at least that much, would be well.
He exchanged names with his companion, who was called Ernie Mullins and said he worked in a vegetable factory.
‘Oh, really?’ Simpson said. ‘What, er, what side of it are you on?’
‘Vending. Outlet apparatus inspector.’
‘I see. Whereabouts is this?’
‘South-West Area. Leatherhead. It’s not much of a job I’ve got, but it means a big part of Fetch-and-Carry’s off my mind.’
Simpson did not like to question such a clearly basic concept as Fetch-and-Carry. Instead, he asked: ‘I suppose you get a fair amount of custom out there, these days?’
‘Yes, pretty fair. On a full working day we get nearly two hundred thousand, which is over half a million in a full working week. A lot more than that before the slack periods, of course. And the second week in December’s murder, when they’re buying for all that time ahead.’
‘That many customers in Leatherhead?’ Simpson inquired with careful casualness.
‘Well, there are six million people in the South-West Area now, don’t forget. I think we’re overloaded myself. People ought to have bigger deep-freezes, so they could stock up for three months instead of three weeks. But there’s not the room. Here we are.’
They were about to enter the pub when its door was jerked open from the inside and three struggling men began to emerge. One of them (a powerful pig-faced character who turned out to be the landlord, and to whom Simpson took an instant dislike) was trying to expel another (a long-haired, heavily bearded person of about forty) with some assistance from the third (a near-replica of Ernie Mullins). All three were shouting angrily.
Dear Illusion: Collected Stories Page 24