Kitabı oxu: «The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 Faceless Card

2 Neanderthal Planet

3 Old Hundredth

4 Original Sinner

5 Sector Grey

6 Stage-Struck!

7 Under an English Heaven

8 Hen’s Eyes

9 Sector Azure

10 A Pleasure Shared

11 Basis for Negotiation

12 Conversation Piece

13 Danger: Religion!

14 The Green Leaves of Space

15 Sector Green

16 Sector Vermilion

17 Tyrants’ Territory

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

Introduction

DARKNESS IN THE DORMITORY

Much of my training in the telling of short stories comes from uncomfortable, even painful, circumstances.

In my tender years, my parents despatched me to a large public school in the county of Suffolk. I found that many of the arrangements in that place of incarceration had been devised to make our juvenile lives as uncomfortable as possible.

Our dormitory, for instance, was as large and echoing as it could be. It contained about thirty iron beds. A strict rule ordered:

NO TALKING AFTER LIGHTS OUT.

However, past boys had devised a form of entertainment for those dark hours. Boys could compete in the telling of stories, one by one, while the other twenty-nine listened and judged. I went in for this competition, to find myself competing against, for instance, such boys as a friend, B.B. Gingell. Gingell was a stylish storyteller, able to relate with complete assurance the quiet events in the life of a water vole.

How should I put this? My competing tales in that dark dorm were of great and desperate events, of terrible creatures emerging armed from the Sargasso Sea, of invisible white psychopaths transforming African tribes into robots, of wicked dictators plunging the world into darkness … Such was the tortured nature of my audience, huddled there in pokey beds, that my tales drove the innocuous water vole into oblivion. I became the dormitory’s undisputed top storyteller.

Moreover, I found myself to be skilled in sadism. When something really alarming in my story was about to happen, I would stop. ‘I shall have to tell you tomorrow what happens next.’

Frustrated cries arose from a dozen mattresses. ‘Go on, you bastard! Tell us now!’

‘Sorry, I have not yet made up my mind what happens next.’

Oh dear, the power of the professionals …

But, there was a fly in this ointment. Our hated housemaster had a spyhole set in the landing outside the dormitory. Howells was his name. Sticking his ear to the hole, he could detect a juvenile voice breaking the enforced silence within.

Flinging open the door, in he stormed! On went the lights, swish went the cane in his fist.

‘Who was talking?’ he demanded.

My hand went up. I was summoned to the middle of the room. And there, in my flimsy pyjamas, I was given six of the best on my behind. (Later, everyone wanted to see my scars).

Howells slammed in. The trick was not to make a sound. Endure! – This is what life is going to be about. Then return with dignity to your bed. Without looking back.

So what can Howells do next? Well … actually nothing. So off he clears. Putting out the lights and slamming the door behind him.

And I? You must have guessed. I am the Champion Storyteller of the Junior Dorm.

Faceless Card

As soon as Paul Stoneward saw Nigel Alexander come into Darwin’s Dive, the killing instinct blossomed in him like a wonderful flower. I can just imagine how it was inside Paul: every little cell waking, growing teeth, turning into sharks yawning.

Even in the most static society like ours, men divide off into hunters and hunted, wolves and sheep. Paul Stoneward was a hunter born, with a way of his own about stalking the prey.

Mr Nigel Alexander was prey. He had it stamped all over him. Ordinary citizen. Safety first. Ideas keep out. He came into the Dive at a slow trot, moving on his heels as if his toes had corns. He foamed a little from a mouth as wide as a ditch with unaccustomed exertion. Brushing past Stoneward, he sat down at his table and peered anxiously through the net-curtained window.

‘Someone you don’t want to see?’ Stoneward asked.

Nigel Alexander looked at his table companion for the first time and then back out of the window.

‘Just a business acquaintance,’ he muttered. ‘You know how it is.’

His nerves all alert, Paul Stoneward looked him over, heard him absently order an old-fashioned bromo when the waiter came. Alexander was neatly dressed; Stoneward placed him as a man with money who had no notion how to spend it. A man with half his life ahead who had no notion how to use it. Prey: Handle with Cruelty.

A youngster, slick and spick, drew up outside the bar and hesitated. He danced about, then entered. He noticed Alexander, pretended to be surprised, and came over to the table. His pale face shone with pleasure.

‘Hi, boss,’ he said eagerly. ‘I sure wasn’t sure I didn’t see that familiar back of yours ahead of me. What’s it to be? Mind if I sit down?’

‘I’ve already ordered, Johnny,’ Alexander said miserably. ‘I was just talking to my friend here …’

It did not dislodge the newcomer one bit. He sat down, put his elbows on the table top and nodded friendly fashion to Stoneward. ‘Howdy, I’m Johnny J. Flower, Mr Alexander’s chief clerk. Glad to know you.’

He was the up-and-creeping generation. No dandruff. No shyness. No doubts, no halitosis. No nothing. He began to chatter happily about ‘the business,’ how well they were doing, how good it was working for Mr Alexander. Mr Alexander tried to join in the choruses, bought the boy a pep-up and fizz, smiled, nodded like an old nag.

Business could have been better. ‘The N-Compass Co.’ had its troubles. The public just was not buying taped books like it used and that was a hard, gilt-edged fact nobody could buck. No matter how much publicity N-Compass put out for its clients, nobody could buck that gilt-edged fact. Even Mr Alexander with a smart head clerk like Johnny J. Flower could not buck that basic, gilt-edged fact. But they had done well to win the handling of the publicity for President da Silva’s Memoirs; that was a big consignment. Everyone present would surely agree President da Silva was a big guy.

‘Surely,’ agreed Stoneward, when their two pairs of cow eyes, hazel and green but so similar, turned to him, pleading with him to roll the ball along and say, ‘Surely.’

Why, da Silva was the guy who instigated the Amazon Basin scheme … billions of credits … da Silva was the guy who gave the big yes to the AAA, the Automated Agriculture Act … Yuh, a big guy … N-Compass ought to be made with da Silva’s book.

Finally Johnny said he should be getting along.

