The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Mr Stackpole –’ Westermark’s mother said tentatively from the door, an arm round Janet’s waist.

  He looked back over his shoulder only long enough to say, ‘Get towels! Phone the Research Hospital for an ambulance and tell them to be here right away.’

  By midday, Westermark was tidily in bed upstairs and the ambulance staff, who had treated him for what after all was only nosebleed, had left. Stackpole, as he turned from closing the front door, eyed the two women.

  ‘I feel it is my duty to warn you,’ he said heavily, ‘that another incident such as this might well prove fatal. This time we escaped very lightly. If anything else of this sort happens, I shall feel obliged to recommend to the board that Mr Westermark is moved back to the hospital.’

  Current way to define accidents

  ‘He wouldn’t want to go,’ Janet said. ‘Besides, you are being absurd; it was entirely an accident. Now I wish to go upstairs and see how he is.’

  ‘Just before you go, may I point out that what happened was not an accident – or not as we generally define accidents, since you saw the results of your interference through the study window before you entered. Where you were to blame –’

  ‘But that’s absurd –’ both women began at once. Janet went on to say, ‘I never would have rushed into the room as I did had I not seen through the window that he was in trouble.’

  ‘What you saw was the result on your husband of your later interference.’

  In something like a wail, Westermark’s mother said, ‘I don’t understand any of this. What did Janet bump into when she ran in?’

  ‘She ran, Mrs Westermark, into the spot where her husband had been standing 3.3077 minutes earlier. Surely by now you have grasped this elementary business of time inertia?’

  When they both started speaking at once, he stared at them until they stopped and looked at him. Then he said, ‘We had better go into the living room. Speaking for myself, I would like a drink.’

  He helped himself, and not until his hand was round a glass of whisky did he say, ‘Now, without wishing to lecture to you ladies, I think it is high time you both realised that you are not living in the old safe world of classical mechanics ruled over by a god invented by eighteenth-century enlightenment. All that has happened here is perfectly rational, but if you are going to pretend it is beyond your female understandings –’

  ‘Mr Stackpole,’ Janet said sharply. ‘Can you please keep to the point without being insulting? Will you tell me why what happened was not an accident? I understand now that when I looked through the study window I saw my husband suffering from a collision that to him had happened three and something minutes before and to me would not happen for another three and something minutes, but at that moment I was so startled that I forgot –’

  ‘No, no, your figures are wrong. The total time lapse is only 3.3077 minutes. When you saw your husband, he had been hit half that time – 1.65385 minutes – ago, and there was another 1.65385 minutes to go before you completed the action by bursting into the room and striking him.’

  ‘But she didn’t strike him!’ the older woman cried.

  Firmly, Stackpole diverted his attention long enough to reply. ‘She struck him at 10.24 Earthtime, which equals 10.20 plus about 36 seconds Mars or his time, which equals 9.59 or whatever Neptune time, which equals 156 and a half Sirius time. It’s a big universe, Mrs Westermark! You will remain confused as long as you continue to confuse event with time. May I suggest you sit down and have a drink?’

  ‘Leaving aside the figures,’ Janet said, returning to the attack – loathsome opportunist the man was – ‘how can you say that what happened was no accident? You are not claiming I injured my husband deliberately, I hope? What you say suggests that I was powerless from the moment I saw him through the window.’

  ‘‘‘Leaving aside the figures. …’’’ he quoted. ‘That’s where your responsibility lies. What you saw through the window was the result of your act; it was by then inevitable that you should complete it, for it had already been completed.’

  Through the window, draughts of time blow

  ‘I can’t understand!’ she clutched her forehead, gratefully accepting a cigarette from her mother-in-law, while shrugging off her consolatory ‘Don’t try to understand, dear!’ ‘Supposing when I had seen Jack’s nose bleeding, I had looked at my watch and thought, “It’s 10.20 or whenever it was, and he may be suffering from my interference, so I’d better not go in,” and I hadn’t gone in? Would his nose then miraculously have healed?’

