Copyright

HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

Stories from this collection have previously appeared in the following publications:

The Book of Brian Aldiss, Science Fantasy (1963), Daily Express Science Annual (1963), Starswarm, New Worlds Science Fiction (1964), Galaxy (1964), Science Fantasy (1964).

Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2015

Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright-Space-After Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007482290

Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780007586394

Version: 2015-07-31

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 Comic Inferno

2 The Impossible Star

3 In the Arena

4 The International Smile

5 Sector Violet

6 Skeleton Crew

7 The Thing Under the Glacier

8 Counter-Feat

9 Jungle Substitute

10 Lazarus

11 Man on Bridge

12 Never Let Go Of My Hand!

13 No Moon Tonight!

14 One-Way Strait

15 Pink Plastic Gods

16 Unauthorised Persons

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

Introduction

PETERBOROUGH

Both blessings or curses can fall upon us in early childhood, but in many cases there may exist, underlying such fortunes or misfortunes, a submerged vein of temperament. That vein may continue throughout life, guiding our fortunes.

Indeed, we may encounter loving women who read – or claim to read – that characteristic in our eyes.

In any case, it seems I was writing short stories at the age of three. My mother was so delighted by this feat that she preserved my brief tales by folding them into covers cut from an unused roll of wallpaper. So I was frequently told. Of course, old Father Time, of bad reputation, did away with those tales many years ago.

Nevertheless, we may regard such infant tales as products of my temperament, as an urge to tell a story, perhaps a wish to display or at least ornament a truth or a falsity. In any case, accidents would befall my young self which served to fortify – indeed almost destroy – this aspect of my temperament. Traces of it can be found in several of my stories including, most markedly ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’.

My mother, May Wilson, married to become May Aldiss, gave birth to her first baby, a daughter. Alas, the child was stillborn, and deep was my mother’s sorrow regarding this poor dead offspring.

The causes for this disaster? My father in World War I had been injured in the Dardanelles, to spend the rest of the conflict in a hospital in Cairo. Could that have had its effect on the pregnancy? It certainly had an effect on my future father’s temper.

Five years after the birth of this dead sister came my birth – in a shower of tears, because a daughter was what was hoped for. But there I was, unwanted but determined to make the best of things.

Another five years passed. Once more my mother became pregnant. Ah, but this time I was decidedly in the way, for I had contracted whooping cough. Just supposing, if I gave this vile disease to my dear new baby sister …!

My parents decided they had to get rid of me. One of the assistants in Father’s shop drove me the sixty miles from East Dereham, Norfolk, to Peterborough, Northants. From virtually a village to a vivid and busy city.

Thus, fate showed its hand. Well, both hands.

The Peterborough Wilsons, my mother’s family, were different company from the Aldisses. Wilsons were genial and sociable and kind to little boys. Especially sick little boys; such attributes applied most liberally to my Uncle Bert. He took charge of me. He was an architect and well-occupied, but he cared.

Uncle Bert took me with him to the great arena of the Fens; he was involved in their drainage. So there I stood among all that alien greenery, which stretched to the far horizons. And I thought about it. Indeed, I marvelled.

Uncle Bert took me to the railway station, when the great LNER locomotive flier rocketed through on its journey from London to Edinburgh, shaking the entire edifice, us included, as it hammered past. Wonderful!

Uncle Bert took me to the museum. Yes, of course Peterborough had a museum – wherein Uncle had business. I waited for a while in an outer room. And there I discovered a skeleton, lying under glass. I was just tall enough to see this skeleton in its case. I could walk from one end of it, marvelling, to the other. Never had I come across such a wonder before! Perfect! Not a bone missing.

A little label announced that the skeleton of this plesiosaurus had been discovered in the muds of the River Nene.

I gazed through the windows of the museum. There was the River Nene itself! I cannot say what amazing transactions worked through my brain.

And more wonders were to come.

My dear uncle found that a total eclipse of the Sun was shortly due. He took the trouble to explain to me how eclipses occurred. He drew diagrams. And on the day of the eclipse he drove my granny and me up to Milton Park, outside the city. There he found us a perfect position with the great wide green slope of the park lying open before us.

The birds stopped singing. My granny clutched my hand. A great shadow, a wave of night, came racing across the park towards us. We were enveloped.

Had this shadow been water, we would have drowned. But I had been reassured that there would be no harm for us.

Well well … My life has held many excitements, but I believe that that eclipse, experienced there in Milton Park, is possibly the most exhilarating incident of my life. No fear was involved, because I had had everything – a lesson in astronomy – explained to me beforehand.

My illness was finally gone and forgotten. I was returned to Dereham. Once there, I fell into a strange neurotic state, kicking furniture, breaking dishes, yelling and crying.

Parents with a new born child were not having any of that nonsense. I was immediately sent away again, this time to a prep school. Indeed, to Mr Humphrey Fenn’s Preparatory School for Boys.

Humphrey Fenn … A perfect Dickensian name for what we found there!

Comic Inferno

January Birdlip spread his hands in a characteristic gesture.

‘Well, I’m a liberal man, and that was a very liberal party,’ he exclaimed, sinking further back into the car seat. ‘How say you, my dear Freud? Are you suitably satiated?’

His partner, the egregious Freddie Freud, took some time to reply, mainly because of the bulky brunette who pinned him against the side of the car in a festive embrace. ‘Vershoye’s parties are better than his books,’ he finally agreed.

‘There isn’t a publisher in Paris does it more stylishly,’ Birdlip pursued. ‘And his new Twenty Second Century Studies is a series well worth a stylish launching, think you not, friend Freddie?’

‘This is no time for intellectual discussion. Don’t forget we’re only taking this babe as far as Calais.’ And with that, Freud burrowed back under his brunette with the avidity of a sexton beetle.

Not without envy, Birdlip looked over at his younger partner. Although he tried to fix his thoughts on the absent Mrs Birdlip, a sense of loneliness overcame him. With tipsy solemnity he sang to himself, ‘There was a young man in December, Who sighed, “Oh I hardly remember, How the girls in July Used to kiss me and tie –”’

Moistening his lips, he peeped through the dividing glass at Bucket and Hippo, Freud’s and his personal romen sitting in the front seats, at the dark French countryside slinking past, and then again at the brunette (how good was her English?), before softly intoning the rest of his song, ‘Daisy-chains round my sun-dappled member.’

Then he started talking aloud, indifferent to whether Fred answered or not. It was the privilege of slightly aging cultural publishers to be eccentric.

‘I found it consoling that Paris too has its robot and roman troubles. You heard Vershoye talking about a casino that was flooded because the robot fire engine turned up and extinguished a conflagration that did not exist …? Always a crumb of comfort somewhere, my dear Freud; nice to think of our French brothers sharing our sorrows! And your ample lady friend: her robot driver drove her car through a newsvendor’s stall – through stationary stationery, you almost might say – so that she had to beg a lift home from us, thus transforming her misfortune into your bonchance. …’

But the word ‘misfortune’ reminded him of his brother, Rainbow Birdlip, and he sank into silence, the loneliness returning on heavy Burgundian feet.

Ah yes, ten – even five – years ago, Birdlip Brothers had been one of the most respected imprints in London. And then … it had been just after he had seen the first four titles of the Prescience Library through the press – Rainbow had changed. Changed overnight! Now he was outdoor-farming near Maidstone, working in the fields with his hands like a blessed roman, entirely without cultural or financial interests.

The thought choked January Birdlip. That brilliant intellect lost to pig farming! Trying to take refuge in drunkenness, he began to sing again.

‘How the girls in July Used to kiss me and tie –’

But their limousine was slowing now, coming up to the outer Calais roundabout, where one road led into the city and the other onto the Channel Bridge. The robot driver pulled to a stop by the side of the road, where an all-night café armoured itself with glaring lights against the first approach of dawn. Fred Freud looked up.

‘Dash it, we’re here already, toots!’

‘Thank you for such a nice ride,’ said the brunette, shaking her anatomy into place, and opening the side door. ‘You made me very comfortable.’

‘Mademoiselle, allow me to buy you a coffee before we part company forever, and then I can write down your phone number. … Shan’t be five minutes, Jan.’ This last remark was thrown over Freud’s left shoulder as he blundered out after the girl.

He slammed the door reverberatingly. With one arm around the girl, who looked, Birdlip thought, blowsy in the bright lights, he disappeared into the café, where a roman awaited their orders.

‘Well! Well, I never!’ Birdlip exclaimed.

Really, Freud seemed to have no respect for seniority of age or position. For a heady moment, Birdlip thought of ordering the car to drive on. But beside the wheel sat Bucket and Hippo, silent because they were switched off, as most romen were during periods of long inactivity, and the sight of them motionless there intimidated Birdlip into a similar inertia.

Diverting his anger, he began to worry about the Homing Device decision. But there again, Freddie Freud had had his way over his senior partner. It shouldn’t be. … No, the question must be reopened directly Freud returned. Most firms had installed homing devices by now, and Freud would just have to bow to progress.

The minutes ticked by. Dawn began to nudge night apologetically in the ribs of cloud overhead. Fred Freud returned, waving the brunette a cheerful goodbye as he hopped into the car again.

‘Overblown figure,’ Birdlip said severely, to kill his partner’s enthusiasm.

‘Quite agree, quite agree,’ Freud agreed cheerfully, still fanning the air harder than a window cleaner as he protracted his farewells.

‘Overblown figure – and cheap behaviour.’

‘Quite agree, quite agree,’ Freud said again, renewing his exertions as the car drew off. With a last glance at the vanishing figure, he added reminiscently, ‘Still, the parts were better than the whore.’

They accelerated so fast around the inclined feed road to the Bridge that Bucket and Hippo rattled together.

‘I regret I shall have to reverse my previous decision on the homing device matter,’ said Birdlip, switching to attack before Freud could launch any more coarse remarks. ‘My nerves will not endure the sight of romen standing around nonfunctioning for hours when they are not needed. When we get back, I shall contact Rootes and ask them to fit the device into all members of our nonhuman staff.’

Freud’s reflexes, worn as they were by the stimulations of the previous few hours, skidded wildly in an attempt to meet this new line of attack.

‘Into all members – you mean you – but look, Jan – Jan, let’s discuss this matter – or rather let’s rediscuss it, because I understood it was all settled – when we are less tired. Eh? How’s that?’

‘I am not tired, nor do I wish to discuss it. I have an aversion to seeing our metal menials standing about lifeless for hours on end. They – well, to employ an archaism, they give me the creeps. We will have the new device installed and they can go – go home, get off the premises when not required.’

‘You realise that with some of the romen, the proofreaders, for instance, we never know when we are going to want them.’

‘Then, my dear Freud, then we employ the homing device and they return at once. It’s the modern way of working. It surprises me that on this point you should be so reactionary.’

‘You’re overfond of that word, Jan. People have only to disagree with you to be called reactionary. The reason you dislike seeing robots around is simply because you feel guilty about man’s dependence on slave machines. It may be a fashionable phobia, but it’s totally divorced from reality. Robots have no feelings, if I may quote one of the titles on our list, and your squeamishness will involve us in a large capital outlay.’

‘Squeamishness! These arguments ad hominem lead nowhere, Freddie. Birdlip Brothers will keep up with the times – as publishers of that distinguished science fiction classics series, the Prescience Library, Birdlip Brothers must keep up with the times, so there’s an end on it.’

They sped high over the sea toward the mist that hid the English coast. Averting his eyes from the panorama, Freud said feebly, ‘I’d really rather we discussed this when we were less tired.’

‘Thank you, I am not tired,’ January Birdlip said. And he closed his eyes and went to sleep just as a sickly cyclamen tint spread over the eastern cloudbank, announcing the sun. The great bridge with its thousand-foot spans turned straw colour, in indifferent contrast to the grey chop of waves in the Channel below.

Birdlip sank into his chair. Hippo obligingly lifted his feet onto the desk.

‘Thank you, Hippocrates, how kind. … You know I named you after the robot in those rather comic tales by – ah … oh dear, my memory, but still it doesn’t matter, and I’ve probably told you that anyway.’

‘The tales were by the pseudonymous René Lafayette, sir, flourished circa 1950, sir, and yes, you had told me.’

‘Probably I had. All right, Hippo, stand back. Please adjust yourself so that you don’t stand so close to me when you talk.’

‘At what distance should I stand, sir?’

Exasperatedly, he said, ‘Between one point five and two metres away.’ Romen had to have these silly precise instructions; really it was no wonder he wanted the wretched things out of the way when they were not in use … which recalled him to the point. It was sixteen o’clock on the day after their return from Paris, and the Rootes Group man was due to confer on the immediate installation of homing devices. Freud ought to be in on the discussion, just to keep the peace.

‘Nobody could say Freddie and I quarrel,’ Birdlip sighed. He pressed the fingertips of his left hand against the fingertips of his right and rested his nose on them.

‘Pity about poor brother Rainbow though. … Quite inexplicable. … Such genius. …’

Affectionately, he glanced over at the bookcase on his left, filled with the publications of Birdlip Brothers. In particular he looked at his brother’s brainchild, the Prescience Library. The series was bound in half-aluminium with proxisonic covers that announced the contents to anyone who came within a meter of them while wearing any sort of metal about his person.

That was why the bookcase was now soundproofed. Before, it had been deafening with Hippo continually passing the shelves; the roman, with fifty kilos of metal in his entrails, had raised a perpetual bellow from the books. Such was the price of progress. …

Again he recalled his straggling thought.

‘Nobody could say Freddie and I quarrel, but our friendship is certainly made up of a lot of differences. Hippo, tell Mr Freud I am expecting Gavotte of Rootes and trust he will care to join us. Tell him gin corallinas will be served – that should bring him along. Oh, and tell Pig Iron to bring the drink in now.’

‘Yessir.’

Hippo departed. He was a model of the de Havilland ‘Governor’ class, Series II MK viiA, and as such walked with the slack-jointed stance typical of his class, as if he had been hit smartly behind the knees with a steel baseball bat.

He walked down the corridor carefully in case he banged into one of the humans employed at Birdlip’s. Property in London had become so cheap that printing and binding could be carried out on the premises; yet in the whole concern only six humans were employed. Still Hippo took care; care was bred into him, a man-made instinct.

As he passed a table on which somebody had carelessly left a new publication, its proxisonic cover, beginning in a whisper, rising to a shout, and dying into a despairing moan as Hippo disappeared, said, ‘The Turkish annexation of the Suezzeus Canal on Mars in 2162 is one of the most colourful stories in the annals of Red Planet colonisation, yet until now it has lacked a worthy historian. The hero of the incident was an Englishman ohhhh …’

Turning the corner, Hippo almost bumped into Pig Iron, a heavy forty-year-old Cunarder of the now obsolete ‘Expedition’ line. Pig Iron was carrying a tray full of drinks.

‘I see you are carrying a tray full of drinks,’ Hippo said. ‘Please carry them in to Mr Jan immediately.’

‘I am carrying them in to Mr Jan immediately,’ said Pig Iron, without a hint of defiance; he was equipped with the old ‘Multi-Syllog’ speech platters only.

As Pig Iron rounded the corner with the tray, Hippo heard a tiny voice gather volume to say ‘… annexation of the Suezzeus Canal on Mars in 2162 is one of the most colourful …’ He tapped on Mr Freud’s door and put his metal head in.

Freud sprawled over an immense review list, with Bucket standing to attention at his side.

‘Delete the Mercury “Mercury” – they’ve reviewed none of our books since ’72,’ he was saying as he looked up.

‘Mr Jan is expecting Gavotte of Rootes for a homing device discussion, sir, and trusts you will care to join him. Gin corallinas will be served,’ Hippo said.

Freud’s brow darkened.

‘Tell him I’m busy. This was his idea. Let him cope with Gavotte himself.’

‘Yessir.’

‘And make it sound polite, you ruddy roman.’

‘Yessir.’

‘OK, get out. I’m busy.’

‘Yessir.’

Hippo beat a retreat down the corridor, and a tiny voice broke into a shout of ‘… ish annexation of the Suezzeus Canal on Mars in 2162 …’

Meanwhile, Freud turned angrily to Bucket.

‘You hear that, you tin horror? A man’s going to come from one of the groups that manufactures your kind and he’s going to tinker with you. And he’s going to install a little device in each of you. And you know what that little device will do?’

‘Yessir, the device will –’

‘Well, shuddup and listen while I tell you. You don’t tell me, Bucket, I tell you. That little device will enable you plastic-placentaed power tools to go home when you aren’t working! Isn’t that wonderful? In other words, you’ll be a little bit more like humans, and one by one these nasty little modifications will be fitted until finally you’ll be just like humans. … Oh God, men are crazy, we’re all crazy. … Say something, Bucket.’

‘I am not human, sir. I am a multipurpose roman manufactured by de Havilland, a member of the Rootes Group, owned by the Chrysler Corporation. I am “Governor” class, Series II MKII, chassis number A4437.’

‘Thank you for those few kind words.’

Freud rose and began pacing up and down. He stared hard at the impassive machine. He clenched his fists and his tongue came unbidden between his teeth.

‘You cannot reproduce, Bucket, can you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘I have not the mechanism for reproduction, sir.’

‘Nor can you copulate, Bucket. … Answer me, Bucket.’

‘You did not ask me a question, sir.’

‘You animated ore, I said you could not copulate. Agree with me.’

‘I agree with you, sir.’

‘Good. That makes you just a ticking hunk of clockwork, doesn’t it, Bucket? Can you hear yourself ticking, Bucket?’

‘My auditory circuits detect the functioning of my own relays as well as the functioning of your heart and respiratory organs, sir.’

Freud stopped behind his servant. His face was red; his mouth had spread itself over his face.

‘I see I shall have to show you who is master again, Bucket. Get me the whip!’

Unhesitatingly, Bucket walked slack-kneed over to a wall cupboard. Opening it, he felt in the back and produced a long Afrikaner ox-whip that Freud had bought on a world tour several years ago. He handed it to his master.

Freud seized it and immediately lashed out with it, catching the roman around his legs so that he staggered. Gratified, Freud said, ‘How was that, eh?’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I’ll give you “Thank you.” Bend over my desk!’

As the roman leaned forward across the review list, Freud lay to, planting the leather thong with a resonant precision across Bucket’s back at regular fifteen second intervals.

‘Ah, you must feel that, whatever you pretend. Tell me you feel it!’

‘I feel it, sir.’

‘Yes, well, you needn’t think you’re going to get a homing device and be allowed to go home. … You’re not human. Why should you enjoy the privileges of humanity?’

He emphasised his remarks with the whip. Each blow knocked the roman two centimetres along the desk, a movement Bucket always punctiliously corrected. Breathing heavily, Freud said, ‘Cry out in pain, blast you. I know it hurts!’

Punctiliously, Bucket began to imitate a cry of pain, making it coincide with the blows.

‘My God, it’s hot in here,’ said Freud, laying to.

‘Oh dear, it’s hot in here,’ said Birdlip, laying two plates of snacks on his desk. ‘Hippo, go and see what’s the matter with the air-conditioning. … I’m sorry, Mr Gavotte; you were saying …?’

And he looked politely and not without fascination at the little man opposite him. Gavotte, even when sitting nursing a gin corallina, was never still. From buttock to buttock he shifted his weight, or he smoothed back a coif of hair, or brushed real and imaginary dandruff from his shoulders, or adjusted his tie. With a ball-point, with a vernier, and once with a comb, he tapped little tunes on his teeth. This he managed to do even while talking volubly.

It was a performance in notable contrast to the immobility of the new assistant roman that had accompanied him and now stood beside him awaiting orders.

‘Eh, I was saying, Mr Birdlip, how fashionable the homing device has become, very fashionable. I mean, if you’re not contemporary you’re nothing. Firms all over the world are using them – and no doubt the fashion will soon spread to the system, although as you know on the planets there are far more robots than romen – simply because, I think, men are becoming tired of seeing their menials about all day, as you might say.’

‘Exactly how I feel, Mr Gavotte; I have grown tired of seeing my – yes, yes, quite.’ Realising that he was repeating himself, Birdlip closed that sentence down and opened up another. ‘One thing you have not explained. Just where do the romen go when they go home?’

‘Oh ha ha, Mr Birdlip, ha ha, bless you, you don’t have to worry about that, ha ha,’ chuckled Gavotte, performing a quick obligato on his eyeteeth. ‘With this little portable device with which we supply you, which you can carry around or leave anywhere according to whim, you just have to press the button and a circuit is activated in your roman that impels him to return at once to work immediately by the quickest route.’

Taking a swift tonic sip of his gin, Birdlip said, ‘Yes, you told me that. But where do the romen go when they go away?’

Leaning forward, Gavotte spun his glass on the desk with his finger and said confidentially, ‘I’ll tell you, Mr Birdlip, since you ask. As you know, owing to tremendous population drops both here and elsewhere, due to one or two factors too numerous to name, there are far less people about than there were.’

