‘So … soon, very soon, we here will collectively launch what will be nothing less than the wine of the century – the twenty-first century, that is, by courtesy of the fourteenth!’
It was quite soon, in 1997 to be exact, and I was there when the corks were pulled at the first tasting, and by universal consent the wine was absolutely horrible. It hadn’t travelled, so to speak. But by then we, the six of us, had all cleaned up.
Hemingway in Space
The woman watched him and he made another sweep. There was nothing again but he knew one of them was around. It got so you always knew. After twenty years it got so you always knew when one of them was around.
‘Anything?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I thought you could tell just where to find these things,’ she said. ‘I thought we hired you because you could take us straight to one of these things. I thought that was why we hired you.’
‘Easy now, Martha,’ the young fellow said. ‘Nobody can find xeeb where there aren’t any xeeb, not even Mr Hardacre. We’ll come across one any minute now.’
She moved away from the three of them at the instrument panel and her thighs were arrogant under the tight space-jeans. You bitch, Philip Hardacre thought suddenly. You goddam, bored, boring, senseless bitch. He felt sorry for the young fellow. He was a pretty nice young fellow, and here he was married to this goddam senseless bitch, and it looked like he was too afraid of her to tell her to get the hell out, although you knew he wanted to.
‘I feel him near,’ the old Martian said, turning the bigger and more grizzled of his two heads towards Philip Hardacre. ‘We shall see him soon now.’
The woman leaned against the ship’s side and stared out the port. ‘I can’t think why you have to go hunting these monstrosities. Two days it’s been since we left, and we could have been in Venusport all that while instead of cooped up in this steel jalopy a couple of light years from civilization. What’s so good about getting a xeeb even if you do get one? What does it prove, getting a xeeb?’
‘The xeeb is the largest life-form in this part of the galaxy.’ The young fellow was a school professor or something like that, and you could tell it from the way he spoke. ‘More than that, it’s the only sentient creature living out here in free space, and it’s ferocious; it’s been known to take on a scout ship. It’s the toughest damn thing there is. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘That’s part of it,’ Philip Hardacre said. There was that, although there was much more, the freedom out there and the stars against the black and the men small in their suits and afraid and yet not afraid and even the xeeb small in the vastness and the cool joy if the xeeb was a good one.
‘He comes,’ the old Martian said in his whistling tones, his smaller head bent toward the screen. ‘See, lady.’
‘I don’t want to see,’ she said, turning her back. It was a deadly insult under the ancient Martian code of honour, and she knew it and Philip Hardacre knew she knew it, and there was hate in his throat, but there was no time now for hate.
He got up from the panel. There was no doubt about it. An amateur could have taken the blip for an asteroid or another ship but after twenty years you knew immediately. ‘Suit up,’ he said. ‘Spaceside in three minutes.’
He helped the young fellow with the helmet and what he had been dreading happened, the Martian had taken out his own suit and was stiffly putting his rear pair of legs into it. He went over to him and put his hand between the two necks in the traditional gesture of appeal. ‘This is not your hunt, Ghlmu,’ he said in the archaic Martian courtly tongue.
‘I am still strong and he is big and he comes fast.’
‘I know, but this is not your hunt. Old ones are hunted more than they hunt.’
‘All my eyes are straight and all my hands are tight.’
‘But they are slow and they must be quick. Once they were quick but now they are slow.’
‘Har-dasha, it is thy comrade who asks thee.’
‘My blood is yours as in all the years; it is only my thought that must seem cruel, old one. I will hunt without you.’
‘Hunt well, Har-dasha, then. I await you always,’ the old creature said, using the ritual formula of acquiescence.
‘Are we going to shoot this goddam whale or not?’ The woman’s voice was shrill. ‘Or are you and that thing going on whistling at each other all night?’
He turned on her savagely. ‘You’re out of this. You’re staying right here where you belong. Put that blaster back on the rack and take off that space-suit and start making food. We’ll be back in half an hour.’
