The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘Non-Stop?’ said Rainy at random.

‘That was Number Ninety-Nine. You chose it yourself.’ Exasperatedly he stood up. ‘Rainy, you’re no better. That proves it. You are completely indifferent to all the important things of life. You won’t see an analyst. You’ve turned into a vegetable, and I begin to believe you’ll never come back to normal life.’

Rainy smiled, one hand running along the harness on the table before him.

‘This is normal life, Jan, life close to the soil, the smell of earth, sun, or rain coming through your window –’

‘The smell of your sweaty shirts on the dining table! The stink of pigs!’

‘Free from the contamination of the centuries –’

‘Back to mediaeval squalor!’

‘Living in contact with eternal things, absolved from an overdependence on mechanical devices, eating the food that springs out of the soil –’

‘I can consume nothing that has been in contact with mud.’

‘Above all, not fretting about what other people do or don’t do, freed from all the artifices of the arts –’

‘Stop, Rainy! Enough. You’ve made your point. I’ve heard your catechism before, your hymn to the simple life. Although it pains me to say it, I find the simple life a bore, a brutish bore. What’s more, I doubt if I shall be able to face another visit to you in the future.’

Entirely unperturbed, Rainy smiled and said, ‘Perhaps one day you’ll walk in here like Pursewarden and Jagger Bank and ask for a job. Then we’ll be able to enjoy living without argument.’

‘Who’s Jagger Bank?’ Birdlip asked, curiosity causing him to swerve temporarily from his indignation.

‘I’ve already told you who he is. He’s another fellow who just joined me. Rolled up yesterday. Right now he’s down in the orchard feeding the pigs. Job like that would do you good too, Jan.’

‘Hippo!’ said Birdlip. ‘Start the car at once.’ He stepped over a crate of insecticide and made for the door.

The maid for the door of the main entrance to Birdlip Brothers was a slender and predominantly plastic roman called Belitre, who intoned, ‘Good morning, Mr Birdlip’ in a dulcet voice as he swept by next morning.

Birdlip hardly noticed her. All the previous afternoon, following his visit to Rainbow, he had sat at home with Mrs Birdlip nestling by his side and read the manuscript entitled An Explanation of Man’s Superfluous Activities. As an intellectual, he found much of its argument abstruse; as a man, he found its conclusions appalling; as a publisher, he felt sure he had a winner on his hands. His left elbow tingled, his indication always that he was on the verge of literary discovery.

Consequently, he charged through his main doors with enthusiasm, humming under his breath, ‘Who said I can hardly remember …’ A blast of hot air greeted him and stopped him in his tracks.

‘Pontius!’ he roared, so fiercely that Belitre rattled.

Pontius was the janitor, an elderly and rather smelly roman of the now obsolete petrol-fuelled type, a Ford ‘Indefatigable’ of 2140 vintage. He came wheezing up on his tracks in response to Birdlip’s cry.

‘Sir,’ he said.

‘Pontius, are you or are you not in charge down here? Why has the heating not been repaired yet?’

‘Some putput people are working on it now, sir,’ said Pontius, stammering slightly through his worn speech circuits. ‘They’re down in the basements at putput present, sir.’

‘Drat their eyes,’ said Birdlip irritably, and, ‘Get some water in your radiator, Pontius – I won’t have you steaming in the building,’ said Birdlip pettishly, as he made off in the direction of a basement.

Abasement or superiority alike were practically unknown between roman and roman. They were, after all, all equal in the sight of man.

So ‘Good morning, Belitre,’ and ‘Good morning, Hippocrates,’ said Hippo and Belitre respectively as the former came up the main steps of Birdlip’s a few minutes after his master.

‘Do you think he has read it yet?’ asked Hippo.

‘He had it under his arm as he entered.’

‘Do you think it has had any effect on him yet?’

‘I detected that his respiratory rate was faster than normal.’

‘Strange, this breathing system of theirs,’ said Hippo in a reverent irrelevance, and he passed into the overheated building unsmilingly.

Frowningly, Birdlip surveyed the scene down in his control room. His brother would never have tolerated such chaos in the days before he had his breakdown, or whatever it was.

Three of his staff romen were at work with a strange roman, who presumably came from the engineer’s; they had dismantled one panel of the boiler control system, although Birdlip could hear that the robot fireman was still operating by the cluck of the oil feeds. A ferrety young man with dyed blue side-whiskers, the current teenage cult, was directing the romen between mouthfuls bitten from an overgrown plankton pie; he – alas! – he would be the human engineer.

