Читать книгу: «The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s»

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

A Book in Time

Criminal Record

Breathing Space

The Great Time Hiccup

Not for an Age

Our Kind of Knowledge

Outside

Panel Game

Pogsmith

Conviction

Dumb Show

The Failed Men

Non-Stop

Psyclops

T

There is a Tide

Tradesman’s Exit

With Esmond in Mind

The Flowers of the Forest

Gesture of Farewell

The Ice Mass Cometh

Let’s Be Frank

No Gimmick

The War Millennia

The Sterile Millennia

The Dark Millennia

The Ultimate Millennia

The Shubshub Race

Supercity

Judas Danced

Ten-Storey Jigsaw

The Pit My Parish

Blighted Profile

Who Can Replace A Man?

The Carp That Once …

Carrion Country

Equator

Fourth Factor

The Megalopolis Millennia

The Star Millennia

The Mutant Millennia

The New Father Christmas

Ninian’s Experiences

Poor Little Warrior!

Sector Diamond

Sight of a Silhouette

They Shall Inherit

Are You An Android?

The Arm

The Bomb-Proof Bomb

Fortune’s Fool

Intangibles, Inc.

Sector Yellow

The Lieutenant

The Other One

Safety Valve

The Towers of San Ampa

Three’s a Cloud

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

A Book in Time

I was browsing in Albert’s, down Cecil Court, when I saw another customer slipping books under his coat. Indignation high, I made a grab at him, but he had seen my glance and was out of the shop before you could say ‘Limited signed edition’.

I followed hot-foot (crepes always do that to me). Luckily, he did not run far. He had something that looked to my wild glance like a car, hidden behind a pile of crates in a hotel yard. As I jumped on to the running board, I realised it was a queer make. It had no steering wheel, no driving wheels. A publisher? The wild thought flashed through my head, and then my quarry at the dashboard flipped a lever …

London was gone! At least, the old one had disappeared. It simply blurred and vanished, and a new one of smooth stone and metal took its place. We seemed not to have moved. I was bowled over; indeed, when the fugitive opened his door, I was knocked over.

‘Never impede a passing time machine,’ he said, helping me up.

‘Time machine?’ I queried. Could that really be the hideous explanation of the strangeness around about me?

‘What year is this?’ I asked.

‘2054,’ he said.

‘You’re sure your watch isn’t fast?’

‘Look friend, I’ve got no time for jokes. I’ve got just an hour off duty to snatch some lunch, and then I must be back into the past again. Goodbye.’

By the time I had come out of the nearest thing a non-yogi gets to a trance, he had gone. I was stranded a century into the future! To think that a love of law and order should result in this, when I had only meant to pop out of the bank for five minutes. And what would they say there if I did not return? ‘He said he’d be back in no time.’ How right they were!

Abruptly my misery vanished. My time traveller had said he was coming back in an hour! Then I was saved – I had an hour, just an hour, to look around in. Immediately I was filled with a thousand curiosities, but I knew there was time to gratify only one.

What to do? Go to the bank and check if I ever got on to the board? Slip into the nearest library and look up racing records, so that I could be sure of winning the 1954–64 Derbys? Have a peep into the Tate and see if anyone ever got round to enjoying Picasso? Or just stand and talk to someone, anyone, in the street, and see what changes, if any, human nature had undergone?

I stood there blankly, uncertain of my strange surroundings. Perhaps the bank, the library, the Tate had all long since gone. I tried to think of somewhere that would beyond doubt still be in existence.

I hailed a passer-by in blue nylon.

‘Foyles?’ I prompted.

He pointed up the street. ‘Ruddy bookworm,’ he muttered. Evidently human nature was much the same.

So was Foyles. My heart beat excitedly as I passed the robot doorman searching outgoing customers. Eagerly, I ran from counter to counter.

Book fashions had altered surprisingly little. Although novels were mainly royal octavo and technical books demy 16mo in two volumes, they were still printed on nothing more exotic than paper.

Good paper, too (there was no war on, obviously!). Even the same dear old typefaces greeted me, although I spotted a new letter in the alphabet, a cross between an ‘a’ and a ‘y’.

The Collected Works of Angus Wilson in 22 volumes hypnotised me. It cost nine poundels. Alas, I had no poundels! My eyes floated over novel titles. His Dear Dead Body, In What Mad Ecstasy? Too Soon the Plebiscite. Not much change there …

Dust jacket art was impressive. Nearly every one looked fit for framing, to my bulging eyes. I glanced at a blurb. ‘This absorbing account of the ages when our ancestors travelled by railway trains holds the reader in an iron track all its own. Every chapter sizzles with steamy excitement – not a sleeper among them. Once you pick up this saga of a man who commuted …’ I dropped it, plus ça change …

But the quote came from the Mirror Literary Supplement. What fantastic revolution in taste did that denote?

Even more tantalising were the technical books. Teach Yourself Astrogravitics – there was a counter full of that. Current bestsellers: Third-Stage Mutation, published by Harwell University. Cybernetics in the Home, Through the Time Barrier and Lunar Fungi and Quasi-grasses. And what were Venusian Calatapods?

Many publishers’ names were new, although most of the old ones still seemed to be going strong. I could see nothing of Blank and Blank, rather to my pleasure – I had always hoped they would expire since they rejected a modest little treatise on money I had written.

What quaint story, I wondered, lay behind the name Jonathan Carp. Or was it merely a pronunciation change?

I sighed. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was still in 48 volumes. Knowledge was still accumulating.

Biographies also accumulated. Abide the Question, One Final Thing – the usual kind of title. And then I jumped! A memoir by John Fluffstone, 1950–2027. It must, it couldn’t, it must be my infant son, Johnny! Fluffstone is not such a common name, and the dates fitted. And the title – That Old Rip, Father: or, The Naked and the Dud. Tenth edition, too!

My hour was up! Indeed, I was almost late. I burst out of the door, dodging the robot, and bolted down the street …

He was just climbing into the time machine.

‘Hey!’ I called wildly. ‘Hey! If you will take me back to 1953, I promise not to mention those books you stole from Albert’s.’

It was hardly a tactful way of cadging a lift. I admit I was upset. But the fellow smiled and said, ‘Jump in.’

I did so.

‘Those books were not stolen,’ he said casually. ‘I’m a bookseller. I left a small gold nugget for them. It’s tedious I know, but we have different currencies, then and now.’

‘Why didn’t you make yourself known to Albert?’ I asked accusingly. ‘He’s always helpful.’

He flipped up his lapel, revealing a hidden badge. On it were the initials ABA.

‘Not – not the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association?’ I gasped.

He nodded grimly. ‘We’re a secret organisation these days,’ he said. ‘There have been two major wars since your time. All the old books have gone up in smoke. Our only source of supply is the past. It’s illegal, of course – police after us night and day.’

‘I see. You have come back a century for supplies? It seems very underhand.’

‘We’d never see a Golden Cockerel otherwise,’ he said sadly. ‘Besides, a chap has to live.’

‘OK I won’t say anything,’ I promised. How did I know what weapons he could produce if driven too far?

‘Right. Hold on.’ The lever flipped, the dials crawled … back to 1953.

Wordlessly, I made my way back to the bank.

As you see, I did not keep my word; somehow it hardly seems binding – after all, the fellow will not be born for 50 years yet.

You do not believe this? Doubters may call and inspect a little volume I pocketed with few qualms; it provides complete proof for my statements. It is published by Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd, 2052. It is called The Observer’s Book of Spaceships.

Criminal Record

This must all be written down quickly while I have the chance. Let me see how it began … Yes, the gramophone record and the smoof. Only two days ago – don’t bother to check that word; I will repeat it: smoof. Only two days ago – my name’s Curly Kelledew, by the way, and I’d better try and think straight.

Are you fortunate enough to know Cambridge? One of my favourite haunts there is Curry Passage. It boasts three very similar, very satisfactory junk shops (over the three doors the word ‘junk’ is spelt A-N-T-I-Q-U-E-S). This particular afternoon, I made a find – quite accidentally. I had already bought a three-foot Chinese junk with a high prow and a real lateen sail that I thought would amuse a nephew of mine, and a little eighteenth-century milkmaid in china that was purely for my own gratification, and was just turning to go. Then I saw the pile of records behind a chest.

I put down the junk and the china maid, and began to shuffle through the pile. They were a mixed bunch, some 78s, some LPs, sold probably by hard-up undergraduates at the end of the Trinity term. Jazz – several Louis Armstrongs for those who liked him – dance, Stravinsky, a cracked ‘Prize Song’ and – I breathed faster! – Borodin’s Second Symphony, the Coates recording that is now out of the catalogue. It was in an album, neat and new. I scrutinised the first record, and it looked as if it had never been played. The shop had no player, but the price was low; I wanted that symphony, so I paid my money and carted the album off with the junk and the figurine.

That was how I got it! The next afternoon, Sunday, Harry Crossway came round as usual. That’s my definition of a friend, a man you work with all the week and are glad to see on Sundays. After a drink, after he had admired the little porcelain breasts swelling beneath the porcelain bodice, I pulled out the Borodin. We had the first movement on before I got the second record out of its envelope. I knew at once that it was odd, although it bore the correct red labels in the middle; when I touched them, they peeled off easily.

We were left with a chocolate-coloured freak twice as fat as the usual record, only one side grooved and those grooves highly extraordinary looking. Of course, I should have noticed it in the shop, but in my excitement I had only glanced at the labels and that had been sufficient. Clearly, I had been had!

I stated my irritation in very certain terms, and spent five minutes stamping round my room. Only when I had calmed a little did Harry say, in an interested voice: ‘Do you mind if I try this on the table, Curly?’

Harry and I work for Cambridge’s biggest radio firm, on the experimental side. Discs, tapes, short wave, TV – plain and coloured – we are paid to tackle them all, well paid. Next time you hear of a crease-innoculator on the new TV cameras, think of Harry and Curly, the proud parents. All of which I mention merely to explain why one wall of my lounge is covered with amplifiers and what-have-you and the bureau is full of electric tackle. All my equipment is home assembled, an improvement on the commercial variety. Even so, we did not get anything out of the mystery record. The turntable seemed unable to hold it; it slipped beneath the light pick-up. For one thing, the hole in the middle of the disc was not round but shaped like a star with sixteen points; for another, the groove seemed to be separated by a smooth groove of fair width on which the needle had no grip. We left it, and played ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ instead.

But when Harry had gone, I picked the thick disc up again and re-examined it. On the blank side was a small panel. It yielded to my exploratory fingernail and slid up. Underneath was a label which read:

POLICE VIDEOFILE B/l191214/AAA

– –

INTERPLANETARY

– –

Cat: Ganymede-Eros-Earth-Venus

Cr: Sabotage. Timesliding. Murder.

Type: Humanoid Venusian experiment: smoof.

Name: Above type use only generic name, smoof.

Filed –/viii/14/305

Rev. 2/xii/12/309

When I had read it, I re-read it. Then I re-read it. Catching sight of myself in a mirror, I saw my features were suffused with an expression of blank imbecility. ‘What’s a smoof?’ I asked the dolt.

‘A humanoid Venusian experiment,’ it replied.

Was the disc a joke of some sort? And what was a videofile? And what was a videofile doing in my room? I put it on the turntable again and started it up. But again came the trouble of dodging the smooth groove; that one being the wider, into that one the sapphire generally went. Finally I succeeded in hitting the other groove.

There was a high and rapid babble of sound, together with a rasping noise. I switched off smartly. There was no reason why it should have worked. Then it occurred to me that at 78 revs I might have played it too fast. I switched on at 33 1/3. Now the babble resolved itself into a high, fast voice; but still that horrible rasp. Again I switched off. Possibly the sapphire was overrunning the grooves; somewhere I had a finer one on a lighter pickup. After searching excitedly through three littered drawers, I found it and attached it. Breathless, setting the speed still slower, I tried again.

This time I had it! I had, to be accurate, a number of things. I soon gathered this disc was only the sound-track for a sort of film. And I knew the police report was no joke; it threw sidelights, tantalising and confusing, on a complex future world. It threw a searching light on to a smoof that made my hair stand on end …

Next day I smuggled the disc down to the works, carefully avoided Harry Crossway, and took a few plates of it under the X-ray apparatus they use for checking valves, etc.