‘Don’t you give me orders, you bum. I can shoot as well as any man and you won’t stop me.’
‘Around here I say what everybody does, and they do it.’ Over her shoulder he could see the Martian hanging up his suit and his throat went dry. ‘If you try to get in that airlock with us we head right back to Venus.’
‘I’m sorry, Martha, you’ll have to do as he says,’ the young fellow said.
The two big Wyndham-Clarke blasters were ready primed and he set them both at maximum, while they stood in the airlock and waited for the air to go. Then the outer door slid into the wall and they were out there in the freedom and the vastness and the fear that was not fear. The stars were very cold and it was black between the stars. There were not many stars, and the black was vast where there were no stars. The stars and the black together were what gave the freedom. Without the stars or without the black there would not have been the freedom, only the vastness, but with the stars and the black you had the freedom as well as the vastness. The stars were few and the light from them was small and cold, and around them there was the black.
He spoke to the young fellow over the suit radio. ‘Can you see him? Toward that big star with the small companion.’
‘Where?’
‘Look where I’m pointing. He hasn’t spotted us yet.’
‘How does he spot us?’
‘Never mind that. Now, listen. Each swoop he makes, give him one shot. Just one. Then go forward on your suit jet as fast as you can. That confuses him more than lateral movement.’
‘You told me.’
‘I’m telling you again. One shot. He homes on your shot. Get ready; he’s seen us; he’s turning.’
The great beautiful phosphorescent shape narrowed as it came head-on to them, then appeared to swell. The xeeb was closing fast, as fast as any he’d known. It was a big, fast xeeb and likely to be a good one. He’d be able to tell for sure after the first swoop. He wanted the xeeb to be a good one for the young fellow’s sake. He wanted the young fellow to have a good hunt with a good, big, fast xeeb.
‘Fire in about fifteen seconds, then jet,’ Philip Hardacre said. ‘And you won’t have too long before his next swoop, so be ready.’
The xeeb closed, and the young fellow’s shot arc’d in. It was too early to be a good shot and it barely flicked the tail end. Philip Hardacre waited as long as he dared and fired toward the hump where the main ganglia were and jetted without waiting to see where he had hit.
It was a good xeeb all right. From the way its phosphorescence had started to pulsate you could tell it had been hit somewhere in the nervous system or what passed for that, but within seconds it had turned and begun another great beautiful graceful swoop on the two men. This time the young fellow held his fire a little longer and got in a good shot near the hump and jetted as he had been told. But then the xeeb dropped in the way they did once in a hundred times and xeeb and man were almost on each other. There was nothing for Philip Hardacre to do but empty his Wyndham-Clarke all at once in the hope that the loosing of so much energy would get the xeeb to change its mind and home on him instead. Then he was jetting forward at top speed and calling over the suit radio to make for the ship at once.
‘It puffed something at me and I lost my blaster,’ came the young fellow’s voice.
‘M
ake for the ship.’
‘We won’t get there, will we?’
‘We can try. You may have damaged him enough with that last shot to slow him down or spoil his sense of direction,’ Philip Hardacre said. He already knew that it was all over for them. The xeeb was only a few miles above them and beginning to turn for a fresh swoop, moving slower but not slow enough. The ship was above them too in the other direction. This was what you faced every time you hunted xeeb and when it happened at last it was just the end of the hunt and the end of the freedom and the vastness, and they would have had to end some time.
There was a long arc of light from the ship and the xeeb was suddenly brighter than ever before for an instant, and then the brightness went out and there was nothing there.
The Martian had fallen into a crouching position in the airlock and the third Wyndham-Clarke was still in his pincers. The two men waited for the outer door to close and the air to flood in.
‘Why didn’t he put on his suit?’ said the young fellow.
‘There wasn’t time. He had about a minute to save us. A Martian suit takes much longer than that to put on.’
‘What would have got him first, the cold?’
‘Airlessness. They respire quickly. Five seconds at most. Just enough to aim and fire.’ He was quick after all, Philip Hardacre thought.
