The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘Yes, I’ve something to say,’ he told her, sitting on the arm of a chair and stretching his legs. He laughed ruefully. ‘Trouble is, I’m not keen to say it. I’m afraid you will be shocked.’

‘If you will tell me, I will tell you if I am shocked,’ she said, attempting to humour him.

‘Okay. Penelope, sweet though you are, Nigel has left you for another woman, the cad.’

‘You are talking nonsense,’ she said.

‘I am speaking the truth. He has tired of you at last, the old dog. Every man his own Romeo.’

‘You are talking nonsense. I don’t believe you have even met my husband,’ she said sharply.

‘He has gone off with a blonde double-breasted girl called Jean with hep hips and sigh-size thighs who is old enough to be his mother and big enough to be his father,’ he lied.

She picked up the vase of dahlias again, in case a weapon were needed. All the interlocking softnesses of her face had frozen hard.

‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘You’re drunk.’

‘No, it’s true!’ Stoneward said, bursting into laughter despite himself. He had spoilt such dramatic scenes before merely because his sense of humour had run away with him – he kept thinking of funny details with which to adorn his theme. ‘It’s all true, Penelope! This wicked girl Jean is old enough to be Ni’s mother. How do I know, you ask? Because she’s my mother! She sure gets around! But this time she’s got a square.’

He rolled into the chair, laughing. Hell, what did it matter how you played your hand when you knew you couldn’t put a foot wrong? That’s what is known as a hand-to-foot existence. It didn’t matter if this chick believed him or not – he had Congress backing. And a free chuckle.

Penelope had moved out with those nicely hinged knees to the call booth in the hall. She dialled angrily and spoke to someone. Sobering, Stoneward sat up and listened. He guessed she was calling Johnny Flower, wanting to know if hubby was under control at the all-N-Compassing office. This was rich! By the shattered look on her face when she returned, slowly, lowly, he knew that he had guessed rightly and Johnny had passed on his little tittle-tattle.

‘I’m truly sorry, Mrs Alexander,’ he said, returning to seriousness to hand out a really corny line. ‘It isn’t that he doesn’t love you any more, it’s just that he fell into temptation. His spirit was willing and his flesh was weak. Try to take it bravely. I don’t think he’ll ever come back to you, but you can always find another man, you know. You’re man-shaped!’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said and burst into tears. With a gallant effort, she tried to check herself but failed; she settled herself in a chair to cry more comfortably. Stoneward went across to her on hands and knees, like a pious panther. When he smoothed her hair, she flicked her head away, continuing to cry

‘You shouldn’t cry,’ he said. ‘Alex was always unfair to you. He left you here shut away. He kept secrets from you. He kept money from you. He never told you about me … I can’t bear to hear you cry. It sounds like termites in a tin beam.’

He put his arms round her, cuddling her. In a minute he was kissing her, her grief and his greed all mixed together in a bowl of tears.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘Who are you? Why did you come and tell me this?’

‘I thought I’d made that clear, Penelope. Ni told me to come and tell you. He’s bored to death and he’s quitting – going to start life anew, a-nude.’

Though she had been crying, she had not really believed till now. Something Stoneward said seemed to have penetrated and made her accept the situation as he presented it.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, which is what all women say when they first begin to believe.

Stoneward neither contradicted nor accepted her statement. He just crouched by her, naked under his clothes.

‘Whatever am I going to do?’ Penelope asked aloud at last, speaking not to him but to herself.

‘I love you,’ he said simply. ‘I always have. Every word your husband has told me about you has been music to my ears. I’ve treasured the smallest fact about you, Penelope. I know your vital measurements, the size of stocking you take, the make of soap you use, which breakfast cereal you prefer, the names of your favourite movie and phoney stars, how long you like to sleep nights. Unless you have secrets from Ni, I know everything about you, for you as a Normal are only the sum of these pretty facts. Come with me to my flat, I’ll take care of you – worshipping from afar all the time, have no fear! My research days for my magnum opus are over!’

She looked at him doubtfully.

‘You know what,’ she said. ‘I think that right now I want to get away out of here. I can’t think here at all. Will you kindly wait five minutes while I just go pack a bag, Mr Stoneward? Then I’ll be with you.’