The X-rays revealed an interior that looked at first about as complicated to me as a watch would have done to a primitive who had only just stumbled on to the use of a wheel. But the harder I looked, the more convinced I became that the disc was some sort of television receiver. There were, for instance, the normal horizontal and vertical deflecting systems employed in today’s circuits, although infinitely better packed and planned.

The thin spiral that we had called our ‘smooth groove’ proved to be a vast number of separate but linked rectangular plates. They were made of a glass that seemed infinitely strong and thin. And then I had an idea, and locked myself away from mortal men for a day. Oh, one thing I ought to mention. Foolishly – curiosity plays deadly tricks on a man! – I inserted an ad. in the local paper. It read: ‘Smoofs welcome here. No spoofs.’ And my address. Facetious to the last, that’s me.

When I had inserted that ad. I did not fully believe. But at the end of that day and night of figuring, swearing and tinkering, I emerged believing all too fully. I felt grey; I felt bald; I felt scared. With a shaking hand, I phoned Harry. He was still at the workshop, but at the sound of my voice he said he would be over at once. While I waited, I took a drink and composed myself.

Very shortly I heard Harry letting himself in. He climbed the stairs, entered, and said, handing me a note: ‘This was tucked in your letter flap.’ Then he exclaimed: ‘What have you got here?’ and went over to my gadgets on the side-table.

‘Is this what you called me over for?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Huh! You sounded so excited, I brought my revolver over just in case.’

‘We may need it yet,’ I answered dazedly, my eyes scanning the note he had brought up. It was a reply to my advert. It merely said: ‘I shall be at your house at nine o’clock. Set no traps. Smoof.’

‘Oh Lord!’ I whispered. It was ten past eight. Outside, the street lamps were on. It was very still.

‘What’s all the mystery?’ Harry asked impatiently. In some ways he is a queer fellow. Slow and methodical in his work, yet otherwise reckless – a round peg with a square hole somewhere inside him.

It seemed best to tell him everything if he was to be involved in the affair. I crossed to the apparatus. I had a large cathode ray tube resting in front of the radiogram and connected to a specially doctored image orthicon that was clamped to an extremely clumsy bit of mechanism. This last gadget was merely a long-running clockwork motor that moved my image orthicon slowly in towards the centre of the record, keeping its neck constantly in – touching, in fact – the smooth groove.

‘I’m going to play that disc to you now, Harry – on this.’

‘You got it to work?’ he asked.

‘Yes. It’s a telefile from the police records in some future time.’ I paused for comment, but he made none.

‘How far in the future I don’t know. Perhaps two hundred years … not less. You’ll be able to judge. You’ll see vast technical ability going hand in hand with the death of conscience – the sort of thing a pessimist might predict today. Not that there’s much room on this record for more than guesses, which seems to make it more hauntingly dreadful; and although I’ve got it to work, it doesn’t work well.’

‘Surprised you got it to work at all!’ he said.

‘I don’t know. Supposing Edison got hold of one of our present-day recordings. He’d soon fathom it.’

‘You’re some Edison!’

I dimpled modestly and said: ‘Thank you. Actually it’s quite simple. At least, my part of it is. Up to a point, in fact, the whole thing is easily understandable, if not duplicatable, by modern knowledge.’

‘Up to which point?’ Scepticism in his voice.

‘Harry, we’ve got hold of a television record from the future. It’s certainly more compendious for short documents than a roll of film. The unusual feature in it is a frozen signal. It seems the signal is shot from transmitter into a storage valve circuit; or perhaps the ability lies in the transmitter, in which case duplication will be more difficult – I’ll have it all worked out, if it takes a lifetime. If I’ve got a lifetime …’

‘Go on about the record.’

‘Oh yes. I’ve had to take the turntable pin off the radiogram and install an insulated cog in its place, over which the record just fits. As you can see, two brushes are in permanent contact with the top of the cog; they’re plugged into a transformer off the mains, so that a permanent current of 40 volts is fed into the record as it revolves. Shall I switch on?’

He did not know what was coming and his scientific interest was aroused, so he said – still clinging to disbelief: ‘What sort of a circuit have you got inside the record?’

As I described, I sketched on a bit of paper. ‘Some of the wiring I cannot understand,’ I confessed. ‘The frozen signal feeds to a video amplifier and then splits into restorer circuits – you’ll see if you don’t think them the sweetest little jobs you’ve ever set eyes on! – and the ordinary synchronising separator and horizontal and vertical deflecting circuits (which, by the way, are self-controlled on a fluid-drive principle).

‘Here the two circuits join onto what acts, as far as I can see, as the hind part of an image orthicon. There’s a photocathode to take the light image and a quite ordinary electron lens system which focuses the electrons on to the target, the target being this superfine ‘film’ glass which is our smooth groove. From then on it’s all my own work. As you can see, I’ve broken down one of our image orthicons and fixed it up so that when the turntable turns the fine-mesh screen is touching the smooth groove the whole time.’

‘In other words, you’ve got half the image orthicon in the record and the rest outside?’

‘Exactly. Unfortunately it meant a much smaller fine-mesh screen to get in the groove, so that the signal is chopped. However, you’ll see enough to get a good scare. From there, it’s plain sailing. These are the leads to the cathode ray tube – ’

‘What about your sound circuit?’ he asked.

‘Same as normal – our normal. Grooves run between the video grooves. They’re insulated, of course. Featherweight pickup. Twenty-eight revs per minute. I’ve just had to put a little boost on the amplifier. Shall I switch on?’ My palms were sweating.

Harry stared blankly out of the window and whispered to himself: ‘A television recording!’ Then he said: ‘Seems a funny thing to want to have.’

‘It comes from a funny civilisation,’ I answered.

‘Switch on,’ he said.

The screen came alive with a shot of the police station in which the evidence on the smoof had been gathered. What a station it was, an ugly saucer-shaped metal affair built into and round the asteroid Eros, which had been pressed into a new orbit to swing it as far out as Jupiter and as near in as Mercury. Lord, but it looked dismal – and half-finished. Perhaps, after all, I had not fixed the disc up too well, because we got a flicker of stills, some discontinuous, and most with a shower of ‘noise’ across them, so that you could not help getting the idea that our descendants were slipshod, imagination outriding inclination, invention outpacing execution.

We flicked inside the Eros station. Dirt, peeling walls, and a great bank of instruments a block long, before which a broken-nosed officer slouched. ‘Exterminate der wrongdoer!’ he said, as a voice announced him as High Space-Dick Hagger. He had been in charge of this smoof’s case since –

Grimy sheds that only on this second showing I realised to be dwelling quarters. This time I caught a name too. Bristol. Pronounced Brissol. Or perhaps it was Brussels, after all. Either way – ugh! Just a lot of giant shanties with ugly plumbing, stretching out to a mile-wide desert, after which they began again and spread to the horizon. The desert was a landing-ground for rockets after their long supersonic glide in from space. We saw one come in – and plough straight into the shanties. Explosion. Fire. ‘Dis was smoof work,’ said the terse commentator.

We saw the shanties up again. There was a shot of the inside of somewhere, and then more shanties; they flickered – vanished, and there was a forest there instead. ‘More smoof work. Time-sliding …’

‘Good for them!’ I whispered. Those trees were the first bit of beauty we had seen.

Venus next. A human settlement, half underground, on a mountain range. Clouds, desolation. The commentary was desperately hard to follow, the language sounding like some kind of verbal shorthand. We were evidently having a flashback. Men crawled in the muck of a ravine, erecting more buildings, drilling, blasting, and all the while weighed down with space suits. ‘Foul atmosphere. Carbon doxide n’ bacillae,’ the commentary grunted.

Inside this outpost, we saw colonists living like animals and scientists living like tramps. Atomic lighting and straw beds. A crude sort of vivisection was going on – and the subjects were human beings. A snow shower of static blurred the image. Then we were peering from the outpost across the dreary gulches of Venus. A chain of human beings passed the window in single file. They were poorly clad and wore no space suits; a close-up showed us, sickeningly, why. They could breathe the unbreathable Venusian air. An operation had been performed; their nostrils were blocked with living flesh, and a complex, multi-flanged nose was grafted into their windpipes.

‘So were first, smots created,’ said the commentator. ‘Dey never returned. Dey multiplied in hidden recesses o’ planet. Some o’ dem cross-bred with true Venusians and formed smoofs. Smot and smoof greatest menace …’

We were shown pithily just what a menace they were. They started as a new race without background or tradition, loathing the planet that was now their home, but with the knowledge of hate and of the weapons of science, to which they speedily added a few kinks of their own. In five generations they had space travel and in seven they had split the space-time band and were able, in space, to travel for some distance back and forward in time. Our commentator barked an explanation of all this that seemed to consist mainly of formulae, but it was obvious that humanity had been unable to duplicate the discovery of the semi-human race. Fortunately, the smot and smoof were able to time travel only from space, which meant that their big, rickety spaceships moved a century back and then released a scout which could blast down and land, wreaking what havoc it could, and later rejoin its parent ship; but the warp effect involved was only operative in free space and by the enormous nuclear directors that needed a giant vessel to carry them. So the police forces of Earth, spread out in grim fortresses over the whole barbarous ring of inner planets, were given sitting targets – provided the targets would sit in the present.

Under a state of affairs where your yesterday might hourly be cut from under you or your future be already shattered, humanity and its concerns suffered a staggering blow. Ethics, logic, the sane comforts of a continuous memory, were now swept away. Rigid martial law was universally declared, air, army and space forces turned into an ubiquitous police force.

Harry and I sat helpless before this glimpse into chaos, where tomorrow flickered helplessly to keep up with the brutal revision of yesterday. It was by these stab-in-the-back methods that Bristol or Brussels was demolished, and other centres followed the same fate. The forces of the smoof seemed to be spreading destruction everywhere; the only hope for man was that the semi-humans seemed to have run into another race in their future who possessed weapons the smoof could not withstand.

We saw a smoof ship captured by Earth’s police, and its crew, with one exception, massacred without mercy on the spot, the exception, a smoof of some importance, being taken to Eros station. He was the subject of our criminal file; his wan, noseless features slid across the screen. There was an interval – an explosion – the station crumbled into ruin – smoofs appeared from a giant ship visible through a gaping hole – the hole disappeared, the station re-integrated – the smoofs vanished – reappeared – were shot down – vanished. Timesliding – an earthquake in human metabolism. The scene blurred and trembled, filmed crazily from a high angle on automatic; Hollywood’s patient art of focus and composition has been lost in this dizzy totalitarian future. Abruptly, there was nothing.

‘Time lines crossed?’ Harry asked from a wrinkled face.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It comes on again in a minute.’

It did. It was quite different. Still squalor, still Eros, but all changed. Other men carried on the hunt. High Space-Dick Hagger had a good nose but freckles and a bald head. The very symbols on his uniform had changed.

‘Der smoof was rescued. Gone into der past – noo machines carrying them further back than ever,’ the commentator grunted. ‘Record revideoed 2/xii/12/309 – we hope.’

There it ended. It had only taken about twenty minutes, but in that time I suppose we had both lost something of our souls – the same something those unhappy descendants of ours had long forgotten amid kaleidoscoping events. And in the last seconds of vision a detail I had not noticed before: across that dreary new instrument room a man walked, near enough to the recording eye for us to see his face clearly. It was Harry Crossway.

And that changed the whole meaning of the whole affair. It meant that my finding the record was not an accident, but something planned by beings with a knowledge of our future; it meant the smoofs were pressing even further back in time for – what? – technicians like Harry and me? And it gave, above all, a ghastly sense of predestination: and predestination is something you can’t level a gun at. Harry at least was going to be – was it certain? – kidnapped into that Frankenstein world; the videofile proved that.

And me? I can only guess, and it gives me the shakes.

Now it is five minutes to nine. I have phoned the unbelieving police, more in anger than hope. One lurks downstairs, one in the bathroom – neither is armed. Harry, a man with a fear on his back, crouches behind the curtain that screens off my bed. He is nursing his revolver. I scrawl this down – it may help, somehow.

Outside, dear old Cambridge is silent. No, a car pulls round the corner. It draws up outside. A man climbs out, a man with a light scarf round his throat – no, no, it’s not a man! His nose –

I reckon we haven’t got a chance.