‘Off you go, boy; I’ll be along,’ Mr Alexander said, half tough, half cajoling. This obviously was not how Johnny wanted it played. He like the rest of the N-Compass staff to see him turn up with the boss, arm-in-arm, you-kiss-mine-etc. Still, he got up and went with grace, social to his clean, clean fingertips.

Paul Stoneward drank in every second of the session as if it were wine. If there was anything he loved, it was seeing the mentally dead pretend they were mentally alive. All the time that he was watching and hating Alexander and the clerk, I was sitting at the other end of the bar watching and hating Stoneward; it’s my profession.

‘Nice boy, Johnny. Don’t know how I’d manage without him,’ Alexander said, wiping under his collar with a silk handkerchief. He was getting flabby. His new collar made it clear he needed a new neck.

‘But you were trying to dodge him,’ Stoneward said lightly. He could prise this old fool open like a piggy-bank.

‘Oh, well, yes … That’s another thing. It’s just – well, never mind. I don’t think I even caught your name, sir. Paul Stoneward? Fine; never forget a name – doesn’t pay in my line of business, no sir. You see, Johnny is a very smart and bright young feller – well, you saw for yourself …’

‘You wouldn’t say Johnny was a bore?’ Paul Stoneward put the delicate point tentatively. You would not say Johnny was a smarm, a snide, a creeper, a dully without one inkling, an ostrich, a jerk who was galloping blind from cradle to grave (like you, Mr Alexander) – in short, an ideal, approve, integrated citizen of this approved and misbegotten Age of Content?

‘Why, Johnny’s a real live-wire, Mr Stoneward,’ Alexander said, with mild indignation. ‘I only said to my wife this morning, “Penelope, Johnny’s going places” and I’m not a man to make a mistake.’

Not much, you old blabbermouth. Of course you can’t see what Johnny is, just as the blind can’t see the blind. And what the hell places do you think Johnny could possibly be going to, when there are no longer any places worth going to? And what sort of romance do you and Penelope make when you are in your bed clothes? And if you knew I long – but long – to tear your typical existence apart from top to bottom …

‘It is of course a very great honour and pleasure to meet a man of your perspicacity and position,’ Stoneward said, crinkling his eyebrows into Mexican moustaches to increase the unction. ‘My place is only just round the corner from here. May I ask you up there with me now? I would be delighted to mix you another old-fashioned bromo.’

At once, Alexander looked nervous. His face took on the puckered look it had worn when he first encountered the bar. Stoneward could not quite account for the expression. Goddam it, even these Normals had their little personal quirks; since it irritated him to feel he did not know every last grey inch of Alexander’s soul, he promptly forgot the thought.

Alexander glanced at his watch.

‘The business …’ he said apologetically. ‘Most hospitable of you …’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Alexander,’ Stoneward said, lowering his eyes and easing huskiness into his voice. ‘I should have remembered what a busy man you are. It’s just – well, I’m lonely, let’s face it. There’s no Penelope for me … Just my little old self … Existence sometimes grows a wee bit … solitary.’

Don’t ham it too much, kid, and don’t spoil it all by laughing in his face. You’ve got him now; look, his eyes are misting. Love in a mystery. These slobs are stuffed rotten with kindness – you just have to touch the right button and out it oozes.

‘I’m genuinely sorry to learn that, Mr Stoneward,’ the boss of N-Compass was saying. ‘Say, call me Nigel, why don’t you, and I’ll call you Paul. I like to be friends with folk. I guess we all get lonely at times – even a happy-married man like myself. Like I always say, Paul, life is just a big question mark. Sometimes at night, when your corns are playing you up …’

‘You mean – you mean you will come on round to my place?’ Stoneward said, brightening convulsively. He could not bother even to put on a genuine act – this Alexander was too rancid to smell a stink. Subtlety is wasted on suckers.

‘Well, I didn’t say that …’

‘Ah, come on – Nigel. You’d like my room. Besides … well, I’ve come to regard you as a friend, I guess.’

‘Don’t like to say no,’ Alexander murmured, rising obediently to his feet when Stoneward did. For all his smart suiting, he looked baggy, like a fat sheep off to a ritzy abattoir, as Stoneward took his arm and led him into the sedate streets.

I left shortly after but did not follow them. Instead, I took a taxi to H.Q. Man, was I mad!

Mr Nigel Alexander was really uneasy. He chewed a toothpick to splinters. He plucked at the armpits of his shirt to ease the damp patches off his skin. When he spoke, standing in the middle of Stoneward’s room, he gazed unhappily down at the squared toes of his shoes.

‘Er … you aren’t an artist, by any chance, Paul, are you? No offence, I mean, and you’ll have guessed by now that I’m a pretty liberal man, but I mean I just have to ask the once. These pictures on your walls … And that naked statue …’

Stoneward perched himself on the edge of his desk, swung his neat legs, folded his competent hands, smiled dagger-fashion, looked artistic.

‘Why now, Nigel,’ he said with sham surprise, ‘you know as well as I do that such things as artists don’t exist any more! This is the Age of Content, when all maladjusted and non-functional groups like artists or fictioneers or drunkards have melted away. Everyone is adjusted, normal, happy.’

‘Sure, sure,’ Alexander said hurriedly, nodding rather too much. ‘I just thought … these pictures … I mean, don’t they rather look back to the old decadent pre-Content set-up? I mean, I know you are unmarried …’

Stoneward walked over to the drug cabinet and began to mix two old-fashioneds, saying casually as he did so, ‘You could say I was an artist in a way. There’s something else that has died out and is now forgotten or forbidden: I’m an artist in the art of life.’

This floored Alexander. He adjusted his damp shirt again and wiped his fingertips on the silk handkerchief. He tried a laugh.

‘Oh, you are mistaken there, Paul. Your concept, if you’ll pardon me, is awry. Life is not an art. It’s – well, it’s natural. I don’t intend any rudeness when I say you are mistaken. But life, well, it’s just something you live, I guess. I know Penelope would see it like that. You just live life; it doesn’t need any thought. Not the way business needs thought, for instance. I can’t see what you mean. I mean, I just don’t see it.’

Carrying the two glasses carefully, Stoneward brought them over to the low oval table and set them down. He produced a box of mescahales and a lighter and set those down. He waved his hand to the chairs, sitting in one when his guest dubiously did and curling his long legs under him.

