The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

It had all taken a fragment of a second. Wyvern still sat huddled on the floor. H crouched like a cat, with his revolver in his hand. The secretary was firing from the door.

  Following the first bullet came another, and another, and another, each bursting into flesh. Crazily, it seemed as if they might go on pouring forever into their target, leaving it eternally unharmed. And then, on the fifth shot, H fell on to his face; a convulsion of his hand muscles firing his gun, his arm moved in an arc with the recoil and was still. He did not move again.

  ‘You see,’ the secretary said unsteadily. ‘I’ve killed him. I’ve killed him!’

  Wyvern got limply to his feet. There was a bitter stink of explosive in the room, and his ears rang with sound.

  ‘I shot him!’ the secretary repeated. ‘You see that’ll show them I had no sympathy with him! They’ve got us cornered – they’ll be here any minute now you’ve given us away. But they won’t kill me now. They’ll see … it’ll prove I was faithful to the People. You’re my witness, Wyvern.’

  ‘You must look after yourself, as you’ve always done,’ Wyvern said tiredly.

  The other seized his arm.

  ‘You appealed to me once,’ he said. ‘Now I’m appealing to you, Wyvern. They’ll believe you because you can tell them telepathically. Tell them I was H’s dupe or anything, but let them know I shot H – it was him they were really after. I have saved your life, you know.’

  ‘You’ll have to take your chance,’ Wyvern told him.

  The secretary grabbed his wrists and thrust his blazing white face into Wyvern’s.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he hissed. ‘Something nobody but I knows now that H is dead. You knew Dorgen killed OBL, Jim Bull. He hid behind the wall of OBL’s bathroom, waiting his chance; then he made his getaway to the moon. That all took organisation. H supplied the organisation! He wasn’t head of the New Police for nothing; he wanted to get higher. He personally had Dorgen walled up while the barracks was being redecorated.’

  ‘And you knew all the time!’

  ‘I didn’t know till it was too late,’ the secretary said. Wyvern doubted the truth of that statement; he had the power of checking it telepathically, but shrunk from the thought of ego-union with this intriguer.

  ‘Directly the killing had been done,’ the latter continued, ‘H was uneasy. He thought the underground might get to Dorgen, or Dorgen go to them. He decided we must come here personally, follow Dorgen and kill him; and that happened to fit our other plans. We left with Parrodyce and his assistant, Rakister.’

  ‘I know,’ Wyvern said. ‘Because you might need an inquisitor here, and Rakister was just the sort of ruffian to erase Dorgen for you.’

  ‘It had to be done,’ the secretary said earnestly.

  ‘And then when Rakister had finished Dorgen, I suppose you put someone on to Rakister?’ remarked Wyvern with sarcasm.

  ‘He was untrustworthy,’ the secretary said. ‘We have not yet traced him. Things are in a bad way. Perhaps even now we may hold out here till relief comes – it’s due.’

  As he spoke, the telescreen in the ceiling lit. This building, Wyvern later discovered, had been scheduled as a solar system museum, but the global wars had crippled the project before it was half-completed, and the great mausoleum was empty of all but a few relics. The telecommunications, however, functioned perfectly. Apart from this defect, the building had made an ideal hiding place for H and his retinue.

  The ceiling screen lit. The foyer, where the intercom controls were, was revealed. It had been an easy matter for the rebels, on Wyvern’s signal to burst down the main door, overpower H’s small guard force, and seize the controls. With these they were now conducting a telesearch of each room in turn.

  Elated at their discovery, faces pressed down on Wyvern and the secretary from above, distorting and ballooning as they swayed too close for focus. Their mouths seemed to open and shut soundlessly, like whales closing in on plankton.

  With one shot, the secretary brought most of the screen shattering down on their heads. Shaking the splinters out of his hair, he burst from the chamber. He jumped the luggage in the next room and ran to the outer door, reloading his revolver as he did so. At the door he halted abruptly and turned back.

  ‘They’re coming down the corridor,’ he said grimly. ‘So in case I don’t get out of this mess, here’s something for you, who landed me in it.’

