The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

The exchange was overheard by a gossip columnist, and soon became famous. Not only was the controversy over the new time-travel drug raging (for this was in 1969), but Rickie and Mickie were the toasts of the switched-on pop world, the duo who finally knocked the groups from the charts.

The extra publicity encouraged Mickie to go ahead with his idea. He went to the famous London clinic where the drug was being administered to the few who were reckless or rich enough to pay for the injection.

The specialist shook his head and said gravely, ‘The effects of LSKK, the so-called time-travel drug, are very strange, Mr Houston. It’s not an experience to be undertaken lightly. We have a duty to warn any potential time-travellers that they take their life in their hands when they undergo the injection.’

‘Yeah, I heard all that jazz from my wife.’

‘Really? What your wife may not have told you is that the effects of the drug are subjective, just like the effects of LSD. With LSKK, you find yourself travelling through the sort of time in which you believe.

‘Thus, a Hindu who took LSKK would find himself travelling through vast cycles of time, since that concept accords with his religion. A holy man who believes only in God’s time would find he travelled straight into God’s presence. But for the average Englishman, like yourself, who believes time and progress go on straight ahead for ever, well, he will find himself doing just that.’

‘Ha, but I’m not the average Englishman! I don’t believe in time-travel at all. It’s just a lot of mystical nonsense and you’re cashing in on the fashion for it.’

The specialist put on a ghastly genial smile.

‘You’re just doing this for publicity, eh?’

‘All I believe in is the present. I live for the living moment, that’s me!’

That’s what Mickie said as the needle sank into his arm and 250ccs of LSKK coursed through his veins. Cameramen were there to record the moment, and Rickie kissed him. Truth to tell, he was a little tired of her, so that even the prospect of never seeing her again did not worry him. Strewn throughout time, he visualised an endless line of pretty girls.

Even as Rickie’s lips touched his, Mickie Houston disappeared.

Powered by LSKK, he drifted into the future, the staggering future where the centuries are thicker than the cells in the bloodstream. For most time-travellers, the effect of LSKK soon wore off and they settled to rest one by one in a remote time at a certain hour of a certain day, as even the leaf that blows furthest from an autumn tree will eventually come to rest somewhere.

But because Mickie believed only in the present moment, he drifted on for ever, imprisoned in his bubble of time like a bubble in a glacier.

Fixed in the gesture of kissing Rickie, he watched the millennia float by. He never wearied, since none of his personal time passed. But outside time passed; the world wearied. The great concourse of the human race began to thin.

Generation after generation had looked on with admiration and amusement as the handsome young man in old-fashioned clothes drifted through their lives, standing always on the same spot in the same romantic attitude. Indeed, Mickie had become something of a world-myth. A small green park was created round him in the midst of the fantastic city. The thousand thousand generations came to look at him here. But the mighty stream dwindled to a trickle eventually. Fixed in his bubble, Mickie saw the trees of the park grown shaggy and old and seamed. Eventually they fell one by one, and the great building behind them. The city was dying, and the human race with it. Few people came to see the world-myth now.

Another race of beings had inherited Earth, phantasmal beings like comets, blazing in solitary beauty like comets that had grown to prefer forests to the deserts of space. The sun that shone upon their millions of centuries of peace and fruitfulness shrank to the apparent size of a grape; it emitted an intense white light like a magnesium flare. So it seemed there was always moonlight on earth.

Still an occasional human came, fur-clad, to the place where Mickie stood imprisoned on the plain. Finally, two humans came together, very small and silent, to look at him for the best part of a magnesium-white day.

They asked each other, ‘He will be the last of our kind; but is he dead or is he immortal?’ So they echoed the once-famous exchange that Mickie and Rickie had had, so very long ago.

No one else ever came again. Even the comet-people faded eventually. Eventually, even the sun faded. Even the stars burned dim and faded. The universe had grown old. Time itself faded and … slowly … came to a stop …

There, poised on the brink of the last second of eternal time, Mickie stood transfixed in his bubble.

And with his lips still pursed in the moment of that long-gone kiss, he asked himself the final question, ‘Am I dead or am I immortal?’