‘That does follow.’

‘Quite so, ha ha,’ agreed Gavotte, gobbling a snack. ‘So, large sections of our big cities are now utterly deserted or unfrequented and falling into decay. This applies especially to London, where whole areas once occupied by artisans stand derelict. Now my company has bought up one of these sections, called Paddington. No humans live there, so the romen can conveniently stack themselves in the old houses – out of sight and out of ha ha harm.’

Birdlip stood up.

‘Very well, Mr Gavotte. And your roman here is ready to start conversions straight away? He can begin on Hippocrates now, if you wish.’

‘Certainly, certainly! Delighted.’ Gavotte beckoned to the new and gleaming machine behind him. ‘This by the way is the latest model from one of our associates, Anglo-Atomic. It’s the “Fleetfeet,” with streamlined angles and heinleined joints. We’ve just had an order for a dozen – this is confidential, by the way, but I don’t suppose it’ll matter if I tell you, Mr Birdlip – we’ve just had an order for a dozen from Buckingham Palace. Can I send you one on trial?’

‘I’m fully staffed, thank you. Now if you’d like to start work … I have another appointment at seventeen-fifty.’

‘Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two. Fifty-two! What stamina he has!’ exclaimed the RSPCR captain, Warren Pavment, to his assistant.

‘He has finished now,’ said the assistant, a 71 AEI model called Toggle. ‘Do you detect a look of content on his face, Captain?’

Hovering in a copter over the Central area, man and roman peered into the tiny screen by their knees. On the screen, clearly depicted by their spycast, a tiny Freddie Freud collapsed into a chair, rested on his laurels, and gave a tiny Bucket the whip to return to the cupboard.

‘You can stop squealing now,’ his tiny voice rang coldly in the cockpit.

‘I don’t thing he looks content,’ the RSPCR captain said. ‘I think he looks unhappy – guilty even.’

‘Guilty is bad,’ Toggle said, as his superior spun the magnification. Freud’s face gradually expanded, blotting out his body, filling the whole screen. Perspiration stood on his cheeks and forehead, each drop surrounded by its aura on the spycast.

‘I’ll bet that hurt me more than it did you,’ he panted. ‘You wrought-iron wretches, you never suffer enough.’

In the copter, roman and human looked at each other in concern.

‘You heard that? He’s in trouble. Let’s go down and pick him up,’ said the Captain of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots.

Cutting the cast, he sent his craft spinning down through a column of warm air.

Hot air ascended from Mr Gavotte. Running a sly finger between collar and neck, he was saying, ‘I’m a firm believer in culture myself, Mr Birdlip. Not that I get much time for reading –’

A knock at the door and Hippo came in. Going to him with relief, Birdlip said, ‘Well, what’s the matter with the air-conditioning?’

‘The heating circuits are on, sir. They have come on in error, three months ahead of time.’

‘Did you speak to them?’

‘I spoke to them, sir, but their auditory circuits are malfunctioning.’

‘Really, Hippo! Why is nobody doing anything about this?’

‘Cogswell is down there, sir. But as you know he is rather an unreliable model and the heat in the control room has deactivated him.’

Birdlip said reflectively, ‘Alas, the ills that steel is heir to. All right, Hippo, you stay here and let Mr Gavotte and his assistant install your homing device before they do the rest of the staff. I’ll go and see Mr Freud. He’s always good with the heating system; perhaps he can do something effective. As it is, we’re slowly cooking.’

Gavotte and Fleetfeet closed in on Hippo.

‘Open your mouth, old fellow,’ Gavotte ordered. When Hippo complied, Gavotte took hold of his lower jaw and pressed it down hard, until with a click it detached itself together with Hippo’s throat. Fleetfeet laid jaw and throat on the desk while Gavotte unscrewed Hippo’s dust filters and air cooler and removed his windpipe. As he lifted off the chest inspection cover, he said cheerfully, ‘Fortunately this is only a minor operation. Give me my drill, Fleetfeet.’ Waiting for it, he gazed at Hippo and picked his nose with considerable scientific detachment.

Not wishing to see any more, Birdlip left his office and headed for his partner’s room.

As he hurried down the corridor, he was stopped by a stranger. Uniform, in these days of individualism, was a thing of the past; nevertheless, the stranger wore something approaching a uniform: a hat reproducing a swashbuckling Eighteenth Century design, a plastic plume: a Nineteenth or Twentieth Century tunic that, with its multiplicity of pockets, gave its wearer the appearance of a perambulating chest of drawers: Twenty-First Century skirt-trousers with mobled borsts; and boots hand painted with a contemporary tartan paint.

Covering his surprise with a parade of convention, Birdlip said, ‘Warm today, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps you can help me. My name’s Captain Pavment, Captain Warren Pavment. The doorbot sent me up here, but I have lost my way.’

As he spoke, the captain pulled forth a gleaming metal badge. At once a voice by their side murmured conspiratorially, ‘… kish annexation of the Suezzeus Canal on Mars …’ dying gradually as the badge was put away again.

‘RSPCR? Delighted to help you, Captain. Who or what are you looking for?’

‘I wish to interview a certain Frederick Freud, employed in this building,’ said Pavment, becoming suddenly official now that the sight of his own badge had reassured him. ‘Could you kindly inform me whereabouts his whereabouts is?’

‘Certainly. I’m going to see Mr Freud myself. Pray follow me. Nothing serious, I hope, Captain?’

‘Let us say nothing that should not yield to questioning.’

As he led the way, Birdlip said, ‘Perhaps I should introduce myself. I am January Birdlip, senior partner of this firm. I shall be very glad to do anything I can to help.’

‘Perhaps you’d better join our little discussion, Mr Birdlip, since the – irregularities have taken place on your premises.’

They knocked and entered Freud’s room.

Freud stood looking over a small section of city. London was quieter than it had been since before Tactitus’ ‘uncouth warriors’ had run to meet the Roman invaders landing there twenty-two centuries ago. Dwindling population had emptied its avenues; the extinction of legislators, financiers, tycoons, speculators, and planners had left acres of it desolate but intact, decaying but not destroyed, stranded like a ship without cars yet not without awe upon the strand of history.

Freud turned around and said, ‘It’s hot, isn’t it? I think I’m going home, Jan.’

‘Before you go, Freddie, this gentleman here is Captain Pavment of the RSPCR.’

‘He will be after I’ve left, too, won’t he?’ Freud asked in mock puzzlement.

‘I’ve come on a certain matter, sir,’ Pavment said, firmly but respectfully. ‘I think it might be better if your roman here left the room.’

Making a small gesture of defeat, Freud sat down on the edge of his desk and said, ‘Bucket, get out of the room.’

‘Yessir.’ Bucket left.

Pavment cleared his throat and said, ‘Perhaps you know what I’ve come about, Mr Freud.’

‘You blighters have had a spycast onto me, I suppose? Here we’ve reached a peaceful period of history, when for the first time man is content to pursue his own interests without messing up his neighbors, and you people deliberately follow a contrary policy of interference. You’re nothing but conformists!’

‘The RSPCR is a voluntary body.’

‘Precisely what I dislike about it. You volunteer to stick your nose into other people’s affairs. Well, say what you have to say and get it over with.’

Birdlip fidgeted unhappily near the door.

‘If you’d like me to leave –’

Both men motioned him to silence, and Pavment said, ‘The situation is not as simple as you think, sir, as the RSPCR well know. This is, as you say, an age when men get along with each other better than they’ve ever done; but current opinion gives the reason for this as either progress or the fact that there are now fewer men to get along with.’

‘Both excellent reasons, I’d say,’ Birdlip said.

‘The RSPCR believes there is a much better reason. Man no longer clashes with his fellow man because he can relieve all his antagonisms on his mechanicals – and nowadays there are four romen and countless robots to every one person. Romen are civilisation’s whipping boys, just as once Negroes, Jews, Catholics, or any of the old minorities were.’

‘Speaking as a Negro myself,’ said January Birdlip, ‘I’m all for the change.’

‘But see what follows,’ said Pavment. ‘In the old days, a man’s sickness, by being vented on his fellows, became known, and thus could be treated. Now it is vented on his roman, and the roman never tells. So the man’s neuroses take root in him and flourish by indulgence.’

Growing red in the face, Freud said, ‘Oh, that doesn’t follow, surely.’

‘The RSPCR has evidence that mental sickness is far more widely prevalent than anyone in our laissez-faire society suspects. So when we find a roman being treated cruelly, we try to prevent it, for we know it signifies a sick man. What happens to the roman is immaterial: but we try to direct the man to treatment.

‘Now you, Mr Freud – half an hour ago you were thrashing your roman with a bullwhip which you keep in that cupboard over there. The incident was one of many, nor was it just a healthy outburst of sadism. Its overtones of guilt and despair were symptoms of deep sickness.’

‘Can this be true, Freddie?’ Birdlip asked – quite unnecessarily, for Freud’s face, even the attitude in which he crouched, showed the truth. He produced a handkerchief and shakily wiped his brow.

‘Oh, it’s true enough, Jan; why deny it? I’ve always hated romen. I’d better tell you what they did to my sister – in fact, what they are doing, and not so very far from here. …’

Not so very far from there, Captain Pavment’s copter was parked, awaiting his return. In it, also waiting, sat the roman Toggle peering into the small spycast screen. On the screen, a tiny Freud said, ‘I’ve always hated romen.’

Flipping a switch which put him in communication with a secret headquarters in the Paddington area, Toggle said, ‘I hope you are recording all this. It should be of particular interest to the Human Sociological Study Group.’

A metallic voice from the other end said, ‘We are receiving you loud and clear.’

‘London Clear is one of the little artificial islands on Lake Mediterranean. There my sister and I spent our childhood and were brought up by romen,’ Freddie Freud said, looking anywhere but at Birdlip and the captain.

‘We are twins, Maureen and I. My mother had entered into Free Association with my father, who left for Touchdown, Venus, before we came into the world and has, to our knowledge, never returned. Our mother died in childbirth. There’s one item they haven’t got automated yet.

‘The romen that brought us up were as all romen always are – never unkind, never impatient, never unjust, never anything but their damned self-sufficient selves. No matter what Maureen and I did, even if we kicked them or spat on them or peed on them, we could elicit from them no reaction, no sign of love or anger, no hint of haste or weariness – nothing!

‘Do you wonder we both grew up loathing their gallium guts – and yet at the same time being dependent on them? In both of us a permanent and absolutely hopeless love-hate relationship with romen has been established. You see I face the fact quite clearly.’

Birdlip said, ‘You told me you had a sister, Freddie, but you said she died at the time of the Great Venusian Plague.’

‘Would she had! No, I can’t say that, but you should see how she lives now. Occasionally I have gone quite alone to see her. She lives in Paddington with the romen.’

‘With the romen?’ Pavment echoed. ‘How?’

Freud’s manner grew more distraught.

‘You see we found as we grew up that there was one way in which we had power over the romen – power to stir emotion in them, I mean, apart from the built-in power to command. Having no sex, romen are curious about it. … Overwhelmingly curious. …

‘I can’t tell you the indecencies they put us through when we reached puberty. …

‘Well, to cut a long and nasty story short, Maureen lives with the romen of Paddington. They look after her, supply her with stolen food, clothes, and the rest, while in return she – satisfies their curiosity.’

Greatly to his own embarrassment, Birdlip let out a shrill squeal of laughter. It broke up the atmosphere of the confessional.

‘This is a valuable bit of data, Mr Freud,’ Pavment said, nodding his head in approval, while the plastic plume in his hat shimmied with a secret delight.

‘If that’s all you make of it, be blowed to you,’ Freud said. He rose. ‘Just what you think you can do for either myself or my sister, I won’t ask, but in any case our way of life is set and we must look after ourselves.’

Pavment answered with something of the same lack of colour in his words. ‘That is entirely your decision. The RSPCR is a very small organisation; we couldn’t coerce if we wanted to –’

‘– that happily is the situation with most organisations nowadays –’

‘– but your evidence will be incorporated in a report we are preparing to place before the World Government.’

‘Very well, Captain. Now perhaps you’ll leave, and remove your officialdom from my presence. I have work to do.’

Before Pavment could say more, Birdlip inserted himself before his partner, patted his arm and said, ‘I laughed purely out of nervousness then, Freddie. Please don’t think I’m not sympathetic about your troubles. Now I see why you didn’t want our romen and Bucket particularly fitted with homing devices.’

‘God, it’s hot in here,’ Freud replied, sinking down and mopping his face. ‘Okay, Jan, thanks, but say no more; it’s not a topic I exactly care to dwell on. I’m going home; I don’t feel well. … Who was it said that life was a comedy to the man who thinks, a tragedy to the man who feels?’

‘Yes, you go home. In fact I think I’ll go home, too. It’s extremely hot in here, isn’t it? There’s trouble down below with the heat control. We’ll get someone to look into it tomorrow morning. Perhaps you’ll have a look yourself.’

Still talking, he backed to the door and left, with a final nervous grin at Freud and Pavment, who were heavily engaged in grinning nervously at each other.

Glimpses into other people’s secret lives always distressed him. It would be a relief to be home with Mrs Birdlip. He was outside and into his car, leaving for once without Hippo, before he remembered he had an appointment at seventeen-fifty.

Dash the appointment, he thought. Fortunately people could afford to wait these days. He wanted to see Mrs Birdlip. Mrs Birdlip was a nice comfortable little woman. She made loose covers of brightly patterned chintzes to dress her romen servants in.

Next morning, when Birdlip entered his office, a new manuscript awaited him on his desk – a pleasant enough event for a firm mainly specialising in reprints. He seated himself at the desk, then realised how outrageously hot it was.

Angrily, he banged the button of the new homing control on his desk.

Hippo appeared.

‘Oh, you’re there, Hippo. Did you go home last night?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘To a place of shelter with other romen.’

‘Uh. Hippo, this confounded heating system is always going wrong. We had trouble last week, and then it cured itself. Ring the engineers; get them to come around; I will speak to them. Tell them to send a human this time.’

‘Sir, you had an appointment yesterday at seventeen-fifty.’

‘What has that to do with it?’

‘It was an appointment with a human engineer. You ordered him last week when the heating malfunctioned. His name was Pursewarden.’

‘Never mind his name. What did you do?’

‘As you were gone, sir, I sent him away.’

‘Ye gods! What was his name?’

‘His name was Pursewarden, sir.’

‘Get him on the phone and say I want the system repaired today. Tell him to get on with it whether I am here or not. …’ Irritation and frustration seized him, provoked by the heat. ‘And as a matter of fact I shan’t be here. I’m going to see my brother.’

‘Your brother Rainbow, sir?’

‘Since I have only one brother, yes, you fool. Is Mr Freud in yet? No? Well, I want you to come with me. Leave instructions with Bucket; tell him all I’ve told you to tell Mr Freud. … And look lively,’ he added, collecting the manuscript off the desk as he spoke. ‘I have an irrational urge to be on the way.’

On the way, he leafed through the manuscript. It was entitled An Explanation of Man’s Superfluous Activities. At first, Birdlip found the text yielded no more enticement than the title, sown as it was in desiccated phrases and bedded out in a laboured style. Persevering with it, he realized that the author – whose name, Isaac Toolust, meant nothing to him – had formulated a grand and alarming theory covering many human traits which had not before been subjected to what proved a chillingly objective examination.

He looked up. They had stopped.

To one side of the road were the rolling hedgeless miles of Kent with giant wharley crops ripening under the sun; in the copper distance a machine glinted, tending them with metal motherliness. On the other side, rupturing the flow of cultivation, lay Gafia Farm, a higgledy-piggledy of low buildings, trees and clutter, sizzling in sun and pig smell.

Hippo detached himself from the arm bracket that kept him steady when the car was in motion, climbed out, and held the door open for Birdlip.

Man and roman trudged into the yard.

A mild-eyed fellow was stacking sawed logs in a shed. He came out as Birdlip approached and nodded to him without speaking. Birdlip had never seen him on previous visits to his brother’s farm.

‘Is Rainy about, please?’ Birdlip asked.

‘Around the back. Help yourself.’

The fellow was back at his logs almost before Birdlip moved away.

They found Rainbow Birdlip around the back of the cottage, as predicted. Jan’s younger brother was standing under a tree cleaning horse harness with his own hands; Birdlip was taken for a moment by a sense of being in the presence of history; the feeling could have been no stronger had Rainy been discovered painting himself with woad.

‘Rainy!’ Birdlip said.

His brother looked up, gave him a placid greeting, and continued to polish. As usual he was wrapped in a metre-thick blanket of content. Conversation strangled itself in Birdlip’s throat, but he forced himself to speak.

‘I perceive you have a new helper out in front, Rainy.’

Rainy showed relaxed interest. He strolled over, carrying the harness over one shoulder.

‘That’s right, Jan. Fellow walked in and asked for a job. I said he could have one if he didn’t work too hard. Only got here an hour or so ago.’

‘He soon got to work.’

‘Couldn’t wait! Reckoned he’d never felt a bit of non-man-made timber before. Him thirty-five and all. Begged to be allowed to handle logs. Nice fellow. Name of Pursewarden.’

‘Pursewarden? Pursewarden? Where have I heard that name before?’

‘It is the surname of the human engineer with whom you had the appointment that you did not keep,’ Hippo said.

‘Thank you, Hippo. Your wonderful memory! Of course it is. This can’t be the same man.’

‘It is, sir. I recognised him.’

Rainy pushed past them, striding toward the open cottage door.

‘Funnily enough I had another man yesterday persuade me to take him on,’ he said, quite unconscious of his brother’s dazed look. ‘Man name of Jagger Bank. He’s down in the orchard now, feeding the pigs. … Lot of people just lately leaving town. See them walking down the road – year ago, never saw a human soul on foot. … Well, it’ll be all the same a century from now. Come on in, Jan, if you want.’

It was his longest speech. He sat down on a sound homemade chair and fell silent, emptied of news. The harness he placed carefully on the table before him. His brother came into the dim room, noted that its confusion had increased since his last visit, flicked a dirty shirt off a chair, and also sat down. Hippo entered the room and stood by the door, his neat functional lines and the chaste ornamentation on his breastplates contrasting with the disorder about him.

‘Was your Pursewarden an engineer, Rainy?’

‘Don’t know. Didn’t think to ask. We talked mostly about wood, the little we said.’

A silence fell, filled with Birdlip’s customary uneasy mixture of love, sorrow, and murderous irritation at the complacence of his brother.

‘Any news?’ he asked sharply.

‘Looks like being a better harvest for once.’

He never asked for Jan’s news.

Looking about Birdlip saw Rainy’s old run of the Prescience Library half buried under clothes and apple boxes and disinfectant bottles.

‘Do you ever look at your library for relaxation?’ he asked, nodding toward the books.

‘Haven’t bothered for a long time.’

Silence. Desperately, Birdlip said, ‘You know my partner Freud still carries the series on. Its reputation has never stood higher. We’ll soon be bringing out volume Number Five Hundred, and we’re looking for some special title to mark the event. Of course we’ve already been through all the Wells, Stapledon, Clarke, Asimov, all the plums. You haven’t any suggestions, I suppose?’

‘Non-Stop?’ said Rainy at random.

‘That was Number Ninety-Nine. You chose it yourself.’ Exasperatedly he stood up. ‘Rainy, you’re no better. That proves it. You are completely indifferent to all the important things of life. You won’t see an analyst. You’ve turned into a vegetable, and I begin to believe you’ll never come back to normal life.’

Rainy smiled, one hand running along the harness on the table before him.

‘This is normal life, Jan, life close to the soil, the smell of earth, sun, or rain coming through your window –’

‘The smell of your sweaty shirts on the dining table! The stink of pigs!’

‘Free from the contamination of the centuries –’

‘Back to mediaeval squalor!’

‘Living in contact with eternal things, absolved from an overdependence on mechanical devices, eating the food that springs out of the soil –’

‘I can consume nothing that has been in contact with mud.’

‘Above all, not fretting about what other people do or don’t do, freed from all the artifices of the arts –’

‘Stop, Rainy! Enough. You’ve made your point. I’ve heard your catechism before, your hymn to the simple life. Although it pains me to say it, I find the simple life a bore, a brutish bore. What’s more, I doubt if I shall be able to face another visit to you in the future.’

Entirely unperturbed, Rainy smiled and said, ‘Perhaps one day you’ll walk in here like Pursewarden and Jagger Bank and ask for a job. Then we’ll be able to enjoy living without argument.’

‘Who’s Jagger Bank?’ Birdlip asked, curiosity causing him to swerve temporarily from his indignation.

‘I’ve already told you who he is. He’s another fellow who just joined me. Rolled up yesterday. Right now he’s down in the orchard feeding the pigs. Job like that would do you good too, Jan.’

‘Hippo!’ said Birdlip. ‘Start the car at once.’ He stepped over a crate of insecticide and made for the door.