  He fired. They were standing only five yards apart.

  A bullet does not take long to travel five yards.

  In that hairsbreadth of time, the history of man unrolled ten thousand years forward: for Wyvern remembered.

  He recalled what Big Bert had said about finding in Wyvern’s mind knowledge of a miraculous kind such as man hardly dreamed of possessing; the unbonding of Wyvern’s chemical structure had been only one fragment of that treasury knowledge.

  The bullet had travelled one yard …

  How had that knowledge ever been forgotten? In a flash of insight, Wyvern saw it had just been overlooked, just as a man may live a week without realising that he breathes all the while. And this knowledge, being fundamental, had been more fundamentally overlooked.

  The bullet had travelled two yards …

  How had that knowledge been there to begin with? To Wyvern, his entire ratiocinative processes having been sieved by Big Bert, the answer was suddenly clear. Now that he had tapped down to that knowledge he was drinking at the fount of life itself. This blind intelligence had sprung armed upon the primeval amoebae, and from them had fashioned the bacillus, the pachyderm, the mesembryanthemum, the homo sapiens.

  The bullet had travelled three yards …

  So Wyvern held the shape of the universe in his hands. He stood with it, humbled.

  The bullet had travelled four yards …

  Only by the pressure of the past and the imminence of death – and the face that he had always been alone among men – had Wyvern discovered this revolution. He could now harness the power that had harnessed him: and there was a world dying for the word he knew.

  The bullet had travelled five yards …

  But Wyvern was a splint of light, darting through the big dome, out through the chill of space, over to the American Sector.

  She was trembling.

  ‘I don’t like to contemplate the future of the world,’ she said. ‘It has been – well, cosy to be human.’

  ‘There will be few who will be able to learn what we can teach, Eileen,’ Wyvern said. ‘We few will have to act as guardians to the many.’

  ‘So much to do,’ she sighed. ‘First you must rest. Promise me that!’

  ‘We’ll go a million light years away,’ he promised. ‘Have you never wondered – what is beyond this universe?’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, half-laughing. ‘There’s enough trouble here without casting so far afield.’

  ‘Talking of trouble,’ he said, ‘What’s become of Parrodyce? I promised to do something for him if he reached you.’

  ‘I know. I did it for you. It was not easy; I had to go down and down into the lower reaches of his mind.’

  Wyvern clutched her hand sympathetically. He knew something of the state of Parrodyce’s mind.

  ‘He was a sick man,’ she said.

  ‘Of course I found the cause in the end, buried away, like a splinter sunk into flesh. As Parrodyce was being born, he uttered a telepathic scream; his mother was a weak creature, who died almost at once of a cerebral haemorrhage. He had carried the guilt of it about ever since.’

  ‘Is he better now?’ Wyvern asked. ‘We shall need all the help we can get. Would he be fit to share the new knowledge? Where is he?’

  Eileen laughed, and then bit her lip.

  ‘He’s certainly better – or changed anyhow. He became very friendly with a small band. They brought him to the American Sector, but he’s now gone back to the Turkish Dome with them; it appears they needed a new zither man and Parrodyce got the job, if you can imagine it. So we shall have
to manage on our own at first, my darling.’

  He could think of nothing in all the new dimensions of the world be would have liked better.

  Man in his Time

  His absence

  Janet Westermark sat watching the three men in the office: the administrator who was about to go out of her life, the behaviourist who was about to come into it, and the husband whose life ran parallel to but insulated from her own.

  She was not the only one playing a watching game. The behaviourist, whose name was Clement Stackpole, sat hunched in his chair with his ugly strong hands clasped round his knee, thrusting his intelligent and simian face forward, the better to regard his new subject, Jack Westermark.

  The administrator of the Mental Research Hospital spoke in a lively and engaged way. Typically, it was only Jack Westermark who seemed absent from the scene.

  Your particular problem, restless

  His hands upon his lap lay still, but he himself was restless, though the restlessness seemed directed. It was as if he were in another room with other people, Janet thought. She saw that he caught her eye when in fact she was not entirely looking at him, and by the time she returned the glance, he was gone, withdrawn.

