The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Do you think it would be that easy?’ Richmond said, with a laugh. He gestured back towards the car, still visible on the amber stretch of road. ‘Wouldn’t the car have disappeared with a blinding flash or something if we had switched into another universe?’

  ‘I wasn’t seriously –’ I began, but Walter said, ‘Why a flash? Why any sign? You are such a seeker after signs, Richmond. We are never given any omens when our lives change from one phase to another. The best we can do is to look back afterwards and say “At this moment I must have altered …” So why not as imperceptible a transition to another universe – or rather, another phase of the total universe?’

  ‘Why not? Because you’d at once be struck by some peculiar difference in your surroundings,’ Richmond said. ‘Blue trees, or four-eyed people, or whatever.’

  ‘Rubbish! My dear brother, your crude mind! Can’t you imagine a world totally, horribly different from ours which might nevertheless seem at first just like this one; so that you’d only find out your predicament by some small betraying detail?’

  They were unalike. Richmond, the older, was the kinder and the more cheerful; he argued now for the fun of it. His brother, however, talked more seriously and heavily, as if he had a mission. In my weakness I thought I did not care greatly for either of them, well launched as they now were on this silly discussion about phases of the universe or whatever it was. They were my wife’s cousins; I knew them very little; since my wife had unfortunately been indisposed at the last moment, the Betts brothers had volunteered instead to drive me down from York to the Crumer-next-Sea sanatorium. Although I appreciated that kindness, I resented this diversion to gape at a mouldy antiquity almost at the end of our long drive; and I longed again for the comfortable car journey and the rug warm over my knees. I was the invalid; with the selfishness of the invalid I wanted to be treated as such.

  Ferns grew about the uncertain path. The ground was uneven, humpy and scrubby. Richmond took my arm as I staggered.

  ‘These dips we’re tramping across mark all that’s left of various old pits and shafts,’ Walter said. ‘Look, here’s a flint.’

  He stooped and picked up a flint that glinted at his feet. Tourists had left litter here; though we were the only people about at that time, orangeade cartons and crumpled newspaper marked the passage of previous visitors to Grimmer’s Graves. The flint lay half-hidden under a sheet of the News of the World. Walter grasped it, spun it into the air, and caught it.

  ‘Here’s a small betraying detail for you, Richmond,’ he said in his dry voice. ‘These flints lie all about here, obvious clues to the nature of the Graves. Yet it was not until I think about 1880 that the Graves were identified as neolithic flint mines.’

  ‘And the burial of Grimmer, whoever he was, exposed as a myth.’

  ‘Some said the Graves were a Celtic village. Camden thought they were ancient fortifications. In fact, everyone was guessing, and the place is much older than they dreamed it could be. Their image of the past was almost wholly imaginary; we are more careful to sift facts today.’

  It’s a lie, I thought. I’ve listened to you, Walter, I’ve watched you all the way from York, I’m sick, and that gives me peculiar faculties. I know that for all your adherence to fact and the factual, you live in your own small world, a Walter-world. You’re not like your brother; he responds to external stimulae, you take them and arrange them in the dead museum of your ego. If you had your way, you’d charge a price of admission to anyone who wanted to speak to you. Only egotism and a desire to air your knowledge made you break the journey to drag Richmond and me to this godforsaken spot.

  ‘Sorry, what did you say?’ I asked, bursting abruptly from the cage of my thoughts.

  ‘I said, shall I go first?’ Walter snapped.

  ‘Are you all right, Arthur?’ Richmond asked, giving me an anxious glance.

  We had reached the top of a pit. I came out of my reverie to find a black hole at my feet. It was like a dark pool in which, far down, candles swam like fish, their little tongues of light seeming to be disturbed by brown water.

  Richmond grasped my arm and pulled me back. For a moment as my head reeled I had been about to dive into that ancient well.

  ‘Look, Walter, I think we’d better get Arthur back to the car,’ Richmond said. ‘He’s not fit to go down there.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s cool below. He’ll feel better down under.’