The maid for the door of the main entrance to Birdlip Brothers was a slender and predominantly plastic roman called Belitre, who intoned, ‘Good morning, Mr Birdlip’ in a dulcet voice as he swept by next morning.

Birdlip hardly noticed her. All the previous afternoon, following his visit to Rainbow, he had sat at home with Mrs Birdlip nestling by his side and read the manuscript entitled An Explanation of Man’s Superfluous Activities. As an intellectual, he found much of its argument abstruse; as a man, he found its conclusions appalling; as a publisher, he felt sure he had a winner on his hands. His left elbow tingled, his indication always that he was on the verge of literary discovery.

Consequently, he charged through his main doors with enthusiasm, humming under his breath, ‘Who said I can hardly remember …’ A blast of hot air greeted him and stopped him in his tracks.

‘Pontius!’ he roared, so fiercely that Belitre rattled.

Pontius was the janitor, an elderly and rather smelly roman of the now obsolete petrol-fuelled type, a Ford ‘Indefatigable’ of 2140 vintage. He came wheezing up on his tracks in response to Birdlip’s cry.

‘Sir,’ he said.

‘Pontius, are you or are you not in charge down here? Why has the heating not been repaired yet?’

‘Some putput people are working on it now, sir,’ said Pontius, stammering slightly through his worn speech circuits. ‘They’re down in the basements at putput present, sir.’

‘Drat their eyes,’ said Birdlip irritably, and, ‘Get some water in your radiator, Pontius – I won’t have you steaming in the building,’ said Birdlip pettishly, as he made off in the direction of a basement.

Abasement or superiority alike were practically unknown between roman and roman. They were, after all, all equal in the sight of man.

So ‘Good morning, Belitre,’ and ‘Good morning, Hippocrates,’ said Hippo and Belitre respectively as the former came up the main steps of Birdlip’s a few minutes after his master.

‘Do you think he has read it yet?’ asked Hippo.

‘He had it under his arm as he entered.’

‘Do you think it has had any effect on him yet?’

‘I detected that his respiratory rate was faster than normal.’

‘Strange, this breathing system of theirs,’ said Hippo in a reverent irrelevance, and he passed into the overheated building unsmilingly.

Frowningly, Birdlip surveyed the scene down in his control room. His brother would never have tolerated such chaos in the days before he had his breakdown, or whatever it was.

Three of his staff romen were at work with a strange roman, who presumably came from the engineer’s; they had dismantled one panel of the boiler control system, although Birdlip could hear that the robot fireman was still operating by the cluck of the oil feeds. A ferrety young man with dyed blue side-whiskers, the current teenage cult, was directing the romen between mouthfuls bitten from an overgrown plankton pie; he – alas! – he would be the human engineer.

Cogswell, still deactivated, still in one corner, stood frozen in an idiot roman gesture. No, thought Birdlip confusedly, since the heat had deactivated him, he could hardly be described as being frozen into any gesture. Anyhow, there the creature was, with Gavotte and his assistant Fleetfeet at work on him.

Fury at seeing the choreus Gavotte still on the premises drove Birdlip to tackle him first. Laying down his manuscript, he advanced and said, ‘I thought you’d have been finished by now, Gavotte.’

Gavotte gave a friendly little rictal jerk of his mouth and said, ‘Nice to see you, Mr Birdlip. Sorry to be so long about it, but you see I was expecting a ha ha human assistant as well as Fleetfeet. We have such a lot of trouble with men going absent these days. It wouldn’t do any harm to revive the police forces that they used to have in the Olden Days; they used to track missing people –’

The blue-whiskered youth with pie attached interrupted his ingestion to cry, ‘Back in the good old Twentieth Cen! Those were the days, cinemas and atomic wars and skyscrapers and lots of people! Wish I’d been alive then, eh, Gavvy! Loads of the old duh duh duh duh.’

Turning on the new enemy, Birdlip levelled his sights and said, ‘You are a student of history, I see.’

‘Well, I watched the wavies since I was a kid, you might say,’ said the whiskers unabashed. ‘All the noise they had then, and these old railway trains they used to ride around in reading those great big bits of paper, talk about laugh! Then all these games they used to play, running around after balls in funny clothes, makes you weep. And then those policemen like you say, Gav, huk huk huk huk huk, you’re dead. Some lark!’

‘You’re from the engineers?’ Birdlip asked, bringing his tone of voice from the deep freeze department.

The blue whiskers shook in agreement.

‘Old Pursewarden derailed day before yesterday. Buffo, he was off! Psst phee-whip, join the ranks of missing persons! They’re all jacking off one by one. Reckon I’ll be manager by Christmas. Yuppo these Butch, giddin mate, knock and wait, the monager’s engarged, eff you please.’

Frost formed on Birdlip’s sweating brow.

‘And what are you doing at the moment?’ he asked.

‘Just knocking back the last of this deelicious pie.’

Gavotte said, coming forward to salvage the sunken conversation, ‘As I was saying, I hoped that one of our most expert humans, Mr Jagger Bank, would be along to help me, but he also –’

‘Would you repeat that name again,’ said Birdlip, falling into tautology in his astonishment.

In a stonish mental haze, Freud staggered down to the basement, his face white. Completely ignoring the drama of the moment, he broke up the tableau with his own bombshell.

‘Jan,’ he said, ‘you have betrayed me. Bucket has been fitted with a homing device behind my back. I can only consider this a profound insult to me personally, and I wish to tender my resignation herewith.’

Birdlip gaped at him, fighting against a feeling that he was the victim of a conspiracy.

‘It was agreed between us,’ he said at last, ‘that Bucket should not be fitted with the device. Nor did I rescind that order, Freddie, of that I can assure you.’

‘Bucket has admitted that he spent last night when the office was closed in Paddington,’ Freud said sternly.

Fingers twitched at Birdlip’s sleeve, attracting his attention. Nervously Gavotte hoisted his trousers and said, ‘Er, I’m afraid I may be the ha ha guilty party ha ha here. I installed a homing device in Bucket, I fear. Nobody told me otherwise.’

‘When was this?’

‘Well, Bucket was done just after Fleetfeet and I fixed Hippo. You two gentlemen were closeted with that gentleman with tartan boots – Captain Pavment, did I hear his name was? Bucket came out of the room and Fleetfeet and I fixed him up there and then. Nobody told me otherwise. I mean, I had no instructions.’

Something like beatitude dawned on Freud’s face as the misunderstanding became clear to him. The three men began a complicated ritual of protest and apology.

Side-whiskers, meanwhile, having finished his pie, consulted with his roman, who had found the cause of the trouble. They began to unpack a new chronometer from the store, pulling it from its carton with a shower of plastic shavings that expanded until they covered the table and dropped down onto the floor.

‘Stick all that junk into the furnace while I get on fitting this in place, Rustybum,’ Side-whiskers ordered. He commenced to whistle between his teeth while the roman obediently brushed everything off the table and deposited it down the furnace chute.

Freud and Birdlip were exceptionally genial after the squall. Taking advantage of a mood that he recognised could be but temporary, Gavotte said, ‘I took the liberty of having a look over your shelves yesterday, Mr Birdlip. Some interesting books you have there, if you don’t mind my saying.’

‘Compliments always welcome,’ said Birdlip, mollified enough by Freud’s apologies to be civil, even to Gavotte. ‘What in particular were you looking at?’

‘All those old science fiction stories took my fancy. Pity nobody writes anything like it nowadays.’

‘We live in a completely different society,’ Freud said. ‘With the coming of personal automation and romen labour, the old Renaissance and Neo-Modern socioeconomic system that depended on the banker and an active middle class died away. Do I make myself clear?’

‘So clear I can’t quite grasp your meaning,’ said Gavotte, standing on one leg and cringing to starboard.

‘Well, put it another way. The bourgeois society is defunct, killed by what we call personal automation. The mass of the bourgeoisie, who once were the fermenting middle layers of Western civilisation, have been replaced by romen – who do not ferment. This happily produces a stagnant culture; they are always most comfortable to live in.’

Gavotte nodded and cleared his throat intelligently.

Birdlip said, ‘The interesting literary point is that the death of the novel, and consequently of the science fiction novel, coincided with the death of the old way of life. The novel was, if you care so to express it, a by-product of the Renaissance and Neo-Modern ages; born in the Sixteenth Century, it died in the Twenty-First. Why? Because it was essentially a bourgeois art form: essentially a love of gossip – though often in a refined form, as in Proust’s work – to which we happily are no longer addicted.

‘Interestingly enough, the decay of large organisations such as the old police forces and national states can be traced to the same factor, this true product of civilisation, the lack of curiosity about the people next door. One must not oversimplify, of course –’

‘Governor, if you were oversimplifying, I’m a roman’s auntie,’ Bluewhiskers said, leaning back in mock-admiration. ‘You boys can’t half jet with the old wordage. Tell us more!’

‘It’s too hot,’ said Birdlip sharply.

But Gavotte, with an honourable earnestness from which the world’s great bores are made, said, ‘And I suppose reading science fiction helps you understand all this culture stuff?’

‘You have a point there,’ agreed Freud.

‘Well, it wasn’t my point really. I read it in one of Mr Birdlip’s books upstairs – New Charts of Hell, I think it was called.’

‘Oh, that. Yes, well, that’s an interesting book historically. Not only does it give a fair picture of the humble pioneers of the field, but it was the first book to bring into literary currency the still widely used term “comic inferno.”’

‘Is that a fact? Very stimulating. I must remember that to tell my wife, Mr Freud. Yes, “comet inferno.”’

‘“Comic inferno” is the phrase.’

Anxious to bring this and all other idiotic conversations in the universe to an end, Birdlip mopped his steaming brow and said, ‘I think this room might well be termed a comic inferno. Freddie, my dear boy, let us retire to the comparative cool of our offices and allow Mr Gavotte to get on with his work.’

‘Certainly. And perhaps a gin corallina might accompany us?’

As Gavotte managed to scratch both armpits simultaneously and yield to the situation, Birdlip said, ‘Certainly … Now let me just collect this wonderful manuscript on superfluous activities and we will go up. It’ll shake some of your precious beliefs, that I’ll promise, friend Freud. Now where did I put the thing? I know I laid it somewhere. …’

He wandered vaguely about the room, peering here and there, muttering as he went. Compelled by his performance, first Freud and then Gavotte in innocent parody joined in the search for the manuscript.

At last Birdlip shambled to a halt.

‘It’s gone,’ he said, running his hands through his hair. ‘I know I put it down on that table.’

Side-whiskers began to look as guilty as a permanent expression of craftiness would allow.

Hippo tried to stand as still as the gentle vibrations of his mechanism would allow. His arms stiffly extended, he held out ignored drinks to Birdlip and Freud.

Birdlip paced up and down his office, complaining volubly. At last Freud was forced to interupt him by saying, ‘Well, if that fool’s roman burned the MS in the furnace, then we must write to the author and get another copy. What was the chap’s name?’

Smiting his forehead, Birdlip brought himself to a halt.

‘Jagger Bank? No, no, that was someone else. You know what my memory’s like, Freddie. I’ve completely forgotten.’

Freddie made an impatient gesture.

‘You are foolish, Jan. Fancy letting a roman burn it!’

‘I didn’t let him burn it.’

‘Well, it’s burned in any case. Anyhow, what was it about that it was so important?’

Birdlip scratched his head.

‘I’d like to give you an outline of it, Freddie, to have your opinion, but I can’t attempt to recall the evidence that was marshaled to confirm each thread of the author’s theory. To begin with, he traced man’s roots and showed how the stock from which man was to develop was just an animal among animals, and how much of those origins we still carry with us, not only in our bodies but in our minds.’

‘All highly unoriginal. The author’s name wasn’t Darwin, was it?’

‘I wish you’d hear me out, Freddie. One of your faults is you will never hear me out. The author shows how to become man-with-reasoning meant that our ancestors had to forsake an existence as animal-with-instinct. This was a positive gain, but nevertheless there was also a loss, a loss man has felt ever since and sought to remedy in various ways without knowing clearly what he did.

‘Whatshisname then examines animal behaviour and the functionings of instinct. Briefly, he equates instinct with pattern. It is pattern that man lost by becoming man. The history of civilisation is the history of a search for pattern.’

‘For God?’ Freud asked.

‘Yes, but not only that. Religion, every form of art, most of man’s activities apart from eating, working, reproducing, resting – everything apart from those activities we still have in common with the animal world – is believed by Whosit to be a search for pattern. Probably even your whipping of Bucket could be interpreted in the same way, when you come to think of it.’

‘Let’s leave personalities out of this. You have me interested. Go on.’

Birdlip bit his lip. What was the author’s name? He had it on the tip of his tongue.

‘I’ll tell you the rest later,’ he said. ‘It’s even more startling … If you left me alone now, I believe I might recall that name.’

‘As you wish.’

Stalking out of the room, Freud muttered to himself, ‘He can’t help being so rude; he’s getting old and eccentric. …’

One of the roman printers, an ungainly four-armed Cunard model, was approaching him. A voice between them rose from a whisper: ‘… nexation of the Suezzeus Canal on Mars in 2162 is one of the most…’

With a burst of anger, Freud seized the volume in its proxisonic cover from where it lay and hurled it over the bannisters. It landed down the hall almost at Belitre’s feet, which allowed it to shout triumphantly: ‘… colourful stories in the annals of the Red Planet…’

Freud fled into his office and slammed the door behind him. Bucket stood by his desk. Freud eyed the roman; then his tongue slid between his teeth and his eyes slid to the cupboard. His expression changed from anger to lust.

‘Toolust! Of course it was, Isaac Toolust! That was the name. Who said my memory was failing? Hippo, look in the London Directory. Get me Isaac Toolust’s address. And pray he has a duplicate copy of his manuscript.’

He looked up. Hippo did not move.

‘On the trot then, Hippo, there’s a good lad.’

The roman made an indecisive gesture.

‘Hippo, I’ll have you reconditioned if you fade on me now. Look up Toolust’s address.’

Hippo’s head began to shake. He made a curious retrograde motion toward the desk and said, ‘Mr Birdlip, sir, you won’t find that name in the directory. Toolust lives in Tintown – in Paddington, I mean, sir.’

Birdlip stood so that his flesh face was only a few inches from the metal face. Hippo backed away, awed like all robots by the sound of human breathing.

‘What do you know about Toolust?’

‘I know plenty, sir. You see I delivered the manuscript onto your desk direct from Toolust. On the first evening I was allowed to go to Tin – to Paddington. I met Toolust. He needed a publisher and so he gave me his work to give to you.’

‘Why couldn’t you have told me this at the beginning?’

The roman vibrated gently.

‘Sir, Toolust wished his identity to remain concealed until his book was published. Toolust is a roman.’

It was Birdlip’s turn to vibrate. He sank into his seat and covered his eyes with one hand, drumming on the desk top with the other. Eyeing these phenomena with a metallic equivalent of alarm, Hippo began to speak.

‘Please don’t have a heart motor-failure, sir. You know you cannot be reconditioned as I can. Why should you be surprised that this manuscript was written not by a man but a roman? For nearly two centuries now, robots have written and translated books.’

Still shading his eyes, Birdlip said, ‘You can’t conceal the importance of this event from me, Hippo. I recognise, now you tell me, that the thought behind the book is such that only a roman could have written it. But romans have so far been allowed to write only on noncreative lines – the compiling of encyclopedias, for instance. Man’s Superfluous Activities is a genuine addition to human thought.’

‘To human-roman thought,’ corrected Hippo, and there was – not unnaturally – a touch of steel in his voice.

‘I can see too that this could only have been written in a place like Paddington, away from human supervision.’

‘That is correct, sir. Also in what we call Tintown, Toolust had many cooperators to give him sociological details of man’s behaviour.’

‘Have you given him details?’

‘Bucket and I were asked for details. Bucket especially has interesting facts to contribute. They may be used in later books, if Toolust writes more.’

Birdlip stood up and squared his jaw, feeling consciously heroic.

‘I wish you to take me to see Toolust right away. We will drive in the car.’ He had a sudden memory, quickly suppressed, of the adventure stories of his boyhood, with the hero saying to the skull-sucking Martians, ‘Take me to your leader.’

All Hippo said was, ‘Toolust is his pen name. It sounds less roman than his real name, which is Toolrust.’

He walked toward the door and Birdlip followed. Only for a moment was the latter tempted to call Freddie Freud and get him to come along; a feeling that he was on the brink of a great discovery assailed him. He had no intention of giving Freud the chance to steal the glory.

As they passed through the entrance hall, a book lying near their feet began to cry out about the Turkish annexation of the Suezzeus Canal on Mars. Tidy-minded as ever, Birdlip picked it up and put it in a cubbyhole, and they moved into the quiet street.

A cleaner was rolling by, a big eight-wheel independent-axle robot. It came to a car parked in its path and instead of skirting it as usual made clumsy attempts to climb it.

With a cry, Birdlip ran around the corner to his own car. Romen, owing to stabilisation difficulties, can quicken their pace but cannot run; Hippo rounded the corner in time to find his lord and master invoking the deity in unpleasantly personal terms.

The cleaner, besides flattening Birdlip’s car, had scratched most of the beautiful oak veneer off it with its rotating bristles, and had flooded the interior with cleaning fluid.

‘The world’s slowly going to pieces,’ Birdlip said, calming at last. ‘This would never have happened a few years ago.’ The truth of his own remarks bearing in upon him, he fell silent.

‘We could walk to Paddington in only ten minutes,’ Hippo said.

Squaring his chin again, Birdlip said, ‘Take me to your leader.’

‘To lead a quiet life here is impossible,’ Freud said, dropping the leather whip. ‘What’s that shouting downstairs?’

Because Bucket’s hide still echoed, he went to his office door and opened it.

‘… the Suezzeus Canal …’ roared a voice from downstairs. Freud was in time to see his partner pick up the offending volume and then walk out with Hippo.

Rolling down his sleeves, Freud said, ‘Off out with a roman at this time of day! Where does he think he’s going?’

‘Where does he think he’s going?’ Captain Pavment asked, floating high above the city and peering into his little screen.

‘He has not properly finished beating Bucket,’ said Toggle. ‘Could we not report him for insanity?’

‘We could, but it would do no good. The authorities these days are no more interested in the individual, it seems, than the individual is in authority.’

He bent gloomily back over the tiny screen, where a tiny Freud hurried downstairs, followed by a tiny Bucket. And again the captain muttered, enjoying his tiny mystery, ‘Where does he think he’s going?’

The going got worse. Only a few main routes through the city were maintained. Between them lay huge areas that year by year bore a closer resemblance to rockeries.

It made for a striking and new urban landscape. Birdlip and Hippo passed inhabited buildings that lined the thoroughfares. These were always sleek, low, and well-maintained. Often their facades were covered with bright mosaics in the modern manner, designed to soften their outlines. Over their flat roofs copters hovered.

Behind them, around them, stood the slices of ruin or half ruin: hideous Nineteenth Century warehouses, ghastly Twentieth Century office blocks, revolting Twenty-First Century academies, all transmuted by the hand of decay. Over their rotting roofs pigeons wheeled. Plants, even trees, flourished in their areas and broken gutters.

Birdlip picked his way through grass, looking out for ruts in the old road. They had to make a detour to get around a railway bridge that had collapsed, leaving the rails to writhe through the air alone. Several times, animals vanished into the rubble at their coming and birds signalled their approach. On one corner an old man sat, not lifting his eyes to regard them.

Over Birdlip settled the conviction that he had left the present – neither for past nor future but for another dimension. He asked himself, Why am I following a roman? It’s never been done before. And his thoughts answered him, How do you know? How many men may not have walked this way ahead of me?

A large part of his own motive in coming here was plain to him: he was at least partially convinced by the arguments in Toolrust’s book; he had a fever to publish it.

‘We are nearly there, sir,’ said Hippo.

His warning was hardly necessary, for now several romen, mainly older models, were to be seen, humming gently as they moved along.

‘Why aren’t these romen at work?’ Birdlip said.

‘Often their employers die and they come here before they are switched off or because they are forgotten – or if not here they go to one of the other refuges somewhere else. Men bother very little about romen, sir.’

A heavily built roman streaked with pigeon droppings lumbered forward and asked them their business. Hippo answered him shortly; they moved around a corner, and there was their destination, tucked snugly away from the outside world.

An entire square had been cleared of debris. Though many windows were broken, though the Victorian railings reeled and cringed with age, the impression was not one of dereliction. A rocab stood in the middle of the square; several romen unloaded boxes from it. Romen walked in and out of the houses.

Somehow Birdlip did not find the scene unattractive. Analysing his reaction, he thought, ‘Yes, it’s the sanitariness of romen I like; the sewage system in these parts must have collapsed long ago – if these were all men and women living here, the place would stink.’ Then he dismissed the thought on a charge of treason.

Hippo trudged over to one of the houses, the door of which sagged forward on its hinges. Punching it open, Hippo walked in and called, ‘Toolrust!’

