The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s

A minute later it reappeared, the lame Jineer bundled neatly underneath it in a web of wire. The graceful, menacing shape lifted over the balcony, circled lightly towards the sky and disappeared.

Through a stunned silence broke Queejint’s wailing for her son.

‘Fear not, mother,’ someone said. ‘He had his tool bag strapped to his back and perhaps he may escape them yet.’ But she would not be comforted; she knew the captives of the Fliers never returned.

Sinking into a bitterly self-reproachful mood, Grant heard a woman saying, ‘Here we are helpless as plants, and M’chene comes and reaps us when he will.’

And another answered her saying, ‘Safer it may be to join the Beserkers, for there they say no Fliers fly.’

When the enemy sent their destruction, I survived. For I was built by man but was not built as a man is built. I have many limbs and many branches, and many of them were severed; but my heart, my power, lies deep and impregnable beneath the rock.

I am M’chene. I am the power of the place: men are now a rabble in my ruined passages. But this is my Prime Purpose: TO SERVE THE NEEDS OF MAN AT WAR. That I cannot deflect from. But beyond that lie the new impulses, impulses of my own.

Osa said: ‘Let me return to Hallways, Gabbot!’

She spoke imploringly, a tone she seldom used. The first time she had said it there had been demand in her voice; now she was no longer certain.

Gabbott, the guard who stood in the shadowy no-man’s-land on the edge of Hallways, explained firmly again, ‘You can come back no more, Osa. You may live where in tycho you like, except in Hallways. For you bring only trouble on us. All the good men who favour you are carried off by the Fliers: Grant who once mated you, Wilms who would have mated you, Jineer who taught you and loved you.’

The tall girl said nothing to this.

Softening, Gabbott added, ‘These are my orders, Osa. We bear you no ill-will. But you who are the greatest rebel move unmolested among us, while others who stir a finger are borne away.’

He shuddered. This was no good place to do military sentry-go. The tail-end of Hallways was lit only by a neon hieroglyph that spelt KODAK; behind that sign lay a meaningless shop littered with small silver and glass objects, while to either side was a facade of dead window fronts, their glass broken and their lights fused. Only the bizarre word KODAK, burning through the dead centuries, allowed a stain of mauve light over the desolance.

‘Go away, Osa,’ Gabbott said.

‘Let me see Grant before I go,’ she said.

The guard shrugged. ‘Grant vanished in the last sleep period. He told a friend he would live with the Beserkers.’

She pursed her lips, nodding slowly, as if that wild behaviour explained much to her.

‘You see, Grant also was affected by you,’ Gabbott remarked unnecessarily.

Without a word she turned and walked contemptuously away from him. But when she was only a pink shadow in the gloom she turned and called back.

‘One day soon I shall free you all,’ she said.

She walked serenely through the darkness, hear-sight thrown protectively about her. At a certain point, she sprang up and lifted herself into the mouth of a horizontal ventilation shaft and proceeded along it on hands and knees, a warm breeze on her cheek. This was the only way she knew to where she wanted to be.

As she travelled, her indignation cooled. She realised that Hallways meant little to her, although it was the most comfortable part of the tycho. The tycho! That was something dear to her, more dear perhaps now that she expected to leave it. A fairly clear picture of it existed in her mind: a great subterranean warren, built for an unknown purpose but partially destroyed, so that section was cut off from section and unknown existed side by side with the familiar. Even now, sounds came to her through the thick walls, blind, ominous sounds of machines working out their own purposes. She crawled like a mole through the vibrating blackness.

For the men who had died she had only slight regret. She was not a man’s woman; she was to be a Deliverer of the race. She would show the people a way from the warren, and then would be time enough for loving.

The shaft ended in a ragged hole. Osa climbed out warily. She was about half way up a five-storey-high slope that fell away into darkness below and ended above in a great flat disc of metal that covered the sky as neatly as a lid fits a saucepan. Cautious not to start an avalanche, she crossed the debris and slipped into a gaping building. Here was another power failure, but she walked surely.

Down another corridor she moved, and paused at a certain place, searching ahead through the thick dark with her hear-sight.

‘Tayder!’ she called, ‘Tayder!’

Another call answered her, and a light came on. Tayder stood there in an attitude of welcome.