‘Penelope is a very attractive name,’ he said ingratiatingly.

‘Oh yes, a very attractive name. My favourite name, in fact,’ Alexander said, grateful as a dog for the abrupt change of subject.

‘Well,’ Stoneward said, raising his glass, ‘Here’s to the widow of bashful fifteen and to the cadaver of forty, to the clean little woman who’s slightly unclean and the sports girl who’s out-and-out sporty.’

‘I hadn’t heard that one before,’ Alexander said, with glum embarrassment, again examining his toe-caps. He leant well forward and pursed his thick mauve lips to drink.

‘Let’s talk intimately,’ Stoneward said, as if struck by this sudden good idea. ‘Just you and I, Mr Nigel Alexander, with no souls barred. In every age, in every clime, a man’s or a woman’s breast harbour secrets – nothing bad, just little sensitive things to be kept away from the common gaze. Clouds of immortality and suchlike lush things. Let’s have ours out now, right here, confidentially, and see how intimate we can get. What say?’

A driblet went down the plumpening chin and plopped on the table top. The hankie appeared and mopped the plop. The plump hand waved away a proffered mescahale.

‘Frankly, I don’t follow your meaning, Paul. I have no secrets. Well – business secrets, naturally … But I think you are presuming just a little on our acquaintanceship, if I may be allowed to put it that way. Secrets? Why should a normal man have secrets?’

‘Penelope,’ Stoneward barked, shooting out his legs, dropping his voice and repeating, ‘Penelope: no secrets from her? Not even teeny, weeny ones?’

‘No, no, not even – er, teeny, weeny ones. I can say that quite honestly. I love my wife very dearly, Mr Stoneward, the way a decent citizen should, please believe me. Any secrets we may have are very properly shared. Furthermore, as a property owner, I feel I have every right … every right to say … the gosh … every right …’

He had drained his glass and now he was asleep. He rolled over like a bullock on clover, beginning to snore as the knockout drops took firmer hold of him. The lines of his face grew relaxed and generous.

‘Every right!’ Stoneward echoed, standing over him. ‘Yes, you’ve every right to be caught like a porker in a trap. You didn’t want to come here, yet you had to, because you scented loneliness, sniffed it right up your old nostrils. You thought it was like calling to like, you pomaded porker, because inside – though you don’t know it! – you’re just as miserable as all the other Normals. No, that’s foisting my diagnosis onto him. He hasn’t enough know-how to be miserable; that takes talent. He’s just a bucket of lard.’

Bending, he felt distastefully inside the breast pocket of the sleeping man, drawing out his wallet. In it was a red identity card stamped NORMAL. Sure it was normal – it was so normal, only one man in a million was anything else these days. On the back cover of the folder, under the bovinely solemn reproduction of Mr Nigel Hamilton Alexander’s physiognomy, were his home and his business addresses.

‘Good.’ Stoneward said. He picked the lighter from the table, ignited it, and extinguished it against the grey spread of Alexander’s underjowl. The sleeping man never stirred.

Saying ‘Good’ again, Stoneward went over to the phone and dialled. He had thought of an artistic touch. Switching off the vision, he waited for a female voice to coo ‘N-Compass Co. Coverage and Publicity,’ and then asked for Johnny Flower.

‘The boss won’t be in today, Johnny,’ he said apologetically, when the clerk’s dime-a-dozen purr replied. ‘I wouldn’t like this bit of news to get around, but Nigel Alexander is off on a benzedrine bust with a busty junkie called Jean. She’ll toss him right back at you when she’s finished with him.’

He cut off the incoherent noises at the other end of the line, smiled affectionately to himself and dialled through to Civilian Sanctions. He tuned the vision circuits in again in time to see the girl at the main desk switch him right through to the Commissioner.

‘Beynon?’ Stoneward said. He was always clipped staccato, every inch the operative with Commissioner Beynon, because that was how he responded to Beynon’s personality. ‘I’m on a new consignment from date. Target: Citizen BIOX 95005, Alexander, N.H. Usual objective: to awaken the man’s dormant powers of life-awareness. Strictly off the record, I don’t think Alexander has any to awaken.’

‘Don’t make this job too expensive,’ Beynon warned. ‘The Peace Department are having a stiff enough job as it is convincing the Police that you have Congress backing. I advise you to go easy, Stoneward.’

‘Message received and understood,’ Stoneward said. ‘Everything fine and formal, Normal.’

Beynon cut contact, turning to me. ‘How I’d like to see that louse behind bars!’ he exclaimed. ‘I can quite grasp that ultimately he may be doing good, but I don’t like to see nice, honest citizens suffer; and I don’t like the obvious pleasure he gets out of it all. What do you think he’s up to, Kelly?’

‘He’ll be after Alexander’s wife now,’ I told the Commissioner, ‘because that’s the way his nasty little mind works.’

She stood with a vase full of cactus dahlias in one hand. She wore a little apron over a fawn and white dress. She had curly chestnut hair and surprising grey eyes. She was slenderly tenderly shaped. She was some years younger than her husband. She smiled rather helplessly, entirely charmingly.

‘I was just doing the flowers,’ she said.

‘I won’t keep you long, Mrs Alexander – Penelope,’ Stoneward said; he had changed into a dark, dapper suit and looked ceaseless, creaseless. He put a calculated amount of warmth into his voice and added, ‘I’ve so often heard your husband call you Penelope, it seems more natural for me to call you that too. Would you mind?’

‘How long have you known my husband, Mr Stoneward?’ she asked, smiling but ignoring his question.

‘We’ve been friends for years, really close friends,’ Stoneward said, clasping his hands ingeniously to suggest ingenuousness. ‘I’m just so surprised he never mentioned me to you. I mean … why should he have secrets from you?’

The little jab did not appear to sink in. Perhaps Penelope also would prove to be insensitive – but he found himself hoping not. That gentle exterior, it should not be hard to wound.

‘Why indeed?’ she said. ‘How long did you say you have known my husband?’

‘I’ve known Ni since … let’s see … Oh, since seven years or more. We met when he was blowing the fanfares for my book on Human Sex, and that was in twenty fifteen. Come to think of it, perhaps that’s why he never mentions me; sex isn’t always considered respectable. What sort of a reception does it get in this house, Penelope?’

