The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  She started to say, ‘But after this surely they won’t be fool enough –’ Then she stopped. She knew they would be fool enough. She thought of Peter saying, ‘I’m going to be a spaceman too. I want to be the first man on Saturn!’

  The men were looking at their watches. Westermark transferred his gaze to the gravel to say, ‘This figure of 3.3077 is surely not a universal constant. It may vary – I think it will vary – from planetary body to planetary body. My private opinion is that it is bound to be connected with solar activity in some way. If that is so, then we may find that the men returning from Venus will be perceiving on a continuum slightly in arrears of Earth time.’

  He stood up suddenly, looking dismayed, the absorption gone from his face.

  ‘That’s a point that hadn’t occurred to me,’ Stackpole said, making a note. ‘If the expedition to Venus is primed with these points beforehand, we should have no trouble about organising their return. Ultimately, this confusion will be sorted out, and I’ve no doubt that it will eventually vastly enrich the culture of mankind. The possibilities are of such enormity that. …’

  ‘It’s awful! You’re all crazy!’ Janet exclaimed. She jumped up and hurried off towards the house.

  Or then again

  Jack began to move after her towards the house. By his watch, which showed Earth time, it was 11.18 and twelve seconds; he thought, not for the first time, that he would invest in another watch, which would be strapped to his right wrist and show Martian time. No, the one on his left wrist should show Martian time, for that was the wrist he principally consulted and the time by which he lived, even when going through the business of communicating with the earth-bound human race.

  He realised he was now moving ahead of Janet, by her reckoning. It would be interesting to have someone ahead of him in perception; then he would wish to converse, would want to go to the labour of it. Although it would rob him of the sensation that he was perpetually first in the universe, first everywhere, with everything dewy in that strange light – Mars-light! He’d call it that, till he had it classified, the romantic vision preceding the scientific, with a touch of the grand permissible before the steadying discipline closed in. Or then again, suppose they were wrong in their theories, and the perceptual effect was some freak of the long space journey itself; supposing time were quantal … Supposing all time were quantal. After all, ageing was a matter of steps, not a smooth progress for much of the inorganic world as for the organic.

  Now he was standing quite still on the lawn. The glaze was coming through the grass, making it look brittle, almost tingeing each blade with a tiny spectrum of light. If his perceptual time were further ahead than it was now, would the Mars-light be stronger, the Earth more translucent? How beautiful it would look! After a longer star journey one would return to a cobweb of a world, centuries behind one in perceptual time, a mere embodiment of light, a prism. Hungrily, he visualised it. But they needed more knowledge.

  Suddenly he thought, ‘If I could get on the Venus expedition! If the Institute’s right, I’d be perhaps six, say five and a half – no, one can’t say – but I’d be ahead of Venerean time. I must go. I’d be valuable to them. I only have to volunteer, surely.’

  He did not notice Stackpole touch his arm in cordial fashion and go past him into the house. He stood looking at the ground and through it, to the stony vales of Mars and the unguessable landscapes of Venus.

  The figures move

  Janet had consented to ride into town with Stackpole. He was collecting his cricket boots, which had been restudded; she thought she might buy a roll of film for her camera. The children would like photos of her and Daddy together. Standing together.

  As the car ran beside trees, their shadow flickered red and green before her vision. Stackpole held the wheel very capably, whistling under his breath. Strangely, she did not resent a habit she would normally have found irksome, taking it as a sign that he was not entirely at his ease.

  ‘I have an awful feeling you now understand my husband better than I do,’ she said.

  He did not deny it. ‘Why do you feel that?’

  ‘I believe he does not mind the terrible isolation he must be experiencing.’

  ‘He’s a brave man.’

  Westermark had been home a week now. Janet saw that each day they were more removed from each other, as he spoke less and stood frequently as still as a statue, gazing at the ground raptly. She thought of something she had once been afraid to utter aloud to her mother-in-law; but with Clem Stackpole she was safer.