‘Your eyes have spent their days drifting among the starry nights,’ he said dreamily.

Penelope laughed, got up a little jerkily and left the room. Paul Stoneward buried his face in the warm patch she had created in the chair, drumming his fists on the chair arm. People were all the same, all the same, even this golden girl, just a puppet … all pulp puppets. He nursed his terrible secret: once people ceased to have any power over you, they were absolutely in your power. He could almost have cried about it.

He rose, walked quietly into the hall and dialled Civilian Sanctions again. When he had given Beynon his orders, he returned to the living room to await Penelope. She appeared after a quarter of an hour, entirely composed, clutching a tan suitcase a little too tightly. Stoneward took her arm and led her out of the house, mincing exaggeratedly by her soft side.

As they walked down the drive, he looked back over his shoulder. Brick house with pink and pistachio trim, lawn with pink roses florabounding all over the place in each corner, mail box on its white post at the foot of the driveway down the slope. Stoneward laughed. This popsie was really leaving home.

‘Coffee?’ she said suspiciously. ‘What’s that?’

‘When you’ve done pacing up and down, it’s an old time euphoric with taste additives,’ Stoneward said, setting the cups down and widening his nostrils over the steam. It was exhilarating to have the three dimensional shape of her in his room.

He had rolled Nigel Hamilton Alexander, snores and all, under his bed, and stuffed a sponge into his mouth. He had chased round, half-serious, half-laughing, straightening out the room after he had let her in. Penelope hardly noticed him; she walked up and down the room like a little caged – well, a little caged cutie. You could see the exercise doing her ankles good; they looked fine. Not so her soul. Penelope was still in a state of shock. No resilience, these Normals – except physically, of course, in the case of present company.

Present company drank down her java like a good girl and heeled over onto the rug. Stoneward, who had been watching like a lynx, caught her as she fell, thought several thoughts, licked his lips, but straightened up and let her sleep.

Business first. Congress should have of his best.

Hustling into the bedroom, legs moving like dapper nutcrackers, head cool as a safe, he pulled several stage properties out of a drawer and flung them onto the bed, ruffling the covers as he did so. Then he seized the mortal remains of N-Compass Co’s chief and rattled them roughly back to life.

‘Penelope … stop … lemme get to the … ugh …’ Alexander muttered, chewing his way through a king-size mist.

‘Don’t give me that crud about Penelope after what you’ve been doing to Jean,’ Stoneward said nastily. ‘Look at the mess the pair of you have made of my bedroom, you dirty old romp. Get up and get out.’

Heavily, Alexander pulled himself to the bedside and sat on it. His dull eye, moving like a whale in heavy seas, finally lighted on a female garment by the pillows.

‘Jean left you that pair with her love,’ Stoneward said. ‘Said to tell you she had another pair some place. Now come on, snap out of it, Nigel.’

The older man buried his head in his hands. After some minutes of silent battle, he launched himself to his feet, exclaiming, ‘I got to get back home and sort all this out with Penelope.’

‘Home! Penelope!’ Stoneward echoed. ‘Don’t be immoral, old sport. You can’t have it both ways. The past has ceased to exist for you. You were a Normal, now you’re not. Normals don’t behave like you have; your card will have to be stamped “Neurotic” now!’

‘You’re just confusing me, mister,’ Alexander said stubbornly. ‘I got to get home.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you, Alexander the Grunt. You’ve got no home. You’ve stepped outside the bounds of normal behaviour and so your Normal life has ceased to exist. Face up to it like a man.’

‘I got to get home. That’s all I know.’

‘Don’t you love me any more, Ni?’ Stoneward asked, peeping at his watch. ‘We used to be such buddies in the old days. Remember the Farellis, the Vestersons, the vacations in Florida? Remember the pistachio shoots off Key West?’

‘Ah, shut up, you give me bellyache,’ Alexander said, ‘not that I wish to be insulting and I’d like to make it clear I regret it if I have committed a nuisance on your premises.’

‘Spoken like a man!’ Stoneward cried delightedly. ‘That’s what I call breeding, pal. It’s all you have left, believe me.’

