The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  He could see his wife by him, standing off in case they happened embarrassingly or painfully to collide. He smiled thinly at her through her glaze. He said, ‘I am, but I’d prefer not to talk.’ He stepped towards the house, noting the slippery feel of gravel that would not move under his tread until the world caught up. He said, ‘I’ve every respect for the Guardian, but I’d prefer not to talk at present.’

  Famous Astronaut Returns Home

  As the party arrived, a man waited in the porch for them, ambushing Westermark’s return home with a deprecatory smile. Hesitant but businesslike, he came forward and looked interrogatively at the three people who had emerged from the car.

  ‘Excuse me, you are Captain Jack Westermark, aren’t you?’

  He stood aside as Westermark seemed to make straight for him.

  ‘I’m the psychology correspondent for the Guardian, if I might intrude for a moment.’

  Westermark’s mother had opened the front door and stood there smiling welcome at him, one hand nervously up to her grey hair. Her son walked past her. The newspaper man stared after him.

  Janet told him apologetically, ‘You’ll have to excuse us. My husband did reply to you, but he’s really not prepared to meet people yet.’

  ‘When did he reply, Mrs Westermark? Before he heard what I had to say?’

  ‘Well, naturally not – but his life stream. … I’m sorry, I can’t explain.’

  ‘He really is living ahead of time, isn’t he? Will you spare me a minute to tell me how you feel now the first shock is over?’

  ‘You really must excuse me,’ Janet said, brushing past him. As she followed her husband into the house, she heard Stackpole say, ‘Actually, I read the Guardian, and perhaps I could help you. The Institute has given me the job of remaining with Captain Westermark. My name’s Clement Stackpole – you may know my book. Persistent Human Relations, Methuen. But you must not say that Westermark is living ahead of time. That’s quite incorrect. What you can say is that some of his psychological and physiological processes have somehow been transposed forward –’

  ‘Ass!’ she exclaimed to herself. She had paused by the threshold to catch some of his words. Now she whisked in.

  Talk hanging in the air among the long watches of supper

  Supper that evening had its discomforts, although Janet Westermark and her mother-in-law achieved an air of melancholy gaiety by bringing two Scandinavian candelabra, relics of a Copenhagen holiday, to the table and surprising the two men with a gay-looking hors d’oeuvre. But the conversation was mainly like the hors d’oeuvre, Janet thought: little tempting isolated bits of talk, not nourishing.

  Mrs Westermark senior had not yet got the hang of talking to her son, and confined her remarks to Janet, though she looked towards Jack often enough. ‘How are the children?’ he asked her. Flustered by the knowledge that he was waiting a long while for her answer, she replied rather incoherently and dropped her knife.

  To relieve the tension, Janet was cooking up a remark on the character of the administrator at the Mental Research Hospital, when Westermark said, ‘Then he is at once thoughtful and literate. Commendable and rare in men of this type. I got the impression, as you evidently did, that he was as interested in his job as in advancement. I suppose one might say one even liked him. But you know him better, Stackpole; what do you think of him?’

  Crumbling bread to cover his ignorance of whom they were supposed to be conversing about, Stackpole said, ‘Oh, I don’t know; it’s hard to say really,’ spinning out time, pretending not to squint at his watch.

  ‘The administrator was quite a charmer, didn’t you think, Jack?’ Janet remarked – perhaps helping Stackpole as much as Jack.

  ‘He looks as if he might make a slow bowler,’ Westermark said, with an intonation that suggested he was agreeing with something as yet unsaid.

  ‘Oh, him!’ Stackpole said. ‘Yes, he seems a satisfactory sort of chap on the whole.’

  ‘He quoted Shakespeare to me and thoughtfully told me where the quotation came from,’ Janet said.

  ‘No thank you, Mother,’ Westermark said.

  ‘I don’t have much to do with him,’ Stackpole continued. ‘Though I have played cricket with him a time or two. He makes quite a good slow bowler.’

  ‘Are you really?’ Westermark exclaimed.