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ I said; it would have been doubly weak to reveal my weakness to him. Walter patted me on the shoulder and began to climb down the iron ladder into the pit. Pulling myself together, I followed him, and Richmond came last. He climbed down with his boots almost kicking my nose.

  My hands were numb on the cold rungs of the ladder. A few inches from my eyes, time’s fingerprints on the Earth slid by. The deposits of glacial gravel passed, and a band of clay; the chalk layers were next and then the black sullen bands of flint.

  ‘Steady now,’ Walter said.

  I reached the bottom rung of the ladder and stepped away from it. We were thirty feet down – and back in 2000 BC.

  The tomb-cool calm of centuries clutched at my cheeks.

  In the formidable dark, tongues of candlelight panted for air. Here my very remote ancestors had sweated and worked, tunnelling below the untamed land to mine and mole the best flints, while somewhere above, the knappers and axe-makers, the craftsmen and the makers of arrowheads, had waited for their yield.

  ‘This is where the Industrial Revolution began,’ Walter said solemnly. ‘History took a decisive turn down here. The first guided missiles were hacked out of this hole.’

  I could not see his face properly, nor Richmond’s. They turned to inspect a side gallery, while I stood with one hand resting on chalk, a suffocating pressure on my chest. They stooped at the gallery’s low entrance, peering in. In that misty light, Richmond’s shaggy tweed trousers turned his back view into the hind quarters of a strange animal.

  Undoubtedly I was light-headed. I tried to call to them; no sound came from my lips – and who would call for help to a shaggy animal? Strange irrelevancies bubbled through my mind; Sir Alister Hardy’s theory that man had become, for a while in his early career, an aquatic creature living mostly in the sea returned to my mind, possibly because we were only a few miles from the coast that was our destination. To support his theory was the comparative hairlessness of man, as against the hairiness of the other primates.

  Suppose, I thought, there was truth in Walter’s absurd hypothesis about there being other, similar phases in the total universe, or however he expressed it? Then might there not exist an earth on which man was as he is now – yet totally alien, man without aquatic ancestry, man with no love of the sea, man with hair … man looking like the shaggy thing at which I now stared … a creature similar to me, but yet ineluctably different, irreconcilably different, hostile even … a hunting creature, shuffling backwards from its burrow before it turned on me….

  But the pit was heaving, the bands of flint seemed to rotate, the shaggy beast was already swinging towards me. I saw its face as it came at me – and then a darkness where no candle could burn swirled in and submerged me.

  When I returned to my senses, Walter and Richmond had hold of me and were propelling me through the ragged remnants of a plantation. I began to cough.

  Richmond turned and looked at me.

  ‘We’re getting you to the sanatorium as fast as we can,’ he said.

  His face was covered with hairs.

  I cried out. Then we passed from among the trees, and I saw my eyes had played a trick on me. Certainly it had seemed that Richmond’s face was totally covered in fine white hairs – a pelt in fact, from which his eyes and mouth bulged. But of course it was a delusion created by the light and aided by my weakness.

  ‘Don’t go so fast,’ I gasped. ‘What’s happening?’ They were marching me along as if they were going to push me over the nearest cliff.

  ‘You are ill,’ Wa
lter said. His face was set and grim. As I glanced sideways at him, I saw that he too wore this sort of mask of pinkish-whitish hairs and that – no, staring at him straight in horror I saw that in reality he looked as usual, that the dappled shade was creating an illusion. But as I gazed forwards towards the waiting car, again it seemed to me that I was flanked by alien creatures who looked only half like men, whose faces were as hairy as badgers.

  Everything lay loaded with menace about me. The flat landscape, the lack of other people, the unnatural quiet … all contributed to my sensation of wrongness. Even the quiet tawny shades imposed by the atmosphere had turned coppery, a metallic tint without mercy.

  ‘I’m ill!’ I cried involuntarily, seeking to dismiss all the unease in one big all-embracing excuse.

  ‘I said you were ill. That’s why we’re getting you away.’