  ‘Of course not. You take such a mechanistic view of the universe. Cultivate a mental approach, try and live in your own century! You could not think what you suggest because that is not in your nature: just as it is not in your nature to consult your watch intelligently, just as you always “leave aside the figures”, as you say. No, I’m not being personal: it’s all very feminine and appealing in a way. What I’m saying is that if before you looked into the window you had been able to think, “However I see my husband now, I must recall he has the additional experience of the next 3.3077 minutes”, then you could have looked in and seen him unharmed, and you would not have come bursting in as you did.’

  She drew on her cigarette, baffled and hurt. ‘You’re saying I’m a danger to my own husband.’

  ‘You’re saying that.’

  ‘God, how I hate men!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re so bloody logical, so bloody smug!’

  He finished his whisky and set the glass down on a table beside her so that he leant close. ‘You’re upset just now,’ he said.

  ‘Of course I’m upset! What do you think?’ She fought a desire to cry or slap his face. She turned to Jack’s mother, who gently took her wrist.

  ‘Why don’t you go off straight away and stay with the children for the weekend, darling? Come back when you feel like it. Jack will be all right and I can look after him – as much as he wants looking after.’

  She glanced about the room.

  ‘I will. I’ll pack right away. They’ll be glad to see me.’ As she passed Stackpole on the way out, she said bitterly, ‘At least they won’t be worrying about the local time on Sirius!’

  ‘They may,’ said Stackpole, imperturbably from the middle of the room, ‘have to one day.’

  All events, all children, all seasons

  Old Time’s Sake

  It was twenty years since I had last visited Oxford, twenty years since I had entered that spacious upper room in All Saints’ College. There was nothing unintentional in that absence.

  Glanville led me in, a solicitous hand which I rather resented on my arm. Perhaps he felt the tension in me, and guessing that I dreaded the coming physical ordeal sympathised. Of course he had no way of divining that it was what depended on the results of my ordeal which made the palms of my hands greasy and my voice harsh.

  ‘Here’s Alexander Sampson, gentlemen,’ he said. And already my nerves were probing into each remark, seeking the real meaning behind it; I interpreted that one as ‘Here’s our prize specimen, gentlemen’.

  Only three men were there to rise and greet me; Dr Eric Bardon, still with a youthful air and spruce clothes; A. E. Peters, the historian, sandy hair very sparse, untidier than ever; and Sir Dennis Wheadon, the dean of the college, now a frail, graceful old man of eighty. We shook hands all round: only A. E. Peters avoided my eye.

  ‘Dr Heynes will be along in a minute,’ Sir Dennis said, referring to the fifth and last member of my committee, and we all sat down and made some conversation. Their natural politeness could not stop them staring at me covertly, searching my face.

  They asked me polite questions, if I had a pleasant drive up from the coast, if my rooms at the Mitre were comfortable. I gave them polite answers – and every casual phrase bore more weight than it was meant to stand.

  I only made one slip before Dr Heynes arrived. Thinking back to when I had known these men better, trying to recall the old life, I asked Bardon, ‘How’s the tenn
is going?’

  He had been one of the keenest men at the University in my day. Now he said, after a sickening pause, ‘I had to throw it up a couple of years ago. Warned off – the old heart, you know.’

  If he had not used the lightest possible tones, it would not have sounded so bitter.

  From the window, Geoff Glanville said, ‘That’s anno domini hot on our tracks, Alec.’

  The others would not have made that remark: Glanville alone kept up the old attitude of friendship with me. Under the circumstances, he had said the same thing, and I nodded ruefully at him – but was there not even then an undercurrent of … jealousy in his words? At our next meeting – no, that must wait.

  All three began talking at once, rather feverishly, as if instead of being mature men they were undergraduates again, trying to impress each other and me. It was a distinct relief when Dr Heynes entered.

