The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s

That there should be no trust between men was an integral part of the Teaching. It seemed a miracle to Brandyholm to be standing again in the peppered night of space: he had momentarily expected a bullet in the back from the priest’s gun.

He squared his shoulders inside the space suit and began to walk slowly back to the escape lock in the giant hull. His feeble bluff had succeeded; liars like Carappa can easily be taken in by lies. Without a doubt Crooner would trick the priest sooner or later, whereas he, Tom Brandyholm, had escaped by returning; he had the power that lay in knowledge. His was the victory.

He came to the lock. Remembering Carappa could hear over the suit-to-suit, he said, ‘Good-bye, priest. I’m just going back into the rat run. Only it’s going to be a different rat run from now on. The Council of Five is going to be a Council of Six. Or if I don’t like their manners, it may just be a Council of One. You thought I was weak, but I’m not. I’m going to show ’em all.’

He clung to a hand-grip to steady himself. Ambition seemed suddenly to consume his very bones.

‘And remember Master Scott, Carappa?’ he continued. ‘He’ll be the first to go to the wall. And that girl Viann – ’ as he spoke her name, she seemed at that instant to be the reason for his return ‘– Viann might well be all that Gwenny never could be.’

The priest flung back an obscene answer which Brandyholm scarcely heeded. He activated the lock. Slowly the panel slid back. The ship! It always had been his world and always would: its confinement, its jungles, its foetid corridors, its taboos and terrors; but now he would be more than a mere hunter – he would be a ruler. Eagerly, he stepped inside.

A dozen figures awaited him. He drew up in amazement. Although they all wore suits and helmets, he recognised Viann at once. And another face that he knew was Master Scott’s. Master Scott, as did many of the others, held a weapon levelled at Brandyholm’s heart.

‘Yes, we’ve been listening carefully over the suit radios,’ Master Scott said. ‘You came back inopportunely, didn’t you?’

‘Uh – uh,’ Brandyholm began, but no words came. His last bolt had been shot. Now the journey was over. The pressures in his brain burst out against their artificial dam, flooding and breaking their neural paths. He tried to summon rage to his aid, to help and strengthen him, but it would not come. He reeled blindly in the semi-dark.

‘We were waiting quietly here to rush the relief rocket when it arrives,’ Scott said levelly. ‘And then in you come, with your big ideas. Well, I think there’s still time to finish you.’

He turned to look at Viann, who had rested a hand on his suit. She shook her head.

‘Leave him,’ she said. ‘He’s harmless now.’

Indeed, Brandyholm had slumped to his knees, almost in an attitude of prayer. The great stars beyond him were suddenly blotted out by the dark, arriving shape of the relief rocket.

Psyclops

Mmm I.

First statement: I am I. I am everything. Everything, everywhere.

The universe is constructed of me, I am the whole of it. Am I? What is that throbbing that is not of me? That must be me too; after a while I shall understand it. All now is dim. Dim mmmm.

Even I am dim. In all this great strangeness and darkness of me, in all this universe of me, I am shadow. A memory of me. Could I be a memory of … not – me? Paradox: if I am everything, could there be a not-me?

Why am I having thoughts? Why am I not, as I was before, just mmmm?

Wake up! It’s urgent!

No! Deny it! I am the universe. If you can speak to me you must be me, so I command you to be still. There must be only the soothing mmmm.

… you are not the universe! Listen!

Louder?

Can you hear at last?

Non-comprehension. I must be everything. Can there be a part of me, like the throbbing, which is … separate?

Am I getting through? Answer!

Who … are you?

Do not be frightened.

Are you another … universe?

I am not a universe. You are not a universe. You are in danger and I must help you.

Mmmm. Must be mmmm …

… If only there were a psychofoetalist within light-years of here … Well, keep trying. Wake up! You must wake up to survive!

Who are you?

I am your father.

Non-comprehension. Are you the throbbing which is not me?

No. I am a long way from you. Light-years away.

You bring me feelings of … pain.

Don’t be afraid of it, but know there is much pain all about you. I am in constant pain.

Interest.

Good! First things first. You are most important.

I know that. All this is not happening. Somehow I catch these echoes, these dreams.

Try to concentrate. You are only one of millions like you. You and I are of the same species: human beings. I am born, you are unborn.

Meaningless.

Listen! Your ‘universe’ is inside another human being. Soon you will emerge into the real universe.

Still meaningless. Curious.

Keep alert. I will send you pictures to help you understand …

Uh …? Distance? Sight? Colour? Form? Definitely do not like this. Frightened. Frightened of falling, insecure … Must immediately retreat to safe mmmm. Mmmm.

Better let him rest! After all, he’s only six months; at the Pre-natal Academies they don’t begin rousing and education till seven and a half months. And then they’re trained to the job. If only I knew – my leg, you blue swine!