  And no sympathy in Walter’s voice. Cast iron, his tone and his intentions. He hated me; Richmond hated me. They were my foes, my captors. The car ahead did not look welcoming. It was black, black as a hearse – my God, it was a hearse! A coffin gleamed inside its glass plate windows and – no, it was a car, the car, our car, I saw as my vision cleared, as we stumbled on to the pebbly road.

  ‘Not so fast!’ I begged again. They were running with me now. A terrible eagerness seemed to possess them, an awful eagerness that made them work as fast as possible. What were they going to do with me?

  Now we were at the car. Richmond opened one of the rear doors and heaving together they threw me in. I collapsed on the back seat. One of them had kicked me; I was sure one of them had kicked me in, and I was sure it was Richmond, whom I had liked the better of the two.

  Because of my weakness, overcome by fear and betrayal, I began to weep.

  The brothers jumped into the front seat and slammed the doors.

  ‘You kicked me!’ I exclaimed.

  Richmond looked round.

  ‘Pull yourself together, Arthur. Nobody kicked you. You’re sick. It’s our fault for stopping here; we didn’t realise how it was with you. Now we’ll get you there as soon as possible.’

  Shakily, I put a trembling hand to my brow. It was hot, fiery. Looking down, I saw a spatter of blood on my tie and lapels. So. I had coughed when I blacked out down in the Grave. Perhaps it had scared them; perhaps I had read too much into their haste, and in my fever had mistaken solicitude for menace.

  ‘Richmond –’ I said.

  As Walter flung in the gears, the car started with a dreadful jerk. I bounced backwards against the seat, biting my tongue painfully. Even while I struggled up again, we were gathering speed. We hurtled past a notice pointing in the direction we were going; it said, TO THE GRAVE. Stones whipped up by the tyres sounded hollowly against the underside of the car. Helplessly I leant back again, fighting a suffocating sensation in my chest.

  Over Walter’s shoulder I could see his left hand on the driving wheel. It was covered with the whitish pelt. It was not a man’s hand at all; nor was it an animal’s hand. And in the driving mirror I saw that his face too …

  For a long screaming moment I shut my eyes. When I opened them, Walter was looking back at me.

  ‘We’ve only ten miles to go,’ he said. The white fur had gone again, Imagination only.

  You’re sick, really sick, in delirium, I told myself. It’s all explicable in terms of your illness – not that anything has really happened. You had this theory that men might have looked – have been – different if they had not once been seagoing at an early stage in their evolution. Then there was this business that you yourself started about thinking you could slip into another phase of the universe, another Earth. That’s all. Down in Grimmer’s Grave it was rather weird and you fainted, coming to again with a high temperature, since when you’ve imagined that both your bits of potty theory have become actuality. You just need rest. The sanatorium, the sea.

  The sea! Ten miles to go to Crumer-next-Sea: there it was on a signpost whipping by the window.

  But the more I thought about the sea, the less easy I felt. The sea was connected with my hallucinations – if they were hallucinations.

  Richmond looked back.

  ‘Nothing to be frightened about,’ he said.

  I calmed myself. The hallucinations had no reality outside myself, my sick self. This was the world I knew, these were the men I knew …

  Or if they weren’t, then I would see some sign to prove I was indeed in an alien world, in a sort of variant earth where a creature something like a tarsier had not emerged to dominance via the ocean.

  At once I began looking for the sign that could alter my concept of the universe, for the – what was Walter’s exact phrase? – the small betraying detail. It had to be something outside this little nightmare world in the car; inside, my feelings were too subjective and could betray me either way. It had to be something beyond my emotional reach.

  Anxiously I surveyed the land outside, still simmering under that copper light. THE SEA 5 MILES, a sign read, as we forged down a twisting lane between hedgerows with Walter still driving like a man possessed. We sped past a tradesman’s van that bumped up onto the verge to avoid us. I twisted in my seat to read what was printed on the side of the van.