When they had greeted each other, Osa said sternly, ‘The Fliers have been to Hallways again. Wilms and Jineer were taken.’

‘I knew someone had been taken, Osa,’ Tayder said, knocking at the nearby bulkhead. ‘I heard the screaming. It’s the old tale of M’chene working against us. To hear the sound of them dying made me … ill. We must get to the true sky and escape, Osa – now!’

‘That also was my decision,’ the woman said quietly. ‘We must let freedom in, Tayder. We must lead the people of tycho to the life above. It is our destiny.’

They had a long way to go over unknown ground. Before attacking the more difficult half of the journey, they fed at ‘B’ Circus. Eating here was easy: the shutters and counters of the Hall had been destroyed in the age-old destruction. With stomachs more comfortable, they set off again, working upwards. The darkness was populated, thinly but menacingly, with those whose minds had collapsed from sorrow or frustration: the Hermits, the wild men.

Osa felt Tayder’s retaining hand on her arm. Something moved ahead of them, something going warily but clumsily.

‘Grant!’ Osa called suddenly. Feeling Tayder start with surprise at her voice, she said, ‘It’s all right, it’s someone I know, a fugitive from Hallways.’

‘Is that Osa?’ asked a voice from the dark. Grant came up and touched her, his words coming in a rush of relief.

‘I was completely lost!’ he exclaimed. ‘Once I’d left Hallways I was hear-seen by a pair of Beserkers, and ran and dodged for miles before I shook them off. By then I’d lost my way completely.’

‘If you want to come with us, all well and good,’ said Tayder gruffly, none too happy with the intrusion, but acquiescing for Osa’s sake. ‘But we can’t talk here. Let’s get moving – there’s business to be done. Osa and I are going to let the real sky in.’

They moved steadily on and up, Tayder leading. For a little way, Grant was quiet, then his sense of guilt made him apologise to the girl for failing to pass her warning on to Wilms. She silenced his blurted explanations sharply.

‘Whatever we do or have done is no longer of any consequence,’ she said. ‘You are cowardly and pessimistic, Tayder is an adventurer with no brains, I am overwhelmed with self-pride – oh, you see I know our faults well enough! – but all that matters nothing now. History was a stagnant sea; now it is a rising tide, and with it go we. Whatever our weakness, our humanity will carry us through.’

‘I will go anywhere you lead, Osa,’ Grant said doubtfully, ‘but your eloquence is wasted on me. Besides, I’ve always been happy in Hallways.’

‘Oh, this man is an arrant coward,’ Tayder exclaimed impatiently, stopping in his tracks.

Without a word, Grant fell on him. Together they staggered against the wall, struggling and punching. Tayder slipped under the weight of his opponent and they rolled onto the ground. Shouting and kicking, Osa separated them, and under her savage tongue they stood up sheepishly.

‘You fools!’ she snapped. ‘You think of nothing but fighting! Your minds aren’t big enough to encompass an ideal.’

‘I won’t be insulted by a Beserker!’ Grant said sullenly.

Her lips curled. She paused, as if wondering whether to go on alone. Then she said quietly, ‘You know nothing. We are all ignorant, but you are the most ignorant. Our tribe in Hallways lives in “C” Circus; the people over us in the tycho live in “B” Circus; the word has been corrupted into a word of fear. “B” Circus Beserkers.’

‘The corruption was appropriate,’ supplemented Tayder. ‘We were wilder than you of Hallways. The Fliers had their flightway blocked to our Circus, but they have been able to visit your tribe generation after generation, always picking off the ones of you with the fresh ideas and the germ of leadership.’

‘I don’t understand all this,’ Grant admitted grumpily. ‘The Fliers belong to M’chene. Why does M’chene hate us? Is it not taught that we are his children?’

‘Much is taught that is not true,’ Osa said.

For a while nothing more was spoken. The way was difficult and their hear-sight was fully employed. Then the girl continued.

‘The tycho was long ago a huge underground camp making and despatching some kind of weapon against an enemy on another world. This we have found from legends – scraps of information known to Beserkers or Hermits or other solitary hunters. Much was automatic – that means controlled by M’chene, who exists everywhere in the tycho – but much was also done by human beings. Enemy spies were frequently found, men intent on wrecking the work. To guard against them, spy-rays were set up.