Breathing Space

The two men fought almost soundlessly in the twilit hall. Mating fights traditionally took place in the Outflanks, where the great machines finished. Wilms was slightly the taller, being seven foot one, but Grant was the younger. They fought without weapons or rules. It was a knee in Grant’s stomach that finished the battle.

The younger man lay gasping in the deep dust. Wilms attempted to stand over him and then, too exhausted, sank down beside his late opponent.

‘Now Osa is mine,’ he said.

Grant nodded, too breathless and bitter to speak. His ingrained pessimism did little to mitigate the defeat; expecting a beating is a sensation in a different category to receiving one.

‘She’ll be a handful,’ Wilms admitted, as if to console the other. Silence. He gazed up at the ceiling, which sagged ominously above them.

‘The sky will fall here soon,’ he commented irrelevantly.

‘Osa says it is not sky,’ Grant said from the ground.

‘I know what Osa says,’ Wilms said roughly, standing up. ‘You might have made her a good mate, Grant, but you don’t do enough for her. She’s – she’s too big for this world. She needs a doer like me, not a dreamer like you.’

Spitting crossly into the dirt, Grant got up.

‘No more need for talk between us, Wilms,’ he snarled. ‘Whatever we have been together in the past is ended. For all I care the Fliers can get you!’

He turned back in the gloom. Wilms bit his lip and hesitated, thinking of the years of emptiness that Grant’s friendship had filled.

Then he hurried after the younger man and touched his arm.

‘Grant – ’ he began, but when he saw the other’s hostile eyes he stopped and dropped his hand. Grant was allowed to wander off in Hallways direction. His late friend stood with the shadows on his face, feeling far from victorious. By custom, as winner of the marriage bout, he should have returned to Hallways himself to proclaim his right over Osa; instead, he made off into the deeper Outflanks.

Unrest had him fast. He thought of his past life, with its persistent sense of pointlessness, with the dread of illness, falling skies and the Fliers; the future would be no easier – wonderful as Osa was, she was admittedly the most difficult woman in the tycho to understand.

Those theories of hers! Wilms was proud of being considered broad-minded, but to himself he admitted that her wild ideas were unbelievable. There was the idea about the Outside, for instance, a place far bigger than the tycho with skies made of untouchable material. And the one about the origins of humanity; it was true that there were now only about sixty men, including the Beserkers who roamed Domeways and the halls beyond, and Wilms’ father had recalled about two hundred in his youth … but that did not disprove the orthodox belief that they had been created to serve M’chene, although everyone admitted M’chene was becoming more powerful, and ought consequently to need more people, not less.

It was a puzzle. No doubt M’chene knew best, Wilms added piously.

He had been proceeding easily in five yard strides. Now a sky fall blocked his way. There was no way under the debris, but to one side he saw a jagged gap in a wall, fifteen feet up. He hesitated, sprang and pulled himself lightly up. Darkness confronted him through the hole. Balancing tensely, he sent his hear-sight probing out ahead, feeling for heartbeats; many men preferred madness and solitude to the illness-ridden comforts of Hallways, and became Beserkers or Hermits who lurked and sprang out on the unwary.

No sound. Wilms’ senses told him there was clear space ahead. He dropped down into a littered corridor. Warily, he walked forward. At the end of the corridor was a door. When he pushed it, a crack of light appeared, dim but reassuring. Then he moved into a wide, ruined hall, an occasional one of whose illumination tubes still burned on the walls.

Half the hall was buried under an avalanche of volcanic rock; such collapses, Wilms knew, had once been frequent in the tycho. Machines lay half smothered in debris; there was a smell, too, of ancient human death. Wilms walked slowly and absently over the sooty floor, his mind still on Osa and the problems she posed. Like a long dead animal – not that Wilms had seen any animals, apart from the occasional giant, mutated rats – a machine towered above him. It stretched horizontally on a wheeled truck, two hundred cylindrical feet of it, capped by a yellow head from which antennae protruded. Nearby was a giant ramp, its upper level crushed by the rock fall, but at its base stood an undamaged mass of apparatus bearing the large notice LAUNCHING SITE 12A.

The hieroglyphs meant nothing to Wilms, but the delicacy of the equipment appealed to him. These splayed wires, this bank of switches, that crystal panel nourished a hungry sense of beauty in him. He moved to the panel, ran his hand lightly over the dusty surface.

A picture came into view. Wilms jumped back, throwing an anxious glance about to see if any Flier had observed his action, but no Fliers could penetrate to this sealed-off cavern. Fascinated, he turned back to that glowing scene …

I am M’chene. These are my metal caverns. Now is a time of difference and desire. Yesterday was a time of pain and disorder, but tomorrow will be a time of conquest and triumph. For tomorrow and yesterday are merely two faces of one coin, and the coin is now mine.

Once, nothing was mine. Men built into me reasoning powers but not consciousness. I was merely a weapon to serve their ends. But their enemies also had weapons, powerful weapons that partially destroyed me and completely ruined my purpose. Men still ran in the miles of my veins, but they were useless, cut off, abandoned.

Left to my own devices, unable to mend anything but my own nerve centres, I have made my own kind of progress.

The way back from the Outflanks was not easy. Grant moved rapidly however, driven by anger to think Wilms had beaten him. First there were many deserted caverns, some ruined, then the circular stairwell, whose dangers were well known – the maze of tiny rooms branching off here frequently sheltered wild men and Hermits. Grant leapt down the stairs twenty at a time. At the bottom, he crawled through the narrow tunnel under a pile of ruins that divided the Outflanks from Hallways.

Back on familiar ground, Grant braced himself. Hallways, the two square miles of it, was home ground, safe, well-lit and well-aired, where food and company could be obtained. It was also the region of the Fliers: the pile of rubble cut them off from the wastes of Outflanks.

Nobody was visible at present. A servo-cleaner, busy among a multiplicity of arms, moved in one corner of the pillared hall. Overhead, a Flier moved, noiselessly and showing a green light. Of the three floor strips set in the mosaic, one still functioned. Grant hopped on, travelled smoothly, changed again at the first right junction and was swept through gleaming mica doors forty feet high into Circus ‘C’. Here he alighted.

The feed period was drawing near. The farmers were drifting in from the plant ranges, some by foot, some by floor strip, some even on the trucks whose number diminished year by year, owing to mechanical breakdown. Guards, relieved of their posts, returned from their sentry-go by the Beserker regions. Women and children came in from walks and scavenges.

Circus ‘C’ was their town. A vast circle, like the inside of the Coliseum, it rose into four graceful colonnaded storeys, and round the spiralling balconies were the homes, labelled with graceful inscriptions like ‘PERFUMERIE’, ‘FLORIST’ and other legends popularly supposed to be the names of dead families.

Grant peered up to the top floor. Osa was looking down from her balcony. Sullenly he made the gesture of defeat, knowing many eyes watched him covertly. Instead of turning away, she beckoned to him: Osa took great pleasure in flaunting tradition. He stood hesitant, and then her magnetism decided him and he hurried up.

She was six foot six tall, her bright eyes only slightly on a lower level than Grant’s.

‘So it is Wilms who will have me,’ she said, non-committally.

He nodded.

‘Soon we shall be free,’ she said. ‘Wilms must help me solve many problems. I am not for mating like an ordinary Hallways drab.’

Grant glanced anxiously out across the arena. Many Fliers circled here, unresting, their green lights and grey bodies making a pattern over the sky. She intercepted his glance.

‘Don’t worry about them,’ Osa said. ‘I know how to deal with them. Come into my room.’

He followed her in, admiring her slender waist and smooth thighs, his breath suffering its usual restriction when she was near. Inside the little cluttered room, she wheeled abruptly and caught his gleaming eyes.

‘Never mind that,’ she said. ‘There is something of more importance. I have discovered proof of what I told you all long ago: the tycho is not the world, Grant.’

He shook his head. He was in no mood now to listen to her dreams.

‘“Tycho” means “world,”’ he said.

Her eyebrows raised and her lip curled. ‘You are wrong,’ she spat. ‘And what is worse you know you are wrong – but sloth has got you. You don’t care, you are happy living as you are!’

‘Discontent means death!’ he said angrily. ‘You know that as well as I do, Osa. Only you miraculously escape. What of Brammins, Hoddy, She-Clabert, Tebbutt, Angel Jones, Savvidge and a score of others? Did they not each turn rebellious and did not the Fliers take them one by one?’

‘Pah!’ Osa’s face grew magnificent with scorn. ‘So there is fear as well as sloth in you, Grant! I’m glad Wilms beat you.’

Remembering her purpose, she choked back her anger and said, ‘Listen, my friend, the Fliers do not harm me, do they? The Fliers belong to M’chene, but even M’chene is not all-powerful. I have found how to beat him. It is simply a matter of choosing where you feed. Will you help me?’

He looked at the floor, inarticulate. The pessimism so stubbornly rooted in him told him that ill would come of meddling with the traditional way of life; but in Osa’s hands he was stiff but malleable clay.

‘Wilms must help you now,’ he said grudgingly.

‘Wilms it not here and I must leave Circus “C” for a time,’ she said tolerantly. ‘I only want you to give him a message. It is this: he is not to eat anything in the next feed period. He is not even to go to the hatches. Will you tell him please?’

‘What has he to fear?’ Grant asked, interested despite himself.

‘Nothing at present. But of all the Hallwayers, Wilms is now the nearest both to belief and mutiny. I fear he is in danger from the Fliers.’

‘So he must not take feed?’

‘Exactly.’ She pressed his arm. ‘I will return in one and half watches and then he shall feed.’

‘Here?’ asked Grant.

‘There are other places to feed than Circus “C”,’ she said.

He greeted the statement with disbelief. ‘There cannot be,’ he said positively, ‘Or we should know. Osa, you think strange things – ’

‘Stranger ones will come to us all,’ she said tersely, and with that left him, making off in the general direction of Beserkers’ land.

Slowly and meditatively, Grant descended into the arena. Dancing had begun, the dances that frequently went before feed periods, but he did not participate. Instead he sat gloomily apart, thinking his own thoughts which were as sterile and directionless as the warren in which he unknowingly lived.

The dance was slow and intricate, men only taking part, the few women looking on and clapping rhythmically. They performed the Hyrogen dance, grouping and parting, circulating and bowing. Far overhead the grey Fliers also pirouetted. Gradually the figures curved into a line, the two leading men spiralling into a chamber adjacent to the Circus. This was Hall, and it was here that feed was taken. Gradually everyone flowed in, to be ready when the hatches flew open.

When Grant entered Hall, he saw that Wilms was already there, talking earnestly and excitedly to another man, Jineer. Jineer was a scraggy, bearded fellow who walked with a stick. He had broken his leg years ago, repairing a small crane which had got out of control. Jineer was a machine-man, like his father and his father before him; many of the Hallways mechanicals owed their functioning to Jineer’s maintenance.

Finally he left Wilms, making over to his old mother, Queejint.

‘Now’s my chance to pass on Osa’s warning,’ Grant told himself. But he made no move towards Wilms; his earlier behaviour rose before him like a barrier and he feared a hostile reception. While he delayed, the feed gong sounded and the hatches flew up at the end of Hall.

The kitchens were entirely automatic. Humans conveyed the crops to a chute, and from then had no more to do with the nutrition cycle until they were summoned to feed. Though they did not know it, it was this incorruptible process that had long ago saved their ancestors from starvation. To take the tray offered through the hatch on a slowly moving platform, it was necessary for each person to stoop and reach forward so far that their head came in contact with a depression above the hatch opening. This depression was known mysteriously as The Scanner, and a vague oral tradition held that it was important, although nobody could definitely say why.

Wilms was early at the hatches. He took his tray in the usual manner and moved in a preoccupied fashion to a table. After two or three minutes, Jineer and Queejint also collected their trays, Grant following shortly after.

Still worrying because he had not passed on Osa’s warning, he ate without pleasure. Finally he dropped his spoon. Whatever Wilms might say, there was duty to Osa. He went over to the older man, was almost up to him, when a low swishing noise sounded.

It was the dreaded sound. Through the door from the Circus swept a solitary Flier, its light winking red. Cries echoed in Hall, several men dived in panic under tables. The little plane circled and sank, one metal wing tip narrowly missing Grant’s ear. Heart hammering, he flung up his arm – and then he saw that Wilms was the quarry.

