The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  Indeed he looked a formidable sight. His gaunt form was clad still in the guard’s white overall, and his basket-work halo still loomed over his skull.

  ‘I must see your pass, sir; you know that,’ the mechanic persisted.

  ‘Oh, very well, man,’ Wyvern said. In one of the overall pockets there was a blank report card. He flicked it through the cabin door. As the mechanic swung to retrieve it, Wyvern switched on the engine and revved the rotors.

  The mechanic was quick on the uptake. He wasted no time examining the card, but flung a spanner wildly at Wyvern; it missed, clanging harmlessly against the metal fuselage. At the same time he was yelling at a group of three officers who had been standing nearby, watching Wyvern curiously. They dashed at the machine.

  It was beginning to lift when the first officer grabbed at the swinging door. Grimly, Wyvern applied full power. His altitude reached ten feet – and stayed there, the motors labouring angrily. The first officer was dragging himself up. The other officers were also hanging on. The mechanic ran just below the wheels, yelling blue murder and jumping to seize the axle.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, do something,’ Wyvern gasped to the brain.

  ‘I can’t. I’d kill you!’ Bert replied. ‘If I drained off any more of your resources, you’d go out like a light.’

  Under the combined weight of the officers, the helicopter listed badly. If anything, it was losing height. They slid over to the edge of the building, a wounded bird swarming with rats. Carried away with excitement, the mechanic made one last jump for the axle, missed, and went plummetting into the depths below.

  Wyvern’s leg was seized. He looked frantically round for a weapon with which to break the officer’s grasp, but there was nothing loose. Through the window he could see the faces of the two others, clinging and bellowing. He kicked furiously, but his strength was nothing; he began to slide diagonally across the floor of the helicopter.

  ‘Let go, you crazy fool!’ he shouted. ‘Let go or you’ll kill us all!’

  The other tugged the harder. Veins stood out on his forehead; one of his fellows had him by the trousers. It was only this that made him release Wyvern, and take a firmer grip on the passenger seat. Wyvern hauled himself back to the controls.

  Their rate of fall was accelerating. The face of a building slid by, desperately close. These in-dome helicopters were light-weight jobs, designed only to carry a maximum of two people. The extra load would be almost buckling the vanes!

  Ahead was another block. They slanted past it, and were making for a lower part of the city, drifting towards Mandalay Gate. As Wyvern calculated it, they would be down before they struck the side of the dome. At that, they would probably hit a building first. He flung open the other door, preparing to jump and run at the first opportunity, if his flagging strength would allow him to. Beneath him swung a pattern of upturned faces and pointing hands. Another ’copter soared up nearby; a telecamera projected from its cabin window.

  So H and his secretary would probably already know where Wyvern was!

  He edged closer to the opening.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot!’ the lean voice said inside his mind. ‘Your human limbs are fragile and you do not yet know how to grow more. Don’t jump! Let them catch you. They will think it in their own interest to keep you alive and restore you to health, for they do not realise I have already extracted from you all I wish. Sit tight.’

  It was good advice. But Wyvern neither took it or disregarded it, for that moment they struck a street pylon. The ’copter wrapped itself lovingly round the pylon and slithered to the ground with a mighty rending of metal. Existence became an affair of stars.

  Everything was going to be well.

  With that conviction Wyvern woke. He’d been back in his dreams to Stratton, walking among the beech copses, riding Nicky over the sweet bracken, swimming in the infant Yare.

  And somehow in the dream everything had sorted itself out so easily. He had been refuelled, and the big computer had scooped him back to earth and the régime had crumbled and then Eileen South had appeared and then … And then he woke up.

  He was in a hospital bed again.

  Plus ça change, he thought wearily. But at least he had been fed intravenously. His limbs had plumped out, the hollows had gone from his cheeks. And they had removed the terminals from his body. Wyvern felt his head; stubble ran crisply over it, and the wire cage had gone. He looked human again. He sat up, feeling wonderful.