  ‘You know why we manage to exist in comparative harmony,’ she said. He was slowing the car, half-looking at her. ‘We only manage to exist by banishing all events from our lives, all children, all seasons. Otherwise we’d be faced at every moment with the knowledge of how much at odds we really are.’

  Catching the note in her voice, Stackpole said soothingly, ‘You are every bit as brave as he is, Janet.’

  ‘Damn being brave. What I can’t bear is – nothing!’

  Seeing the sign by the side of the road, Stackpole glanced in his driving mirror and changed gear. The road was deserted in front as well as behind. He whistled through his teeth again, and Janet felt compelled to go on talking.

  ‘We’ve already interfered with time too much – all of us, I mean. Time is a European invention. Goodness knows how mixed up in it we are going to get if – well, if this goes on.’ She was irritated by the lack of her usual coherence.

  As Stackpole spoke next, he was pulling the car into a lay-by, stopping it by overhanging bushes. He turned to her, smiling tolerantly. ‘Time was God’s invention, if you believe in God, as I prefer to do. We observe it, tame it, exploit it where possible.’

  ‘Exploit it!’

  ‘You mustn’t think of the future as if we were all wading knee deep in treacle or something.’ He laughed briefly, resting his hands on the steering wheel. ‘What lovely weather it is! I was wondering – on Sunday I’m playing cricket over in the village. Would you like to come and watch the match? And perhaps we could have tea somewhere afterwards.’

  All events, all children, all seasons

  She had a letter next morning from Jane, her five-year-old daughter, and it made her think. All the letter said was: ‘Dear Mummy, Thank you for the dollies. With love from Jane,’ but Janet knew the labour that had gone into the inch-high letters. How long could she bear to leave the children away from their home and her care?

  As soon as the thought emerged, she recalled that during the previous evening she had told herself nebulously that if there was going to be ‘anything’ with Stackpole, it was as well the children would be out of the way – purely, she now realised, for her convenience and for Stackpole’s. She had not thought then about the children; she had thought about Stackpole who, despite the unexpected delicacy he had shown, was not a man she cared for.

  ‘And another intolerably immoral thought,’ she muttered unhappily to the empty room, ‘what alternative have I to Stackpole?’

  She knew Westermark was in his study. It was a cold day, too cold and damp for him to make his daily parade round the garden. She knew he was sinking deeper into isolation, she longed to help, she feared to sacrifice herself to that isolation, longed to stay outside it, in life. Dropping the letter, she held her head in her hands, closing her eyes as in the curved bone of her skull she heard all her possible courses of action jar together, future lifelines that annihilated each other.

  As Janet stood transfixed, Westermark’s mother came into the room.

  ‘I was looking for you,’ she said. ‘You’re so unhappy, my dear, aren’t you?’

  ‘Mother, people always try and hide from others how they suffer. Does everyone do it?’

  ‘You don’t have to hide it from me – chiefly, I suppose, because you can’t.’

  ‘But I don’t know how much you suffer, and it ought to work both ways. Why do we do this awful covering up? What are we afraid of – pity or derision?’


  ‘Help, perhaps.’

  ‘Help! Perhaps you’re right … That’s a disconcerting thought.’

  They stood there staring at each other, until the older woman said, awkwardly, ‘We don’t often talk like this, Janet.’

  ‘No.’ She wanted to say more. To a stranger in a train, perhaps she would have done; here, she could not deliver.

  Seeing nothing more was said on that subject, Mrs Westermark said, ‘I was going to tell you, Janet, that I thought perhaps it would be better if the children didn’t come back here while things are as they are. If you want to go and see them and stay with them at your parents’ house, I can look after Jack and Mr Stackpole for a week. I don’t think Jack wants to see them.’

  ‘That’s very kind, Mother. I’ll see. I promised Clem – well, I told Mr Stackpole that perhaps I’d go and watch him play cricket tomorrow afternoon. It’s not important, of course, but I did say – anyhow, I might drive over to see the children on Monday, if you could hold the fort.’