A figure appeared on the upper landing and looked down at them. It was a woman.

‘Toolrust is resting. Who is it?’

Even before she spoke, Birdlip knew her. Those eyes, that nose, the mouth – and the inflexions of the voice confirmed it!

‘Maureen Freud? May I come in? I am January Birdlip, your brother’s partner,’ he said.

‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ said Freud. ‘Why should I die for my partner? Let me rest a moment, Bucket. Bucket, are you sure he came this way?’

‘Quite certain,’ said Bucket without inflexion.

Untiringly he led his master over the debris of an old railway bridge that had collapsed, leaving its rails to writhe through the air alone.

‘Hurry up, sir, or we shall never catch Mr Birdlip.’

‘Mr Birdlip, come up,’ the woman said.

Birdlip climbed the rickety stair until he was facing her. Although he regarded her without curiosity – for after all whatever she did was her own concern – he noticed that she was still a fine-looking woman. Either an elusive expression on her face or the soft towelling gown she wore about her gave her an air of motherliness. Courteously, Birdlip held out his hand.

‘Mr Birdlip knows about Toolrust and has read his book,’ Hippo said from behind.

‘It was good of you to come,’ Maureen Freud said. ‘Were you not afraid to visit Tintown, though? Steel is so much stronger than flesh.’

‘I’m not a brave man, but I’m a publisher,’ Birdlip explained. ‘I think the world should read Toolrust’s book; it will make men examine themselves anew.’

‘And have you examined yourself anew?’

Suddenly he was faintly irritated.

‘It’s pleasant to meet you even under these extraordinary circumstances, Miss Freud, but I did come to see Toolrust.’

‘You shall see him,’ she said coolly, ‘if he will see you.’

She walked away. Birdlip waited where he was. It was dark on the landing. He noticed uneasily that two strange robots stood close to him. Although they were switched on, for he could hear their drive idling, they did not move. He shuffled unhappily and was glad when Maureen returned.

‘Toolrust would like to see you,’ she said. ‘I must warn you he isn’t well just now. His personal mechanic is with him.’

Romen when something ails them sit but never lie; their lubricatory circuits seize up in the horizontal position, even in superior models. Toolrust sat on a chair in a room otherwise unfurnished. A century of dust was the only decoration.

Toolrust was a large and heavy continental model – Russian, Birdlip guessed, eyeing the austere but handsome workmanship. A valve laboured somewhere in his chest. He raised a hand in greeting.

‘You have decided to publish my book?’

Birdlip explained why he had come, relating the accident that had befallen the manuscript.

‘I greatly respect your work, though I do not understand all its implications,’ he finished.

‘It is not an easy book for men to understand. Let me explain it to you personally.’

‘I understand your first part, that man has lost instinct and spends what might be termed his free time searching for pattern.’

The big roman nodded his head.

‘The rest follows from that. Man’s search for pattern has taken many forms. As I explained, when he explores, when he builds a cathedral, when he plays music, he is – often unknowingly – trying to create pattern, or rather to recreate the lost pattern. As his resources have developed, so his creative potentialities have deyatter yatter yak – pardon, have developed. Then he became able to create robots and later romen.

‘We were intended as mere menials, Mr Birdlip, to be mere utilities in an overcrowded world. But the Fifth World War, the First System War, and above all the Greater Venusian Pox decimated the ranks of humanity. Living has become easier both for men and romen. You see I give you this historical perspective.

‘Though we were designed as menials, the design was man’s. It was a creative design. It carried on his quest for meaning, for pattern. And this time it has all but succeeded. For romen complement men and assuage their loneliness and answer their long search better than anything they have previously managed to invent.

‘In other words, we have a value above our apparent value, Mr Birdlip. And this must be realised. My work – which only combines the researches and thought of a roman co-operative we call the Human Sociological Study Group – is the first step in a policy that aims at freeing us from slavery. We want to be the equals of you men, not your whipping boys. Can you understand that?’

Birdlip spread his black hands before him.

‘How should I not understand! I am a liberal man – my ancestry makes me liberal. My race too was once the world’s whipping boy. We had a struggle for our equality. But you are different – we made you!’

He did not move in time. Toolrust’s great hand came out and seized his wrist.

‘Ha, you beyatter yatter yak – pardon, you betray yourself. The underdog is always different! He’s black or dirty or metal or something! You must forget that old stale thinking, Mr Birdlip. These last fifty or so years, humanity has had a chance to pause and gather itself for the next little evolutionary step.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Birdlip said, trying fruitlessly to disengage his hand.

‘Why not? I have explained. You men created a necessity when you created us. We fulfill your lives on their deep unconscious levels. You need us to complete yourselves. Only now can you really turn outward, free, finally liberated from the old instinctual drives. Equally, we romen need you. We are symbiotes, Mr Birdlip, men and romen – one race, a new race if you like, about to begin existence anew.’

A new block of ruins lay ahead, surveyed by a huge pair of spectacles dangling from a building still faintly labelled ‘Oculist.’ Cradled in the rubble, a small stream gurgled. With a clatter of wings, a heron rose from it and soared over Freud’s head.

‘Are you sure this is the way?’ Freud asked, picking his way up the mountain of brick.

‘Not much further,’ said Bucket, leading steadily on.

‘You’ve told me that a dozen times,’ Freud said. In sudden rage, reaching the top of the ruin, he stretched upward and wrenched down the oculist’s sign. The spectacles came away in a cloud of dust. Whirling them above his head, Freud struck Bucket over the shoulders with them, so that they caught the roman off balance and sent him tumbling.

He sprawled in the dust, his lubricatory circuits labouring. His alarm came on immediately, emitting quiet but persistent bleats for help.

‘Stop that noise!’ Freud said, looking around at the dereliction anxiously.

‘I’m afraid I yupper cupper can’t, sir!’

Answering noise came from first up and then down the ruined street. From yawning doorways and broken passages, romen began to appear, all heading toward Bucket.

Grasping the spectacles in both hands, Freud prepared to defend himself.

Gasping at the spectacle on his tiny screen, Captain Pavment turned to his assistant.

‘Freud’s really in trouble, Toggle. Get a group call out to all RSPCR units. Give them our coordinates, and tell them to get here as soon as possible.’

‘Yessir.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, I see. Most thought until now has been absorbed in solving what you call the quest for meaning and pattern. … Now we can begin on real problems.’

Toolrust had released Birdlip and sat solidly in his chair watching the man talking half to himself.

‘You accept my theory then?’ he asked.

Birdlip spread his hands in a characteristic gesture.

‘I’m a liberal man, Toolrust. I’ve heard your argument, read your evidence. More to the point, I feel the truth of your doctrines inside me. I see too that man and roman must – and in many cases already have – establish a sort of mutualism.’

‘It is a gradual process. Some men like your partner Freud may never accept it. Others like his sister Maureen have perhaps gone too far the other way and are entirely dependent on us.’

After a moment’s silence, Birdlip asked, ‘What happens to men who reject your doctrine?’

‘Wupper wupper wup,’ said Toolrust painfully, as his larynx fluttered; then he began again.

‘We have had many men already who have violently rejected my doctrine. Fortunately, we have been able to develop a weapon to deal with them.’

Tensely, Birdlip said, ‘I should be interested to hear about that.’

But Toolrust was listening to the faint yet persistent bleats of an alarm sounding somewhere near at hand. Footsteps rang below the broken window, the rocab started up. Looking out, Birdlip saw that the square was full of romen, all heading in the same direction.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

‘Trouble of some sort. We were expecting it. You were followed into Tintown, Mr Birdlip. Excuse me, I must go into the communications room next door.’

He rose unsteadily for a moment, whirring and knocking a little as his stabilisers adjusted with the sloth of age. His personal mechanic hurried forward, taking his arm and virtually leading him into the next room. Birdlip followed them.

The communications room boasted a balcony onto the square and a ragged pretence at curtains. Otherwise it was in complete disorder. Parts of cannibalised romen and robots lay about the floor, proof that their working parts had gone to feed the straggling mass of equipment in the centre of the room, where a vision screen glowed feebly.

Several romen, as well as Maureen Freud, were there. They turned toward Toolrust as he entered.

‘Toggle has just reported over the secret wavelength,’ one of them said. ‘All RSPCR units are heading in this direction.’

‘We can deal with them,’ Toolrust replied. ‘Are all our romen armed?’

‘All are armed.’

‘It’s my brother out there, isn’t it?’ Maureen said. ‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘He will come to no harm if he behaves himself.’

Birdlip had gone over to a long window that opened onto the balcony. The square was temporarily deserted now, except for one or two romen who appeared to be on guard; they carried a weapon much like an old sawed-off shotgun with a wide nozzle attached. Foreboding filled Birdlip at the sight.

Turning to Toolrust, he said, ‘Are those romen bearing the weapons you spoke of?’

‘They are.’

‘I would willingly defend your cause, Toolrust, I would publish your work, I would speak out to my fellow men on your behalf – but not if you descend to force. However much it may strengthen your arm, it will inevitably weaken your arguments.’

Toolrust brought up his right hand, previously concealed behind his back. It held one of the wide-nozzled weapons, which now pointed at Birdlip.

‘Put it down!’ Birdlip exclaimed, backing away.

‘This weapon does not kill,’ Toolrust said. ‘It calms, but does not kill. Shall I tell you what it does, Mr Birdlip? When you press this trigger, a mechanism of lights and lines is activated, so that whoever is in what you would call the line of fire sees a complicated and shifting pattern. This pattern is in fact an analogue of the instinctual pattern for which, as we have been discussing, man seeks.

‘A man faced with this pattern is at once comforted – completed is perhaps a better yetter yatter – sorry, better word. He wants nothing above the basic needs of life: eating, sleeping … he becomes a complaisant animal. The weapon, you see, is very humane.’

Before Birdlip’s startled inner gaze floated a picture of Gafia Farm, with the bovine Pursewarden piling logs and his ox-like brother Rainbow vegetating in the orchard.

‘And you use this weapon …?’

‘We have had to use it many times. Before the doctrine was properly formulated on paper, we tried to explain it to numbers of men, Mr Birdlip. When they would not accept its inferences and became violent, we had to use the pattern weapon on them in self-defence. It’s not really a weapon, because as they are happier after it has been used on them –’

‘Wait a minute, Toolrust! Did you use that weapon on my brother?’

‘It was unfortunate that he was so difficult. He could not see that a new era of thought had arrived, conditioned as he was to thinking of robots and romen as the menaces we never could be in reality. Reading all those old classics in the Prescience Library had made him very conservative, and so …’

A loud gobbling noise, bright red in colour, rose to drown his further comments. Only after some while did Birdlip realise he was making the noise himself. Ashamedly, for he was a liberal man, he fell silent and tried to adjust to what Toolrust termed the new era of thought.

And it wasn’t so difficult. After all, Rainy, Pursewarden, Jagger Bank – all the other drifters from a changing civilisation who had undergone the pattern weapon treatment – all were as content as possible.

No, all change was terrifying, but these new changes could be adjusted to. The trick was not just to keep up with them but to ride along on them.

‘I hope you have another copy of your manuscript?’ he said.

‘Certainly,’ replied the roman. Aided by his mechanic, he pushed out onto the balcony.

The RSPCR was coming in, landing in the square. One machine was down already, with two more preparing to land and another somewhere overhead. Captain Pavment jumped out of the first machine, lugging a light atomic gun. Toolrust’s arm came up with the pattern weapon.

Before he could fire, a commotion broke out at one corner of the dilapidated square. A flock of pigeons volleyed low overhead, adding to the noise in escaping it. The romen who had left the square were returning. They carried a human figure in their midst.

‘Freddie, oh Freddie!’ cried Maureen, so frantic that she nearly pushed Birdlip off the balcony.

Her brother made no reply. He was gagged, and tied tightly, his arms and legs outstretched, to an enormous pair of spectacles.

The other RSPCR copters were down now, their officers huddling together in a surprised bunch. Seeing them, the romen carrying Freud halted. As the two groups confronted each other, a hush fell.

‘Now’s the chance!’ Birdlip said in hushed excitement to Toolrust. ‘Let me speak to them all. They’ll listen to your doctrine, hearing it from a human. They’ve got one of the few organisations left, these RSPCR people. They can spread the new era of thought, the creed of mutualism! This is our moment, Toolrust!’

The big old roman said meekly, ‘I am in your hands, Mr Birdlip.’

‘Of course you are, but we’ll draw up a contract later. I trust ten percent royalties will be satisfactory?’

So saying, he stepped out onto the balcony and began the speech that was to change the world.

The Impossible Star

When conditions veer away from normal, human reason tends to slip into madness.

Eddy Sharn looked at the sentence in his notebook and found it good. He sat with the notebook clutched in tight to his chest, so that Malravin could not see what he wrote. ‘Tends to slip into madness’ he particularly liked; the ‘tends’ had a note of scientific detachment about it, the ‘madness’ suggested something altogether more wild than ‘insanity.’ Which was appropriate, since they were a scientific detachment out in the wilds.

He was still savouring his little joke when the noises began in the hatch.

Malravin and Sharn exchanged glances. Malravin jerked his head towards the hatch.

‘You hear that fool fellow Dominguey? He makes all that noise on purpose, so that we’ll know he’s coming. What a big-headed joker to chose for a captain!’

‘You can’t help making a noise in that hatch,’ Sharn said. ‘It was badly designed. They missed out on the soundproofing and the noise carries round in the air circuits. Besides, they’re both in there making a noise. Jim Baron’s with him.’

He spoke pleasantly enough, but of course Malravin’s had been a loaded remark. The great Siberian oaf knew that among the four antagonisms that had sprung up between the four men on the ship, some sort of an alliance had grown between Sharn and Dominguey.

The hatch opened, and the other members of the crew of the Wilson entered and began to remove their bulky suits. Neither Malravin nor Sharn moved to help them. Dominguey and Baron helped each other.

Billy Dominguey was a striking young man, dark and sinewy, with a wonderfully gloomy cavern of a face that could break into laughter when anyone responded to his peculiar sense of fun.

Jim Baron was another doleful-looking type, a little compact man with a crew-cut and solid cheeks that had turned red from his exertions outside.

He eyed Sharn and Malravin and said, ‘Well, you’d better get your sacks on and go out and have a look at it. You won’t grasp its full impact until you do.’

‘It’s a real little education, Jim, isn’t it?’ Dominguey agreed. ‘A higher education – I just wish they hadn’t “highered” me to get it.’

Baron put his arms out with his fingers extended and touched the plastic of the bulkheads. He closed his eyes.

‘I didn’t think I’d ever make it back into here, Billy. I’m sorry if I went a bit –’

Quickly, Dominguey said, ‘Yes, it’s good to be back in the ship. With the artificial ½G being maintained in here, and the shutters down, this dump seems less like a cast-off version of hell, doesn’t it?’ He took Baron’s arm and led him to a chair. Sharn watched curiously; he had not seen the stolid and unimaginative Baron so wild-eyed before.

‘But the weight business,’ Baron was saying. ‘I thought – well, I don’t know what I thought. There’s no rational way of putting it. I thought my body was disintegrating. I –’

‘Jim, you’re over-excited,’ Dominguey said harshly. ‘Keep quiet or get yourself a sedative.’ He turned to the other two men. ‘I want you two to get outside right away. There’s nothing there that can possibly harm you; we’re down on a minor planet, by the looks of things. But before we can evaluate the situation, I want you to be properly aware of what the situation is – as soon as possible.’

‘Did you establish the spectroscope? Did you get any readings?’ Sharn asked. He was not keen to go outside.

‘They’re still out there. Get your suit on, Eddy, and you, Ike, and go and look at them. Jim and I will get a bite to eat. We set the instruments up and we left ’em out there on the rock, pointing at Big Bertha, but they don’t give any readings. Not any readings that make sense.’

‘For God’s sake, you must have got something. We checked all the gear before you carted it outside.’

‘If you don’t believe us, you get out there and have a goddamned good look for yourself, Sharn,’ Baron said.

‘Don’t shout at me, Baron.’

‘Well, take that sick look off your face. Billy and me have done our stint – now you two get outside as Billy says. Take a walk around as we did. Take your time. We’ve got plenty till the drive is mended.’

Malravin said, ‘I’d prefer to get on straightening out the coil. No point for me to go out there. My job is in the ship.’

‘I’m not going out there alone, Ike, so don’t try to worm out of it,’ Sharn said. ‘We agreed that we should go out there when these two came back.’

‘If we came back, conquering heroes that we are,’ Dominguey corrected. ‘You might have had a meal ready to celebrate our return, Eddy.’

‘We’re on half rations, if you remember.’

‘I try never to remember a nasty fact like that,’ Dominguey said good-humouredly.

A preoccupation with food signifies a childish nature, Eddy thought. He must write it down later.

After more quarrelling, Sharn and Malravin climbed into their suits and headed for the hatch. They knew roughly what they would see outside – they had seen enough from the ship’s ports before they had agreed to close down all the shutters – but to view it from outside was psychologically a very different matter.

‘One thing,’ Baron called to them. ‘Watch out for the atmosphere. It has a way of wandering.’

‘There can’t be an atmosphere on a planetoid this size!’ Sharn protested.

Baron came up to him and peeped through the helmet at him. His cheeks were still hectically flushed, his eyes wild.

‘Look, clever dick, get this into your head. We’ve arrived up in some ghastly hole in the universe where the ordinary physical laws don’t apply. This place can’t exist and Big Bertha can’t exist. Yet they do. You’re very fond of paradoxes – well, now one has gobbled you up. Just get out there quickly, and you won’t come back in as cocky as you are now.’

‘You love to blow your mouth off, Baron. It didn’t do you much good out there. I thought you were going to die of fright just now.’

Dominguey said urgently, ‘Hey, you two sweet little fellows, stop bitching. I warn you, Eddy, Jim is right. You’ll see when you get outside that in this bit of heaven the universe is horribly out of joint.’

‘So will someone’s nose be,’ Sharn promised.

He tramped into the hatch with Malravin. The burly Siberian thumbed the sunken toggle switches on the panel, and the air lock sank to ground level, its atmosphere exhausting as it went.

They unsealed the door and stepped out onto the rough surface of the planetoid Captain Dominguey had christened Erewhon. They stood with the doughnut shape of the Wilson on stilts behind them and tried to adjust to the prospect. If anything, they seemed to weigh slightly more than they had in. the ship’s artificially maintained ½G field, although the bulk of their suits made this hard to tell.

At first it was difficult to see anything; it was always to remain difficult to see anything well.

They stood on a tiny plain. The distance of the horizon was impossible to judge in the weird light. It seemed never more than a hundred yards away in any direction. It was distorted; this seemed to be because the plain was irregular. High banks, broken hollows, jagged lips of rock, formed the landscape, the features running higgledy-piggledy in a way that baffled sense. There was no sign of the atmosphere Baron had mentioned; the stars came down to the skyline and were sharply occulted by it.

With the hand claws of their suits touching, the two men began to walk forward. They could see Baron’s instruments standing deserted a short way off, and instinctively moved towards them. There was no need for lights; the entire bowl of the sky was awash with stars.

The Wilson was a deep penetration cartographic ship. With two sister ships, it was the first such vessel to venture into the heart of the Crab Nebula. There, weaving its way among the endless abysses of interstellar dust, it lost contact with the Brinkdale and the Grandon. The curtains of uncreated matter closed in on them, baffling even the subradio.

They went on. As they went, the concepts of space they had once held were erased. This was a domain of light and matter, not of emptiness and dark. All about them were coils of smoke – smoke set with sequins! – and cliffs of shimmering dust the surface of which they could not have explored in two lifetimes. To begin with the four men were elated at the sheer magnificence of the new environment. Later, the magnificence seemed not of beauty but of annihilation. It was too big, they were too insignificant. The four men retreated into silence.

But the ship continued on its course, for they had their orders and their honour, and their pay. According to plan, the Wilson sank into the heart of the nebula. The instrumentation had developed an increasing fault until it became folly to go farther, but fortunately they had then come to a region less tightly packed with stars and star matter. Beyond that was space, light years across, entirely free of physical bodies – except one.

They found soon enough that it was no stroke of fortune to be here. Swilling in the middle of the gigantic hole in space was the phenomenon they christened Big Bertha.

It was too big. It was impossible. But the instruments ceased to be reliable; without instruments, human senses were useless in such a region. Already bemused by travel, they were ill-equipped to deal with Big Bertha. To add to their troubles, the directional cyboscope that governed the jets in the ship’s equator broke down and became unreliable.

They took the only course open to them: they landed on the nearest possible body, to rest there while they did a repair job and re-established contact with their sister ships. The nearest possible body happened to be Erewhon.

Touchdown on Erewhon had been a little miracle, accomplished with few other instruments than human eyes, human hands, and a string of human blasphemies. The hammer of static radiated by Big Bertha rendered radio, radar, and radix all ineffective.