Down the Up Escalation

Being alone in the house, not feeling too well, I kept the television burning for company. The volume was low. Three men mouthed almost soundlessly about the Chinese rôle in the Vietnam war. Getting my head down, I turned to my aunt Laura’s manuscript.

She had a new hairstyle these days. She looked very good; she was seventy-three, my aunt, and you were not intended to take her for anything less; but you could mistake her for ageless. Now she had written her first book – ‘a sort of autobiography’, she told me when she handed the bundle over. Terrible apprehension gripped me. I had to rest my head in my hand. Another heart attack coming.

On the screen, figures scrambling over mountain. All unclear. Either my eyesight going or a captured Chinese newsreel. Strings of animals – you couldn’t see what, film slightly overexposed. Could be reindeer crossing snow, donkeys crossing sand. I could hear them now, knocking, knocking, very cold.

A helicopter crashing towards the ground? Manuscript coming very close, my legs, my lips, the noise I was making.

There was a ship embedded in the ice. You’d hardly know there was a river. Snow had piled up over the piled-up ice.

Surrounding land was flat. There was music, distorted stuff from a radio, accordions, and balalaikas. The music came from a wooden house. From its misty windows, they saw the ship, sunk in the rotted light. A thing moved along the road, clearing away the day’s load of ice, ugly in form and movement. Four people sat in the room with the unpleasant music; two of them were girls in their late teens, flat faces with sharp eyes; they were studying at the university. Their parents ate a salad, two forks, one plate. Both man and woman had been imprisoned in a nearby concentration camp in Stalin’s time. The camp had gone now. Built elsewhere, for other reasons.

The ship was free of ice, sailing along in a sea of mist. It was no longer a pleasure ship but a research ship. Men were singing. They sang that they sailed on a lake as big as Australia.

‘They aren’t men. They are horses!’ My aunt.

‘There are horses aboard.’

‘I certainly don’t see any men.’

‘Funny-looking horses.’

‘Did you see a wolf then?’

‘I mean, more like ponies. Shaggy. Small and shaggy. Is that gun loaded?’

‘Naturally. They’re forest ponies – I mean to say, not ponies but reindeer. “The curse of the devil”, they call them.’

‘It’s the bloody rotten light! They do look like reindeer. But they must be men.’

‘Ever looked one in the eye? They are the most frightening animals.’

My father was talking to me again, speaking over the phone. It had been so long. I had forgotten how I loved him, how I missed him. All I remembered was that I had gone with my two brothers to his funeral; but that must have been someone else’s funeral, someone else’s father. So many people, good people, were dying.

I poured my smiles down the telephone, heart full of delight, easy. He was embarking on one of his marvellous stories. I gulped down his sentences.

‘That burial business was all a joke – a swindle. I collected two thousand pounds for that, you know, Bruce. No, I’m lying! Two and a half. It was chicken feed, of course, compared with some of the swindles I’ve been in. Did I ever tell you how Ginger Robbins and I got demobbed in Singapore at the end of the war, 1945? We bought a defunct trawler off a couple of Chinese business men – very nice old fatties called Pee – marvellous name! Ginger and I had both kept our uniforms, and we marched into a transit camp and got a detail of men organised – young rookies, all saluting us like mad – you’d have laughed! We got them to load a big LCT engine into a five-tonner, and we all drove out of camp without a question being asked, and – wham! – straight down to the docks and our old tub. It was boiling bloody hot, and you should have seen those squaddies sweat as they unloaded the engine and man-handled –’

‘Shit, Dad, this is all very funny and all that,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got some work to do, you know. Don’t think I’m not enjoying a great reminiscence, but I have to damned work, see? Okay?’

I rang off.

I put my head between my hands and – no, I could not manage weeping. I just put my head between my hands and wondered why I did what I did. Subconscious working, of course. I tried to plan out a science fiction story about a race of men who had only subconsciousnesses. Their consciousnesses had been painlessly removed by surgery.

