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 Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths, SF Horizons (1965), Science Fantasy (1965), New Worlds SF (1965), Worlds of Tomorrow (1965), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1966), SF Impulse, Knight (1966). 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 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: 9780008148959 Version: 2015-07-31

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 The Day of the Doomed King

2 The Girl and the Robot with Flowers

3 How are they All on Deneb IV?

4 The Impossible Smile

5 Man in his Time

6 Old Time’s Sake

7 The Saliva Tree

8 Scarfe’s World

9 The Small Betraying Detail

10 The Source

11 Amen and Out

12 Another Little Boy

13 Burning Question

14 The Circulation of the Blood…

15 The Eyes of the Blind King

16 Heresies of the Huge God

17 Lambeth Blossom

18 The Lonely Habit

19 The O in José

20 One Role with Relish

21 Paternal Care

22 The Plot Sickens

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

Introduction

As might be expected, these stories resonate with occurrences in life both unfortunate and fortunate.

It seems I have an eloquence for stories, most of which I can see in retrospect as an impatience with ordinary life. And ‘ordinary life’, as many might agree, has its pains and pleasures, its omens and significances.

The ordinary (as I suppose, after my re-reading of this produce of long ago) can be appreciated only by acquaintance with its phantom partner – fiction! – where truth slinks about in disguise.

At the tender age of five, I was sent away from home to a preparatory school on the Norfolk coast. What did I take with me? We were allowed only two items for company – let’s say a teddy bear or a gollywog and a copy of Alice in Wonderland. I took along a microscope and a volume called The Treasury of Knowledge. A good start at an adverse time.

Then, later, considerably later, I am back from a long hazardous tenure – many alien years – abroad in the East, courtesy of HM Government. I am dog poor. Oxford University would not have me. I write a novel entitled Non-Stop featuring a man who does not recognise that he is lost from ordinary life.

This novel went to Faber and Faber. Faber had recently engaged a new director, Charles Monteith. Charles enjoyed many of the perks of life to which I could not aspire. We immediately became friends. Why? Because both Charles and I had served in the British Army in Burma.

Indeed, Charles had fought in the ghastly Arakan where he had been wounded in one leg – a wound that troubled him throughout life. I had been stuck in a nicer part of the jungle – where I shot dead (a disturbing fact I hid from my conscious self for many years) an attacking Japanese soldier. BURMA, with its enormous freight, was Charles’ and my watchword.

We never really spoke about it. But we knew.

So such facts and factors lie behind many of these stories, from ‘Comic Inferno’ to ‘Unauthorised Persons’.

I enjoyed writing them. How do you feel, I wonder?

The Day of the Doomed King

Through his heavy lids, the church hardly appeared to grow nearer until they were upon it. The summer and the wound at his chest made him dizzy. As he stumbled from his horse, the great daisies in the long grass made it seem to him that he was walking across a starry sky, and his perspectives would not come right.

A priest with a rich mantle thrown over his black frock came hurrying to them. He heard Jovann say to the priest, ‘It is King Vukasan, and he is sore wounded. Make ready a couch for him to rest on.’

He muttered into his horse’s flank, ‘We must get to Sveti Andrej and warn them to arm themselves against the Turk,’ and then the daisies and the sky and dappled shade rippled like a banner, and he had a near view of his silver stirrup before blackness closed upon him.

When he roused again, things were better for him. He lay on a bunk in a cool cell, and his head was clearer. Propping himself on one elbow, he said, ‘Now I am able to go on to my kinsmen at Sveti Andrej.’

Jovann and the old black priest were at his side, smiling with anxiety. ‘My lord king,’ said the priest, ‘you have taken grievous harm, and must stay with us until you have strength for the rest of the journey.’

His mouth was stiff, but he said, ‘Priest, yesterday we fought a battle all daylight long against the scimitared muslim, until the River Babuna flowed with their blood and ours. Courage does not trifle with numbers, that I know, but we had only one blade to every six of theirs, and so in the end every one of my soldiers fell. My cousins at Andrej must be told to make ready to fight, and there are only my general Jovann and I surviving to tell them. Bind me up and let me go on.’

Then Jovann and the priest conferred together, first with Jovann’s moustache at the priest’s furry ear, and then with the priest’s beard at Jovann’s ear. Then Jovann came to his king and knelt by the bed, taking his hand and saying, ‘My lord, though we did not slay the vile muslim, at least we stayed him; he also has his wounds to bind. So the urgency is only in you, and not in the situation. It is the heat of noonday now. Rest, take some soup and rest, and we will go on later. I must have care of you and not forget that you are of the house of Nemanija and your wound bleeds authority.’

So he learnt to be persuaded, and they brought him a thin soup and a trout culled from the nearby lake, and a pot of wine, and then they left him to rest.

He could eat no more than a mouthful of the fish. Though he was not conscious of his wound, he was sick inside with worry, wounded to think that the consuming Turk ate his lands away and was never defeated; his people were brave and terrible in battle; why then did God not allow them to flourish? It was as if a vast tide of time flowed continually against them.

Listlessly, he stared through the opened window by his bed. This room in the priests’ quarters closely overlooked the lake, so that the waters seemed to flow even to the sill. All that punctuated the expanse of his view was a reed bed near at hand; the further shore was an uncertain line of blue, there merely to emphasise the water. He stared at it a long time until, growing tired of its excessive vacancy, he turned his gaze instead to the view within the room.

Although the cell itself was simple, it contained a number of objects, cloaks and instruments and even a field hoe. These had been hastily concealed, at least to some extent, from the royal view by a screen, interposed between the foot of the bed and the miscellany. Slowly his stare fixed itself on this screen.

It was carved of wood, elaborately, in a manner that he recognised as that of the masters of Debar, for some of their work graced his own stronghold. Intertwined among leaves and vines were large birds swallowing fruit, and boys lying piping, and hogs rolling in flowers, and turrets, and lizards that curled like Turkish scimitars. These little religious foundations, scattered like jewels throughout his kingdom, hid many such treasures, but at this time he took no delight in them.

For a long while, he lay between lake and screen, thinking he must move and speed on to his kinsmen. Many times he thought he had already climbed from his bed before Jovann arrived at the door, staring anxiously at his face and asking, ‘Are you strong enough, my lord, to take the road again?’

‘Fetch me my sword,’ he said.

So they set forth again, and this time, the path leading upland, they went by a more complicated way. The horses were fresh from their rest but nervous, and started violently at the jays that flashed across their track. Their nervousness conveyed itself to him, and he sweated inside his shirt until its heavy embroidery knocked cold against his ribs. He started against his will to speak of what was in his mind, of things that he knew a king had better keep hidden from even the most faithful of his generals.

‘I fear an evil enchantment upon me,’ he said through his teeth. ‘When the wolves howled as my child-wife died at Bitola of the fever, I thought they cried my name, and now I know they did. There is a mark on me, and the mark is disaster.’

‘Then it is on me as well, and all who love you,’ said Jovann. ‘You are our common wealth, and as surely as the pig-fearing muslim shall slay you, he shall slay all Serbia.’

Then he regretted he had spoken, for it was not in Jovann’s position to answer in such a way, but still the words shuddered from his lips. ‘As our fine clothes cannot hide our nakedness from God, so the trees that make my kingdom fair cannot hide his curse from me. For you know what the legends say, that we south Slavs rode from the East in great numbers when barbaric enemies drove us from the lands of our ancestors. Though our people have for many centuries broken the earth here, and I lie under it numerously, yet it is still not our homeland; and I am afeared, Jovann, afeared lest this land fall all to the dark-visaged muslim and the distant pashas.’

‘Your royal brethren will take arms with us against them, and turn them back so roughly that they never again dare cross the Vardar,’ said Jovann stoutly. But under the thick trees his face seemed to have a green shade that was not of nature; and even as he spoke, he reined his horse and stared anxiously ahead.

On the path where they must ascend, a magpie crouched with a lizard in its gullet. With wings outspread, it beat at the dust and the horses rattled their reins with dislike of the sight. Jovann sucked in a sharp hissing breath, and slid from the saddle, drawing his sword as he moved forward. The black bird flopped dead at his feet the lizard still protruding from its beak. He made to strike it, but the king cried to him to stay.

‘I never knew a magpie to choke to death before, nor to take a lizard,’ he said. ‘Better not to touch them. We will ride about them.’

So they pricked their horses through the mantle of trees, forcing them along the mountain, and rode with some difficulty until they achieved the plain once more. Here grew the red poppies in their multitudes, millions and millions of them, the hue of dried blood in the distance, of fresh blood underfoot. In the king’s head, there was only this colour, as he tried to understand the meaning of the lizard and the magpie.

With a heavy hand, he pointed across the plain, ‘Jakupica Planina lies there, with snow still on its ridge. When we have forded the Topolka, we can camp by the foot of the hills. By tomorrow night, we will rest ourselves by the stoves of Sveti Andrej and lay our story in sympathetic hands. But first I shall call at a small monastery I know of, Sveti Pantelimon by name, where lives a strange and wise seer who shall explain to me what ails me and my kingdom.’

So they slowly drew near the river in the afternoon heat, and came on a shepherd sitting by a flock of sheep, some white and many black, with half-grown lambs among them. The shepherd was a youth who greeted the king without an excess of respect.

‘My humble home lies there,’ he said, when Jovann spoke sharply to him, and he stretched a finger towards a distant hut perched on a rock. ‘And there waits your enemy the grinning musulman!’ And the finger raised to crags over which a falcon circled. The king and his general looked there, and made out smoke ascending.

‘It is impossible they should be here so soon, my lord. Plainly the boy lies,’ Jovann said in a small voice.

‘There is, alas, more than one force of the enemy on my fertile lands,’ he said and, turning to the boy, asked, ‘If you know the stinking muslim is there, why do you not fight? Why do you not join my arms? Have you nothing, even your life, that is precious to you, and that you must defend?’

But the boy was not perturbed, answering straightly, ‘King Vukasan, because you are a king and therefore rich, the laughing musulman wants all from you, and will take all. But I have nothing, being poor, that he could want. Think you these are my sheep? Then my master would laugh to know. Think you my life is my own? Then you have a different creed from mine. No, your enemies in the hill will pass me by and leave me as I am.’

Jovann drew his sword, and the boy retreated a step, but the king said, ‘Leave him, for only baseness comes from the base, and he is right to hold that even the thieving muslim can wish nothing from him. Meanwhile, we have one more reason to press swiftly on towards Sveti Andrej.’

But when they had crossed the broad and shallow stream of the Topolka, they came on wide shingle beds, on which the hooves of the horses could obtain small purchase. The heat rose up from these shingle beds, dazzling their eyes, and nothing grew save an occasional poppy and frail yellow flowers with five wide-spread petals to each blossom. And the shingle crunched and seemed to wish to draw them back to the river. So they were tired when they gained the bank, and the weight of the sun grew heavy on their shoulders. When they reached the first foothill, Jovann, taking as little regard for majesty as the shepherd boy had done, flung himself off his horse and declared he could go no further. They climbed down beneath a tree where a slight breeze stirred, so that the shadows of its branches crawled like vines on the stoney ground. They pulled ripening figs from the tree and ate, and the horses cropped at scanty grass. Heavy blood was in their foreheads; they fell asleep as they sprawled.

He stirred, and the foliage above his head was patterned with fruit like the wooden screen from Debar, and there were greedy birds there, screaming and devouring the fruit. The sun was low over the hills, and he sat up guiltily, crying, ‘Jovann, Jovann, we must go on! Why are we waiting here, my general?’

His companion sat up, rubbing his head and saying grumpily, ‘As I will die for you, my lord, when the time comes, so when the time comes must I sleep.’

But they got to their feet then, and the king forced them to go on, though Jovann would have eaten the cold fish, wrapped in leaves, that he had brought with him for their evening fare. Looking back over the plain of poppies, they heard the clank of a sheep bell as the sheep were ushered towards protection for the night, and they saw the lights of the Turk burning on the forehead of the mountain. These sights and sounds were soon hidden from them as they rounded the shoulders of the new hills and as night brought down its gentle wing upon them.

Wrapped safe in shadow, the king let his mind wander from the ride, until he imagined he had no wound and his child-wife Simonida was alive again; then said he gently to her, ‘My daughter, you see how the boundaries of our kingdom widen, and how the soldiers and merchants grow as rich as was my grandfather, great Orusah himself. The Bulgars now pay us tribute as far as Bess-Arabia, and the Byzantines are so poor and weak that their cities fall to us every month.’

And he imagined that she smiled and answered, ‘My sweet lord Vukasan, it is good as you say, but let us establish a state that will make the name Serbia sweet even to those it conquers. Let there be not only executions, but laws; not only swords and armies but books and universities, and peace where we can instil peace.’

Then did the king smile and stroke her hair, saying, ‘You know that way shall be my way, even as it would be your way or the way of my father and grandfather. We will bring wise men to speak to the people from distant Hilander, on the Mount called Athos, and there shall be artists and masons summoned from Thessaloniki, who work less rudely than our native craftsmen. And we shall start new arts and works with men from Ragusa and Venezia, and even beyond, from the courts of Europe, and the Pope in Rome shall heed us …’

‘You dream too largely, my sweet lord. It is not good to do so.’ She had often said it.

‘Dreams cannot be too large. Do you know what I dream, my daughter? I dream that one day I may ride into Constantinople and have myself crowned king of Byzantium – Emperor! – while you shall wear no dress but jewels.’

‘Then how your subjects will stare at me!’ she said with a laugh, but the sound came faint and unnatural, more like the clink of a horse’s bridle; and he could not see her for shade, so that Jovann said at his elbow, ‘Steady, my lord, as you go, for the way is rocky here.’

And he answered heavily and confusedly, saying, ‘You are not the companion she was, though I grant you are bolder. What a change has come these last few years! Perhaps you were right in holding I dreamed too largely, for now my dreams are no more and you are gone from me, sweet child of my bed, and all I hear of is the rattle of swords, and for the designing of your jewellery I have exchanged battle plans against the fuming muslim. Ho, then, and hup, or we’ll die before we get to the gates of Constantin’s town!’

The horse plunged under his sharp-digging stirrup, and he returned to his senses, more tired from the mental journey than the actual one.

‘Did I speak to myself then, Jovann?’

‘It is my lord’s privilege,’ said the general.

‘Did I speak aloud, tell me?’

‘My lord, no, on my oath.’ But he knew the man lied to hide his sovereign’s weakness, and bit his lip to keep silence until he had the pleasure of feeling the blood run in the hairs of his beard.

They followed a vague track, not speaking. At last they heard the noise of a bullock-cart creaking and bumping along, and emerged onto the dusty road that would take them to Sveti Andrej. Now that the trees stood further apart, and their eyes were adjusted to the night journey, they could see the shape of the bullock-cart ahead. He was well awake now, and motioned to Jovann to follow. They rode up to the cart and hailed the driver.

Deciding they now had no cause to go further, the two bullocks dragging the cart stopped and cropped grass in the middle of the road. With an oath, Jovann jumped to the ground, his sword again ready in his hand. The driver of the cart sprawled face up to the stars with his throat cut. Rags lay under his outspread arm which they examined after a little, and found them to be a peasant woman’s clothes.

‘This they dare do, so near to home, to kill one of my peasants for the sake of his wife, so near to home, so near to home!’

In a storm of anger and weakness, he felt the tears scald from his eyes, and sat on the bank to weep. Jovann joined him, and put an arm about his shoulders, until he stopped for shame. At that, Jovann thrust a jug into his hands.

‘The man’s rakija, lord. We might as well profit from it, since he no longer can. Drink it, for we have not many hours’ travel left, and then we will eat the fish and pluck some of the cherries that are growing above our heads.’

He was secretly angry that Jovann could speak of these trivial matters when the urgency of the situation was so great. But a sort of fear gripped him; he was unnerved by the way the bullock-cart had arrived so punctually to deliver its message of death, and he needed to feel the heat of the rakija as it plunged down his throat. They drank in turns, quaffing out of the jug.

After a while, the bullocks took the cart off down the road again, creaking and bumping every inch of the way. The two men began to laugh. The king sang a fragment of song:

‘How happy are they who dwell in Prilep

Where the birds nest under every eave

And the green tree grows.’

Although he recalled that the Turk now stood at the gates of Prilep, he sang the verse again into the leafy night. He told Jovann stories of the old days to raise his spirits, of how his grandfather Orusan had in his youth leaped across the fissure in the rock on Pelister and would not marry till he found a girl of hot enough breath to do likewise, no, not though five bare-legged maidens lost their life trying; and how he himself had swum underground a vrst in a cold and unknown river in the same region; and of his father’s day-long flight alone in the hills, with Alisto, the Shiptar prince. And then he thought of his little wife dying in Bitola, and was solemn, and reproached himself. They got to their feet and climbed once more stiffly into their saddles, though Jovann took a great bunch of cherries from the tree as they went, pulling half a branch along with him.

So they rode on through the night, and shivered in their jackets. When dawn leapt over the hills again, they were near to the holy place that the king had mentioned, called Sveti Pantelimon.

He halted his steed by a side track and said, ‘The way is steep here. I will leave the horses here with you and be back in only an hour, after I have consulted the holy man about the future.’

But Jovann protested. ‘My lord, we are but two hours’ travel now from the house of your kinsmen at Sveti Andrej. Let us first carry our ill news to them and set their warlike intentions astir, and then we can return here to your holy man tomorrow, after we have rested.’

But he was set in his course, and said so. ‘Then,’ said the faithful Jovann with a sigh, ‘I will follow after you on foot, leading the horses, that where we may ride we can. Heaven guide you, sweet lord, that you know best.’

‘There is no room for doubt of that,’ he said sharply, though in his own head there was room enough.

Now they climbed amid sharp spurs of rock, on which the first lizards already crawled to sun themselves. Tortoises ambled from their path, and the progress they made was no faster than that of the tortoise, for the track led back and forth about the hillside. The noise grew of a fast mountain stream by which they could guide themselves. When they found it, they saw how it ran deep between two cliffs, and how the path to Sveti Pantelimon followed beside it as man’s paths must ever be slave to those of nature.

Here, after a brief discussion, the horses were hobbled and left, and the king and Jovann went forward together, the one behind the other because the path was so narrow. The water rushed by their feet, making unpleasant music. The rocks above overhung dangerously, so that the trees growing slantwise from one side were often trapped in the vines growing from the other. In one place, a great boulder had fallen and wedged itself between two sides above their heads, making a bridge for any who were foolhardy enough to pass that way. At another point, where blue flowers clung to the damp rock, they had to bend double, for the path had been painfully chipped through the rock itself.

It was thus, bent double like cripples at Bitola fair, that they reached the monastery of Sveti Pantelimon. Roses grew by it, otherwise it was a grim place, a tiny church built into the rock on a widening ledge of the rock, with a dwelling hut attached. The modest brick cupola of the church was almost scraped by fingers of rock stabbing from the cliff-face.

The intruders were seen. Only four brothers lived here; three of them hurried out to meet their royal guest, whom they recognised. But it was the fourth the king required to see, and after taking slatko, the traditional dish of Serbian hospitality, he asked to see this priest.

Jovann rose. ‘My lord king, I fear for your safety even here, since we know not that even now the foul-stomached muslim may be riding along this very canyon. I am a soldier. I will guard outside, and give you warning if they come – in a place like this, we might hold off an army.’

‘Guard well, my general,’ said the king, and was prompted to give Jovann his hand.

The holy man he wished to see sat in the bare adjoining room. He seemed, with his wrinkled visage, to represent antiquity rather than old age; but his most notable feature was his left eye which, unlike its brown neighbour, was entirely and featurelessly white. To the king, it appeared that this priest, by name Milos, often saw best with his white eye.

When their courtesies were concluded, the king said, ‘I am here to ask you only one question, and I need from you only one answer.’

‘Often, my lord king Vukasan, there is more than one answer to a question. Question and answer are not simple and complete opposites, as are black and white.’

‘Do not tease me, for I am weary, and the freedom of my kingdom is at stake.’

‘You know I will do what I can.’

‘I believe you are among the wisest men in my lands, and that is why I come to you now. Here is the question. Only a few years ago, in the reign of my father and grandfather, whom we all recall and bless, this our kingdom was expanding, and with it the life of our peoples. Life and knowledge and art and worship were gaining strength every day. Now we see all that we hoped for threatened with ruin, as the red-tipped muslim bites into our lands. So I ask you what will the future be, and how can we influence it for good?’

