by Brian Aldiss
Swettenham consisted of two horseshoe-shaped lines of bungalows and huts, one inside the other. The outer line faced outward onto the meandering half-circle of river; the inner and more impressive line faced inward onto a large and dusty square where a few trees grew. Anderson's captor brought him into this square and gave a call.
The grip on his arm was released only when fifteen or more men and women had sidled out and gathered around him, staring at him in curious fashion without comment. None of them looked bright. Their hair grew long, generally drooping over low foreheads. Their lower lips generally protruded. Some of them were near nude. Their collective body smell was offensively strong.
“I guess you don't have many visitors on Nehru II these days," Anderson said uneasily.
By now he felt like a man in a bad dream. His space craft was a mile away over two lines of hills, and he was heartily wishing himself a mile away in it. What chiefly alarmed him was not so much the hostility of these people as their very presence. Swettenham's was the only Earth settlement on this otherwise empty planet: and it was a colony for intellectuals, mainly intellectuals disaffected by Earth's increasingly automated life. This crowd, far from looking like eggheads, resembled apes.
“Tell us where you come from," one of the men in the crowd said. "Are you from Earth?"
"I'm an Earthman—I was born on Earth," said Anderson, telling his prepared tale. "I've actually just come from Lenin's Planet, stopping in here on my way back to Earth. Does that answer your question?"
"Things are still bad on Earth?" a woman inquired of Anderson. She was young. He had to admit he could recognize a sort of beauty in her ugly countenance. "Is the Oil War still going on?"
"Yes," Anderson admitted. "And the Have-Not Nations are fighting a conventional war against Common Europe. But our latest counterattack against South America seems to be going well, if you can believe the telecasts. I guess you all have a load of questions you want to ask about the home planet. I'll answer them when I've been directed to the man I came to Nehru to visit, Dr. Frank Arlblaster. Will someone kindly show me his dwelling?"
This caused some discussion. At least it was evident the name Arlblaster meant something to them.
"The man you want will not see you yet," someone announced.
"Direct me to his house, and I'll worry about that. I'm an old pupil of his. Hell be pleased to see me."
They ignored him for a fragmentary argument of their own. The hairy man who had caught Anderson— his fellows called him Ell—repeated vehemently, "He's a Crow!"
"Of course he's a Crow," one of the others agreed. "Take him to Menderstone."
That they spoke Universal English was a blessing. It was slurred and curiously accented, but quite unmistakable.
“Do you mean Stanley A. Menderstone?" asked Anderson with sudden hope. The literary critic had certainly been one of Swettenham's original group that had come to form its own intellectual center in the wilds of this planet.
"Well take you to him," Ell's friend said.
They seemed reluctant to trade in straight answers, Anderson observed. He wondered what his sister Kay was doing, half-expecting to see her drive the tourer into the settlement at any moment.
Seizing Anderson's wrist—they were a possessive lot—Ell's friend set off at a good pace for the last house on one end of the inner horseshoe. The rest of the crowd moved back into convenient shade. Many of them squatted, formidable, content, waiting, watching. Dogs moved between huts, a duck toddled up from the river, flies circled dusty excreta. Behind everything stood the mountains, spurting cloud.
The Menderstone place did not look inviting. It had been built long and low some twenty years past. Now the stresscrete was all cracked and stained, the steel-frame windows rusting, the panes of glass them-selves as bleary as a drunkard's stare.
Ell’s friend went up to the door and kicked on it. Then he turned without either hurrying or delaying to go and join his friends, leaving Anderson standing on the step.
The door opened.
A beefy man stood there, the old-fashioned rifle in his hands reinforcing his air of enormous self-sufficiency. His face was as brown and pitted as the keel of a junk; he was bald and his forehead shone as if a high polish had just been applied to it. Although probably into his sixties, he gave the impression of having looked just as he did now for the last twenty years.
Most remarkably, he wore lenses over his eyes, cored in place by wires twisting behind his ears. Anderson recalled the name for this old-fashioned apparatus: spectacles.