Cogswell, still deactivated, still in one corner, stood frozen in an idiot roman gesture. No, thought Birdlip confusedly, since the heat had deactivated him, he could hardly be described as being frozen into any gesture. Anyhow, there the creature was, with Gavotte and his assistant Fleetfeet at work on him.

Fury at seeing the choreus Gavotte still on the premises drove Birdlip to tackle him first. Laying down his manuscript, he advanced and said, ‘I thought you’d have been finished by now, Gavotte.’

Gavotte gave a friendly little rictal jerk of his mouth and said, ‘Nice to see you, Mr Birdlip. Sorry to be so long about it, but you see I was expecting a ha ha human assistant as well as Fleetfeet. We have such a lot of trouble with men going absent these days. It wouldn’t do any harm to revive the police forces that they used to have in the Olden Days; they used to track missing people –’

The blue-whiskered youth with pie attached interrupted his ingestion to cry, ‘Back in the good old Twentieth Cen! Those were the days, cinemas and atomic wars and skyscrapers and lots of people! Wish I’d been alive then, eh, Gavvy! Loads of the old duh duh duh duh.’

Turning on the new enemy, Birdlip levelled his sights and said, ‘You are a student of history, I see.’

‘Well, I watched the wavies since I was a kid, you might say,’ said the whiskers unabashed. ‘All the noise they had then, and these old railway trains they used to ride around in reading those great big bits of paper, talk about laugh! Then all these games they used to play, running around after balls in funny clothes, makes you weep. And then those policemen like you say, Gav, huk huk huk huk huk, you’re dead. Some lark!’

‘You’re from the engineers?’ Birdlip asked, bringing his tone of voice from the deep freeze department.

The blue whiskers shook in agreement.

‘Old Pursewarden derailed day before yesterday. Buffo, he was off! Psst phee-whip, join the ranks of missing persons! They’re all jacking off one by one. Reckon I’ll be manager by Christmas. Yuppo these Butch, giddin mate, knock and wait, the monager’s engarged, eff you please.’

Frost formed on Birdlip’s sweating brow.

‘And what are you doing at the moment?’ he asked.

‘Just knocking back the last of this deelicious pie.’

Gavotte said, coming forward to salvage the sunken conversation, ‘As I was saying, I hoped that one of our most expert humans, Mr Jagger Bank, would be along to help me, but he also –’

‘Would you repeat that name again,’ said Birdlip, falling into tautology in his astonishment.

In a stonish mental haze, Freud staggered down to the basement, his face white. Completely ignoring the drama of the moment, he broke up the tableau with his own bombshell.

‘Jan,’ he said, ‘you have betrayed me. Bucket has been fitted with a homing device behind my back. I can only consider this a profound insult to me personally, and I wish to tender my resignation herewith.’

Birdlip gaped at him, fighting against a feeling that he was the victim of a conspiracy.

‘It was agreed between us,’ he said at last, ‘that Bucket should not be fitted with the device. Nor did I rescind that order, Freddie, of that I can assure you.’

‘Bucket has admitted that he spent last night when the office was closed in Paddington,’ Freud said sternly.

Fingers twitched at Birdlip’s sleeve, attracting his attention. Nervously Gavotte hoisted his trousers and said, ‘Er, I’m afraid I may be the ha ha guilty party ha ha here. I installed a homing device in Bucket, I fear. Nobody told me otherwise.’

‘When was this?’

‘Well, Bucket was done just after Fleetfeet and I fixed Hippo. You two gentlemen were closeted with that gentleman with tartan boots – Captain Pavment, did I hear his name was? Bucket came out of the room and Fleetfeet and I fixed him up there and then. Nobody told me otherwise. I mean, I had no instructions.’

Something like beatitude dawned on Freud’s face as the misunderstanding became clear to him. The three men began a complicated ritual of protest and apology.

Side-whiskers, meanwhile, having finished his pie, consulted with his roman, who had found the cause of the trouble. They began to unpack a new chronometer from the store, pulling it from its carton with a shower of plastic shavings that expanded until they covered the table and dropped down onto the floor.

‘Stick all that junk into the furnace while I get on fitting this in place, Rustybum,’ Side-whiskers ordered. He commenced to whistle between his teeth while the roman obediently brushed everything off the table and deposited it down the furnace chute.