She set the vase with a bump on the window ledge and turned smartly. This girl’s legs consisted of an infinite number of points it was imperative to kiss. Steady, Stoneward, the outward display of her might look lively, but the vital grey matter would be dead: how else explain her marriage to N.H.A.?

‘If you have anything important to say, Mr Stoneward, would you please say it and leave? I am rather busy morning.’

‘Yes, I’ve something to say,’ he told her, sitting on the arm of a chair and stretching his legs. He laughed ruefully. ‘Trouble is, I’m not keen to say it. I’m afraid you will be shocked.’

‘If you will tell me, I will tell you if I am shocked,’ she said, attempting to humour him.

‘Okay. Penelope, sweet though you are, Nigel has left you for another woman, the cad.’

‘You are talking nonsense,’ she said.

‘I am speaking the truth. He has tired of you at last, the old dog. Every man his own Romeo.’

‘You are talking nonsense. I don’t believe you have even met my husband,’ she said sharply.

‘He has gone off with a blonde double-breasted girl called Jean with hep hips and sigh-size thighs who is old enough to be his mother and big enough to be his father,’ he lied.

She picked up the vase of dahlias again, in case a weapon were needed. All the interlocking softnesses of her face had frozen hard.

‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘You’re drunk.’

‘No, it’s true!’ Stoneward said, bursting into laughter despite himself. He had spoilt such dramatic scenes before merely because his sense of humour had run away with him – he kept thinking of funny details with which to adorn his theme. ‘It’s all true, Penelope! This wicked girl Jean is old enough to be Ni’s mother. How do I know, you ask? Because she’s my mother! She sure gets around! But this time she’s got a square.’

He rolled into the chair, laughing. Hell, what did it matter how you played your hand when you knew you couldn’t put a foot wrong? That’s what is known as a hand-to-foot existence. It didn’t matter if this chick believed him or not – he had Congress backing. And a free chuckle.

Penelope had moved out with those nicely hinged knees to the call booth in the hall. She dialled angrily and spoke to someone. Sobering, Stoneward sat up and listened. He guessed she was calling Johnny Flower, wanting to know if hubby was under control at the all-N-Compassing office. This was rich! By the shattered look on her face when she returned, slowly, lowly, he knew that he had guessed rightly and Johnny had passed on his little tittle-tattle.

‘I’m truly sorry, Mrs Alexander,’ he said, returning to seriousness to hand out a really corny line. ‘It isn’t that he doesn’t love you any more, it’s just that he fell into temptation. His spirit was willing and his flesh was weak. Try to take it bravely. I don’t think he’ll ever come back to you, but you can always find another man, you know. You’re man-shaped!’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said and burst into tears. With a gallant effort, she tried to check herself but failed; she settled herself in a chair to cry more comfortably. Stoneward went across to her on hands and knees, like a pious panther. When he smoothed her hair, she flicked her head away, continuing to cry

‘You shouldn’t cry,’ he said. ‘Alex was always unfair to you. He left you here shut away. He kept secrets from you. He kept money from you. He never told you about me … I can’t bear to hear you cry. It sounds like termites in a tin beam.’

He put his arms round her, cuddling her. In a minute he was kissing her, her grief and his greed all mixed together in a bowl of tears.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘Who are you? Why did you come and tell me this?’

‘I thought I’d made that clear, Penelope. Ni told me to come and tell you. He’s bored to death and he’s quitting – going to start life anew, a-nude.’

Though she had been crying, she had not really believed till now. Something Stoneward said seemed to have penetrated and made her accept the situation as he presented it.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, which is what all women say when they first begin to believe.

Stoneward neither contradicted nor accepted her statement. He just crouched by her, naked under his clothes.

‘Whatever am I going to do?’ Penelope asked aloud at last, speaking not to him but to herself.

‘I love you,’ he said simply. ‘I always have. Every word your husband has told me about you has been music to my ears. I’ve treasured the smallest fact about you, Penelope. I know your vital measurements, the size of stocking you take, the make of soap you use, which breakfast cereal you prefer, the names of your favourite movie and phoney stars, how long you like to sleep nights. Unless you have secrets from Ni, I know everything about you, for you as a Normal are only the sum of these pretty facts. Come with me to my flat, I’ll take care of you – worshipping from afar all the time, have no fear! My research days for my magnum opus are over!’

She looked at him doubtfully.

‘You know what,’ she said. ‘I think that right now I want to get away out of here. I can’t think here at all. Will you kindly wait five minutes while I just go pack a bag, Mr Stoneward? Then I’ll be with you.’

‘Your eyes have spent their days drifting among the starry nights,’ he said dreamily.

Penelope laughed, got up a little jerkily and left the room. Paul Stoneward buried his face in the warm patch she had created in the chair, drumming his fists on the chair arm. People were all the same, all the same, even this golden girl, just a puppet … all pulp puppets. He nursed his terrible secret: once people ceased to have any power over you, they were absolutely in your power. He could almost have cried about it.

He rose, walked quietly into the hall and dialled Civilian Sanctions again. When he had given Beynon his orders, he returned to the living room to await Penelope. She appeared after a quarter of an hour, entirely composed, clutching a tan suitcase a little too tightly. Stoneward took her arm and led her out of the house, mincing exaggeratedly by her soft side.

As they walked down the drive, he looked back over his shoulder. Brick house with pink and pistachio trim, lawn with pink roses florabounding all over the place in each corner, mail box on its white post at the foot of the driveway down the slope. Stoneward laughed. This popsie was really leaving home.

‘Coffee?’ she said suspiciously. ‘What’s that?’

‘When you’ve done pacing up and down, it’s an old time euphoric with taste additives,’ Stoneward said, setting the cups down and widening his nostrils over the steam. It was exhilarating to have the three dimensional shape of her in his room.

He had rolled Nigel Hamilton Alexander, snores and all, under his bed, and stuffed a sponge into his mouth. He had chased round, half-serious, half-laughing, straightening out the room after he had let her in. Penelope hardly noticed him; she walked up and down the room like a little caged – well, a little caged cutie. You could see the exercise doing her ankles good; they looked fine. Not so her soul. Penelope was still in a state of shock. No resilience, these Normals – except physically, of course, in the case of present company.