‘That sounds, my lord king, like two questions, both large; but I will reply to you straightly.’ Milos opened the palm of his hand and stared at it with his white eye. ‘There are as many futures as there are paths in your kingdom, my lord; but just as some paths, if followed to their end, will take you to the west and others if followed to their end will take you to the east, so there are futures which represent the two extremes of what may be – the best and the worst, we might say. I can, if you will, show you the best and the worst.’

‘Tell me what you can.’

The priest Milos rose and stared out of his small window, which afforded a view onto the gloomy rock beyond. With his back to the king, he said, ‘First, I will tell you what I see of the good future.

‘I see you only a year from now. You lead a great army to a beleaguered city set under an isolated mountain, as it might be Prilep. There you smite the sacrilegious Turk, and scatter the entrails of his soldiery far over the blossoming plain, so that he does not come again to our Serbian lands. For this great victory, many petty princes turn to your side and swear allegiance to you. The Byzants, being corrupt, offer you their crown. You accept, and rule their domain even as your father hoped you might.’

He turned to look at the king, but the king sat there at the bare table with his head bowed, as if indifferent to the burning tidings the priest bore. The latter, nodding, turned back to contemplate the rock and continued in an even tone as previously.

‘You rule wisely, if without fire, and make a sensible dynastic marriage, securing the succession of the house of Nemanija. The arts and religion flourish as never before in the new kingdom. Many homes of piety and learning and law are established. Now the Slavs come into their inheritance, and go forth to spread their culture to other nations. Long after you are dead, my king, people speak your name with love, even as we speak of your grandfather, Orusan. But the greatness of the nation you founded is beyond your imagining. It spreads right across Europe and the lands of the Russian. Our gentleness and our culture go with it. There are lands across the sea as yet undiscovered; but the day will come when our emissaries will sail there. And the great inventions of the world yet to come will spring from the seed of our Serbian knowledge, and the mind of all mankind be tempered by our civility. It will be a contemplative world, as we are contemplative, and the love in it will be nourished by that contemplation, until it becomes stronger than wickedness.’

He ceased, and the king spoke, though his eyes were fixed on the bare floor. ‘It is a grand vision you have, priest. And … the other, the ill future?’

Milos stared but with his white eye at the rock and said, ‘In the ill future, I see you leading no grand army. I see a series of small battles, with the shrieking Turk winning almost all of them by superior numbers and science. I see you, my lord king, fall face forward down into the Serbian dust, never to rise again. And I see eventually Serbia herself falling, and the other nations that are our neighbours and rivals, all falling to the braying enemy, until he stands hammering at the gates even of Vienna in the European north. So, my lord, I see nigh on six centuries in which our culture is trampled underfoot by the conqueror.’

Silence came into the chilly room, until the king said heavily, ‘And the other lands you spoke of, and overseas, how are they in this ill future?

‘Perhaps you can imagine, my lord. For those six centuries, lost is the name of Serbia, and the places we know and love are regarded simply as the domain of the ginger-whiskered Turk. Europe grows into a fierce and strifeful nest of warring nations – art they have, but little comtemplation, power but little gentleness. They never know what they lack, naturally. And when Serbia finally manages to free itself from its hated bondage, the centuries have changed it until your name is lost, and the very title King no longer reverenced. And though she may grow to be a modest power in the world, the time when she might have touched the hearts of all men with her essence is long faded, even as are last year’s poppies.’

After he had heard Milos out, the king rose to his feet, though his body trembled. ‘You give me two futures, priest, and even as you said, they differ as does a speckled trout from a bird. Now answer my question and say which of them is to be the real future, and how I can realise the good vision of which you spoke first.’

The priest turned to face him. ‘It is not in my power to tell you which future will happen. No man can do that. All I can do is give you an omen, hoping that you will then take power into your own hands. Seers see, rulers rule.’

‘Give me then an omen!’

‘Think for yourself where the futures divide in the prospects I laid before you.’

He groaned and said, ‘Ah, I know full well where they divide. We do not bring enough men against the devilish muslim at one time. We are as you say a contemplative people, and the floods must lap our doorstep before we take in the rug at the portal.’

‘Suppose it were not a question of being warlike but of being … well, too contemplative.’

‘Then Jovann and I must rouse the whole nation to fight. This I will do, priest, this is what I was hastening to Sveti Andrej to do.’

‘But you called here. Was not that a delay?’

‘Priest, I came bleeding from the battle at the River Babuna with all haste.’

‘Ah?’

He put a weary hand to his forehead and stared at the bare wall. He recalled the long hours of delay at the monastery, the sleep under the trees, the feast of fish and cherries and rakija; and then the diversion here, and he blamed himself deeply for this ineradicable tardiness in his nature, so characteristic of his people also. But there were some more warlike than he, and on them, he saw, the new burden of militarism must rest.

‘Jovann,’ he said. ‘My bold General Jovann stands outside even now, defending us. He will lend metal to the Serbian arm even if I by my nature cannot.’

Milos looked at him with the white eye and said, ‘Then there is your omen. Come now to the window, my lord king.’

By leaning a little way out of the window, it was possible to see the path by the stream below. Jovann lay with his back to a rock, a pink rose between his teeth. All thought of the Turk had plainly left him, for he sat drawing a heart in the dust, and his sword lay some distance from him beneath a bush.

‘As we are contemplative, I fear it will not be a contemplative future,’ Milos said, taking the arm of the king to prevent him swooning.

When the dizziness wore off, King Vukasan shook off the hand that held his. He saw, looking wearily up, that it was Jovann who squatted by his bed. He lay breathing heavily, conscious of the terrible weight on his chest, trying to measure where his spirit had been. He saw the wooden screen at the bottom of his couch, he regarded the still lake outside his window and he forced a few words through his swollen lips.

‘We should have been in Sveti Andrej today.’

‘My lord, do not fret yourself, there is plenty of time in the world.’

And that, my dear unhastening Jovann, is only the truth, thought he, unable to turn the thought into words; but the fate of the coming centuries has to be decided now, and you should have left me here to die and dream of death, and hurry on with the news that my kinsmen must unite and arm … But he could only look up into the trusting and gentle face of his general and speak no word of all he feared.

Then his focus slipped, and rested momentarily on the carved screen. He saw that among the wilderness of flowers and leaves a bird strained at a lizard, and a bullock-cart traced a path along a vine, and there were little cupolas appearing amid the buds, and shepherd boys and fat sheep, and even a wooden river. Then his head rolled to one side, and he saw instead the vast vacancy of the lake, with the rushes stirring, and the sky reflected in the lake, until it seemed to his labouring mind that all heaven stood just outside the window. He closed his eyes and went to it.

And Jovann moved on tiptoe out to the waiting priests and said, ‘A mass must be sung, and the villagers must come at once with flowers and mourn their king as he would have it. And all arrangements must be made properly for the burial of this, our great and loved king. I will stay and arrange it for a day or so before taking the news on to Sveti Andrej. There is plenty of time, and the king would not wish us to spoil things by haste.’

And one of the priests walked along with him along the narrow way, to summon mourners from the nearest village in the beleaguered hills.

The Girl and the Robot With Flowers

I dropped it to her casually as we were clearing away the lunch things. ‘I’ve started another story.’

Marion put the coffee cups down on the draining board, hugged me, and said, ‘You clever old thing! When did you do that? When I was out shopping this morning?’

I nodded, smiling at her, feeling good, enjoying hearing her chirp with pleasure and excitement. Marion’s marvellous, she can always be relied on. Does she really feel as delighted as that – after all, she doesn’t care so greatly for science fiction? But I don’t mind; she is full of love, and it may lend her enough empathy to make her feel as sincerely delighted as I do when another story is on the way.

‘I suppose you don’t want to tell me what it’s going to be about?’ she asked.

‘It’s about robots, but more than that I won’t tell you.’

‘Okay. You go and write a bit more while I wash these few things. We don’t have to leave for another ten minutes, do we?’

We were planning to go and see our friends the Carrs, who live the other side of Oxford. Despite their name, the Carrs haven’t a car, and we had arranged to take them and their two children out for a ride and a picnic in the country, to celebrate the heatwave.

As I went out of the kitchen, the fridge started charging again.

‘There it goes!’ I told Marion grimly. I kicked it, but it continued to growl at me.

‘I never hear it till you remind me,’ she said. I tell you, nothing rattles her! It’s wonderful; it means that she is a great nerve tonic, exciting though I find her.

‘I must get an electrician in to look at it,’ I said. ‘Unless you actually enjoy the noise, that is. It just sits there gobbling electricity like a –’

‘A robot?’ Marion suggested.

‘Yep.’ I ambled into the living room-cum-study. Nikola was lying on the rug under the window in an absurd position, her tummy up to the sunlight. Absently, I went over and tickled her to make her purr. She knew I enjoyed it as much as she did; she was very like Marion in some ways. And at that moment, discontent struck me.

I lit a Van Dyke cigar and walked back into the kitchen. The back door was open; I leant against the post and said, ‘Perhaps for once I will tell you the plot. I don’t know if it’s good enough to bear completing.’

She looked at me. ‘Will my hearing it improve it?’

‘You might have some suggestions to offer.’

Perhaps she was thinking how ill-advised she would be ever to call me in for help when the cooking goes wrong, even if I am a dab hand with the pappadoms. All she said was, ‘It never hurts to talk an idea over.’

‘There was a chap who wrote a tremendous article on the generation of ideas in conversation. A German last century, but I can’t remember who – Von Kleist, I think. Probably I told you. I’d like to read that again some time. He pointed out how odd it is that we can surprise even ourselves in conversation, as we can when writing.’

‘Don’t your robots surprise you?’

‘They’ve been done too often. Perhaps I ought to leave them alone. Maybe Jim Ballard’s right and they are old hat, worked to death.’

‘What’s your idea?’

So I stopped dodging the issue and told her.

This earth-like planet, Iksnivarts, declares war on Earth. Its people are extremely long-lived, so that the long voyage to Earth means nothing to them – eighty years are nothing, a brief interval. To the Earthmen, it’s a lifetime. So the only way they can carry the war back to Iksnivarts is to use robots – beautiful, deadly creatures without many of humanity’s grandeurs and failings. They work off solar batteries, they last almost forever, and they carry miniature computers in their heads that can out-think any protoplasmic being.

An armada of ships loaded with these robots is sent off to attack Iksnivarts. With the fleet goes a factory which is staffed by robots capable of repairing their fellows. And with this fully automated strike force goes a most terrible weapon, capable of locking all the oxygen in Iksnivarts’ air into the rocks, so that the planetary atmosphere is rendered unbreathable in the course of a few hours.

The inhuman fleet sails. Some twenty years later, an alien fleet arrives in the solar system and gives Earth, Venus, and Mars a good peppering of radioactive dusts, so that just about seventy per cent of humanity is wiped out. But nothing stops the robot fleet, and after eighty years they reach target. The anti-oxygen weapon is appallingly effective. Every alien dies of almost immediate suffocation, and the planet falls to its metallic conquerors. The robots land, radio news of their success back to Earth, and spend the next ten years tidily burying corpses.

By the time their message gets back to the solar system, Earth is pulling itself together again after its pasting. Men are tremendously interested in their conquest of the distant world, and plan to send a small ship to see what is going on currently on Iksnivarts; but they feel a certain anxiety about their warlike robots, which now own the planet, and send a human-manned ship carrying two pilots in deep freeze. Unfortunately, this ship goes off course through a technical error, as does a second. But a third gets through, and the two pilots aboard, Graham and Josca, come out of cold storage in time to guide their ship in a long reconnaissance glide through Iksnivarts’ unbreathable atmosphere.

When their photographs are delivered back to Earth – after they have endured another eighty years in deep freeze – they show a world covered with enormous robot cities, and tremendous technological activity going on apace. This looks alarming.

But Earth is reassured. It seems that the war robots they made have turned to peaceful ways. More than one shot through the telescope lenses shows solitary robots up in the hills and mountains of their planet, picking flowers. One close-up in particular is reproduced in every communication medium and finds its way all round rejoicing Earth. It shows a heavily armed robot, twelve feet high, with its arms laden with flowers. And that was to be the title of my story: ‘Robot with Flowers’.

Marion had finished washing up by this time. We were standing in my little sheltered back garden, idly watching the birds swoop along the roof of the old church that stands behind the garden. Nikola came out and joined us.

‘Is that the end?’ Marion asked.

‘Not quite. There’s an irony to come. This shot of the robot with flowers is misinterpreted – an automated example of the pathetic fallacy, I suppose. The robots have to destroy all flowers, because flowers exhale oxygen, and oxygen is liable to give the robots rust troubles. They’ve not picked up the human trick of appreciating beauty, they’re indulging in the old robot vice of being utilitarian, and in a few years they’ll be coming back to lick the Earthmen on Earth.’

Inside the kitchen, I could hear the fridge charging again. I fought an urge to tell Marion about it; I didn’t want to disturb the sunlight on her face.

She said, ‘That sounds quite a good twist. It sounds as if it ought to make a decent run-of-the-mill story. Not quite you, perhaps.’

‘Somehow, I don’t think I can bring myself to finish it.’

‘It’s a bit like that Poul Anderson robot story you admired – “Epilogue”, wasn’t it?’

‘Maybe. Every SF story is getting like every other one. It’s also a bit like one of Harry’s in his War With the Robots collection.’

‘“Anything that Harry wrote can’t be all bad”’, she said, quoting a private joke.

‘“Wish I’d written that,”’ I said, adding the punchline. ‘But that isn’t really why I don’t want to finish “Robot With Flowers”. Maybe Fred Pohl or Mike Moorcock would like it enough to publish it, but I feel disappointed with it. Not just because it’s a crib.’

‘You said once that you could always spot a crib because it lacked emotional tone.’

The goldfish were flitting about under the water-lily leaves in my little ornamental pond. Both Nikola and Marion had got interested in them; I said that they were alike. I looked down at them in love and a little exasperation. Her last remark told me she was carrying on the conversation just for my sake – it lacked emotional tone.

‘You were meant to ask why I was disappointed with the idea.’

‘Darling, if we are going to go and collect the Carrs, we ought to be moving. It’s two-forty already.’

‘I’m raring to go.’

‘I won’t be a moment.’ She kissed me as she went by.

Of course she was right, I thought. I had to work it out for myself, otherwise I would never be satisfied. I went and sat by the cat and watched the goldfish. The birds were busy round the church, feeding their young; they could enjoy so few summers.

In a way, what I wanted to say was not the sort of thing I wanted to say to Marion, and for a special reason that was very much part of me. I’d seen many loving summers with several loving girls, and now here was Marion, the sweetest of them all, the one with whom I could be most myself and most freely speak my thoughts; for that very reason, I did not wish to abuse the privilege and needed to keep some reserves in me.

So I was chary about telling her more than I had done. I was chary about telling her that in my present mood of happiness I felt only contempt for my robot story, and would do so however skilfully I wrote it. There was no war in my heart; how could I begin to believe in an interplanetary war with all its imponderables and impossibilities? When I was lapped about by such a soft and gentle person as Marion, why this wish to traffic in emotionless metal mockeries of human beings?

Further, was not science fiction a product of man’s divided and warring nature? I thought it was, for my own science fiction novels dealt mainly with dark things, a reflection of the personal unhappiness that had haunted my own life until Marion entered it. But this too was not a declaration lightly to be made.

The idea of robots gathering flowers, I suddenly thought, was a message from my psyche telling me to reverse the trend of my armed apprehensions, to turn about that line of Shakespeare’s:

‘And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies;

Now thrive the armourers. …’

It was a time for me to bankrupt my fictional armourers and get out the dalliance. My psyche wanted to do away with armoured men – but my fearful ego had to complete the story by making the robots merely prepare for a harsher time to come. All fiction was a similar rationalisation of internal battles.

But suppose my time of trouble was over … even suppose it was only over temporarily … Ought I not to disarm while I could? Ought I not to offer some thanks to the gods and my patient regular readers by writing a cheerful story while I could, to reach out beyond my fortifications and show them for once a future it might be worth living in?

No, that was too involved to explain. And it made good enough sense for me not to need to explain it.

So I got up and left the cat sprawled by the pond, fishing with an occasional hope under the leaves. I walked through the kitchen into the study and started putting essentials into my pockets and taking inessentials out, my mind on the picnic. It was a lovely day, warm and almost cloudless. Charles Carr and I would need some cold beer. They were providing the picnic hamper, but I had a sound impulse to make sure of the beer.

As I took four cans out of the fridge, the motor started charging again. Poor old thing, it was getting old. Under ten years old, but you couldn’t expect a machine to last for ever. Only in fiction. You could send an animated machine out on a paper spaceship voyage over paper light years and it would never let you down. The psyche saw to that. Perhaps if you started writing up-beat stories, the psyche would be encouraged by them and start thinking in an upbeat way, as it had ten years and more ago.

‘Just getting some beer!’ I said, as Marion came back into the room from upstairs. She had changed her dress and put on fresh lipstick. She looked just the sort of girl without which no worthwhile picnic was complete. And I knew she would be good with the Carr kids too.

‘There’s a can opener in the car, I seem to remember,’ she said. ‘And what exactly struck you as so wrong with your story?’

I laughed. ‘Oh, never mind that! It’s just that it seemed so far divorced from real life.’ I picked up the cans and made towards the door, scooping one beer-laden arm about her and reciting, ‘“How can I live without thee, how forgo Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined?” Adam to Eve, me to you.’

‘You’ve been at the beer, my old Adam. Let me get my handbag. How do you mean, divorced from real life? We may not have robots yet, but we have a fridge with a mind of its own.’

‘Exactly. Then why can’t I get the fridge into an SF story, and this wonderful sunlight, and you, instead of just a bunch of artless robots? See that little furry cat outside, trying to scoop up goldfish? She has no idea that today isn’t going to run on forever, that the rest of life isn’t going to be one golden afternoon. We know it won’t be, but wouldn’t it be a change if I could make a story about just this transitory golden afternoon instead of centuries of misery and total lack of oxygen, cats, and sexy females?’

We were outside the front door. I shut it and followed Marion to the car. We were going to be a bit late.

She laughed, knowing by my tone that I was half kidding.

‘Go ahead and put those things into a story,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you can do it. Pile them all in!’

Though she was smiling, it sounded like a challenge.

I put the beer carefully into the back of the car and we drove off down the baking road for our picnic.

How Are They All on Deneb IV?

All right, I know, times are changing. It’s the great theme of our age. Ever since evolution and all that, the decades have gone hog wild for change; you’d think there was a law about it. Maybe there is a law about it.

Don’t think I’m complaining: I am. Since I was a kid, everything has changed, from the taste of bread to the nature of Africa and China. But at least I thought SF would stay the same.

Instead, what has happened? It’s all different. They don’t write like Heinlein any more – even Heinlein doesn’t. In the old days, you knew exactly where you stood in a story. Take the aliens; back in the Golden Age, when the writers had a bit of a sense of wonder and there were blondes on the covers, you knew the aliens would always be there, endlessly mown down, endlessly picturesque, swarming over endless alien worlds. But nowadays – well, let’s take actual cases, he said, reaching eagerly for the May 1940 copy of Gruelling Science Stories. The Luftwaffe was plastering London at the time, but thank heavens the American SF writers hadn’t got wind of that, and Zago Blinder was still turning out his customary peaceful limpid prose. His May 1940 stint was entitled, with what I’ve always thought showed considerable skill in alliteration, ‘The Devils of Deneb IV’.

You know how this sort of thing goes right from the start. The pleasure lies in its predictability. Scarcely has the whine (whisper, snarl, thunder) of the landing jets died than the hatch opens and three Earthmen jump (crawl, climb, fall) out and stand looking round Deneb IV. They find the air is breathable and quickly hoist the flag (Old Glory, UN banner, Stars and Stripes).

Up to now, we readers have been carried along breathlessly (restlessly, hesitantly, mindlessly) on the flood of the author’s prose, full of admiration for the way in which he has so economically created a situation so distinct from our own humdrum world. More, the old-timers among us are full of gratitude for his dropping the first three (four, six, twelve) chapters describing the construction of the spaceship in someone’s back yard and its long eventful journey to Deneb which were once considered compulsory in this sort of exercise.

Now, however, comes an awkward pause. We have been brought painlessly through what the textbooks call Building Up Atmosphere, Establishing Environment, Creating Character, and so on. The idyllic mood must be shattered. It is time to Introduce the Action.

