by Brian Aldiss
And so he said – and found himself now saying it for the third time, ‘Dorgen could still talk when I reached him. He was able to describe the killer as a tall fellow with a square face, blue jowls, small black moustache, black bushy eyebrows, hair black with a prominent streak of white in it. Hairy hands and arms.’
‘Dorgen told you this before he died?’ the neat man with the beard asked.
‘I just said he did,’ Wyvern said. His voice rasped; they would not, surely, be on the alert for telepaths up here. His story was perfectly convincing.
‘With his dying breath,’ Wyvern added, ‘Dorgen said, “I killed Our Beloved Leader”.’
The beard took a precise step or two in each direction, running a fingernail lightly along the thick glass as he walked.
‘Now may I go?’ Wyvern asked. ‘I have been detained quite long enough already, it seems to me. You know where to contact me if you wish.’
‘It is not as easy as that,’ the beard said. ‘Nothing is easy in this world, Wyvern. Men behave foolishly. We are not, for example, at all happy about some aspects of your story. Everything is very complicated; you must be kept here a little longer yet.’
He turned to go, adding, ‘You may congratulate yourself at least on having a front seat while history is in the making.’
‘I never had a seat I hated more.’
The other left without comment.
Almost as soon as he had gone, the light in the outer compartment went out. A bright bulb out of reach above Wyvern’s head was now the only source of illumination, and it so shone on to the glass before his eyes that he could hardly see into the other part of the room beyond the glass. Once, he thought someone slipped in and observed him, but could not be sure.
The light threw considerable heat on to his head and neck. Cramp crawled and tingled in his legs. Disquiet increased with discomfort. He just hoped this infernal delay meant they were combing the Sector for Dorgen’s slayer; but he could not help reading more sinister motives into this custody.
At least they had no reason to suspect him of powers of ego-union – he hoped. To have that discovered would involve him in a nasty fate. He recalled, as he sat waiting, the thing Parrodyce had said when they were talking about H’s projected coupling of another telepath to Big Bert: ‘That must be the worst pain of all; I pray I never come to it.’
If they did find out about Wyvern, it would be remarkably convenient for them. The monster computer was only a hundred yards away, in the centre of the British Sector!
Wyvern’s reveries were interrupted by the opening of a grill behind his head. A basin full of patent cereal and condensed milk was thrust in upon him. He ate and dozed. Broken fantasias on Dorgen’s past sleazed through his sleep.
He came suddenly back to full consciousness, and sat bolt upright, his blood racing heavily. Beyond the glass, the shadowy forms of Colonel H and his secretary were watching him! Involuntarily, Wyvern was reminded of the ghosts which haunted Julius Caesar before his death.
The urge was strong to speak to them, to try and establish communication, to render them human, but he fought it down and stayed silent, wondering what horrible coincidence had brought them to the scene at this time. He had thought them still on Earth.
H’s small features were drawn closer together than ever, as if all the venom of him concentrated itself towards the end of his nose. He came forward at last and pressed his hands against the glass.
‘What did Dorgen say to you?’ he asked in a terrible voice.
‘He told me he killed Our Beloved Leader,’ Wyvern said.
When H spoke again, his words charged Wyvern full of understanding and fear; he realised for the first time the meaning of that impossible smile carved onto Dorgen’s face; he realised how it had made him betray himself into a future too ghastly to contemplate; for H said, ‘You are a telepath, Wyvern! That cur Dorgen was dumb: he had his tongue cut out twenty years ago.’
V
The moon should have been the ideal place for the régime of the British Republics to thrive in: scenery and policy alike were arid and uncompromising. Only in the sense of having been rough-hewn by time did either of them approach beauty; they functioned by virtue of the accidents of the past. And lunar colony and police state alike required a continual maximum effort to maintain equilibrium.
Yet the régime did not thrive here; the intransigence of the one clashed with the intransigence of the other. Luna had always been a trouble spot. There seemed to be no room for any law but the harsh natural ones, and on these stony shores of space politics secured little foothold. With the death of Our Beloved Leader, revolt against the powers-that-be broke forth again. It was to quell this insurrection that Colonel H had arrived at the British sector.