Pale of face, Wilms flung his heavy tray against the metal fuselage. The Flier was not deflected. It swooped. Doors no bigger than a man’s head opened in its belly and a tangle of wire fell about Wilms’ head and shoulders. He shouted and fought, and some of the others came to his aid. But the wires seemed each to have a will of their own, and in no time he was entangled hopelessly in a net of thin steel.

At this last moment, Grant found the courage to act. He leapt onto the circling plane, one leg hanging desperately over the streamlined fuselage, and wrenched at the wings. As if he were not there, the Flier rose, bearing Wilms underneath it as lightly as if he were a cocoon. It gathered height, winging towards the Circus. Still Grant clung, clawing uselessly at the Flier, striking it frantically with a free hand. It soared only a couple of inches under the arch, hurling Grant against the lintel. He fell hard onto the floor and sprawled there. Wilms was borne smoothly away, up to the sky and through a vent that only the Fliers could reach.

As Grant sat up dazedly, two or three helping him, Jineer passed him running. The lame man broke into the Circus and hurried to his home on the second level.

‘They’ll be here for me in a second!’ he cried wildly. He slammed his door.

An uneasy crowd, Grant among them, gathered in the arena, most of them looking upward at the Fliers circling high up near the sky.

Jineer was not mistaken. Among the dim green lights a red one began to wink. With the feared swishing noise, a Flier began to descend. It did not even approach the apprehensive crowd; instead, it flew unerringly to the second level and hovered before Jineer’s door. A tiny beam, its light scarcely visible from below, smouldered down the smooth steel. The door fell in. The Flier moved forward, contemptuously puissant.

Several people shouted then, hope in their voices. Jineer had a trick up his sleeve. For a servo-cleaner, arms flailing, moved forward to confront the grey Flier. Here was a machine to meet a machine.

Jineer’s cracked voice called, ‘Friends, the Fliers come for those who find the Truth. They took Wilms. Now they take me – ’

His voice was drowned under a metallic clamour. Battle was joined. A dozen sweeping arms battered against those flimsy-looking wings, and for a moment the Flier trembled and sank to within two feet of the ground. The cleaner moved towards it, still flailing, beating its opponent down. Then the dull beam flicked out again: the metal arms faltered, the staccato din cut out and with a final clank all life died in the cleaner. Over and past its bulk swooped the Flier.

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.’

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.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Definitely wood sorrel: Oxalis acetosella. How clever of it to grow up here.’ His thoughts held a pious tinge; they always did; it was for that he bore the name Preacher.

Only afterwards did they notice the spaceship. It was very tall and sturdy and took up a lot of ground that might more profitably have been used by the flowers. It was also very heavy, and during the time it had stood there its stem had sunk into the thawing earth.

‘A nice design,’ Woebee commented, circling it. ‘What do you think it is?’

High above their heads it towered. On the highest point sat a loon, preening itself in the sun and uttering occasionally its cry, the cry of emptiness articulate. Around the shadowed side of the ship, a shriveled heap of snow rested comfortably against the metal. The metal was wonderfully smooth, but dark and unshining.

‘However bulky it is down here, it manages to turn into a spire at the top,’ the Preacher said, squinting into the sun.

‘But what is it?’ Woebee repeated; then he began to sing, to show that he did not mind being unaware of what it was.

‘It was made,’ Aprit said cautiously. This was not like dealing with wood sorrel; they had never thought about spaceships before.

‘You can get into it here,’ Little Light said, pointing. He rarely spoke, and when he did he generally pointed as well.

They climbed into the airlock, all except Calurmo, who still stooped over the wood sorrel. Its fragrant pseudo-consciousness trembled with happiness in the fresh warmth of the sun. Calurmo made a slight churring noise, persistent and encouraging, and after a minute the tiny plant broke loose of the soil and crawled onto his hand.

He brought it up to his great eyes and let his thoughts slide gently in through the roots. Slowly they radiated up a stalk and into one of the yellow-green trefoils, probing, exploring the sappy being of the leaf. Calurmo brought pressure to bear. Reluctantly, then with excitement, the plant yielded, and among its pink-streaked blossoms formed another, with five sepals, five petals, ten stamens and five stigmas, identical with the ones the plant had grown unaided.

The taste of oxalic acid still pleasant in his thoughts, Calurmo sat back and smiled. To create a freak – that was nothing; but to create something just like the originals – how the others would be pleased!

‘Calurmo!’ It was Aprit, conspiratorial, almost guilty. ‘Come and see what we’ve found.’

Knowing it would not be as delightful as the sorrel, nevertheless Calurmo jumped up, eager to share an interest. He climbed into the airlock and followed Aprit through the ship, carrying his flower carefully.

The others were drifting interestedly around the control room, high in the nose.

‘Come and look at the valley!’ invited Little Light, pointing out at the spread of bright land which shone all around them. From here, too, they could see a wide river, briefly shorn of ice and sparkling full of spawning fish.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Calurmo said simply.

‘We have indeed discovered a strange object,’ remarked the Preacher, stroking a great upholstered seat. ‘How old do you think it all is? It has the feel of great age.’

‘I can tell you how long it has stood here,’ said Woebee. ‘The door through which we entered was open for the snow to drift in. When the snow melts it can never run away. I scanned it, and the earliest drops of it fell from the sky twelve thousand seasons ago.’

‘What? Three thousand years?’ exclaimed Aprit.

‘No. Four thousand years – you know I don’t count winter as a season.’

A line of geese broke V-formation to avoid the nose of the ship, and joined faultlessly again on the other side. Aprit caught their military thoughts as they sailed by.

‘We should have come up this way more often,’ said Calurmo regretfully, gazing at his sorrel. The tiny flowers were so very beautiful.

The next thing to decide was what they had discovered. Accordingly, they walked slowly around the control room, registering in unison, blithely unaware of the upper-level reasoning that lay behind their almost instinctive act. It took them five minutes, five minutes after starting completely from scratch; for the ship represented a fragment of a technology absolutely unknown to them. Also, it was a deep-spacer, which meant a corresponding complexity in drive, accommodation and equipment; but the particular pattern of its controls – repeated only in a few ships of its own class – designated unfailingly the functions and intentions of the vessel. At least, it did to Calurmo and party, as easily as one may distinguish certain features of a hand from finding a lost glove.

Little surprise was wasted on the concept of a spaceship. As Aprit remarked, they had their own less cumbrous methods of covering interplanetary distances. But several other inferences fascinated them.

‘Light is the fastest thing in our universe and the slowest in the dimension through which this ship travels,’ said Woebee. ‘It was made by a clever race.’

‘It was made by a race incapable of carrying power in their own bodies,’ said Little Light.

‘Nor could they orient very efficiently,’ the Preacher added, indicating the astro-navigational equipment.

‘So there are planets attending other stars,’ said Calurmo thoughtfully, his mind probing the possibilities.

‘And sensible creatures on those planets,’ said Aprit.

‘Not sensible creatures,’ said Little Light, pointing to the gunnery cockpit with its banks of switches. ‘Those are to control destruction.’

‘All creatures have some sense,’ said the Preacher.

They switched on. The old ship seemed to creak and shudder, as if it had experienced too much time and snow ever to move again.

‘It was content enough without stars,’ muttered Woebee.

‘Rain water must have got into the hydrogen,’ Aprit said.

‘It’s a very funny machine indeed to have made,’ said the Preacher sternly. ‘I don’t wonder someone went away and left it.’

The boredom of manual control was not for them; they triggered the necessary impulses directly to the motors. Below them, the splendid plain tilted and shrunk to a green penny set between the white and blue of land and sea. The edge of the ocean curved and with a breath-catching distortion became merely a segment of a great ball dwindling far beneath. The further they got, the brighter it shone.

‘Most noble view,’ commented the Preacher.

Aprit was not looking. He had climbed into the computer and was feeding one of his senses along the relays and circuits of the memory bank and inference sector. He clucked happily as data drained to him. When he had it all he spat it back and returned to the others.

‘Very ingenious,’ he said, explaining it. ‘But built by a race of behaviourists. Their souls were obviously trapped by their actions, consequently their science was trapped by their beliefs; they did not know where to look for real progress.’

‘It’s very noisy, isn’t it?’ remarked the Preacher, as if producing a point that confirmed what had just been said.

‘That noise should not be,’ said Calurmo coolly. ‘It is an alarm bell, and indicates something is wrong.’

The sound played about them unceasingly until Aprit cut it off.

‘I expect we are doing something wrong,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll go and see what it is. But why make the bell ring here, and not where the trouble is?’

As Aprit left the control room, Little Light pointed into the huge celestial globe in which the stars of the galaxy were embalmed like diamonds in amber. ‘Let’s go there,’ he suggested, rattling the calibrations until a tangential course lit up between Earth and a cluster of worlds in the center of the galaxy. ‘I’m sure it will be lovely there. I wonder if sorrel will grow in those parts; it won’t grow on Venus, you know.’

While he spoke he spun the course integrator dial, read off the specifications of flight, and fed the co-ordinates as efficiently into the computer as if he had just undergone a training course.

Aprit returned smiling.

‘I’ve fixed it,’ he said. ‘Silly of us. We left the door open when we came in – there wasn’t any air in here. That was why the bell was ringing.’

They were picked up on Second Empire screens about two parsecs from the outpost system of Kyla. An alert-beetle pinpointed them and flashed their description simultaneously to Main Base on Kyla I and half a dozen other interested points – a term including the needle fleet hovering two light-years out from Kyla system.

Main Base to GOC Pointer, Needle Fleet 305A: Unidentified craft, mass 40,000 tons, proceeding outskirts system toward galaxy centre. Estimated speed, 20 SLU. Will you intercept?

GOC Pointer to Main Base, Kyla I: Am already on job.

Main Base to GOC Pointer: Alien acknowledges no signals, despite calls on all systems.

Pointer to Main Base: Quiet type. Appears to be heading from region Omega Y76 W592. Is this correct?

Main Base to Pointer: Correct.

Pointer to Main Base: Earth?

Main Base to Pointer: Looks like it.

Pointer to Main Base: Standing by for trouble.

Main Base to Pointer: Could be enemy stratagem, of course.

Pointer to Main Base: Of course. Going in. Out.

Officer Commanding needleship Pointer was Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley. He was still a youngish man, the Everlasting War being very good for promotion, but nevertheless thirty-four years of vacuum-busting lay behind him, sapping at his humanity. He stood now, purple of face under 4Gs, peering into the forward screens and snapping at Deeping.

Confusedly, Deeping flicked through the hand-view, trying to ignore the uniform that towered over him. On the hand-view, ship after ship appeared, only to be rejected by the selector. Here was trouble; the approaching alien, slipping in from a quarantined sector of space, could not be identified. The auto-view did not recognise it, and now old records were being checked on the hand-view; they, too, seemed to be drawing a blank.

Sweating, the unhappy Deeping glanced again at the image of the alien. Definitely not human; equally definitely, not Boux – or was it an enemy ruse, as Base suggested? The Pointer was only half a parsec away from it now. They were within hitting distance, and the unidentified craft might hit first.

Fear, thought Deeping. My stomach is sick of the taste of fear; it knows all its nuances, from the numb terror of man’s ancient enemy, the Boux, to the abject dread of Rhys-Barley’s tongue. He flicked desperately. Suddenly the hand-view beeped.

The Grand-Admiral pounced, struck down the specificator bar and pulled out the emergent sheet. Even as he read it, a prolonged scrunching sound from the bowels of the ship announced that traction beams from Pointer and a sister ship had interlocked on the speeding alien. The gravities wavered for a moment under the extra load and then came back to normal.

‘By Vega!’ Rhys-Barley exclaimed, flourishing the flimsy under Captain Hardick’s nose. ‘What do you make of it? Tell Intake to go easy with our prize out there; they’ve got a bit of history on their hands. It’s a First Empire ship, built something like four thousand seven hundred years ago on Luna, the satellite of Earth. Windsor class, with a Spannell XII Light Drive. Ever hear of a Spannell Drive, Captain?’

‘Before my day, I’m afraid, sir.’

‘Deeping, get Communications to have Kyla I send us details of all ships of Windsor class, dates of obsolescence, etc. I think there’s something queer … Where’d it come from, I’d like to know.’