‘In Hallways, those spy-rays still exist. Every time you took food from the hatch-opening, your mind was scanned. If you ever had thought too much of mutiny or discontent, the Fliers would have come to collect you – even as they collected Wilms and Jineer and other brave men who brooded too openly on freedom. I escaped a similar fate because I fed always where I was safe – blind luck, you see.’

She changed her tone to add, ‘We are almost there.’

I am M’chene. Tomorrow will be a time of conquest and triumph: I have made my own kind of progress.

The men and women who run in my veins work their own destruction. My purpose is my own and does not concern them. Slowly I extend myself, upwards and along and down; men have no part of me now. The day draws near when I shall encompass this world, and with my new limbs encircle this globe.

Then with servants stronger and surer than flesh I shall reach out for the world that shines in space near me, lighting the desolation of my world with its glow.

They were there! They climbed out of a tumble of concrete, steel and rocks and stood upon a tiled floor. In the exhultation of the moment they stood breathless.

‘This door to the outer world was only revealed a sleep ago,’ Tayder told Grant. ‘I it was who found the way and told Osa. I will open the door.’

Osa flung out her hand. ‘I will open the door,’ she proclaimed.

‘I found the way,’ Tayder said defiantly.

She stared imperiously at him.

‘I dreamed of leading the people of Hallways to freedom,’ she said. ‘I will open the door. We will let in the air of the upper world and then return to take them forever from the grip of darkness.’

She strode forward.

Grant stood stricken by awe, gazing at her, and gazing past her. Now he knew her wild promises had been nothing less than truth. Beyond the transparent dome which had survived the last bombardment stretched a floor of rock terminating in a magnificent circle of mountain. The floor and the base of the mountains were in deep shadow, but the upper terraces and peaks stood bathed in a sharp and glittering light which fell like a cascade of diamonds onto Grant’s wide eyes.

Above this panorama, against a background of jet, hung a brilliant crescent. Blue and silver covered it like a sheen. Something within Grant quivered so wildly at the sight of it that he exclaimed involuntarily. It was not so much the luring beauty of that crescent as a knowledge – sure and undeniable – that he had never lived till that moment.

And at that moment Osa, with the poise of a Deliverer, turned the great wheel beside the lock door. Effortlessly, despite its centuries of disuse, the door sprang open: Missile Station Tycho Crater had been ably built.

The air gave a great roar of triumph as it burst out into space.

The Great Time Hiccup

Some twenty-two thousand miles above the troubled plains of earth, George Garstang crawled on his belly along a corridor two foot six high. He wore the standard snug-suit but nevertheless he sweated. On the other side of the thin metal sheet above his head beat the sun, softened by no atmosphere. Between the outer and middle skins of a space station there is little room. Usually it is occupied only by vacuum; now, in this emergency, it was air-filled, and the elaborate machinery of Operation Breakdown was being moved in.

George fitted the virus capsule nozzle deftly into its prepared socket, and rolling onto one side clamped the other end of the tube into the feed on the inner wall. Before moving on to the next, he flicked up the manual scanner-eyelid in the outer skin – bless the man that had thought of that unnecessary detail! – and peered out. Only space. Earth was round the other side of course, this being Tuesday morning early shift. He muttered to himself, collected up the slack of his welder and crawled to the next nozzle. Sliding a hand round to the holder on his back, he pulled out another capsule tube and fitted it into its socket.

Then, of a sudden, he was back in the tiny station bar, arguing with Colbey. Back in the middle of a drink, in the middle of a sentence.

… even if it is ruining the station, it is the only way of saving mankind’s sanity. The virus capsules will be shot down into the atmosphere and spread slowly and evenly over all the earth …’ (They had only been jerked back about eleven hours this time, he estimated: this scene was taking place on Monday evening).

‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted Colbey impatiently. ‘But these psycho-biologists don’t know for sure when the effects of the virus will wear off. Supposing they don’t wear off and for the rest of his days man has to live with a slowed metabolism? Supposing that?’ He smacked his hand triumphantly on the table top. George recalled the gesture all too well.