  ‘Although Mr Stackpole has not dealt before with your particular problem,’ the administrator was saying, ‘he has had plenty of field experience. I know –’

  ‘I’m sure we won’t,’ Westermark said, folding his hands and nodding his head slightly.

  Smoothly, the administrator made a pencilled note of the remark, scribbled the precise time beside it, and continued, ‘I know Mr Stackpole is too modest to say this, but he is a great man for working in with people –’

  ‘If you feel it’s necessary,’ Westermark said. ‘Though I’ve seen enough of your equipment for a while.’

  The pencil moved, the smooth voice proceeded. ‘Good. A great man for working in with people, and I’m sure you and Mr Westermark will soon find you are glad to have him around. Remember, he’s there to help both of you.’

  Janet smiled, and said from the island of her chair, trying to smile at him and Stackpole, ‘I’m sure that everything will work –’ She was interrupted by her husband, who rose to his feet, letting his hands drop to his sides and saying, turning slightly to address thin air, ‘Do you mind if I say good-bye to Nurse Simmons?’

  Her voice no longer wavered

  ‘Everything will be all right, I’m sure,’ she said hastily. And Stackpole nodded at her, conspiratorially agreeing to see her point of view.

  ‘We’ll all get on fine, Janet,’ he said. She was in the swift process of digesting that unexpected use of her Christian name, and the administrator was also giving her the sort of encouraging smile so many people had fed her since Westermark was pulled out of the ocean off Casablanca, when her husband, still having his lonely conversation with the air, said, ‘Of course, I should have remembered.’

  His right hand went halfway to his forehead – or his heart? Janet wondered – and then dropped, as he added, ‘Perhaps she’ll come round and see us some time.’ Now he turned and was smiling faintly at another vacant space with just the faintest nod of his head, as if slightly cajoling. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Janet?’

  She moved her head, instinctively trying to bring her eyes into his gaze as she replied vaguely, ‘Of course, darling.’ Her voice no longer wavered when she addressed his absent attention.

  There was sunlight through which they could see each other

  There was sunlight in one corner of the room, coming through the windows of a bay angled towards the sun. For a moment she caught, as she rose to her feet, her husband’s profile with the sunlight behind it. It was thin and withdrawn. Intelligent: she had always thought him over-burdened with his intelligence, but now there was a lost look there, and she thought of the words of a psychiatrist who had been called in on the case earlier: ‘You must understand that the waking brain is perpetually lapped by the unconscious.’

  Lapped by the unconscious

  Fighting the words away, she said, addressing the smile of the administrator – that smile which must have advanced his career so much – ‘You’ve helped me a lot. I couldn’t have got through these months without you. Now we’d better go.’

  She heard herself chopping her words, fearing Westermark would talk across them, as he did: ‘Thank you for your help. If you find anything …’

  Stackpole walked modestly over to Janet as the administrator rose and said, ‘Well, don’t either of you forget us if you’re in any kind of trouble.’

  ‘I’m sure we won’t.’

  ‘And, Jack, we’d like you to come back here to visit us once a month for a personal check-up. Don’t want to waste all our expensive equipment, you know, and you are our star – er, patient.’ He smiled rather tightly as he said it, glancing at the paper on his desk to check Westermark’s answer. Westermark’s back was already turned on him, Westermark was already walking slowly to the door, Westermark had said his goodbyes, perched out on the lonely eminence of his existence.

  Janet looked helplessly, before she could guard against it, at the administrator and Stackpole. She hated it that they were too professional to take note of what seemed her husband’s breach of conduct. Stackpole looked kindly in a monkey way and took her arm with one of his thick hands.

  ‘Shall we be off then? My car’s waiting outside.’

  Not saying anything, nodding, thinking, and consulting watches

  She nodded, not saying anything, thinking only, without the need of the administrator’s notes to think it, ‘Oh yes, this was when he said, “Do you mind if I say good-bye to Nurse” – who’s it? – Simpson?’ She was learning to follow her husband’s footprints across the broken path of conversation. He was now out in the corridor, the door swinging to behind him and to empty air the administrator was saying, ‘It’s her day off today.’