Present company drank down her java like a good girl and heeled over onto the rug. Stoneward, who had been watching like a lynx, caught her as she fell, thought several thoughts, licked his lips, but straightened up and let her sleep.

Business first. Congress should have of his best.

Hustling into the bedroom, legs moving like dapper nutcrackers, head cool as a safe, he pulled several stage properties out of a drawer and flung them onto the bed, ruffling the covers as he did so. Then he seized the mortal remains of N-Compass Co’s chief and rattled them roughly back to life.

‘Penelope … stop … lemme get to the … ugh …’ Alexander muttered, chewing his way through a king-size mist.

‘Don’t give me that crud about Penelope after what you’ve been doing to Jean,’ Stoneward said nastily. ‘Look at the mess the pair of you have made of my bedroom, you dirty old romp. Get up and get out.’

Heavily, Alexander pulled himself to the bedside and sat on it. His dull eye, moving like a whale in heavy seas, finally lighted on a female garment by the pillows.

‘Jean left you that pair with her love,’ Stoneward said. ‘Said to tell you she had another pair some place. Now come on, snap out of it, Nigel.’

The older man buried his head in his hands. After some minutes of silent battle, he launched himself to his feet, exclaiming, ‘I got to get back home and sort all this out with Penelope.’

‘Home! Penelope!’ Stoneward echoed. ‘Don’t be immoral, old sport. You can’t have it both ways. The past has ceased to exist for you. You were a Normal, now you’re not. Normals don’t behave like you have; your card will have to be stamped “Neurotic” now!’

‘You’re just confusing me, mister,’ Alexander said stubbornly. ‘I got to get home.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you, Alexander the Grunt. You’ve got no home. You’ve stepped outside the bounds of normal behaviour and so your Normal life has ceased to exist. Face up to it like a man.’

‘I got to get home. That’s all I know.’

‘Don’t you love me any more, Ni?’ Stoneward asked, peeping at his watch. ‘We used to be such buddies in the old days. Remember the Farellis, the Vestersons, the vacations in Florida? Remember the pistachio shoots off Key West?’

‘Ah, shut up, you give me bellyache,’ Alexander said, ‘not that I wish to be insulting and I’d like to make it clear I regret it if I have committed a nuisance on your premises.’

‘Spoken like a man!’ Stoneward cried delightedly. ‘That’s what I call breeding, pal. It’s all you have left, believe me.’

‘Just help me get a taxi, will you?’

They went down onto the street, quiet, well-manicured street full of ditto people. A cab pulled up for them. Paul Stoneward bundled in after his victim, who did not protest beyond a grunt. He glanced at his watch again; but his timing had always been faultless and he could have patted himself with approval.

‘2011, Springfield,’ Alexander said to the driver.

The drive took them fifteen minutes. The cabby pulled up uncertainly by a big advertisement hoarding. Stoneward dragged his companion onto the sidewalk, crammed money into the driver’s hand and said, ‘Beat it, bud.’

He stood there, hands on hips, posing for his own pleasure and whistling the opening theme of Borodin’s Second Symphony, while Alexander moved unhappily back and forth, a bull bereft of its favourite china shop. Before them loomed a big hoarding boosting Fawdree’s Fadeless Fabrics.

‘It’s gone! My house – my home has gone!’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Stoneward said.

Crying as if in physical pain, Alexander ran behind the hoarding. Nothing there – just a flat lot with a little dust still hanging above it (The Civic Demolition boys must have worked their disintegrators with real zest!) Alexander burst into howls of anguish.

‘You’re having a wail of a time, Alec Sander,’ Stoneward said, taking the other by the arm. ‘Now why don’t you listen to me, your uncle P.? You’re at last – although a solid forty-five – getting a glimmer of what life is about. You’re learning man! Life is not a substantial thing; you can’t guarantee any one minute of it, past, present or future; you can’t salt it away in moth-balls. You thought it was secure, safe, snug, something as solid and predictable as the foot in your boot, didn’t you? You were wrong by at least one hundred and eighty degrees. Life is a dream, a dew. Fickle, coy and hard to please, prone to moth. Nothing is left to you now, man, but dreams. You never had a dream in your life. Now you have actively to start dreaming. Now – at last!’

‘Penelope,’ Alexander said. He pronounced the single word, then he took out his silk handkerchief and blew one forlorn and faded chord on his nose. The breeze turned over a page of his hair and he said, ‘Penelope, you don’t understand … Penelope, I can’t live without her mister. We … shared everything. I can’t explain. We shared … had secrets.’

‘You had secrets?’ Stoneward whispered, leaning forward. ‘Now you’re really giving, man. Let me inside the catwalks of your psycho-

logy, if you’ll pardon the dirty word, and I’ll see if I can help at all.’

‘There was one secret,’ the middle-aged man said, weeping without restraint now as he talked, ‘one secret that was very dear to us. I suppose everyone must have something. You have such a sharp way of being sympathetic, Paul, I can’t be sure if you’ll understand. Remember how I was trying to dodge away from Johnny J. Flower in the bar, whenever it was? This morning. I like him. I like Johnny. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; and he likes me – you could see that. I wanted it to stay that way. I want him to like me. I don’t to know if you’ll understand … You see, I didn’t want Johnny to find out what a bore I am. I always dodge him if I can. People bore me – except you, Paul, you’re my only friend. I don’t mind being bored; it’s, well, kind of comfortable – you know you’re safe when you’re bored. But I know I am boring, too, and that’s the secret Penelope and me had … I never wanted Johnny to find out. She knew I knew I was a bore and she – well, she just understood, that’s all. I’ll never find anyone like her again and now she’s gone. Gone, man.’

Paul Stoneward did not even laugh. He had seen right down into the depths which had hitherto been closed to him, and he was frightened. Without another word, he turned away, walking off with hunched shoulders past the hoarding, down the road, leaving Alexander crying on an empty lot.

By the time he got home, his high spirits had returned. He rang Beynon again.

‘Your hair looks heliotrope on this screen, Commissioner,’ he said, ‘or did you dye it? Either way, I like it how you have it.’ And he launched into a long and unwisecracking account of what he had done and was going to do on the Alexander case.