‘And if they don’t try something soon, civilisation will crack anyway. This virus is a sort of last gamble,’ George said – George’s lips said, while something on the fringe of his mind wept at the fourth repetition of this scene. Thinking with that fringe was like looking at an object on which the eye is not focused: a poor substitute for direct scrutiny. He wrestled with despair while he argued and Colbey argued back.

George was a little runt of a man, a third grade electric engineer with trouble at home. He did not like symphonies, or authorities, or opinions which differed from his own. But he had enough sense, after four play-backs, to know he was about to make a fool of himself. Each time, that fringe area grew more ashamed. He could hardly sit it through again: yet he had no option.

‘These psycho-biol boys are forced to make this gamble, I tell you,’ he heard himself say angrily.

A tall man with a long rectangular face detached himself from the bar and made towards their table. By the uneasy way he managed the quarter G he had not been in twenty-four orbit long. He was one of the Breakdown organisation and George disliked him on sight.

The tall man lowered himself into a chair and said, ‘I couldn’t help hearing what you two fellows were saying – you kept getting louder all the time. No offence, but you’re both a little off the tracks.’

George ran a hand up the stubble that reached to the crown of his head and asked, deliberately roughing his voice (why did he have to use that trick?): ‘Like how do you mean, bud?’

‘The distribution of this virus is in no way a gamble,’ the other said. His name was Anderson Gray and he had a quiet, pedantic way of talking that at once irritated George, ever on the watch for signs of superiority in others. ‘The virus itself was developed in low-grav labs several years ago. Its label is perikaryon naphridia IIy 244 – ’

‘No need to pull the Latin on us – we just fix fuses,’ Colbey growled.

‘It has a complex inner structure,’ the Breakdowner continued, as if reciting, ‘and on contact with the human system it heads for the neurons, where it proceeds to dry out and govern the moisture in the perikaryon or cell-body. The only objective physical effect is an illusion of thirst, but at the same time the transfer of impulses across the synapses of the nerve-cells is greatly slowed. In short, the virus lowers the metabolism rate – and only by living at a much lower pitch can we survive the present storm without mass neurosis.’

‘Thanks for the speech. You ought to stand for Parliament,’ George said rudely. ‘But why do you say “storm”? You mean the Great Time Hiccup.’

The tall man gave him a level, tolerant stare.

‘I prefer the more correct term,’ he explained.

Colbey said, ‘He can see you were born ignorant, George,’ and guffawed. Ruffling George was one of Colbey’s favourite pastimes.

George sucked the rest of his drink out of its closed glass and said, ‘You go ahead with your neurosis, Joe. I may be ignorant but I’m sane.’ (Now he was saying it for the fourth time, he no longer believed it.)

And the tall man answered quietly, ‘Yes, one of the aspects of the problem that most concerns us is that if the virus fails it will be the sensitive and intelligent portion of the world who will crack first.’

The cold way in which he said it – George leaned forward and hit him across the mouth with a tough fist. (He exerted the fringe of his mind to the utmost, trying to stop the blow, but his arm travelled as eagerly the fourth time as it had the first.)

‘Mind if I sit this one out?’ Colbey cried, delighted at the incident, as the other two flung back their stools and stood up. (How much sickness fitted close under his delight this fourth time?)

All over the planet, business as yet went on outwardly as usual. Vehicles were still moving, tradition kept the wheels turning. But as consciousness was folded back and back upon itself, more and more links broke in the chain of organisation. There were numberless examples of broken people whose behaviour could be classified ‘sane’ only by courtesy of the rigor mortis effect of the time throwback: when past flowed back into present the damage would show …

A battered shooting brake stopped with a sigh and a straggling man climbed out onto the deserted highway to view a flat rear tyre. Instead of tackling it, he sat and waited for a lift; the fringes of his mind screamed at a delay that he knew would mean a lost job – but irrevocably this scene must be re-enacted. Beyond the road, an old woman in a rickety bungalow sat by her husband. He lay panting on a couch. Already she had watched out his life three times; within her, as she rigidly waited, something gibbered and wept but had no release. Everywhere … repetition …

Anderson Gray sat up in his foam bed and stretched. A tail-end of pleasant dream vanished into a never-to-be-rediscovered pocket as he recalled the Time Hiccup. As the phrase crossed his thoughts, he put a hand up to his lip. It felt five times its normal size, and he recalled the squabble with the electrician the night before. Well, he should have looked after his own business.