  ‘You’ve still plenty of time if you feel like going today. I’m sure Mr Stackpole will understand your maternal feelings.’

  ‘I’d prefer to leave it till Monday,’ Janet said – a little distantly, for she suspected now the motive behind her mother-in-law’s suggestion.

  Where the Scientific American did not reach

  Jack Westermark put down the Scientific American and stared at the table top. With his right hand, he felt the beat of his heart. In the magazine was an article about him, illustrated with photographs of him taken at the Research Hospital. This thoughtful article was far removed from the sensational pieces that had appeared elsewhere, the shallow things that referred to him as The Man Who Has Done More Than Einstein To Wreck Our Cosmic Picture; and for that very reason it was the more startling, and presented some aspects of the matter that Westermark himself had not considered.

  As he thought over its conclusions, he rested from the effort of reading terrestrial books, and Stackpole sat by the fire, smoking a cigar and waiting to take Westermark’s dictation. Even reading a magazine represented a feat in space-time, a collaboration, a conspiracy. Stackpole turned the pages at timed intervals, Westermark read when they lay flat. He was unable to turn them when, in their own narrow continuum, they were not being turned; to his fingers, they lay under the jelly-like glaze, that visual hallucination that represented an unconquerable cosmic inertia.

  The inertia gave a special shine to the surface of the table as he stared into it and probed into his own mind to determine the truths of the Scientific American article.

  The writer of the article began by considering the facts and observing that they tended to point towards the existence of ‘local times’ throughout the universe; and that if this were so, a new explanation might be forthcoming for the recession of the galaxies and different estimates arrived at for the age of the universe (and of course for its complexity). He then proceeded to deal with the problem that vexed other writers on the subject; namely, why, if Westermark lost Earth time on Mars, he had not reciprocally lost Mars time back on Earth. This, more than anything, pointed to the fact that ‘local times’ were not purely mechanistic but to some extent at least a psycho-biological function.

  In the table top, Westermark saw himself being asked to travel again to Mars, to take part in a second expedition to those continents of russet sand where the fabric of space-time was in some mysterious and insuperable fashion 3.3077 minutes ahead of Earth norm. Would his interior clock leap forward again? What then of the sheen on things earthly? And what would be the effect of gradually drawing away from the iron laws under which, since its scampering pleistocene infancy, humankind had lived?

  Impatiently he thrust his mind forward to imagine the day when Earth harboured many local times, gleaned from voyages across the vacancies of space; those vacancies lay across time, too, and that little-understood concept (McTaggart had denied its external reality, hadn’t he?) would come to lie within the grasp of man’s understanding. Wasn’t that the ultimate secret, to be able to understand the flux in which existence is staged as a dream is staged in the primitive reaches of the mind?

  And – But – Would not that day bring the annihilation of Earth’s local time? That was what he had started. It could only mean that ‘local time’ was not a product of planetary elements; there the writer of the Scientific American article had not dared to go far enough; local time was entirely a product of the psyche. That dark innermost thing that could keep accurate time even while a man lay unconscious was a mere provincial; but it could be educated to be a citizen of the universe. He saw that he was the first of a new race, unimaginable in the wildest mind a few months previously. He was independent of the enemy that, more than Death, menaced contemporary man: Time. Locked within him was an entirely new potential. Superman had arrived.

  Painfully, Superman stirred in his seat. He sat so rapt for so long that his limbs grew stiff and dead without his noticing it.

  Universal thoughts may occur if one times carefully enough one’s circumbendibus about a given table

  ‘Dictation,’ he said, and waited impatiently until the command had penetrated backwards to the limbo by the fire where Stackpole sat. What he had to say was so terribly important – yet it had to wait on these people.

  As was his custom, he rose and began to walk round the table, speaking in phrases quickly delivered. This was to be the testament to the new way of life. …

  ‘Consciousness is not expendable but concurrent … There may have been many time nodes at the beginning of the human race … The mentally deranged often revert to different time rates. For some, a day seems to stretch on for ever … We know by experience that for children time is seen in the convex mirror of consciousness, enlarged and distorted beyond its focal point. …’ He was momentarily irritated by the scared face of his wife appearing outside the study window, but he brushed it away and continued.