  So Bert had been right! They wanted him alive; they would think the computer still had everything to learn from him. If H’s secretary suspected the truth, it hardly seemed likely he would dare tell H that Wyvern had just disappeared before his eyes; for the new Leader, a materialist if ever Wyvern saw one, would dismiss the notion as fantastic. Which it was.

  They would couple him back on to the machine – and he would vanish again. But this time for good.

  ‘Hey!’ he called. The sooner they fetched him the better. He could face them; he could face anything with Bert on his side.

  It occurred to him then: if they intended to couple him up again, why had they removed the terminals from his body?

  ‘Bert!’ he cried inside his head. ‘Bert!’

  The machine did not answer, only the silence of the skull where its answer should have been.

  Two guards entered the room, the usual wall-faced-looking entities who clicked for these bully jobs.

  ‘Get up,’ one said in a wall-faced voice.

  Wyvern did not like it. He hesitated, until an impatient movement from one of the guns decided him. He climbed out of bed.

  ‘Put that coat on and come this way,’ one of the guards said, indicating a greatcoat on a peg. ‘And don’t attempt to engage us in any kind of conversation.’

  Wyvern wondered remotely what kind of conversation it would have been possible to engage them in, but it seemed a poor time for argument; meekly, he did as he was told. He was marched along a passage and up a flight of stairs, and locked into a featureless waiting room. Beyond the door he could hear voices and footsteps.

  Uneasily he thought of all captives in man’s chequered history who from behind locked doors had listened to the unsettling clatter of boots and commands. It would have been better, he reflected, if the moon had never been attainable, than it should be a mere extension of Earth’s hard mazes.

  He recalled a song and its casually grim words:

  ‘Life goes on; no one’s Irreplaceable.’

  Again he called Big Bert, but it was still mysteriously silent.

  The door was flung open, this time by two different guards. They bundled him out to a yard and into a waiting van, climbing up after him. The vehicle moved off with a lurch and began to travel at speed. At one point, Wyvern thought he heard a shot fired at it.

  A quarter of an hour later he was again standing before Colonel H and his secretary.

  Colonel H was hardly recognisable. His face was hushed and heavy and his head was carried with a peculiar alertness not noticeable previously; he looked, Wyvern thought for the first time, a man to be reckoned with. He slammed a suitcase shut and stood up, glowering at Wyvern.

  ‘Come through here,’ he commanded without any preliminaries, gesturing to an adjoining room.

  Wyvern walked through. The secretary made to follow, but H thrust out his hand.

  ‘You can stay here and cope with the paper work,’ he said sarcastically. ‘I’ll deal with this hero.’

  He closed the door, and Wyvern and he were alone. The room was bare but for a metal stool and a blank telescreen in the ceiling. It would be years, at the present rate of so-called progress, before the warrens constructed on the moon were properly furnished; by and large, they looked less inviting than the craters outside.

  H also looked ugly. Wyvern began another mental call for Big Bert, but still there was no reply.

  ‘So you have me again,’ he observed.

  ‘I only want the answer to one question, and then I’m going
to shoot you,’ H said.

  ‘That wouldn’t be very clever of you,’ Wyvern said. not without trepidation, ‘or have you run another telepath to earth?’

  ‘Not Parrodyce, if that’s who you’re thinking of – and he’s got nothing better than a dose of gamma coming to him when we catch up with him. What you reckon we want another telepath for, eh?’

  ‘To teach your computer to mind read, as you said,’ Wyvern replied.

  ‘You’ve already done that,’ the Colonel said.

  How had he found out? Had they found out, perhaps, from Bert itself? H did not leave Wyvern long in doubt.

  ‘You fool,’ he said savagely, ‘didn’t you realise that when you were communicating with Big Bert anyone within fifty yards could pick it up? One of the officers who pulled your ’copter down got out of the crash as lightly as you – the other two broke their necks, by the way – and he told us everything that went over between you.’