That picture …

Well done! I’m really sorry to rouse you so early, but it’s vital.

Praise for me, warm feelings. Good. Better than being alone in the universe.

That’s a great step forward, son. I can almost realise how the Creator felt, when you say that.

Non-comprehension.

Sorry, my fault; let the thought slip by. Must be careful. You were going to ask me about the picture I sent you. Shall I send again?

Only a little at once. Curious. Shape, colour, beauty. Is that the real universe?

That was just Earth I showed you, where I was born, where I hope you will be born.

Non-comprehension. Show again … shapes, tones, scents … Ah, this time not so strange. Different?

Yes, a different picture. Many pictures of Earth. Look.

Ah … Better than my darkness … I know only my darkness, sweet and warm, yet I seem to remember those – trees.

That’s a race memory, son. Your faculties are beginning to work, now.

More beautiful pictures please.

We cannot waste too long on the pictures. I’ve got a lot to tell you before you get out of range. These blue devils –

Why do you cease sending so abruptly? Hello? … Nothing. Father? … Nothing. Was there ever anything, or have I been alone and dreaming?

Nothing in all my universe but the throbbing. Is someone here with me? No, no answer. I must ask the voice, if the voice comes back. Now I must mmmm. Am no longer content as I was before. Strange feelings. … I want more pictures; I want … to …

Mmmm.

Dreaming myself to be a fish, fin-tailed, flickering through deep, still water. All is green and warm and without menace, and I swim forever with assurance … And then the water splits into lashing cords and plunges down, down, down a sunlit cliff. I fight to turn back, carried forward, fighting to return to the deep, sure dark –

– if you want to save yourself! Wake if you want to save yourself! I can’t hold out much longer. Another few days across these mountains –

Go away! Leave me to myself. I can have nothing to do with you.

You must try and understand! I know it’s agony for you, but you must stir yourself and take in what I say. It is imperative.

Nothing is imperative here. And now my mind seems to clear. Yes! I exist in the darkness where formerly there was nothing. Yes, there are imperatives; that I can recognise. Father?

What are you trying to say?

Confused. Understanding better, trying harder, but so confused.

Do not worry about that. It is your twin sister. The Pollux II hospital diagnosed twins, one boy and one girl.

So many concepts I cannot grasp. I should despair but for curiosity prodding me on. I’m one of a pair?

There you have it. That is a little girl lying next to you: you can hear her heart beating. Your mother –

Stop, Stop! Too much to understand at once. Must think to myself about this.

Keep calm. There is something you must do for me – for us all. If you do that, there is no danger.

Tell me quickly.

As yet it is too difficult. In a few days you will be ready – if I can hang on that long.

Why is it difficult?

Only because you are small.

Where are you?

I am on a world like Earth which is ninety light-years from Earth and getting farther from you even as we communicate together.

Why? How? Don’t understand. So much is now beyond my understanding; before you came everything was peaceful and dim.

Lie quiet and don’t fret, son. You’re doing well; you take the points quickly, you’ll reach Earth yet. You are travelling toward Earth in a spaceship which left Mirone, planet where I am, sixteen days ago.

Send that picture of a spaceship again.

Coming up …

It is a kind of enclosure for us all. That idea I can more or less grasp, but you don’t explain distances to me satisfactorily.

These are big distances, what we call light-years. I can’t explain them for you properly because a human mind ever really grasps them.

Then they don’t exist.

Unfortunately they exist all right. But they are only comprehensible as mathematical concepts. OHHH! My leg …

Why are you stopping? I remember you suddenly stopped before. You send a horrible pain thought, then you are gone. Answer.

Wait a minute.

I can hardly hear you. Now I am interested, why do you not continue? Are you there?

… this is all beyond me. We’re all finished. Judy, my love, if only I could reach you …

Who are you talking to? This is frustrating. You are so faint and your message so blurred.

Call you when I can …

Fear and pain. Only symbols from his mind to mine, yet they have an uncomfortable meaning of their own – something elusive. Perhaps another race memory.

My own memory is not good. Unused. I must train it. Something he said eludes me; I must try and remember it. Yet why should I bother? None of it really concerns me, I am safe here, safe forever in this darkness. This whole thing is imagination. I am talking to myself. Wait! I can feel projections coming back again. Do not trouble to listen. Curious.

… gangrene, without doubt. Shall be dead before these blue devils get me to their village. So much Judy and I planned to do …

Are you listening, son?

No, no.

Listen carefully while I give you instructions.

Have something to ask you.

Please save it. The connection between us is growing attenuated; soon we will be out of mind range.

Indifferent.

My dear child, how could you be other than indifferent! I am truly sorry to have broken so early into your foetal sleep.

An unnamable sensation, half-pleasant; gratitude, love? No doubt a race memory.