They moved faster without their burdening consciousnesses, wearing lunatic smiles or lunatic frowns. Directly after the operation, scars still moist, they had restarted World War II, some assuming the roles of Nazis or Japanese or Jugoslav partisans or British fighter pilots in kinky boots. Many even chose to be Italians, the role of Mussolini being so keenly desired that at one time there were a dozen Duces striding about, keeping company with the droves of Hitlers.

Some of these Hitlers later volunteered to fly with the Kamikazes.

Many women volunteered to be raped by the Wehrmacht and turned nasty when the requirements were filled. When a concentration camp was set up, it was rapidly filled; people have a talent for suffering. The history of the war was rewritten a bit. They had Passchendaele and the Somme in; a certain President Johnson led the British forces.

The war petered out in a win for Germany. Few people were left alive. They voted themselves second-class citizens, mostly becoming Jewish Negroes or Vietnamese. There was birching between consenting adults. These good folk voted unanimously to have their subconsciousnesses removed, leaving only their ids.

I was on the floor. My study. The name of the vinolay was – it had a name, that rather odious pattern of little wooden chocks. I had it on the tip of my tongue. When I sat up, I realised how cold I was, cold and trembling, not working very well.

My body was rather destructive to society, as the Top Clergy would say. I had used it for all sorts of things; nobody knew where it had been. I had used it in an unjust war. Festival. It was called Festival. Terrible name, surely impeded sales.

I could not get up. I crawled across the floor towards the drink cupboard in the next room. Vision blurry. As I looked up, I saw my old aunt’s manuscript on the table. One sheet had fluttered down on to the Festival. I crawled out into the dining-room, through the door, banging myself as I went. Neither mind nor body was the precision ballistic missile it once had been.

The bottle. I got it open before I saw it was Sweet Martini, and dropped it. It seeped into the carpet; no doubt that had a name too. Weary, I rested my head in the mess.

‘If I die now, I shall never read Aunt Laura’s life …’

Head on carpet, bottom in air, I reached and grasped the whisky bottle. Why did they make the stuff so hard to get at? Then I drank. It made me very ill indeed.

It was Siberia again, the dread reindeer sailing eternally their ships across the foggy ice lakes. They were munching things, fur and wood and bone, the saliva freezing into icicles as it ran from their jaws. Terrible noise, like the knocking of my heart.

I was laughing. Whoever died dreaming of reindeer – who but Lapps? Digging my fingers into the nameless carpet, I tried to sit up. It proved easier to open my eyes.

In the shady room, a woman was sitting. She had turned from the window to look at me. Gentle and reassuring lines and planes composed her face. It took a while to see it as a face; even as an arrangement against a window, I greatly liked it.

The woman came over to look closely at me. I realised I was in bed before I realised it was my wife. She touched my brow, making my nervous system set to work on discovering whether the signal was a pain or pleasure impulse, so that things in there were too busy for me to hear what she was saying. The sight of her speaking was pleasurable; it moved me to think that I should answer her.

‘How’s Aunt Laura?’

The messages were coming through, old old learning sorting out speech, hearing, vision, tactile sensations, and shunting them through the appropriate organs. The doctor had been; it had only been a slight one, but this time I really would have to rest up and take all the pills and do nothing foolish; she had already phoned the office and they were very understanding. One of my brothers was coming round, but she was not at all sure whether he should be allowed to see me. I felt entirely as she did about that.

‘I’ve forgotten what it was called.’

‘Your brother Bob?’

My speech was a little indistinct. I had a creepy feeling about whether I could move the limbs I knew were bundled with me in the bed. We’d tackle that challenge as and when necessary.

‘Not Bob. Not Bob. The…the …’

‘Just lie there quietly, darling. Don’t try to talk.’

‘The…carpet …’

She went on talking. The hand on the forehead was a good idea. Irritably, I wondered why she didn’t do it to me when I was well and better able to appreciate it. What the hell was it called? Roundabout?

‘Roundabout …’

‘Yes, darling. You’ve been here for several hours, you know. You aren’t quite awake yet, are you?’

‘Shampoo …’

‘Later, perhaps. Lie back now and have another little doze.’

‘Variety …’

‘Try and have another little doze.’

