The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  And now the agent of his misery, Conrad Wyvern, was probably connected to Big Bert. For a moment, Parrodyce wished he might also be so connected. He visualised yearningly a vast father-mother figure who would take him over completely, know all his secrets. Then, recalling the pain this process would involve, he let his attention wander again to the window.

  A Turkish six-piece band was haggling with the guard at the Trafalgar Gate. It had come to the British Sector as a seven-piece band; but the zither (doubling guitar) man had been disqualified from anything bar harp music the night before in a political brawl. As a protest, the rest of the band was leaving the sector. Besides a van load of possessions, they were taking with them their wives and their instruments. The noise from these two latter was considerable, supplying a chorus of support for Fezzi Forta, the band-leader, who was haranguing the guard

  commander.

  It appeared that the Customs wished to look into the dead musician’s coffin, which was leaving with the rest of the band. The Customs seemed to think it likely that the ornate box contained contraband rather than a defunct Turk. Parrodyce was inclined to agree with them.

  He was getting a pale sort of pleasure out of watching this tableau when a ‘Single Z’ waiter arrived by his side.

  ‘Gen’leman upstairs wants to see you,’ he told Parrodyce.

  The liquid in Parrodyce’s bladder froze over instantly.

  ‘What’s his name?’ he asked. ‘What’s he want?’

  ‘He di’n’ say, sir,’ the waiter said, adding virtuously ‘and I naturally di’n’ ask. But he did say it was a matter of life and death you went up.’

  Parrodyce had an aversion to the word ‘death’, but he got to his feet almost with a feeling of relief: the initiative was at last out of his hands.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked.

  ‘Right up the stairs. Room 3.’

  Parrodyce went up. There seemed no alternative, but in any case he was curious; if the New Police wanted to arrest him, why not do it in their usual fashion – in full view of others, as a warning – rather than in this roundabout way? And if it wasn’t the police, it might conceivably be someone offering him help.

  Upstairs, cheap moon-plaster was crumbling from the walls. It was gloomy here, with a smell of beer and fagends and dirty trousers. The door of Room 3 stood open. Parrodyce entered cautiously, and was immediately grabbed. Arms, ferociously strong, flung him on to a bed.

  He was searched all over, and then his captor stood back and surveyed him.

  It was Joe Rakister, Parrodyce’s ex-assistant.

  ‘I never thought you’d be fool enough to walk in like that!’ Rakister exclaimed. ‘You know I was up here – what made you come? Or have you got someone else with you? In that case, it’s just too bad, because we’re leaving in a moment by a back entrance.’

  This made little sense to Parrodyce. He stared blankly at his late assistant. The man looked wild. He was filthy and unshaven and evidently had not slept for some time. He wore some kind of ill-fitting uniform which included a cap, jammed tightly on to his head.

  ‘You see, I’m too smart for you all,’ Rakister explained. ‘I cottoned on instantly. I messed up the killing of Dorgen – I heard someone come into the earth shop as I was doing it. And I thought, “The Colonel will get you for this, boy!” And then I realised that he was planning to get me any way, I’d go back for my reward and nobody would ever see me again. For some reason, it was important to him to get Dorgen out of the way secretly; but the secret would only be really safe with me out of the way too. Oh, I worked it all out, Parrodyce.’

  ‘Very clever of you, Joe,’ said Parrodyce. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’ve seen the telecasts. I know they pinned the job on this bod Wyvern. But that’s just a blind to lull me into a sense of security and make me come out of hiding. It won’t wash. Now they’ve sent you along – to talk me into coming back, I suppose?’

  So he did not know that Parrodyce was also on the run – but how could he? The sense of hope rose in Parrodyce again.

  ‘Well …’ he said.

  ‘Oh, don’t trouble to deny it. I’ve got no grudge against you, Parrodyce – you were a good boss, as bosses go. But now you’re here, you’re going to help me. With your assistance, I can carry out a little plan I’ve hatched. We’re going out through Trafalgar Gate, see? I’m beating it out of the sector.’

  The sense of hope swelled into a sense of triumph. It interfered with Parrodyce’s breathing.