It may be so. Try to remember me – later. Now, business. Your mother and I were on our way back to Earth when we stopped on this world Mirone, where I now am. It was an unnecessary luxury to break our journey. How bitterly now I wish we had never stopped.

Why did you?

Well, it was chiefly to please Judy – your mother. This is a beautiful world, around the North Pole, anyhow. We had wandered some way from the ship when a group of natives burst out upon us.

Natives?

People who live here. They are sub-human, blue-skinned and hairless – not pretty to look at.

Picture!

I think you’d be better without one. Judy and I ran for the ship. We were nearly up to it when a rock caught me behind the knee – they were pitching rocks at us – and I went down. Judy never noticed until she was in the airlock, and then the savages were on me. My leg was hurt; I couldn’t even put up a fight.

Please tell me no more of this. I want mmmm.

Listen, son! That’s all the frightening part. The savages are taking me over the mountains to their village. I don’t think they mean to harm me; I’m just a … curiosity to them.

Please let me mmmm.

You can go comatose as soon as I’ve explained how these little spacecraft work. Astrogating, the business of getting from one planet to another, is far too intricate a task for anyone but an expert to master. I’m not an expert; I’m a geohistorian. So the whole thing is done by a robot pilot. You feed it details like payload, gravities and destination, and it juggles them with the data in its memory banks and works out all the course for you – carries you home safely, in fact. Do you get all that?

This sounds complicated.

Now you’re talking like your mother, boy. She’s never bothered, but actually it’s all simple; the complications take place under the steel panelling where you don’t worry about them. The point I’m trying to make is that steering is all automatic once you’ve punched in a few co-ordinates.

I’m tired.

So am I. Fortunately, before we left the ship that last time, I had set up the figures for Earth. OK?

If you had not, she would not have been able to get home?

Exactly it. Keep trying! She left Mirone safely and you are now heading for Earth – but you’ll never make it. When I set the figures up, they were right; but my not being aboard made them wrong. Every split second of thrust the ship makes is calculated for an extra weight that isn’t there. It’s here with me, being hauled along a mountain.

Is this bad? Does it mean we reach Earth too fast?

No, son. IT MEANS YOU’LL NEVER REACH EARTH AT ALL. The ship moves in a hyperbola, and although my weight is only about one eight-thousandth of total ship’s mass, that tiny fraction of error will have multiplied itself into a couple of light-years by the time you get adjacent to the solar system.

I’m trying, but this talk of distance means nothing to me. Explain it again.

Where you are there is neither light nor space; how do I make you feel what a light-year is? No, you’ll just have to take it from me that the crucial point is, you’ll shoot right past the Earth.

Can’t we go on?

You will – if nothing is done about it. But landfall will be delayed some thousands of years.

You are growing fainter. Strain too much. Must mmmm

The fish again, and the water. No peace in the pool now. Cool pool, cruel pool, pool … The waters whirl toward the brink.

I am the fish-foetus. Have I dreamed? Was there a voice talking to me? It seems unlikely. Something I had to ask it, one gigantic fact which made nonsense of everything; something – cannot remember.

Perhaps there was no voice. Perhaps in this darkness I have taken a wrong choice between sanity and non-sanity.

… thank heavens for hot spring water …

Hello! Father?

How long will they let me lie here in this pool? They must realize I’m not long for this world, or any other.

I’m awake and answering!

Just let me lie here. Son, it’s man’s first pleasure and his last to lie and swill in hot water. Wish I could live to know you … However. Here’s what you have to do.

Am powerless here. Unable to do anything.

Don’t get frightened. There’s something you already do very expertly – telemit.

Non-comprehension.

We talk to each other over this growing distance by what is called telepathy. It’s part gift, part skill. It happens to be the only contact between distant planets, except spaceships. But whereas spaceships take time to get anywhere, thought is instantaneous.

Understood.

Good. Unfortunately, whereas spaceships get anywhere in time, thought has a definite limited range. Its span is as strictly governed as – well, as the size of a plant, for instance. When you are fifty light-years from Mirone, contact between us will abruptly cease.

How far apart are we now?

At the most we have forty-eight hours more in contact.

Don’t leave me. I shall be lonely!

I’ll be lonely too – but not for long. But you, son, you are already halfway to Earth, or as near as I can estimate it you are. As soon as contact between us ceases, you must call TRE.

Which means?

Telepath Radial Earth. It’s a general control and information centre, permanently beamed for any sort of emergency. You can raise them. I can’t.

They won’t know me.

I’ll give you their call pattern. They’ll soon know you when you telemit. You can give them my pattern for identification if you like. You must explain what is happening.

Will they believe?

Of course.

Are they real?

Of course. Tell TRE what the trouble is; they’ll send out a fast ship to pick Judy and you up before you are out of range.