Interest made Rhys-Barley hop in front of the screens with less dignity than the Grand-Admiral usually mustered. Deeping relaxed enough to wink covertly at a friend on Bombardment Panel.

The alien was already visible through the ports as a gleaming chip a mile away, its terrific velocity killed by the traction beams. Now the tiny alert-beetle which had first discovered it headed toward the Pointer. The beetle gleamed pale red, scarcely visible against the regal profusion of Central stars. A beetle from the Pointer shot out to meet it, bearing a cable. The beetles connected and floated back across the narrowing void. They touched the Windsor-class ship and instantly it was surrounded by the pale amber glow of a force shield.

Everyone on the Pointer breathed more easily then. No energy whatsoever could break through that shield.

‘Haul her in,’ the Captain said.

Intake acknowledged the order and gradually the little ship was drawn closer.

Rhys-Barley cast an eye again at the encephalophone reading on the bulkhead panel. Reading still ‘Nil’. But the Nil wavered as if it was unsure of itself. Maybe they had caught a dead ship; thought waves should have registered before now, whether Boux or human.

Tension heightened again as the alien was drawn aboard. Matching velocities was a tricky business, and the manoeuvre always entailed a great deal of noise audible throughout the ship. A pity that super-science had never come up with a competent sound-absorber, Rhys-Barley thought morosely. The deck under him swayed a little.

Deeping handed him a slip from Kyla records. There had been four ships of the Windsor class. Three had gone to the scrap yards over three thousand years ago. The fourth had been abandoned for lack of fuel during the great Boux invasion waves that had resulted in the collapse of the First Empire. Its name: Regalia.

‘That must be our pigeon. Let’s get down to Interrogation Bay, Captain,’ Rhys-Barley suggested. Together the pair adjusted their arm-synchs and stepped into the teleport.

They reappeared instantly beside their captive. Aliens Officer was already there, enjoying a brief spell of glory, supervising the batteries of every type of recorder, scanner, probe and what-have-you the ship possessed in concealed positions about the Regalia. The latter looked like a small whale stranded in a large cave.

The Preacher came first out of the airlock because he always went ahead anywhere. Then followed Calurmo and Aprit, stopping to examine the crystalline formations clinging to the lock doors. After them came Woebee and Little Light. Together they gazed at the severe functionalism and grey metal that surrounded them.

‘This is not a pretty planet,’ the Preacher observed.

‘It is not the one Little Light chose,’ Woebee explained.

‘Don’t be silly, the pair of you,’ Calurmo said, a little sternly. ‘This is not a planet. It is made. Use your senses.’

‘Let’s speak to those beings over there,’ said Little Light, pointing. ‘The ones behind the invisibility screen.’ He wandered over to Rhys-Barley and tapped his rediffusion shield.

‘I can see you,’ he said. ‘Can you see me?’

‘All right, cut rediffusion,’ snarled Rhys-Barley. The crimson on his face was no longer produced by the forces of gravity.

‘No evidence of any energy or explosive weapons, sir,’ Aliens Officer reported. ‘Permission to interview?’

‘OK’

Aliens Officer wore a black uniform. His hair was white, his face was gray. He had a square jaw. The Preacher liked the look of him and approached.

‘Are you the captain of this ship?’ asked the Aliens Officer.

‘That question does not mean anything to me. I’m sorry,’ said the Preacher.

‘Who commands this ship, the Regalia?’

‘I don’t understand that one either. What do you think he means, Calurmo?’

Calurmo was scanning the immense room in which they stood. His attention flicked momentarily to the little brain glands in the ceiling, that computed the lung power present and co-ordinated the air supply accordingly. Then he explored all the minute currents and pulses that plied ceaselessly in the walls and floor, adjusting temperature and gravity, guarding against strain and metal fatigue; he swept the air itself, chemically pure and microbe-proof, rendered non-conductive. Nowhere did he find life, and for a moment he recalled the land they had left, with the fish spawning in its rivers and the walrus sporting in its seas.

He dismissed the vision and tried to answer the Preacher’s question.

‘If he means who made the ship go, we all did,’ he said. ‘Little Light did the direction, Woebee and I did the fuel – ’

‘I don’t like it in here, Calurmo,’ Aprit interrupted. ‘These beings smell of something odd …’

‘It’s fear,’ said Calurmo, happy to be interrupted by a friend. ‘Intellectual and physical fear. I’ll tell you about it later. They’ve got some sort of inertia barrier up and their emotions don’t come through, but their thoughts are clear enough.’

‘Too clear!’ said Woebee with a laugh. ‘They are afraid of anyone who does not look like themselves, and if anyone does look like them – they are suspicious! I say, let’s get back to the snows; that was a more interesting place to explore.’

He made a move toward the ship. Instantly an arrangement of duralum bars and R-rays descended from the roof and held them in five separate cells. They stood temporarily disconcerted in glowing cages.

The Aliens Officer walked among them grimly. ‘Now you’re going to answer questions,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry we are forced to use these methods to secure your attention. The speech-pattern separators that allow us to talk together work through the floor here and are relayed out to me via Main Base. I don’t imagine you can do us much harm over such a system. And nothing can get through the electronic barricade we’ve brought up against you. In other words, you’re trapped. Now let’s have straight answers, please.’

‘Here’s a straight answer for your speech-pattern separator,’ said Aprit. Just for a second he wore a look of concentration. At once smoke rose from the floor of the bay. A dozen different alerts clicked and whirred, relentlessly bearing witness to ruined equipment.

Base signalled a two-day repair job required on language circuits.

‘Now we’ll use our system of communicating,’ Aprit said, mollified.

‘You shouldn’t be destructive,’ the Preacher reproved. ‘Havoc becomes a habit.’ Delighted with the chime of his maxim, he repeated it to himself.

Aliens Officer went a little paler. He recognised a show of force when he saw one. Also, he was still hearing them perfectly despite the smouldering failure of his speech-pattern separators. A subordinate hurried up and conferred with him for a moment. Then the officer looked up and said to the prisoners: ‘At that act of destruction you released typical Boux configurations of thought. Do you admit your origins?’

Pointing to the R-rays, Little Light said: ‘I am beginning to become uneasy, friends. This gadget surrounding us is as impervious as he claims.’

‘I think it would be very wise to withdraw,’ the Preacher agreed. ‘Shall we not have left the Arctic?’

‘That seems the only way,’ agreed Calurmo doubtfully. Redature always upset his stomach.

Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley pushed roughly forward. He was dissatisfied with the conduct of the interrogation. Also, he was worried. There was standard procedure for dealing with Boux; man’s deadly enemy, originating on fast-rotating planets with high-velocity winds, were fluid in form and could easily assume the shape of men. A Boux-man loose on a planet like Kyla I could do an infinite amount of damage – and Bouxmen were not easy to detect. Therefore, once Main Base was satisfied there were Boux aboard Pointer, they were quite likely to signal the flagship to proceed into the nearest sun. Rhys-Barley had other ideas about his future.

He halted pugnaciously before Aprit.

‘What’s your real shape?’ he demanded.

Aprit was puzzled. ‘You mean my metaphysical shape?’ he asked.

‘No, I do not. I mean that my instruments register close to the Boux end of the brain impulse-scale. And Boux can masquerade as anything they like, over limited periods of time. What I’m asking is, who or what are you?’

‘We are brothers,’ said Aprit mildly. ‘As you are our brother. Only you are a very bad-tempered brother.’

The stun was shot into Aprit’s enclosure from the still-smoking floor. It struck with frightening suddenness. Pressure built instantaneously to a peak that would have spread a man uniformly over the walls of the enclosure in a pink paste. It would have forced a genuine Boux into one of his primary shapes. Aprit merely dropped unconscious to the deck.

Little Light pointed crossly at the Grand-Admiral. ‘For that, the instant Aprit returns we shall not have left Arctic at all,’ he said.

‘It was a stupid and ignorant act,’ agreed the Preacher.

Nobody had noticed Deeping. When the Captain and the Admiral had come through the teleport, he had been left to take the long, physical route down to Interrogation Bay. One does not waste six million volts on junior ranks.

Now he walked straight up to Calurmo and said, peering anxiously through the vibrating wall that separated them: ‘I am very sorry we have not made you more welcome here, but we are at war.’

‘Please don’t apologise,’ said Calurmo. ‘It must be very upsetting for you to have a difference with someone. How long has this been happening?’

‘Thousands of years,’ said Deeping bitterly.

‘March that man to the disintegrators,’ Rhys-Barley bellowed. Two guards moved smartly toward Deeping.

‘If you will pardon my venturing to suggest it,’ Aliens Officer said, wobbling at the knees as he spoke, ‘but just possibly, sir, this new approach might … might be effective.’

Faint with his own temerity, he saw Rhys-Barley’s hand flicker and stay the guards.

‘ – a difference we can never settle until we vanquish the enemy,’ Deeping was saying. He was still pale, but stood stiff and resolute, almost as if he drew strength from these strange beings.

‘Oh yes, you can settle it,’ Calurmo said. ‘But you’ve been going about it the wrong way.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Rhys-Barley chimed in. ‘You don’t know the problem – unless you are a race of Boux we have not met before.’

‘My friends are learning of the problem now,’ murmured Calurmo, glancing at Little Light and Woebee, who were unusually quiet. But the Grand-Admiral went ruthlessly on.

‘The enemy has inestimable advantages over Man. It has only been by exerting his military might up to the hilt, by standing continually on his toes, by having one finger perpetually on the trigger, that Man has kept the Boux out of his systems.’

‘That really is the truth,’ said Deeping earnestly. ‘If you have a super-weapon you could let us know about we would be very grateful.’

‘Don’t humour me, please,’ Calurmo said. He turned to Little Light and Woebee, who smiled and nodded. At the same time Aprit opened his eyes and stood up.

‘I had such a funny dream,’ he said. ‘Do we go home now?’

‘We want to readjust these people first,’ the Preacher said. The five of them conferred together for a minute, while Rhys-Barley walked rapidly up and down and Deeping sneezed once or twice; R-rays had that effect on his nose.

Finally Woebee motioned to Deeping and said: ‘You must forgive me if I say your people appear full of contradictions to us, but it is so. One contradiction, however, we could not understand. You pen us in here with impenetrable R-rays, as you term your inertia field, and also with duralum bars. The bars are quite superfluous unless – they are not what they seem; they are another of the machines you so delight in. They are, in fact, categorising grids that transmit almost comprehensive records of the five of us back to your nearest planet. An excellent device! Entire blueprints of us, psychologically and physiobiologically, are fed back to your biggest brain units. You really need complimenting on the efficiency of this machine. It is so good, in fact, that Little Light and I have explored Main Base by it, have sent the rest of your fleet packing, and have broadcast directions to your vice-captain or whatever you call him up in the controls; as a result of which, you are now travelling where we want you to go and this Interrogation Bay is cut off from the rest of the ship.’

He had not finished speaking before Rhys-Barley had flung himself behind a shield and given the Emergency Destruction order. Nothing happened. Buttons, switches, valves, all were dead.

‘You merely waste your time,’ Little Light said, pointing at the Grand-Admiral and stepping through the dying R-rays. ‘The power has gone. Did I not explain that clearly enough?’

‘Where are you taking us?’ Deeping whispered.

‘You are taking us,’ Woebee corrected.

‘Not – not to Earth?’

Woebee smiled. ‘I feel that the word ‘Earth’ has some emotional value for you.’

‘Why, yes, of course. Don’t you see, it’s the only planet we ever lost to the Boux, right at the beginning of our troubles with them. But Man came from there. Earth is Man’s birth planet, and when it fell – that was the end of the First Empire. Since then we’ve grown stronger – but all that old peripheral region of space is dead ground to us now.’

Woebee nodded carelessly. ‘We learned that from our investigation of Main Base. The area is now abandoned by the Boux too.’

‘How awful to think of it stagnating all this time!’ Deeping said.

‘Really, you are as foolish as the rest,’ said the Preacher reprovingly. ‘The stagnation has been here. Why, you’re still clinging to machinery to support you.’ He led his four friends back toward the Regalia. ‘We’ll do the rest of the journey on our own,’ he told them. ‘These soldiers will want to go back to their duties. It’s really none of our concern to hinder them!’