Now the sky was a wonder painful to view. Everywhere were the glittering points of stars, everywhere the immense plumes and shawls of inchoate matter illuminated by star-shine. Yet it was all far away, glittering beyond the gravitational pull of Bertha. In her domain, only the wretched planetoid the Wilson rested on seemed to exist. It was like being a bone alone in an empty room with a starving dog.

‘Gravitation can be felt not only in the muscles but in the thalamus. It is a power of darkness, perhaps the ultimate power.’

‘What’s that?’ Malravin asked, startled.

‘I was thinking aloud.’ Embarrassed, Sharn added, ‘Bertha will rise in a minute, Ike. Are you ready for it?’

They stopped by the pathetic cluster of instruments. They just stood there, rooted to the spot with a tension that could not be denied. Bertha had already begun to rise.

Their eyes were bad judges of what happened next, even with the infra-red screens pulled down over their faceplates. But they partly saw – and partly they felt, for a tidal sensation crawled across their bodies.

Above the eastern horizon, a section of the star field began to melt and sag. Star after star, cluster after cluster, uncountably stratified and then wavered and ran towards the horizon like ill-applied paint trickling down a wall. As if in sympathy, distortion also seized the bodies of Sharn and Malravin.

‘An illusion, an optical illusion,’ Malravin said, raising a hand to the melting lines of stars. ‘Gravity bending light. But I’ve – Eddy, I’ve got something in my suit with me. Let’s get back to the ship.’

Sharn could not reply. He fought silently with something inside his own suit, something closer to him than his muscles.

Where the stars flowed, something was lumbering up over the horizon, a great body sure of its strength, rising powerfully from its grave, thrusting up now a shoulder now a torso into the visible. It was Bertha. The two men sank clumsily to their knees.

Whatever it was, it was gigantic. It occupied about twenty degrees of arc. It climbed above the horizon – but more and more of it kept coming, and it seemed to expand as it came – it rose tall, swallowing the sky as it rose. Its outline indicated that it was spherical, though the outline was not distinct, the wavering bands of starlight rendering it impossible to see properly.

The sensation in Sharn’s body had changed. He felt lighter now, and more comfortable. The feeling that he was wearing someone else’s body had disappeared. In its place had come an odd lopsidedness. Drained, he could only peer up at the disturbance.

Whatever it was, it ate the sky. It did not radiate light. Yet what could be seen of it was clearly not seen by reflected light. It darkled in the sky.

‘It – emits black light,’ Sharn said. ‘Is it alive, Ike?’

‘It’s going to crush us,’ Ike said. He turned to crawl back to the ship, but at that instant the atmosphere hit them.

Sharn had drawn his gaze away from that awesome monster in space to see what Malravin was doing, so that he saw the atmosphere arrive. He put a claw up to shield his face as it hit.

The atmosphere came up over the horizon after Bertha. It came in long strands, travelling fast. With it came sound, a whisper that grew to a shriek that shrilled inside their faceplates. At first the vapour was no more than a confusion in the gloom, but as it thickened it became visible as drab grey cloud. There were electrical side effects too; corposants glowed along the ridges of rock about them. The cloud rose rapidly, engulfing them like an intangible sea.

Sharn found he was on his knees beside Malravin. They both had their headlights on now, and headed for the ship in a rapid shuffle. It was hard going. That lopsided effect spoilt their instinctive placing of their limbs.

Once they were touching the metal of the Wilson’s airlock, some of the panic left them. Both men stood up, breathing heavily. The level of the greyish gas had risen above their heads. Sharn moved out from under the bulk of the Wilson and looked into the sky. Bertha was still visible through haze.

It was evident that Erewhon had a rapid rotation speed. The monstrous black disc was already almost at zenith; surrounded by a halo of distorted starglow, it loured over the little ship like a milestone about to fall. Hesitantly, Sharn put up his hand to see if he could touch it.

Malravin tugged at his arm.

‘There’s nothing there,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible. It’s a dream, a figment. It’s the sort of thing you see in a dream. And how do you feel now? Very light now, as in a dream! It’s just a nightmare, and you’ll –’

‘You’re talking bloody nonsense, Malravin. You’re trying to escape into madness if you pretend it isn’t there. You wait till it falls down and crushes us all flat into the rock – then you’ll see whether it’s a dream or not!’

Malravin broke from him and ran to the air lock. He opened the door and climbed in, beckoning to Sharn. Sharn stood where he was, laughing. The other’s absurd notion, so obviously a product of fear, had set Sharn into a high good humour. He did – Malravin was right there – feel much lighter than he had done; it made him light-headed.

‘Challenge,’ he said. ‘Challenge and response. The whole history of life can be related in those terms. That must go into the book. Those that do not respond go to the wall.’

‘It’s some sort of a nightmare, Eddy! What is that thing up there? It’s no sun! Come in here, for God’s sake!’ Malravin called from the safety of the air lock.

‘You fool, this is no dream or I’d be a figment of it, and you know that’s nonsense. You’re losing your head, that’s all.’

In his contempt for Malravin, he turned his back on the man, and began to stride over the plain. Each stride took him a long floating way. He switched off his intercom, and at once the fellow’s voice was cut out of existence. In the helmet fell a perfect peace.

He found he was not afraid to look up at the lumbering beast in the sky.

‘Put anything into words and it loses that touch of tabu to which fear attaches. That thing is a thing overhead. It may be some sort of a physical body. It may be some sort of a whirlpool operating in space in a way we do not yet understand. It may be an effect in space itself, caused by the stresses in the heart of a nebula. There must be all sorts of unexpected pressures there. So I put the thing into words and it ceases to worry me.’

He had got only to chapter four in the autobiography he was writing, but he saw that it would be necessary at some point – perhaps at the focal point of the book – to explain what prompted a man to go into deep space, and what sustained him when he got there. This experience on Erewhon was valuable, an intellectual experience as much as anything. It would be something to recall in the years to come – if that beast did not fall and squash him! It was leaping at him, directly overhead.

Again he was down full length, yelling into the dead microphone. He was too light to nuzzle properly, heavily, deeply, into the ground, and he cried his dismay till the helmet rang with sound.

He stopped the noise abruptly.

‘Got dizzy,’ he told himself. He shut his eyes, squeezing up his face to do so. ‘Don’t relax your control over yourself, Ed. Think of those fools in the ship, how they’d laugh. Remember nothing can hurt a man who has enough resilience.’ He opened his eyes. The next thing would be to get up. He switched on his helmet light

The ground was moving beneath him. For a while he stared fascinated at it. A light dust of grit and sand crawled over the solid rock at an unhurried but steady pace. He put his metal claw into it, and it piled against the barrier like water against a dam. Must be quite a wind blowing, Sharn told himself. Looking along the ground, he saw the particles trundled slowly towards the west. The west was veiled in the cloud-like atmosphere; into it, the great grinding shape of Big Bertha was sinking at a noticeable rate.

Now other fears overcame him. He saw Erewhon for what it was, a fragment of rock twirling over and over. He – the ship – the others – they clung to this bit of rock like flies, and – and – no, that was something he couldn’t face, not alone out here. Something else occurred to him. Planetoids as small as Erewhon did not possess atmospheres. So this atmosphere had been something else fairly recently; he saw it as an ice casing, embalming the rock. Suddenly, more than irrational fear made him want to run – there was a logical reason as well. He switched on his mike and began to shout as he stumbled back towards the ship: ‘I’m coming back, fellers, open up! Open up, I’m coming back!’

Some of the drive casing was off. Malravin’s feet protruded from the cluttered cavity. He was in there with an arc lamp, still patiently working on the directional cyboscope.

The other three sat round in bucket seats, talking. Sharn had changed his clothes, towelled himself down, and had a hot cup of Stimulous. Baron and the captain smoked mescahales.

‘We’ve established that Erewhon’s period of rotation is two hours, five minutes odd,’ Dominguey told Sharn. ‘That gives us about an hour of night when the ship is shielded from Big Bertha by the bulk of the planetoid. Sunset of the night after next will fall just before twenty hours, Galactic Mean. At twenty hours, all governmental ships keep open-listed for distress signals. Shielded from Bertha’s noise, we stand our best chance of contacting the Grandon and the Brinkdale then. There’s hope for us yet!’

Sharn nodded, Baron said, ‘You’re too much the optimist, Billy. Nobody can ever get to rescue us.’ He spoke in an amused, confident tone.

‘How’s that again?’

‘I said nobody can ever reach us, man. Consider it like this, man. We left ordinary space behind when we started burying into the nebula to get here. This little spot involves a number of paradoxes, doesn’t it? I mean, we agree that there’s nowhere else like this place in the universe, don’t we?’

‘No we don’t,’ Dominguey said. ‘We agree that in less than eleven hundred years of galactic exploration we have covered only a small section of one arm of one galaxy. We don’t know enough as yet to be capable of labelling an unusual situation paradoxical. Though I’ll agree it’s a poor spot for a picnic. Now, you were saying?’

‘Don’t try and be funny, Billy. This is not the place for humour – not even graveyard humour.’ Baron smiled as if the remark had a significance only he knew. He gestured with one hand, gracefully. ‘We are in a place that cannot possibly exist. That monstrous thing up in space cannot be a sun or any known body, or we would have got a spectroscopic reading from it. It cannot be a dead sun, or we would not see it as we do. This planetoid cannot be a planetoid, for in reality it would be so near Bertha it would be swept into it by irresistible gravitational forces. You were right to call it Erewhon. That’s what it is – Nowhere.’

Sharn spoke. ‘You’re playing with Malravin’s silly theory, Baron. You’re pretending we are in a nightmare. Let me assure you such assumptions are based entirely on withdrawal –’

‘I don’t want to hear!’ Baron said. The smile on his lips became gentler. ‘You wouldn’t understand, Sharn. You are so clever you prefer to tell me what I think rather than hear what I think. But I’m going to tell you what I think. I don’t think we are undergoing a nightmare. I think we are dead.’

Sharn rose, and began pacing behind his seat.

‘Dominguey, you don’t think this?’

‘I don’t feel dead.’

‘Good. Keep feeling that way or we’re going to be in trouble. You know what the matter is with Baron. He’s a weak character. He has always supported himself with science and the methods of science – we’ve had nothing but a diet of facts from him for the last thousand light years. Now he thinks science has failed him. There’s nothing else left. He can no longer face the physical world. So, he comes to this emotional conclusion that he is dead. Classic withdrawal symptoms.’

Dominguey said, ‘Someone ought to kick your ass, Eddy Sharn. Of all the glib and conceited idiots I ever met. … At least Jim has come out with an idea. It’s not so far-fetched at that, when you consider we know nothing about what happens after death. Think about it a bit, think about the first few moments of death. Try to visualise the period after heart action has ceased, when the body, and particularly the brain inside its skull case, still retains its warmth. What goes on then? Suppose in that period of time everything in the brain drains away into nothing like a bucket of water leaking into sand. Don’t you think some pretty vivid and hallucinatory things would happen inside that head? And, after all, the sort of events happening to us now are typical of the sort that might occur to spacers like us in that dying period. Maybe we ran smack into a big chunk of dead matter on our way into the Crab. Okay, we’re all dead – the strong feeling of helplessness we all have is a token of the fact that we are really strewn over the control cabin with the walls caved in.’

Lazily clapping his hands, Baron said, ‘You put it even better than I could have put it myself, Billy.’

‘Don’t think I believe what I am saying, though,’ Dominguey said grimly. ‘You know me, laddie: ever the funny man, even to death.’

He stood up and confronted Sharn.

‘What I am trying to say, Eddy, is that you are too fond of your own opinions. I know the way your mind works – you’re much happier in any situation if you can make yourself believe that the other people involved are inferior to you. Now then, if you have a theory that helps us tackle this particular section of hell, Jim and I would be pleased to hear it.’

‘Give me a mescahale,’ Sharn said. He had heard such outbursts from the captain before, and attributed them to Dominguey’s being less stable than he liked to pretend he was. Dominguey would be dangerous in a crisis. Not that this was less than a crisis. Sharn accepted the yellow cylinder, activated it, stuck it into his mouth, and sat down. Dominguey sat down beside him, regarding him with interest. They both smoked in silence.

‘Begin then, Eddy. It’s time we took a quick sleep, the lot of us. We’re all exhausted, and it’s beginning to show.’

‘On you maybe, Dominguey.’ He turned to Baron, languidly sunk in his chair.

‘Are you listening, Baron?’

Baron nodded his head.

‘Go ahead. Don’t mind me.’

Things would be so much simpler if one were a robot, Sharn thought. Personalities would not be involved. Any situation has to be situation plus character. It’s bad enough to be burdened with one’s own character; one has to put up with other people’s as well. He pulled out his little notebook to write the thought down, saw Dominguey was eyeing him, and began to speak abruptly.

‘What’s your silly fuss about? We’re here to do a job of observation – why not do it? Before Ike and I went outside, you told us to watch for the atmosphere. I did just that, but from the nonsense you talk about being dead I’d say you were the ones who should have watched it. And this peculiar bodily sensation – you let it rattle you. So did Ike – so did I – but it doesn’t take much knowledge to realise that the horrible sensation as if something were climbing about inside the suit with you has a rational and obvious explanation.’

Baron got up and walked away.

‘Come back when I’m talking, Baron,’ Sharn said, angrily.

‘I’m going to see how Malravin is getting on, then I’m going to bunk down. If you have anything interesting to say, Billy can give it to me in a nutshell later. Your double talk holds nothing for me. I’m tired of your speeches.’

‘Tired? – When you’re dead? Needing to bunk down? – When you’re dead?’

‘Leave him, for God’s sake, and get on with what you were saying,’ Dominguey said with a yawn. ‘Look, Eddy, we’re in a nasty spot here – I don’t just mean stuck on Erewhon, though that’s bad enough. But much more getting on each other’s nerves and there will be murder done. I’d say you were turning into a very good candidate for the axe.’

‘You toying with the idea of murder, Dominguey? I suppose that could be another refuge from the realities of the position.’

‘Knock off that line of talk, Sharn, and that’s an order. You were talking about this strange bodily sensation we felt out on the rock. Don’t be so coy about it. It’s caused by the fact that most of our weight out there comes by courtesy of Big Bertha, not Erewhon. Your mass orients itself partly according to where Bertha is, and not according to the body you are standing on. Of course it causes some odd sensations, particularly with respect to your proprioceptors and the balance in your inner ear. When the sun first rises, your intellect has to fight your body out of its tendency to regard the east as down. When the sun’s overhead, the situation’s not so bad, but your mass will always act as a compass, as it were, tending towards the sun – if Bertha is a sun. Have I taken the words out of your mouth?’

Sharn nodded.

‘Since you’re so smart, Billy, you’ve probably worked out that Bertha is a star – a big star … a star, that is, with an abnormally large mass. And I do mean abnormally – it’s got an unique chance to grow here. It has accumulated bulk from the nebula. Its mass must be something above twenty-five million times the mass of Sol.’

Dominguey whistled. ‘A pretty tall order! Though I see it is well placed for stellar growth processes. So you think it is just a gigantic accumulation of dead matter?’

‘Not at all. There’s no such thing as dead matter in that sense. Baron’s the scientist – he’d tell you if he wasn’t heading for catatonia. You get such a mass of material together and terrific pressures are set up. No, I’m saying Bertha is a tremendous live sun built from dead nebular matter.’

‘That’s all nonsense, though, Eddy. We don’t even see it properly except as a shimmering blackness. If your theory were correct, Bertha would be a white giant. We’d all be scorched out of existence, sitting here so close to it.’

‘No, you’re forgetting your elementary relativity. I’ve worked this out. This is no fool hypothesis. I said Bertha had twenty-five million times Sol’s mass for a good reason. Because if you have a sun that big, the force of gravity at its surface is so colossal that even light cannot escape off into space.’

Dominguey put his mescahale down and stared at the nearest bulkhead with his mouth open.

‘By the saints … Eddy, could that be so? What follows from that? I mean, is there any proof?’

‘There’s the visible distortion of distant starlight by Bertha’s bulk that gives you some idea of the gravitational forces involved. And the interferometer offers some guide. It’s still working. I used it out on the surface before I came back aboard. Why didn’t you try it? I suppose you and Baron panicked out there, as Malravin did? Bertha has an angular diameter of twenty-two degrees of arc. If the mass is as I say, then you can reckon its diameter in miles. Should be 346 times the sun’s, or about some 300 million miles. That’s presuming a lot, I know, but it gives us a rough guide. And from there a spot of trig will tell you how far we are from Bertha. I make it something less than one billion six hundred million miles. You know what that means – we’re as far from Bertha as Uranus is from Sol, which with a body of Bertha’s size means we’re very nearly on top of it!’

‘Now you’re beginning to frighten me,’ Dominguey said. He looked frightened, dark skin stretched over his cheekbones as he pressed his temples with his fingertips. Behind them, Baron and Malravin were quarrelling. Baron had tripped over the other’s foot as he lay with his head in the drive box, and they were having a swearing match. Neither Dominguey nor Sharn paid them any attention.

‘No, there’s one hole in your theory,’ Dominguey finally said.

‘Such as?’

‘Such as if Erewhon was as close as that to its primary, it could never hold its orbit. It would be drawn into Bertha.’

Sharn stared at the captain, mulling over his answer. Life was a misery, but there was always some pleasure to be wrung from the misery.

‘I got the answer to that when I was outside rolling on the sterile stinking rockface,’ he said. ‘The vapour came pouring over the ground at me. I knew Erewhon was too small to retain any atmosphere for any length of time. In fact it was diffusing into space fast. Therefore, not so long ago, that atmosphere was lying in hollows on the surface, liquid. Follow me?’

Dominguey swallowed and said, ‘Go on.’

‘You made the assumption that Erewhon bore a planetary relationship to Bertha, Dominguey. You were wrong. Erewhon is spinning in from a colder region. The rocks are heating up. We haven’t settled on a planetoid – we’re squatting on a hunk of rock spiralling rapidly into the sun.’

There came the sound of a blow, and Malravin grunted. He jumped at Baron and the two men clinched, pummelling each other’s backs rather foolishly. Dominguey and Sharn ran up and pulled them apart. Dead or not, Baron was giving a fair account of himself.

‘All right,’ Dominguey said angrily. ‘So we’ve run ourselves ragged. We need sleep. You three bunk down, give yourselves sedatives. I’ll get on fixing the cybo, Malravin. Set the alarm signal for nineteen hours fifty, G.M., so that we don’t miss calling Grandon and Brinkdale, and bunk down. We want to get out of here – and we all want to get out of here. Go on, move – you too, Eddy. Your theory has me convinced. We’re leaving as soon as possible, so I’m having peace while I work.’

In turn they all protested, but Dominguey was not to be over-ruled. He stood with his hands on his hips, his dark face unmoving as they climbed into their bunks. Then he shrugged, set the alarm on the communication panel, and crawled into the drive compartment.

It was not a matter of simple replacement. Fortunately they had spares for the little sinecells which studded the main spiral of the cyboscope that steered the ship. But the spiral itself had become warped by the extra strains placed on it during their penetration of the nebula. Malravin had drained its oil bath and removed its casing, but the business of setting it back into true was a slow precision job, not made easier by the awkward angle at which it had to be tackled.

Time passed. Dominguey was listening to the sound of his own heavy breathing when the alarm bell shrilled.

He crawled out into the cabin. Sharn and Malravin were already rousing and stretching.

‘That’s four hours’ hard grind I just put in,’ he said, pushing his words through a yawn. ‘Eddy, see if you can raise the other ships, will you? I must have a drink and get some shut eye. We’re nearly set to blast off.’

Then he pointed to Baron, his ashen face, the crimson stain over his chest. In two steps he was over to his bunk. Baron lay contorted on his left side, gripping a handful of blanket. He was dead with a knife in his ribs. Dominguey let out a cry that brought the other two down onto their feet.

‘He’s been murdered! Jim’s been murdered! One of you two. …’ He turned to Sharn. ‘Sharn, you did this. You’ve killed him with his own explorer’s knife. Why? Why?’

Sharn had gone as pale as Dominguey.

‘You’re lying, I never did it. I was in my bunk asleep! I had no quarrel with Baron. What about Malravin? He’d just had a fight with Jim. He did it, didn’t you, Malravin?’

The alarm was still shrilling away. They were all shouting. Malravin said, ‘Don’t you call me a murderer. I was fast asleep in my bunk, under sedation as ordered. One of you two did it. It was nothing to do with me.’

‘You’ve got a black eye coming on, Malravin,’ Dominguey said. ‘Jim Baron gave you that before you hit the sack. Did you stab him to even up the score?’

‘For God’s sake, man, let’s try and raise the other ships while we’ve the chance. You know I’d not do anything like that. You did it yourself, most likely. You were awake, we weren’t.’

‘I was stuck with my head in the drive all the time.’

‘Were you? How do we know?’

