The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s

His friend nodded grimly. ‘In other words, it might be more comfortable to die now – except that even death’s no refuge when you can be flicked back ten years at a breath. Man! It’s bad … And on the other side of the storm?’

‘That may be even worse. You may be flung head first into your own future. Think over the possibilities of that!’

Betson entered the mess and strolled over to them smiling. Bald and cherubic in appearance, the mainspring of Operation Breakdown, he wore his burden lightly.

‘What’s the matter with you two?’ he enquired. ‘You bear that jaded look! Feeling self-conscious with the ghosts of Gray – and Proust – future hanging over you?’

‘That is quite a feeling,’ Anderson admitted, and explained. Then he had to explain his lip.

Betson grinned. ‘Don’t blame that little cable-monkey. I know him – George Garstang’s his name. He’s seen their end of the job through in time, and it’s no fun either between skins, doing his job. That and the hiccup effect have worn his sense of proportion thin. Remember, Andy, all we have to do is keep IIy 244 warm. Everything should be ready to squirt in two hours. Then we climb into the orbital rockets, abandon station, and go down and drink the airs of Lethe.’

He rubbed his hands and added, ‘Doesn’t the prospect of five years at half-throttle appeal?’

‘Not to this boy,’ Dick said. ‘But I can’t think of a better solution.’

They took their used plates over to the hatch and walked with Betson to the upper deck. Here, all the usual equipment had been scrapped and every available inch housed the perikaryon cultures. Here, it was quiet except for a boiling-kettle noise from the solar converters. Two biologists walked watchfully by the container machinery, which was already siphoning the virus into the ejection canisters. These canisters would spin down in a chain round the globe, dissolving under friction a few thousand yards from surface, spreading their vital contents over every square mile of land.

‘Anything further we can do?’ Anderson asked.

Betson puffed out his cheeks until he looked like an ugly, intelligent baby. ‘Hope two hours passes without getting a reef-knot in it,’ he suggested.

He walked over to the nearest viewer and flipped it on. The wide-angle lens showed a well-furnished view of space: the corona, the night-side of Earth beautiful in moonlight, the moon. It looked almost cosy, with none of the blankness of deep space in it.

The same thought came to all the three men. The storm did not show. There was no sign in these blank depths of the light-year wide disturbance that hurtled through the System at a speed of something like a hundred thousand miles every second.

‘Odd thing,’ Anderson commented, laying a cool finger on his hot lip. ‘These interstellar storms have been known of in theory for a long time, long before we even got to the moon. The radarscopes have detected them moving beyond the galaxy. This one was traced all the way here, but somehow a whirlpool of nothing seemed no cause for worry.’

Betson switched the view off and they turned away. Even the shallows of heaven do not bear looking at for long.

‘It’s never any good just knowing a thing in theory,’ he said. ‘We talked glibly about space-time, never realising exactly how integrated the two were. A storm in space is a storm in time – disrupt one, you disrupt the other.’

An inspection lid above their heads slid open and a ladder whirred down. A man climbed down it and it returned smoothly into the bulkhead. The man was George Garstang, complete with red face and backache.

He unzipped his snug-suit, straightened his short figure and said respectfully to Betson, ‘That’s the last rejection nozzles all finished in this section, sir. They should be wound up everywhere in another half hour.’

Involuntarily, they all sighed with relief.

‘Everything else is ready for action. We’ll put zero hour sixty minutes ahead,’ Betson said decisively. ‘I’ll phone Centre, we’ll push it through before we are jerked back again.’

As he moved away, George caught sight of Anderson. He took in the long, sober face with its pouting upper lip and half-smiled. Then he rubbed a grimy palm against his suit.

‘Sorry I lost my temper last night,’ he said. ‘I only meant to do it once, you know – not four times.’

Anderson smiled. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘We’ve all had a bad time. Tempers’ll run slower at half-speed …’

George finished his drink and said, ‘You go ahead with your neurosis, Joe. I may be ignorant but I’m sane.’

‘Yes,’ Anderson said quietly. ‘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.’

George leaned forward and struck him across the mouth. (Anderson lied; they were all cracking together.)

Anderson broke into a sharp wailing cry.