Beynon sighed heavily when the screen finally dimmed, and turned to me. He looked not unlike Alexander, heavy, solid, without dreams.

‘Well, Kelly, do you feel the same as I do?’ he asked. Commissioner Beynon always lead with a query.

I nodded. ‘Paul’s way of handling things is all wrong,’ I said. ‘It’s not only a question of whether neurotics are born not made – Stoneward produces crazy, mixed-up people efficiently enough, but they all have vacuums inside them by the time he’s through, they can’t create after he has been at them. The reason’s simply that he himself has a vacuum inside. Underneath, he knows it, too; of that I’m certain.’

‘Do we let him carry on?’

That’s the godawful curse with Normals; I know well enough how Paul Stoneward feels about them. Even a man like Beynon, lousy with authority, passes the buck whenever he can. Basic lack of imagination, I suppose.

‘I know I have the same stamp on my folder as he does,’ I said ‘and that should make me on his side. But Paul’s just out there doing mischief from which no good can come. Let me get on to Senator Willcroft at Peace Department.’

‘You can’t worry him!’ Beynon said in alarm.

‘Can’t I? Sit back and watch me, Beynon. Willcroft’s in charge of this project and I’m going to have it out with him straight. I want to save that girl if there’s still time.’

It was dark when Stoneward got Penelope to the lot. The afternoon’s infant breeze had become a wind with a will of its own. Alexander had trundled off, maybe to the nearest river. Callously Paul loaned the girl a torch, watching the erratic beam of it hunt for lawn and ramblers and verandah and brick with pink and pistachio trim. When she fell onto nyloned knees, head drooping, he went over, squatting on his haunches by her.

Penelope had found a dahlia. It must have been one of the bunch she was tending before Stoneward appeared; the disintegrators had missed it. She clutched it, her eyes bowl-full of tears. Almost it seemed as if the flower brought her understanding.

‘Whatever you are, you are wicked,’ she said unsteadily. ‘You have done all – all this. I don’t know why or how … You must be the devil.’

‘The devil was a bore without a sense of humour; I’m not flattered,’ Stoneward said.

She brought her hand, that pebble-smooth hand, up and smote him over his handsome mouth.

‘Why?’ she said, her voice rising unmanageably, ‘just tell me why, for pity’s sake, have you done this to us?’

‘I love you, so I will tell you,’ he said, calmed by the hurt of her hand. ‘I work for civilisation. I love civilisation more than any blank and pretty-faced mediocrity in the world. Unfortunately civilisation has got stuck right in a rut. When sociology really got itself established as a science at the end of last century, formulae were developed which enabled everyone to fit exactly into his or her social niche; maybe you’ve heard? And for anyone with any little residual twinges of emotion, a wide range of drugs was made tastily available. The end result was the complete – well, almost complete – banishment of mental upset from the world. Unprecedented calm and content settled like fog, and this is me lamenting it. Three boozy boos for the Age of Content.’

They squatted together facing each other, the fallen torch casting shadows upward over their figures. Penelope still clutched the dahlia but had forgotten it. In the blind-blowing dark, they had lost their identities. They might have been things on Easter Island.

‘Civilisation is dying day by day, because the people who made it and continued it have gone,’ Stoneward said, speaking naturally now he was saying something he believed. ‘Everything we value was produced by malcontents or psychotics – men who could not shape themselves to the world as it was, and tried to reshape it to fit them. Our first ancestor who came down out of a tree only did it because the trees weren’t good enough for him. The guy who invented the wheel was just too goddammed cussed to lend a hand with the sledge like the rest. The guy who first kindled fire only did it to prove to himself that he was a cut above the other jerks. So it’s been all along. Your inventor, your artist – he’s got something to work out. But now, now no-one has a thing to work out!’

‘Except you,’ Penelope said.

Stoneward rested his finger on her knees, playing a small, silent tune there.

‘I’m the one in a million who still has a chip on his shoulder; no society is absolutely perfect, thank God!’ he said. ‘Yes, Penny, Pennyworth, Penelope, my darling Pente Loop, I am the Joker in the pack. The few neurotics left in the country are now all Government employed, trying to cope with the dangers of stagnation. We act as random factors, jerking dull citizens here and there into awareness. You Normals live in life as if it were a house: it’s not, it’s a tiger ride. I’ve sold Congress my own way of waking people – at least for a trial period. It’s violent but it’s effective; I reckon you’ll admit that, Penelope. You’ll never be the same girl again, will you, eh?’

She did not answer, just looked at him as if he had melted.

‘Reckon old Cornbags Alexander has blo-o-own away to limbo,’ Stoneward sighed. ‘You’ll have to grow some real dreams now, little girl, now you see what a false dream security was …’

‘So you even have an intellectual front to cover all you’ve done,’ she exclaimed slowly. ‘You wanted to see into me, not realising how reciprocal the process was – and consequently I’ve seen into you. You’re – you’re just miserably unhappy, Paul. You boost yourself up as a joker, but you’re not. You’re not even the knave. You’re just the extra, faceless card that sometimes gets stuck into a new deck. You’re – even with Congress behind you! – you’re nothing, you can be nothing …’

He had put his sharp elbows on his thighs and rested his chin in his hands as if he was listening his ears off. Instead, he was crying his eyes out. The little crystals elongated and flashed down to the torchlight.

‘Paul,’ she said sharply.

Paul Stoneward could not cry at all elegantly. He needed practice, that guy.

‘I just … I can’t go any further,’ he said brokenly. ‘Penny, you got to help pick me up.’

It was about then I came round the corner of Fawdree’s Fadeless Fabrics with the gun in my hand, out of breath and angry, but so happy to have made Senator Willcroft see things my way. Strange to reflect how that first view of my future wife should be of her with her arms round the man I killed.

Even the hunters are hunted: in this or any other rotten age.

Neanderthal Planet

Hidden machines varied the five axioms of the Scanning Place. They ran through a series of arbitrary systems, consisting of Kolmogorovian finite sets, counterpointed harmonically by a one-to one assignment of non-negative real numbers, so that the parietal areas shifted constantly in strict relationship projected by the Master Boff deep under Manhattan.