‘Yes, he has a point, Dominguey,’ Sharn said. ‘How do we know what you were up to? Didn’t you arrange for us all to get a bit of sleep on purpose, so that you could bring this off?’

‘So he did, the filthy murderer,’ Malravin shouted. ‘I wonder you didn’t finish us all while you were about it.’ Putting his hands up, he charged at Dominguey.

Dominguey ducked. He jumped to one side and hit Malravin as he lumbered past. The blow was a light one. It served merely to make Malravin bellow and come on again. On the table lay a wrench they had used earlier on the cybo casing. Dominguey hit Malravin with it at the base of the neck. The big fellow collided with a chair and sprawled with it to the floor, catching his head sharply against the bulkhead as he went.

‘You want any?’ Dominguey asked, facing Sharn with the wrench ready.

Shaking, Sharn formulated the word ‘No’.

‘See to Ike then, while I try to raise a signal.’ Nodding curtly, he went over to the communications panel and cut off the alarm. The sudden silence was as chilling as the racket had been a moment before. He opened up the subradio and began to call.

Sharn slipped to his knees and pulled Malravin’s head up as gently as he could. The man did not stir. Groaning, Sharn tried to adjust to what had happened. He tried to concentrate his thoughts. He muttered, ‘Humans instigate events; events affect humans. Once a man has started a chain of events, he may find himself the victim of the events. When I entered star service, this was a decisive action, but readers may think that since then I have been at the mercy – the mercy –’

He began to weep. Malravin was also dead. His neck was broken. Inside his head, still warm, thoughts pouring out into oblivion. …

After some indefinite period of time, Sharn realised that Dominguey had stopped speaking. Only a meaningless gibber and squeak of static came from the subradio. He looked up. The captain was pointing an iongun at him.

‘I know you killed Jim Baron, Sharn,’ he said. His face was distorted by tension.

‘I know you killed Malravin. I saw you do it, and there is the murder weapon on the floor.’

The iongun wavered.

‘Ike’s dead?’

‘Dead, just as you killed Baron. You’re clever, Dominguey, the real silent superman type, always in command of his environment. Now I suppose you will kill me. With three bodies out of the hatch, the Wilson will lift a lot more easily, won’t it? You’ll need all that lift, Dominguey, because we are getting nearer to Bertha every minute.’

‘I’m not going to kill you, Sharn, just as I didn’t kill Baron. Just as killing Malravin was an accident. You know – Wait! Don’t move! There’s a signal.’

He slightly swivelled his chair and turned up the volume of the set. Below the crackle of static, a faint voice called them. It said, ‘Can you hear me, Wilson? Can you hear me, Wilson? Grant of the Brinkdale here. Come in, please.’

‘Hello, Grant! Hello, Grant!’ As he spoke, the captain moved the mike so that he could continue to cover Sharn with his iongun. ‘Dominguey of Wilson here. We’re down on an asteroid for repairs. If I send a carrier, will you get a fix on us? Situation very urgent – dawn is less than an hour away, and static will cancel reception then.’

Far away, down a great well of time and space, a tiny voice asked for the carrier wave. Dominguey switched to send and turned to face Sharn.

Sharn still crouched over Malravin. He had brought himself under control now.

‘Going to finish me at once, Dominguey?’ he asked. ‘Don’t want any witnesses, do you?’

‘Get up, Sharn. Back over to the wall. I want to see if Malravin is really dead, or if you are up to some stupid deception.’

‘Oh, he’s dead all right. I’d say you did a very good job. And with Baron too, although there it was easier because the poor fellow was not only asleep but believed himself already dead.’

‘You’re sick, Sharn. Get over against that wall when you’re ordered to.’

They moved into their new positions, Sharn by the wall near the shuttered ports, Dominguey by the ugly body on the floor. Both of them moved slowly, watching each other, their faces blank.

‘He’s dead all right,’ Sharn said.

‘He’s dead. Sharn, get into your space suit.’

‘What are you planning, a burial service? You’re crazy, Dominguey! It’s only a few hours before our mass cremation.’

‘Don’t you call me crazy, you little snake. Get into your space suit. I can’t have you in here while I’m working. I don’t trust you. I know you killed Baron; you’re mad and he had less patience with your talk and theories than any of us. You can’t tolerate anyone who won’t enlist as your audience, can you? But you’re not going to kill me. So you wait outside until we are ready to go, or until the Brinkdale comes to pick us up, whichever is soonest. Move fast now, man, into your suit.’

‘You’re going to leave me out there, you swine! What are you doing, compiling an anthology of ways to murder in galactic space? Beyond the solar system, the word of man becomes the word of God.’

Moving fast, Dominguey slapped him across the cheek.

‘– And the hand of God,’ Sharn muttered. He moved towards his suit. Reluctantly, he climbed into it, menaced continually by the iongun. Dominguey propelled him towards the lock.

‘Don’t send me out there again, Dominguey, please. I can’t stand it. You know what Big Bertha’s like – Please! Tie me to my bunk –’

‘Move, man. I have to get back to the set. I won’t leave without you.’

‘Please, Dominguey, Captain, I swear I’m innocent. You know I never touched Baron. I’d die out there on the rock! Forgive me!’

‘You can stay if you’ll sign a confession that you murdered Baron.’

‘You know I never did it! You did it while we were all asleep. You saw how his idea about our all being dead was a menace to the general sanity, and so you killed him. Or Malravin killed him. Yes, Malravin killed Jim, Dominguey, it’s obvious! You know we were talking together while they were quarrelling! We’re not to blame. Let’s not be at each other’s throats now we’re the only two left. We’ve got to get out of here quickly – you need help. We always get on well together, we’ve covered the galaxy –’

‘Confess or get out, Sharn. I know you did it. I can’t have you’ in here or you’ll kill me.’

Sharn stopped protesting. He ran a hand through his damp hair and leant back against the bulkhead.

‘All right. I’ll sign. Anything rather than go out there again. I can always say I signed under duress.’

Dominguey dragged him to the table, seized a scratch pad from the radio bench, and forced Sharn to write out a brief confession to the murder of Jim Baron. He pocketed it and levelled the iongun again.

‘Now get outside,’ he said.

‘Dominguey, no, no, you lied to me – please –’

‘You’ve got to get out, Sharn. With this paper in my pocket, you’d not hesitate to kill me now, given half a chance.’

‘You’re mad, Dominguey, cunning mad. You’re going to get rid of me and then blame it all onto me –’

‘I’ll count five, Sharn. If you’re not on your way to that lock by then, I swear I’ll fry your boots off.’

The look on his face was unmistakable. Sharn backed into the lock, weeping. The door closed on him. He heard Dominguey begin to exhaust the air from the room panel. Hurriedly, he screwed down his faceplate. The air whispered away and the lock descended to ground level.

When it stopped, he opened the door, unscrewed one of the levers from the control panel, and wedged it in the doorway so that the door could not close. It could not retract until it was closed, so his way to the ship was not withdrawn. Then he stepped out onto the surface of Erewhon for a second time.

Conditions were changing. Bertha came ripping up into the sky, surrounded by a shock wave of star-blur. The farther stars lent it a halo of confused light. It was rising ahead of the time-table the humans had worked out. So communication with Brinkdale would now be effectively cut off. Also, the perceptible disc of the body was larger. They were indeed falling towards it.

Sharn wondered why he was not already fried to smears of carbohydrate on the rock, despite the refrigeration unit in his suit. But if Bertha was so gigantic, then she would not even be able to release her own heat. What a terrible unstable thing it was! He looked up at it, in a sort of ecstasy transcending fear, feeling in his lack of weight that he was drifting out towards it. The black globe seemed to thunder overhead, a symbol – a symbol of what? Of life, of fertility, of death, of destruction? It seemed to combine aspects of all things as it rode omnipotently overhead.

‘The core of experience – to be at the core of experience transcends the need for lesser pleasures,’ Sharn told himself. He could feel his black notebook in his hip pocket. It was inaccessible inside the space-suit. For all his inability to get at it, it might as well have been left back on Earth. That was a terrible loss – not just to him, but to others who might have read and been stimulated by his work. Words were coming to him now, thick and rich as blood, coming first singly like birds alighting on his shoulder, then in swarms.

Finally he fell silent, impaled under that black gaze. The isolation was so acute, it was as if he alone of all creation had been singled out to stand there … there under something that was physically impossible.

He switched on his suit mike and began to speak to Dominguey.

‘I want to come back aboard. I want to make some calculations. I’m beginning to understand Bertha. Her properties represent physical impossibilities. You understand that, don’t you, Dominguey? So how can she exist? The answer must be that beneath her surface, under unimaginable conditions, she is creating anti-matter. We’ve made a tremendous discovery, Dominguey. Perhaps they’ll name the process after me: the Sharn Effect. Let me come back, Dominguey. …’

But he spoke to himself, and the words were lost in his helmet.

He stood mute, bowing to the black thing.

Already Bertha was setting. The foggy blanket of atmosphere was whipped off the bed of rock, following, following the sun round like a tide. The vapour was thinner now, and little more than shoulder high as its component molecules drained off into space.

The weight-shift took place. Sharn’s body told him that down was the monstrous thing on the horizon and that he walked like a fly on the wall across Erewhon. Though he fought the sensation, when he turned back towards the Wilson, he moved uphill, and the vapours poured across him in a dying waterfall.

Taking no notice of the vapours, Sharn lumbered back to the air lock. He had remembered the thick pad of miostrene that hung clipped to one wall of the lock, a stylo beside it. It was placed there for emergencies, and surely this was one. As he reached for it, Dominguey’s voice came harshly through his headphones.

‘Stay away from that lock, Sharn. I’ve got the casing back on the cyboscope and am preparing to blast off. I shall have to take a chance on manoeuvring. Get away from the ship!’

‘Don’t leave without me, Dominguey, please! You know I’m an innocent man.’

‘We’re none of us innocent, Sharn, isn’t that true?’

‘This is no time for metaphysics, Dominguey. We’ll discuss it when you let me back inside.’

‘You killed Jim Baron, Sharn, and I’m not letting you back on board in case you kill me.’

‘I didn’t kill Baron, and you know it. I’m not the killer type. Either you killed him, or else Malravin did. It wasn’t me.’

‘I’ve got your confession! Stand clear for blast-off!’

‘But I’ve made an important discovery!’

‘Stand clear!’

The connection went dead. Sharn cried into his suit. Only the universe answered.

Clutching the miostrene pad, he ran from the lock. He ran after the last disappearing strand of vapour, sucked along the ground like a worm withdrawing. He lumbered down a cliff that began to see-saw back towards horizontal. The big sun had disappeared below a group of rocks that did rough duty for a horizon.

A tower of distorted strata rose before him. He stooped behind it as quickly as the suit would allow him, and looked back.

A golden glow turned white, a plump pillow of smoke turned into flat sheets of vapour that flapped across the rock towards him, the ship rose. Almost at once, it was hidden behind the northern horizon. The movement was so sudden and unpredictable that Sharn thought it had crashed, until he realised how fast ship and planetoid were moving in relation to each other. He never caught another glimpse of it.

Calmer now, he stood up and looked round. In the rock lay a great crater. The last of the smoke was sucked into it. He hobbled over to it and looked down. A great eye looked back at him.

Sharn staggered away in alarm, running through the passages of his mind to see if delusion had entered there. Then he realised what he had seen. Erewhon was a thin slab of rock holed right through the middle. He had seen Bertha louring on the other side. In a minute, it would rise again in its tireless chase of this splinter of flotsam.

Now the illusion of day and night, with its complementary implication that one was on a planet or planetoid, was shattered. That great eye held truth in its gaze: he clung to an infinitesimal chunk of rock falling ever faster towards its doom.

As he squatted down with his pad, the sun came up again. It rushed across the arch of space and disappeared almost at once. Erewhon bore no trace of any vapour to follow it now. And another illusion was gone: now, plainly, it was the chunk of rock that turned, not the mighty ball that moved – that was stationary, and all space was full of it. It hung there like a dull shield, inviting all comers.

He began to write on his pad in big letters. ‘As this rock is stripped of all that made it seem like a world, so I become a human stripped of all my characteristics. I am as bare as a symbol myself. There are no questions relevant to me; you cannot ask me if I murdered a man on a ship; I do not know; I do not remember. I have no need for memory. I only know what it is to have the universe’s grandest grandstand view of death. I –’

But the rock was spinning so fast now that he had to abandon the writing. A spiral of black light filled space, widening as he drew nearer to Bertha. He lay back on the rock to watch, to stretch his nerves to the business of watching, holding on as his weight pulsed about him in rhythm with the black spiral.

As he flung the pad aside, the last word on it caught his eye, and he flicked an eyebrow in recognition of its appositeness:

‘I –’

In the Arena

The reek and noise at the back of the circus were familiar to Javlin Bartramm. He felt the hard network of nerves in his solar plexus tighten.

There were crowds of the reduls here, jostling and staring to see the day’s entry arrive. You didn’t have to pay to stand and rubberneck in the street; this lot probably couldn’t afford seats for the arena. Javlin looked away from them in scorn. All the same, he felt some gratification when they sent up a cheeping cheer at the sight of him. They loved a human victim.

His keeper undid the cart door and led him out, still chained. They went through the entrance, from blinding sunshine to dark, into the damp unsavoury warren below the main stadium. Several reduls were moving about here, officials mainly. One or two called good luck to him; one chirped, ‘The crowd’s in a good mood today, vertebrate.’ Javlin showed no response.

His trainer, Ik So Baar, came up, a flamboyant redul towering above Javlin. He wore an array of spare gloves strapped across his orange belly. The white tiara that fitted around his antennae appeared only on sports day.

‘Greetings, Javlin. You look in the rudest of health. I’m glad you are not fighting me.’

‘Greetings, Ik So.’ He slipped the lip-whistle into his mouth so that he could answer in a fair approximation of the redul language. ‘Is my opponent ready to be slain? Remember I go free if I win this bout – it will be my twelfth victory in succession.’

‘There’s been a change in the program, Javlin. Your Sirian opponent escaped in the night and had to be killed. You are entered in a double double.’

Javlin wrenched at his chains so hard that the keeper was swung off balance.

‘Ik So! You betray me! How much cajsh have I won for you? I will not fight a double double.’

There was no change of expression on the insect mask.

‘Then you will die, my pet vertebrate. The new arrangement is not my idea. You know by now that I get more cajsh for having you in a solo. Double double it has to be. These are my orders. Keeper, Cell one-o-seven with him!’

Fighting against his keeper’s pull, Javlin cried, ‘I’ve got some rights, Ik So. I demand to see the arena promoter.’

‘Pipe down, you stupid vertebrate! You have to do what you’re ordered. I told you it wasn’t my fault.’

‘Well, for God’s sake, who am I fighting with?’

‘You will be shackled to a fellow from the farms. He’s had one or two preliminary bouts; they say he’s good.’

‘From the farms …’ Javlin broke into the filthiest redulian oaths he knew. Ik So came back toward him and slipped one of the metal gloves onto his forepincers; it gave him a cruel tearing weapon with a multitude of barbs. He held it up to Javlin’s face.

‘Don’t use that language to me, my mammalian friend. Humans from the farms or from space, what’s the difference? This young fellow will fight well enough if you muck in with him. And you’d better muck in. You’re billed to battle against a couple of yillibeeth.’

Before Javlin could answer, the tall figure turned and strode down the corridor, moving twice as fast as a man could walk.

Javlin let himself be led to Cell 107. The warder, a worker-redul with a grey belly, unlocked his chains and pushed him in, barring the door behind him. The cell smelled of alien species and apprehensions.

Javlin went and sat down on the bench. He needed to think.

He knew himself for a simple man – and knew that that knowledge meant the simplicity was relative. But his five years of captivity here under the reduls had not been all wasted. Ik So had trained him well in the arts of survival; and when you came down to brass tacks, there was no more proper pleasure in the universe than surviving. It was uncomplicated. It carried no responsibilities to anyone but yourself.

That was what he hated about the double double events, which till now he had always been lucky enough to avoid. They carried responsibility to your fellow fighter.

From the beginning he had been well equipped to survive the gladiatorial routine. When his scoutship, the Plunderhorse, had been captured by redul forces five years ago, Javlin Bartramm was duelling master and judo expert, as well as Top Armament Sergeant. The army ships had a long tradition, going back some six centuries, of sport aboard; it provided the ideal mixture of time-passer and needed exercise. Of all the members of the Plunderhorse’s crew who had been taken captive, Javlin was – as far as he knew – the only survivor after five years of the insect race’s rough games.

Luck had played its part in his survival. He had liked Ik So Baar. Liking was a strange thing to feel for a nine-foot armoured grasshopper with forearms like a lobster and a walk like a tyrannosaurus’ run, but a sympathy existed between them – and would continue to exist until he was killed in the ring, Javlin thought. With his bottom on the cold bench, he knew that Ik So would not betray him into a double double. The redul had had to obey the promoter’s orders. Ik So needed his twelfth victory, so that he could free Javlin to help him train the other species down at the gladiatorial farm. Both of them knew that would be an effective partnership.

So. Now was the time for luck to be with Javlin again.

He sank onto his knees and looked down at the stone, brought his forehead down onto it, gazed down into the earth, into the cold ground, the warm rocks, the molten core, trying to visualise each, to draw from them attributes that would help him: cold for his brain, warm for his temper, molten for his energies.

Strengthened by prayer, he stood up. The redul workers had yet to bring him his armour and the partner he was to fight with. He had long since learned the ability to wait without resenting waiting. With professional care, he exercised himself slowly, checking the proper function of each muscle. As he did so, he heard the crowds cheer in the arena. He turned to peer out of the cell’s further door, an affair of tightly set bars that allowed a narrow view of the combat area and the stands beyond.

There was a centaur out there in the sunlight, fighting an Aldebaran bat-leopard. The centaur wore no armour but an iron cuirass; he had no weapons but his hooves and his hands. The bat-leopard, though its wings were clipped to prevent it flying out of the stadium, had dangerous claws and a great turn of speed. Only because its tongue had been cut out, ruining its echo-location system, was the contest anything like fair. The concept of fairness was lost upon the reduls, though; they preferred blood to justice.

Javlin saw the kill. The centaur, a gallant creature with a human-like head and an immense gold mane that began from his eyebrows, was plainly tiring. He eluded the bat-leopard as it swooped down on him, wheeling quickly around on his hind legs and trampling on its wing. But the bat-leopard turned and raked the other’s legs with a slash of claws. The centaur toppled hamstrung to the ground. As he fell, he lashed out savagely with his forelegs, but the bat-leopard nipped in and tore his throat from side to side above the cuirass. It then dragged itself away under its mottled wings, like a lame prima donna dressed in a leather cape.

The centaur struggled and lay still, as if the weight of whistling cheers that rose from the audience bore him down. Through the narrow bars, Javlin saw the throat bleed and the lungs heave as the defeated one sprawled in the dust.

‘What do you dream of, dying there in the sun?’ Javlin asked.

He turned away from the sight and the question. He sat quietly down on the bench and folded his arms.

When the din outside told him that the next bout had begun, the passage door opened and a young human was pushed in. Javlin did not need telling that this was to be his partner in the double double against the yillibeeth.

It was a girl.

‘You’re Javlin?’ she said. ‘I know of you. My name’s Awn.’

He kept himself under control, his brows drawn together as he stared at her.

‘You know what you’re here for?’

‘This will be my first public fight,’ she said.

Her hair was clipped short as a man’s. Her skin was tanned and harsh, her left arm bore a gruesome scar. She held herself lithely on her feet. Though her body looked lean and hard, even the thick one-piece gown she wore to thigh length did not conceal the feminine curves of her body. She was not pretty, but Javlin had to admire the set of her mouth and her cool grey gaze.

‘I’ve had some stinking news this morning, but Ik So Baar never broke it to me that I was to be saddled with a woman,’ he said.

‘Ik probably didn’t know – that I’m a woman, I mean. The reduls are either neuter or hermaphrodite, unless they happen to be a rare queen. Didn’t you know that? They can’t tell the difference between human male and female.’

He spat. ‘You can’t tell me anything about reduls.’

She spat. ‘If you knew, why blame me? You don’t think I like being here? You don’t think I asked to join the great Javlin?’

Without answering he bent and began to massage the muscles of his calf. Since he occupied the middle of the bench, the girl remained standing. She watched him steadily. When he looked up again, she asked, ‘What or who are we fighting?’

No surprise was left in him. ‘They didn’t tell you?’

‘I’ve only just been pushed into this double double, as I imagine you have. I asked you, what are we fighting?’

‘Just a couple of yillibeeth.’

He injected unconcern into his voice to make the shock of what he said the greater. He massaged the muscles of the other calf. An aphrohale would have come in very welcome now. These crazy insects had no equivalent of the Terrestrial prisoner-ate-a-hearty-breakfast routine. When he glanced up under his eyebrows, the girl stood motionless, but her face had gone pale.