‘Look!’ gasps (coughs, barks, yells) the captain, pointing with trembling (rigid, scarred, nicotine-stained) finger at the nearby hill (jungle, ocean, ruined temple). His crewmen follow the line of his fingertip, and there approaching them they see an angry group (ugly bunch, slavering horde, slobbering herd) of Denebians who are plainly out for blood as they gallop (surge, slime, esp) towards the spaceship.

You must admit this is value for money, particularly if you only borrowed the magazine. In no time, the three intrepid explorers are back in their ship and the vile Denebians are trying to scratch their way in through the cargo hatch.

What more could you ask for? Personally, I asked for nothing more; I had had enough by the time I came across this situation for the fiftieth time. It was not boredom so much as bravery. The Denebians weren’t what they used to be. However mindless and merciless they got, I was no longer scared. I developed immunity. Yet, for all that, I liked things the way they were. The more unsociably those aliens behaved, the more I realized how superior we Earthmen were.

Then things became less straightforward. I was rifling through Microscopic Sex Wonder during the boom year of 1951 when I realised that Deneb was no longer the same. They’d dared to alter the plot!

This time, the aliens didn’t appear when the flag was hoisted. Everything was peaceful – too peaceful. Our three chums wandered among beautiful trees, or they found charming people like themselves but nicer, with sweet old mums sitting knitting on the porch, and Pa sucking a corn cob and spittin’ to avoid bunches of rosy-cheeked kids, or else they found nothing there at all except the waving grass.

You remember what happened, don’t you? Those beautiful trees, that grand old granny, those cheeky kids, that expanse of nothing, that sneaky grass, was really our old Denebians in disguise. Yes, sir! Freud had hit SF by this date, and the old slobbering hordes were back in full force only nastier, because they could thought-wrap themselves as grannies or grass and get into the ship and cause chaos. That was a terrible era, and I don’t know how I survived it. Story after story, I had to face utter mind-wrenching terror.

I grew to love it.

Then they went and changed the plot again! I knew just how things were going and was all set to relax when the editors or whoever it is that insists on these things – for sure it’s not the writers – altered the orthodoxy.

I can pinpoint the date exactly when I realized something had gone wrong. I had bought the Jannish – sorry, the January issue of The Monthly of Whimsey and Whammo-Science, 1960, and was leafing through this story by Piledriver Jones entitled ‘On Deneb Deep My Pleasure Stalks’. Funny, I thought, the title doesn’t sound right, they’ve started mucking around with the titles now, is nothing sacred? But since I wanted to find out if a pleasure stalk was what I thought it was (it wasn’t), I forced myself to read on.

You can’t fail to recall the story, not only because it has since been anthologised fifty-two times and won a Hank, but because it started a new trend. This is the one where they arrive on Deneb IV all right, in this funny ship that rides solar winds, but some sort of bug gets them and they all grow extra limbs; the captain alone grows twelve big toes, fourteen left arms, a spare pair of buttocks, two girl’s knees, and a horse’s head. And then they sit around and talk philosophy, not minding at all, until in the end it turns out that back on Earth things are even worse because people are terribly short of horse’s heads and buttocks and knee caps and things.

Let’s have no false modesty – I can adjust to anything. But it needs about twenty years to adjust to that sort of plot. And what happened? Already, already, they’ve altered the line again. That’s what I mean about change running hog wild.

Just this year the new orthodoxy has set in. Look at this month’s crop of magazines – it’s not a very big crop these days, because people won’t read unless they know what to expect – look at Monolog, look at Off, look at Odious Fantasy and Lewd Worlds and Gallimaufry, and what do you find? Not a darned one of them has a story set on Deneb IV!

Not a darned one of them has a story set on any alien planet! They’re all Earth stories, everyone, though Monolog has this nine-part serial set in England at the time of the Norman Conquest, with William the Conqueror finding cases of telepathy among the peasants. Otherwise, nothing! Russians, psi powers, medicine, psychology, sociology, politics, traffic problems, robots, nuclear wars, funny little tales about fellows meeting aliens and not realising it, oh yes, no shortage of all that sort of stuff, and, of course, plenty of drowned, crystallised, rainless, bug-ridden, childless, adultless, metal-less, doodless, witless worlds, all of them Earth. But not a single story set on another planet.

I’d chuck in my hand. I would. I’d give up. I’d never bother to try and read another SF story in another magazine in my life. There just happens to be one small thing that gives me grounds for hope.

Lewd Worlds has a little cameo, not more than a thousand words long, about this chap who seduces this girl and then creeps into his back yard and builds his own rocket ship. He has this secret perverted desire to reach the stars, see?

It’s only a matter of sweating it out a few more years, boys. We’ll get back to Deneb one day. The times they are a-changing.

The Impossible Smile

I

June 1st, 2020: Norwich, Capital of the British Republics. A sports car growled through the empty streets. Pouring rain was turning the evening green as the car ran slowly up the hill towards the barracks. Beside the driver a nervous man in a blue mac consulted his wrist watch every two seconds. He swallowed continually, peering out at the curtain of rain, muttering when the great barrack wall loomed into view.

The barracks, after some hasty redecoration, had been converted into a palace fortress for Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader of the State. Behind the plaster of the newly decorated rooms, a man crouched. The room was a bathroom belonging to the Leader’s suite, and the man was

armed.

For forty-two hours the armed man had waited in his two-foot-wide hiding place. He had dozed without daring to sleep, afraid of breaking through the wafer of plaster before him. He had provisions, a luminous watch – and his gun. He heard someone enter the bathroom.

Fixing his right eye to a hair-thin crack, he watched and waited. The man in the bathroom was out of his line of vision as yet; by the sound of it, he was undressing. Grinning his strange grin, the assassin twitched his leg muscles to exercise them. Soon, praise be, he’d need to move fast.

The man in the bathroom went over to the shower, presenting his bare back to the plaster wall; as he turned on the shower, he presented his profile. This was it! For this second the forty-two hours had been endured.

The assassin pushed aside the flimsy plaster and fired three times. Jim Bull, ex-spacehand, ex-firebrand, fell dead, head under the tepid spray. The water began to turn gravy-coloured as it drained away.

Still clutching his gun, the killer slid sideways in his recess to an old lift shaft. He jumped twelve feet onto a carefully planted mattress, and was on the ground floor. He flung back the folding lift door whose rusty padlock had been previously attended to, and emerged into a stone corridor at the back of the barrack block.

A soldier in shirt sleeves a few yards down the corridor turned and boggled as the killer flung open a window and jumped into the wet evening. Belatedly, the soldier called, ‘Hey!’

The killer ran round a wash-house, cursing his cramped legs, skirted the deserted cookhouse, dodged the swill bins and doubled into the closed way leading to the gym. Two sergeants were approaching him.

They stared in surprise. But the killer wore Army uniform with corporal’s stripes. He winked at them as he passed. The sergeants continued to walk slowly on.

He bolted into the open again at the gym, turned left at the NAAFI, jumped the low hedge into the officers’ quarters and swerved behind the bike shed.

Now he was in the small laundry square, the laundry standing silent at this late hour. Ahead was what was popularly known as Snoggers’ Exit, a narrow wooden gate in the high barracks wall. A sentry stood at the gate.

The fugitive stopped, took aim and, as the sentry hastily raised his light machine-gun, fired. He was running again before the sentry hit the stones. Sounds of whistles far behind spurred him on.

The wooden gate splintered and fell open, before he got to it. Outside on the hill track, the sports car stood. The driver, who had broken down the gate, was already jumping back into his seat. The nervous man in the mac held a back door open for the killer; directly he had scrambled in, the nervous man followed. The car was already on the move again.

They bucked down the track at sixty, skirting the high walls of the barracks. They slowed to turn down a slope, slipping and crashing through wet bracken, and curved among sparse trees. In a clearing they accelerated again, licked past a ruined bandstand and onto a gravelled road.

Rain was falling more heavily when, two minutes later, they swerved sharply left and climbed again. This track curved among pines and brought them suddenly into a chalk pit, once used as a small arms range.

In the middle of the range, a light passenger type spaceship waited, its single port open.

The killer broke from the car and ran across to the ship. He climbed in, ascending the narrow companionway. The pilot, swivelling in his seat, held a levelled revolver until he got a good look at the newcomer’s face; then he dropped it and turned to the controls.

‘Take off in one minute forty-five seconds,’ he said. ‘Strap yourself in quickly.’

Stratton Hall was a big, eighteenth century building a few miles from Norwich. Across the weed-infested courtyard stood a small stable. A horse and rider approached it over the hummocky turf, moving quietly through the downpour. At the stable door, the rider dismounted and led Nicky into the dry. As he did so, he broke off the mental union with the animal; instantly, the wild, wordless chiaroscuros of his vision disappeared, and he was back in his own senses.

The feeling of refreshment left Conrad Wyvern. At once, the memory of his sister’s death returned to him. He rubbed Nicky down less thoroughly than usual, watered him and turned to go.

He had ridden bare-back from East Hingham, as always. As always, he had taken the overland route, avoiding roads, so that Nicky could go unshod. He himself went with no shoes or weapon, and a piece of rope securing his trousers. The Flyspies which covered the country were good at detecting metal, and Wyvern kept his journeys to East Hingham as secret as possible.

It was eleven o’clock, Treble Summertime, as he peered out of the stable, and already growing dark. The rain fell steadily; the harvests would be ruined, turning sour on the stalk. Squinting up at the west gable of the house, Wyvern could see the Flyspy attached to the Hall resting in its recharge cradle, its double vane idle. Even as he looked, the rotors moved and it climbed pot-bellied out of its metal nest, circling the building like a tired barn-owl after mice.

The Flyspies were one of the few new inventions of the ill-financed Republics. At that, thought Wyvern, they weren’t much good. Certainly, they detected any moving metal, but that was something easily circumvented, as he had proved, to his own satisfaction. Their television eye was poor – useless in this light – and he walked over to the rear of the Hall with no effort at concealment, although the machine hovered fairly near.

He slipped quietly in and went up what had been the servants’ staircase to his own rooms to change his clothes. As he did so, he chewed over the evening’s events.

The disused railway station at East Hingham had established itself as a Black Market. You could buy anything there from a box of safety matches (for ten shillings) to a ticket on a moon-bound ship (no upper price limit). Wyvern’s sister Lucie was one of the organisers. Surreptitiously, the place thrived; the Republic, desperately short of manpower after the Fourth War, left it unmolested.

But when Wyvern had got there this evening, the station was a shambles.

He found an old woman dying in the ticket office. As he gave her a drink of water, she rendered him a broken account of the raid.

‘They – Our Leader’s soldiers – drove down in trucks,’ she said. ‘They surrounded the place. Anyone who ran out got shot. Then they came in – very rough! Interrogated us – asked us all questions, you know. I was only after a blanket, if I could get one. I thought it might be cheaper at this time of year.’

‘What about Lucie?’

‘Your sister was rounded up with the other organisers, sir. They were cross-questioned too, and stood against the far wall. Later, they were hustled out, into a lorry, I think. But she passed a note to someone. It must have been for you.’

‘Who did she pass it to?’ Wyvern asked urgently.

‘A little more water, please. It was to … I can’t think … It was to Birdie Byers, who kept the post office – when there was a post. But I think he was shot. We was all shot, sir. Oh – if you’d seen … They weren’t meant to shoot. The officer called out to stop. But they were young chaps – crazy. Crazy! All crazy. I’ll never forget …’

She interrupted herself with a burst of coughing, which turned to weeping. Five minutes later she was mercifully dead.

Wyvern searched grimly for Byers, the old postmaster. He found him at last some yards down the railway line in the direction of Stratton. The old man lay dead, face down in a clump of docks. In his hand was clutched a note. It read: CON – THEY ARE AFTER TELEPATHS FOR BIG BERT. YOU MUST LEAVE. LOVE EVER, LUCE.

Conrad crushed it, tears in his eyes, knowing he would never see his sister again.

The message was fairly clear to him. Big Bert was Bert the Brain, the giant electronic computer situated in the British Republics Sector on the Moon. He could guess why Our Beloved Leader and his gang of thugs should want a telepath for it: he had heard the state secrets which turned into ugly public rumours …

The message told Wyvern something else. It told him that his sister remembered he had the freak power. When they were small children together he had once revealed the secret to her. The indescribable blending of egos had terrified them both; Wyvern never repeated the experiment, and neither of them ever referred to it again. Yet she had not forgotten.

And when Jim Bull’s Gestapo got to work on her – would she not, perhaps under narcotics, give up her secret? If she did so, Wyvern would be a doomed man.

Lucie was right: he must go. But where? America, now more rigidly isolationist than ever before, licking its terrible internal wounds? Russia, where rumour said anarchy prevailed? The new state of Indasia, hostile to the rest of the world? Turkey, the crackpot state which had risen by virtue of the general collapse? The still-warring African republics?

Wyvern toweled himself down, thinking hard. Telepaths were as rare as total eclipses; no doubt the State would like the aid of one. Wyvern had willingly revealed his wild talent to no human but Lucie. He kept it shut away in a tight compartment. For if he tried to ‘read people’s minds’ (as popular parlance inexactly put it), the people would be instantly as aware of his mental presence as if he were shouting. And although his power was of limited range, it flowed out in all directions, so that he was unable to confine it quietly to one desired receiver.

The power had been erratic throughout childhood; with puberty it had come into real being. But Wyvern kept it locked away during the hopeless years of war and devastation. Only occasionally, as with Nicky, had he ventured to use it, and then with a feeling of guilt, as if he had an unearned gift.

Of course, there had been the man in London … Wyvern had been on leave just before the capital was obliterated. A drunk had barged into him down Praed Street. In a moment of anger, the drunk’s mind had opened: the two stood locked in that overpowering union – and then both shut off abruptly. Yet Wyvern knew if he ever met that man again, the recognition would be mutual.

Most of Praed Street must have sensed that strange meeting; but then a crickeytip droned overhead, and everything else was forgotten in a general dive for shelter.

Still bothered by that memory. Wyvern hung his damp clothes over a line and began to dry his hair.

There was a loud rapping at his door. For a moment he had forgotten he was not alone in Stratton Hall. Instinctively he tensed, then relaxed. Not so soon …

‘Come in,’ he said.

It was Plunkett, one of his pupils on the course he ran here.

‘Sir, come into the rec, quick!’ Plunkett said. ‘They’ve just announced it on the telly – OBL’s had his chips!’

OBL was an irreverent way of referring to Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader.

Wyvern followed the youngster downstairs at a run. His government job was to teach relays of twelve young men the essentials of his own invention, cruxtistics, the science of three-di mathematical aerial lodgements, first established in space and later adapted to stratospheric fighting. He enjoyed the task, even if it was for a loathed régime, for the squads of eager young men, changing every five weeks, brought life to the decaying house, with its peeling paint and its two ancient servants.

It had been Plunkett, for instance, who had invented the Flyspy-baiter. He had trapped birds and tied tinfoil to their legs; when released, they had flown off and attracted the miniature gyro after them, televising frantically and signalling to HQ for help.

Plunkett led the way to the rec room. The other eleven youths were clustered round the ill-coloured tellyscreen. They called excitedly to their instructor.

On the screen, men marching. Wyvern found time to wonder how often he had seen almost identical shots – how often, over years and years of war, armistice and betrayed peace; it seemed a miracle there were still men to march. These now, lean and shabby, paraded beneath the angular front of the capital’s city hall, with its asymmetrical clock tower.

‘Our on-the-spot newsreel shows you crack troops pouring into the capital for the funeral of Our Beloved Leader, to be held tomorrow. The assassin is expected to be apprehended at any minute; there is nobody in the whole Republic who would not gladly be his executioner!’

The metallic voice stopped. There were more scenes from other parts of the inhabitable country: York, Glasgow, Hull. Shouting, marching, shows of mourning, the dipping of banners.

‘And now we give you a personal message from Colonel H,’ the unseen commentator said. ‘Friends, Colonel H! – Head of the New Police, Chief Nursemaid of State, Our Late Beloved Leader’s Closest Friend!’

Colonel H lowered into the cameras. Aping the old Prussian style, his hair was clipped to a short stubble, so that it looked now as if it stood on end with his fury. His features were small, almost pinched, their niggardliness emphasised by two heavy bars of dark eyebrow and a protruding jaw. He was less popular generally than Jim Bull but more feared.

‘Republicans!’ he began, as one who should say ‘curs’, ‘Our Beloved Leader has been killed – raped of his life by bloody brutes. We have all lost a friend! We have all lost our best friend! By allowing him to die we have betrayed him and his high ideals. We must suffer! We must scourge ourselves! We shall suffer – and we shall be scourged! We have been too easy, and the time for easiness is not yet, not while there are still maniacs among us.

‘I shall take over temporary leadership until a new Beloved Leader is elected by republican methods. I mean to make tight the chinks in our security curtain. The way will be hard, republicans, but I know you will suffer gladly for the sake of truth.

‘Meanwhile, it makes me happy to announce that the two murderers of Our Late Beloved Leader have just been apprehended by our splendid New Police. Here they are for you all to view – and loathe. Their punishment will be announced later.’

The scowling visage faded.

On the screen, a bullet-riddled sports car lay overturned near a roadside garage. A motley crowd of soldiers and civilians jostled round it. An officer stood on top of a tank, bellowing his lungs out through a megaphone. Nobody paid him any attention. It was pouring with grey rain.

The camera panned between the crowd. Two terrified men stood against the overturned car. One, the driver, silently hugged a shattered arm; the other, a small fellow in a blue mac, stood to attention and wept.

‘These are the blood-crazed, reactionary killers!’ screamed the commentator.

‘Crikey!’ Plunkett exclaimed, ‘they don’t look capable of passing dud cheques!’

‘Stand by for shots from the British Republics Sector of the Moon!’ the commentator said.

The familiar domes like great cloches faded in. Utilitarian architecture, ventilation towers, mobs of people surging back and forth, waving sticks, shaking fists.

‘These true republicans demonstrate their loyalty to the new Leader, Colonel H,’ cried the commentator. ‘They savagely mourn the grave loss of Our Late Beloved Leader!’

‘They don’t, you know,’ a youngster of Wyvern’s party exclaimed. ‘I reckon they are rioting!’

It certainly looked as if that was the case. The colony had scant respect for any Earth authority, but Jim Bull had been an old spacer, and as such his word had always carried some weight. The sound track was cut in, and the viewers heard an ugly roaring. And then, for Wyvern, the miracle happened. The camera swooped into close-up, facing a swirling knot of people. In the background, a girl passed, taking no notice of the agitators.

And her thoughts came over clearly to Wyvern!

She was a telepath! He glanced quickly at the other twelve viewers, but they obviously noticed nothing. Somehow, over the ether, her thoughts had been filtered out for all but another telepath: and her thoughts were in turmoil.

Wyvern watched her almost incredulously, his eyes strained to the reproduction of her figure. And she was thinking, in profound anxiety, ‘Got to follow him. 108, JJ Lane: that’s his destination. Heavens, I’m sending – must stop!’

That was all; but with the thought ‘I’ came, vaguely, her name: Eileen something – Eileen South, it had seemed to Wyvern.

She ceased sending. In a moment, she disappeared behind a pillar. The camera lost her. Wyvern forced himself to begin breathing again.

Who the ‘him’ was Eileen South had to follow, he could not grasp; but floating behind the pronoun had been another phrase in her mind; ‘the impossible smile’.

Of one thing he was sure. He had to get to Luna – he had to find Eileen South; she was his kind.

II

Around the factories and the quaint housing estates – dating back to the fifties of the previous century and already in decay – which fringed the capital of the Republic, a clutter of prefabricated buildings had gathered like rubbish along the high tide mark of a beach. Refugees and traders from London and the shattered Midlands accumulated here in all the disorder of an oriental bazaar.

It was to this region that Wyvern drove in his shooting brake the next morning. He had a small collections of canvases under his arm – a Dufy, two Paul Nashes and a Sutherland, the last of his father’s fine collection. Wyvern knew of no other way to raise the required money for a lunar ticket quickly. In this quarter, they bought anything – at their own price.

After half an hour, Wyvern emerged with five thousand, five hundred pounds in greasy tenners; it was about a half of what the Dufy alone was worth. But it bought a ticket on the moonship Aqualung, leaving at midday the next day.

That gave him twenty-four-hours to wait. He just hoped he would still be at liberty when the time came. But the officials at Thorpe spaceport had seemed casual enough: his passport had been checked, his papers examined, and not a word said. He drove home in a state of modest triumph.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, soon after he had got back to Stratton, he was arrested by the New Police.