  On its green side in faded letters was one word. It was a battered old van; we were going too fast; I could not be sure I had the word right. It looked like MANTRAPS. But what would that mean? With my heart hammering, I told myself that the van was a little grocer’s delivery van with the grocer’s name painted rather illegibly on its side: Mantraps, perhaps, or Mawraps. Mr Mawraps the Grocer. I tried to visualise him.

  At the same time my mind played uncomfortably with a different little fantasy. The creatures that had not deviated to sport in the sea for a few million years had naturally gained an evolutionary lead. When the true men came inland (after doing nothing but lose their body hair!) and took up hunting and agriculture, it was to find the Pelt people already in occupation … And ever since, in this variant world, men like me were the dispossessed, so that along a quiet Norfolk lane it was natural to find someone who would sell the dominant race the wherewithal to defend its land from its hairless chief marauder …

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘Mr Mawraps the Grocer!’

  ‘Keep quiet!’ Richmond said. His face as he turned round was distorted in hate. For a moment I thought he would lash out and hit me. Cowed, I slid back into a corner, again peering out for something definite that would confirm me in or release me from my dread.

  We came out from the hedgerows. We sped through a sleepy village. We twisted down another lane. Then we were out of it and on to a good secondary road. No traffic still, and on our right the sea, motionless as vellum.

  We snarled up a slight incline and turned, coming out on the main coast road.

  There was the little huddle of Crumer-next-Sea, there was the beach, there a caravan site, there the distant block of the sanatorium to which the brothers were supposed to be taking me. Frantically, pawing at the windows, I searched for that terrible detail I needed.

  Everything looked normal.

  I had visited Crumer six years before. It seemed quite unchanged. The pier was there, the cliff gardens, the railway station … everything as I remembered. Except – surely something was changed?

  I pressed my burning brow to the window, peering along the beach. Wasn’t there something amiss there?

  No, there as usual were lounging holiday-makers, hardly as many as might be expected, but a fair scattering. They sprawled in the usual semi-nudity, taking what sun there was. From this distance I could not see whether or not they had pelts; that was not what worried me, but my subconscious told me that one slight yet obvious factor put the whole picture out of true.

  Again I stared.

  Kids were running up and down the sand. One or two were building castles. Two donkeys gave rides. On the promenade, an ice-cream booth did desultory business. On the beach, a number of deck-chairs with bright canvas were pitched. Then in one cr
ushing blow the obvious hit me: all those creatures on the sands sat or stood looking at the land; not a one faced out to sea….

  The Source

  Only two of the detachment of Seekers left the human settlement and set off across the desert in the direction they had been advised to take. They were the leader of the whole expedition, Kervis XI, and his year-wife, Ysis, who sat beside him in the front of the crawler.

  In the sand about them lay memorials of old time. Occasionally they passed a cultivated patch of ground, where men and women stood silent in ragged grandeur to watch them go by, framed perhaps in the entrance of a glassless block of flats or an old railway station.

  Kervis said, ‘I don’t understand it I only hope this place Ani-mykey will offer a clue to where we can find mankind’s greatest achievement, as the settlement promised it would.’

  Ysis regarded the sessions in the settlement as great nonsense. She said quietly, ‘You have made a mistake, Kervis, haven’t you?’

  He did not reply. His flow of thought had become confused over the last months as they spiralled through the unending light years towards Earth, and the confusion had increased since they landed. He had been a hard and crystal-clear man. As he grew woollier, Ysis became more indifferent to him and the crew of the Seeker ship more restless. Unhappy though he was, he welcomed the confusion in a curious way.

  ‘This is Earth, the Earth,’ he said.

  ‘It’s primitive, more primitive than I could have imagined.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said eagerly. ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘You can see it is,’ she said contemptuously. ‘It’s a disgusting planet. You can’t tell me this is what we are looking for.’

  ‘I don’t find it disgusting,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Stop being so simple, Kervis. From Andromeda to here, we have travelled through stupendous civilisations far more glorious than anything in our own remote galaxy. So wonderful is it, it seems as if science can have no end and man’s achievements no limit. Yet we never found what we were searching for –’