He took immediate advantage of the chance which threw Wyvern into his power almost as he landed. For, if the lunar base – with Bert the Brain and its potentialities for military conquest – was the key to his future, Wyvern gave him the power to turn that key. Wyvern was a telepath. From Wyvern Bert should learn the ability to read the minds of the whole population; and when it could do that, H was firmly in the saddle.
‘Take him down to Bu-X!’ Colonel H ordered. ‘And be careful with him. Don’t repeat the mistakes you made with Grisewood.’
They took Wyvern away struggling.
‘Right,’ the Colonel said to his secretary. ‘Now arrange with Radio Imbrium for me to televise to the people at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow in the role of Beloved Leader. I don’t think we’d better fix it for any earlier than that.’
He turned resolutely to the formidable mass of reports on his desk. They were without exception smudged and hard to read: the imported Turkish typewriters were unsatisfactory in every way. He made a note on a memo pad to enquire into the possibilities of setting up a typewriter factory when he got back to Norwich. Then he turned again to the papers, hunching his shoulders grimly. He was not cut out for paper work.
The secretary returned from the telephone, looking spruce and savage.
‘It’s taking them a while to get Wyvern down the passage,’ he reported. ‘I told them they must not lay him out or anything beastly like that. That’s Bu-X’s job.’
‘This ruddy administration –,’ Colonel H began. He was occasionally irked by what he considered his underling’s prissy way of speech.
‘I came back to say we’d forgotten something,’ said the secretary crisply. He disliked these outbursts against paper work, believing legislators to be the unacknowledged poets of the world. ‘I came to remind you that we had Wyvern in our hands in Norwich. We should have found out then that he was telepathic – that was what we handed him over to Parrodyce for. I understood that gentleman was supposed to be infallible?’
‘My God!’ H exclaimed, jumping up. ‘You’re right! Why didn’t I think of that?’
He snatched up his desk telephone.
‘Send Parrodyce up to me on the double,’ he barked, and bruised the receiver setting it down again.
‘Lucky I had the wit to bring that fellow to Luna with us,’ he said. ‘If I remember, you were rather against the idea.’
The secretary stood dapper and silent, gazing at the crease in his trousers. He was an excellent judge of when silence was both wisest and most infuriating.
The four New Police who had been entrusted with Wyvern were getting him fairly rapidly down a stretch of passage when Parrodyce appeared at the other end of it. The Questioner looked disturbed. He was wasting no time in answering his boss’s summons, but he quaked in doing it. His cheeks shone, his spectacles misted. Then he saw Wyvern and Wyvern saw him.
Only a short while before, Wyvern had resolved never to make contact with a human mind again. His contact with Dorgen had sickened him to the core; it had indeed contaminated him, for he had involuntarily taken over the dying man’s jumble of impressions complete, and they were now as much a part of him as his own memories. He wanted no more such. Least of all did he want ego-union with Parr
odyce, for he already knew that here was a mind more sick than Dorgen’s.
Nevertheless, the desperate circumstances altered the case. Too much was at stake for queasiness. He did not hesitate. Disregarding the posse who had bodily hold of him, he made mental contact with Parrodyce.
He held it only for a second. It was enough.
Their thought states interlocked.
Wyvern: ‘They’ve discovered what I am. I slipped up. It’s all over. I’m being taken to Bu-X, whatever that is.’
Parrodyce: ‘Fear for myself. That explains what H and buddy want me for. My secret’s up too – or if not that, they’ll think I’ve failed. Either way: torture, pain. Pain! Remove my lower jaw maybe. Castration …!’
Wyvern: ‘Stow it! Listen – my guards will be getting most of this exchange.’
Parrodyce: ‘Then I am betrayed. It’s your fault, Wyvern. Why didn’t I kill you when I had you? We’ll both be taken to Bu-X. That’s where they fit you up to couple you on to Bert the Brain. They’re worse torturers than I and Joe Rakister, my assistant. Daren’t go to H.’