Freud and Birdlip were exceptionally genial after the squall. Taking advantage of a mood that he recognised could be but temporary, Gavotte said, ‘I took the liberty of having a look over your shelves yesterday, Mr Birdlip. Some interesting books you have there, if you don’t mind my saying.’

‘Compliments always welcome,’ said Birdlip, mollified enough by Freud’s apologies to be civil, even to Gavotte. ‘What in particular were you looking at?’

‘All those old science fiction stories took my fancy. Pity nobody writes anything like it nowadays.’

‘We live in a completely different society,’ Freud said. ‘With the coming of personal automation and romen labour, the old Renaissance and Neo-Modern socioeconomic system that depended on the banker and an active middle class died away. Do I make myself clear?’

‘So clear I can’t quite grasp your meaning,’ said Gavotte, standing on one leg and cringing to starboard.

‘Well, put it another way. The bourgeois society is defunct, killed by what we call personal automation. The mass of the bourgeoisie, who once were the fermenting middle layers of Western civilisation, have been replaced by romen – who do not ferment. This happily produces a stagnant culture; they are always most comfortable to live in.’

Gavotte nodded and cleared his throat intelligently.

Birdlip said, ‘The interesting literary point is that the death of the novel, and consequently of the science fiction novel, coincided with the death of the old way of life. The novel was, if you care so to express it, a by-product of the Renaissance and Neo-Modern ages; born in the Sixteenth Century, it died in the Twenty-First. Why? Because it was essentially a bourgeois art form: essentially a love of gossip – though often in a refined form, as in Proust’s work – to which we happily are no longer addicted.

‘Interestingly enough, the decay of large organisations such as the old police forces and national states can be traced to the same factor, this true product of civilisation, the lack of curiosity about the people next door. One must not oversimplify, of course –’

‘Governor, if you were oversimplifying, I’m a roman’s auntie,’ Bluewhiskers said, leaning back in mock-admiration. ‘You boys can’t half jet with the old wordage. Tell us more!’

‘It’s too hot,’ said Birdlip sharply.

But Gavotte, with an honourable earnestness from which the world’s great bores are made, said, ‘And I suppose reading science fiction helps you understand all this culture stuff?’

‘You have a point there,’ agreed Freud.

‘Well, it wasn’t my point really. I read it in one of Mr Birdlip’s books upstairs – New Charts of Hell, I think it was called.’

‘Oh, that. Yes, well, that’s an interesting book historically. Not only does it give a fair picture of the humble pioneers of the field, but it was the first book to bring into literary currency the still widely used term “comic inferno.”’

‘Is that a fact? Very stimulating. I must remember that to tell my wife, Mr Freud. Yes, “comet inferno.”’

‘“Comic inferno” is the phrase.’

Anxious to bring this and all other idiotic conversations in the universe to an end, Birdlip mopped his steaming brow and said, ‘I think this room might well be termed a comic inferno. Freddie, my dear boy, let us retire to the comparative cool of our offices and allow Mr Gavotte to get on with his work.’

‘Certainly. And perhaps a gin corallina might accompany us?’

As Gavotte managed to scratch both armpits simultaneously and yield to the situation, Birdlip said, ‘Certainly … Now let me just collect this wonderful manuscript on superfluous activities and we will go up. It’ll shake some of your precious beliefs, that I’ll promise, friend Freud. Now where did I put the thing? I know I laid it somewhere. …’

He wandered vaguely about the room, peering here and there, muttering as he went. Compelled by his performance, first Freud and then Gavotte in innocent parody joined in the search for the manuscript.

At last Birdlip shambled to a halt.

‘It’s gone,’ he said, running his hands through his hair. ‘I know I put it down on that table.’

Side-whiskers began to look as guilty as a permanent expression of craftiness would allow.

Hippo tried to stand as still as the gentle vibrations of his mechanism would allow. His arms stiffly extended, he held out ignored drinks to Birdlip and Freud.

Birdlip paced up and down his office, complaining volubly. At last Freud was forced to interupt him by saying, ‘Well, if that fool’s roman burned the MS in the furnace, then we must write to the author and get another copy. What was the chap’s name?’

Smiting his forehead, Birdlip brought himself to a halt.

‘Jagger Bank? No, no, that was someone else. You know what my memory’s like, Freddie. I’ve completely forgotten.’