At four-thirty, after a bumpy lorry-ride which he spent handcuffed to the frame of the lorry, he found himself back in Norwich again.

The New Police had taken over a big department store on one corner of the market square; it swarmed with activity. Still handcuffed, Wyvern was taken through a side door up to the second floor and left with a Captain Runton, who nodded to him in abstracted fashion and continued to direct some builders working there.

This floor was still being converted to police use. Once, it had been a spacious restaurant; now, flimsy partitions were transforming it into a nest of tiny offices.

‘Let’s see, what are you here for?’ the Captain asked Wyvern mildly.

‘It’s no good asking me: I don’t know,’ Wyvern said, truthfully.

‘You don’t what?’

‘Know, I don’t know,’ Wyvern said.

‘Sorry, there’s so much banging here! You have to watch these fellows or they down tools. I think they suspect they are not going to get paid for this job.’

A swinging plank narrowly missed his ear. He ducked under a partition frame.

‘Now,’ he shouted, above a fresh outburst of hammering. ‘We’ve found in practice that the quickest thing for everyone is for you to confess at once, without mucking about.’

‘Confess what?’

‘The crime.’

‘What crime?’

‘What what? Oh, what crime? Why man, the crime for which you were brought here.’

‘You’ll have to tell me what it is first,’ Wyvern said grimly.

‘Oh hell, I suppose I’ll have to take you down and look at your bloody papers,’ Captain Runton said sourly. ‘It won’t pay you to be unco-operative, you know.’

He bellowed to the workmen to keep hard at it and led the way to a lift. They descended to the basement and Runton pushed Wyvern into his room; cocking his leg up on the edge of a desk, Runton read carefully through the ill-typed report someone had left on his pad.

Wyvern looked round. Tarnished mirrors greeted him, and glass-fronted cupboards with cracked glass, containing cardboard boxes and big rubber bouncing balls for children. He saw little wooden spades, yachting caps, a dusty poster saying ‘The Glorious Norfolk Broads’. Nothing very frightening: he wondered why he felt frightened.

The captain of police was looking at him.

‘So you’re Conrad Wyvern, one of the inventors of cruxtistics?’ he said.

‘Is that why I’ve been arrested?’

Runton went and sat heavily down in the room’s only chair. His behind was running to fat and his hair thinning. It was a wonder how he did it on the lean rations. No doubt he had lost his family and spent long evenings feeling sorry for himself, drinking. He looked the typical man of his age: comfortless, unlovable.

‘Why do you suddenly want to go to the Moon, Mr Wyvern?’ he asked.

‘There’s nothing sudden about it,’ Wyvern said. ‘I’ve been planning this trip for some time.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh – a change.’

‘A change from what?’

‘From routine.’

‘You don’t like routine?’

‘Yes, but I just want a change.’

‘You realise you do an important job, Mr Wyvern?’

‘Of course. I thought a change –’

‘The government doesn’t like to lose its important men.’

‘I booked return, didn’t I? I’ll be back in four days, before the next course starts at Stratton.’

‘The government doesn’t like to lose its important men even for four days.’

‘It’s getting choosy, isn’t it?’ Wyvern asked. He could feel his temper rising.

‘These are bad days, Mr Wyvern.’

‘Need we make them worse?’

‘You can still hear that bloody banging, even from here.’ Runton sighed deeply. He picked up the phone.

‘The palace,’ he said, not without a trace of irony. After a pause, he said, ‘Get me Colonel H.’ After another pause, ‘I’m Captain Runton, late of Leicester; he’ll remember.’ Later, ‘Yes, I’ll settle for his secretary.’

Finally he was put through.

‘Hello? Captain Runton here … Good. Look, we have Conrad Wyvern here … Yes, that’s him. He is being rather impolite in answer to polite questions … Yes … May I bring him over to you? … Well, for one thing, we have the decorators in here, making a lot of noise, and for another I hoped I might perhaps have the great pleasure of – er, possibly meeting Colonel H again … Oh yes, yes, I’m sure he must be … Yes, well another thing was, I hear you have a marvellous new Inquisitor up there, eh? … No, oh no, sir, that was a mild joke merely. I’m sorry. I naturally meant Questioner … Thank you.’

Runton hung up, puffing out his cheeks. Somebody at the other end of the line evidently did not love him.

‘Come on, Wyvern,’ he said heavily. ‘We’re going over to see the big chiefs at the barracks.’

It took ten minutes to drive, in a commandeered Post Office van, up to the barracks where Our Beloved Leader had been shot. It took a further twenty to get inside, by which time Captain Runton was more nervous than his captive.

Aside from his own preoccupations, Wyvern was intrigued by the Captain. The man was plainly using him as an excuse to ingratiate himself with the powers-that-be. He seemed to have nothing specific against Wyvern; the mere fact that Wyvern was someone of importance made him worth hanging on to. All of which might be very well for Runton, but was uncomfortable for Wyvern.

And now, no doubt, Runton was reflecting that if he had come on a wild-goose chase he would get, not congratulations, but a kick in the well-padded seat of his pants. And that would make him unscrupulous about getting something pinned on Wyvern. Just what would happen seemed suddenly in the hands of chance; one thing Wyvern sincerely hoped: that the State’s inter-departmental communications were poor, and that these people did not know his sister had been arrested at East Hingham.

That question at least was partly answered when they were finally allowed out of the guard room, and Runton grumbled, ‘There’s a lot of reorganisation needed here – everyone lives in watertight compartments. No government department knows what the next one is up to. You can’t get anything done.’

The barracks swarmed with soldiers and police. Tanks were drawn up in the old drill square.

‘I’d better take your handcuffs off,’ Runton said. ‘They look a bit ostentatious in here. And for God’s sake don’t try anything, or I’ll shoot you down and swear blind you were OBL’s murderer.’

‘I thought they’d already caught the killers?’ Wyvern asked, mildly surprised.

‘Hold your tongue while you’ve got the chance,’ Runton said in a sharp burst of savagery.

They passed together into the main building, where an armed guard met them and escorted them upstairs. The armed guard met them and escorted them upstairs. The guards’ hobnails clattered loudly up the stone steps. A clock at the top said nearly six. ‘Eighteen hours before my ship goes,’ Wyvern thought grimly.

They were pushed through a door on which, in still wet paint, was the legend ‘Col. H & Sec.’ Inside, the first thing that caught Wyvern’s eye was the pot of white paint itself. It stood nearly empty on a desk, the brush in it. Someone had been doing over the window casement with it, and the room stank of paint.

‘Same old Republication muddle,’ Wyvern thought, but the man in the room, Colonel H’s secretary, gave him other ideas.

The secretary was a man in his late fifties, as thin and neat as a picked chicken bone. His uniform was spotless, his white hair impeccably parted. His eyes were fish cold.

‘Oh – er, we’ve an appointment with Colonel H,’ said Runton, plainly distressed at lack of clue to rank on the secretary’s uniform.

‘Are you Conrad Wyvern?’ the secretary asked Wyvern.

‘I am.’

‘You have an appointment with Colonel H,’ the secretary said. ‘Thank you for bringing him, Captain. Have you his report there? Thank you, splendid. We will keep you no longer.’

He accepted the report and waited for Runton to shamble backwards out of the room, without once removing his gaze from Wyvern. The latter, to his chagrin, found himself fidgeting and looking down. He decided to defend by attack.

‘I am hoping to receive an official apology for the way I’ve been treated,’ he said. ‘I was handcuffed and brought here on the very flimsiest of pretexts.’

‘Our junior officers make up in enthusiasm what they lack in manners,’ the secretary said.

‘Is that supposed to be an apology?’

The secretary stood up.

‘No, it damn well isn’t,’ he said. ‘The State does not apologise. We brought you here to cross-examine you, not kiss you better. The Republic is in its early days – we can’t afford to be sentimental. Don’t you know, the road to success is paved with bruised egos like yours. If you feel badly about all this, it’s obviously because you are out of sympathy with us. Why are you out of sympathy with us, Wyvern?’

‘I don’t think –’ Wyvern said, then lapsed into silence. It was hardly an answerable question.

‘You are an important man, Wyvern – or you could be. You should be a member of the Party, Wyvern. Why aren’t you a member of the Party, Wyvern?’ He used the name as if it were a dirty word.

‘I’m busy – teaching your young men.’

‘And?’

‘Well, it’s a full-time job.’

‘You get four or five days break between each course, don’t you?’

‘I have to organise things – administration, rations …’

‘Oh? But it has to wait if you fancy a flip to Luna, eh?’

‘Can you tell me how long it will be before the Colonel is ready to see me?’ Wyvern asked pointedly. ‘Perhaps you would care to continue painting your office?’

The secretary reached out and struck him across the cheek. Then he turned, going by a side door into the adjoining room. It slammed behind him, hard.

By now, Wyvern was slightly rattled; he even contemplated stepping into the corridor and trying to make a break for it. But a slight scrape of an army boot and a mutter of conversation outside the room told him the corridor was guarded.

Devoutly, Wyvern wished he could use his hidden power to find just what these people intended of him; but that was impossible; he could no more commune with this secretary without his being aware of it than he could dance with him.

The secretary returned accompanying a sturdy man with wide shoulders and small features. He looked more plebeian in the flesh than over TV, but was unmistakably Colonel H. He held a juicy pat of butter in one hand and ate it with a teaspoon.

‘Loot!’ he explained to Wyvern. ‘First fresh butter I’ve tasted for months. There are some advantages in having OBL out of the way.’ He chuckled and sucked the spoon greedily.

The secretary frowned.

‘Sir, may I know why I have been brought here in this undignified way?’ Wyvern asked urgently. ‘If I’ve broken any laws, please tell me.’

A slip of butter fell onto the secretary’s desk.

‘We’ve none of us got any dignity these days,’ Colonel H said. ‘We gave up our right to dignity when we dropped the first fusion bombs. Oh, I know it’s easy for me to theorise … Look here, Wyvern, we can’t let you go to the Moon. How do we know you’re not planning to nip off to the American Sector as soon as you get there? We’ve got to have you here, teaching our boys cruxtistics, or whatever it is.’

‘Why should you think I was planning to leave the Republic?’ Wyvern asked.

Colonel H laughed.

‘We can’t trust anyone,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be tough in Britain this next decade, and those who can’t face the prospect will betray us. A hungry man will cut his brother’s throat for a crust of bread. I’ve just had word of a roundup of profiteers at a place called East Hingham – the list of prisoners should be in at any minute. Those sort of people, they’re swindling someone, they only deserve shooting.’

He lapsed into moody silence and dug into his pat of butter.

‘If only there was some way of really knowing what people are thinking inside here.’ The colonel thumped his stubbly skull. ‘Really knowing … And there is a way, if we could only get at it.’

‘I don’t think that idea is something we should discuss with a suspect,’ the secretary said primly.

‘Why not?’ the colonel asked. Then he laughed, ‘You see, I was thinking of sending him down into the cellars to see our new inquisitor – and he ought to know what it’s all about first.’

At that, the secretary laughed too, and wet his lips.

‘You better tell him about it,’ the colonel said. He licked the last of the butter off the paper, dropped the paper into a wastepaper basket and slipped the spoon into a pocket of his tunic.

‘It won’t take long,’ the secretary said crisply. ‘You have heard of Big Bert, Wyvern. It is the largest computer in existence, except for Fall Cut, the American computer on Luna. For a number of years, for lack of adequate staff, Big Bert has lain practically idle, yet it is potentially the Republic’s greatest weapon. You see, Bert has latent mind-reading abilities. Once he is taught, we, the State, will be able to know what any citizen is thinking!’

Wyvern’s hands had gone damp. He rested them lightly on the desk.

‘When – when is he going to be taught?’ he asked. His voice sounded unreal in his ears.

‘That’s the snag!’ Colonel H exclaimed. ‘Only a telepath knows what this telepathy stunt really is. We’ve got to get our hands on a telepath – as soon as possible.’

‘Actually, we had one,’ the secretary said. ‘A fellow called Grisewood volunteered. But there are surgical difficulties – which have now been overcome – in coupling these freaks to the machine. Grisewood died. Now we want another of his ilk. You don’t happen to know any telepathic persons running round loose, Wyvern, do you?’

Were they playing with him? Did they know all the time?

Wyvern said: ‘I wouldn’t know one if I saw one.’

Colonel H went over to the door. ‘Big Bert seems to think that telepathy is a sort of side product of intelligence – you wouldn’t get it in an idiot, for instance. So we’re checking on anyone who isn’t imbecile. We are starting a republic-wide drive very shortly. You’d better be checked now you’re here, Wyvern.’

He turned, his finger on the door handle, and looked at Wyvern. In his eyes was a terrible kind of excitement; Wyvern recognised it: it was blood lust. He knew then his life and reputation were mere straws to these men.

‘Is this justice?’ he said.

‘My dear man, of course not,’ the secretary said, his voice expressing incredulity at such a naïve question. ‘We are only police, and as such our concern is with the law, not with justice. For justice you must go to the government – if you can get there!’

‘You are the government!’ Wyvern said.

‘Good God, not yet!’ Colonel H said. ‘OBL only died the day before yesterday. Give us a week!’

He uttered his meaningless laugh again, and opened the door.

‘Corporal, take this civilian down to Parrodyce in the cellars,’ he called.

A corporal and a private marched in at once.

‘Parrodyce is our new Inquisitor,’ the secretary whispered to Wyvern, conspiratorially. ‘You’ll find he’s hot stuff!’

Wyvern was seized and marched into the corridor. He did not struggle; it seemed useless. The mentality of the captive had descended suddenly upon him, a resignation blind to life.

They clumped downstairs, and then down two underground flights, and then along a corridor, and then through a locked steel door and down another corridor. And as they moved more deeply into the stronghold, paradoxically, a hope began to grow in Wyvern. This Inquisitor, Parrodyce, however cruel his methods were, would have no more understanding of telepathy than anyone else; he would not know what to look for; he would fail; Wyvern would be released.

The corporal pushed Wyvern into a tiny room. ‘Strip,’ he ordered, and stood watching interestedly while Wyvern did so.

‘Let’s have your kit,’ he said.

Wyvern handed it over. Protesting would do him no good. Yet in his pocket went his health certificate, passport, identity and ticket for the Aqualung.

‘How long am I likely to be down here?’ he asked the corporal.

‘Let’s have your watch too. That depends on you.’

‘I’ve got to be out tomorrow.’

‘Have you now? I’d better tell the chap who makes the coffins to get busy, then, hadn’t I?’

He disappeared, leaving the private on guard. In two minutes he was back. Signalling to Wyvern, he led him through a swing door. It was hot in here, and there was a smell of antiseptic and ether about.

‘This is where they operate,’ the corporal said in a hushed voice. ‘They do some terrible things in here.’

A man in a white coat passed them, wheeling a patient along on a trolley. The corporal gaped.

‘Did you see that?’ he whispered. ‘The poor fellow has had his lower jaw removed! How long do you think he’ll live like that?’

Without hanging about for an answer, he pushed Wyvern through another door, remaining outside himself and bolting the door. Wyvern found he was alone with a nurse.

‘I must warn you that any show whatsoever of violence, or any raising of the voice in shouting or screaming will be dealt with very firmly indeed,’ she said, in the voice of one repeating a lesson. ‘Now come and have a shower. This way.’

‘I don’t need a shower,’ he said.

‘Come and have a shower,’ she said. ‘You’re filthy. Mr Parrodyce is funny about people who stink.’

The shower was nothing. True, for a few seconds Wyvern, twisting in pain against the cubicle wall, thought he was being scalded to death; but then it was over, and the cold soused him back to a grim sanity. Someone, presumably, was just getting his hand in.

‘Now you look quite a healthy pink,’ said the nurse sociably.

She shackled his hands behind his back on a pair of long-chained cuffs, and led him into another room. Wyvern noticed the walls and door were very thick; the room itself would be quite soundproof.

It was furnished with steel cupboards, a big chair like a dentist’s with gas cylinders attached, and a light table at which a plump man sat, his hands folded on the table top. His spectacles flashed as he looked up at Wyvern.

‘This is Mr Parrodyce,’ the nurse said, and left the room.

‘I’ve got to kill this devil,’ Wyvern thought. He had never felt that way about anybody before; the emotion came on a wave of revulsion that shocked him with its strength.

Yet Parrodyce had not touched him. He had merely come round the table, looked, and gone back and sat down, putting his hands back on the table top. Now he sat there, his hands trembling slightly.

And Wyvern hated him.

Also, he had suddenly realised that the power to kill might well lie within his mind. The shock of ego-union which everyone called telepathy was formidable; driven steel-tipped with hate into an unprepared brain, it should prove fatal, or at least cause insanity. And that would be nice, thought Wyvern.

‘What shall I do to you first?’ Parrodyce asked.

Suddenly, it was as if Wyvern had already suffered all this in another existence. For was this not, he asked himself, the nightmare which had afflicted every generation since the first World War: to be delivered into the hands of a merciless enemy; to feel one’s precious life at a burnt-out end; to know that all the bright things in the world were absolutely nothing against the privilege of not having to bear pain?

But Parrodyce turned his broad back and went over to a steel cabinet.

‘This is my kingdom down here,’ he said abstractedly, rummaging in a drawer. ‘I can do what I like; I am encouraged to do what I like. They are pleased when I do what I like – provided I get information for them. And I generally do get it: by advanced, clinical methods. I sometimes think I was born with a silver hypodermic in my hand.’

He laughed, and turned. There was a silver hypodermic in his hand.

Wyvern started to run round the other side of the table. A section of the floor instantly sank eighteen inches; unavoidably, he tripped into the pit so formed, and fell. He barked his shins painfully and – his hands being secured behind his back – caught his head hard on the floor. Parrodyce was upon him before his vision cleared; the needle was sliding into the sinews of his arm.

‘There!’ Parrodyce exclaimed. ‘Now get up.’

Carefully Wyvern stood up. His heart beat furiously as he searched himself for the first indication of harm the drug might produce. He was all right now, and now, but in a minute, in twenty seconds –?

‘What have you pumped into me?’ he gasped.

‘Oh – I think I will not tell you; it is better your mind should not be at rest. Get on this chair here.’

He sat in the dentist’s chair, and was secured by steel bands which clamped round his throat and ankles. Parrodyce went back to his cabinets, glancing at his wrist watch as he did so.

‘Just wait for that injection to take effect,’ he said ‘and then we’ll start the questioning and see how much of a potential mind-reader you are.’

Wyvern watched the plump man’s nonchalance, thinking, ‘He’s acting a part to me; here I am helpless, yet he finds it necessary to put up some sort of a front. Is it just to scare me?’

With the same careful nonchalance, Parrodyce flipped on a slow-moving tape of dance music, an import from Turkey. He sat with his chin in his hands, listening to someone else’s nostalgia.

‘What if it’s spring, if you’re not embraceable?

I feel no joy, joy is untraceable;

Don’t even hear the birds, hear only your parting words:

“Life goes on; no one’s Irreplaceable”.’

Like the drowsy beat of the music, giddiness swept over Wyvern in spasms. He was away from reality now, a mere ball of sensation expanding and contracting rhythmically from infinite size to a pinpoint, each heartbeat a rush to become either an atom or a universe: yet all the while the silent concrete room bellowed in his ears.

And now the Inquisitor was leaning over him. Wyvern saw him as a fish might see a corpse dangled bulge-eyed over its rippling pool. The corpse’s mouth was opening and shutting; it seemed to be saying ‘Irreplaceable’, but every syllable was followed by the gurgle in Wyvern’s tympanum: ‘Irgugregugplagugcegugagugbull, irgugreguggugplagugcegugagugbull.’

The human mind, like the body, has its strange, secret reserves. Among the madness and noise there was a split second when Wyvern was entirely in possession of himself. In that moment, he acted upon his earlier decision trap of his mind, pouring out loathing to the utmost of his strength – and was met with a counter-surge of telepathic force!

On the instant of ego-union between them, Wyvern learnt much; he knew, for instance, as unmistakably as one recognises a brother, that Parrodyce was the drunken telepath he had bumped into years ago in London; and then he dropped deep into unconsciousness.

III

Eugene Parrodyce talked rapidly.

Sweat stood out on his forehead, like grease on a bit of dirty vellum. As he spoke, he held a bitter-tasting beaker of liquid to Wyvern’s lips, letting it slop down his chin while he concentrated on what he was saying. With the sense of urgency harrying him, he had not unlocked the bands round Wyvern’s throat and ankles; but instead of standing over him, he now knelt before him.