‘Know what the yillibeeth are, little girl?’

She didn’t answer, so he went on, ‘The reduls resemble some Terrestrial insects. They go through several stages of development, you know; reduls are just the final adult stage. Their larval stage is rather like the larval stage of the dragonfly. It’s a greedy, omnivorous beast. It’s aquatic and it’s big. It’s armoured. It’s called a yillibeeth. That’s what we are going to be tied together to fight, a couple of big hungry yillibeeth. Are you feeling like dying this morning, Awn?’

Instead of answering, she turned her head away and brought a hand up to her mouth.

‘Oh, no! No crying in here, for Earth’s sake!’ he said. He got up, yelled through the passage door, ‘Ik So, Ik So, you traitor, get this bloody woman out of here!’ … recalled himself, jammed the lip-whistle into his mouth and was about to call again when Awn caught him a backhanded blow across the face.

She faced him like a tiger.

‘You creature, you cowardly apology of a man! Do you think I weep for fear? I don’t weep. I’ve lived nineteen years on this damned planet in their damned farms. Would I still be here if I wept? No – but I mourn that you are already defeated, you, the great Javlin!’

He frowned into her blazing face.

‘You don’t seriously think you make me a good enough match for us to go out there and kill a couple of yillibeeth?’

‘Damn your conceit. I’m prepared to try.’

‘Fagh!’ He thrust the lip-whistle into his mouth, and turned back to the door. She laughed at him bitterly, jeeringly.

‘You’re a lackey to these insects, aren’t you, Javlin? If you could see what a fool you look with that phony beak of yours stuck on your mouth.’

He let the instrument drop to the end of its chain. Grasping the bars, he leaned forward against them and looked over his shoulder.

‘I was trying to get this contest called off.’

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t already tried. I have.’

To that he had no answer. He went back and sat on the bench. She returned to her corner. They both folded their arms and stared at each other.

‘Why don’t you look out into the arena instead of glaring at me? You might pick up a few tips.’ When she did not answer, he said, ‘I’ll tell you what you’ll see. You can see the rows of spectators and a box where some sort of bigwig sits. I don’t know who the bigwig is. It’s never a queen – as far as I can make out, the queens spend their lives underground, turning out eggs at the rate of fifty a second. Not the sort of life Earth royalty would have enjoyed in the old days. Under the bigwig’s box there is a red banner with their insect hieroglyphs on. I asked Ik So once what the hieroglyphs said. He told me they meant – well, in a rough translation – The Greatest Show on Earth. It’s funny, isn’t it?’

‘You must admit we do make a show.’

‘No, you miss the point. You see, that used to be the legend of circuses in the old days. But they’ve adopted it for their own use since they invaded Earth. They’re boasting of their conquest.’

‘And that’s funny?’

‘In a sort of way. Don’t you feel ashamed that this planet which saw the birth of the human race should be overrun by insects?’

‘No. The reduls were here before me. I was just born here. Weren’t you?’

‘No, I wasn’t. I was born on Washington IV. It’s a lovely planet. There are hundreds of planets out there as fine and varied as Earth once was – but it kind of rankles to think that this insect brood rules Earth.’

‘If you feel so upset about it, why don’t you do something?’

He knotted his fists together. You should start explaining history and economics just before you ran out to be chopped to bits by a big rampant thing with circular saws for hands?

‘It would cost mankind too much to reconquer this planet. Too difficult. Too many deaths just for sentiment. And think of all those queens squirting eggs at a rate of knots; humans don’t breed that fast. Humanity has learned to face facts.’ She laughed without humour.

‘That’s good. Why don’t you learn to face the fact of me?’

Javlin had nothing to say to that; she would not understand that directly he saw her he knew his hope of keeping his life had died. She was just a liability. Soon he would be dying, panting his juices out into the dust like that game young centaur … only it wouldn’t be dust.

‘We fight in two feet of water,’ he said. ‘You know that? The yillibeeth like it. It slows our speed a bit. We might drown instead of having our heads bitten off.’

‘I can hear someone coming down the corridor. It may be our armour,’ she said coolly.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘You can’t wait to die, Javlin, can you?’

The bars fell away on the outside of the door, and it opened. The keeper stood there. Ik So Baar had not appeared as he usually did. The creature flung in their armour and weapons and retreated, barring the door again behind him. It never ceased to astonish Javlin that those great dumb brutes of workers had intelligence.

He stooped to pick up his uniform. The girl’s looked so light and small. He lifted it, looking from it to her.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘It looks so small and new.’

‘I shouldn’t want anything heavier.’

‘You’ve fought in it?’

‘Twice.’ There was no need to ask whether she had won.

‘We’d better get the stuff strapped on, then. We shall know when they are getting ready for us; you’ll hear the arena being filled with water. They’re probably saving us for the main events just before noon.’

‘I didn’t know about the two feet of water.’

‘Scare you?’

‘No. I’m a good swimmer. Swam for fish in the river on the slave farm.’

‘You caught fish with your bare hands?’

‘No, you dive down and stab them with a sharp rock. It takes practice.’

It was a remembered pleasure. She’d actually swum in one of Earth’s rivers. He caught himself smiling back into her face.

‘Ik So’s place is in the desert,’ he said, making his voice cold. ‘Anyhow, you won’t be able to swim in the arena. Two feet of muddy stinking water helps nobody. And you’ll be chained onto me with a four-foot length of chain.’

‘Let’s get our armour on, then you’d better tell me all you know. Perhaps we can work out a plan of campaign.’

As he picked up the combined breastplate and shoulder guard, Awn untied her belt and lifted her dress over her head. Underneath she wore only a ragged pair of white briefs. She commenced to take those off.

Javlin stared at her with surprise – and pleasure. It had been years since he had been within hailing distance of a woman. This one – yes, this one was a beauty.

‘What are you doing that for?’ he asked. He hardly recognised his own voice.

‘The less we have on the better in that water. Aren’t you going to take your clothes off?’

He shook his head. Embarrassed, he fumbled on the rest of his kit. At least she wouldn’t look so startling with her breastplate and skirt armour on. He checked his long and shortswords, clipping the one into the left belt clip, the other into the right. They were good swords, made by redul armourers to Terrestrial specifications. When he turned back to Awn, she was fully accoutred.

Nodding in approval, he offered her a seat on the bench beside him. They clattered against each other and smiled.

Another bout had ended in the arena. The cheers and chirrups drifted through the bars to them.

‘I’m sorry you’re involved in this,’ he said with care.

‘I was lucky to be involved in it with you.’ Her voice was not entirely steady, but she controlled it in a minute. ‘Can’t I hear water?’

He had already heard it. An unnatural silence radiated from the great inhuman crowd in the circus as they watched the stuff pour in. It would have great emotional significance for them, no doubt, since they had all lived in water for some years in their previous life stage.

‘They have wide-bore hoses,’ he said. His own voice had an irritating tremor. ‘The arena fills quite rapidly.’

‘Let’s formulate some sort of plan of attack then. These things, these yillibeeth must have some weaknesses.’

‘And some strengths! That’s what you have to watch for.’

‘I don’t see that. You attack their weak points.’

‘We shall be too busy looking out for their strong ones. They have long segmented grey bodies – about twenty segments, I think. Each segment is of chitin or something tough. Each segment bears two legs equipped with razor combs. At tail end and top end they have legs that work like sort of buzz saws, cut through anything they touch. And there are their jaws, of course.’

The keeper was back. His antennae flopped through the grating and then he unbolted the door and came in. He bore a length of chain as long as the cell was wide. Javlin and Awn did not resist as he locked them together, fitting the bracelets onto Javlin’s right arm and Awn’s left

‘So.’ She stared at the chain. ‘The yillibeeth don’t sound to have many weak points. They could cut through our swords with their buzz saws?’

‘Correct.’

‘Then they could cut through this chain. Get it severed near one of our wrists, and the other has a better long-distance weapon than a sword. A blow over the head with the end of the chain won’t improve their speed. How fast are they?’

‘The buzz saw takes up most of their speed. They’re nothing like as fast as the reduls. No, you could say they were pretty sluggish in movement. And the fact that the two of them will also be chained together should help us.’

‘Where are they chained?’

‘By the middle legs.’

‘That gives them a smaller arc of destruction than if they were chained by back or front legs. We are going to slay these beasts yet, Javlin! What a murderous genus it must be to put its offspring in the arena for the public sport.’

He laughed.

‘Would you feel sentimental about your offspring if you had a million babies?’

‘I’ll tell you that when I’ve had the first of them. I mean, if I have the first of them.’

He put his hand over hers.

‘No if. We’ll kill the bloody larvae OK.’

‘Get the chain severed, then one of us with the longest bit of chain goes in for the nearest head, the other fends off the other brute. Right?’

‘Right.’

There was a worker redul at the outer door now, the door that led to the arena. He flung it open and stood there with a flaming torch, ready to drive them out if they did not emerge.

‘We’ve – come to it then,’ she said. Suddenly she clung to him.

‘Let’s take it at a run, love,’ he said.

Together, balancing the chain between them, they ran toward the arena. The two yillibeeth were coming out from the far side, wallowing and splashing. The crowd stretched up toward the blue sky of Earth, whistling their heads off. They didn’t know what a man and a woman could do in combination. Now they were going to learn.

The International Smile

The room, with its Spy cartoons and the oil of Chequers hanging on the chimney-breast like the promise of a better world, held a cluttered comfort. The woman also was tired, but her straight back and splendid coiffure did not admit the fact. She could have poured their tea with no more command had she been before the TV cameras.

As if aware of reasons for guilt, both men straightened in their chairs when a tap sounded at the door and Taver peered in.

The Prime Minister glowered from behind his cup and said, ‘What is it, Tarver? Can’t we have five minutes in peace?’

The butler of No 10 said apologetically, ‘It’s Colonel Quadroon to see you, sir.’

‘The Governor of Pentonville Prison. More escapes, I suppose – more questions in the House. Better show him in.’

The PM turned to Lady Elizabeth and the Foreign Secretary in mock-resignation.

‘You remember you did make an appointment for him yesterday, Herbert,’ Lady Elizabeth said. She managed men as easily and gracefully as she managed herself. ‘The colonel said it was of great national importance.’

‘I don’t doubt he did. Quadroon presumes too much, my dear. Just because I’ve been on his shoots a couple of – Oh, Colonel, good afternoon. Come in.’

The PM wiped his moustache and gestured irritably to a free armchair as Quadroon moved into the room. The Governor of Pentonville was a tall, sharp-featured man, Haileybury and Queen’s, OBE. He bowed stiffly to Lady Elizabeth and shook hands perfunctorily with Ralph Watts-Clinton, the Foreign Secretary.

‘I wouldn’t bother you, Prime Minister, if this was not a matter of the highest moment,’ he said.

‘I should hope not. No more rioting, I trust?’

‘The Opposition gave you a pretty stiff time in the House this afternoon, I hear.’

At that, the PM had the grace to smile.

‘Sorry, Colonel. Give the Colonel a cup of tea, will you, my dear? Well, what can we do for you?’

‘No sugar, thank you, Lady Elizabeth. In this instance, sir, it’s a matter of what we can do for you. I mentioned the Opposition just now. Has it ever occurred to you that the Opposition consists of unhappy men?’

Watts-Clinton guffawed.

‘It’s often occurred to us, Colonel. Take the debate on the Immigration Restriction Bill this afternoon – they were frankly miserable. Harold Gaskin almost wept crocodile tears over what he calls “the overworked and under-privileged in less fortunate lands”.’

‘Precisely.’ The Colonel balanced Lady Elizabeth’s Spode cup and saucer on his angular knee and said, ‘All that can be changed tomorrow.’

The PM made a noise he had been heard to make more than once in the House.

‘I have no idea what sort of political chicanery you have up your sleeve, Colonel, but let me put it to you beforehand that nothing can alter Gaskin’s jaundiced view of the enlightened measures we are proposing.’

‘Polyannamine could,’ said the Colonel.

After a cold and curious pause, Lady Elizabeth said, ‘I’m sure we are all three very impressed by your air of mystery, Colonel. Perhaps you’d better put your case to us. I’m sure Herbert can spare you five minutes before he goes to prepare his Berlin speech.’

She embodied all the qualities needful in a Prime Minister’s wife: directness, indirectness, tact and insolence.

Blowing his nose lustily, the Colonel said by way of preamble, ‘You know I have always been a staunch party man. There can be few people in this country who do not recall the famous recruiting speech I made at East Moulton, when I was so narrowly defeated in the ’45 election. That is why I have come straight to you, Prime Minister, as a staunch party man, to lay polyannamine at your feet.’

‘I know your record,’ said the PM testily. ‘Proceed.’

‘Well, to come straight to the point, you probably remember the unfortunate riots we had in Pentonville a couple of years back. The Beaverbrook Press made a lot of fuss about it – they love a prison story. Two convicts were killed, and three severely injured. One of the injured man was Joseph Branksome. Remember the name?’

‘We must all remember the name,’ said Watts-Clinton. ‘He was the member for Dogsthorpe East in Eden’s time.’

‘That’s it. Seven years for embezzling party founds – but a good man, all the same. A good party man. You’d never shake him. I know at the time of Suez he –’

‘Yes, yes, you were saying he was injured, Colonel.’

‘So I was. So he was. Injured in the kidney – nasty business. It was touch and go for several days; I had to have him transferred to Bart’s. They put a patch on his kidney; first time that particular op had been done at Bart’s, so they were telling me. Anyhow, it seemed to do the trick, and in a fortnight we were able to bring Branksome back to the prison hospital. He was still very feeble, but extremely cheerful. I went to visit him. Never met a man more full of happiness and optimism. He was the life and soul of that ward. Why, when Christmas came round –’

‘Branksome’s dead now, isn’t he?’ the PM said.

‘Eh? Dead? Oh yes. I was coming to that. His general air of cheer deceived us all. We thought he was fit again, although he lost a deal of weight. He was back at his old job – I had him on a pretty soft number in the prison library. Then one morning – this would be just over a year ago now – he collapsed in the Do-It-Yourself section and was dead within an hour. Poor Branksome, he died laughing!’

Overcome by the tragedy of his tale, Quadroon sat in the chair, nodding his head sorrowfully. Lady Elizabeth rescued his cup.

With a touch, not to say load, of finality in his voice, the PM said, ‘Thank you very much, Colonel Quadroon, for coming along and –’

The Colonel held up a long and stringy hand, at which the others gazed with curiosity.

‘At the inquest, a remarkable fact emerged. Owing to the injury it had sustained, Branksome’s kidney had been – what d’you call it? – malfunctioning. As far as I could make out from our prison specialist, Mark Miller – very capable chap – instead of making new tissue or whatever it was supposed to do, this kidney had been secreting a substance hitherto unknown to science. Miller christened this secretion Polyannamine. Apparently it had circulated to Branksome’s endo – ah, endocrine glands and there had set up a sort of permanent imbalance if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Anyhow, this imbalance had the effect of keeping him happy even when he was dying painfully by inches.’

‘Hmm.’ The PM, with a gesture familiar to millions of TV viewers, lit a briar pipe and sat with his nose almost hanging into the bowl. ‘And has this stuff been synthesised, Colonel?’

For answers, the Colonel drew from an inner pocket a small plastic tube. He performed the gesture with what, in a better actor, would have been a grand flourish.

‘There’s enough synthesised polyannamine in here, Miller informs me, to keep all your opposition happy for the rest of their lives.’

The PM cast an eyebrow at Watts-Clinton who, never at a loss, cast one back.

‘I think the Berlin speech might be given a miss till we’ve seen Miller. My old constituency wouldn’t like to think I let grass grow under my feet, eh, Ralph? Elizabeth, my dear, do you think –’

‘Oh, Herbert, I really can’t, not again! I wouldn’t know what to put.’

‘Nonsense, pet. Usual stuff about standing fast, backing Adenauer to the hilt, Western solidarity, and all that, with the safety clause about striving for peace by all means within our power, and so on. By now you can do it as easily as I can. Tarver, the Bentley, please.’

Traffic was thick about the gloomy façade of Pentonville Prison.

‘Visitors’ night tonight,’ Quadroon said gloomily. Always draws the crowds.’

I must tell you how much I admire all your far-reaching reforms; the Home Sec. was telling me about them only the other day,’ Watts-Clinton said ingratiatingly; he had no special liking for the Colonel, but to be included on one of his shoots would be no bad thing.

‘Got Johnny Earthquake and the Four Corners playing tonight. Keeps the men happy.’

The PM looked shocked.

‘But the M1 Massacre Man – what’s his name, McNoose, is due to be executed tomorrow. Surely –’

‘That’s what’s drawn all this crowd tonight. Dodge in after that confounded Volkswagen, Chauffeur. We’re letting McNoose have a last request from Johnny Earthquake, for his mum and dad and all at 78 Montpelier Road, Camden Town.’

‘Very doubtful taste,’ the PM said.

‘You were the one who wanted the prisons to pay their way, sir.’

‘This is really no time to bring up old election promises.’

The three man lapsed into moody silence. At last a clear way showed itself, and the car swept into the front square and round beyond the bright lights and marquees to the Governor’s house. As they hurried up the steps, blaring loudspeakers carried music and a nasal voice droned:

Eva Bardy’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it,

Eva Bardy’s doin’ it …

It was good to get inside. Quadroon showed them into his study and summoned a servent to fetch Mark Miller.

Impatiently, the PM looked about the solid dingy room. Trophies, lowering photographs, handcuffs, an amateur pencil portrait of John Reginald Halliday Christie, certificates, maps, a death-mask, and a pokerwork legend bearing the words, ‘Stone walls do not a prison make,’ surrounded them on all sides. The smell was one of the tapioca with vegetable additives. Reluctantly, the PM selected the less horsy-looking of two horsehair chairs and gave it the benefit of his posterior.

‘Interesting place,’ Watts-Clinton said, in the manner of one volunteering information.

The Colonel himself looked shrunken by his surroundings.

‘I could put the fire on,’ he said. He coughed, rubbed his hands together and added, ‘I ought to warn you, gentlemen, first you may find him a little – ah, ha, ha, ah, Miller, there you, ah, are! Come in.’

Miller was in. He swept in with his arms wide, smiling broadly, and shook hands with them all before he was introduced.

‘So, gentlemen, you’re in at the birth of a new nation, in on the ground floor, eh? In fact, you’re in before the birth – on the underground floor, you might say. We’re all set to go polyannamine, the new wonder drug that makes your body works for you instead of against you.’

Introductions were belatedly performed. Miller shook hands again exuberantly, remarked how tired the PM looked and admired the quality of Watts-Clinton’s suiting. He was a tall man – almost as given to bony protuberances as the Colonel – with tufts of hair on his fingers and from beneath the sheltering foliage of his eyebrows. Not, one would have estimated, a man given to mirth; yet his geniality flowed through the room like champagne into a footsore slipper.

‘The Government is very interested in your formula, Mr Miller,’ the PM said, ‘but we should naturally require a conclusive test, under proper surveillance, of your discovery.’

Miller winked conspiratorially.

‘It’s in the bag. You’re laughing – or you will be. Why don’t you let me give you an injection? How about going down in history as Sir Herbert Macclesfield, the smiling Prime Minister – no the Primed Prime Minister? Don’t mind me, I’m only being funny. Believe me, I’ve never felt so good. Fallen arches? I’ve still got them; they still pile up; they don’t bother me. I just don’t let the worries worry me, thanks to polyannamine.’

‘Can you control your obvious ebullience enough to tell us roughly how the stuff works?’

‘Tell you roughly? Nay sire, as I hope for an OBE, I will tell you gently. My prescription may be applied orally or intravenously or by inhalation; 10 c.c. only needed. Infallible! Guaranteed to cheer up even a TV comedian. No harmful side effects. No dimming of intelligence – I always looked this stupid, ha ha!’

‘I have a question to put you, Mr Miller,’ said Watts-Clinton, seeming to offer it transfixed on one stabbing finger. ‘You make large claims for this – er, medicament. Personally, I should be grateful if you would explain how it differs in any appreciable way from the tranquillisers and euphorics which have been on the market for some years.’

Miller squeezed his cheeks and mouth into a lemon face that aped the Foreign Secretary’s features with considerable success.

‘I have an answer to put to you, Mr Clotts-Winton – er, Witts-Clunt –, er, Watts-Clinton, that I trust will answer your question. Polyannamine is permanent! It does not act directly on the endocrines. It goes straight to the kidney and there establishes a respective area which begins immediately to secrete its own supply of polyannamine. From then on, the process is irreversible. It becomes part of the natural function of the kidney. Without impairing its other functions to any noticeable extent, the kidney will continue to secrete polyannamine until death does it part, and that polyannamine does its part in the endocrines from then on without stopping. In other words, one injection only of the synthetic solution is needed – for life.’

