Dark Night in Toyland

by Bob Shaw

  “Be calm, dearest. You mustn’t forget that I have been listening to these creatures’ radio transmissions for years while—I might point out—others were immersed in brutish pleasures. I know them. There will be about twenty others in the space ship…”

  “The what?”

  “The space ship.”

  “You mean the shell?”

  “Yes, dearest, I mean the shell; but we must learn to think of it as something more than a food container—it is a machine which can fly from star to star, not just a large exoskeleton. As long as the trapped food creature is alive the others will not leave here. I expect them to emerge from the space ship at any moment and try to retrieve their companion—then, thanks to my wisdom, we will have twenty to share among us. I shall not be greedy, of course, perhaps two or three…

  “Stop rambling,” Cadesk interrupted coarsely. “I can’t listen to you and that stupid shouting at the same time.”

  Turbon glanced up to where six males were crouched before the cave-mouth, emitting, in obedience to his orders, blasts of radio waves from their speech centres each time the food creature within tried to communicate with the space ship from which it had strayed. He wondered if he should try to explain something of what he had learned about the strangers who walked on only two legs.

  Years previously, when he had first heard their voices filtering down from the sky, Turbon had believed he was listening to beings like himself who by virtue of strong metallic traces in their nervous systems were able to communicate by radio emission. It had been a long time before he realised his imagined giants who could shout from star to star were, in reality, only creatures who spoke with sound waves but employed radio to extend their range. The next big step forward had been the discovery that the creatures also transmitted pictures. After a year of intense mental effort and discipline—during which Cadesk had continually threatened to leave him because of the apparent loss of his sexual powers—he had learned to unscramble the signals and actually see the pictures from the sky. Once this breakthrough had been made Turbon got to know a lot about the unfamiliar creatures and had learned their language.

  “If the shouting goes on much longer,” Cadesk said petulantly, “I won’t be able to eat.”

  Turbon ignored this comment, partly because it was such a blatant lie but mainly because he had realised what was going wrong. The creature had previously been making sporadic attempts to use its radio transmitter, but for the last few seconds the attempts had been coming very close together. The massed shouts from the six males, faithfully superimposing themselves on the signals from the cave, were forming a pattern of long and short bursts of radio noise.

  He tugged Cadesk’s tail in panic. “Get up near the cave at once and tell the males to shout continuously. No more of this starting and stopping. The food creature is using them to send its message.” Cadesk gave him an exasperated glance, but she slid obediently away through the yellow undergrowth. At an early stage Turbon had learned the code which the sky creatures used for continuous wave transmissions and, with a sinking sensation, he applied it to the emergent pattern.

  “…able to study these beasts for some time without their knowledge. The main thing to remember when you come for me is that only the females can kill. If you pick them off first the males will run for cover. They are easy to tell apart. In fact you cannot go wrong in identifying male and female because…” The remainder of the message was drowned out as the six males, having been reached by Cadesk, swung over to producing an uninterrupted blast of noise. Turbon twitched with relief.

  They held a meeting of the Elder Council right away. “That’s it then,” Cadesk said briskly when told the situation. “It would be stupid to try an attack now that the food creatures have our secret. I vote we rush the cave now and at least get something. I must say, also, that the creature wasn’t long in deciding who matters and who doesn’t around here.” She flexed her great killer’s muscles and lay down. The other five members of the Council, being male, registered as much protest as they dared but the general feeling of the meeting was that Cadesk had scored a definite point.

  Turbon stepped into the breach quickly, aware that this was an important chance to demonstrate the superiority of mind over muscle. “It is true,” he announced, “the food creatures are aware that our females invariably carry out the…less pleasant tasks associated with the perpetuation of our species, but…”

  “Don’t be too modest,” Cadesk interrupted. “One of these days you’ll learn how to talk ְ’em to death.”

  “…but, important as this piece of information undoubtedly is, it’s of little value to anyone encountering us for the first time. The differences in physiognomy, musculature, pigmentation, etc, which enable us to distinguish male from female so readily are meaningless without prior knowledge. In short, the food creatures can’t tell one of our males from one of our females—so, in effect, nothing has changed.”

  Cadesk looked impressed. “He’s right, you know. Perhaps we ought to keep to the original plan, but I hope something happens soon. I can almost smell them from here.” She smacked her lips and drooled slightly in a way which Turbon, in spite of himself, found captivating.

  In the afternoon of the following day something did happen. A door on the spaceship swung open and fourteen of the two-legged food creatures, carrying weapons, set out across the mile of jungle which lay between their ship and the cave.

  The plan was immediately put into action. It was not a highly developed scheme because the Trelgans, as the dominant life form on a world of primitive jungle, were in the habit of simply running headlong at anything which moved and then eating it. But for Turbon’s advice about weapons they would have done the same thing with the new arrivals from the sky. Instead they had devised what they felt was a subtle little manoeuvre—the idea being to hide behind trees until the strangers were in their midst and then run headlong and eat them.