  ‘Once we’re in the open, you can please yourself what you do,’ Rakister continued. ‘I shan’t harm you if you co-operate. If you don’t co-operate, I’ll kill you soon as look at you. Get that?’

  ‘You know I’m no fool, Joe.’

  Rakister laughed harshly.

  ‘See this get-up I’m wearing?’ he said. ‘Never mind how I came by it. It belonged to a lung-piper. Know what a lung-pipe is?’

  The term meant nothing to Parrodyce.

  ‘A lung-piper is a chap who inspects the oxygen wells. You know how they get the liquid oxygen up here from underground lakes? The pipes run through the hangar, and the pumps are there. We’re going to inspect them; I’m the piper, you’re my mate. Now here’s exactly what we do, and keep your ears open because we’ve got to hurry.’

  For a man who looked as mad as Rakister, the plan sounded a pretty cool one.

  The substitute lung-piper and his mate, the latter in dungarees, the former equipped with a tool case and necessary credentials, crossed from the rear entrance of the ‘Single Z’ to the Trafalgar Gate.

  There, the Turkish band was haggling its way through the smaller gate. Instruments blared saucily, for they had won a moral victory over the Customs officials and the coffin full of loot was getting through untouched. They were the centre of all eyes, which suited Rakister and Parrodyce well.

  Rakister had obtained a good deal of information on lung-piping from the unfortunate off whom he had got his uniform. Parrodyce following, he marched boldly into the guard room, flashing a yellow pass.

  They were well in before a corporal stopped them.

  ‘Out of my way, sergeant,’ Rakister said. ‘We’ve got to get through here. There’s an emergency job required on the underground piping. They phoned through about it, didn’t they?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge,’ the corporal said, ‘but I’ve only just come off watch. I’ll have to wake up the sergeant, if you’ll hang on.’

  ‘Wake the bloody sergeant if you like, but we must get on with it unless you want to be floating out on liquid oxygen. There’s a break in X-235.’

  He had brushed past the corporal, and was in the tiny store behind the guard room proper. Through a doorway on their right they could see the rest of the detail sleeping in steel cots with their boots on.

  At the far end of the store was a trap door. Rakister knelt down beside it, pulled out a bunch of keys and began unlocking the locks and snapping the seals.

  ‘Hang on a bit for God’s sake, man,’ the corporal said. ‘It won’t take a minute, but whoever tampers with those seals has to sign a form.’

  ‘Give it me when I come up from the tunnel,’ said Rakister.

  The corporal weakened. Evidently he did not consider that rousing a sleepy sergeant was too sound an idea.

  ‘How long are you going to be?’ he asked, indecision in his voice.

  ‘An hour – eighty minutes,’ Rakister said. ‘Bring us down some tea, eh?’

  ‘I’ll still be here then,’ the corporal said with evident relief. ‘I’ll go and get the form, if I can find it. I think it’s a KH 725A.’

  He drifted back into the front room as Rakister pulled up the metal square. Parrodyce fished a torch out of the kit they had with them, and they climbed down into the depths, lowering the trap door on top of them.

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been playing safer if we had tipped that corporal down here and shut him up?’ Parrodyce enquired.

  ‘He knows he shouldn’t have let us dow
n here. Therefore he’ll keep the secret better than we could,’ said Rakister, and Parrodyce knew he was right. In the old days, casual remarks like this, revealing Rakister’s considerable working knowledge of human psychology, had surprised Parrodyce; he could not understand how a man with such contempt for his fellows gained that sort of wisdom. Now he saw it had been picked up selfishly, to gain Rakister’s own ends. And in the same flash Parrodyce saw that his own usefulness was almost at an end. One of them was going to die shortly, and Parrodyce looked the likelier candidate so far.

  ‘Well, I didn’t need much help from you after all,’ Rakister said, almost as if reading the other’s thoughts. ‘I was afraid we might have more than one dumb double-striper to cope with.’