I want to ask you –

Wait a minute, son … You’re getting faint … Can you smell the gangrene over all those light-years? … These blue horrors are lifting me out of the spring, and I’ll probably pass out. Not much time …

Pain. Pain and silence. All like a dream.

… distance …

Father! Louder!

… too feeble … Done all I could …

Why did you rouse me and not communicate with my mother?

The village! We’re nearly there. Just down the valley and then it’s journey’s end … Human race only developing telepathic powers gradually … Steady, you fellows!

The question, answer the question.

That is the answer. Easy down the slope, boys, don’t burst this big leg, eh? Ah … I have telepathic ability but Judy hasn’t; I couldn’t call her a yard away. But you have the ability … Easy there! All the matter in the universe is in my leg …

You sound so muddled. Has my sister this power?

Good old Mendelian theory … You and your sister, one sensitive, one not. Two eyes of the giant and only one can see properly … the path’s too steep to – whoa, Cyclops, steady, boy, or you’ll put out that other eye.

Cannot understand!

Understand? My leg’s a flaming torch – Steady, steady! Gently down the steep blue hill.

Father!

What’s the matter?

I can’t understand. Are you talking of real things?

Sorry, boy. Steady now. Touch of delirium; it’s the pain. You’ll be OK if you get in contact with TRE. Remember?

Yes, I remember. If only I could … I don’t know. Mother is real then?

Yes. You must look after her.

And is the giant real?

The giant? What giant? You mean the giant hill. The people are climbing up the giant hill. Up to my giant leg. Goodbye, son. I’ve got to see a blue man about a … a leg …

Father! Wait, wait, look, see, I can move. I’ve just discovered I can turn. Father!

No answer now. Just a stream of silence. I have got to call TRE.

Plenty of time. Perhaps if I turn first … Easy. I’m only six months, he said. Maybe I could call more easily if I was outside, in the real universe. If I turn again.

Now if I kick …

Ah, easy now. Kick again. Good. Wonder if my legs are blue.

Kick.

Something yielding.

Kick …

T

By the time T was ten years old, his machine was already on the fringes of that galaxy. T was not his name – the laboratory never considered christening him – but it was the symbol on the hull of his machine and it will suffice for a name. And again, it was not his machine; rather, he belonged to it. He could not claim the honourable role of pilot, nor even the humbler one of passenger; he was a chattel whose seconds of utility lay two hundred years ahead.

He lay like a maggot in the heart of an apple at the centre of the machine, as it fled through space and time. He never moved; the impulse to move did not present itself to him, nor would he have been able to obey if it had. For one thing, T had been created legless – his single limb was an arm. For another, the machine hemmed him in on all sides. It nourished him by means of pipes which fed into his body a thin stream of vitamins and proteins. It circulated his blood by a tiny motor that throbbed in the starboard bulkhead like a heart. It removed his waste products by a steady siphoning process. It produced his supply of oxygen. It regulated T so that he neither grew nor wasted. It saw that he would be alive in two hundred years.

T had one reciprocal duty. His ears were filled perpetually with an even droning note and before his lidless eyes there was a screen on which a dull red band travelled forever down a fixed green line. The drone represented (although not to T) a direction through space, while the red band indicated (although not to T) a direction in time. Occasionally, perhaps only once a decade, the drone changed pitch or the band faltered from its green line. These variations registered in T’s consciousness as acute discomforts, and accordingly he would adjust one of the two small wheels by his hand, until conditions returned to normal and the even tenor of monotony was resumed.

Although T was aware of his own life, loneliness was one of the innumerable concepts that his creators arranged he should never sense. He lay passive, in an artificial contentment. His time was divided not by night or day, or waking or sleeping, or by feeding periods, but by silence or speaking. Part of the machine spoke to him at intervals, short monologues on duty and reward, instructions as to the working of a simple apparatus that would be required two centuries ahead. The speaker presented T with a carefully distorted picture of his environs. It made no reference to the inter-galactic night outside, nor to the fast backward seepage of time. The idea of motion was not a factor to trouble an entombed thing like T. But it did refer to the Koax in reverent terms, speaking also – but in words filled with loathing – of that inevitable enemy of the Koax, Man. The machine informed T that he would be responsible for the complete destruction of Man.

T was utterly alone, but the machine which carried him had company on its flight. Eleven other identical machines – each occupied by beings similar to T – bore through the continuum. This continuum was empty and lightless and stood in the same relationship to the universe as a fold in a silk dress stands to the dress: when the sides of the fold touch, a funnel is formed by the surface of the material inside the surface of the dress. Or you may liken it to the negativity of the square root of minus two, which has a positive value. It was a vacuum inside a vacuum. The machines were undetectable, piercing the dark like light itself and sinking through the hovering millennia like stones.