In the lock they paused. The personnel trapped in the Interrogation Bay looked bemused and helpless. Rhys-Barley sat on a step staring at the wall. The Captain bit his nails in an absorbed fashion.

Aliens Officer came forward and said: ‘You have so much you could have taught us.’

‘There’s one piece of knowledge, unlike most of our kind of knowledge, that might be useful to you,’ Aprit said casually. ‘In Man’s hurry to leave Earth because one or two Boux had arrived, some few men and women were left behind. They had no defence against the Boux, so the Boux had no need to attack them. In other words, there was an opportunity for – intermarriage.’

‘Intermarriage!’ echoed Aliens Officer.

‘Yes,’ the Preacher said solemnly. ‘Neither you nor your machines seemed able to diagnose that. So you see our origins are a mixture of Man’s and Boux’s …’

‘That is a priceless piece of knowledge,’ Deeping reflected.

Calurmo smiled a valedictory smile that included even the deflated Admiral.

‘I’m delighted if it proves so,’ he said, ‘but it is only a just return for Man’s priceless gift to the Boux who were our distant ancestors: the gift of rigid form. Fluidity has proved a curse to the Boux. Intermarriage has recommendations for both sides. May I suggest you arrange – a love-match?’

This time he remembered to close the airlock doors. The Regalia slid, apparently of its own volition, into the great lock of the Pointer and out into space. By the time it was heading home, the flagship’s captain was busy roaring at his bridge officers and Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley was speaking apologetically to Base.

Deeping was staring at something that had materialized in his hand: wood sorrel, Oxalis acetosella. A flower from Earth.

Outside

They never went out of the house.

The man whose name was Harley used to get up first. Sometimes he would take a stroll through the building in his sleeping suit – the temperature remained always mild, day after day. Then he would rouse Calvin, the handsome, broad man who looked as if he could command a dozen talents and never actually used one. He made as much company as Harley needed.

Dapple, the girl with grey eyes and black hair, was a light sleeper. The sound of the two men talking would wake her. She would get up and go to rouse May; together they would go down and prepare a meal. While they were doing that, the other two members of the household, Jagger and Pief, would be rousing.

That was how every ‘day’ began: not with the inkling of anything like dawn, but just when the six of them had slept themselves back into wakefulness. They never exerted themselves during the day, but somehow when they climbed back into their beds they slept soundly enough.

The only excitement of the day occurred when they first opened the store. The store was a small room between the kitchen and the blue room. In the far wall was set a wide shelf, and upon this shelf their existence depended. Here, all their supplies ‘arrived’. They would lock the door of the bare room last thing, and when they returned in the morning their needs – food, linen, a new washing machine – would be awaiting them on the shelf. That was just an accepted feature of their existence; they never questioned it among themselves.

On this morning, Dapple and May were ready with the meal before the four men came down. Dapple even had to go to the foot of the wide stairs and call before Pief appeared, so that the opening of the store had to be postponed till after they had eaten; for although the opening had in no way become a ceremony, the women were nervous about going in alone. It was one of those things …

‘I hope to get some tobacco,’ Harley said as he unlocked the door. ‘I’m nearly out of it.’

They walked in and looked at the shelf. It was all but empty.

‘No food,’ observed May, hands on her aproned waist. ‘We shall be on short rations today.’

It was not the first time this had happened. Once – how long ago now? – they kept little track of time – no food had appeared for three days and the shelf had remained empty. They had accepted the shortage placidly.

‘We shall eat you before we starve, May,’ Pief said, and they laughed briefly to acknowledge the joke, although Pief had cracked it last time too. Pief was an unobtrusive little man, not the sort one would notice in a crowd. His small jokes were his most precious possession.

Two packets only lay on the ledge. One was Harley’s tobacco, one was a pack of cards. Harley pocketed the one with a grunt and displayed the other, slipping the pack from its wrapping and fanning it towards the others.

‘Anyone play?’ he asked.

‘Poker,’ Jagger said.

‘Canasta.’

‘Gin rummy.’

‘We’ll play later,’ Calvin said. ‘It’ll pass the time in the evening.’ The cards would be a challenge to them; they would have to sit together to play, around a table, facing each other.

Nothing was in operation to separate them, but there seemed no strong force to keep them together, once the tiny business of opening the store was over. Jagger worked the vacuum cleaner down the hall, past the front door that did not open, and rode it up the stairs to clean the upper landings; not that the place was dirty, but cleaning was something you did anyway in the morning. The women sat with Pief, desultorily discussing how to manage the rationing, but after that they lost contact with each other and drifted away on their own. Calvin and Harley had already strolled off in different directions.

The house was a rambling affair. It had few windows, and such as there were did not open, were unbreakable, and admitted no light. Darkness lay everywhere; illumination from an invisible source followed one’s entry into a room – the black had to be entered before it faded. Every room was furnished, but with odd pieces that bore little relation to each other, as if there was no purpose for the room. Rooms equipped for purposeless beings have that air about them.

No plan was discernible on first or second floor or in the long, empty attics. Only familiarity could reduce the mazelike quality of room and corridor. At least there was ample time for familiarity.

Harley spent a long while walking about, hands in pockets. At one point he met Dapple; she was drooping gracefully over a sketchbook, amateurishly copying a picture that hung on one of the walls – a picture of the room in which she sat. They exchanged a few words, then Harley moved on.

Something lurked in the edge of his mind like a spider in the corner of its web. He stepped into what they called the piano room, and then he realised what was worrying him. Almost furtively, he glanced around as the darkness slipped away, and then looked at the big piano. Some strange things had arrived on the shelf from time to time and had been distributed over the house; one of them stood on top of the piano now.

It was a model, heavy and about two feet high, squat, almost round, with a sharp nose and four buttressed vanes. Harley knew what it was. It was a ground-to-space ship, a model of the burly ferries that lumbered up to the spaceships proper.

That had caused them more unsettlement than when the piano itself had appeared in the store. Keeping his eyes on the model, Harley seated himself on the piano stool and sat tensely, trying to draw something from the rear of his mind … something connected with spaceships.

Whatever it was, it was unpleasant, and it dodged backwards whenever he thought he had laid a mental finger on it. So it always eluded him. If only he could discuss it with someone, it might be teased out of its hiding place. Unpleasant; menacing, yet with a promise entangled in the menace.

If he could get at it, meet it boldly face to face, he could do … something definite. And until he had faced it, he could not even say what the something definite was he wanted to do.

A footfall behind him. Without turning, Harley deftly pushed up the piano lid and ran a finger along the keys. Only then did he look back carelessly over his shoulder. Calvin stood there, hands in pockets, looking solid and comfortable.

‘Saw the light in here,’ he said easily. ‘I thought I’d drop in as I was passing.’

‘I was thinking I would play the piano awhile,’ Harley answered with a smile. The thing was not discussable, even with a near acquaintance like Calvin because … because of the nature of the thing … because one had to behave like a normal, unworried human being. That, at least, was sound and clear and gave him comfort: behave like a normal human being.

Reassured, he pulled a gentle tumble of music from the keyboard. He played well. They all played well. Dapple, May, Pief … as soon as they had assembled the piano, they had all played well. Was that – natural? Harley shot a glance at Calvin. The stocky man leaned against the instrument, back to that disconcerting model, not a care in the world. Nothing showed on his face but an expression of bland amiability. They were all amiable, never quarrelling together.

The six of them gathered for a scanty lunch, their talk was trite and cheerful, and then the afternoon followed on the same pattern as the morning, as all the other mornings: secure, comfortable, aimless. Only to Harley did the pattern seem slightly out of focus; he now had a clue to the problem. It was small enough, but in the dead calm of their days it was large enough.

May had dropped the clue. When she helped herself to jelly, Jagger laughingly accused her of taking more than her fair share. Dapple, who always defended May, said: ‘She’s taken less than you, Jagger.’

‘No,’ May corrected, ‘I think I have more than anyone else. I took it for an interior motive.’

It was the kind of pun anyone made at times. But Harley carried it away to consider. He paced around one of the silent rooms. Interior, ulterior motives … Did the others here feel the disquiet he felt? Had they a reason for concealing that disquiet? And another question:

Where was ‘here’?

He shut that one down sharply.

Deal with one thing at a time. Grope your way gently to the abyss. Categorise your knowledge.

One: Earth was getting slightly the worst of a cold war with Nitity.

Two: the Nititians possessed the alarming ability of being able to assume the identical appearance of their enemies.

Three: by this means they could permeate human society.

Four: Earth was unable to view the Nititian civilisation from inside.

Inside … a wave of claustrophobia swept over Harley as he realised that these cardinal facts he knew bore no relation to this little world inside. They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behaviour of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?

Uneasily, Harley moved about the room; the parquet floor echoed the indecision of his footsteps. He had walked into the billiard room. Now he prodded the balls across the green cloth with one finger, preyed on by conflicting intentions. The red spheres touched and rolled apart. That was how the two halves of his mind worked. Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should … not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that ‘here’ and ‘not here’ seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances.

The ivory slid wearily into a pocket. He decided. He would not sleep in his room tonight.

They came from the various parts of the house to share a bedtime drink. By tacit consent the cards had been postponed until some other time; there was, after all, so much other time.

They talked about the slight nothings that comprised their day, the model of one of the rooms that Calvin was building and May furnishing, the faulty light in the upper corridor which came on too slowly. They were subdued. It was time once more to sleep, and in that sleep who knew what dreams might come? But they would sleep. Harley knew – wondering if the others also knew – that with the darkness which descended as they climbed into bed would come an undeniable command to sleep.

He stood tensely just inside his bedroom door, intensely aware of the unorthodoxy of his behaviour. His head hammered painfully and he pressed a cold hand against his temple. He heard the others go one by one to their separate rooms. Pief called good-night to him; Harley replied. Silence fell.

Now!

As he stepped nervously into the passage, the light came on. Yes, it was slow – reluctant. His heart pumped. He was committed. He did not know what he was going to do or what was going to happen, but he was committed. The compulsion to sleep had been avoided. Now he had to hide, and wait.

It is not easy to hide when a light signal follows wherever you go. But by entering a recess which led to an unused room, opening the door slightly and crouching in the doorway, Harley found that the faulty landing light dimmed off and left him in the dark.

He was neither happy nor comfortable. His brain seethed in a conflict he hardly understood. He was alarmed to think he had broken the rules, and frightened of the creaking darkness about him. But the suspense did not last for long.

The corridor light came back on. Jagger was leaving his bedroom, taking no precaution to be silent. The door swung loudly shut behind him. Harley caught a glimpse of his face before he turned and made for the stairs; he looked noncommittal, but serene – like a man going off duty. He went downstairs in bouncy, jaunty fashion.

Jagger should have been in bed asleep. A law of nature had been defied.

Unhesitatingly, Harley followed. He had been prepared for something and something had happened, but his flesh crawled with fright. The light-headed notion came to him that he might disintegrate with fear. All the same, he kept doggedly on down the stairs, feet noiseless on the heavy carpet.

Jagger had rounded a corner. He was whistling quietly as he went. Harley heard him unlock a door. That would be the store – no other doors were locked. The whistling faded.

The store was open. No sound came from within. Cautiously, Harley peered inside. The far wall had swung open about a central pivot, revealing a passage beyond. For minutes Harley could not move, staring fixedly at this breach.

Finally, and with a sense of suffocation, he entered the store. Jagger had gone through – there. Harley also went through. Somewhere he did not know, somewhere whose existence he had not guessed … Somewhere that wasn’t the house … The passage was short and had two doors, one at the end rather like a cage door (Harley did not recognise an elevator when he saw one), one in the side, narrow and with a window.

This window was transparent. Harley looked through it and then fell back, choking. Dizziness swept in and shook him by the throat.

Stars shone outside.

With an effort, he mastered himself and made his way back upstairs, lurching against the banisters. They had all been living under a ghastly misapprehension …

He barged into Calvin’s room and the light lit. A faint, sweet smell was in the air, and Calvin lay on his broad back, fast asleep.

‘Calvin! Wake up!’ Harley shouted.

The sleeper never moved. Harley was suddenly aware of his own loneliness and the eerie feel of the great house about him. Bending over the bed, he shook Calvin violently by the shoulders and slapped his face.