One of the difficulties of being a publisher is that one has to fend off so many manuscripts submitted by friends of friends. Friends always have friends with obsessions about writing. Life would be simple – it was the secret of a happy life, not to have friends of friends. Supposing you were cast away on a desert island disc, Mr Hartwell, what eight friends of friends would you take with you, provided you had an inexhaustible supply of manuscripts?

I leaned across the desk and said, ‘But this is worse than ever. You aren’t even a friend of a friend of a friend, auntie.’

‘And what am I if I’m not a friend of a friend?’

‘Well, you’re an aunt of a nephew, you see, and after all, as an old-established firm, we have to adhere to certain rules of – etiquette, shall we call it, by which –’

It was difficult to see how offended she was. The pile of manuscript hid most of her face from view. I could not remove it, partly because there was a certain awareness that this was really the sheets. Finally I got them open.

‘It’s your life, Bruce. I’ve written your life. It could be a bestseller.’

‘Variety… No, Show Business …’

‘I thought of calling it “By Any Other Name” …’

‘We have to adhere to certain rules …’

It was better when I woke again. I had the name I had been searching for: Festival. Now I could not remember what it was the name of.

The bedroom had changed. There were flowers about. The portable TV set stood on the dressing-table. The curtains were drawn back and I could see into the garden. My wife was still there, coming over, smiling. Several times she walked across to me, smiling. The light came and went, the flowers changed position, colour, the doctor got in her way. Finally she reached me.

‘You’ve made it! You’re marvellous!’

‘You’ve made it! You’re marvellous!’

No more trouble after that. We had the TV on and watched the war escalate in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Returning health made me philosophical. ‘That’s what made me ill. Nothing I did…under-exercise, over-eating…too much booze…too many fags…just the refugees.’

‘I’ll turn it off if it upsets you.’

‘No. I’m adapting. They won’t get me again. It’s the misery the TV sets beam out from Vietnam all over the world. That’s what gives people heart attacks. Look at lung cancer – think how it has been on the increase since the war started out there. They aren’t real illnesses in the old sense, they’re sort of prodromic illness, forecasting some bigger sickness to come. The whole world’s going to escalate into a Vietnam.’

She jumped up, alarmed. ‘I’ll switch it off!’

‘The war?’

‘The set.’

The screen went blank. I could still see them. Thin women in those dark blue overalls, all their possessions slung from a frail bamboo over a frail shoulder. Father had died about the time the French were slung out. We were all bastards. Perhaps every time one of us died, one of the thin women lived. I began to dream up a new religion.

They had the angels dressed in UN uniform. They no longer looked like angels, not because of the uniform but because they were all disguised as a western diplomat – nobody in particular, but jocular, uneasy, stolid, with stony eyes that twinkled.

My angel came in hotfoot and said, ‘Can you get a few friends of friends together? The refugees are waiting on the beach.’ There were four of us in the hospital beds. We scrambled up immediately, dragging bandages and sputum cups and bed pans. The guy next to me came trailing a plasma bottle. We climbed into the helicopter.

We prayed en route. ‘Bet the Chinese and Russian volunteers don’t pray on the trip,’ I insinuated to the angel.

‘The Chinese and Russians don’t volunteer.’

‘So you make a silly insinuation, you get a silly innuendo,’ the plasma man said.

God’s hand powered the chopper. Faster than engines but maybe less reliable. We landed on the beach beside a foaming river. Heat pouring down and up the sideways. The refugees were forlorn and dirty. A small boy stood hatless with a babe hatless on his back. Both ageless, eyes like reindeer’s, dark, moist, cursed.

‘I’ll die for those two,’ I said, pointing.

‘One for one. Which one do you choose?’

‘Hell, come on now, angel, isn’t my soul as good as any two god-damned Viet kid souls?’

‘No discounts here, bud. Yours is shop-soiled, anyway.’

‘Okay, the bigger kid.’

He was whisked instantly into the helicopter. I saw his dirty and forlorn face at the window. The baby sprawled screaming on the sand. It was naked, scabs on both knees. It yelled in slow motion, piddling, trying to burrow into the sand. I reached slowly out to it, but the exchange had been made, the angel turned the napalm on to me. As I fell, the baby went black in my shadow.