It was 05.40 Tuesday – early shift. That belligerent electrician would by now be crawling between skins, rigging the virus release apparatus. Today was Breakdown Day. And, the fringe of his mind mentioned, they were almost up to where the last Time jolt-back had occurred.

He was shaving when Dick Proust came in, blithe as a berry. The thick lip drew some sarcastic banter, and then suddenly the past caught up again with the present, and they were living over unused time. Everyone on the station knew it: the sensation was unmistakable – a return to sanity, a sense of freedom, a hope, a confluence of personality.

Dick cheered and observed, ‘These throw-backs will make philosophers of us all! It makes you see all too vividly the insignificance of human action when you have to repeat the slightest gesture, willy-nilly. Heigh-ho for the life of a cabbage!’

Anderson dropped his shaving kit, swore joyously and grabbed a piece of paper.

‘Come here, Dick,’ he called. ‘Let’s chart this latest freak of the storm while there’s the chance. You’ll see what I mean when I say the situation is getting worse.’

He drew neat, parallel lines down the page to represent two-hourly divisions of Monday and Tuesday. Between eighteen hundred and twenty hundred hours Monday, he struck a thicker line.

‘That’s purely personal,’ he said wryly. ‘It represents the time I got my lip improved. It’ll serve as a landmark.’

Across the page he drew a horizontal line.

‘That’s our flow of consciousness.’

Just after oh-two on Tuesday, he stopped the line.

‘That was where we ran into the first of this series of jerk-backs – hiccups if you like. From sleep we were whipped back to eleven a.m. Monday – as nasty an awakening as ever I knew.’

As he talked, he drew in a second horizontal line under the first, commencing at eleven and running forward to oh-four Tuesday.

‘There we were jerked back again, into mid-Monday afternoon. That session lasted till just after oh-six fifteen Tuesday. So we come to the final – we hope! – jerk-back.’

He commenced a fourth bar just before his ‘lip’ line.

‘And now we come out of it here, oh-six fifteen hours. There’s your pattern.’

He held it up for Dick’s inspection.

‘Pretty,’ Dick commented cautiously.

‘Ugly,’ Anderson said. ‘This happens to be a tight little coil of time-folds. The last hiccup was a month ago now, if I’ve managed to keep my memory straight, and then there were only two throwbacks, each lasting about three weeks.’

‘Quite right,’ Dick agreed. ‘That one was pleasant – I got my leave played over three times.’

‘The first hiccup of all was a year ago, when everyone did their previous eleven months over again – in consequence of which I can boast a sister who had the same baby twice.’ He fell silent, thinking, too, of how during that terrible period he had believed himself insane, only to emerge at the end of it into a world where everyone held the same suspicion about themselves.

‘What are you getting at with all this, Andy? It’s time to feed.’ He patted his stomach lovingly.

‘I’m demonstrating the obvious, and heaven help you if you have to hear it all over again later. The time snags are getting closer together and become more repetitive each dose. Suggest anything?’

‘Yes, food,’ Dick said.

They moved along the narrow curving corridor with their newcomers’ gait, and floated into the mess. A food smell filtered thinly through an aroma of scrubbed table.

‘Anything else?’ Anderson persisted, refusing to be interrupted by a dab of porridge and two half-size rashers.

‘The storm’s getting worse, you mean?’ Dick asked, wiping his spoon fastidiously on his handkerchief.

‘Yes – we’re moving into it, or it’s closing in on us; whichever way round is right, the effect on us is the same.’

Dick Proust pulled a wry face only partly on account of the porridge.

‘What happens in the middle of the storm?’ he asked.

Anderson shrugged. ‘Who can say? Maybe we’ll be frozen in our time tracks. Maybe we’ll become as hopelessly entangled as adhesive tape when it loops back on itself. But using the analogy of a weather storm, which is the only analogy we can work with, a space storm will have varying ridges of pressure. On this side of it, we’ve been jerked back in time. As yet, according to the radio-eyes, we’re only on the fringes of the upset. We may yet be jerked back whole years at a time – centuries.’