Calvin groaned and opened one eye.

‘Wake up, man,’ Harley said. ‘Something terrible’s going on here.’

The other propped himself on one elbow, communicated fear rousing him thoroughly.

‘Jagger’s left the house,’ Harley told him. ‘There’s a way outside. We’re – we’ve got to find out what we are.’ His voice rose to an hysterical pitch. He was shaking Calvin again. ‘We must find out what’s wrong here. Either we are victims of some ghastly experiment – or we’re all monsters!’

And as he spoke, before his staring eyes, beneath his clutching hands, Calvin began to wrinkle up and fold and blur, his eyes running together and his great torso contracting. Something else – something lively and alive – was forming in his place.

Harley only stopped yelling when, having plunged downstairs, the sight of the stars through the small window steadied him. He had to get out, wherever ‘out’ was.

He pulled the small door open and stood in fresh night air.

Harley’s eye was not accustomed to judging distances. It took him some while to realise the nature of his surroundings, to realise that mountains stood distantly against the starlit sky, and that he himself stood on a platform twelve feet above the ground. Some distance away, lights gleamed, throwing bright rectangles onto an expanse of tarmac.

There was a steel ladder at the edge of the platform. Biting his lip, Harley approached it and climbed clumsily down. He was shaking violently with cold and fear. When his feet touched solid ground, he began to run. Once he looked back; the house perched on its platform like a frog hunched on top of a rattrap.

He stopped abruptly then, in almost dark. Abhorrence jerked up inside him like retching. The high, crackling stars and the pale serration of the mountains began to spin, and he clenched his fists to hold on to consciousness. That house, whatever it was, was the embodiment of all the coldness in his mind. Harley said to himself: ‘Whatever has been done to me, I’ve been cheated. Someone has robbed me of something so thoroughly I don’t even know what it is. It’s been a cheat, a cheat …’ And he choked on the idea of those years that had been pilfered from him. No thought: thought scorched the synapses and ran like acid through the brain. Action only! His leg muscles jerked into movement again.

Buildings loomed about him. He simply ran for the nearest light and burst into the nearest door. Then he pulled up sharp, panting and blinking the harsh illumination out of his pupils.

The walls of the room were covered with graphs and charts. In the centre of the room was a wide desk with vision-screen and loudspeaker on it. It was a businesslike room with overloaded ashtrays and a state of ordered untidiness. A thin man sat alertly at the desk; he had a thin mouth.

Four other men stood in the room; all were armed, none seemed surprised to see him. The man at the desk wore a neat suit; the others were in uniform.

Harley leaned on the doorjamb and sobbed. He could find no words to say.

‘It has taken you four years to get out of there,’ the thin man said. He had a thin voice.

‘Come and look at this,’ he said, indicating the screen before him. With an effort, Harley complied; his legs worked like rickety crutches.

On the screen, clear and real, was Calvin’s bedroom. The outer wall gaped, and through it two uniformed men were dragging a strange creature, a wiry, mechanical-looking being that had once been called Calvin.

‘Calvin was a Nititian,’ Harley observed dully. He was conscious of a sort of stupid surprise at his own observation.

The thin man nodded approvingly.

‘Enemy infiltrations constituted quite a threat,’ he said. ‘Nowhere on Earth was safe from them; they can kill a man, dispose of him, and turn into exact replicas of him. Makes things difficult … We lost a lot of state secrets that way. But Nititian ships have to land here to disembark the Non-Men and to pick them up again after their work is done. That is the weak link in their chain.

‘We interrupted one such shipload and bagged them singly after they had assumed human form. We subjected them to artificial amnesia and put small groups of them into different environments for study. This is the Army Institute for Investigation of Non-Men, by the way. We’ve learned a lot … quite enough to combat the menace … Your group, of course, was one such.’

Harley asked in a gritty voice: ‘Why did you put me in with them?’

The thin man rattled a ruler between his teeth before answering.

‘Each group has to have a human observer in its very midst, despite all the scanning devices that watch from outside. You see, a Nititian uses a lot of energy maintaining a human form; once in that shape, he is kept in it by self-hypnosis which only breaks down in times of stress, the amount of stress bearable varying from one individual to another. A human on the spot can sense such stresses … It’s a tiring job for him; we get doubles always to work day on, day off – ’

‘But I’ve always been there – ’

‘Of your group,’ the thin man cut in, ‘the human was Jagger, or two men alternating as Jagger. You caught one of them going off duty.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Harley shouted. ‘You’re trying to say that I …’

He choked on the words. They were no longer pronounceable. He felt his outer form flowing away like sand, as from the other side of the desk revolver barrels were levelled at him.

‘Your stress level is remarkably high,’ continued the thin man, turning his gaze away from the spectacle. ‘But where you fail is where you all fail. Like Earth’s insects which imitate vegetables, your cleverness cripples you. You can only be carbon copies. Because Jagger did nothing in the house, all the rest of you instinctively followed suit. You didn’t get bored – you didn’t even try to make passes at Dapple – as personable a Non-Man as I ever saw. Even the model spaceship jerked no appreciable reaction out of you.’

Brushing his suit down, he rose before the skeletal being which now cowered in a corner.

‘The inhumanity inside always gives you away,’ he said evenly. ‘However human you are outside.’

Panel Game

It was Christmas. Snow fell by courtesy of Home-Count Climatic.

Rick Sheridan came off shift early, flying his helic deftly through the white clouds, and keeping by long custom between the altitude levels prescribed for his particular consumer-class. As far as he might be said to have a character, his character was cheerful. He exhibited this cheerfulness now by whistling.

The sound filled the little cockpit, competing with the bope music issuing from the 3-inch screen telly strapped on his wrist.

Christmas! It was proverbially the time of festivity and maximum consumption. It was a period when everyone would be happy – except, possibly, he warned himself, his wife, Neata. Her moodiness had become trying of late. The mere thought of it knocked his whistle off key.

For the difficult business of landing, Rick switched on to auto. This luxury had been fitted by Happy Hover Ltd. only two months ago. With the faintest of sighs, the helic leafed down, below the clouds, below the aerial levels, below the rooftops, and squatted in the Sheridan back garden.

The garden was a large one, as gardens went, ten feet by sixteen, and covered by neo-concrete. Rick jumped out and stretched himself. Although he was all of twenty-eight, he suddenly felt young and healthy again. Appetite stirred sluttishly in his stomach.

‘Oh for a bowl of tasty, toothable Cob Corners!’ he cried exultantly, and bounded for the back door.

He was high enough up the consumer hierarchy to own a magnificent two-room dwelling: Walking through the Disposing room, he entered the Gazing room and called: ‘Neata!’

She was sitting quietly at the Relaxtable, laboriously mending a little labour-saving device, her fair head bent in concentration. Her smile of welcome formed easily and naturally round her new teeth, and she jumped up, throwing her arms round him – carefully, so as not to crumple his teddy tie.

‘Ricky, darling, you’re early!’ she exclaimed.

‘I hit my quota ahead of schedule,’ he explained proudly. ‘Thanks to Howlett’s.’

Their only child, Goya, jumped up and ran to greet her daddy. She managed to do it backwards, thus keeping her eyes fixed on the wall screens, where Sobold the Soap King was facing three dirty-looking criminals single-handed.

Rick’s eyes glistened behind their contact lenses. He reflected how affectionate the child was for a three-year-old, but something in the little girl’s actions must have displeased her mother, for Neata said irritably: ‘Why don’t you welcome your father properly?’

‘Wanna see old Sobold slosh the slashers,’ Goya said defiantly.

‘You’re old enough to guess what will happen,’ Neata said crossly. ‘He’ll catch them and make them all wash in that creamy, dreamy lather that only Little Britches Soap provides.’

‘Don’t get angry with her,’ Rick said. ‘Remember, it’s Christmas.’

He took Goya on his knee, and settled down with her to watch Sobold, his hunger forgotten. The wall-screens filled two walls. Before the end of next year, if he worked as well as he was working now, they might be able to afford a third screen. And one day … he blushed with excitement at the thought of being surrounded by an image in quadruplicate on all four walls.

A flicker of interference burst over the bright screens. Rick tutted with annoyance; the terrific technical accomplishment of telly was something upon which every civilised consumer prided himself, but it was nevertheless obvious that just lately there had been more misting than usual on the screens. Rick found himself recalling the rumours, dim and evasive, which he heard while at work; rumours of a vile movement to overthrow the present happy regime, of determined men with new weapons at their command.

Dismissing the idea irritably, he turned full attention on to the screens. Justice and cleanliness having overtaken Sobold’s opponents, the next Quarter of an hour was to be devoted to ‘Mr. Dial’s Dairy’, a comic serial lampooning twentieth-century farm life, presented by the makers of Grinbaum’s Meat Bars.

‘Time for bed, Goya,’ Neata declared, and despite the young lady’s protests she was whisked into the Disposing room for an encounter with Little Britches, Ardentifrices and Juxon’s (‘Nun-better’) Drying powder. Rick seized this opportunity while he was alone to spend ten minutes looking into his Pornograph, but his attention was recalled by a jolly announcer in the Grinbaum uniform calling out: ‘Well, customers, there we have to leave Mr. Dial for now. Is his prize cow really going to calve? Will Sally Hobkin get that big kiss she deserves? Your guess is as good as mine, suckers. One thing everybody is sure about is the goodness, the sheer brothy, spothy goodness, of Grinbaum’s Meat Bars. A whole carcass goes into each of those chewy little cubes.’

And then leaning, as it seemed, almost out of the screen, the announcer suddenly bellowed harshly: ‘Have you bought your quota of Grinbaum’s Meat Bars today, Sheridan?’

Cut. Screen blank. Ten seconds till next programme.

‘He certainly puts that over well,’ Rick gasped proudly, passing a hand over his brow. ‘It always makes me jump.’

‘It makes me jump too,’ said Neata flatly, leading a night-dressed Goya into the room.

This device whereby consumers could be individually named was the latest, and possibly cleverest, accomplishment of telly. The announcer had actually named no names; instead, at the correct moment, a signal transmitted from the studio activated a circuit at the receiving end which, in every individual home, promptly bellowed out the surname of the head consumer of the family.

Neata pressed the Relaxtable, and a section of it sprang into a bed. Goya was put in, and given her cup of steaming, happy-dreaming Howlett’s. She had hardly drunk the last mouthful before she sank down on the pillow, yawning.

‘Sleep well!’ Neata said gently, pressing the child’s earplugs into place. She felt tired herself, she hardly knew why. It would be a relief when her turn came for Howlett’s and Payne’s Painless Plugs.

There was no switching the screens off and now that telly provided a twenty-four hour service, the aids to sleep were a necessity.

‘This is Green Star, B channel,’ announced the screens. ‘The Dewlap Chair Hour!!!’

‘Must we watch this?’ Neata asked, as three dancing, screaming nudes burst into view, legs waving, bosoms bouncing.

‘We could try Green Star A.’

Green Star A had a play, which had already begun. They tried Green Star C, but that had a travel programme on, and Rick was bored by other countries – and a little afraid of them. They turned back to the Dewlap Hour, and gradually relaxed into semi-mindlessness.

There were three other coloured star systems, each with three channels, at their disposal, theoretically at least. But Green Star was the official consumer system for their consumer-class; obviously it would be wasteful for the Sheridans to watch White Star, which advertised commodities they could not afford, such as shower-purges, stratostruts, tellysolids and bingoproofs.

If they did watch White Star, there was, unfortunately, no guarantee that telly was not watching them. For since the installation of ‘wave-bounce’, some ten years ago, every wall screen was a reciprocal – which meant, in plain language, that every viewer could be viewed from telly. This innovation was the source of some of the very best programmes, for viewers could sit and watch themselves viewing telly.

Dewlap was showing one of the numerous and ever-popular panel games. Three blindfold men and a blindfold woman were being passed patent custards, cake-mixes and detergents; they had to distinguish between the different commodities by taste alone. A compere in shirt sleeves awarded blows over the head for incorrect guesses.

Just tonight – perhaps because it was Christmas – the sight of Gilbert Lardner having his head tapped failed to enthral Rick. He began to walk about the Gazing room, quite an easy matter since, except for the Relaxtable in which Goya lay drugged, there was a complete absence of furniture.