‘Open up again, Wyvern,’ he whispered. ‘For heaven’s sake open your mind up again, and let me in. Why’re you closed down on me? You know it’s dangerous to be talking to you like this – for all I know, they’ve got secret microphones about the place, although they may be too disorganised to have thought of it yet. But H might come in. He came down here once before. If you’d only open up again for a second, we’d get everything cleared up between us – more than we’ll ever be able to do by talking.’

‘Shut up!’ Wyvern said.

The bitter liquid cleared the fire in his body.

‘Release my hands and neck, and let me sit up,’ he said.

‘You – you won’t try anything stupid, will you?’

‘Keep my ankles locked if you’re afraid I’m going to murder you.’

Abjectly, muttering apologies, Parrodyce released the chafed wrists and neck from their bands; he left ankles locked, as Wyvern had suggested. And talk burst from him again.

‘We must communicate, Wyvern! Be sensible! We’re the only ones who have this gift – this great gift. You must let me in: I’ve so much so say and explain …’

‘Shut up!’ Wyvern said. ‘I won’t open my mind to you again. I’d be sick if I did. You’re a walking cess-pit.’

‘Oh, it’s easy to insult me now, now you know my secret –’

‘Parrodyce – you had me here unconscious. Why didn’t you kill me then?’

The plump man didn’t answer. He shook his head helplessly, his eyes fixed on Wyvern’s, tears blurring his gaze. He was trying to break through Wyvern’s shield. Wyvern could feel him like a blind man padding behind locked mental doors.

‘Stop it!’ he said. ‘You aren’t coming in. I won’t have you. You’re too foul, Parrodyce!’

‘Yes, yes, I am foul,’ the other agreed eagerly. ‘But can’t you see we are brothers really in this. You’ve got to help me get out of here. You’ve –’

‘Oh no,’ Wyvern said. ‘You’ve got to help me get out of here. And first of all there are several things I want to know.’

‘Let’s connect – then you can know everything!’

‘Question and answer will do me, you dog! How did you get this job?’

Parrodyce knelt back wretchedly. He wrung his hands as if he were washing them; Wyvern had read of this gesture but had never before seen it actually performed. On top of everything else he had suffered, this man’s sudden transformation had considerably shaken him. From a torturer, Parrodyce had turned into a sobbing wreck: Wyvern had regained consciousness to find the creature slobbering round his neck.

‘A telepath is an ideal inquisitor,’ Parrodyce was saying now. ‘Don’t you see, when I had someone shut up safe in here – so that nobody outside could feel what I was doing – I could explore his mind when he was drugged and read every secret he had. When they came round, even if they were allowed to get away alive, they didn’t know what had happened to them. And – and I always delivered the goods to H. I couldn’t fail. And I didn’t dare fail –’

‘But why did you do it?’

‘I – I – Let me into your mind! I’ll explain then.’

‘You filthy vampire! No, I won’t let you in,’ Wyvern said. And Wyvern had no need for explanation. Their second of ego-union had given him the real truth: Parrodyce was a pathological coward; full of fear himself, he could only exist on the fear of others.

Yet it was not so much this shameless exhibition of fear which revolted Wyvern. Rather, it was to find that a fellow telepath had slipped so far from everything regarded as decent in human conduct. Isolated from others of his kind, Wyvern had vaguely imagined that a telepathic community (supposing such a thing should ever exist or had existed) would be free from vice; given such a powerful instruments of understanding, surely it would always consider the feelings of its fellows which it could learn so easily? Now he saw the fallacy of his assumption; telepathy was a gift which lay in its place alongside all the other human traits, good or bad. There could no more be a true brotherhood of telepaths than there could be a true brotherhood of man.

‘Get these bands off my legs,’ Wyvern ordered. ‘You’re going to let me go free out of here.’

‘No! Oh no, I can’t let you go now I’ve found you!’

‘Wait! Colonel H’s little pal told me there was another telepath. What was his name – Grimslade? What did you do to him?’

‘You mean Grisewood? I never got near enough to him to communicate … Don’t remind me of him – he died horribly, when they tried to couple him to Big Bert. That must be the worst pain of all; I pray I never come to that!’

‘Get these shackles off me!’ Wyvern said.

Tears ran from Parrodyce’s eyes. His spectacles misted. He fumbled at the locks by Wyvern’s ankles. When they were undone, he lay helplessly where he was at the foot of the chair.

‘You’re going to betray me to H! You’re going to betray me,’ he muttered, over and over again.

‘If I betrayed you, I’d betray myself,’ Wyvern said in a hard voice. He was testing out his legs; they just held him. Parrodyce, too, got slowly to his feet.

‘That’s right,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘If you betray me you betray yourself.’

He mended visibly. Some degree of colour returned to his face. He could see there was hope for himself.

‘I can get you safely out of here by just giving the word,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it at once.’

He turned and went slowly back to his cabinets. He began to speak into a concealed phone in something like his old manner. When he finished, he pushed the phone back and came and put his hand on Wyvern’s arm.

‘I’m in control of myself again now,’ he said. ‘It was the shock of finding another telepath at last. I must have a drink. Let me give you one, too. They only allow me a stingy bit each day, or I try to drown my sorrows.’

Wyvern curtly refused the drink when it was offered. Parrodyce drank it off and poured himself another.

‘I’m kept down here,’ he said. ‘My life’s pure misery, Wyvern, I swear it is. They’ve given me an assistant just recently, a fellow called Joe Rakister. The company’s good for me – it’s just someone to talk to, you know. I’ve become quite fond of Rakister, in my own way, you know. But all the while I’m afraid he’s really one of H’s men, sent to spy on me. I’m getting a bag of nerves, Wyvern; I never used to be like this, even during the Fourth War. I suppose it’s the feed-back effect of the torture. I don’t get any pleasure out of it. At least – well, I’m sorry afterwards. Sick, you know. In my dreams they come back and do all the things to me I’ve done to them.’

His hand started quivering. He put the glass down, biting his lip, and suddenly swung round to confront Wyvern.

‘For God’s sake do something for me,’ he begged.

‘What?’

‘If you ever get the chance – I want you to communicate with me. Oh, I know what it must be like for you: free-diving in a cesspool … But you’ve got to find what I’ve got wrong with me, Wyvern. You’ve got to go down and find it, and try and put it right. It must be something buried right down in my id, I don’t know what: something someone did to me when I was a kid in a pram, perhaps. Psychiatrists can’t do anything. But you could! You’re telepathic, Wyvern! You could put me straight again, Wyvern.’

Yes, Parrodyce was right. He was just one of the bits of horrible mess man had infested his world with. If you could, you put it right; even if it did no ultimate good, the gesture satisfied you yourself. And that was something.

‘If I get the chance, I will, Parrodyce,’ Wyvern said. ‘Now I want to go.’

Parrodyce thanked him hopelessly, and handed him over to the nurse.

‘I spoke to H’s secretary,’ were Parrodyce’s last words. ‘You’ll be allowed out the main gate.’

He went back into his silent torture chamber, polishing his spectacles and shaking his head.

The nurse handed Wyvern over to the corporal. The corporal gave him his clothes and watched him dress.

‘Not a mark on you, except that bruised shin,’ he exclaimed wonderingly.

‘Where are my belongings?’ Wyvern asked.

‘Just going to get them. In a hurry, aren’t you?’

He produced them in an old toffee tin. Wyvern looked rapidly through them; everything was there except two items: the ticket to Luna and his passport. He looked sharply up at the corporal.

‘Something missing?’ the latter asked. ‘This was the Colonel’s secretary’s orders. He told me to give you this.’

He produced a grubby envelope from a tunic pocket. It contained the Luna ticket and the passport, torn to tiny shreds.

A private soldier led Wyvern upstairs and out across the barrack square. It was still raining. Wyvern had no coat, but he scarcely noticed the wet. With a minimum of formality, he was let through the gate into freedom: they had ceased to be interested in him.

He had no option but to walk home, exhausted as he felt. Before dawn, the rain ceased. The sun rose behind cloud. The country was fine and still, trees bending in luxuriant summer growth, dripping moisture into the ground. Grass blades shimmered like harmless spears. The birds rejoiced in the new daylight.

At last Stratton Hall was in sight. It would be empty now, except for the two old servants, as empty as Wyvern felt. He had no hope. Somewhere, thousands of miles away, was a girl he might have loved. Now he would never get to her. There was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

A car engine sounded behind him as he turned into the drive gates. Instinctively, he flinched. Had they come to get him back again already? Perhaps he shouldn’t have returned here at all; he could have lost his identity and become one of the many nomads who tramped the countryside.

But the driver of the car wore no uniform. He pulled up in a spray of mud and called out, ‘Is this place Stratton Hall?’ He looked about eighty, but his voice was young and sharp.

‘Yes.’

‘You just going in? Well I’m Government Mail. Give this to Mr Conrad Wyvern for me, and spare me half a mile.’

He was off. Wyvern looked blankly at the green envelope. He stuffed it in a damp pocket and trudged up the drive. A side door had been carelessly left open. The servants seemed to be still asleep; even the Flyspy was not stirring in its metal nest.

Wyvern sank wearily onto his bed before opening the envelope and reading its contents. Then he sat recalling the discontented voice of Captain Runton saying: ‘There’s a lot of reorganisation needed here – everyone lives in watertight compartments. No government department knows what the next one is up to.’ He began to smile. Then he began to laugh. He laughed helplessly, stupidly, until he was out of breath.

He had just received a government warrant to report to the Ss Aqualung at 1200 hours on that date for service on Luna. The warrant overrode any such formalities as passports or tickets.

IV

For the first part of the brief journey to the moon, Wyvern slept. Even when he felt himself again, he hardly left his tiny cabin.

The ship was almost full, despite many reports of trouble in the British Republics Sector following the death of Our Beloved Leader, for most of the passengers were on official business, and so could not make cancellations even if they wished it. They had stood about uneasily at Thorpe Field before take-off, grey little people making small British jokes about having to get away from the rain at all costs; Wyvern avoided them, purposely arriving late and keeping to himself.

A painful attempt at pre-Republican luxury had been aimed at aboard. There was a selection of drinks at the bar; perfumes were on sale; a bookstall sold something besides the eternal grey-paged numbers of On, the official magazine of the régime. Wyvern bought a modern Turkish novel. Turkey alone, neutral during two atomic wars, maintained something of an international culture. Haven of refugees from all over the globe, it produced a stream of literature and teleplays in all languages. Istanbul was again ‘the incomparable city’, as it had been over a thousand years ago.

The novel cheered Wyvern. It was technically competent, humorous and absolutely superficial; its characters moved gaily through their paces in a non-political setting. It all served to restore Wyvern’s equilibrium, as it was meant to do. It also directed his thoughts to Eileen South.

She did not know of Conrad Wyvern’s existence; he had never met her. Yet such were their natures that he felt he knew her better than an ordinary man might know his own wife. He had caught the essence of her as surely as a grape traps the essence of the sun.

He would find her. In the circumscribed environments of the moon, and with his powers, that would not be too difficult. And then? Then they might perhaps escape together to the American Sector; thanks be to goodness there was nothing like an extradition order these days, with international law a thing of the past.

It was possible that the New Police might have radioed ahead to have him arrested on landing; if they wished, they could have it done – lack of passport would be adequate reason, were one even needed. But they had, as far as Wyvern knew, nothing definite against him; the tearing up of the ticket had been no more than a spiteful gesture. No doubt, Wyvern thought ruefully, his Dufy probably hung on H’s secretary’s wall by now.

A man called Head, from Government Warfare, greeted Wyvern when he left the Aqualung. He shook hands respectfully. Wyvern was still a free citizen, as far as the term ‘free’ applied at all these days. The Aqualung had landed on the chill expanse of field outside the huddled domes of the British Luna community. Through the ports, the strange city was visible, stewing in sunlight. They transferred from the ship straight into a buggy, which crawled into the vast maw of one of the airlocks. There they underwent the tedious process of decontamination: no infections were allowed to enter the closed system of the Sector, where they might circulate all too easily.

Head apologised a hundred times for the lengthy delay.

At last they were officially cleared and allowed to pass into the dome proper.

They drove to a civil servant’s hotel on a laner, a small vehicle running on a monorail among the lanes, as the narrow avenues of the British Sector were called. The hotel accommodation was adequate, although utilitarian, like everything else up here. Head apologised for it all, taking the blame for the entire economic framework upon his own narrow shoulders.

‘And I shall call for you punctually tomorrow morning, Mr Wyvern,’ he said, smiling deferentially. ‘There will be a busy day ahead of us then, I dare surmise, so I will leave you now to get what I trust will be an excellent night’s rest. The bed looks at least comfortable, and no doubt you are fatigued by your journey. The water should be on at this time of the evening.’

After more profuse expressions of solicitude for Wyvern’s comfort, Head left.

His amiable talk of mornings and evenings had been a mere convention: it would be sunlight for the next week, and the cloche-like domes had up their polarscreens.

As soon as he was alone, restlessness seized Wyvern. Eileen was somewhere near, perhaps within a mile. He shaved, changed his suit and went downstairs. There were few people about, mostly male and as grey and official-looking as the people on the ship. One brightly dressed woman walked elegantly into the bar; she was possibly Turkish. A synthetic orchestra was playing the ‘Atomics’ from Dinkuhl’s Managerial Suite.

Wyvern carefully studied a map of the British Sector framed in the foyer. The name ‘JJ Lane’ roused his heart excitedly: that was the name of the lane to which Eileen had been going. He went and ordered a dinner in better spirits.

The meal was simple: soup, a choice of two main dishes, a sweet, ice cream and something labelled coffee which was obviously and unsuccessfully synthetic. The only touch of the exotic was a Martian sauce served with the creamed fish; the new colony had begun to export something other than fissionables. With the present state of world affairs, food was scarcer than uranium.

Once he had eaten, Wyvern went determinedly to bed. But no sooner was the light out and the window polared, than restlessness seized him. Tomorrow might be too late, he thought. Suppose the New Police arrived in the night? He got up and dressed, his fingers suddenly frantic with haste.

As far as Wyvern could tell, he left the hotel unobserved.

The distance to JJ Lane was short, and he decided to walk there. The British Sector had been planned with mathematical precision even before the first lunar landings, in the days of the First H-War; the thoroughfares running East – West were called ‘Walks’, and numbered; the thoroughfares running North – South were called ‘Lanes’, and designated by the letters of the alphabet, which had to stand doubled after the first twenty-six Lanes, to adhere to the plan.

Unfortunately, some British muddle-headedness had crept into the design. Where the German and American Sectors adhered with mathematical precision to their planners’ blueprints, the British had succumbed to a traditional love of crooked lanes. JJ, in fact, out on the periphery, actually cut Five Walk in two places. The plan had been further botched by additions on the wrong side of town, so that Wyvern’s hotel, for example, stood in Minus Nine. Despite these complications, it was only ten minutes before he turned into JJ.

Eileen South had been going to follow someone to 108. As he too moved in that direction, Wyvern ran over in his mind all he knew of this business. To begin with, something must greatly have surprised her to break through her guard and make her radiate for a moment. There had been no hint in her thought of having met another telepath, which surely would have emerged if she had done. And that indicated that whoever she was going to follow – a non-telepath – had been radiating very strongly to get through. Whoever he was, Eileen’s thought showed he was a stranger to her, and something about him evoked in her mind that curious phrase: ‘the impossible smile’.

Of a sudden, Wyvern found himself needing to know much more about this stranger to whose house he was going. The stranger was the only link with Eileen; and the stranger had a secret disturbing him powerfully enough to radiate to Eileen accidentally, although her power was shut down.

Wyvern knew this feeling well. If he opened his own mind to become aware of the minds about him, those minds would be as aware of him as he of them; they would be wireless receivers picking up his broadcast. Yet when his mind was closed, he still retained an abnormal sensitivity which might be agitated by agitation about him. The troubledness would loom up to him like buildings swimming on oil in a dense fog: some town halls, most merely suburban villas, one perhaps a cathedral of worry.

As he came into JJ, Wyvern met a growing mob of people. They were a rough-looking lot, although quiet enough at present, their attention fixed on a haggard man who was addressing them. Wyvern caught something of what he was saying.

‘… this skinflint régime. And things aren’t going to get any better, friends. No! They’re going to get worse – and they’re going to go on getting worse. It was bad enough with Jim Bull in control. He was a black-hearted rogue! But he was an old spacer! You don’t need me to remind you he was with Wattleton on the third Venus expedition; it was Jim Bull coaxed the old Elizabeth home. He knew what it was like up here.

‘Now Jim Bull’s dead. And I tell you this for nothing, friends – if any of the Earthbound pack that is squabbling for his empty seat now gets a whip-hand over us, we may as well go straight round to the Bureau and draw our death certificates – and I’ll be in front of the queue!’

There was a roar of approval, but on the whole they sounded peaceable enough.

JJ was not a savoury quarter. It had lodgings and snuff palaces and a blue cinema, and even one of the gadarenes beloved by spacemen on the search for orgies, thriving among the many tiny shops. 108 was an ‘earth shop’, the lunar version of a pawnbroker’s, so called because here were stocked all the innumerable little articles in daily use but manufactured only on the home planet. Over the shop was a small flat. A descriptive word out of an ancient thriller crossed Wyvern’s mind: seedy. This shop, this flat, was seedy.

He pushed open the shop door and went in.

The place was poky and ill-stocked. If you thumped your fist on the counter, you could crack the veneer – but some irate customer had thought of that already. In a cubicle at the back, the proprietor slouched over a telephone. He did not look up when Wyvern entered.

Somewhere out of sight, a man in soft shoes ran heavily down a staircase, burst open a door and let it slam behind him.

Still the proprietor did not move.

‘I want some service,’ Wyvern said sharply. ‘Are you asleep?’

Still no movement.

‘Listen, I want to buy some informa –’ Wyvern’s voice died as he saw the deep stain on the man’s tunic in the region of his stomach. He pushed up the flap of the counter and went round.

The fellow was dead, although still warm and still bleeding. He peered into eternity with a fixed, mercenary stare. His call to the exchange had never gone through, and he was beyond needing it now. The lunar ground had no worms; this stabbed body would keep for ever in its coffin.

And did this mean the only link with Eileen South was broken? Wyvern’s thoughts twisted unhappily.

Then he remembered hearing a man running downstairs; that could have been the murderer of the proprietor.

He pulled open a flimsy side door and backstairs were revealed. After a second’s hesitation, he ran up them three at a time. At the top were two doors, one open. Wyvern entered at the double.

A man lay on a bed dying. He was curled up clutching at dirty blankets, with a heavy knife in his ribs. In his agony, he rolled on to his back, driving the knife further home. He sighed wearily and seemed to relax.

On his face, an impossible smile stretched from ear to ear.

Wyvern knelt by the side of the bed. This man was no newcomer to violence. He looked every inch a thug. Old scars stretched from either end of his mouth right up his cheekbones, giving him, even in the midst of pain, that look of ghastly hilarity. He was clearly beyond help and fading fast. He rolled convulsively over again, burying his face in the bedding.

Here was the link with Eileen South. There was only one thing Wyvern could do, loath as he was to do it. He opened up his mind and entered into ego-union with the dying man …

*

A garble of voices, beating like rain on a roof. A welter of regret, cruel as frightened fangs. Fear, foamlike. Anger. Vindictiveness, blasphemy, pain: shutters banging in December’s storm. Memory. Stupidity, the sparse lanterns going out in the mediaeval alleys of his mind. Warped ways. And, even now, even yet, hope.

Hopes like bats, pain like a driving sleet seemed to batter against Wyvern’s face, blinding his psychic sense.

On all sides of him, three-dimensionally as it appeared, crowded scenes from the man’s past life, scudding by, falling out of darkness into more darkness. The backgrounds were mainly of an appalling drabness, the faces in the foreground often twisted into hatred; here a girl’s countenance smiled like a lamp, there envy burned in a rival’s face; everywhere callousness, besottedness, a life run to see. Wyvern sank grimly through the sediment.

He was hopelessly lost in the labyrinth, walled up in night while fifty movie projectors played fifty different films on him. And the projectors faltered and dimmed. He had to be quick: the man with the impossible smile was dying.

The patterned mists cleared for a moment. Something came clearly through from the man, his identity and his latest crime:

‘I, George Dorgen, killed Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader.’