  ‘… its focal point … Yet man in his ignorance has persisted in pretending time was some sort of uni-directional flow, and homogenous at that … despite the evidence to the contrary … Our conception of ourselves – no, this erroneous conception has become a basic life assumption. …’

  Daughters of daughters

  Westermark’s mother was not given to metaphysical speculation, but as she was leaving the room, she turned and said to her daughter-in-law, ‘You know what I sometimes think? Jack is so strange, I wonder at nights if men and women aren’t getting more and more apart in thought and in their ways with every generation – you know, almost like separate species. My generation made a great attempt to bring the two sexes together in equality and all the rest, but it seems to have come to nothing.’

  ‘Jack will get better.’ Janet could hear the lack of confidence in her voice.

  ‘I thought the same thing – about men and women getting wider apart I mean – when my husband was killed.’

  Suddenly all Janet’s sympathy was gone. She had recognised a familiar topic drifting on to the scene, knew well the careful tone that ironed away all self-pity as her mother-in-law said, ‘Bob was dedicated to speed, you know. That was what killed him really, not the fool backing into the road in front of him.’

  ‘No blame was attached to your husband,’ Janet said. ‘You should try not to let it worry you still.’

  ‘You see the connection though … This progress thing. Bob so crazy to get round the next bend first, and now Jack … Oh well, there’s nothing a woman can do.’

  She closed the door behind her. Absently, Janet picked up the message from the next generation of women: ‘Thank you for the dollies.’

  The resolves and the sudden risks involved

  He was their father. Perhaps Jane and Peter should come back, despite the risks involved. Anxiously, Janet stood there, moving herself with a sudden resolve to tackle Jack straight away. He was so irritable, so unapproachable, but at least she could observe how busy he was before interrupting him.

  As she slipped
into the side hall and made for the back door, she heard her mother-in-law call her. ‘Just a minute!’ she answered.

  The sun had broken through, sucking moisture from the damp garden. It was now unmistakably autumn. She rounded the corner of the house, stepped round the rose bed, and looked into her husband’s study.

  Shaken, she saw he leaned half over the table. His hands were over his face, blood ran between his fingers and dripped on to an open magazine on the table top. She was aware of Stackpole sitting indifferently beside the electric fire.

  She gave a small cry and ran round the house again, to be met at the back door by Mrs Westermark.

  ‘Oh, I was just – Janet, what is it?’

  ‘Jack, Mother! He’s had a stroke or something terrible!’

  ‘But how do you know?’

  ‘Quick, we must phone the hospital – I must go to him.’

  Mrs Westermark took Janet’s arm. ‘Perhaps we’d better leave it to Mr Stackpole, hadn’t we? I’m afraid –’

  ‘Mother, we must do what we can. I know we’re amateurs. Please let me go.’

  ‘No, Janet, we’re – it’s their world. I’m frightened. They’ll come if they want us.’ She was gripping Janet in her fright. Their wild eyes stared momentarily at each other as if seeing something else, and then Janet snatched herself away. ‘I must go to him,’ she said.

  She hurried down the hall and pushed open the study door. Her husband stood now at the far end of the room by the window, while blood streamed from his nose.

  ‘Jack!’ she exclaimed. As she ran towards him, a blow from the empty air struck her on the forehead, so that she staggered aside, falling against a bookcase. A shower of smaller volumes from the upper shelf fell on her and round her. Exclaiming, Stackpole dropped his notebook and ran round the table to her. Even as he went to her aid, he noted the time from his watch: 10.24.

  Aid after 10.24 and the tidiness of bed

  Westermark’s mother appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Stackpole shouted, ‘or there will be more trouble! Jack, I’m right with you – God knows what you’ve felt, isolated without aid for three and a third minutes!’ Angrily, he went across and stood within arm’s length of his patient. He threw his handkerchief down on to the table.