‘Let me switch the fire down, if you’re too hot, darling.’

‘Yuh. And a drink …’

She helped me struggle into a sitting position, put her arm round my shoulders. Glass to lips, teeth, cool water in throat.

‘God, I love you, Ellen, thank God you’re not …’

‘What? Another nightmare?’

‘Not Vietnamese …’

It was better then, and she sat and talked about what had been going on, who had called, my brother, my secretary, the Roaches…‘the Roaches have called’…‘any Earwigs’?…the neighbours, the doctor. Then we were quiet a while.

‘I’m better now, much better. The older generation’s safe from all this, honey. They were born as civilians. We weren’t. Get me auntie’s manuscript, will you?’

‘You’re not starting work this week.’

‘It won’t hurt me. She’ll be writing about her past, before the war and all that. The past’s safe. It’ll do me good. The prose style doesn’t matter.’

I settled back as she left the room. Flowers stood before the TV, making it like a little shrine.

Full Sun

The shadows of the endless trees lengthened toward evening and then disappeared, as the sun was consumed by a great pile of cloud on the horizon. Balank was ill at ease, taking his laser rifle from the trundler and tucking it under his arm, although it meant more weight to carry uphill and he was tiring.

The trundler never tired. They had been climbing these hills most of the day, as Balank’s thigh muscles informed him, and he had been bent almost double under the oak trees, with the machine always matching his pace beside him, keeping up the hunt.

During much of the wearying day, their instruments told them that the werewolf was fairly close. Balank remained alert, suspicious of every tree. In the last half hour, though, the scent had faded. When they reached the top of this hill, they would rest – or the man would. The clearing at the top was near now. Under Balank’s boots, the layer of dead leaves was thinning.

He had spent too long with his head bent toward the brown-gold carpet; even his retinas were tired. Now he stopped, breathing the sharp air deeply, and stared about. The view behind them, across tumbled and almost uninhabited country, was magnificent, but Balank gave it scarcely a glance. The infrared warning on the trundler sounded, and the machine pointed a slender rod at a man-sized heat source ahead of them. Balank saw the man almost at the same moment as the machine.

The stranger was standing half-concealed behind the trunk of a tree, gazing uncertainly at the trundler and Balank. When Balank raised a hand in tentative greeting, the stranger responded hesitantly. When Balank called out his identification number, the man came cautiously into the open, replying with his own number. The trundler searched in its files, issued an okay, and they moved forward.

As they got level with the man, they saw he had a small mobile hut pitched behind him. He shook hands with Balank, exchanging personal signals, and gave his name as Cyfal.

Balank was a tall slender man, almost hairless, with the closed expression on his face that might be regarded as characteristic of his epoch. Cyfal, on the other hand, was as slender but much shorter, so that he appeared stockier; his thatch of hair covered all his skull and obtruded slightly onto his face. Something in his manner, or perhaps the expression around his eyes, spoke of the rare type of man whose existence was chiefly spent outside the city.

‘I am the timber officer for this region,’ he said, and indicated his wristcaster as he added, ‘I was notified you might be in this area, Balank.’

‘Then you’ll know I’m after the werewolf.’

‘The werewolf? There are plenty of them moving through this region, now that the human population is concentrated almost entirely in the cities.’

Something in the tone of the remark sounded like social criticism to Balank; he glanced at the trundler without replying.

‘Anyhow, you’ve got a good night to go hunting him,’ Cyfal said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Full moon.’

Balank gave no answer. He knew better than Cyfal, he thought, that when the moon was at full, the werewolves reached their time of greatest power.

The trundler was ranging about nearby, an antenna slowly spinning. It made Balank uneasy. He followed it. Man and machine stood together on the edge of a little cliff behind the mobile hut. The cliff was like the curl of foam on the peak of a giant Pacific comber, for here the great wave of earth that was this hill reached its highest point. Beyond, in broken magnificence, it fell down into fresh valleys. The way down was clothed in beeches, just as the way up had been in oaks.

‘That’s the valley of the Pracha. You can’t see the river from here.’ Cyfal had come up behind them.