‘Just help me get a taxi, will you?’

They went down onto the street, quiet, well-manicured street full of ditto people. A cab pulled up for them. Paul Stoneward bundled in after his victim, who did not protest beyond a grunt. He glanced at his watch again; but his timing had always been faultless and he could have patted himself with approval.

‘2011, Springfield,’ Alexander said to the driver.

The drive took them fifteen minutes. The cabby pulled up uncertainly by a big advertisement hoarding. Stoneward dragged his companion onto the sidewalk, crammed money into the driver’s hand and said, ‘Beat it, bud.’

He stood there, hands on hips, posing for his own pleasure and whistling the opening theme of Borodin’s Second Symphony, while Alexander moved unhappily back and forth, a bull bereft of its favourite china shop. Before them loomed a big hoarding boosting Fawdree’s Fadeless Fabrics.

‘It’s gone! My house – my home has gone!’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Stoneward said.

Crying as if in physical pain, Alexander ran behind the hoarding. Nothing there – just a flat lot with a little dust still hanging above it (The Civic Demolition boys must have worked their disintegrators with real zest!) Alexander burst into howls of anguish.

‘You’re having a wail of a time, Alec Sander,’ Stoneward said, taking the other by the arm. ‘Now why don’t you listen to me, your uncle P.? You’re at last – although a solid forty-five – getting a glimmer of what life is about. You’re learning man! Life is not a substantial thing; you can’t guarantee any one minute of it, past, present or future; you can’t salt it away in moth-balls. You thought it was secure, safe, snug, something as solid and predictable as the foot in your boot, didn’t you? You were wrong by at least one hundred and eighty degrees. Life is a dream, a dew. Fickle, coy and hard to please, prone to moth. Nothing is left to you now, man, but dreams. You never had a dream in your life. Now you have actively to start dreaming. Now – at last!’

‘Penelope,’ Alexander said. He pronounced the single word, then he took out his silk handkerchief and blew one forlorn and faded chord on his nose. The breeze turned over a page of his hair and he said, ‘Penelope, you don’t understand … Penelope, I can’t live without her mister. We … shared everything. I can’t explain. We shared … had secrets.’

‘You had secrets?’ Stoneward whispered, leaning forward. ‘Now you’re really giving, man. Let me inside the catwalks of your psycho-

logy, if you’ll pardon the dirty word, and I’ll see if I can help at all.’

‘There was one secret,’ the middle-aged man said, weeping without restraint now as he talked, ‘one secret that was very dear to us. I suppose everyone must have something. You have such a sharp way of being sympathetic, Paul, I can’t be sure if you’ll understand. Remember how I was trying to dodge away from Johnny J. Flower in the bar, whenever it was? This morning. I like him. I like Johnny. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; and he likes me – you could see that. I wanted it to stay that way. I want him to like me. I don’t to know if you’ll understand … You see, I didn’t want Johnny to find out what a bore I am. I always dodge him if I can. People bore me – except you, Paul, you’re my only friend. I don’t mind being bored; it’s, well, kind of comfortable – you know you’re safe when you’re bored. But I know I am boring, too, and that’s the secret Penelope and me had … I never wanted Johnny to find out. She knew I knew I was a bore and she – well, she just understood, that’s all. I’ll never find anyone like her again and now she’s gone. Gone, man.’

Paul Stoneward did not even laugh. He had seen right down into the depths which had hitherto been closed to him, and he was frightened. Without another word, he turned away, walking off with hunched shoulders past the hoarding, down the road, leaving Alexander crying on an empty lot.

By the time he got home, his high spirits had returned. He rang Beynon again.

‘Your hair looks heliotrope on this screen, Commissioner,’ he said, ‘or did you dye it? Either way, I like it how you have it.’ And he launched into a long and unwisecracking account of what he had done and was going to do on the Alexander case.

Beynon sighed heavily when the screen finally dimmed, and turned to me. He looked not unlike Alexander, heavy, solid, without dreams.

‘Well, Kelly, do you feel the same as I do?’ he asked. Commissioner Beynon always lead with a query.