  She was forty-five, brisk and severe as ever in attitude and attire. At once I thought she had weathered the years better than the others of the committee.

  ‘Hello, Sampson,’ she said, stretching out a bony little hand. ‘You’re looking fine.’ And so, effortlessly, she carried the meeting from general uneasiness to business.

  I spent five days at Oxford, as arranged, going sedulously and as patiently as possible through all the tests they had designed for me. The tests were of two classes: those primarily for my good, and those for the good of other people. And through all my tests I was treated by men and women whose feelings were mixed towards me. Did they but know it, their attitudes were only reflections of my own, and the question they asked themselves was the same one I kept asking myself: was I the world’s prize guinea-pig or the world’s luckiest man? Looking back, it seems extraordinary that I had not yet decided.

  How they thought up so many different examinations I do not know. Most of them meant nothing to me. The medical ones were varied and ingenious; I spent two of my five days in the Infirmary undergoing starvation and being wheeled from one department to another. I met my old plastic surgeon, who had retired and came up from Maidstone to see me; I met toxicologists, epidemiologists, epigamists, urinologists – they came by the dozen, ageing men with eager faces, experts with long official names, to check on my lymphatic system, my heart, my teeth, my bones, odd corners I did not know I had. The sensory specialists ran rough-shod over me, using the new brain-meters, determining the abilities of my receptor outfit, responses, etc. Their stock-in-trade also included lights, sounds, chill air currents, hot bars, electric shocks and smells, all of which came and went with calculated suddenness.

  When they had finished, I felt more like an anatomical chart than a human being. But there was worse yet. The examination of my mind followed: it was intensive and remorseless. They probed me from every angle. I saw Adlerians, Freudians, and dianeticians, as well as the new brand of thought dredger, the mentographers who were later to cause me so much anxiety. All brought the full force of their theories and machines to bear on me. I was plied with questions, plugged with drugs and hypnotised.

  And all the weary while, secretaries wrote, computers hummed, spools turned: they must have filled a large room with the records they look.

  At last the ordeal was over. With a disembodied feeling, I emerged into sunlight. Glanville awaited me with a sympathetic smile and tenderly took my arm. Recalling that same possibly possessive gesture five days before, I withdrew my arm.

  ‘Been a bit of an inquisition?’ he enquired sympathetically, mistaking the motion.

  I nodded.

  ‘Never mind, it’s only once in every twenty years,’ he said consolingly.

  I said, ‘All the same, it almost makes me sorry I’m the world’s only immortal.’

  They meant me well. A. E. Peters gave a farewell dinner for me in his rooms, and over the college port the five on the committee and I tried to sink our differences. Always between us lay the shadow of my long future, but the shadow was faint that night. All the same, there was a question which bothered me, and when I saw the others were ready to discuss business I broached it to Sir Dennis.

  ‘When do we get the results of the examination?’ he said, with an old man’s trick of repeating a question. ‘I’m afraid it will be a week before the geniuses manage to coordinate their data into an intelligible answer. Directly we know we shall inform you of their verdict, rest assured.’

  Dr Heynes, reading something of my expression, said, ‘Remember, Sampson, the results can be only good – that you have survived this first critical phase tells us that. All we can learn now is how far your life is likely to extend beyond the natural term.’ She lit the dry phrases with her smile.

  From behind his pipe, Glanville amplified the remark. ‘You may last anything from another hundred years to – well, theoretically at least there is no upper limit.’

  And again all the eyes were on me, recalling no doubt the rigorous tests 1 had undergone before I had been committed to the fantastic process of preservation. They had needed someone without ties intelligent enough to undergo control, stoical enough to face discomfort, stable enough to bear isolation and – this perhaps above all – unimaginative enough to face an infinitely protracted future; they had found – me. Did they now regret they had not selected someone with more gratitude?