  It was convincing, crushing, final. The only excuse Wyvern had for not having realised it before was that the usual staggering thought emanations of ego-union had been absent during communication with Bert. Bert was not human: he had intellect but no ego. With him, it had been altogether a quiet, unsensational business. But Wyvern, of course, had opened his mind and had been sending at his usual strength. In the pressure of events, he had not realised it – and nor had Big Bert, which was significant; for it showed that the machine, being man-built, could on occasion act like a man and proceed without sifting all available data.

  Even if he had realised that fact, he could have done no differently. It had been essential for Wyvern to communicate with Bert. The past was unalterable; and now the future seemed inevitable. For him, death only lay ahead; for mankind, whom Wyvern had imagined he could help, lay the long terror of spies loose in their very heads. And yet – and yet Big Bert had spoken only to Wyvern …

  The hostile silence was broken by Colonel H.

  ‘So you see you are of no further use to us,’ he said, and slowly drew a revolver from his hip holster.

  ‘Then why did you go to all the trouble of reviving me and removing the wire network after my helicopter crashed?’

  ‘Because I want the answer to one question.’

  ‘And that?’

  Colonel H paused as if sorting his words carefully.

  Then he said: ‘The machine was instructed to learn from you. It followed those instructions. It learnt the secrets of your freak mind so quickly that we were deceived, and when it closed itself down we could only presume there had been a failure somewhere before it had got to the information. We were wrong there, as we soon discovered. But the point I am interested in is this: when the brain opened itself up again and collaborated with you, it was acting directly contrary to its instructions. How and why was that possible?’

  Wyvern leant against the cold wall. The revolver was lowered. The problem was indeed one in which he was deeply, vitally interested – yet at present his brain was working only on the surface.

  ‘Perhaps the brain found out about something you never have – the sacredness of human life!’ he said.

  ‘Sacredness!’ He exploded. ‘That sort of cant went out of date back in nineteen fifty! It’s absolute rubbish! Your trouble is, you’ve had 3,000 calories a day all your life. It’s put fat on your brain. You just think of me as a roughneck, Wyvern, don’t you? You’re wrong, wrong right down to your guts. I’m the new élite, I’ve learnt the facts of the modern world! I don’t rule just by bullets – I rule by the iron rod of demography. At the end of the second world war, back in nineteen forty something, the world’s population was only about 2,700 million; they couldn’t visualise totalitarianism in England then, unless it was forced on ’em from outside. That’s what they were guarding against, but it sneaked in and coshed ’em from behind. Why? Because world population – despite all the intervening bloodletting – had doubled. It’s something like 5,500 million now!’

  ‘Are you trying to make some sort of apology?’ Wyvern asked.

  ‘No! It’s bare facts. Growing population gobbling up dwindling resources. Average calorie intake falling. Fiercer struggles for less food, nation envying nation. Your bloated electorate turns into a starving rabble; below 2,000 calories a day, they forget what ballot slips are, they forget the subtle distinctions between things like Conservatism and Socialism. They have to be ruled by whips and bullets. You see, Wyvern, it’s a law of nature.

  ‘Take a damn good look at me, Wyvern. I’m Mother Nature personified!’

  Irrelevantly, Wyvern thought: he’s been drinking; that’s why he’s so flushed. It made no difference. The fellow might still be right, and the whole vast structure of human attainment thrown over to the new god, Calorie Intake.

  ‘You find it necessary to explain yourself to me,’ Wyvern said. ‘I think a psychiatrist would find grave reasons behind your equating yourself with Mother Nature.’

  The gun was up again, staring motionless at Wyvern’s stomach.

  ‘I can bear what happens in my head while my belly’s comfortable,’ H said. ‘Only sentimental fools like you think mental pain’s worse than physical.’

  ‘You’re kidding yourself, not me, H.’

  ‘Just tell me why the brain – how it could go against instructions,’ the Colonel grated.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  ‘Stay out!’ He roared, never taking his eyes off his prisoner. ‘Well, Wyvern, you must know.’

  Wyvern thought, ‘If only I still had the strength, I’d kill him by mental force. But now I know how much it requires, I just haven’t the reserves.’