Inside, the woman was waiting for them. ‘What happened?’
‘He’s dead, of course. He got the xeeb.’
‘Did he have to get himself killed doing it?’
‘There was one weapon on board and one place to use it from,’ Philip Hardacre said. Then his voice went quiet. ‘Why are you still wearing your space-suit?’
‘I wanted to get the feel of it. And you said to take it off.’
‘Why couldn’t you have taken the gun into the airlock?’
Her eyes went dull. ‘I didn’t know how the lock worked.’
‘But Ghlmu did. He could have operated it from in here. And you can shoot, or so you said.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry I like,’ the young fellow said. He didn’t sound like a school professor now, or afraid of her. ‘Sorry brings back that old guy as alive as ever he was, doesn’t it? Sorry is about the best I ever heard. And sorry is something else too. Sorry as all hell is how I feel when I drop you off in Venusport and take the shuttle to Earth by myself. You like Venusport, don’t you? Well, here’s your chance to get lost in it.’
Philip Hardacre finished composing the old Martian’s limbs and appendages and muttered as much as he knew of the prescribed incantation. ‘Forgive me,’ he said.
‘Get supper,’ the young fellow said to the woman. ‘Right away.’
‘This was your hunt,’ Philip Hardacre said to his friend’s body.
Who or What Was It?
I want to tell you about a very odd experience I had a few months ago, not so as to entertain you, but because I think it raises some very basic questions about, you know, what life is all about and to what extent we run our own lives. Rather worrying questions. Anyway, what happened was this.
My wife and I had been staying the weekend with her uncle and aunt in Westmorland, near a place called Milnethorpe. Both of us, Jane and I that is, had things to do in London on the Monday morning, and it’s a long drive from up there down to Barnet, where we live, even though a good half of it is on the M6. So I said, Look, don’t let’s break our necks trying to get home in the light (this was in August), let’s take it easy and stop somewhere for dinner and reckon to get home about half-past ten or eleven. Jane said okay.
So we left Milnethorpe in the middle of the afternoon, took things fairly easily, and landed up about half-past seven or a quarter to eight at the … the place we’d picked out of one of the food guides before we started. I won’t tell you the name of the place, because the people who run it wouldn’t thank me if I did. Please don’t go looking for it. I’d advise you not to.
Anyway, we parked the car in the yard and went inside. It was a nice-looking sort of place, pretty old, built a good time ago I mean, done up in a sensible sort of way, no muzak and no bloody silly blacked-out lighting, but no olde-worlde nonsense either.
Well, I got us both a drink in the bar and went off to see about a table for dinner. I soon found the right chap, and he said, Fine, table for two in half an hour, certainly sir, are you in the bar, I’ll get someone to bring you the menu in a few minutes. Pleasant sort of chap, a bit young for the job.
I was just going off when a sort of paunchy business type came in and said something about, Mr Allington not in tonight? and the young fellow said No sir, he’s taken the evening off. All right, never mind.
Well, I’ll tell you why in a minute, but I turned back to the young fellow, said, Excuse me, but is your name Palmer? and he said Yes sir, and I said, Not David Palmer by any chance? and he said No sir, actually the name’s George. I said, or rather burbled, A friend of mine was telling me about this place, said he’d stayed here, liked it very much, mentioned you, anyway I got half the name right, and Mr Allington is the proprietor, isn’t he? That’s correct, sir. See you later and all that.
I went straight back to the bar, went up to the barman and said, Fred? and he said Yes sir. I said, Fred Soames? and he said, Fred Browning, sir. I just said, Wrong Fred, not very polite, but it was all I could think of. I went over to where my wife was sitting and I’d hardly sat down before she asked, What’s the matter?
What was the matter calls for a bit of explanation. In 1969 I published a novel called The Green Man, which was not only the title of the book but also the name of a sort of classy pub, or inn, where most of the action took place, very much the kind of establishment we were in that evening.
