Читать книгу The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s - Brian Aldiss - Страница 9

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.