  ‘You’re good on your cues,’ she said, feeling the hand tighten on her arm. She politely brushed his fingers away, horrid Stackpole, trying to recall what had gone only four minutes before. Jack had said something to her; she couldn’t remember, didn’t speak, avoided eyes, put out her hand and shook the administrator’s firmly.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘Au revoir to both of you,’ he replied firmly, glancing swiftly: watch, notes, her, the door. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘If we find anything at all. We are very hopeful. …’

  He adjusted his tie, looking at the watch again.

  ‘Your husband has gone now, Mrs Westermark,’ he said, his manner softening. He walked towards the door with her and added, ‘You have been wonderfully brave, and I do realise – we all realise – that you will have to go on being wonderful. With time, it should be easier for you; doesn’t Shakespeare say in Hamlet that “Use almost can change the stamp of nature”? May I suggest that you follow Stackpole’s and my example and keep a little notebook and a strict check on the time?’

  They saw her tiny hesitation, stood about her, two men round a personable women, not entirely innocent of relish. Stackpole cleared his throat, smiled, said, ‘He can so easily feel cut off, you know. It’s essential that you of all people answer his questions, or he will feel cut off.’

  Always a pace ahead

  ‘The children?’ she asked.

  ‘Let’s see you and Jack well settled in at home again, say for a fortnight or so,’ the administrator said, ‘before we think about having the children back to see him.’

  ‘That way’s better for them and Jack and you, Janet,’ Stackpole said. ‘Don’t be glib,’ she thought; ‘consolation I need, God knows, but that’s too facile.’ She turned her face away, fearing it looked too vulnerable these days.

  In the corridor, the administrator said, as valediction, ‘I’m sure Grandma’s spoiling them terribly, Mrs Westermark, but worrying won’t mend it, as the old saw says.’

  She smiled at him and walked quickly away, a pace ahead of Stackpole.

  Westermark sat in the
back of the car outside the administrative block. She climbed in beside him. As she did so, he jerked violently back in his seat.

  ‘Darling, what is it?’ she asked. He said nothing.

  Stackpole had not emerged from the building, evidently having a last word with the administrator. Janet took the moment to lean over and kiss her husband’s cheek, aware as she did so that a phantom wife had already, from his viewpoint, done so. His response was a phantom to her.

  ‘The countryside looks green,’ he said. His eyes were flickering over the grey concrete block opposite.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Stackpole came bustling down the steps, apologising as he opened the car door, settled in. He let the clutch back too fast and they shot forward. Janet saw then the reason for Westermark’s jerking backwards a short while before. Now the acceleration caught him again; his body was rolled helplessly back. As they drove along, he set one hand fiercely on the side grip, for his sway was not properly counterbalancing the movement of the car.

  Once outside the grounds of the institute, they were in the country, still under a mid-August day.

  His theories

  Westermark, by concentrating, could bring himself to conform to some of the laws of the time continuum he had left. When the car he was in climbed up his drive (familiar, yet strange with the rhododendrons unclipped and no signs of children) and stopped by the front door, he sat in his seat for three and a half minutes before venturing to open his door. Then he climbed out and stood on the gravel, frowning down at it. Was it as real as ever, as material? Was there a slight glaze on it? – as if something shone through from the interior of the earth, shone through all things? Or was it that there was a screen between him and everything else? It was important to decide between the two theories, for he had to live under the discipline of one. What he hoped to prove was that the permeation theory was correct; that way he was merely one of the factors comprising the functioning universe, together with the rest of humanity. By the glaze theory, he was isolated not only from the rest of humanity but from the entire cosmos (except Mars?). It was early days yet; he had a deal of thinking to do, and new ideas would undoubtedly emerge after observation and cogitation. Emotion must not decide the issue; he must be detached. Revolutionary theories could well emerge from this – suffering.