  Aloud, he said slowly, ‘I suppose the same sort of law governs Bert as governs your population. They turn instinctively from the old to the new, believing it to hold more promise. Bert thinks I hold more promise; and because the basic premises of his being include the rule Expand – the old Biblical ‘Multiply and be fruitful’, H, which works so nicely for you! – he must follow me, for I teach him more than you. Through me, he finds everything accessible.’

  ‘No longer!’ H declared. ‘We blew him up completely soon after you crashed.’

  Suddenly Wyvern found he was laughing weakly. It was ironical. He had once schemed with Parrodyce for this. Now they had played into his hands; and instead of triumph – he had lost his best friend!

  ‘I just wanted your confirmation on that point,’ H said heavily. ‘It was only what we had already deduced; that was why we had to destroy Bert. I am sorry that we are at present in hiding, and consequently you have to go out this way instead of more slowly, as my secretary would have preferred.’

  And he raised the gun with easy efficiency and squeezed the trigger.

  IX

  In hiding! So the new Leader and his secretary were in as poor a position as that! Wyvern recalled that there had been a greatcoat draped over luggage in the outer room, ready for a quick getaway. In England, H was secure, but here on Luna his position was weak, and no doubt a spaceship was already due to take him back to Earth and a bevy of guards.

  Without hesitation, Wyvern opened his mind to full blast. He conveyed a concise mental picture of the route by which he had been brought to H’s room. The necessary effort dizzied him, but he felt contact with about forty minds which were within receiving distance of his impulse. Rainbow-feeling reactions of fear, surprise, triumph, excitement and gratitude pierced him. He felt H stagger under the mental shock, and the secretary outside explode in fury.

  Rebel forces were evidently very near the room; even as their kaleidoscopic impressions seeped to him, Wyvern shut off contact and dived for H’s legs. The Colonel brought up his knee, striking Wyvern’s shoulder, and they both rolled on to the ground.

  H had dropped his revolver, but Wyvern in his weakened state was no match for him. H kicked out with his heavy boot at Wyvern’s chest and sent the latter sprawling over the floor. With one pounce, H was on to his gun and bringing it up again.

  At that moment, th
e door was flung open and H’s secretary appeared. He also was armed. He fired, without hesitation, a single shot.

  And at the same moment a terrific charge of mental force enfolded Wyvern, and a voice spoke inside his head.

  ‘At last we’ve reached you, Conrad! To get the distance we had to use a tight beam, and we couldn’t pick you up until you sent just then and accidentally gave us a direction on you.’

  ‘Eileen!’ he answered mutely, ‘Eileen South!’

  Unmistakably it was she. The timbre of her thought, the pitch of her mind, were unalterably hers. Her hair slanted across his face like rain, she was a cool breeze through his tiredness.

  They began exchanging ideas and information with lightning speed. There were no misunderstandings, no concealments.

  ‘How are you managing to reach me, Eileen?’

  ‘I am in the American Sector.’

  ‘So far?’

  ‘I am linked to Fall Guy, their computer, as you were linked to Big Bert.’

  ‘Pain, my darling …’

  ‘Joy …’

  ‘I knew of you – it seems so long ago. How did you know of me?

  ‘I have only just known, Conrad. A man called Parrodyce …’ She flashed Wyvern what Parrodyce had revealed to her of his escape.

  ‘So he got through! Yes, I know what you feel about him, dear. When I first found out about you, you were following a man called Dorgen.’

  ‘The man with the impossible smile.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was only by accident I read his thought – and found he had killed Jim Bull, the old Leader. I felt I had to follow him; you see, I’m one of the Democratics, the underground, and I knew Dorgen was important. But then I realised I had been sending! Anyone might have picked me up. So I made for the American Sector as quickly as possible. You must join us here.’

  He sketched his present predicament to her.

  And the whole time, he was promising her the sun on the wild acres of Stratton and they were weaving crosscurrents of love. Then he broke contact.