  That stopped them. Jack’s mother looked helplessly about, caught her son’s glazed eye, said, covering up, ‘Do have some more sauce, Jack, dear,’ recalled she had already had her answer, almost let her knife slide again, gave up trying to eat.

  ‘I’m a batsman, myself,’ Stackpole said, as if bringing an old pneumatic drill to the new silence. When no answer came, he doggedly went on, expounding on the game, the pleasure of it. Janet sat and watched, a shade perplexed that she was admiring Stackpole’s performance and wondering at her slight perplexity; then she decided that she had made up her mind to dislike Stackpole, and immediately dissolved the resolution. Was he not on their side? And even the strong hairy hands became a little more acceptable when you thought of them gripping the rubber bat-handle; and the broad shoulders swinging … She closed her eyes momentarily, and tried to concentrate on what he was saying.

  A batsman himself

  Later, she met Stackpole on the upper landing. He had a small cigar in his mouth, she had two pillows in her arms. He stood in her way.

  ‘Can I help at all, Janet?’

  ‘I’m only making up a bed, Mr Stackpole.’

  ‘Are you not sleeping in with your husband?’

  ‘He would like to be on his own for a night or two, Mr Stackpole. I shall sleep in the children’s room for the time being.’

  ‘Then please permit me to carry the pillows for you. And do please call me Clem. All my friends do.’

  Trying to be pleasanter, to unfreeze, to recall that Jack was not moving her out of the bedroom permanently, she said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that we once had a terrier called Clem.’ But it did not sound as she had wished it to do.

  He put the pillows on Peter’s blue bed, switched on the bedside lamp, and sat on the edge of the bed, clutching his cigar and puffing at it.

  ‘This may be a bit embarrassing, but there’s something I feel I should say to you, Janet.’ He did not look at her. She brought him an ashtray and stood by him.

  ‘We feel your husband’s mental health may be endangered, although I hasten to assure you that he shows no signs of losing his mental equilibrium beyond what we may call an inordinate absorption in phenomena – and even there, we cannot say, of course we can’t, that his absorption is any greater than one might expect. Except in the totally unprecedented circumstances, I mean. We must talk about this in the next few days.’

  She waited for him to go on, not unamused by the play with the cigar. Then he looked straight up at her and said, ‘Frankly, Mrs Westermark, we think it would help your husband if you could have sexual relations with him.’

  A little taken aback, she said, ‘Can you imagine –’ Correcting herself, she said, ‘That is for my husband to say. I am not unapproachable.’

  She saw he had caught her slip. Playing a very straight bat, he said, ‘I’m sure you’re not, Mrs Westermark.’

  With the light out, living, she lay in Peter’s bed

  She lay in Peter’s bed with the light out. Certainly she wanted him: pretty badly, now she allowed herself to dwell on it. During the long months of the Mars expedition, while she had stayed at home and he had got farther from home, while he actually had existence on that other planet, she had been chaste. She had looked after the children and driven round the countryside and enjoyed writing those articles for women’s magazines and being interviewed on TV when the ship was reported to have left Mars on its homeward journey. She had been, in part, dormant.

  Then came the news, kept from her at first, that there was confusion in communicating with the returning ship. A sensational tabloid broke the secrecy by declaring that the nine-man crew had all gone mad. A
nd the ship had overshot its landing area, crashing into the Atlantic. Her first reaction had been purely a selfish one – no, not selfish, but from the self: He’ll never lie with me again. And infinite love and sorrow.

  At his rescue, the only survivor, miraculously unmaimed, her hope had revived. Since then, it had remained embalmed, as he was now embalmed in time. She tried to visualise love as it would be now, with everything happening first to him, before she had begun to – With his movement of pleasure even before she – No, it wasn’t possible! But of course it was, if they worked it out first intellectually; then if she just lay flat … But what she was trying to visualise, all she could visualise, was not love-making, merely a formal prostration to the exigencies of glands and time flow.