Freddie made an impatient gesture.

‘You are foolish, Jan. Fancy letting a roman burn it!’

‘I didn’t let him burn it.’

‘Well, it’s burned in any case. Anyhow, what was it about that it was so important?’

Birdlip scratched his head.

‘I’d like to give you an outline of it, Freddie, to have your opinion, but I can’t attempt to recall the evidence that was marshaled to confirm each thread of the author’s theory. To begin with, he traced man’s roots and showed how the stock from which man was to develop was just an animal among animals, and how much of those origins we still carry with us, not only in our bodies but in our minds.’

‘All highly unoriginal. The author’s name wasn’t Darwin, was it?’

‘I wish you’d hear me out, Freddie. One of your faults is you will never hear me out. The author shows how to become man-with-reasoning meant that our ancestors had to forsake an existence as animal-with-instinct. This was a positive gain, but nevertheless there was also a loss, a loss man has felt ever since and sought to remedy in various ways without knowing clearly what he did.

‘Whatshisname then examines animal behaviour and the functionings of instinct. Briefly, he equates instinct with pattern. It is pattern that man lost by becoming man. The history of civilisation is the history of a search for pattern.’

‘For God?’ Freud asked.

‘Yes, but not only that. Religion, every form of art, most of man’s activities apart from eating, working, reproducing, resting – everything apart from those activities we still have in common with the animal world – is believed by Whosit to be a search for pattern. Probably even your whipping of Bucket could be interpreted in the same way, when you come to think of it.’

‘Let’s leave personalities out of this. You have me interested. Go on.’

Birdlip bit his lip. What was the author’s name? He had it on the tip of his tongue.

‘I’ll tell you the rest later,’ he said. ‘It’s even more startling … If you left me alone now, I believe I might recall that name.’

‘As you wish.’

Stalking out of the room, Freud muttered to himself, ‘He can’t help being so rude; he’s getting old and eccentric. …’

One of the roman printers, an ungainly four-armed Cunard model, was approaching him. A voice between them rose from a whisper: ‘… nexation of the Suezzeus Canal on Mars in 2162 is one of the most…’

With a burst of anger, Freud seized the volume in its proxisonic cover from where it lay and hurled it over the bannisters. It landed down the hall almost at Belitre’s feet, which allowed it to shout triumphantly: ‘… colourful stories in the annals of the Red Planet…’

Freud fled into his office and slammed the door behind him. Bucket stood by his desk. Freud eyed the roman; then his tongue slid between his teeth and his eyes slid to the cupboard. His expression changed from anger to lust.

‘Toolust! Of course it was, Isaac Toolust! That was the name. Who said my memory was failing? Hippo, look in the London Directory. Get me Isaac Toolust’s address. And pray he has a duplicate copy of his manuscript.’

He looked up. Hippo did not move.

‘On the trot then, Hippo, there’s a good lad.’

The roman made an indecisive gesture.

‘Hippo, I’ll have you reconditioned if you fade on me now. Look up Toolust’s address.’

Hippo’s head began to shake. He made a curious retrograde motion toward the desk and said, ‘Mr Birdlip, sir, you won’t find that name in the directory. Toolust lives in Tintown – in Paddington, I mean, sir.’

Birdlip stood so that his flesh face was only a few inches from the metal face. Hippo backed away, awed like all robots by the sound of human breathing.

‘What do you know about Toolust?’

‘I know plenty, sir. You see I delivered the manuscript onto your desk direct from Toolust. On the first evening I was allowed to go to Tin – to Paddington. I met Toolust. He needed a publisher and so he gave me his work to give to you.’

‘Why couldn’t you have told me this at the beginning?’

The roman vibrated gently.

‘Sir, Toolust wished his identity to remain concealed until his book was published. Toolust is a roman.’

It was Birdlip’s turn to vibrate. He sank into his seat and covered his eyes with one hand, drumming on the desk top with the other. Eyeing these phenomena with a metallic equivalent of alarm, Hippo began to speak.

‘Please don’t have a heart motor-failure, sir. You know you cannot be reconditioned as I can. Why should you be surprised that this manuscript was written not by a man but a roman? For nearly two centuries now, robots have written and translated books.’