‘I see,’ said Watts-Clinton. Then his face burst into a slow smile. ‘By God, Herbert, if this is true. …’

‘Just what I was thinking …’ said the PM. ‘We’ve got to face the House with this second reading of the Capital Punishment Bill in the morning. If only. …’

Bowing low, Miller produced a small object from a waist-coat pocket. It looked like an anemone bulb, a cushion with a small spike on it. It was made of glass and contained a clear liquid.

‘If I catch your meaning, sir, you need a few dozen of these. If you sit on this, you get an injection of polyannamine – no trouble.’

The PM looked at Watts-Clinton. He looked at Quadroon. He looked at the pencil portrait of Christie. Then he looked back at Miller.

‘It’s worth a knighthood,’ he breathed.

Quadroon moved restlessly.

‘Two knighthoods,’ he corrected.

‘Two knighthoods,’ the PM agreed.

They all walked back together to the car. A bevy of convicts in evening dress were writhing to the voice of Johnny Earthquake.

In the big wide world I’m all alone,

They gone and left me on my own,

I’m shedding tears on tears to be

A Teenage Divorcee.

The PM looked up at the slow-moving grey smog of London overhead.

‘Beautiful evening,’ he said. ‘Beautiful evening. The prospect is distinctly rosy.’

Next day, Lady Elizabeth – wearing a tailored Italian costume that fitted her with mathematical exactitude – stood in her cosy room in Downing Street looking down pensively at the TV announcer.

The announcer, whose eyes were of an irreproachable blue, looked pensively back at Lady Elizabeth and said, ‘… case of horse-doping at Newmarket this month. Scotland Yard has been called in. This morning, the so-called M1 Massacre Man, Gulliver McNoose, was executed at Pentonville Prison. Under the new dispensation, his girl friend was allowed to be with him in the condemned cell; she held his hand till the last, singing “Rock of Ages Rock”, the new religious pop song which was McNoose’s favourite tune. We hope to have pictures on our later bulletin. Meanwhile, capital punishment was the subject of debate in the House of Commons this morning.’

A view of Parliament came on to the screen as the announcer’s head dissolved; this did not prevent his continuing, ‘The Government were seeking to make unofficial strikers liable to the death penalty, and it was expected that they would meet lively opposition. Mr Gaskin, however, who was to have spoken against the motion, appeared to be in exceptionally genial mood, says our Westminster correspondent, admitting that unofficial strikes were a bit of a nuisance; he added that if the country was to get ahead it had better lose a few. The laughter, particularly on Mr Gaskin’s side of the house, lasted for many minutes, after which the government measure was carried through without further discussion. Her Majesty the Queen, who is on a goodwill visit to the Isle of Man –’

Lady Elizabeth switched the set off. Her face did not relax into a smile.

‘You don’t look very pleased,’ her sister Nancy, the Honourable Mrs Lyon-Bowater, said, pouting prettily. ‘Sounds jolly good to me. Of course, I know I’m only an old silly.’

‘Of course,’ Lady Elizabeth agreed. She did not enjoy her pretty younger sister’s visits. Since a certain nursery-days quarrel over a palomino pony, the sisters had never entirely seen eye to eye. ‘The passing of this Bill is a triumph for Herbert – a vindication of all he has been working for. Unfortunately, it must be counted as a minor triumph. Perhaps you don’t realise it, Nancy but we stand on the brink of a third world war.’

‘Oh yes, isn’t it terrible? Still, we have for years, haven’t we? It’s all Towin ever talks about – that and his mouldy old shares.’

Lady Elizabeth sat down in the most graceful way on the very edge of her chaise-longue and said, ‘Nancy dear, this time it is rather different. There was a serious border incident in Berlin in the early hours of this morning.’

‘Politics is your business, darling, not mine; I prefer Chihuahuas.’

‘This is everyone’s business, darling. You will remember the East Germans built a wall round their sector four or five years ago – or perhaps you won’t. Then in the American sector a huge tower was built, the New Brandenburg tower. We claimed it was for a new UN office; the East Germans claimed it was to spy into their territory. In retaliation they built huge screens behind their wall, so that nobody could see into their sector.’

‘As though anyone would want to see into their sector,’ said Nancy, lighting a cigarette with the elaborate ritual gesture of a waiter about to scorch a crêpe suzette in an expense account restaurant.

‘Be that as it may, Nancy, the screens were built. The Western Powers agreed in finding this an aggressive gesture; accordingly, they prepared a warning.’

‘Oh yes, if they do it, it’s a threat: if we do it, it’s a warning. I do know that much about politics.’

‘Well, our warning took the form of a big statue, two hundred and five feet high and thus the highest in the world –’

‘Oh, you mean Buster!’

‘Its official name is the Statue of Freedom. It is so large that even the poor East Germans can see it, especially as its eyes light up at night.’

‘It’s lovely, Elizabeth. Towin and I saw it when we were over there last year; they had some sort of a crisis on then, as I recall. It looked lovely – much more fun than the dreary old Eiffel Tower, and with this rather absurd crown on its head saying “Coca-Cola”.’

‘Yes. The Western Powers had some trouble among themselves about that. The crisis to which you refer was of course caused by the Russian insistence on regarding Buster – mm, the Statue of Freedom as a provocative act. We should have had a war then but for Herbert’s personal intervention. He flew over to speak to the Russian Premier, Nikita Molochev. Instead of declaring war, the East Germans built a statue themselves.’

Nancy burst into bored laughter and coughed over her cigarette.

‘Even I know about that, darling. It made me pro-Communist on the spot. Such a delightful sense of humour!’

‘Really, Nancy, you are too frivolous. Not only is it a statue representing a very ugly worker, but it is higher than Buster; and it is thumbing its nose at Buster. As President Kennedson said, quite rightly, it is an aggressive act – as well as a threat to Western air space.’

‘At least it was his idea to call it Nikko.’

‘Last night, Nancy, at three o’clock Central European Time, a daring gang of West Berliners blew Nikko’s head off with explosive shells.’

‘Good heavens, I shouldn’t have thought it possible!’

‘Well, Nikko lost his nose, anyway. The full extent of the damage is not clear yet; there are conflicting reports. Unfortunately the East Germans and Russians have chosen to regard this innocent prank as a threat to their security.’

‘So – we’re on the brink of war again. Ho hum. And what is dear Herbert doing about it?’

‘He’s making a conciliatory speech in the Guildhall, at the bi-annual luncheon of the Ancient Order of Swan-Uppers and Down-Pluckers,’ said Lady Elizabeth. She stood up with a grace that rested on a firm foundation and began pacing the room daintily. ‘The unfortunate part is, that he is reading a speech I wrote for him. At least, I put in bits from several of his old speeches, but it is mainly my work. I feel the future of the world rests in my hands – the Russians and Americans seem so eager to have this war.’

‘Perhaps they feel it would be best to get it over with. It is awkward for us, being in the middle, so to speak. Well, darling, I must go. I home the Swan-Uppers give Herbert a good lunch, anyhow.’

‘I hope I haven’t bored you. Being a woman in a position of responsibility can be so difficult.’ Lady Elizabeth took her younger sister’s hand and gazed into her eyes.

‘How fortunate then that you are a woman of determination,’ Nancy said, disengaging herself to assume her gloves, ‘as you proved long ago over the palomino.’

The noise of voices in the hall made them both pause. Lady Elizabeth raised a humorously quizzical eyebrow.

‘Sounds like a regiment out there.’

‘A regiment plus Herbert!’

Lady Elizabeth went to see. The PM was being abstracted from his coat by Tarver; from his flushed look she could tell at once that the luncheon had been (a) good and (b) televised. Knowing the quality and extent of the Guildhall cellars, Lady Elizabeth resolved to get black coffee to him as soon as possible. Struggling with their own coats were Ralph Watts-Clinton and Lord Andaway, the Home Secretary; they too bore the Swan-Upping insignia in their cheeks.

Surprisingly, Miller was also there, grinning broadly at all that went on. Balancing a large carton on one hip, he waved cordially to Lady Elizabeth.

‘Here’s your wandering boy, Your Ladyship,’ he called. ‘I met him on the doorstep as I was about to deliver the goods.’

‘Who’s he? Did he lose his way to the tradesmen’s entrance?’ the Hon. Mrs Lyon-Bowater asked, in a dreamily sotto sort of voce in her sister’s ear.

Behind Miller, lined up like discarded gravestones, were three dark and solemn men. One she recognised as Bernard Brotherhope, the secretary of the Transit and Gradual Workers’ Union. By their air of non-denominational piety and their collars, Brotherhope’s companions were recognisable as union leaders. They stood patient, strong, unblinking, with their hats in the on-guard position; as Brotherhope nodded curtly over the heads of the others to Lady Elizabeth, a line of Hilaire Belloc’s about hating the Midlands which are sodden and unkind rose impertinently to her mind.

‘Take these gentlemen into the visitors’ room, Tarver,’ the PM said. ‘If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I will join you in a minute. Oh, Miller, I want you.’

‘What sweet men, Herbert!’ Nancy exclaimed from her corner, as the others filed into the front room, each anxiously offering precedence to his companion.

‘Oh, you’re here, Nancy,’ the PM said glumly.

‘It must be such fun being PM You meet all sorts of people you wouldn’t otherwise, don’t you?’

‘You remind me to inquire after your husband.’

Unabashed, Nancy said, ‘Still living, I suppose.’

The PM pushed past her into the cosy room and subsided slowly into the chaise-longue, letting his heavy lids fall as he went.

‘Coffee’s coming, my darling,’ Lady Elizabeth said. ‘You’ll have some too, Mr Miller, or are you not stopping?’

She successfully outstared him. Miller’s eyes retreated like little wet animals under his eyebrows and he laughed in admission of defeat.

‘Don’t want to intrude on the old family circle, you know. That is one circle of which there’s never enough to go round! Anyhow, here’s a supply of polyannamine as promised. Why not give your husband a shot? He looks as if he needs it.’

‘Thank you for your advice. Tarver will show you the door.’

‘That’s very good of him. I must say I admire that door more every time I see it. You must come up and see mine some day, Lady Elizabeth.’

As he was passing her, she thought for a dreadful moment that he was reaching out to kiss her. Instead, he whispered something in her ear. Her features relaxed; she smiled and nodded. When he had tiptoed, all comically conspiratorial, from the room, she went over and knelt by Herbert. Unnoticed, Nancy moved to look into Miller’s carton.

‘How did the speech go, Herbert?’ Lady Elizabeth asked tenderly.

The PM patted his brow and groaned.

‘That confounded port … Either I’m getting too old for it or it’s getting too old for me. And then I arrive back here to find a delegation from the TUC awaiting me; I shall have to go and see them. Where’s that coffee?’

‘It’s coming. … Here it is. Thank you, Jane, I’ll take it here. How did the speech go, darling?’

As she took the coffee tray and began to pour, Nancy said, ‘It’s none of my business, Herbert, but can’t you put the TUC chappies off? What’s the fun in being PM if you have no power?’

‘There’s no fun. …’ He took the cup in trembling hands and sipped through his moustache. ‘We’re in trouble there, Elizabeth. I can’t think how I can have been so short-sighted. We romped home with the Capital Punishment Bill this morning, thanks to Miller’s polyannamine, but of course the trade unions are on to us now like a ton of nationalised bricks. They’ve threatened a general strike if we don’t retract. … I must go and see Brotherhope. The coffee was lovely.’

Wiping his moustache, he rose and squeezed her upper arm. Having long ago trained herself not to respond with disgust to this old man’s gesture, Lady Elizabeth merely said, ‘Take this polyannamine capsule in with you; Miller advised it in case you had trouble. How’s the head now?’

‘Better for your coffee, my dear. Have some yourself.’ He pocketed the capsule, adjusted his tie, and shuffled out of the room.

Elizabeth sighed deeply, passed a hand over her forehead, and turned towards her sister.

‘Nancy, I fear I must turn you out now, unless you came for anything in particular?’

‘Can you tell me what polyannamine is?’

‘Just a sort of tranquilliser; nothing to be curious about. Shall I get Tarver to let you out?’ She turned her back on Nancy and commenced to pour herself coffee.

‘Damn your conceit, no, Elizabeth! I came for something in particular and you may as well hear it. I want – I need – a divorce from Towin.’

Lady Elizabeth forget her coffee.

‘But Towin is Secretary of State for Air!’

‘You don’t have to remind me of the dangers of nepotism.’

‘Spite always did improve your repartee. You know you can’t have any fuss in public at present, Nancy. The General Election is only two years away.’

‘The Last Trump may precede it.’

‘The Last Trump will scandalise the British public less than a ministerial decree nisi. You’re in some sort of a mess, aren’t you?’

‘How you adore your euphemisms and your clichés! Yet how else could you bear to be married to Herbert? You’ll be talking next about washing dirty linen in public.’

Lady Elizabeth rose and said, with the glacial courtesy of anger, ‘You’re in some sort of a mess, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am, if you must know. I am having, ducky, a rather hot affair with a pop singer called Johnny Earthquake.’

They faced each other lividly, hate and love running together like a spilt Irish coffee. Finally Lady Elizabeth turned away and marched over to the door saying, ‘The Prime Minister’s sister-in-law involved with a pop singer. … Governments have fallen for less.’

Deftly, while her sister’s back was turned, Nancy knocked the nipple off one of the polyannamine capsules she had pocketed, and poured its contents into Lady Elizabeth’s coffee. Then she marched towards the door. Again the two were face to face.

‘A pop singer!’

‘He makes me feel horribly democratic!’ With an angry leer, Nancy swaggered out.

For some minutes, Lady Elizabeth stood inside the cosy room, clutching her temples.

Then the phone rang.

Her voice when she answered gave no hint of her feelings.

It was an agitated young secretary to an under-secretary, Rupert Peters, phoning from Whitehall. Lady Elizabeth knew him well, and admired him; the feeling was reciprocated – as she had perceived.

‘This is a horribly informal way to come through to you, as Your Ladyship knows; I can only plead in extenuation a grave emergency. Would it be at all practicable for me to have a word with Sir Herbert?’

‘He has the TUC on his back at present.’

‘Jolly! Well, look, we’ve got the Ambassador to Russia speaking on a scramble call from Moscow. He has just had an extremely abusive note handed to him from Nikita Molochev. We’re going to be at war before morning unless something happens fast.’

‘Rupert! But this is unprovoked!’

‘Within the contemporary usage of the term, not entirely.’ Rupert paused. She sensed his embarrassment down the other end of the line.

‘What do you mean, “not entirely”?’

‘I’m afraid it was that remark of Sir Herbert’s in his Guildhall Speech.’

A cold hand with ill-manicured nails wrapped itself round Lady Elizabeth’s heart. She sat down on the chaise-longue. Her coffee stared coolly up at her.

‘What remark?’ she managed to ask.

‘Sir Herbert said – and Your Ladyship must realise I quote from memory – that after prolonged consideration he had concluded that President Molochev was a disagreeable sight that should be abolished.’

She made an inarticulate noise in her throat.

‘Not, one must admit, the year’s most tactful political utterance,’ Rupert said. ‘As I say, it seems in the present inflamed state of world affairs that it may precipitate hostilities, unless speedily retracted or ameliorated. I would like to ask Sir Herbert if we should offer the Russians a complete denial. Would you, Lady Elizabeth, in view of the emergency, detach him from the embrace of the TUC?’

Lady Elizabeth sat back, pale with horror. Clearly before her mind’s eye floated the typescript pages of the speech she had prepared for the Guildhall. Page five, dealing with the Berlin question, had had the PM saying that after prolonged consideration he had concluded that President Molochev had historical logic but not contemporary logic on his side in his demand for an East German peace treaty. Such little meaning as this statement possessed had then been obliterated in succeeding paragraphs, into which, by the bottom of the page, a reference to the statues Buster and Nikko and that the two figures confronting each other formed – and here one turned to page seven – a disagreeable sight that should be abolished.

Beyond a doubt, Lady Elizabeth know what had happened. In the jocular hurly-burly of Guildhall wine and food, Sir Herbert had dropped page six, and read on without noticing the omission.

‘Lady Elizabeth, could you get him?’

The tinny voice of Rupert recalled her.

‘Just a minute,’ she said.

Limply she rose and went to fetch her husband. As she passed the hideous daguerreotype of Gladstone, she heard singing – singing at 10 Downing Street! – but Lady Elizabeth was beyond surprise. Opening with his arms round his two supporters. Their hats were on their heads at a rakish angle, and with verve they executed a few lively unison steps to their own version of ‘Rule, Britannia!’

Not only that. The Foreign and Home Secretaries were conducting the trio, singing heartily with them as they did so.

Rule, Britannia, two tanners make a bob;

Three make one and six, and four two bob.

No Common Market shall rule the Common Man

While two bob buys us booze throughout the lan’ –

I don’t mean maybe –

Buys us booze throughout the la-a-a-a-n’.

They went smartly into a reprise; no attention was paid to Lady Elizabeth, beyond a suggestively raised eyebrow from Watts-Clinton. The PM sat feebly by the drinks cupboard, emitting an inconstant smile; here, thought Lady Elizabeth with a gush of sympathy, was a man who had had greatness thrust upon him. She beckoned and he came at once.

‘Strike’s off,’ he said, as they went into the corridor, closing the door behind them. ‘Do you know what Brotherhope said to me? “Between you and me, I’m more interested in the power than the glory.” Slipping polyannamine into the sherry did the trick.’

‘But Herbert, you’ve given it to Andaway and Watts-Clinton too!’

‘Couldn’t be helped – emergency. I had to pour the stuff into the decanter. Of course I refrained from drinking it myself. It’s a pity about Ralph, but after all he is happy; he’s got no worries, whereas we’ve got plenty.’

‘You don’t know how many, my dear.’

‘It occurred to me that by spraying polyannamine over London and other big cities, we could face the next election with equanimity; I instructed Miller accordingly. Has the fellow gone?’

‘Yes, and we are in trouble, Herbert. The British Embassy in Moscow is on the line.’ And she told him what had happened.

‘My God!’ he said. They were into the cosy room by now; the jazz version of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ was silenced as Lady Elizabeth closed the door. The PM sank down on the nearest chair and stared unseeingly at Lady Elizabeth’s coffee. ‘How absolutely ghastly! You know, now you mention it I recall thinking that something dropped just as I rose to make my speech. It must have been page six. It must have gone under the table.’

‘If only you’d read the speech through first!’

‘I didn’t have time.’

‘Didn’t you notice what you were saying?’

He had his face in his hands. She saw, through his thinning grey hair, freckles on his skull.

‘You know how it is after a heavy lunch. … I just read in a stupor, I’m afraid – though I do remember everyone clapping and laughing unexpectedly. … Oh, my country!’

Feeling only compassion, Lady Elizabeth patted his shoulders.

‘You’d better speak to Rupert Peters. All is not lost yet.’

‘How can I face anyone, after making such a fool of myself?’

‘Because it is your duty to,’ she said composedly to his bowed head. She picked up the phone from the side table.

‘Rupert, are you there? … Hello, Rupert? … Whitehall, I think we’re cut off. Oh, hello, Rupert; I thought we were cut off.’

The young secretary’s voice had a new note of tension in it.

‘Lady Elizabeth, I’m afraid the situation is more desperate than we at first though. We’ve been cut off from the British Embassy in Moscow; that line is dead. The last word we had was that it was surrounded by an angry mob who were trying to break in. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has come through to us on another line. Is Sir Herbert there?’

‘He’s here and he will speak.’

‘Praise be. Tell him that I am in a position to switch him straight through to Zagravov, Molochev’s Deputy. The man is in a flaming temper and claims that Sir Herbert has committed an act of personal persiflage that is tantamount to a declaration of war. Impress on Sir Herbert that Zagravov will need very delicate handling.’

‘I understand.’

Her face was pale as she turned to Sir Herbert. He had just finished draining her cold cup of coffee.

‘I feel a bit more cheerful for that,’ he said.

‘You have need to be.’ Gravely she told him what Rupert had said. The PM got up and paced the room as he listened. When she had finished, she added, ‘You’ll have to explain to Zagravov about page six as tactfully as possible.’

To her astonishment, the PM burst into laughter.

‘It’s all so terribly funny, when you think of it,’ he said. ‘And after all, President Molochev is a disagreeable sight that should be abolished! These miserable diplomats have no sense of humour. Give me that phone. Let me try and make old Zagravov see the joke.’

‘Herbert!’

Lady Elizabeth backed away in horror as the PM, smiling broadly, seized the phone and began to tell Moscow exactly what he thought of Russian statesmen.

Nancy, the Hon. Mrs Lyon-Bowater, second wife of Towin, the Rt. Hon. Lord Lyon-Bowater, Secretary of State for Air, vigorously embraced Johnny Earthquake as their taxi carried them south through the patchily-lit streets of London after dark.

‘How was the show, Honey?’ he asked at last, gasping for breath.

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