Now the landlord of the Green Man was called Allington, and his deputy was called David Palmer, and the barman was called Fred Soames. Allington is a very uncommon name – I wanted that for reasons nothing to do with this story. The other two aren’t, but to have got Palmer and Fred right, so to speak, as well as Allington was a thumping great coincidence, staggering in fact. But I wasn’t just staggered, I was very alarmed. Because the Green Man wasn’t only the name of the pub in my book; it was also the name of a frightening creature, a sort of solid ghost conjured up out of tree-branches and leaves and so on that very nearly kills Allington and his young daughter. I didn’t want to find I was right about that, too.
Jane was very sensible, as always. She said stranger coincidences had happened and still been just coincidences, and mightn’t I have come across an innkeeper called Allington somewhere, half forgotten about it and brought it up out of my unconscious mind when I was looking for a name for an innkeeper to put in the book, and now the real Allington’s moved from wherever I’d seen him before to this place. And Palmer and Fred really are very common names. And I’d got the name of the pub wrong. I’m still not telling you what it’s called, but one of the things it isn’t called is the Green Man. And, my pub was in Hertfordshire and this place was … off the M6. All very reasonable and reassuring.
Only I wasn’t very reassured. I mean, I obviously couldn’t just leave it there. The thing to do was get hold of this chap Palmer and see if there was, well, any more to come. Which was going to be tricky if I wasn’t going to look nosy or mad or something else that would shut him up. Neither of us ate much dinner, though there was nothing wrong with the food. We didn’t say much, either. I drank a fair amount.
Then halfway through, Palmer turned up to do his everything-all-right routine, as I’d hoped he would, and as he would have done in my book. I said yes, it was fine, thanks, and then I asked him, I said we’d be very pleased if he’d join us for a brandy afterwards if he’d got time, and he said he’d be delighted. Jolly good, but I was still stuck with this problem of how to dress the thing up.
Jane had said earlier on, why didn’t I just tell the truth, and I’d said, since Palmer hadn’t reacted at all when I gav
e him my name when I was booking the table – see what I mean? – he’d only have my word for the whole story and might still think I was off my rocker, and she said of course she’d back me up, and I’d said he’d just think he’d got two loonies on his hands instead of one. Anyway, now she said, Some people who’ve read The Green Man must have mentioned it – fancy that, Mr Palmer, you and Mr Allington and Fred are all in a book by somebody called Kingsley Amis. Obvious enough when you think of it, but like a lot of obvious things, you have got to think of it.
Well, that was the line I took when Palmer rolled up for his brandy, I’m me and I wrote this book and so on. Oh really? he said, more or less. I thought we were buggered, but then he said, Oh yes, now you mention it, I do remember some chap saying something like that, but it must have been two or three years ago – you know, as if that stopped it counting for much. I’m not much of a reader, you see, he said.
So. What about Mr Allington, I said, doesn’t he read? Not what you’d call a reader, he said. Well, that was one down to me, or one up, depending on how you look at it, because my Allington was a tremendous reader, French poetry and all that. Still, the approach had worked after a fashion, and Palmer very decently put up with being cross-questioned on how far this place corresponded with my place, in the book.
Was Mrs Allington blonde? There wasn’t a Mrs Allington any more; she’d died of leukemia quite a long time ago. Had he got his widowed father living here? (Allington’s father, that is.) No, Mr Allington senior, and his wife, lived in Eastbourne. Was the house, the pub, haunted at all? Not as far as Palmer knew, and he’d been there three years. In fact, the place was only about two hundred years old, which completely clobbered a good half of my novel, where the ghosts had been hard at it more than a hundred years earlier still.
Nearly all of it was like that. Of course, there were some questions I couldn’t ask, for one reason or another. For instance, was Allington a boozer, like my Allington, and even more so, had this Allington had a visit from God. In the book, God turns up in the form of a young man to give Allington some tips on how to deal with the ghosts, who he, God, thinks are a menace to him. No point in going any further into that part.
Complete Stories Page 27