‘Hush, dear, hush,’ his mother whispered, wrapping the blue christening robe more securely and rocking him gently.

Not for an Age

A bedspring groaned and pinged, mists cleared, Rodney Furnell awoke. From the bathroom next door came the crisp sound of shaving; his son was up. The bed next to his was empty; Valerie, his second wife, was up. Guiltily Rodney also rose, and performed several timid exercises to flex his backbone. Youth! When it was going it had to be husbanded. He touched his toes.

The audience had its first laugh there.

By the time Rodney had got into his Sunday suit, Valerie’s cuckoo clock was chuckling nine, followed by the more sardonic notes of his ormolu chimer. Valerie and Jim (Rodney had conscientiously shunned a literary name for his only offspring) were already at the cornflakes when he entered their gay little kitchenette.

More laughter at the first sight of that antiquated twentieth-century modernity.

‘Hello, both! Lovely morning,’ he boomed, kissing Valerie’s forehead. The September sun, in fact, was making a fair showing through damp mist; a man of forty-two instinctively arms himself with enthusiasm when facing a wife fifteen years younger.

The audience always loved the day’s meals, murmuring with delight as each quaint accessory – toaster, teapot, sugar tongs – was used.

Valerie looked fresh and immaculate. Jim sported an open-necked shirt and was attentive to his stepmother. At nineteen he was too manly and too attentive … He shared the Sunday paper companionably with her, chatting about the theatre and books. Sometimes Rodney could join in about one of the books. Under the notion that Valerie disliked seeing him in spectacles, he refrained from reading at breakfast.

How the audience roared later when he slipped them on in his study! How he hated that audience! How fervently he wished that he had the power to raise even one eyebrow in scorn of them!

The day wore on exactly as it had for over a thousand times, unable to deviate in the slightest from its original course. So it would go on and on, as meaningless as a cliché, or a tune endlessly repeated, for the benefit of these fools who stood on all four sides and laughed at the silliest things.

At first, Rodney had been frightened. This power to snatch them all, as it were, from the grave had seemed something occult. Then, becoming accustomed to it, he had been flattered. That these wise beings had wanted to review his day, disinter his modest life. But it was balm only for a time; Rodney soon discovered he was simply a glorified side-show at some latter-day fair, a butt for fools and not food for philosophers.

He walked in the tumble-down garden with Valerie, his arm around her waist. The north Oxford air was mild and sleepy; the neighbours’ radio was off.

‘Have you got to go and see that desiccated old Regius Professor, darling?’ she asked.

‘You know I must.’ He conquered his irritation and added: ‘We’ll go for a drive after lunch – just you and I.’

Unfailingly, each day’s audience laughed at that. Presumably ‘a drive after lunch’ had come to mean something dubious. Each time Rodney made that remark, he dreaded the reaction from those half-glimpsed countenances that pressed on all sides; yet he was powerless to alter what had once been said.

He kissed Valerie, he hoped elegantly; the audience tittered, and he stepped into the garage. His wife returned to the house, and Jim. What happened in there he would never know, however many times the day was repeated. There was no way of confirming his suspicion that his son was in love with Valerie and she attracted to him. She should have enough sense to prefer a mature man to a stripling of nineteen; besides, it was only eighteen months since he had been referred to in print as ‘one of our promising young men of litterae historicae’.

Rodney could have walked around to Septuagint College. But because the car was new and something that his don’s salary would hardly stretch to, he preferred to drive. The watchers, of course, shrieked with laughter at the sight of his little automobile. He occupied himself, as he polished the windshield, with hating the audience and all inhabitants of this future world.

That was the strange thing. There was room in the corner of the old Rodney mind for the new Rodney ghost. He depended on the old Rodney – the Rodney who had actually lived that fine, autumn day – for vision, motion, all the paraphernalia of life; but he could occupy independently a tiny cell of his consciousness. He was a helpless observer carried over and over in a cockpit of the past.

The irony of it lay there. He would have been spared all this humiliation if he did not know what was happening. But he did know, trapped though he was in an unknowing shell.