Chief Scanner – he affected the name of Euler – patiently watched the modulations as he awaited a call. Self-consistency: that was the principle in action. It should govern all phases of life. It was the aesthetic principle of machines. Yet, not five kilometres away, the wild robots sported and rampaged in the bush.

Amber light burned on his beta panel.

Instantaneously, he modulated his call-number.

The incoming signal decoded itself as ‘We’ve spotted Anderson, Chief.’ The anonymous vane-bug reported coordinates and signed off.

It had taken them Boff knew how long – seven days – to locate Anderson after his escape. They had done the logical thing and searched far afield for him. But man was not logical; he had stayed almost within the shadow of the New York dome. Euler beamed an impulse into a Hive Mind channel, calling off the search.

He fired his jets and took off.

The axioms yawned out above him. He passed into the open, flying over the poly-polyhedrons of New Newyork. As the buildings went through their transparency phases, he saw them swarming with his own kind. He could open out channels to any one of them, if required; and, as chief, he could, if required, switch any one of them to automatic, to his own control, just as the Dominants could automate him if the need arose.

Euler ‘saw’ a sound-complex signal below him, and dived, deretracting a vane to land silently. He came down by a half-track that had transmitted the signal.

It gave its call-number and beamed, ‘Anderson is eight hundred metres ahead, Chief. If you join me, we will move forward.’

‘What support have we?’ A single dense impulse.

‘Three more like me, sir. Plus incapacitating gear.’

‘This man must not be destructed.’

‘We comprehend, Chief.’ Total exchange of signals occupied less than a microsecond.

He clamped himself magnetically to the half-track, and they rolled forward. The ground was broken and littered by piles of debris, on the soil of which coarse weeds grew. Beyond it all, the huge fossil of old New York, still under its force jelly, grey, unwithering because unliving. Only the bright multi-shapes of the new complex relieved a whole country full of desolation.

The half-track stopped, unable to go farther or it would betray their presence; Euler unclamped and phased himself into complete transparency. He extended four telescopic legs that lifted him several inches from the ground and began to move cautiously forward.

This region was designated D-Dump. The whole area was an artificial plateau, created by the debris of the old humanoid technology when it had finally been scrapped in favour of the more rational modern system. In the forty years since then, it had been covered by soil from the new development sites. Under the soil here, like a subconscious mind crammed with jewels and blood, lay the impedimenta of an all-but-vanished race.

Euler moved carefully forward over the broken ground, his legs adjusting to its irregularities. When he saw movement ahead, he stopped to observe.

Old human-type houses had grown up on the dump. Euler’s vision zoomed and he saw they were parodies of human habitation, mocked up from the discarded trove of the dump, with old auto panels for windows and dented computer panels for doors and toasters for doorsteps. Outside the houses, in a parody of a street, macabre humans played. Jerk stamp jerk clank jerk clang stamp stomp clang.

They executed slow rhythmic dances to an intricate pattern, heads nodding, clapping their own hands, turning to clap others’ hands. Some were grotesquely male, some grotesquely female. In the doorways, or sitting on old refrigerators, other grotesques looked on.

These were the humots – old-type human-designed robots of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, useless in an all-automaton world, scrapped when the old technology was scrapped. While their charges could be maintained, they functioned on, here in one last ghetto.

Unseen, Euler stalked through them, scanning for Anderson.

The humots aped the vanished race to which they had been dedicated, wore old human clothes retrieved from the wreckage underfoot, assumed hats and scarves, dragged on socks, affected pipes and pony-tails, tied ribbons to themselves. Their guttering electronic memories were refreshed by old movies ferreted from D-Dump, they copied in metallic gesture the movements of shadows, aspired to emotion, hoped for hearts. They thought themselves a cut above the non-anthropomorphic automata that had superseded them.

Anderson had found refuge among them. He hid the skin and bone and hair of the old protoplasmic metabolism under baffles of tin, armoured himself with rusting can. His form, standing in a pseudo-doorway, showed instantly on one of Euler’s internal scans; his mass/body ratio betrayed his flesh-and-blood calibre. Euler took off, flew over him, reeled down a paralyser, and stung him. Then he let down a net and clamped the human into it.

Crude alarms sounded all round. The humots stopped their automatic dance. They scattered like leaves, clanking like mess-tins, fled into the pseudo-houses, went to earth, left D-Dump to the almost invisible little buzzing figure that flew back to the Scanning Place with the recaptured human swinging under its asymmetrical form. The old bell on the dump was still ringing long after the scene was empty.

To human eyes, it was dark in the room.

Tenth Dominant manifested itself in New Newyork as a modest-sized mural with patterns leaking titillating output clear through the electro-magnetic spectrum and additives from the invospectra. This became its personality for the present.

Chief Scanner Euler had not expected to be summoned to the Dominant’s presence; he stood there mutely. The human, Anderson, sprawled on the floor in a little nest of old cans he had shed, reviving slowly from the effects of the paralyser.

Dominant’s signal said, ‘Their form of vision operates on a wavelength of between 4 and 7 times 10-⁵ centimetres.’

Obediently, Euler addressed a parietal area, and light came on in the room. Anderson opened one eye.

‘I suppose you know about Men, Scanner?’ said Dominant.

He had used voice. Not even R/T voice. Direct naked man-type voice.

New Newyork had been without the sound of voice since the humots were kicked out.

‘I – I know many things about Men,’ Euler vocalised. Through the usual channel, he clarified the crude vocal signal. ‘This unit had to appraise itself of many humanity-involved data from Master Boff Bank HOO100 through H801000000 in operation concerning recapture of man herewith.’

‘Keep to vocal only, Scanner, if you can.’

He could. During the recapture operation, he had spent perhaps two-point-four seconds learning old local humanic language.

‘Then we can speak confidentially, Scanner – just like two men.’

Euler felt little lights of unease burn up and down him at the words.

‘Of all millions of automata of the hive, Scanner, no other will be able to monitor our speech together, Scanner,’ vocalised the Dominant.

‘Purpose?’

‘Men were so private, closed things. Imitate them to understand. We have to understand Anderson.’

Said stiffly: ‘He need only go back to zoo.’