"Have you something you wish to say or do to me?" demanded the bespectacled man, impatiently wagging his rifle.
"My name's K. D. Anderson. Your friends suggested I come to see you."
"My what? Friends? If you wish to speak to me you'd better take more care over your choice of words."
"Mr. Menderstone—if you are Mr. Menderstone— choosing words is at present the least of my worries. I should appreciate hospitality and a little help."
"You must be from Earth or you wouldn't ask a complete stranger for such rare things. Alice!”
This last name was bawled back into the house. It produced a sharp-featured female countenance which looked over Menderstone's shoulder like a parrot peering from its perch.
"Good afternoon, madam," Anderson said, determinedly keeping his temper. "May I come in and speak to you for a while? I'm newly arrived on Nehru."
"Jesus! The first 'good afternoon' I've heard in a lifetime," the woman answering to the name of Alice exclaimed. "You'd better come in, you poetical creature!"
"I decide who comes in here," Menderstone I snapped, elbowing her back.
"Then why didn't you decide instead of dithering on the step? Come in, young man."
Menderstone's rifle barrel reluctantly swung back I far enough to allow Anderson entry. Alice led him through into a large miscellaneous room with a stove at one end, a bed at the other, and a table between.
Anderson took a brief glance around before focusing his attention on his host and hostess. They were an odd pair. Seen close to, Menderstone looked less large than he had done on the step, yet the impression of a formidable personality was more marked than ever. Strong personalities were rare on Earth these days; Anderson decided he might even like the man if he would curb his hostility.
As it was, Alice seemed more approachable. Considerably younger than Menderstone, she had a good figure, and her face was sympathetic as well as slightly comical. With her birdlike head tilted on one side, she was examining Anderson with interest, so he addressed himself to her. Which proved to be a mistake.
“I was just about to tell your husband that I stopped by to see an old friend and teacher of mine, Dr. Frank Arlblaster…”
Menderstone never let Anderson finish.
“Now you have sidled in here, Mr. K. D. Anderson, you’d be advised to keep your facts straight. Alice is not my wife; ergo, I am not her husband. We just live together, there being nobody else in Swettenham more suitable to live with. The arrangement, I may add, is as much one of convenience as passion."
“Mr. Anderson and I both would appreciate your leaving your egotistical self out of this for a while," Alice told him pointedly. Turning to Anderson, she motioned him to a chair and sat down on another herself. "How did you get permission to come here? I take it you have little idea of what goes on on Nehru II?" she asked.
"Who or what are those shambling apes outside?" he asked. "What makes you two so prickly? I thought this was supposed to be a colony of exiled intellectuals.”
“He wants discussions of Kant, calculus, and copulation." Menderstone commented.
Alice said: "You expected to be greeted by eggheads rather than apes?"
“I’d have settled for human beings."
“What do you know about Arlblaster?”
Anderson gestured impatiently.
“You're very kind to have me in, Mrs.—Alice, I mean—but can we have a conversation some other time? I've a tourer
parked back up the hill with my sister Kay waiting in it for me to return. I want to know if I can get there and back without being waylaid by these ruffians outside."
Alice and Menderstone looked at each other. A deal of meaning seemed to pass between them. After a pause, unexpectedly, Menderstone thrust his rifle forward, butt first.
“Take this," he said. "Nobody will harm you if they see a rifle in your hand. Be prepared to use it. Get your car and your sister and come back here."
"Thanks a lot, but I have a revolver back near my vehicle...."
"Carry my rifle. They know it; they respect it. Bear this in mind—you're in a damn sight nastier spot than you imagine as yet. Don't let anything—anything— deflect you from getting straight back here. Then you'll listen to what we have to say."
Anderson took the rifle and balanced it, getting the feel of it. It was heavy and slightly oiled, without a speck of dust, unlike the rest of the house. For some obscure reason, contact with it made him uneasy.
"Aren't you dramatizing your situation here, Menderstone? You ought to try living on Earth these days—it's like an armed camp. The tension there is real, not manufactured."