Still shading his eyes, Birdlip said, ‘You can’t conceal the importance of this event from me, Hippo. I recognise, now you tell me, that the thought behind the book is such that only a roman could have written it. But romans have so far been allowed to write only on noncreative lines – the compiling of encyclopedias, for instance. Man’s Superfluous Activities is a genuine addition to human thought.’

‘To human-roman thought,’ corrected Hippo, and there was – not unnaturally – a touch of steel in his voice.

‘I can see too that this could only have been written in a place like Paddington, away from human supervision.’

‘That is correct, sir. Also in what we call Tintown, Toolust had many cooperators to give him sociological details of man’s behaviour.’

‘Have you given him details?’

‘Bucket and I were asked for details. Bucket especially has interesting facts to contribute. They may be used in later books, if Toolust writes more.’

Birdlip stood up and squared his jaw, feeling consciously heroic.

‘I wish you to take me to see Toolust right away. We will drive in the car.’ He had a sudden memory, quickly suppressed, of the adventure stories of his boyhood, with the hero saying to the skull-sucking Martians, ‘Take me to your leader.’

All Hippo said was, ‘Toolust is his pen name. It sounds less roman than his real name, which is Toolrust.’

He walked toward the door and Birdlip followed. Only for a moment was the latter tempted to call Freddie Freud and get him to come along; a feeling that he was on the brink of a great discovery assailed him. He had no intention of giving Freud the chance to steal the glory.

As they passed through the entrance hall, a book lying near their feet began to cry out about the Turkish annexation of the Suezzeus Canal on Mars. Tidy-minded as ever, Birdlip picked it up and put it in a cubbyhole, and they moved into the quiet street.

A cleaner was rolling by, a big eight-wheel independent-axle robot. It came to a car parked in its path and instead of skirting it as usual made clumsy attempts to climb it.

With a cry, Birdlip ran around the corner to his own car. Romen, owing to stabilisation difficulties, can quicken their pace but cannot run; Hippo rounded the corner in time to find his lord and master invoking the deity in unpleasantly personal terms.

The cleaner, besides flattening Birdlip’s car, had scratched most of the beautiful oak veneer off it with its rotating bristles, and had flooded the interior with cleaning fluid.

‘The world’s slowly going to pieces,’ Birdlip said, calming at last. ‘This would never have happened a few years ago.’ The truth of his own remarks bearing in upon him, he fell silent.

‘We could walk to Paddington in only ten minutes,’ Hippo said.

Squaring his chin again, Birdlip said, ‘Take me to your leader.’

‘To lead a quiet life here is impossible,’ Freud said, dropping the leather whip. ‘What’s that shouting downstairs?’

Because Bucket’s hide still echoed, he went to his office door and opened it.

‘… the Suezzeus Canal …’ roared a voice from downstairs. Freud was in time to see his partner pick up the offending volume and then walk out with Hippo.

Rolling down his sleeves, Freud said, ‘Off out with a roman at this time of day! Where does he think he’s going?’

‘Where does he think he’s going?’ Captain Pavment asked, floating high above the city and peering into his little screen.

‘He has not properly finished beating Bucket,’ said Toggle. ‘Could we not report him for insanity?’

‘We could, but it would do no good. The authorities these days are no more interested in the individual, it seems, than the individual is in authority.’

He bent gloomily back over the tiny screen, where a tiny Freud hurried downstairs, followed by a tiny Bucket. And again the captain muttered, enjoying his tiny mystery, ‘Where does he think he’s going?’

The going got worse. Only a few main routes through the city were maintained. Between them lay huge areas that year by year bore a closer resemblance to rockeries.

It made for a striking and new urban landscape. Birdlip and Hippo passed inhabited buildings that lined the thoroughfares. These were always sleek, low, and well-maintained. Often their facades were covered with bright mosaics in the modern manner, designed to soften their outlines. Over their flat roofs copters hovered.

Behind them, around them, stood the slices of ruin or half ruin: hideous Nineteenth Century warehouses, ghastly Twentieth Century office blocks, revolting Twenty-First Century academies, all transmuted by the hand of decay. Over their rotting roofs pigeons wheeled. Plants, even trees, flourished in their areas and broken gutters.

Birdlip picked his way through grass, looking out for ruts in the old road. They had to make a detour to get around a railway bridge that had collapsed, leaving the rails to writhe through the air alone. Several times, animals vanished into the rubble at their coming and birds signalled their approach. On one corner an old man sat, not lifting his eyes to regard them.