Even to Rodney, a history man and no scientist, the broad outline of what had happened was obvious enough. Somewhere in the future, man had ferreted out the secret of literally reclaiming the past. Bygone years lay in the rack of antiquity like film spools in a library. Like film spools, they were not amenable to change, but might be played over and over on a suitable projector. Rodney’s autumn day was being played over and over.

He had reflected helplessly on the situation so often that the horror of it had worn thin. That day had passed, quietly, trivially, had been forgotten; suddenly, long afterwards, it had been whipped back among the things that were. Its actions, even its thoughts, had been reconstituted, with only Rodney’s innermost ego to suffer from the imposition. How unsuspecting he had been then! How inadequate every one of his gestures seemed now, performed twice, ten, a hundred, a thousand times!

Had he been as smug every day as he was that day? And what had happened after that day? Having, naturally, no knowledge of the rest of his life then, he had none now. If he had been happy with Valerie for much longer, if his recently published work on feudal justice had been acclaimed – these were questions he could pose without answering.

A pair of Valerie’s gloves lay on the back seat of the car; Rodney threw them into a locker with an éclat quite divorced from his inner impotence. She, poor dear bright thing, was in the same predicament. In that they were united, although powerless to express the union in any slightest flicker of expression.

He drove slowly down Banbury Road. As ever, there were four subdivisions of reality. There was the external world of Oxford; there were Rodney’s original abstracted observations as he moved through the world; there were the ghost thoughts of the ‘present-I’, bitter and frustrated; there were the half-seen faces of the future which advanced or receded aimlessly. The four blended indefinably, one becoming another in Rodney’s moments of near-madness. (What would it be like to be insane, trapped in a sane mind? He was tempted by the luxury of letting go.)

Sometimes he caught snatches of talk from the onlookers. They at least varied from day to day. ‘If he knew what he looked like!’ they would exclaim. Or: ‘Do you see her hair-do?’ Or: ‘Can you beat that for a slum!’ Or: ‘Mummy, what’s that funny brown thing he’s eating?’ Or – how often he heard that one; ‘I just wish he knew we were watching him!’

Church bells were solemnly ringing as he pulled up outside Septuagint and switched off the ignition. Soon he would be in that fusty study, taking a glass of something with the creaking old Regius Professor. For the nth time he would be smiling a shade too much as the grip of ambition outreached the hand of friendship. His mind leaped ahead and back and ahead and back again in a frenzy. Oh, if he could only do something! So the day would pass. Finally, the night would come – one last gust of derision at Valerie’s nightgown and his pyjamas! – and then oblivion.

Oblivion … that lasted an eternity but took no time at all … And they wound the reel back and started it again, all over again.

He was pleased to see the Regius Professor. The Regius Professor was pleased to see him. Yes, it was a nice day. No, he hadn’t been out of college since, let’s see, it must be the summer before last. And then came that line that drew the biggest laugh of all; Rodney said, inevitably: ‘Oh, we must all hope for some sort of immortality.’

To have to say it again, to have to say it not a shade less glibly than when it had first been said, and when the wish had been granted already in such a ludicrous fashion! If only he might die first, if only the film would break down!

And then the film did break down.

The universe flickered to a standstill and faded into dim purple. Temperature and sound slid down to zero. Rodney Furnell stood transfixed, his arms extended in the middle of a gesture, a wineglass in his right hand. The flicker, the purple, the zeroness cut down through him; but even as he sensed himself beginning to fade, a great fierce hope was born within him. With a burst of avidity, the ghost of him took over the old Rodney. Confidence flooded him as he fought back the negativity.

The wineglass vanished from his hand. The Regius Professor sank into twilight and was gone. Blackness reigned. Rodney turned around. It was a voluntary movement; it was not in the script; he was alive, free.

The bubble of twentieth-century time had burst, leaving him alive in the future. He stood in the middle of a black and barren area. There had evidently been a slight explosion. Overhead was a crane-like affair as big as a locomotive with several funnels protruding from its underside; smoke issued from one of the funnels. Doubtless the thing was a time-projector or whatever it might be called, and obviously it had blown a fuse!