It came not in words but pictures, a cramped figure on a deadly mission, breaking through a bathroom wall, shooting a man in his shower. Then it all burst like a bubble and Dorgen was lying on this very bed; he had fled to the Moon, he thought himself safe, and then the man with the knife and the soft shoes entered the bedroom …

Then that bubble of memory also burst, burst into the garish colour of pain. It flowed round, over, through Wyvern, drowning him, bearing him seven seas down in another’s futility. It bore him Everest-deep, changing its hues, fading and cooling. It carried him where no lungs could live, and then it was going, gargling away into a whirlpool down the hole in the universe where all life goes. It broke foaming over Wyvern’s head, pouring away like a mill-race, tearing to take him with it, sucking at his body, whipping about his legs, screaming as it slid over the bare nerve-ends of Dorgen’s ocean-mind-bed.

The last drop drained. The little universe collapsed with one inexorable implosion. Dorgen was dead.

For a long time, clutching his pebble of extraordinary information, Wyvern slumped against the rickety bed. He was vitiated. His body had no strength: his eyes would not open: his mind was dead. There was only the memory of a killer who slayed an innocent man downstairs to come up here and kill another killer; and that killer had killed Jim Bull, the killer.

Kill, kill, kill. Wyvern feebly resolved never to use his mental power again, unless …

Suddenly he remembered Eileen South. As far as he could tell in the chaos of Dorgen’s mind, the man had no knowledge of her at all, her identity or her whereabouts. But the mere thought of Eileen revived Wyvern. After a while, he picked himself up off the floor.

It came to him decisively that he must get away from it all. Life was too foul, too complicated. He must get to the American Sector, or Turksdome, anywhere.

He came weakly out on to the landing.

Two men in the uniform of the New Police stood shoulder to shoulder at the bottom of the stairs. Revolvers were clasped in their fists.

‘Come on down quietly,’ said one of them, ‘or we’ll blow your guts out.’

The stairs creaked one by one as he trod on them, obeying.

The next three hours were full of uniforms and questions.

After his first interrogation at Police Headquarters, Wyvern was put into an ordinary cell. That interrogation was made by a police sergeant with a man in plain clothes looking on. Then he was taken from the cell and questioned again, this time by a police captain and two men in plain clothes, after which he was taken to a special box-like cell.

The back wall of this cell was fitted with a steel bench. When the door of the cell closed it was so shaped that the prisoner was forced to sit on the bench; there was no room to do anything else. The wall was of glass and Wyvern estimated, every bit of two feet thick. He sat in his pillory like a fish in an aquarium.

He had been sitting there for about an hour when a man entered the bare room on the other side of the glass. The man was sleek and blank and neat and had a brown beard. He advanced to the glass and said, ‘Your cell is wired for sound so that we can talk comfortably. You will talk, I will listen. Your case is very serious.’

His voice was clipped; he did indeed make it sound serious.

Hell’s bells, it is serious, Wyvern thought. I’m spending all my time recently being browbeaten by big and little autocrats. If I ever get out of here, I shall suffer from persecution complex for the rest of my days.

‘I’ve told your people my story twice,’ he said aloud. ‘I omitted nothing. That fat police sergeant will give you a copy of my statement.’

The beard made no comment.

‘A customer went into the earth shop and found the proprietor dead, stabbed,’ the beard said stonily. ‘Police were called. They heard a movement in the room above. You appeared. You were arrested. In the room you had just vacated, another body was found. Our weapon experts say the same blade did both jobs. Obviously, you are Number One suspect. I think it worth your while to tell your story again.’

‘It’s all circumstantial,’ Wyvern snapped. ‘Do I have to tell you people your business? Why haven’t you taken my fingerprints? Take them at once and compare them with the ones on the knife. You’ll find I never even touched it. I’ve told you who I am, I’ve told you what I’m doing on Luna – ring through and check with the government at once. I demand it!’

The beard let this outburst die on the hot air.

‘I think it worth your while to tell your story again,’ he repeated.

Wyvern sighed. Then he capitulated and said what he had said before. With certain simplifications, he told only truth. His motive for entering the shop he had altered, to avoid any mention of Eileen; he merely made himself out to be a tourist in search of local colour who had accidentally stumbled on a corpse, etc., etc. And another alteration had come at the end of the story.

It became obvious to Wyvern as he recounted the discovery of Dorgen that he was getting entangled in a political murder; indeed, it was being pinned on him for reasons best known to the police. There was one obvious way to extricate himself, and he took it. He had to describe the real murderer, as he had been reflected in Dorgen’s dying mind. Once that murderer was caught, he, Wyvern, was cleared.

And so he said – and found himself now saying it for the third time, ‘Dorgen could still talk when I reached him. He was able to describe the killer as a tall fellow with a square face, blue jowls, small black moustache, black bushy eyebrows, hair black with a prominent streak of white in it. Hairy hands and arms.’

‘Dorgen told you this before he died?’ the neat man with the beard asked.

‘I just said he did,’ Wyvern said. His voice rasped; they would not, surely, be on the alert for telepaths up here. His story was perfectly convincing.

‘With his dying breath,’ Wyvern added, ‘Dorgen said, “I killed Our Beloved Leader”.’

The beard took a precise step or two in each direction, running a fingernail lightly along the thick glass as he walked.

‘Now may I go?’ Wyvern asked. ‘I have been detained quite long enough already, it seems to me. You know where to contact me if you wish.’

‘It is not as easy as that,’ the beard said. ‘Nothing is easy in this world, Wyvern. Men behave foolishly. We are not, for example, at all happy about some aspects of your story. Everything is very complicated; you must be kept here a little longer yet.’

He turned to go, adding, ‘You may congratulate yourself at least on having a front seat while history is in the making.’

‘I never had a seat I hated more.’

The other left without comment.

Almost as soon as he had gone, the light in the outer compartment went out. A bright bulb out of reach above Wyvern’s head was now the only source of illumination, and it so shone on to the glass before his eyes that he could hardly see into the other part of the room beyond the glass. Once, he thought someone slipped in and observed him, but could not be sure.

The light threw considerable heat on to his head and neck. Cramp crawled and tingled in his legs. Disquiet increased with discomfort. He just hoped this infernal delay meant they were combing the Sector for Dorgen’s slayer; but he could not help reading more sinister motives into this custody.

At least they had no reason to suspect him of powers of ego-union – he hoped. To have that discovered would involve him in a nasty fate. He recalled, as he sat waiting, the thing Parrodyce had said when they were talking about H’s projected coupling of another telepath to Big Bert: ‘That must be the worst pain of all; I pray I never come to it.’

If they did find out about Wyvern, it would be remarkably convenient for them. The monster computer was only a hundred yards away, in the centre of the British Sector!

Wyvern’s reveries were interrupted by the opening of a grill behind his head. A basin full of patent cereal and condensed milk was thrust in upon him. He ate and dozed. Broken fantasias on Dorgen’s past sleazed through his sleep.

He came suddenly back to full consciousness, and sat bolt upright, his blood racing heavily. Beyond the glass, the shadowy forms of Colonel H and his secretary were watching him! Involuntarily, Wyvern was reminded of the ghosts which haunted Julius Caesar before his death.

The urge was strong to speak to them, to try and establish communication, to render them human, but he fought it down and stayed silent, wondering what horrible coincidence had brought them to the scene at this time. He had thought them still on Earth.

H’s small features were drawn closer together than ever, as if all the venom of him concentrated itself towards the end of his nose. He came forward at last and pressed his hands against the glass.

‘What did Dorgen say to you?’ he asked in a terrible voice.

‘He told me he killed Our Beloved Leader,’ Wyvern said.

When H spoke again, his words charged Wyvern full of understanding and fear; he realised for the first time the meaning of that impossible smile carved onto Dorgen’s face; he realised how it had made him betray himself into a future too ghastly to contemplate; for H said, ‘You are a telepath, Wyvern! That cur Dorgen was dumb: he had his tongue cut out twenty years ago.’

V

The moon should have been the ideal place for the régime of the British Republics to thrive in: scenery and policy alike were arid and uncompromising. Only in the sense of having been rough-hewn by time did either of them approach beauty; they functioned by virtue of the accidents of the past. And lunar colony and police state alike required a continual maximum effort to maintain equilibrium.

Yet the régime did not thrive here; the intransigence of the one clashed with the intransigence of the other. Luna had always been a trouble spot. There seemed to be no room for any law but the harsh natural ones, and on these stony shores of space politics secured little foothold. With the death of Our Beloved Leader, revolt against the powers-that-be broke forth again. It was to quell this insurrection that Colonel H had arrived at the British sector.

He took immediate advantage of the chance which threw Wyvern into his power almost as he landed. For, if the lunar base – with Bert the Brain and its potentialities for military conquest – was the key to his future, Wyvern gave him the power to turn that key. Wyvern was a telepath. From Wyvern Bert should learn the ability to read the minds of the whole population; and when it could do that, H was firmly in the saddle.

‘Take him down to Bu-X!’ Colonel H ordered. ‘And be careful with him. Don’t repeat the mistakes you made with Grisewood.’

They took Wyvern away struggling.

‘Right,’ the Colonel said to his secretary. ‘Now arrange with Radio Imbrium for me to televise to the people at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow in the role of Beloved Leader. I don’t think we’d better fix it for any earlier than that.’

He turned resolutely to the formidable mass of reports on his desk. They were without exception smudged and hard to read: the imported Turkish typewriters were unsatisfactory in every way. He made a note on a memo pad to enquire into the possibilities of setting up a typewriter factory when he got back to Norwich. Then he turned again to the papers, hunching his shoulders grimly. He was not cut out for paper work.

The secretary returned from the telephone, looking spruce and savage.

‘It’s taking them a while to get Wyvern down the passage,’ he reported. ‘I told them they must not lay him out or anything beastly like that. That’s Bu-X’s job.’

‘This ruddy administration –,’ Colonel H began. He was occasionally irked by what he considered his underling’s prissy way of speech.

‘I came back to say we’d forgotten something,’ said the secretary crisply. He disliked these outbursts against paper work, believing legislators to be the unacknowledged poets of the world. ‘I came to remind you that we had Wyvern in our hands in Norwich. We should have found out then that he was telepathic – that was what we handed him over to Parrodyce for. I understood that gentleman was supposed to be infallible?’

‘My God!’ H exclaimed, jumping up. ‘You’re right! Why didn’t I think of that?’

He snatched up his desk telephone.

‘Send Parrodyce up to me on the double,’ he barked, and bruised the receiver setting it down again.

‘Lucky I had the wit to bring that fellow to Luna with us,’ he said. ‘If I remember, you were rather against the idea.’

The secretary stood dapper and silent, gazing at the crease in his trousers. He was an excellent judge of when silence was both wisest and most infuriating.

The four New Police who had been entrusted with Wyvern were getting him fairly rapidly down a stretch of passage when Parrodyce appeared at the other end of it. The Questioner looked disturbed. He was wasting no time in answering his boss’s summons, but he quaked in doing it. His cheeks shone, his spectacles misted. Then he saw Wyvern and Wyvern saw him.

Only a short while before, Wyvern had resolved never to make contact with a human mind again. His contact with Dorgen had sickened him to the core; it had indeed contaminated him, for he had involuntarily taken over the dying man’s jumble of impressions complete, and they were now as much a part of him as his own memories. He wanted no more such. Least of all did he want ego-union with Parrodyce, for he already knew that here was a mind more sick than Dorgen’s.

Nevertheless, the desperate circumstances altered the case. Too much was at stake for queasiness. He did not hesitate. Disregarding the posse who had bodily hold of him, he made mental contact with Parrodyce.

He held it only for a second. It was enough.

Their thought states interlocked.

Wyvern: ‘They’ve discovered what I am. I slipped up. It’s all over. I’m being taken to Bu-X, whatever that is.’

Parrodyce: ‘Fear for myself. That explains what H and buddy want me for. My secret’s up too – or if not that, they’ll think I’ve failed. Either way: torture, pain. Pain! Remove my lower jaw maybe. Castration …!’

Wyvern: ‘Stow it! Listen – my guards will be getting most of this exchange.’

Parrodyce: ‘Then I am betrayed. It’s your fault, Wyvern. Why didn’t I kill you when I had you? We’ll both be taken to Bu-X. That’s where they fit you up to couple you on to Bert the Brain. They’re worse torturers than I and Joe Rakister, my assistant. Daren’t go to H.’

Wyvern: ‘You must escape, Parrodyce, now. Get away to another sector quickly. Tell them what is about to happen; Bert must be wrecked. If this scheme of H’s succeeds, he’ll rule the entire roost in no time. A telepathic computer would be unstoppable. Get away now.’

Parrodyce: ‘Must save own skin. Which sector is powerful enough to defy H, which?’

Wyvern: ‘Try any – American will do. All sectors must unite against this. Bomb it to bits if necessary.’

Parrodyce: ‘Killing. Good.’

Wyvern: ‘Just get the message through. Leave them to judge. Now for heaven’s sake scoot, you horror.’

Parrodyce: ‘Loathe you. Yet if you were saved, you could probe me properly, find what went wrong. Some thorn in the infant flesh. Oh, Wyvern, am afraid …’

Wyvern: ‘There’ll be nothing to fear if you get out. And listen, somewhere on Luna is a girl called Eileen South; she’s a telepath, no other details. Tell her – tell her I loved her.’

Parrodyce: ‘No use for women. Subtle, smothering …’

Wyvern: ‘Get the message through. Do it all, and I swear if there’s ever a chance I’ll dig down through your dirt and put you right, if it’s still possible.’

Parrodyce: ‘Love/hate. Going now.’

The contact broke. The plump figure at the end of the corridor turned and ran back through the door it had entered. Badly frightened, one of the guards, strictly against orders, slammed home a blow on to the side of Wyvern’s chin.

Oblivion was a complexity of sensation. The top of Wyvern’s sleeping mind whirled, whirled till all its colours blended into blinding whiteness. He was far away, but his heart still beat, his bloodstream still flowed, his latent consciousness foamed and subsided like milk boiling on an intermittent fire. Down there, where sleep never penetrates, fright was active; the smouldering intelligence knew that something was afoot which would violate its inmost hearth. The something came from outside, where all dangers came from, but it was working steadily in, insidiously, slyly and/or boldly, deeper.

The danger was chromium-plated, then it was a gnarled hand, or it was pins. It had little piggy leech-snouts, or it had nozzles or nails. It assumed any shape to get where it wanted, and soon the primeval country fell to this protean invader, and the enemy camp fires glowed from every point of vantage.

Time slowed, stopped. Presently it began again at a new rhythm. Dawn came: Wyvern roused.

He could not move. He was looking at a wall of lawn starred with daisies, or it was a green sky stuffed with stars; slowly, with infinite care, the invalid muscles of his eyes brought it into focus, and it was a green wall of instruments, studded with little dials, like eyeballs. It was about three feet away from him. He acquired these facts as a new-born babe might acquire them.

Something fiendish had been done to him.

Men in white overalls crossed his line of vision. For the most part, they seemed to ignore him, being more concerned with the little dials. Then one came over and injected something into him – it might have been into his shoulder or his calf, he could not tell, could only feel a coolness spread, gradually defining the limits of his body.

It seemed to him he was left alone then, with only the blind eyeballs to watch him. Slowly strength returned. Wyvern discovered that he was lying on his chest with a pillow under his left cheek. Taking his time about it, he rolled on to one side and sat up, propping himself up with his arms helped by the light lunar gravity. The effort dizzied him; he sat with his eyes shut, vaguely exploring the dry taste in his mouth. He could eventually open his eyes again.

He was in a small room on a large table. He had been covered with a blanket which had now slipped aside. He was naked; he could see his body direct, and in a wide mirror slanting above the table. Wyvern stared at the reflection – not in horror, for his subconscious had already accepted this violation.

From six points on the front of his body, and two on his legs, little terminals projected. From the terminals, cables – or were they tubes? – led off. He could tell that his back was similarly served.

His skull was shaved; from it, similar though smaller terminals projected, secured into the bone. There were twelve terminals in his skull, and the connections from them had been built out so that the rear of his head was surrounded by a kind of wire basket, like a fencing mask worn backwards. A pigtail of cable hung from the back of the basket, carrying the wires away.

‘Someone’s been busy,’ Wyvern muttered to himself. Only that trivial thought bubbled up.

At the bottom of the bed, a steel arm with a hook on it gathered all the thin cables together into one fat one. The fat cable slithered across the floor to a trolley fitted with valves and glass cylinders and a pump which worked slowly and laboriously. At the other side of the trolley, the cable ran into the base of the green instrument panel.

Wyvern had no doubt at all as to what it all meant. Experimentally, he tugged at the terminal set in his left nipple and felt the network of wires like capillary veins tighten under his skin. They had taped him up. The innermost meaning of his innermost chromosome was being syphoned out of him and on to the panel. He could feel his slightest sensation, an itch on the pores of his leg or the stir of bile in his gut, register in micro-amps and flick up a reading on a dial. He could feel his thoughts scuttle along the wires and whistle through the machine’s mazes. He was ready to be coupled up to Big Bert.

Sighing, he lay down again. A small metal box was fixed between his shoulders – a fuse box? He wondered – and he could not lie comfortably. So he lay uncomfortably.

Four men entered the room. They wore white overalls. Two of them took great interest in Wyvern, examining him, prodding him, checking the instruments; the other two stood to one side rather boredly, and began chatting together. Wyvern could hear snatches of their conversation.

‘… nasty bust up on Twenty One last night. Three of our boys had it.’

‘My mate Alfred was down there. Apparently he picked up with some French tart …’

It was a reminder of a world which might have ceased to exist for Wyvern.

The examination took the best part of an hour. At the end of it, the examiners showed themselves satisfied and left. They returned in ten minutes with Colonel H’s secretary.

The secretary came over to the table and stared down at Wyvern. Viewed from this angle, he looked less the pukka officer than usual, more the thug; his mouth had that stupid set to it observable in men of callous natures.

‘You see we managed to bring you through,’ he said, mock-brightly. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I want a drink,’ Wyvern said. But, he reflected as he asked, he did no longer need a drink; the trolley had automatically supplied the shortage. The secretary, in any case, paid no heed to the request.

‘I regret the Colonel could not come,’ he said. ‘He is attending to a little source of irritation outside. We are going to get the computer to work draining you straight away – it has already been given its instructions. Results should be coming through by late afternoon, shortly after the Colonel is officially proclaimed Beloved Leader.’

‘I’m not interested,’ Wyvern said sourly.

‘You should be – it concerns you,’ the secretary said. He turned and talked in a low voice to the men in white. After some consultation, one of them left the room; he was gone only a minute, and when he returned he said, ‘Yes, they’re all standing by at Computer Central.’

‘Splendid,’ the secretary said. ‘You’d better switch on straight away.’

The other nodded and went over to the green panel.

Wyvern tensed himself, not knowing what to expect, unless it was a form of electrocution. He lay there on the devilish rack, eyes probing the others. Apart from some signs of strain, their faces were blank. Of all the winds loose from Pandora’s box, Wyvern thought, only the wind of science blows today; untempered by human kindness, it’s a cold wind. I die of mere cleverness.

But several toggle switches clicked over and he did not die. Indeed, at first he felt nothing. Then a not unpleasant vibration crept through his body. It worked steadily through him, learning every cell, and so into his brain.

An indescribable sensation of a myriad doors being flung open attacked Wyvern. But for that moment he was not Wyvern; his identity was gone, sucked into the giant computer for inspection. Then it was back, packed into the correct cubicles it had come from. Then silence.

The white-overalled men glanced anxiously up at H’s secretary, then turned back to the board. Without a word, they commenced checking across the wide expanse of instruments.

‘What’s up?’ asked the secretary sharply.

‘Power’s packed in,’ one of the men said in an equally sharp tone.

The secretary strode over to the board.

‘You mean to say –,’ he began.

‘Everything’s perfectly in order here,’ the other interrupted. ‘Our readings are all OK. It’s the pipe to Bert where the failure’s occurred. You’d better get them on the blower – maybe the rioters have cut the line!’

‘Get them yourself, as quickly as possible,’ the secretary ordered. As he spoke, the phone gonged. He grabbed it and listened, barking every now and again.

‘Damned incompetence,’ he remarked, putting the receiver down as if he were lowering an enemy into a cobra’s hole. ‘That was Computer Central. They say that Bert itself has shut down. They are at a loss to account for it, but are working on the problem. No faults detected as yet. I’m going over there. See that this fellow Wyvern does not die.’

He left.