  They stood beside the big, lagged, oxygen pipes; four of them ran straight from darkness to darkness, in a tolerably wide tunnel stretching from outside the dome to the centre of the city. A notice on the wall proclaimed, ‘It is Dangerous to touch these Pipes unless Insulated Gloves are worn’. It was colder than a vault; their breath clouded and fell as rime on to the pipes.

  ‘There should be a lung-piper’s hut here,’ Rakister said. He took the torch and swung it round.

  The ‘hut’ was a deep alcove a couple of yards down the tunnel. They switched on an electric light and went in. Hoses hung on the wall, tools were stacked in racks. There were also two space suits.

  ‘Get ’em on,’ Rakister said briefly.

  The suits felt icy and were difficult to put on. They helped each other, trembling with cold. One of Parrodyce’s teeth began to ache.

  ‘We’ve got no time to lose,’ he said, and then realised it was something he was repeating over and over.

  At last they were into the suits. With relief they switched on the heating circuits.

  ‘Don’t close your face-plate yet,’ Rakister said. ‘Then we can talk without using the intercom; someone else might be listening in over it. You go on first down the corridor; I’ll follow. Stop at the outer lock.’

  Very nice, Parrodyce thought. And at the lock you can shoot me if you feel like it. Do you feel like it? I can’t tell. I can’t tell what anyone ever thinks, despite this freak gift I have. So I walk down this tunnel of darkness, round-shouldered, with a gun following. Perhaps someone more observant would know what Rakister felt like. He may have given himself away by some tiny item, just as Wyvern was betrayed by an impossible smile.

  Just ahead of him in the long tunnel, the oxygen pipes were punctuated with taps worked by wheels. Hoses could be attached to these taps and the liquid syphoned off if a section of pipe had to be emptied for repairs. The taps pointed back down the tunnel the way they had come.

  Parrodyce had no two thoughts about the matter.

  Judging his distance, he flicked off the torch and ran to the nearest wheel. As he heaved it round, he heard Rakister call in astonishment. Then the liquid oxygen was jetting out; he could feel it thundering through the cock. And he was shouting, cheering, blaspheming.

  He switched the tap off after a long minute and flashed his torch.

  Quickly he slammed his face plate shut. The lenses of his spectacles had iced over, and he had to wait till the suit heater had coped with the trouble before he could see again. The liquid he had released was boiling, misting up into the corridor, multiplying, writhing, blue, beastly, raw: the stuff of life in killer mood. Half hidden in the vapour, a figure lay across the pipes, frozen there. Parrodyce hurried away from it, a little nauseated.

  It was not far to the overhead airlock. He climbed the ladder and heaved himself in, closing the hatch behind him with relief.

  Three minutes later he was stepping out of the side of the hangar on to the moon’s surface.

  He had never been out alone. It was terrifying! He stood in the shadow of the dome and it was absolutely black. Parrodyce could not see the ground, the hangar or any particle of himself.

  Some distance away – he could not tell how far – the world began, an intensely bright world with a biting background of peaks and stars that might have been only at arm’s length. And in the foreground of this chunk of world, a line of figures were making towards a tracked bus; they bore a coffin with them; Fezzi Forta’s boys were on their way.

  Pulling himself together, Parrodyce forced himself to march across the black void to the light. He got to the vehicle as the last of the Turks was boarding. They hauled him up without question.

  Gloating to himself, Parrodyce began to plan his next move. He had forgotten Wyvern; he was thinking of the telepathic girl.

  VIII

  ‘To say it in a way you would understand it,’ Bert the Brain explained, ‘I was so surprised I was speechless. I have not been out of order at all. I have been out of action, voluntarily. The amount of knowledge you gave me to digest was more than the total volume I have received since I was started – not, I mean, your conscious knowledge, which was comparatively negligible, but the inherited and latent knowledge in you.’

  ‘I did not realise,’ Wyvern said, ‘that in that brief contact you had with me on the operating table you had learnt all you could.’

  ‘You had expected the process to be what you call painful,’ the brain answered. ‘I suppose the operation was brief, as you tell time; but once I had grasped one strand of the pattern I could predict and interpret the whole design. It is intensely interesting.’