The scene about him engaged all Rodney’s attention. He was delighted to see that his late audience had been thrown into mild panic. They shouted and pushed and – in one quarter – fought vigorously. Male and female alike, they wore featureless, transparent bags which encased them from neck to ankle – and they had the impertinence to laugh at his pyjamas!

Cautiously, Rodney moved away. At first the idea of liberty overwhelmed him, he could scarcely believe himself alive. Then the realisation came: his liberty was precious – how doubly precious after that most terrible form of captivity! – and he must guard it by flight. He hurried beyond the projection area, pausing at a great sign that read:

CHRONOARCHEOLOGY LTD PRESENTS – THE SIGHTS OF THE CENTURIES

COME AND ENJOY THE ANTICS OF YOUR ANCESTORS!

YOU’LL LAUGH AS YOU LEARN

And underneath: Please Take One.

Shaking, Rodney seized a gaudy folder and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he ran.

His guess about the fair-ground was correct, and Valerie and he had been merely a glorified peepshow. Gigantic booths towered on all sides. Gay crowds sauntered or stood, taking little notice as Rodney passed. Flags flew, silvery music sounded; nearby, a flashing sign begged:

TRY ANTI-GRAV AND REALISE YOUR DREAMS

Farther on, a banner proclaimed:

THE SINISTER VENUSIANS ARE HERE!

Fortunately, a gateway was close. Dreading a detaining hand on his arm, Rodney made for it as quickly as possible. He passed a towering structure before which a waiting line of people gazed impatiently up at the words:

SAVOUR THE EROTIC POSSIBILITIES OF FREE-FALL

and came to the entrance.

An attendant called and tried to stop him. Rodney broke into a run. He ran down a satin-smooth road until exhaustion overcame him. A metal object shaped vaguely like a shoe but as big as a small bungalow stood at the kerb. Through its windows, Rodney saw couches and no human beings. Thankful at the mute offer of rest and concealment, he climbed in.

As he sank panting onto yielding rubber-foam, he realised what a horrible situation he was in. To be stranded centuries ahead of his own lifetime – and death – in a world of supertechnology and barbarism! – for so he visualised it. However, it was a vast improvement on the repetitive nightmare he had recently endured. Chiefly, now, he needed time to think quietly.

‘Are you ready to proceed, sir?’

Rodney jumped up, startled by a voice so near him. Nobody was in sight. The interior resembled a coach’s, with wide, soft seats, all of which were empty.

‘Are you ready to proceed, sir?’ There it was again.

‘Who is that?’ Rodney asked.

‘This is Auto-moto Seven Six One at your service, sir, awaiting instructions to proceed.’

‘You mean away from here?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Yes, please!’

At once the structure glided smoothly forward. No noise, no vibration. The gaudy fair-ground fell back and was replaced by other buildings, widely spaced, smokeless, built of a substance which looked like curtain fabric; they flowed by without end.

‘Are you – are we heading for the country?’ Rodney asked.

‘This is the country, sir. Do you require a city?’

‘No, I don’t. What is there beside city and country?’

‘Nothing, sir – except of course the sea fields.’

Dropping that line of questioning, Rodney, who was instinctively addressing a busy control board at the front of the vehicle, inquired: ‘Excuse my asking, but are you a – er, robot?’

‘Yes, sir, Auto-moto Seven Six One. New on this route, sir.’

Rodney breathed a sigh of relief. He could not have faced a human being but irrationally felt superior to a mere mechanical. Pleasant voice it had, no more grating certainly than the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at his old college … however long ago that was.

‘What year is this?’ he asked.

‘Circuit Zero, Epoch Eighty-two, new style. Year Two Thousand Five Hundred Anno Domini, old style.’

It was the first direct confirmation of all his suspicions; there was no gainsaying that level voice.

‘Thanks,’ he said hollowly, ‘Now if you don’t mind I’ve got to think.’

Thought, however, yielded little in comfort or results. Possibly the wisest course would be to throw himself on the mercy of some civilised authority – if there were any civilised authorities left. And would the wisest course in a twentieth-century world be the wisest in a – um, twenty-sixth-century world?

‘Driver, is Oxford in existence?’

‘What is Oxford, sir?’

A twinge of anxiety as he asked: ‘This is England?’