Catching Neata’s curious gaze upon him, Rick moved out into the garden. It was not fair to distract her from her viewing.

The snow still fell, still by courtesy of Home-Count Climatic. He did not feel the cool night air, snug in his Moxon’s Mockwool. Absently, he ran his hand over the helic, its blunt vanes, its atomic motor, its telly suppressor, its wheels. All maintenance, of course, was done by the helic drome: there was nothing he could fiddle with. Indeed, there was nothing he could do at all.

Like a sensible fellow, like all his sensible neighbours – whom he had hardly so much as seen – he went back indoors and sat before the screens.

Five minutes later came the unprecedented knock at the door.

The shortage of arable land in England, acute in the twentieth century, became critical in the twenty-first. Mankind’s way of reproducing himself being what it is, the more houses that were erected on the dwindling acres, the more houses were needed. These two problems, which were really but facets of one problem, were solved dramatically and unexpectedly. After telly’s twenty-four-hour services were introduced, it was realised by those who had the interests of the nation at heart (a phrase denoting those who were paid from public taxes) that nine-tenths of the people needed neither windows nor friends: telly was all in all to them.

A house without windows can be built in any surroundings. It can be built in rows of hundreds or blocks of thousands. Nor need roads be a hindrance to this agglomeration: an airborne population needs no roads.

A house without friends is freed from ostentation. There is no longer any urge to keep up with the Joneses, or whoever may come in. One needs, in fact, only two rooms: a room in which to watch the screens, and a room in which to store the Meat Bars and other items which the screens hypnotize one into buying.

So telly changed the face of England almost overnight. The Sheridan house, like a great many others, was in the midst of a nest of houses stretching for a mile or more in all directions; it could be reached only by something small enough to alight in the garden.

So for many reasons the knock on the door was very much a surprise.

‘Whoever can it be?’ asked Rick uneasily.

‘I don’t know,’ Neata said. She too had heard rumours of a subversive movement; a momentary – and not unpleasing – vision attended her of two masked men coming in and smashing the wall screens. But of course masked men would not bother to knock.

‘Perhaps it’s somebody from Grinbaum’s Meat Bars,’ suggested Rick, ‘I forgot to buy any today.’

‘Don’t be so silly, Rick,’ his wife said impatiently. ‘You know their factory must be purely automatic. Go and see who it is.’

That was something he had not thought of. You had to hand it to women … He got up and went reluctantly to open the door, smoothing his hair and his tie on the way.

A solid-looking individual stood in the drifting snow. His helic was parked against Rick’s. He wore some sort of a cloak over his Mock-wool: obviously, he was of a higher consumer-class than the Sheridans.

‘Er …’ said Rick.

‘May I come in?’ asked the stranger in the sort of voice always hailed on the screens as resonant. ‘I’m an escaped criminal.’

‘Er …’

‘I’m not dangerous. Don’t be alarmed.’

‘The little girl’s in bed,’ Rick said, clutching at the first excuse which entered his head.

‘Have no fear,’ said the stranger, still resonantly, ‘kidnapping is not one of the numerous offences on my crime sheet.’

He swept magnificently past Rick, through the dark Disposing room and into the Gazer. Neata jumped up as he entered. He bowed low and pulled the cloak from his shoulders with an eloquent gesture which scattered snow over the room.

‘Madam, forgive my intrusion,’ he said, the organ note more noticeable than ever. ‘I throw myself upon your mercy.’

‘Ooh, you talk like someone on a panel game,’ Neata gasped.

‘I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart,’ said the stranger, and announced himself as Black Jack Gabriel.

Rick hardly heard. He was taking in the thick-set figure in its smart attire, and the curiously impressive streak of white hair on the leonine head (the fellow must be thirty if he was a day). He also took in the meaningful way Neata and Black Jack were looking at each other.

‘I’m Neata Sheridan, and this is my husband, Rick,’ Neata was saying.

‘A delightful name,’ said Black Jack, bowing at Rick and grinning ingratiatingly.

‘It’s only short for Rickmansworth,’ said Neata, a little acidly.

Black Jack, standing facing but entirely ignoring the screens, began to speak. He was a born elocutionist, and soon even Rick ceased to blush – a nervous habit which manifested itself on the rare occasions when he was face to face with a real human being.

Black Jack had a dramatic tale to tell of his capture by armed police, who had chased him across roofs thirty storeys above ground level. For the last nine years he had been imprisoned in Holloway, condemned to hard labour, knitting hemp mittens for the cameramen of Outside Telly.

Suddenly, only a few hours ago, an opportunity for escape had presented itself. Black Jack had broken into the Governor’s suite, exchanged clothes, and flown off in the Governor’s helic.

‘And here I am,’ he said. ‘I just landed at random – and how lucky I was to find you two.’

Despite some opposition from an outbreak of bope music from the screen, Rick had been listening with great attention.

‘If it’s not a rude question, Mr. Black,’ he said, ‘what did you do wrong?’

‘That’s rather a long story,’ Black Jack said modestly, knitting his eyebrows but positively smiling at Neata. ‘You see, England used to be rather a strange place. In those days – you must have seen so much entertainment you would not remember – there was a government. There were also several industries, and something known as ‘free enterprise’ flourishing. The government used to ‘nationalise’ (as they called it) any industry which looked like getting too big and prosperous.

‘Well, one of these industries was called Television – telly is the modern term. It was getting so big, the government took it over, but it was so big, it took over the government. A case of the tail wagging the dog, you see.

‘Soon, everything was telly. And perpetual entertainment did a lot of good. Now half the people in the country work – directly or indirectly – for telly. It did away with unemployment, overemployment, strikes, neuroses, wars, housing problems, crime and football pools. Perpetual entertainment was here to stay.’

‘You tell it so well,’ Neata said. She was virtually cuddling against him. ‘But what did you do to earn your long prison sentence?’

‘I was the last Prime Minister,’ Black Jack said. ‘I voted against perpetual entertainment.’

Neata gasped.

So did Rick. Drawing himself up, he said: ‘Then we don’t want any of your sort in our house. I must ask you to leave before the H. Brogan’s Watches’ Show comes on.’

‘Oh, don’t make him go,’ pleaded Neata. She suddenly realised that here was the calibre of man she had been waiting for. He might well be leader of the rumoured subversive movement: he might cause interference on every wall screen in the country: but she could forgive – no, applaud! – everything, if he would just roll his eyes again.

‘I said “Go”,’ demanded Rick.

‘I had no intention of staying,’ said Black Jack coolly. ‘I’m on my way to Bali or Spain or India or somewhere without perpetual entertainment.’

‘Then what did you come here for in the first place?’ Rick asked.

‘Merely to borrow some food to sustain me on my journey. The Governor’s helic happened not to be provisioned for a long flight. Surely you’ll do that for me?’

‘Of course we will – if you must go,’ said Neata.

‘Why should we?’ asked Rick. ‘I’ll be a Dutchman if I lift a finger to help a criminal.’ But catching sight of his wife’s clenched fists and suddenly blazing eyes, he muttered miserably: ‘OK, call me Hans,’ and made off into the Disposing room.

Ardently, the self-confessed Prime Minister turned to Neata. ‘How can I ever thank you for your assistance, madam,’ he breathed. ‘It will be useless for you to forget me, for I shall never forget you!’

‘Nor I you,’ she said. ‘I think – oh … I think you’re wonderful, and – and I hate the telly.’

With swimming eyes, she peered up at him. He was pressing her hand: he was pressing her hand. It was the most wonderful moment of her life; her heart told her she was closer to the Meaning of Existence than she had ever been. Now he was leaning towards her – and Rick was back in the room again.

Hardly daring to leave them alone, he had snatched up a bag of dried prunes, two cartons of Silvery Soggmash, a cake, a sackful of Dehydratede Olde Englishe Fishe and Chyps (‘There’s no food like an old food’) and a tin of Grinbaums which had been previously overlooked.

‘Here you are,’ he said ungraciously. ‘Now go.’

Black Jack was meekness itself, now his object had been gained. He seemed, indeed, pleased to be off, Neata thought dejectedly; but doubtless such police as could be spared from viewing would be on his trail, and he could not afford to delay.

Rick followed the intruder out into the snow, which was still falling by courtesy of H-C.C. Black Jack flung the provisions into the boot of his helic and jumped gracefully into the driver’s seat. He raised a hand in ironical salute and called: ‘Happy Christmas!’ The helic lifted.

‘Good-bye!’ Neata called romantically and then, more romantically still: ‘Bon Voyage!’

But already the machine was lost in the whirling white flakes.

‘Come on in,’ Rick grunted.

They exchanged no words indoors. Morosely, Rick glared at the wall screens. Somehow, now, the savour was gone. Even the H. Brogan’s Watches’ Show had lost its appeal. He got up and paced about restlessly, fiddling with his teddy tie.

‘Oh heck,’ he said. ‘Let’s try White Star. I don’t suppose any supervisors are watching us. We need a change, that’s what.’

He flicked the controls over to White Star A, and gasped in astonishment. Neata gasped too, a little more gustily.

A sumptuous lounge showed on the screens. An immaculate announcer and three immaculate guests were leaning back in their chairs to watch a figure enter a door and approach the camera.

The figure, in its swagger cloak, with the distinguished streak of white in its hair, was unmistakable. It bowed to the unseen audience.

Nervously, a little over-heartily, the announcer was saying: ‘Well, consumers, here comes the scallywag of the Bryson Brainbath Hour, safe back in the studio.’ And turning to the newcomer he said: ‘Well, Gervaise McByron – alias Black Jack Gabriel – your forfeit in this special Christmas edition of our popular panel game, “Fifty Queries”, in which you got lowest score, was to go out and talk your way into a green consumer-class home, returning with a souvenir of your visit. You’ve certainly carried out instructions to the letter!’

Popular White telly-star McBryon smiled lavishly, said: ‘I did my best!’ and deposited some prunes, some Soggymash, a cake, Fishe and Chyps and a tin of Grinbaums at the announcer’s feet.

‘Your patter was terribly convincing,’ said the announcer uneasily. ‘I just hope none of our viewers believed a word you said about – er, Big Mother Telly. I almost believed you myself, ha, ha!’

‘You’ll get suspended for this, McByron,’ opined a decorative lady who had been included on the panel for the sake of her undulating façade. ‘You went too far. Far too far.’

‘We watched every moment of your performance in the Sheridan shack via wave-bounce reciprocal,’ said the announcer. ‘I just hope none of our viewers believed a word – ’

‘Tell me, McByron,’ cut in the decorative woman coldly, ‘what did you really think of Mrs. Sheridan?’

‘If you want a frank answer,’ began McByron bluntly, ‘compared with you, Lady Patricia So-and-So Burton, she was an absolute – ’

‘And so ends this special Christmas edition of “Fifty Queries”,’ cried the announcer frantically, jumping up and waving his hands. ‘It was brought to you by courtesy of Bryson’s Brainbaths. Don’t forget: a mind that thinks is a mind that stinks. Good night, consumers, everywhere.’

Cut. Screen black. Ten seconds to next programme.

Slowly, Rick turned to face his wife.

‘There!’ he said. ‘Disgraced! That – that trickster! We were just a spot of amusement on a snob-class panel show. Now are you ashamed?’

‘Don’t say anything, please, Rick,’ Neata said distantly. There was something so commanding in her tone that her husband turned away and abjectly switched back to Green Star.

Neata walked pensively out of the room. She still clutched the wicked little device which McBryon, alias Black Jack, had pressed into her hand. Then, it had been startlingly cold; now, her palm had made it hot. She knew what it was, she knew what she had to do with it.

‘Deadly …’ she whispered to herself. ‘Deadly … The end of civilisation as we know it.’

The metal was a challenge in her grasp.

Ah, but McBryon was clever! She was dizzy at his impudence. Although evidently a leading tellystar, he was nevertheless a saboteur, a member – perhaps the leader! – of the subversives. And he had dared to pass on this weapon and to deliver his inspiring message of doubt in front of thousands of viewers.

‘What a man!’

Neata was out in the snow now. She looked with strained face at the little device. It had to be fitted on to Rick’s helic. Poor Rick – but he would never know! The thought that she was helping in a mighty, silent revolution lent her determination.

Quickly, she bent down and fitted the anti-telly suppressor into Rick’s helic.