  As if voicing some such doubt, A. E. Peters said, ‘Come, Sampson, “Of that seven score and ten, twenty will not come again” – you’ve none of that sort of stuff to worry you, you know. You’d be the envy of everyone if they knew about you.’

  By their silent, almost imperceptible gestures of assent, the others disclosed that that too was their chief feeling, over-riding any scientific detachment: envy.

  ‘I shall always be delighted with the springs of the years, Mr Peters,’ I said, forcing mildness into my voice. ‘But I can’t help wondering how well I shall get along with myself.’

  ‘You will find that your chief duty, the collection of material for the assistance of future historians, should come to your aid there,’ Sir Dennis said, adding with a smile, ‘It should give you both objectivity and an object in life.’

  ‘But the most valuable function you will perform,’ Eric Bardon said, squinting away from me down the barrel of his pipe, ‘is to present us here with an otherwise unobtainable mass of psychological data every twenty years.’

  This was not only a stab at me, reminding me I was more a guinea pig than a hero, but a side blow at Sir Dennis too. As an amateur student of human affairs I had watched with uncomfortable interest the jostling of two different aspirations in those who commanded me. The whole experiment of which I was the subject had been, from its inception in the wastes of Antarctica, a costly business. Government backing had not been forthcoming, and all initial expenses had been footed by Glanville’s family. Then he had managed to interest the University; by that time, I had undergone my ‘operation’, but funds were more keenly needed than ever.

  So factions represented by Barton and Heynes on one side and Peters and Wheadon on the other were co-opted, the former pair representing the sciences, the latter the humanities. They rubbed shoulders uneasily together. Jointly, however, they administered a trust which served the double purpose of keeping me economically secure and answerable to a responsible body. 1 hoped they would get their money’s worth.

  Signs of this division of outlook appeared only once more that evening. We talked of our youth (I always with the sense that I would know other generations to whom my early days would seem remote: here I was still with my seniors) and it was late when we parted in the quiet, starlit quad. There was peace here that distant rumbling traffic only emphasised.

  Tomorrow morning I would be away early. I should see Glanville, as he was a friend, but by mutual arrangement I met my committee only on visits of inspection, once in every twenty years.

  In their different fashions they said good-bye, Dr Heynes brisk and birdlike, Peters embarrassed, Barton defensively. And then Sir Dennis. In both our minds was the sure knowledg
e that on my next visit he would not be here to shake my hand under the everlasting sky.

  ‘I shall always wonder if we had the right to commit you to this course,’ he said. ‘Alec – try not to become inhuman. Try not to blame us, ever, for this experiment. Remember too – our Maker will also be interested in its results.’

  I walked up the High with his jerky old voice still in my ears. I had that feeling again that I was a sort of glorified anatomical chart. Mind, body, soul, had all three been endowed with the same lasting powers? In other words, which would crack first.

  *

  Next morning I breakfasted early and drove south. As I drove, my spirits rose. Oxford had a depressing effect on me, now hope and joy surged through me. Immortal! I had Time, and having Time had power. Peters’ dry voice returned to me: ‘You’d be the envy of everyone if they knew,’ and now I saw he was right. Of a sudden, the human span of seventy years became something pitiable and cramped, something too petty for the splendid complexity of an adult human.

  When my results arrived, elation overtopped itself. They said in effect, ignoring all the cautious pedantry, that I was good for at least thirty thousand years, ‘towards the end of which period, a repetition of the original “operation” may (if desired) be undergone with every expectation of providing another term of longevity equal to the first.’

  Thirty thousand years! I, like the earth, should grow no older in all that time! It is little reflection on my vaunted stability that I broke down then and wept: the last twenty years had imposed a greater strain than I had realised, with their tiny but permanent doubt of success. Thirty thousand years! Again I whispered it to myself, tasting the significance of the words.

  It is interesting to recall that even then, in the first flush of triumph, I was casting ahead, trying to decide if I should want that second span when the time came, or if by then I should have had enough.