I nodded. ‘Paul’s way of handling things is all wrong,’ I said. ‘It’s not only a question of whether neurotics are born not made – Stoneward produces crazy, mixed-up people efficiently enough, but they all have vacuums inside them by the time he’s through, they can’t create after he has been at them. The reason’s simply that he himself has a vacuum inside. Underneath, he knows it, too; of that I’m certain.’

‘Do we let him carry on?’

That’s the godawful curse with Normals; I know well enough how Paul Stoneward feels about them. Even a man like Beynon, lousy with authority, passes the buck whenever he can. Basic lack of imagination, I suppose.

‘I know I have the same stamp on my folder as he does,’ I said ‘and that should make me on his side. But Paul’s just out there doing mischief from which no good can come. Let me get on to Senator Willcroft at Peace Department.’

‘You can’t worry him!’ Beynon said in alarm.

‘Can’t I? Sit back and watch me, Beynon. Willcroft’s in charge of this project and I’m going to have it out with him straight. I want to save that girl if there’s still time.’

It was dark when Stoneward got Penelope to the lot. The afternoon’s infant breeze had become a wind with a will of its own. Alexander had trundled off, maybe to the nearest river. Callously Paul loaned the girl a torch, watching the erratic beam of it hunt for lawn and ramblers and verandah and brick with pink and pistachio trim. When she fell onto nyloned knees, head drooping, he went over, squatting on his haunches by her.

Penelope had found a dahlia. It must have been one of the bunch she was tending before Stoneward appeared; the disintegrators had missed it. She clutched it, her eyes bowl-full of tears. Almost it seemed as if the flower brought her understanding.

‘Whatever you are, you are wicked,’ she said unsteadily. ‘You have done all – all this. I don’t know why or how … You must be the devil.’

‘The devil was a bore without a sense of humour; I’m not flattered,’ Stoneward said.

She brought her hand, that pebble-smooth hand, up and smote him over his handsome mouth.

‘Why?’ she said, her voice rising unmanageably, ‘just tell me why, for pity’s sake, have you done this to us?’

‘I love you, so I will tell you,’ he said, calmed by the hurt of her hand. ‘I work for civilisation. I love civilisation more than any blank and pretty-faced mediocrity in the world. Unfortunately civilisation has got stuck right in a rut. When sociology really got itself established as a science at the end of last century, formulae were developed which enabled everyone to fit exactly into his or her social niche; maybe you’ve heard? And for anyone with any little residual twinges of emotion, a wide range of drugs was made tastily available. The end result was the complete – well, almost complete – banishment of mental upset from the world. Unprecedented calm and content settled like fog, and this is me lamenting it. Three boozy boos for the Age of Content.’

They squatted together facing each other, the fallen torch casting shadows upward over their figures. Penelope still clutched the dahlia but had forgotten it. In the blind-blowing dark, they had lost their identities. They might have been things on Easter Island.

‘Civilisation is dying day by day, because the people who made it and continued it have gone,’ Stoneward said, speaking naturally now he was saying something he believed. ‘Everything we value was produced by malcontents or psychotics – men who could not shape themselves to the world as it was, and tried to reshape it to fit them. Our first ancestor who came down out of a tree only did it because the trees weren’t good enough for him. The guy who invented the wheel was just too goddammed cussed to lend a hand with the sledge like the rest. The guy who first kindled fire only did it to prove to himself that he was a cut above the other jerks. So it’s been all along. Your inventor, your artist – he’s got something to work out. But now, now no-one has a thing to work out!’

‘Except you,’ Penelope said.

Stoneward rested his finger on her knees, playing a small, silent tune there.

‘I’m the one in a million who still has a chip on his shoulder; no society is absolutely perfect, thank God!’ he said. ‘Yes, Penny, Pennyworth, Penelope, my darling Pente Loop, I am the Joker in the pack. The few neurotics left in the country are now all Government employed, trying to cope with the dangers of stagnation. We act as random factors, jerking dull citizens here and there into awareness. You Normals live in life as if it were a house: it’s not, it’s a tiger ride. I’ve sold Congress my own way of waking people – at least for a trial period. It’s violent but it’s effective; I reckon you’ll admit that, Penelope. You’ll never be the same girl again, will you, eh?’