  When the big moment arrived the food creatures made it easy by following a dead straight line to the cave, moving slowly through the ochre vegetation, weapons at the ready, red uniforms catching the sun. Turbon and Cadesk had mustered all their forces for the attack—two dozen females and four times as many males. They even had time to find a good vantage point half way up a huge tree overlooking the scene of the ambush, which was a flat piece of ground quite close to the cave.

  “You’re certain nothing can go wrong?” The wait was straining Cadesk’s naturally minute store of patience.

  “Of course, dearest,” Turbon replied peacefully. “The food creature told the others they would have no trouble identifying our females, but he didn’t get the chance to say how. Perhaps, being mammals, they are assuming we are too, and will be looking for creatures with great lactic glands thumping about all over the place.” He laughed at the idea and then fell silent as the leaders of the little column of food creatures came into view at the far edge of the clearing.

  It seemed to take an eternity for the slow-moving file to reach the centre but they finally made it and Turbon gave the signal to attack.

  Moving with beautiful precision the Trelgans emerged from hiding and converged on the food creatures at top speed, their hurtling bodies smashing smaller bushes and trees out of the way. The strangers’ weapons began to flash but Turbon noted with satisfaction that the females were well spaced among the males, and Cadesk almost fell from her perch in anticipatory excitement.

  “Don’t they smell good,” she slobbered. “Tear ’em apart!”

  Turbon smiled indulgently, then realised that he could now only see about half the females who had started the charge. The file of food creatures had contracted into an efficient little knot and the sharp reports of their weapons were a continuous crash of thunder. And the astonishing, ghastly truth was that they were concentrating their fire on the widely-spaced females! Even as he realised what was happening, the number of females withered under the accurate shooting until there were only five…four…three…two…

/>   A solitary female escaped with the fleeing males as the charge suddenly reversed its direction and raced outwards like the ripple from a pebble dropped in water. Only ten hellish seconds had elapsed since the beginning of the attack but in that time Turbon had lost more than half of his subjects, including all but one female. He was almost unable to believe it had happened. How could it have happened?

  “This is your fault,” Cadesk snarled. “This wouldn’t have happened but for your big ideas. That settles it—from now on I give the orders around here.”

  “But I don’t understand it,” Turbon protested numbly as the file of food creatures re-formed and passed out of sight in the direction of the cave. “The one we trapped gave absolutely no information as to how the others could tell female Trelgans from males. There was just no way they could have known!”

  Cadesk slapped him across the face with her powerful tail. “Shut up and let’s go,” she snapped. “I’m hungry.” They climbed down from the tree and together moved into the clearing where the survivors of the ill-fated charge were already returning to dine off their unlucky comrades. In spite of the great shock they had received Turbon and Cadesk still made a handsome couple by Trelgan standards, and the afternoon sun glinted on their sleek, heavy bodies.

  On his blue body.

  And her pink body.

  THE K-Y WARRIORS

  “Grandma Gina’s fridge runs without being plugged into the electricity,” Tommy Beveridge said, casually throwing the remark into a discussion about machines in general and the workings of the internal combustion engine in particular.

  Willett Morris smiled indulgently at his nephew. “Some fridges run on gas.”

  “Yes, but she hasn’t got gas.” Tommy spoke with the assurance of a precocious eleven-year-old. “Grandma Gina is all-electric.”

  “Then her fridge must be plugged into the mains.” Willett switched from car engines to the principles of refrigeration, determined to educate the boy into seeing how nonsensical his statement had been. But Tommy soon exhibited signs of boredom, darted out of the garage/workshop and began pursuing the butterflies that twinkled over the lawn. Willett was disappointed, thinking it a shame that nobody else in the family appreciated the beauty inherent in even the simplest machines.

  He shook his head, returned to the workbench where—just for the sheer pleasure of it—he was rewinding a washing-machine motor, and the snippet of conversation quickly faded from his mind. It had seemed pointless and inconsequential in the extreme, and when he recalled it many months later it was unrecognisable as a prelude to sudden death.

  There had been times, right at the beginning of Muriel’s driving instruction, when Willett had believed himself to be enduring the worst extremes of misery and fear.

  To take but one example, there had been the business of her control—or lack of control—of the clutch pedal. That period had lasted for a couple of months, and during it Muriel had, when trying to move off from standstill under the slightest hint of strain, simply taken her foot off the pedal and allowed it to spring up. Each time the car had bucked to a self-damaging halt and Willett, visualising shock waves racing through the transmission, had waited with sick apprehension for the metallic thunk and sudden roar of a freed engine which would have signalled a broken half-shaft. It had seemed miraculous to him that no component had ever actually failed, although he had no doubt that the car’s mechanical life had been drastically shortened.

  At least twenty times he had taken a deep breath and, while stoically staring straight ahead, had said, “You must bring the clutch pedal up slowly.”

  “There was a lorry coming,” Muriel would say. “I had to get away quickly.”

  And at least twenty times Willett had replied, “Forgive me for being so dense about these things—but how does stalling the engine aid a quick getaway?”

  The sarcasm had never had any noticeable effect.