  Conversing with Bert was unlike ego-union. That process was always, basically, a clash of opposing forces, or a locking together of magnetic North and South. Bert had no character; his voice was thin water in the brain. Nothing was there of good or evil, personal ambition, altruism; he was intellect without will, potentiality without promise. There was no threat in him. He was power, but Wyvern was in command. Yet Wyvern was not satisfied.

  ‘Now that you have the power of ego-union with others,’ he asked, ‘could you do a sort of hook-up with everyone?’

  ‘Yes – through you. Only if you were in ego-union with them.’

  Wyvern knew the machine would be reading the satisfaction his answer brought, and at once it added, ‘After that, I would have their pattern and could communicate with them on my own.’

  ‘Which is how you communicate with me now, although we are not joined by power cables?’

  ‘Precisely. I am supplying the stimulus, you supply the power.’ It was a remark Wyvern would soon ruefully recall.

  He drifted in a limbo. It was only a moment since he had dissolved before H’s secretary’s eyes, but his time values had altered, together with all his other senses. His vision, for instance, was diffused throughout his body; he was seeing through his cell structure, and on all sides stretched a wall of glass marbles – or so it appeared. Actually, Bert told him, he was viewing the carefully stacked elements of his own body. Using the latent knowledge in Wyvern’s own mind, Bert had unbonded his biochemical position; he was now escaping from the secretary in a wafer of matter a fraction of a millimetre thick – but the endless array of marbles seemed not to move.

  ‘You can resume normal structure now,’ the machine advised.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I will guide.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I cannot say what the place is.’

  ‘How can you see it?’

  ‘Through your senses.’

  ‘Yet I cannot see it.’

  ‘You will learn.’

  And resuming normal structure was easy. Yet it was difficult. Snapping the fingers is easy; yet a one-year-old babe cannot manage it.

  Wyvern was in a blank little office which looked disused. He was starving.

  ‘This is only about fifty yards from where I found you,’ the wire voice in his head announced.

  ‘I’m starving!’ Wyvern cried.

  He staggered over to the swivel chair and collapsed into it. He still wore the clothes he had taken from the guard, William; he was still peppered with terminals, and the basket of wire still crowned his head. But his flesh seemed to have atrophied, his
bones showed, the skin stretched tight over his temples. His stomach felt like a walnut. He was in the last stages of starvation.

  Bert realised his plight immediately.

  ‘This is my fault,’ it exclaimed. ‘I had neglected a basic factor of human metabolism. You feed every five waking hours to maintain energy. That energy is easily consumed, and of course the sub-molecular transposition has entirely drained your energy supplies. I told you you were supplying the power. You must go in search of food at once.’

  ‘I worked that one out for myself,’ Wyvern said bitterly.

  He staggered towards the doorway, wondering where he was, what aid he was likely to get. His hopes sank directly he looked outside: the corridor stretching either way was painted a drab grey and brown, the standard army colours. The opposite wall of the corridor was all glass, Wyvern looked out; he was on the top floor of a tall building. Overhead he could see the domes with their polar shields up.

  ‘Not hopeful,’ he messaged to the machine.

  Without bothering to take any precautions, he walked down the corridor, past two closed doors, to a self-service lift. A notice on it read: UP – HELICOPTERS ONLY. OUT OF BOUNDS TO OTHER RANKS. Wyvern pushed his way in.

  ‘Going up,’ he said, and went up.

  He emerged on top of the building in what at first was blinding light. When he got his bearings, he saw there were several army personnel about, officers in uniform, men in dungarees. Several helicopters were parked in a line, with one just landing.

  Wyvern was beyond making any sort of pretence at concealment, nor was it easy to see what exactly he could have done to hide. He merely walked up to the nearest helicopter and flung open the cabin door. Someone called out to him at once.

  ‘The one this end if you don’t mind, sir.’

  Nodding curtly in reply to the mechanic who had shouted, Wyvern walked as steadily as he could down the line of air vehicles. As he reached the one designated, the mechanic pulled open the door and said humbly, ‘May I just see your pass, sir, please.’

  ‘Do I look as if I was on pleasure?’ Wyvern asked, swinging himself up into the little cabin.