  She sat up in bed, longing for movement, freedom. She jumped out and opened the lower window; there was still a tang of cigar smoke in the dark room.

  If they worked it out intellectually

  Within a couple of days, they had fallen into routine. It was as if the calm weather, perpetuating mildness, aided them. They had to be careful to move slowly through doors, keeping to the left, so as not to bump into each other – a tray of drinks was dropped before they agreed on that. They devised simple knocking systems before using the bathroom. They conversed in bulletins that did not ask questions unless questions were necessary. They walked slightly apart. In short, they made detours round each other’s lives.

  ‘It’s really quite easy as long as one is careful,’ Mrs Westermark senior said to Janet. ‘And dear Jack is so patient!’

  ‘I even get the feeling he likes the situation.’

  ‘Oh, my dear, how could he like such an unfortunate predicament?’

  ‘Mother, you realise how we all exist together, don’t you? No, it sounds too terrible – I daren’t say it.’

  ‘Now don’t you start getting silly ideas. You’ve been very brave, and this is not the time for us to be getting upset, just as things are going well. If you have any worries, you must tell Clem. That’s what he’s here for.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well then.’

  She saw Jack walk in the garden. As she looked, he glanced up, smiled, said something to himself, stretched out a hand, withdrew it, and went, still smiling, to sit on one end of the seat on the lawn. Touched, Janet hurried over to the french windows, to go and join him.

  She paused. Already, she saw ahead, saw her sequence of actions, for Jack had already sketched them into the future. She would go on to the lawn, call his name, smile, and walk over to him when he smiled back. Then they would stroll together to the seat and sit down, one at each end.

  The knowledge drained all spontaneity from her. She might have been working a treadmill, for what she was about to do had already been done as far as Jack was concerned, with his head’s start in time. Then if she did not go, if she mutinied, turned back to the discussion of the day’s chores with her mother-in-law … That left Jack mouthing like a fool on the lawn, indulging in a fantasy there was no penetrating. Let him do that, let Stackpole see; then they could drop this theory about Jack’s being ahead of time and would have to treat him for a more normal sort of hallucinatory insanity. He would be safe in Clem’s hands.

  But Jack’s actions proved that she would go out there. It was insane for her not to go out there. Insane? To disobey a law of the universe was impossible, not insane. Jack was not disobeying – he had simply tumbled over a law that nobody knew was there before the first expedition to Mars; certainly they had discovered something more momentous than anyone had expected, and more unforeseen. And she had lost – No, she hadn’t lost yet! She ran out on to the lawn, calling to him, letting the action quell the confusion in her mind.

  And in the repeated event there was concealed a little freshness for she remembered how his smile, glimpsed through the window, had held a special warmth, as if he sought to reassure her. What had he said? That was lost. She walked over to the seat and sat beside him.

  He had been saving a remark for the statutory and unvarying time lapse.

  ‘Don’t worry, Janet,’ he said. ‘It could be worse.’

  ‘How?’ she asked, but he was already answering: ‘We could be a day apart. 3.3077 minutes at least allows us a measure of communication.’

  ‘It’s wonderful how philosophical you are about it,’ she said. She was alarmed at the sarcasm in her tone.

  ‘Shall we have a talk together now?’

  ‘Jack, I’ve been wanting to have a private talk with you for some time.’

  ‘I?’

  The tall beeches that sheltered the garden on the north side were so still that she thought, ‘They will look exactly the same for him as for me.’

  He delivered a bulletin, looking at his watch. His wrists were thin. He appeared frailer than he had done when they left hospital. ‘I am aware, my darling, how painful this must be for you. We are both isolated from the other by this amazing shift of temporal function, but at least I have the consolation of experiencing the new phenomenon, whereas you –’

  ‘I?’

  Talking of interstellar distances

  ‘I was going to say that you are stuck with the same old world all of mankind has always known, but I suppose you don’t see it that way.’ Evidently a remark of hers had caught up with him, for he added inconsequentially, ‘I’ve wanted a private talk with you.’