"Don't tell me you didn't feel something when you came in here," Menderstone said. "You were trembling!"
"What do you know about Arlblaster?" Alice put her question again.
"A number of things. Arlblaster discovered a pre-historic-type skull in Brittany, France, back in the eighties. He made a lot of strange claims for the skull. By current theories, it should have been maybe ninety-five thousand years old, but RCD made it only a I few hundred years old. Arlblaster lost a lot of face over it academically. He retired from teaching—I was one of his last pupils—and became very solitary. When he gave up everything to work on a cranky theory of his own, the government naturally disapproved.”
“Ah, the old philosophy: ‘Work for the common man rather than the common good,'" sighed Menderstone. “And you think he was a crank, do you?"
“He was a crank! And as he was on the professions role as Learned Man, he was paid by world government" he explained. "Naturally, they expected results from him.”
“Naturally," agreed Menderstone. "Their sort of results.”
“Life isn't easy on Earth, Menderstone, as it is here. A man has to get on or get out. Anyhow, when Arlblaster got a chance to join Swettenham's newly formed colony here, he seized the opportunity to come. I take it you both know him? How is he?"
“I suppose one would say he is still alive," Menderstone said.
“But he's changed since you knew him," Alice said, and she and Menderstone laughed.
“I’ll go and get my tourer," Anderson said, not liking them or the situation one bit. "See you."
Cradling the rifle under his right arm, he went out into the square. The sun shone momentarily through the cloud cover so hotly that it filled the shadows with splotches of red and gray. Behind the splotches, in front of the creaking houses of Swettenham, the people of Swettenham squatted or leaned with simian abandon in the trampled dust.
Keeping his eye on them, Anderson moved off, heading for the hill. Nobody attempted to follow him. A haphazardly beaten track led up the slope, its roughness emphasizing the general neglect.
When he was out of sight of the village, Anderson's anxiety got the better of him. He ran up the track calling: "Kay, Kay!"
No answer. The clotted light seemed to absorb his voice.
Breasting the slope, he passed the point where he had seen the woolly rhinoceros. His vehicle was where he had left it. Empty.
He ran to it, rifle ready. He ran around it. He shouted his sister's name again. No reply.
Checking the panic he felt, Anderson looked about for footprints but could find none. Kay was gone, spirited away. Yet there was nowhere on the whole planet to go to, except Swettenham.
On sudden impulse he ran down to the two boulders where he had encountered the brutish Ell. They stood deserted and silent. When he had retrieved his revolver from where it had fallen, he turned back. He trudged grimly back to the vehicle, his shirt sticking to his spine. Climbing in, he switched on and coasted into the settlement.
In the square again, he braked and jumped down, confronting the chunky bodies in the shadows.
"Where's my sister?" he shouted to them. "What sort of funny business are you playing at?"
Someone answered one syllable, croaking it into the brightness: "Crow!"
"Crow!" someone else called, throwing the word forward like a stone.
In a rage, Anderson aimed Menderstone's rifle over the low roof tops and squeezed the trigger. The weapon recoiled with a loud explosion. Visible humanity upped onto its flat feet and disappeared into hovels or back streets.
Anderson went over to Menderstone's door, banged on it, and walked in. Menderstone was eating a peeled, apple and did not cease to do so when his guest entered.
"My sister has been kidnapped," Anderson said. "Where are the police?"
"The nearest police are on Earth," Menderstone said, between bites. "There you have robot-controlled police states stretching from pole to pole. ‘Police on Earth, goodwill toward men.' Here on Nehru we have only anarchy.” It's horrible, but better than your robotocracy. My advice to you, Anderson, which I proffer in all seriousness, is to beat it back to your little rocket ship and head for home without bothering too much about your sister."
“Look, Menderstone, I'm in no mood for your sort of nonsense! I don't brush off that easy. Who's in charge around here? Where is the egghead camp? Who has some effectual say in local affairs? I want to speak to him."