Wyvern: ‘You must escape, Parrodyce, now. Get away to another sector quickly. Tell them what is about to happen; Bert must be wrecked. If this scheme of H’s succeeds, he’ll rule the entire roost in no time. A telepathic computer would be unstoppable. Get away now.’
Parrodyce: ‘Must save own skin. Which sector is powerful enough to defy H, which?’
Wyvern: ‘Try any – American will do. All sectors must unite against this. Bomb it to bits if necessary.’
Parrodyce: ‘Killing. Good.’
Wyvern: ‘Just get the message through. Leave them to judge. Now for heaven’s sake scoot, you horror.’
Parrodyce: ‘Loathe you. Yet if you were saved, you could probe me properly, find what went wrong. Some thorn in the infant flesh. Oh, Wyvern, am afraid …’
Wyvern: ‘There’ll be nothing to fear if you get out. And listen, somewhere on Luna is a girl called Eileen South; she’s a telepath, no other details. Tell her – tell her I loved her.’
Parrodyce: ‘No use for women. Subtle, smothering …’
Wyvern: ‘Get the message through. Do it all, and I swear if there’s ever a chance I’ll dig down through your dirt and put you right, if it’s still possible.’
Parrodyce: ‘Love/hate. Going now.’
The contact broke. The plump figure at the end of the corridor turned and ran back through the door it had entered. Badly frightened, one of the guards, strictly against orders, slammed home a blow on to the side of Wyvern’s chin.
Oblivion was a complexity of sensation. The top of Wyvern’s sleeping mind whirled, whirled till all its colours blended into blinding whiteness. He was far away, but his heart still beat, his bloodstream still flowed, his latent consciousness foamed and subsided like milk boiling on an intermittent fire. Down there, where sleep never penetrates, fright was active; the smouldering intelligence knew that something was afoot which would violate its inmost hearth. The something came from outside, where all dangers came from, but it was working steadily in, insidiously, slyly and/or boldly, deeper.
The danger was chromium-plated, then it was a gnarled hand, or it was pins. It had little piggy leech-snouts, or it had nozzles or nails. It assumed any shape to get where it wanted, and soon the primeval country fell to this protean invader, and the enemy camp fires glowed from every point of vantage.
Time slowed, stopped. Presently it began again at a new rhythm. Dawn came: Wyvern roused.
He could not move. He was looking at a wall of lawn starred with daisies, or it was a green sky stuffed with stars; slowly, with infinite care, the invalid muscles of his eyes brought it into focus, and it was a green wall of instruments, studded with little dials, like eyeballs. It was about three feet away from him. He acquired these facts as a new-born babe might acquire them.
Something fiendish had been done to him.
Men in white overalls crossed his line of vision. For the most part, they seemed to ignore him, being more concerned with the little dials. Then one came over and injected something into him – it might have been into his shoulder or his calf, he could not tell, could only feel a coolness spread, gradually defining the limits of his body.
It seemed to him he was left alone then, with only the blind eyeballs to watch him. Slowly strength returned. Wyvern discovered that he was lying on his chest with a pillow under his left cheek. Taking his time about it, he rolled on to one side and sat up, propping himself up with his arms helped by the light lunar gravity. The effort dizzied him; he sat with his eyes shut, vaguely exploring the dry taste in his mouth. He could eventually open his eyes again.
He was in a small room on a large table. He had been covered with a blanket which had now slipped aside. He was naked; he could see his body direct, and in a wide mirror slanting above the table. Wyvern stared at the reflection – not in horror, for his subconscious had already accepted this violation.
From six points on the front of his body, and two on his legs, little terminals projected. From the terminals, cables – or were they tubes? – led off. He could tell that his back was similarly served.
His skull was shaved; from it, similar though smaller terminals projected, secured into the bone. There were twelve terminals in his skull, and the connections from them had been built out so that the rear of his head was surrounded by a kind of wire basket, like a fencing mask worn backwards. A pigtail of cable hung from the back of the basket, carrying the wires away.