  Janet bit off something she was going to say, for he raised a finger irritably and said, ‘Please time your statements, so that we do not talk at cross purposes. Confine what you have to say to essentials. Really, darling, I’m surprised you don’t do as Clem suggests, and make notes of what is said at what time.’

  ‘That – I just wanted – we can’t act as if we were a board meeting. I want to know your feelings, how you are, what you are thinking, so that I can help you, so that eventually you will be able to live a normal life again.’

  He was timing it so that he answered almost at once, ‘I am not suffering from any mental illness, and I have completely recovered my physical health after the crash. There is no reason to foresee that my perceptions will ever lapse back into phase with yours. They have remained an unfluctuating 3.3077 minutes ahead of terrestrial time ever since our ship left the surface of Mars.’

  He paused. She thought, ‘It is now about 11.03 by my watch, and there is so much I long to say. But it’s 11.06 and a bit by his time, and he already knows I can’t say anything. It’s such an effort of endurance, talking across this three and a bit minutes; we might just as well be talking across an interstellar distance.’

  Evidently he too had lost the thread of the exercise, for he smiled and stretched out a hand, holding it in the air; Janet looked round. Clem Stackpole was coming out towards them with a tray full of drinks. He set it carefully down on the lawn, and picked up a martini, the stem of which he slipped between Jack’s fingers.

  ‘Cheers!’ he said smiling, and ‘Here’s your tipple,’ giving Janet her gin and tonic. He had brought himself a bottle of pale ale.

  ‘Can you make my position clearer to Janet, Clem? She does not seem to understand it yet.’

  Angrily, she turned to the behaviourist. ‘This was meant to be a private talk, Mr Stackpole, between my husband and myself.’

  ‘Sorry you’re not getting on too well, then. Perhaps I can help you sort it out a bit. It is difficult, I know.’

  3.3077

  Powerfully, he wrenched the top off the beer bottle and poured the liquid into the glass. Sipping, he said, ‘We have always been used to the idea that everything moves forward in time at the same rate. We speak of the course of time, presuming it only has one rate of flow. We’ve assumed, too, that anything living on another planet in any other part of our universe might have the same rate of flow. In other words, although we’ve long been accustomed to some oddities of time, thanks to relativity theories, we have accustomed ourselves, perhaps, to certain errors of thinking. Now we’re going to have to think differently. You follow me.�
��

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘The universe is by no means the simple box our predecessors imagined. It may be that each planet is encased in its own time field, just as it is in its own gravitational field. From the evidence, it seems that Mars’s time field is 3.3077 minutes ahead of ours on Earth. We deduce this from the fact that your husband and the eight other men with him on Mars experienced no sensation of temporal difference among themselves, and were unaware that anything was untoward until they were away from Mars and attempted to get into communication again with Earth, when the temporal discrepancy at once showed up. Your husband is still living in Mars time. Unfortunately, the other members of the crew did not survive the crash; but we can be sure that if they did, they too would suffer from the same effect. That’s clear, isn’t it?’

  ‘Entirely. But I still cannot see why this effect, if it is as you say –’

  ‘It’s not what I say, Janet, but the conclusion arrived at by much cleverer men than I.’ He smiled as he said that, adding parenthetically, ‘Not that we don’t develop and even alter our conclusions every day.’

  ‘Then why was a similar effect not noticed when the Russians and Americans returned from the moon?’

  ‘We don’t know. There’s so much we don’t know. We surmise that because the moon is a satellite of Earth’s, and thus within its gravitational field, there is no temporal discrepancy. But until we have more data, until we can explore further, we know so little, and can only speculate so much. It’s like trying to estimate the runs of an entire innings when only one over has been bowled. After the expedition gets back from Venus, we shall be in a much better position to start theorising.’

  ‘What expedition to Venus?’ she asked, shocked.

  ‘It may not leave for a year yet, but they’re speeding up the programme. That will bring us really invaluable data.’

  Future time with its uses and abuses