The white coats promptly lit cigarettes. They looked quizzically at Wyvern, then gave him one.

‘Thanks,’ Wyvern said.

‘Think nothing of it. Smoke while you can.’

‘I mean thanks for realising I was still human.’

‘Oh that.’ They laughed uneasily, and lapsed into silence.

Wyvern was not letting them off so lightly. Confidence had returned to him. For one thing, it was clear that the machine was not going to kill him: it had to learn from him, and therefore there was the possibility that he could enlist it on his side. For another thing, the knowledge that had been, so to speak, drawn from him and put back now showed itself to contain an item he had overlooked. For another, nobody had a thing on him legally, and when Bert had finished its task Wyvern should again be a free man – provided he could engineer himself free of the Colonel’s house party.

‘Answer a straight question, will you,’ he said to the technicians. ‘Just what do you think I’ve done that squares your consciences with this inhuman job you are carrying out on me?’

They exchanged looks.

‘Do you think we don’t know about you?’ one asked. ‘The whole Sector knows about you!’

‘Knows what about me?’ Wyvern said.

For answer, the other fished a copy of ‘Lunareview’ from his pocket. It was the latest edition. It bore Wyvern’s photograph and headlines which ran:

MURDER BY EX-CRUXTISTICIAN

DUMB MAN DIES IN BRAWL OVER BLONDE

VI

Now Wyvern was alone in the room except for a guard. The guard called himself a male nurse; his name was William. He was very big and pale, and had been born on the moon; his father was dead, his mother worked in the Imbrium Dyes Factory and he had three sisters, Katie, Joyce and Joy, all of whom were married except Joy, and she was engaged.

This Wyvern had learnt when William first arrived. Now the big fellow settled down in a chair beside the couch and absorbed himself in part three of a four part serial entitled ‘Shall Love’s Affairs Be Hushed?’ contained in a magazine Joy had lent him.

Wyvern lay back, glad of a chance to collect his wits. So much had happened, he found himself marvelling he was still whole and hopeful. Part of the hope lay in the fact that he realised he knew the identity of Dorgen’s murderer.

During the disorienting periods of ego-union he had spent with Parrodyce and Dorgen, many impressions had soaked in on him. He had scarcely heeded them at the time, and had shrunk from trying to sort them later, so unprepossessing had most of them been. Yet hidden information lay in them; he might, for instance, have discovered in them the severing of Dorgen’s tongue, had he attempted the analysis.

An analysis was precisely what Big Bert had performed in the few moments before its mysterious breakdown. It had coupled like with like, and this orderly process inevitably left an imprint on Wyvern’s mind; indeed it might almost be said to have altered the whole organisation of his mind. It left two hitherto separate facts significantly side by side: Dorgen’s mental picture of his killer; Parrodyce’s mental picture of his assistant. The pictures dissolved and merged; they were one: Parrodyce’s assistant was Dorgen’s killer.

Why? Wyvern asked himself Why? How? But the truth had lain there undeniably in his mind waiting to be developed, like a film in a dark drawer. He was able even to piece together a name with the portraits: Joe Rakister; for though the name had never actually been formulated to him in the state of ego-union, face and name were one symbol.

If only Wyvern could get that knowledge through to a neutral authority, he would be cleared of the spurious charge H had framed him with. That meant getting himself clear of the Sector. Of a sudden, he longed for a free, straightforward life again. He was not dead yet: and better be dead than waiting here for he knew not what.

He slid his legs off the table.

‘Here, you’ve got to stay on there,’ William said, looking up from his magazine.

‘I’ve got cramp in my legs. Let me try and have a walk round.’

‘That machine’s supposed to look after your cramp.’

‘My dear William, science has not yet invented an antidote to pins and needles. You get on with your reading; I can’t go far.’

William grunted uncertainly and returned to the love story. Wyvern found his legs were a good deal stronger than he had expected; the trolley had indeed looked after him well. He walked slowly towards it, feigning weakness and groaning, dragging the cable with him. When he was up to the trolley, he called out.

‘I think I’m going to faint, William!’

The big guard was on his feet at once. Wyvern bent double, grabbed the cable, and wrenched its multi-point plug out of its socket on the trolley base. Thus armed, he swung about, whirling the cable over his head. The heavy plug caught William hard behind one ear. He went down on his knees, crashing into the trolley. Wyvern snatched up a urine bottle and crowned him with it.

For a moment Wyvern paused to wonder if he was going to survive being disconnected. Although his blood pounded heavily, he felt well enough, despite the overhead mirror’s assurance that he looked horrible. He went rapidly to work.

He slipped William’s white overall and slacks off and assumed them himself. He peeled the man’s shirt off and tied his hands behind his back with it. He stuffed the woman’s magazine into his mouth. There was adhesive plaster in a roll on the trolley; with this Wyvern stuck the magazine in place and wound a couple of twists round wrists and ankles.

The result was not artistic but it would hold for a bit.

Bundling the loose cable, which was still attached to the terminals on his body, into a pocket, Wyvern made into the corridor. There was no light or sound anywhere. He could vaguely discern two doors in the corridor, one at each end. He went to one, hesitated, opened it.

It was a hospital-type wash room and lavatory, without windows. ‘This is probably a mile below surface,’ he thought, heart sinking. The only outlets, apart from the flush, were a small ventilator grill and a large refuse disposal chute. He opened the latter; it evidently did not function properly, being choked with rubbish: bloody bandages, newspaper, cigarette cartons. A grey human finger caught his eye. Good old Grisewood, he thought grimly; or was it Grimshaw?

He went back down the corridor, glancing in at the recumbent William, and tried the far door.

Stairs went up on his left, another door stood just ahead. He took the stairs, ascending easily in the low gravity.

A light burnt at the top. This looked like part of a regular hospital. Someone was talking somewhere.

A row of closed doors faced him, all identical and uninviting. One of them said ‘Private’. Wyvern could feel panic beginning to mount in himself; the business of taking pot-luck at closed doors quickly becomes wearing in such sinister establishments.

At least he would have the element of surprise on his side, and this might be considerable in view of the contraption on the back of his skull. He barged into the door marked ‘Private’, determined to bear down anyone inside.

Nobody was there. It was an office. Neat white furniture. Synthetic flowers on the table.

Quite an anti-climax, he thought. There was a far door. Wyvern opened it casually, expecting a cupboard.

An old lady dropped a cup of tea and began to scream. Perhaps she was the almoner, he thought later. In a moment he had his hand clapped over her mouth.

‘I’ll throttle you if I hear another peep,’ he lied. Now what do I do? he asked himself; I should have brought that damned adhesive tape along from below.

‘Got any adhesive tape?’ he demanded.

She rolled her eyes and made signs. He brought his hand an inch away from her mouth and said, ‘What was that?’

‘I only asked if you had cut yourself,’ she said timidly.

‘Never mind that! Where is the tape?’

‘Just next door. It’s a store, a medical cupboard, don’t you know. You’ll find some in there.’

Wyvern didn’t want to risk going into the corridor again.

‘How do I get out of here?’ he asked.

‘To where?’

‘To anywhere!’

‘Well if you turn right and go down the corridor, you get into the male nurses’ quarters –’

‘And left?’ he prompted.

‘There’s a side entrance down that way.’

‘Which door?’

‘The last – no, the last but one on the right.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Now let’s go and get that tape.’

He hustled her through the outer room, paused to peer round the door, took a firmer grip round her mouth, pulled her out into the corridor and opened the door of what she had described as a cupboard.

It was a staff room, with three women in it. The old lady was no fool, Wyvern thought, curing her quick-wittedness.

He pushed her into the room, slammed the door and ran like mad down the corridor, hoping furiously she had at least not lied about the staff entrance.

She had. This was a dingy waiting room. Again no windows.

He tried the next door. The corridor echoed with shouting behind him, and he burst out of it with his only weapon, the cable, swinging in his hand.

He was in a dark side hall. It contained a staircase and two other doors, one with frosted glass, through which he could see the blur of an approaching figure. He could hear someone also approaching the second door, steelshod boots ringing on tile. And two pairs of legs appeared at the head of the stairs and began to descend even as he paused.

It was too late to double back into the corridor, where the women were no doubt marshalling male help. Wyvern was cornered!

At the last possible moment, he spotted a cupboard door under the stairs and dived into it. As he did so, he recognised the voice of one of the men coming down the stairs; it was Colonel H, and in a foul temper by the sound of it.

Mops and brooms filled Wyvern’s perilous hiding place. He stumbled against them, but the clatter went unheard, for by this time the pursuers had gained the side hall and run into the two men entering by the other doors. The women from the staff room were all trying frantically to explain at once, the men were trying to calm them.

The high voices were silenced by H’s bull-like roar. His anger scattered them like pollen on a wind, and in no time they had all dispersed; a siren wailed distantly, insistently indicating that an organised search had now started.

Colonel H came down into the now empty hall with his companion. Through the thin partition, Wyvern could hear every word he said.

‘You see what happens,’ he was saying. ‘Nobody can be relied on. I tell you the whole set-up must be reorganised from top to bottom. Once I’m Leader –’

‘But we haven’t time,’ replied the other voice. It was H’s secretary, his tones full of spinsterish annoyance.

‘After this crisis, yes, by all means. But we can’t change horses in midstream.’

‘You argue too much,’ H bellowed. ‘I’ll ask when I want your advice in future. It’s done me no good so far. Now we’ve lost Wyvern –’

‘No,’ said the secretary, ‘we haven’t lost him. He must be in the building.’

‘He’d better be!’

‘Personally I rather admire Wyvern; he is what a century ago, would have been called a good all-rounder. But we have allowed ourselves to be diverted from our original topic,’ said the secretary icily, ‘which was the question of the disposal of Parrodyce and his assistant, Rakister.’

‘How can we dispose of them when we can’t lay our hands on either of them?’

‘That is a question merely of time.’

‘Time, time!’ shouted the Colonel. ‘Too many of the underground – these so-called wretched Democratics – have seeped into the military for it to be merely a question of time! There’s got to be a reorganisation. There’s got to be a purge. Bull had to have one when he came to power.’ Abruptly, he controlled himself and said in a lower voice, ‘Give orders that they are both to be shot on sight. Parrodyce is a traitor.’

‘Rakister is not,’ the secretary said.

‘Then why didn’t he report back to us when he’d done the job? I told you long ago, never trust a man who prefers a knife to a gun – they’re always neurotics. Anyhow, he knows too much about Dorgen. He must go.’

Their conversation grew indistinct. They had moved off into the corridor. Wyvern heard the door click behind them. He could not stay where he was: doubtless the building was now being combed. One obvious avenue of hope lay open to him.

He came out of the cupboard and ran up the stairs which H and his secretary had just descended. As he reached the first landing, he heard a door open on the level he had left. Double doors stood on the landing; he tried them, and they were locked. Softly, he hurried up another flight.

The stairs ended here in a single door. It was of clear glass, and also locked. The whole building below Wyvern was housed beneath the lunar rock, for gazing out he could see he had just reached ground level. In a tiny square, a helicopter waited. This, no doubt, was the VIP entrance to the hospital.

Urgently, he pushed at the door. It did not budge. The glass was dauntingly thick. He was praying in the cavern of his dry mouth. Now footsteps were ascending the stairs behind him, rapidly, confidently.

If he could not get out of here, he was trapped in a dead end. Abandoning any idea of secrecy, Wyvern struck at the glass with his cable and point. It starred, but did not shatter. He was still battering when a voice behind him said, ‘You’d need dynamite to make a go of it, Wyvern.’

He turned to stare into the muzzle of the secretary’s revolver.

A long, tasty silence. Wyvern dropped his cable.

‘I suddenly had this thought, you see,’ the secretary explained. ‘I left the Colonel to do all the shouting and doubled back on our tracks. It occurred to me that you might somehow have sneaked past us. Come on down.’

‘Listen,’ Wyvern said. ‘I don’t even know your name, but you’re not cut out for this sort of stunt. The régime’s doomed anyway, so why not help me out of this? You should have enough intelligence to recognise a moral stink when you smell one.’

‘A puzzling and illogical appeal,’ commented the secretary, ‘with a lot of rich ingredients: an argument of necessity, a moral argument, something which sounded suspiciously like an appeal to the old school tie, and a yen to be formally introduced to me. My name’s Bottom, if you must know; for obvious reasons I use it as little as possible. Now we must get you back on your couch.’

‘H would shoot you as soon as look at you!’ Wyvern exclaimed.

‘Won’t wash, old boy – too obvious a ruse, and a lie anyway. Oh, granted he’s a bit boorish. But stick by him and he’ll stick by you; I don’t pretend to understand that type of idealism, but there it is. Now come on down.’

‘Look here –’

‘Come on down before I shoot your foot off. Don’t you believe me when I ask you nicely?’

There was no alternative. Wyvern started slowly forward. Then he stopped, shaken by a vast strangeness. Almost at once – it seemed intuitively – he knew what was happening: Bert the Brain had come back into action.

The secretary fired deliberately at his captive’s legs. But it was too late. Wyvern’s figure grew blurred, shadowy, and then disappeared.

The ricocheting bullet spanged dismally down the stairwell.

VII

From the orange-tinted windows of the ‘Single Z’ bar there was a fine view of one of the Sector’s airlocks, Trafalgar Gate. For the price of a drink, anyone with nothing better to do could sit all day and watch the traffic in and out of the big dome. Eugene Parrodyce sat and watched it now, from a concealed seat, wistfully.

A deal of military activity was taking place. There had been a demonstration here the evening before, and a home-made bomb thrown. Now a light tank stood by the gate, with new and military police reinforcing the usual lunar guard.

The sectionalised glass of the dome began fifteen feet from the ground, and rested on reinforced steel. The entire gate consisted of three pairs of double doors, two of them wide and full fifteen feet high for freight, and one much smaller for personnel. There was also a guard room which contained a door into the outside wall of the dome.

Behind all these doors stretched a vast, compartmented hangar containing decontamination rooms, showers, first aid posts, an isolation ward, a fire station and a repair base, besides the runways which terminated at the double airlocks leading to the lunar surface. A large team of men worked in this complex hangar, so that a stream of people moved in and out of Trafalgar Gate whether or not spaceships happened to be on the landing ramps outside.

Parrodyce knew that besides the actual airlocks at the far end of the hangar, there were also emergency locks in the sides. The knowledge was of no use to him. He did not know whereabouts they were; he had no spacesuit; he could not get into the hangar without at least four special passes. And to cap it all, he was tied to his seat with funk and indecision.

In his heart, he blamed it all on Wyvern. It was Wyvern’s fault. Now he, Parrodyce, was a hopeless fugitive. The only element of comfort in the matter was that nobody was likely to betray him to the detested police if they recognised him; and the police seemed to have more urgent matters afoot. He thought longingly of his snug little questioning chamber below Norwich barracks, and of the timid friendship he had felt for his assistant until that amiable giant had disappeared.

And now the agent of his misery, Conrad Wyvern, was probably connected to Big Bert. For a moment, Parrodyce wished he might also be so connected. He visualised yearningly a vast father-mother figure who would take him over completely, know all his secrets. Then, recalling the pain this process would involve, he let his attention wander again to the window.

A Turkish six-piece band was haggling with the guard at the Trafalgar Gate. It had come to the British Sector as a seven-piece band; but the zither (doubling guitar) man had been disqualified from anything bar harp music the night before in a political brawl. As a protest, the rest of the band was leaving the sector. Besides a van load of possessions, they were taking with them their wives and their instruments. The noise from these two latter was considerable, supplying a chorus of support for Fezzi Forta, the band-leader, who was haranguing the guard

commander.

It appeared that the Customs wished to look into the dead musician’s coffin, which was leaving with the rest of the band. The Customs seemed to think it likely that the ornate box contained contraband rather than a defunct Turk. Parrodyce was inclined to agree with them.

He was getting a pale sort of pleasure out of watching this tableau when a ‘Single Z’ waiter arrived by his side.

‘Gen’leman upstairs wants to see you,’ he told Parrodyce.

The liquid in Parrodyce’s bladder froze over instantly.

‘What’s his name?’ he asked. ‘What’s he want?’

‘He di’n’ say, sir,’ the waiter said, adding virtuously ‘and I naturally di’n’ ask. But he did say it was a matter of life and death you went up.’

Parrodyce had an aversion to the word ‘death’, but he got to his feet almost with a feeling of relief: the initiative was at last out of his hands.

‘Where is he?’ he asked.

‘Right up the stairs. Room 3.’

Parrodyce went up. There seemed no alternative, but in any case he was curious; if the New Police wanted to arrest him, why not do it in their usual fashion – in full view of others, as a warning – rather than in this roundabout way? And if it wasn’t the police, it might conceivably be someone offering him help.

Upstairs, cheap moon-plaster was crumbling from the walls. It was gloomy here, with a smell of beer and fagends and dirty trousers. The door of Room 3 stood open. Parrodyce entered cautiously, and was immediately grabbed. Arms, ferociously strong, flung him on to a bed.

He was searched all over, and then his captor stood back and surveyed him.

It was Joe Rakister, Parrodyce’s ex-assistant.

‘I never thought you’d be fool enough to walk in like that!’ Rakister exclaimed. ‘You know I was up here – what made you come? Or have you got someone else with you? In that case, it’s just too bad, because we’re leaving in a moment by a back entrance.’

This made little sense to Parrodyce. He stared blankly at his late assistant. The man looked wild. He was filthy and unshaven and evidently had not slept for some time. He wore some kind of ill-fitting uniform which included a cap, jammed tightly on to his head.

‘You see, I’m too smart for you all,’ Rakister explained. ‘I cottoned on instantly. I messed up the killing of Dorgen – I heard someone come into the earth shop as I was doing it. And I thought, “The Colonel will get you for this, boy!” And then I realised that he was planning to get me any way, I’d go back for my reward and nobody would ever see me again. For some reason, it was important to him to get Dorgen out of the way secretly; but the secret would only be really safe with me out of the way too. Oh, I worked it all out, Parrodyce.’

‘Very clever of you, Joe,’ said Parrodyce. ‘Go on.’

‘I’ve seen the telecasts. I know they pinned the job on this bod Wyvern. But that’s just a blind to lull me into a sense of security and make me come out of hiding. It won’t wash. Now they’ve sent you along – to talk me into coming back, I suppose?’

So he did not know that Parrodyce was also on the run – but how could he? The sense of hope rose in Parrodyce again.

‘Well …’ he said.

‘Oh, don’t trouble to deny it. I’ve got no grudge against you, Parrodyce – you were a good boss, as bosses go. But now you’re here, you’re going to help me. With your assistance, I can carry out a little plan I’ve hatched. We’re going out through Trafalgar Gate, see? I’m beating it out of the sector.’

The sense of hope swelled into a sense of triumph. It interfered with Parrodyce’s breathing.

‘Once we’re in the open, you can please yourself what you do,’ Rakister continued. ‘I shan’t harm you if you co-operate. If you don’t co-operate, I’ll kill you soon as look at you. Get that?’

‘You know I’m no fool, Joe.’

Rakister laughed harshly.

‘See this get-up I’m wearing?’ he said. ‘Never mind how I came by it. It belonged to a lung-piper. Know what a lung-pipe is?’

The term meant nothing to Parrodyce.

‘A lung-piper is a chap who inspects the oxygen wells. You know how they get the liquid oxygen up here from underground lakes? The pipes run through the hangar, and the pumps are there. We’re going to inspect them; I’m the piper, you’re my mate. Now here’s exactly what we do, and keep your ears open because we’ve got to hurry.’

For a man who looked as mad as Rakister, the plan sounded a pretty cool one.

The substitute lung-piper and his mate, the latter in dungarees, the former equipped with a tool case and necessary credentials, crossed from the rear entrance of the ‘Single Z’ to the Trafalgar Gate.

There, the Turkish band was haggling its way through the smaller gate. Instruments blared saucily, for they had won a moral victory over the Customs officials and the coffin full of loot was getting through untouched. They were the centre of all eyes, which suited Rakister and Parrodyce well.

Rakister had obtained a good deal of information on lung-piping from the unfortunate off whom he had got his uniform. Parrodyce following, he marched boldly into the guard room, flashing a yellow pass.

They were well in before a corporal stopped them.

‘Out of my way, sergeant,’ Rakister said. ‘We’ve got to get through here. There’s an emergency job required on the underground piping. They phoned through about it, didn’t they?’

‘Not to my knowledge,’ the corporal said, ‘but I’ve only just come off watch. I’ll have to wake up the sergeant, if you’ll hang on.’