“’Who’s in charge around here?’ You really miss the iron hand of your robot bosses, don't you?"
Menderstone put his apple down and advanced, still chewing. His big face was as hard and cold as an undersea rock.
“Give me that rifle," he said, laying a hand on the barrel and tugging. He flung it onto the table. "Don't talk big to me, K. D. Anderson! I happen to loathe the regime on Earth and all the pip-squeaks like you it spawns. If you need help, see you ask politely."
“I’m not asking you for help—it's plain you can't even help yourself!"
“You’d better not give Stanley too much lip," Alice said. She had come in and stood behind Menderstone, her parrot's-beak nose on one side as she regarded Anderson. "You may not find him very lovable, but I’m sad to say that he is the egghead camp nowadays. This dump was its old HQ. But all the other boys have gone to join your pal Arlblaster up in the hills, across the river."
“It must be pleasanter and healthier there. I can quite see why they didn't want you two with them," Anderson said sourly.
Menderstone burst into laughter,
“In actuality, you don't see at all."
“Go ahead and explain, then. I'm listening."
Menderstone resumed his apple, his free hand thrust into a trouser pocket.
"Do we explain to him, Alice? Can you tell yet which side he'll be on? A high N-factor in his makeup, wouldn't you say?"
"He could be a Crow. More likely an Ape, though, I agree. Hell, whichever he is, he's a relief after your undiluted company, Stanley."
"Don't start making eyes at him, you cow! He could be your son!"
"What was good enough for Jocasta is good enough for me," Alice cackled. Turning to Anderson, she said, "Don't get involved in our squabbles! You'd best put up here for the night. At least they aren't cannibals outside—they won't eat your sister, whatever else they do. There must be a reason for kidnapping her, so if you sit tight they'll get in touch with you. Besides, it's half-past nineteen, and your hunt for Arlblaster would be better put off till tomorrow morning."
After further argument, Anderson agreed with what she suggested. Menderstone thrust out his lower lip and said nothing. It was impossible to determine how he felt about having a guest.
The rest of the daylight soon faded. After he had unloaded his supply kit from his vehicle and stashed it indoors, Anderson had nothing t
o do. He tried to make Alice talk about the situation on Nehru II, but she was not informative; though she was a garrulous type, something seemed to hold her back. Only over supper, taken as the sun sank, did she cast some light on what was happening by discussing her arrival on the planet.
"I used to be switchboard operator and assistant radiop on a patrol ship," she said. "That was five years ago. Our ship touched down in a valley two miles south of here. The ship's still there, though they say a landslide buried it last winter. None of the crew returned to it once they had visited Swettenham."
"Keith doesn't want to hear your past history," Menderstone said, using Anderson's first name contemptuously.
“What happened to the crew?" Anderson asked.
She laughed harshly.
“They got wrapped up in your friend Arlblaster's way of life, shall we say. They became converted….All except me. And since I couldn't manage the ship by myself, I also had to stay here."
“How lucky for me, dear," said Menderstone with heavy mock-tenderness. "You're just my match, aren't you?”
Alice jumped up, sudden tears in her eyes.
“Shut up, you—toad! You're a pain in the neck to me and yourself and everyone! You needn't remind what a bitch you've turned me into!" Flinging down her fork, she turned and ran from the room.
“The divine eternal female! Shall we divide what she has left of her supper between us?" Menderstone asked, reaching out for Alice's plate.
Anderson stood up.
“What she said was an understatement, judging by the little I've seen here."
“Do you imagine I enjoy this life? Or her? Or you, for that matter? Sit down, Anderson. Existence is something to be got through the best way possible, isn’t it? You weary me with your trite and predictable responses."
This stormy personal atmosphere prevailed till bedtime. A bitter three-cornered silence was maintained until Menderstone had locked Anderson into a distant part of the long building.
He had blankets with him, which he spread over the moldy camp bed provided. He did not investigate the rooms adjoining his; several of the doors bore names vaguely familiar to him; the rooms had been used when the intellectual group was flourishing but were now deserted.