‘Yes, sir. I have found Oxford in my directory, sir. It is a motor and spaceship factory in the Midlands, sir.’

‘Just keep going.’

Dipping into his pocket, he produced the fun-fair brochure and scanned its bright lettering, hoping for a clue to action.

‘Chronoarcheology Ltd. presents a staggering series of Peeps into the Past. Whole days in the lives of (a) A Mother Dinosaur, (b) William the Conqueror’s Wicked Nephew, (c) A Citizen of Crazed, Plague-Ridden Stuart London, (d) A Twentieth-Century Teacher in Love.

‘Nothing expurgated, nothing added! Better than the Feelies! All in glorious 4D – no stereos required.’

Fuming at the description of himself, Rodney crumpled the brochure in his hand. He wondered bitterly how many of his own generation were helplessly enduring this gross irreverence in peepshows all over the world. When the sense of outrage abated slightly, curiosity reasserted itself; he smoothed out the folder and read a brief description of the process which ‘will give you history-sterics as it brings each era nearer’.

Below the heading ‘It’s Fabulous – It’s Pabulous!’ he read: ‘Just as anti-gravity lifts a man against the direction of weight, chrono-grab can lift a machine out of the direction of time and send it speeding back over the dark centuries. It can be accurately guided from the present to scoop up a fragment from the past, slapping that fragment – all unknown to the people in it – right into your lucky laps. The terrific expense of this intricate operation need hardly be emphas – ’

‘Driver!’ Rodney screamed. ‘Do you know anything about this time-grabbing business?’

‘Only what I have heard, sir.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘My built-in information centre contains only facts relating to my duty, sir, but since I also have learning circuits I am occasionally able to collect gossip from passengers which – ’

‘Tell me this, then: can human beings as well as machines travel back in time?’

The buildings were still flashing by, silent, hostile in the unknown world. Drumming his fingers wildly on his seat, Rodney awaited an answer.

‘Only machines, sir. Humans can’t live backwards.’

For a long time he lay and cried comfortably. The automoto made solacing cluck-cluck noises, but it was a situation with which it was incompetent to deal.

At last, Rodney wiped his eyes on his sleeve, the sleeve of his Sunday suit, and sat up. He directed the driver to head for the main offices of Chronoarcheology, and slumped back in a kind of stupor. Only at the headquarters of that fiendish invention might there be people who could – if they would – restore him to his own time.

Rodney dreaded the thought of facing any creature of this unscrupulous age. He pressed the idea away, and concentrated instead on the peace and orderliness of the world from which he had been resurrected. To see Oxford again, to see Valerie … Dear, dear Valerie …

Would they help him at Chronoarcheology? Or – supposing the people at the fair-ground repaired their devilish apparatus before he got there … What would happen then he shuddered to imagine.

‘Faster, driver,’ he shouted.

The wide-spaced buildings became a wall.

‘Faster, driver,’ he screamed.

The wall became a mist.

‘We are doing mach 2.3, sir,’ said the driver calmly.

‘Faster!’

The mist became a scream.

‘We are about to crash, sir.’

They crashed. Blackness, merciful, complete.

A bedspring groaned and pinged and the mists cleared. Rodney awoke. From the bathroom next door came the crisp, repetitive sound of Jim shaving …

Our Kind of Knowledge

It was a glorious day for exploring the Arctic Circle. The brief and violent spring had exploded over the bleak lands with a welter of life. The wilderness was a wilderness of flowers. Flocks of tern and golden plover, with the world to sport in, stood here leg-deep in blossom. Acres of blue ice crocus stretched away into the distance like shallow pools reflecting the clear skies. And on the near horizon rose a barrier of snow-covered mountains, high and harmless.

Five of them constituted the exploring party: the Preacher, Aprit, Woebee, Calurmo and Little Light – the Preacher ahead as usual. They moved to the top of a rise, and there was the valley stretched before them, washed and brilliant. There, too, was the spaceship.

Calurmo cried out in excitement and darted down among the flowers. The others saw instantly what was in his mind and followed fast behind, calling and laughing.

To them it was the most obvious feature of the colourful plain. Calurmo touched it first, and then they crowded around looking at it. The Preacher bent down and sniffed it.