‘Wake the bloody sergeant if you like, but we must get on with it unless you want to be floating out on liquid oxygen. There’s a break in X-235.’

He had brushed past the corporal, and was in the tiny store behind the guard room proper. Through a doorway on their right they could see the rest of the detail sleeping in steel cots with their boots on.

At the far end of the store was a trap door. Rakister knelt down beside it, pulled out a bunch of keys and began unlocking the locks and snapping the seals.

‘Hang on a bit for God’s sake, man,’ the corporal said. ‘It won’t take a minute, but whoever tampers with those seals has to sign a form.’

‘Give it me when I come up from the tunnel,’ said Rakister.

The corporal weakened. Evidently he did not consider that rousing a sleepy sergeant was too sound an idea.

‘How long are you going to be?’ he asked, indecision in his voice.

‘An hour – eighty minutes,’ Rakister said. ‘Bring us down some tea, eh?’

‘I’ll still be here then,’ the corporal said with evident relief. ‘I’ll go and get the form, if I can find it. I think it’s a KH 725A.’

He drifted back into the front room as Rakister pulled up the metal square. Parrodyce fished a torch out of the kit they had with them, and they climbed down into the depths, lowering the trap door on top of them.

‘Wouldn’t it have been playing safer if we had tipped that corporal down here and shut him up?’ Parrodyce enquired.

‘He knows he shouldn’t have let us down here. Therefore he’ll keep the secret better than we could,’ said Rakister, and Parrodyce knew he was right. In the old days, casual remarks like this, revealing Rakister’s considerable working knowledge of human psychology, had surprised Parrodyce; he could not understand how a man with such contempt for his fellows gained that sort of wisdom. Now he saw it had been picked up selfishly, to gain Rakister’s own ends. And in the same flash Parrodyce saw that his own usefulness was almost at an end. One of them was going to die shortly, and Parrodyce looked the likelier candidate so far.

‘Well, I didn’t need much help from you after all,’ Rakister said, almost as if reading the other’s thoughts. ‘I was afraid we might have more than one dumb double-striper to cope with.’

They stood beside the big, lagged, oxygen pipes; four of them ran straight from darkness to darkness, in a tolerably wide tunnel stretching from outside the dome to the centre of the city. A notice on the wall proclaimed, ‘It is Dangerous to touch these Pipes unless Insulated Gloves are worn’. It was colder than a vault; their breath clouded and fell as rime on to the pipes.

‘There should be a lung-piper’s hut here,’ Rakister said. He took the torch and swung it round.

The ‘hut’ was a deep alcove a couple of yards down the tunnel. They switched on an electric light and went in. Hoses hung on the wall, tools were stacked in racks. There were also two space suits.

‘Get ’em on,’ Rakister said briefly.

The suits felt icy and were difficult to put on. They helped each other, trembling with cold. One of Parrodyce’s teeth began to ache.

‘We’ve got no time to lose,’ he said, and then realised it was something he was repeating over and over.

At last they were into the suits. With relief they switched on the heating circuits.

‘Don’t close your face-plate yet,’ Rakister said. ‘Then we can talk without using the intercom; someone else might be listening in over it. You go on first down the corridor; I’ll follow. Stop at the outer lock.’

Very nice, Parrodyce thought. And at the lock you can shoot me if you feel like it. Do you feel like it? I can’t tell. I can’t tell what anyone ever thinks, despite this freak gift I have. So I walk down this tunnel of darkness, round-shouldered, with a gun following. Perhaps someone more observant would know what Rakister felt like. He may have given himself away by some tiny item, just as Wyvern was betrayed by an impossible smile.

Just ahead of him in the long tunnel, the oxygen pipes were punctuated with taps worked by wheels. Hoses could be attached to these taps and the liquid syphoned off if a section of pipe had to be emptied for repairs. The taps pointed back down the tunnel the way they had come.

Parrodyce had no two thoughts about the matter.

Judging his distance, he flicked off the torch and ran to the nearest wheel. As he heaved it round, he heard Rakister call in astonishment. Then the liquid oxygen was jetting out; he could feel it thundering through the cock. And he was shouting, cheering, blaspheming.

He switched the tap off after a long minute and flashed his torch.

Quickly he slammed his face plate shut. The lenses of his spectacles had iced over, and he had to wait till the suit heater had coped with the trouble before he could see again. The liquid he had released was boiling, misting up into the corridor, multiplying, writhing, blue, beastly, raw: the stuff of life in killer mood. Half hidden in the vapour, a figure lay across the pipes, frozen there. Parrodyce hurried away from it, a little nauseated.

It was not far to the overhead airlock. He climbed the ladder and heaved himself in, closing the hatch behind him with relief.

Three minutes later he was stepping out of the side of the hangar on to the moon’s surface.

He had never been out alone. It was terrifying! He stood in the shadow of the dome and it was absolutely black. Parrodyce could not see the ground, the hangar or any particle of himself.

Some distance away – he could not tell how far – the world began, an intensely bright world with a biting background of peaks and stars that might have been only at arm’s length. And in the foreground of this chunk of world, a line of figures were making towards a tracked bus; they bore a coffin with them; Fezzi Forta’s boys were on their way.

Pulling himself together, Parrodyce forced himself to march across the black void to the light. He got to the vehicle as the last of the Turks was boarding. They hauled him up without question.

Gloating to himself, Parrodyce began to plan his next move. He had forgotten Wyvern; he was thinking of the telepathic girl.

VIII

‘To say it in a way you would understand it,’ Bert the Brain explained, ‘I was so surprised I was speechless. I have not been out of order at all. I have been out of action, voluntarily. The amount of knowledge you gave me to digest was more than the total volume I have received since I was started – not, I mean, your conscious knowledge, which was comparatively negligible, but the inherited and latent knowledge in you.’

‘I did not realise,’ Wyvern said, ‘that in that brief contact you had with me on the operating table you had learnt all you could.’

‘You had expected the process to be what you call painful,’ the brain answered. ‘I suppose the operation was brief, as you tell time; but once I had grasped one strand of the pattern I could predict and interpret the whole design. It is intensely interesting.’

Conversing with Bert was unlike ego-union. That process was always, basically, a clash of opposing forces, or a locking together of magnetic North and South. Bert had no character; his voice was thin water in the brain. Nothing was there of good or evil, personal ambition, altruism; he was intellect without will, potentiality without promise. There was no threat in him. He was power, but Wyvern was in command. Yet Wyvern was not satisfied.

‘Now that you have the power of ego-union with others,’ he asked, ‘could you do a sort of hook-up with everyone?’

‘Yes – through you. Only if you were in ego-union with them.’

Wyvern knew the machine would be reading the satisfaction his answer brought, and at once it added, ‘After that, I would have their pattern and could communicate with them on my own.’

‘Which is how you communicate with me now, although we are not joined by power cables?’

‘Precisely. I am supplying the stimulus, you supply the power.’ It was a remark Wyvern would soon ruefully recall.

He drifted in a limbo. It was only a moment since he had dissolved before H’s secretary’s eyes, but his time values had altered, together with all his other senses. His vision, for instance, was diffused throughout his body; he was seeing through his cell structure, and on all sides stretched a wall of glass marbles – or so it appeared. Actually, Bert told him, he was viewing the carefully stacked elements of his own body. Using the latent knowledge in Wyvern’s own mind, Bert had unbonded his biochemical position; he was now escaping from the secretary in a wafer of matter a fraction of a millimetre thick – but the endless array of marbles seemed not to move.

‘You can resume normal structure now,’ the machine advised.

‘How?’

‘I will guide.’

‘Where?’

‘I cannot say what the place is.’

‘How can you see it?’

‘Through your senses.’

‘Yet I cannot see it.’

‘You will learn.’

And resuming normal structure was easy. Yet it was difficult. Snapping the fingers is easy; yet a one-year-old babe cannot manage it.

Wyvern was in a blank little office which looked disused. He was starving.

‘This is only about fifty yards from where I found you,’ the wire voice in his head announced.

‘I’m starving!’ Wyvern cried.

He staggered over to the swivel chair and collapsed into it. He still wore the clothes he had taken from the guard, William; he was still peppered with terminals, and the basket of wire still crowned his head. But his flesh seemed to have atrophied, his bones showed, the skin stretched tight over his temples. His stomach felt like a walnut. He was in the last stages of starvation.

Bert realised his plight immediately.

‘This is my fault,’ it exclaimed. ‘I had neglected a basic factor of human metabolism. You feed every five waking hours to maintain energy. That energy is easily consumed, and of course the sub-molecular transposition has entirely drained your energy supplies. I told you you were supplying the power. You must go in search of food at once.’

‘I worked that one out for myself,’ Wyvern said bitterly.

He staggered towards the doorway, wondering where he was, what aid he was likely to get. His hopes sank directly he looked outside: the corridor stretching either way was painted a drab grey and brown, the standard army colours. The opposite wall of the corridor was all glass, Wyvern looked out; he was on the top floor of a tall building. Overhead he could see the domes with their polar shields up.

‘Not hopeful,’ he messaged to the machine.

Without bothering to take any precautions, he walked down the corridor, past two closed doors, to a self-service lift. A notice on it read: UP – HELICOPTERS ONLY. OUT OF BOUNDS TO OTHER RANKS. Wyvern pushed his way in.

‘Going up,’ he said, and went up.

He emerged on top of the building in what at first was blinding light. When he got his bearings, he saw there were several army personnel about, officers in uniform, men in dungarees. Several helicopters were parked in a line, with one just landing.

Wyvern was beyond making any sort of pretence at concealment, nor was it easy to see what exactly he could have done to hide. He merely walked up to the nearest helicopter and flung open the cabin door. Someone called out to him at once.

‘The one this end if you don’t mind, sir.’

Nodding curtly in reply to the mechanic who had shouted, Wyvern walked as steadily as he could down the line of air vehicles. As he reached the one designated, the mechanic pulled open the door and said humbly, ‘May I just see your pass, sir, please.’

‘Do I look as if I was on pleasure?’ Wyvern asked, swinging himself up into the little cabin.

Indeed he looked a formidable sight. His gaunt form was clad still in the guard’s white overall, and his basket-work halo still loomed over his skull.

‘I must see your pass, sir; you know that,’ the mechanic persisted.

‘Oh, very well, man,’ Wyvern said. In one of the overall pockets there was a blank report card. He flicked it through the cabin door. As the mechanic swung to retrieve it, Wyvern switched on the engine and revved the rotors.

The mechanic was quick on the uptake. He wasted no time examining the card, but flung a spanner wildly at Wyvern; it missed, clanging harmlessly against the metal fuselage. At the same time he was yelling at a group of three officers who had been standing nearby, watching Wyvern curiously. They dashed at the machine.

It was beginning to lift when the first officer grabbed at the swinging door. Grimly, Wyvern applied full power. His altitude reached ten feet – and stayed there, the motors labouring angrily. The first officer was dragging himself up. The other officers were also hanging on. The mechanic ran just below the wheels, yelling blue murder and jumping to seize the axle.

‘For heaven’s sake, do something,’ Wyvern gasped to the brain.

‘I can’t. I’d kill you!’ Bert replied. ‘If I drained off any more of your resources, you’d go out like a light.’

Under the combined weight of the officers, the helicopter listed badly. If anything, it was losing height. They slid over to the edge of the building, a wounded bird swarming with rats. Carried away with excitement, the mechanic made one last jump for the axle, missed, and went plummetting into the depths below.

Wyvern’s leg was seized. He looked frantically round for a weapon with which to break the officer’s grasp, but there was nothing loose. Through the window he could see the faces of the two others, clinging and bellowing. He kicked furiously, but his strength was nothing; he began to slide diagonally across the floor of the helicopter.

‘Let go, you crazy fool!’ he shouted. ‘Let go or you’ll kill us all!’

The other tugged the harder. Veins stood out on his forehead; one of his fellows had him by the trousers. It was only this that made him release Wyvern, and take a firmer grip on the passenger seat. Wyvern hauled himself back to the controls.

Their rate of fall was accelerating. The face of a building slid by, desperately close. These in-dome helicopters were light-weight jobs, designed only to carry a maximum of two people. The extra load would be almost buckling the vanes!

Ahead was another block. They slanted past it, and were making for a lower part of the city, drifting towards Mandalay Gate. As Wyvern calculated it, they would be down before they struck the side of the dome. At that, they would probably hit a building first. He flung open the other door, preparing to jump and run at the first opportunity, if his flagging strength would allow him to. Beneath him swung a pattern of upturned faces and pointing hands. Another ’copter soared up nearby; a telecamera projected from its cabin window.

So H and his secretary would probably already know where Wyvern was!

He edged closer to the opening.

‘Don’t be an idiot!’ the lean voice said inside his mind. ‘Your human limbs are fragile and you do not yet know how to grow more. Don’t jump! Let them catch you. They will think it in their own interest to keep you alive and restore you to health, for they do not realise I have already extracted from you all I wish. Sit tight.’

It was good advice. But Wyvern neither took it or disregarded it, for that moment they struck a street pylon. The ’copter wrapped itself lovingly round the pylon and slithered to the ground with a mighty rending of metal. Existence became an affair of stars.

Everything was going to be well.

With that conviction Wyvern woke. He’d been back in his dreams to Stratton, walking among the beech copses, riding Nicky over the sweet bracken, swimming in the infant Yare.

And somehow in the dream everything had sorted itself out so easily. He had been refuelled, and the big computer had scooped him back to earth and the régime had crumbled and then Eileen South had appeared and then … And then he woke up.

He was in a hospital bed again.

Plus ça change, he thought wearily. But at least he had been fed intravenously. His limbs had plumped out, the hollows had gone from his cheeks. And they had removed the terminals from his body. Wyvern felt his head; stubble ran crisply over it, and the wire cage had gone. He looked human again. He sat up, feeling wonderful.

So Bert had been right! They wanted him alive; they would think the computer still had everything to learn from him. If H’s secretary suspected the truth, it hardly seemed likely he would dare tell H that Wyvern had just disappeared before his eyes; for the new Leader, a materialist if ever Wyvern saw one, would dismiss the notion as fantastic. Which it was.

They would couple him back on to the machine – and he would vanish again. But this time for good.

‘Hey!’ he called. The sooner they fetched him the better. He could face them; he could face anything with Bert on his side.

It occurred to him then: if they intended to couple him up again, why had they removed the terminals from his body?

‘Bert!’ he cried inside his head. ‘Bert!’

The machine did not answer, only the silence of the skull where its answer should have been.

Two guards entered the room, the usual wall-faced-looking entities who clicked for these bully jobs.

‘Get up,’ one said in a wall-faced voice.

Wyvern did not like it. He hesitated, until an impatient movement from one of the guns decided him. He climbed out of bed.

‘Put that coat on and come this way,’ one of the guards said, indicating a greatcoat on a peg. ‘And don’t attempt to engage us in any kind of conversation.’

Wyvern wondered remotely what kind of conversation it would have been possible to engage them in, but it seemed a poor time for argument; meekly, he did as he was told. He was marched along a passage and up a flight of stairs, and locked into a featureless waiting room. Beyond the door he could hear voices and footsteps.

Uneasily he thought of all captives in man’s chequered history who from behind locked doors had listened to the unsettling clatter of boots and commands. It would have been better, he reflected, if the moon had never been attainable, than it should be a mere extension of Earth’s hard mazes.

He recalled a song and its casually grim words:

‘Life goes on; no one’s Irreplaceable.’

Again he called Big Bert, but it was still mysteriously silent.

The door was flung open, this time by two different guards. They bundled him out to a yard and into a waiting van, climbing up after him. The vehicle moved off with a lurch and began to travel at speed. At one point, Wyvern thought he heard a shot fired at it.

A quarter of an hour later he was again standing before Colonel H and his secretary.

Colonel H was hardly recognisable. His face was hushed and heavy and his head was carried with a peculiar alertness not noticeable previously; he looked, Wyvern thought for the first time, a man to be reckoned with. He slammed a suitcase shut and stood up, glowering at Wyvern.

‘Come through here,’ he commanded without any preliminaries, gesturing to an adjoining room.

Wyvern walked through. The secretary made to follow, but H thrust out his hand.

‘You can stay here and cope with the paper work,’ he said sarcastically. ‘I’ll deal with this hero.’

He closed the door, and Wyvern and he were alone. The room was bare but for a metal stool and a blank telescreen in the ceiling. It would be years, at the present rate of so-called progress, before the warrens constructed on the moon were properly furnished; by and large, they looked less inviting than the craters outside.

H also looked ugly. Wyvern began another mental call for Big Bert, but still there was no reply.

‘So you have me again,’ he observed.

‘I only want the answer to one question, and then I’m going to shoot you,’ H said.

‘That wouldn’t be very clever of you,’ Wyvern said. not without trepidation, ‘or have you run another telepath to earth?’

‘Not Parrodyce, if that’s who you’re thinking of – and he’s got nothing better than a dose of gamma coming to him when we catch up with him. What you reckon we want another telepath for, eh?’

‘To teach your computer to mind read, as you said,’ Wyvern replied.

‘You’ve already done that,’ the Colonel said.

How had he found out? Had they found out, perhaps, from Bert itself? H did not leave Wyvern long in doubt.

‘You fool,’ he said savagely, ‘didn’t you realise that when you were communicating with Big Bert anyone within fifty yards could pick it up? One of the officers who pulled your ’copter down got out of the crash as lightly as you – the other two broke their necks, by the way – and he told us everything that went over between you.’

It was convincing, crushing, final. The only excuse Wyvern had for not having realised it before was that the usual staggering thought emanations of ego-union had been absent during communication with Bert. Bert was not human: he had intellect but no ego. With him, it had been altogether a quiet, unsensational business. But Wyvern, of course, had opened his mind and had been sending at his usual strength. In the pressure of events, he had not realised it – and nor had Big Bert, which was significant; for it showed that the machine, being man-built, could on occasion act like a man and proceed without sifting all available data.

Even if he had realised that fact, he could have done no differently. It had been essential for Wyvern to communicate with Bert. The past was unalterable; and now the future seemed inevitable. For him, death only lay ahead; for mankind, whom Wyvern had imagined he could help, lay the long terror of spies loose in their very heads. And yet – and yet Big Bert had spoken only to Wyvern …

The hostile silence was broken by Colonel H.

‘So you see you are of no further use to us,’ he said, and slowly drew a revolver from his hip holster.

‘Then why did you go to all the trouble of reviving me and removing the wire network after my helicopter crashed?’

‘Because I want the answer to one question.’

‘And that?’

Colonel H paused as if sorting his words carefully.

Then he said: ‘The machine was instructed to learn from you. It followed those instructions. It learnt the secrets of your freak mind so quickly that we were deceived, and when it closed itself down we could only presume there had been a failure somewhere before it had got to the information. We were wrong there, as we soon discovered. But the point I am interested in is this: when the brain opened itself up again and collaborated with you, it was acting directly contrary to its instructions. How and why was that possible?’

Wyvern leant against the cold wall. The revolver was lowered. The problem was indeed one in which he was deeply, vitally interested – yet at present his brain was working only on the surface.

‘Perhaps the brain found out about something you never have – the sacredness of human life!’ he said.

‘Sacredness!’ He exploded. ‘That sort of cant went out of date back in nineteen fifty! It’s absolute rubbish! Your trouble is, you’ve had 3,000 calories a day all your life. It’s put fat on your brain. You just think of me as a roughneck, Wyvern, don’t you? You’re wrong, wrong right down to your guts. I’m the new élite, I’ve learnt the facts of the modern world! I don’t rule just by bullets – I rule by the iron rod of demography. At the end of the second world war, back in nineteen forty something, the world’s population was only about 2,700 million; they couldn’t visualise totalitarianism in England then, unless it was forced on ’em from outside. That’s what they were guarding against, but it sneaked in and coshed ’em from behind. Why? Because world population – despite all the intervening bloodletting – had doubled. It’s something like 5,500 million now!’

‘Are you trying to make some sort of apology?’ Wyvern asked.

‘No! It’s bare facts. Growing population gobbling up dwindling resources. Average calorie intake falling. Fiercer struggles for less food, nation envying nation. Your bloated electorate turns into a starving rabble; below 2,000 calories a day, they forget what ballot slips are, they forget the subtle distinctions between things like Conservatism and Socialism. They have to be ruled by whips and bullets. You see, Wyvern, it’s a law of nature.

‘Take a damn good look at me, Wyvern. I’m Mother Nature personified!’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.