‘Someone’s been busy,’ Wyvern muttered to himself. Only that trivial thought bubbled up.
At the bottom of the bed, a steel arm with a hook on it gathered all the thin cables together into one fat one. The fat cable slithered across the floor to a trolley fitted with valves and glass cylinders and a pump which worked slowly and laboriously. At the other side of the trolley, the cable ran into the base of the green instrument panel.
Wyvern had no doubt at all as to what it all meant. Experimentally, he tugged at the terminal set in his left nipple and felt the network of wires like capillary veins tighten under his skin. They had taped him up. The innermost meaning of his innermost chromosome was being syphoned out of him and on to the panel. He could feel his slightest sensation, an itch on the pores of his leg or the stir of bile in his gut, register in micro-amps and flick up a reading on a dial. He could feel his thoughts scuttle along the wires and whistle through the machine’s mazes. He was ready to be coupled up to Big Bert.
Sighing, he lay down again. A small metal box was fixed between his shoulders – a fuse box? He wondered – and he could not lie comfortably. So he lay uncomfortably.
Four men entered the room. They wore white overalls. Two of them took great interest in Wyvern, examining him, prodding him, checking the instruments; the other two stood to one side rather boredly, and began chatting together. Wyvern could hear snatches of their conversation.
‘… nasty bust up on Twenty One last night. Three of our boys had it.’
‘My mate Alfred was down there. Apparently he picked up with some French tart …’
It was a reminder of a world which might have ceased to exist for Wyvern.
The examination took the best part of an hour. At the end of it, the examiners showed themselves satisfied and left. They returned in ten minutes with Colonel H’s secretary.
The secretary came over to the table and stared down at Wyvern. Viewed from this angle, he looked less the pukka officer than usual, more the thug; his mouth had that stupid set to it observable in men of callous natures.
‘You see we managed to bring you through,’ he said, mock-brightly. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I want a drink,’ Wyvern said. But, he reflected as he asked, he did no longer need a drink; the trolley had automatically supplied the shortage. The secretary, in any case, paid no heed to the request.
‘I regret the Colonel could not come,’ he said. ‘He is attending to a little source of irritation outside. We are goin
g to get the computer to work draining you straight away – it has already been given its instructions. Results should be coming through by late afternoon, shortly after the Colonel is officially proclaimed Beloved Leader.’
‘I’m not interested,’ Wyvern said sourly.
‘You should be – it concerns you,’ the secretary said. He turned and talked in a low voice to the men in white. After some consultation, one of them left the room; he was gone only a minute, and when he returned he said, ‘Yes, they’re all standing by at Computer Central.’
‘Splendid,’ the secretary said. ‘You’d better switch on straight away.’
The other nodded and went over to the green panel.
Wyvern tensed himself, not knowing what to expect, unless it was a form of electrocution. He lay there on the devilish rack, eyes probing the others. Apart from some signs of strain, their faces were blank. Of all the winds loose from Pandora’s box, Wyvern thought, only the wind of science blows today; untempered by human kindness, it’s a cold wind. I die of mere cleverness.
But several toggle switches clicked over and he did not die. Indeed, at first he felt nothing. Then a not unpleasant vibration crept through his body. It worked steadily through him, learning every cell, and so into his brain.
An indescribable sensation of a myriad doors being flung open attacked Wyvern. But for that moment he was not Wyvern; his identity was gone, sucked into the giant computer for inspection. Then it was back, packed into the correct cubicles it had come from. Then silence.
The white-overalled men glanced anxiously up at H’s secretary, then turned back to the board. Without a word, they commenced checking across the wide expanse of instruments.
‘What’s up?’ asked the secretary sharply.
‘Power’s packed in,’ one of the men said in an equally sharp tone.
The secretary strode over to the board.
‘You mean to say –,’ he began.
‘Everything’s perfectly in order here,’ the other interrupted. ‘Our readings are all OK. It’s the pipe to Bert where the failure’s occurred. You’d better get them on the blower – maybe the rioters have cut the line!’