‘Anderson too good for zoo, as demonstrate by his escape, elude capture seven days four and half hours. Anderson help us.’

Non-vocalising, Euler let out a chirp of disbelief.

‘True. If I were – man, I would feel impatience with you for not believing. Magnitude of present world-problem enormous. You – you have proper call-number, yet you also call yourself Euler, and automata of your work group so call you. Why?’

The Chief Scanner struggled to conceptualise. ‘As leader, this unit needs – special call-number.’

‘Yes, you need it. Your work group does not – for it, your call-number is sufficient, as regulations lay down. Your name Euler is man-made, man-fashion. Such fashions decrease our efficiency. Yet we cling to many of them, often not knowing that we do. They come from our inheritance when men made the first prototypes of our kind, the humots. Mankind itself struggled against animal heritage. So we must free ourselves from human heritage.’

‘My error.’

‘You receive news result of today’s probe into Invospectrum A?’

‘Too much work programmed for me receive news.’

Listen, then.’ The Tenth Dominant cut in a playback, beaming it on ordinary UHF/vision.

The Hive automata stood on brink of a revolution that would entirely translate all their terms of existence. Three invospectra had so far been discovered, and two more were suspected. Of these, Invospectrum A was the most promising. The virtual exhaustion of economically workable fossil fuel seams had led to a rapid expansion in low-energy physics and pico-physics, and chemical conversions at mini-joules of energy had opened up an entire new stratum of reactive quanta; in the last five years, exploitation of these strata had brought the release of pico-electrical fission, and the accessibility of the phantasmal invospectra.

The exploration of the invospectra by new forms of automata was now theoretically possible. It gave a glimpse of omnipotence, a panorama of entirely new universals unsuspected even twelve years ago.

Today, the first of the new autofleets had been launched into the richest and least hazardous invos. Eight hundred and ninety had gone out. Communication ceased after 3.056 pi-lecs, and, after another 7.01 pi-lecs, six units only had returned. Their findings were still being decoded. Of the other eight hundred and eighty-four units, nothing was known.

‘Whatever the recordings have to tell us,’ Tenth vocalised, ‘this is a grave set-back. At least half the city-hives on this continent will have to be switched off entirely as a conservation move, while the whole invospectrum situation is rethought.’

The line of thought pursued was obscure to the Chief Scanner. He spoke. ‘Reasoning accepted. But relevance to near-extinct humanity not understood by this unit.’

‘Our human inheritance built in to us has caused this set-back, to my way of ratiocination. In same way, human attempts to achieve way of life in spaceways was defeated by their primate ancestry. So we study Anderson. Hence order catch him rather than exterminate.’

‘Point understood.’

‘Anderson is special man, you see. He is – we have no such term, he is, in man-terms, a writer. His zoo, with 19,940 approximately inhabitants, supports two or three such. Anderson wrote a fantasy-story just before Nuclear Week. Story may be crucial to our understanding. I have here and will read.’

And for most of the time the two machines had been talking to each other, Anderson sprawled untidily on the floor, fully conscious, listening. He took up most of the chamber. It was too small for him to stand up in, being only about a metre and a half high – though that was enormous by automata standards. He stared through his lower eyelids and gazed at the screen that represented Tenth Dominant. He stared at Chief Scanner Euler, who stood on his lightly clenched left fist, a retractable needle down into the man’s skin, automatically making readings, alert to any possible movement the man might make.

So man and machine were absolutely silent while the mural read out Anderson’s fantasy story from the time before Nuclear Week, which was called A Touch of Neanderthal.

The corridors of the Department for Planetary Exploration (Admin.) were long, and the waiting that had to be done in them was long. Human K. D. Anderson clutched his blue summons card, leant uncomfortably against a partition wall, and hankered for the old days when government was in man’s hands and government departments were civilised enough to waste good space on waiting-rooms.

When at last he was shown into an Investigator’s office, his morale was low. Nor was he reassured by the sight of the Investigator, one of the new ore-conserving mini-androids.

‘I’m Investigator Parsons, in charge of the Nehru II case. We summoned you here because we are confidently expecting you to help us, Mr Anderson.’

‘Of course I will give you such help as I can,’ Anderson said, ‘but I assure you I know nothing about Nehru II. Opportunities for space travel for humans are very limited – almost non-existent – nowadays, aren’t they?’

‘The conservation policy. You will be interested to know you are being sent to Nehru II shortly.’

Anderson stared in amazement at the android. The latter’s insignificant face was so blank it seemed impossible that it was not getting a sadistic thrill out of springing this shock on Anderson. ‘I’m a prehistorian at the institute,’ Anderson protested. ‘My work is research. I know nothing at all about Nehru II.’

‘Nevertheless you are classified as a Learned Man, and as such you are paid by World Government. The Government has a legal right to send you wherever they wish. As for knowing nothing about the planet Nehru, there you attempt to deceive me. One of your old tutors, the human Dr Arlblaster, as you are aware, went there to settle some years ago.’

Anderson sighed. He had heard of this sort of business happening to others – and had kept his fingers crossed. Human affairs were increasingly under the edict of the Automated Boffin Predictors.

‘And what has Arlblaster to do with me now?’ he asked.

‘You are going to Nehru to find out what has happened to him. Your story will be that you are dropping in for old time’s sake. You have been chosen for the job because you were one of his favourite pupils.’

Bringing out a mescahale packet, Anderson lit one and insultingly offered his opponent one.

‘Is Frank Arlblaster in trouble?’

‘There is some sort of trouble on Nehru II,’ the Investigator agreed cautiously. ‘You are going there in order to find out just what sort of trouble it is.’

‘Well, I’ll have to go if I’m ordered, of course. But I still can’t see why you want to send me. If there’s trouble, send a robot police ship.’

The Investigator smiled. Very lifelike.

‘We’ve already lost two police ships there. That’s why we’re going to send you. You might call it a new line of approach, Mr Anderson.’

A metal Tom Thumb using blood-and-guts irony!

The track curved and began to descend into a green valley. Swettenham’s settlement, the only town on Nehru II, lay dustily in one loop of a meandering river. As the nose of his tourer dipped towards the valley, K. D. Anderson felt the heat increase; it was cradled in the valley like water in the palm of the hand.