  Then there had been the occasions when, with a dangerous obstacle looming directly in front, he had snapped out the order to brake and had experienced an exquisite and soul-withering dread as the car had continued on its way, direction and speed unaltered, with Muriel apparently in a trance. The frenzied uncontrollable stamping of his right foot on a non-existent brake pedal at his side of the car had always startled her into last-instant action, followed by tears and recriminations about his lack of consideration for her nerves.

  In retrospect those incidents, so harrowing at the time, were seen to be trivial and almost amusing—for now Muriel had progressed to driving in traffic. And, what was much worse, she had acquired a totally unwarranted confidence.

  Please hurry up, Willett thought as he leaned against the car and surveyed the deepening colours of the sky. It was late on an April afternoon and he wanted the day’s lesson to be completed before darkness fell, otherwise the risks to the vehicle and its occupants’ health would be greatly increased. He glanced towards the house and detected a blurry movement behind the pebbled glass of the hall window which told him that Muriel was on the phone to her mother or one of her sisters. A good two hours had passed since the five women had met over tea and scones, and therefore it was necessary for them to be brought up to date on each other’s activities before Muriel could leave the house.

  Trying to control his impatience, Willett used the toe of his shoe to decapitate a small weed which had had the impertinence to thrust up through the gravel of his drive. What was it that Muriel had accomplished in the course of the afternoon which was so important that tidings of it had to be electronically circulated with the expensive help of British Telecom? All he had noticed her doing was giving the shower curtain its weekly wash. The curtain was a sheet of pink plastic whose sole function in life was to withstand repeated dousings with hot soapy water. At regular intervals Muriel decided it needed revivifying, a goal she sought to achieve by putting it in the Hotpoint and dousing it with hot soapy water.

  Willett had long since given up criticising the procedure on the advice of Hank Beveridge, who had been married to Yvonne, the youngest of Muriel’s three sisters. “You’ll never win that kind of argument,” Hank had counselled, “and your health will only suffer if you try. Hypertension, old son! That’s the way women get you, you know. They kill you by making you kill yourself.”

  Willett still missed Hank for his black humour and cynical wryness, even though in the weeks before his death he had shown distinct signs of progressing beyond the socially acceptable degree of neuroticism. At lunchtime on most Sundays the two had met at the Rifleman’s Arms—a pub which was equidistant between their homes and mercifully free of juke boxes and games machines—and had spent pleasurable hours in conversation. Declining standards in just about everything had been a favourite topic, and the essential strangeness of the female mind had been another.

  “It’s hard to find a fresh egg in my house,” Hank had once said. “And do you know why? Yvonne refuses to keep them in the fridge. She thinks she read somewhere that eggs keep better at room temperature. But do you know what she does keep in the fridge? Pickles and preserves! The two kinds of food whose names are synonymous with imperishability! Our fridge is so full of pickles and preserves you can hardly get anything else in there, Willett, but I pass no comment. She’s not giving me hypertension.”

  The last had been a reference to Clive and Edward, the deceased spouses of Yvonne’s older sisters. Both men had died before their time of blockaded hearts, and afterwards Hank had never tired of elaborating on a fantasy based on the notion that the Sturmey sisters were a breed who consciously killed their husbands…

  The sound of the front door being closed interrupted Willett’s reverie. He raised his head and watched Muriel carefully making her way towards him on red sandals whose slim heels went deep into the gravel at every step. At the age of fifty his wife looked almost exactly as she had done in her twenties and could wear her daughters’ clothes without exciting comment. Willett was not particularly aware of his own mortality, but there were time
s when he was shocked to realise that Muriel—with her temperate habits and long-lived forebears—might be only halfway through her span. Another life awaited her if he were to die soon.

  She was of medium height and medium build and had what he thought of as a medium face, one which had nothing particularly wrong with it and which could be made quite beautiful when she took the trouble, which was most of the time. Today she was wearing a white blouse and white slacks, and had tied her black hair in place with a red-and-white scarf. He recognised the ensemble as one of her motoring outfits—she always changed her clothes specially for driving lessons.

  “The afternoon’s going,” he said. “Who were you phoning?”

  “Yvonne.” Muriel got into the driving seat and began taking off her sandals.

  Willett opened the passenger door and sat beside her. “But you were with Yvonne most of the day. What could you possibly have to talk about on the phone?”

  “It was only a local call—it won’t bankrupt you.”

  “I’m not bothered about the cost of the call. I’m genuinely interested in finding out what you had to add to the day’s deliberations. What were you talking about?”

  “Women’s things. You’re being childish, Willett.” Muriel rummaged below her seat, selected flat-heeled shoes from the three pairs she kept in a clutter around the seat-positioning mechanism and worked her feet into them. Willett watched the performance with bafflement and, in spite of his best intentions, a growing annoyance. Would any man, anywhere, have thought of treating the car as a kind of travelling wardrobe?

  “That’s better.” Muriel fastened her safety belt and switched on the ignition with the key Willett had left in the lock, illuminating the square plastic buttons on the dash. He waited for her to begin the ritual struggle with the handbrake, then became aware that she was staring at the instrument display as though never having seen it before.