She did not answer, just looked at him as if he had melted.

‘Reckon old Cornbags Alexander has blo-o-own away to limbo,’ Stoneward sighed. ‘You’ll have to grow some real dreams now, little girl, now you see what a false dream security was …’

‘So you even have an intellectual front to cover all you’ve done,’ she exclaimed slowly. ‘You wanted to see into me, not realising how reciprocal the process was – and consequently I’ve seen into you. You’re – you’re just miserably unhappy, Paul. You boost yourself up as a joker, but you’re not. You’re not even the knave. You’re just the extra, faceless card that sometimes gets stuck into a new deck. You’re – even with Congress behind you! – you’re nothing, you can be nothing …’

He had put his sharp elbows on his thighs and rested his chin in his hands as if he was listening his ears off. Instead, he was crying his eyes out. The little crystals elongated and flashed down to the torchlight.

‘Paul,’ she said sharply.

Paul Stoneward could not cry at all elegantly. He needed practice, that guy.

‘I just … I can’t go any further,’ he said brokenly. ‘Penny, you got to help pick me up.’

It was about then I came round the corner of Fawdree’s Fadeless Fabrics with the gun in my hand, out of breath and angry, but so happy to have made Senator Willcroft see things my way. Strange to reflect how that first view of my future wife should be of her with her arms round the man I killed.

Even the hunters are hunted: in this or any other rotten age.

Neanderthal Planet

Hidden machines varied the five axioms of the Scanning Place. They ran through a series of arbitrary systems, consisting of Kolmogorovian finite sets, counterpointed harmonically by a one-to one assignment of non-negative real numbers, so that the parietal areas shifted constantly in strict relationship projected by the Master Boff deep under Manhattan.

Chief Scanner – he affected the name of Euler – patiently watched the modulations as he awaited a call. Self-consistency: that was the principle in action. It should govern all phases of life. It was the aesthetic principle of machines. Yet, not five kilometres away, the wild robots sported and rampaged in the bush.

Amber light burned on his beta panel.

Instantaneously, he modulated his call-number.

The incoming signal decoded itself as ‘We’ve spotted Anderson, Chief.’ The anonymous vane-bug reported coordinates and signed off.

It had taken them Boff knew how long – seven days – to locate Anderson after his escape. They had done the logical thing and searched far afield for him. But man was not logical; he had stayed almost within the shadow of the New York dome. Euler beamed an impulse into a Hive Mind channel, calling off the search.

He fired his jets and took off.

The axioms yawned out above him. He passed into the open, flying over the poly-polyhedrons of New Newyork. As the buildings went through their transparency phases, he saw them swarming with his own kind. He could open out channels to any one of them, if required; and, as chief, he could, if required, switch any one of them to automatic, to his own control, just as the Dominants could automate him if the need arose.

Euler ‘saw’ a sound-complex signal below him, and dived, deretracting a vane to land silently. He came down by a half-track that had transmitted the signal.

It gave its call-number and beamed, ‘Anderson is eight hundred metres ahead, Chief. If you join me, we will move forward.’

‘What support have we?’ A single dense impulse.

‘Three more like me, sir. Plus incapacitating gear.’

‘This man must not be destructed.’

‘We comprehend, Chief.’ Total exchange of signals occupied less than a microsecond.

He clamped himself magnetically to the half-track, and they rolled forward. The ground was broken and littered by piles of debris, on the soil of which coarse weeds grew. Beyond it all, the huge fossil of old New York, still under its force jelly, grey, unwithering because unliving. Only the bright multi-shapes of the new complex relieved a whole country full of desolation.

The half-track stopped, unable to go farther or it would betray their presence; Euler unclamped and phased himself into complete transparency. He extended four telescopic legs that lifted him several inches from the ground and began to move cautiously forward.

This region was designated D-Dump. The whole area was an artificial plateau, created by the debris of the old humanoid technology when it had finally been scrapped in favour of the more rational modern system. In the forty years since then, it had been covered by soil from the new development sites. Under the soil here, like a subconscious mind crammed with jewels and blood, lay the impedimenta of an all-but-vanished race.