Eighty Minute Hour

George smiled and nodded, looking down at the path, glancing at his watch. Soon it would be time for us to work.

Slavonski Brod Grad was not always a place of merriment. The parties were growing fewer as the economic situation deteriorated.

George Hornbeck and I fought our own little battle against the monolithic state threatening to engulf the world once the Cap-Comm Treaty was really a going concern.

We published creative pornography. Much of the material, mainly in the form of comic strips, was supplied by our Brazilian ally, da Perquista Mangista. We were backed by Brazilian money as well.

Our one-room offices were in the castle. We called ourselves P.P.P., which stood for Pornography Permissive and Progressive. Strangely enough, the idea had come from Russia, where their samizdat, or do-it-yourself publishing, led the world.

Our puny blow against machine-culture was done by machines which mainly ran themselves. We could afford a few minutes more in the fresh air.

‘Let’s sit on a bench and sun ourselves,’ George said. ‘It’s a traditional old man’s occupation. We don’t have to talk to Dinah. She’s a foolish woman. I wonder why she will tell nobody who the father of her infant is?’

We sat down together, and he started to discuss paternity. He did ramble sometimes. Then he said, ‘Your other burden is the loss of your parents. I know your mother is doing good work on Mars, but she should be here with you and Choggles. Choggles is getting too precocious for her own boots … No, that wasn’t what I meant to ask you. Durrant, what are you intending to do with your life?’

Well, why not tell him?

‘I’m intending to write a novel. I’m not interested in holoplays, and pornography has its limitations. I want to write a good old-fashioned novel, with no more ambition in it than to reflect pleasure and disgust in what I see round me.’

At that time, I was not entirely serious. I did not entirely intend to write a novel, merely to keep old George, whom I regarded highly, content. Certainly, I did not intend to write this novel. But, the neuro-scientists declare, every human act can be analysed in chemical terms; so perhaps that conversation predetermined this book.

I hereby determine not to intervene in the narrative again – or not overtly. But, bereft of my own legs, I intend to play a long-legged God – the new kind of god, god of creation, slave of the creation it has created, as man has now become slave of the systems he created, according to the new neuro-philosophy. For – why not admit it – I’m vexed already with my task: by what scale of values is it more worthwhile to create or read a novel, even one with real people in it, than to opt for hallucinations provoked by root, as does my dark obverse, my brother, over in California? – Except in this: that drug-dreams cover old ground, and look back; I try to look forward, to encompass new thought.

Accordingly, I will travel with my characters all round space and time. If I do that, I will also travel into their thoughts. Why not? Mind is now proven an epiphenomenon of space and time! You see I write a story on deterministic principles.

The first flutter of this came to me as I sat in the sun with George Hornbeck, for I said, ‘I’d like to try and invent what others think. Thought has always seemed to me easier to understand than action.’ (And there I finish telling what I said.)

He gave his dry laugh. ‘Understanding is a relative expression. But we can all of us always do with a little more of it. Go ahead, Durrant, see what you can do for us – and yourself!’

He left me, walking quite strongly across the wide courtyard, an old man missing England.

IV

Orbiting the sun in a region of space somewhere (not to put too fine a point on it) between Mars and Jupiter, was the space vehicle known to its enemies as Spy-Bell Zero Zero Zero. To the D.N., and to its occupants, it was known as Doomwitch.

The occupants numbered ten humans, plus a very efficient computer. The ship was built by the Dissident Nations – those who could not or would not enter the World Government umbrella offered by the Cap-Comm Treaty. Most of the structure was Japanese-made, except the computer, which was a Danish model, an IMRA40, and the engines, which were Yugo-Hungarian.

Most of the crew were American. Four of them were conscious, while the rest lay in semi-deep, just three degrees Kelvin above BAZ (Biochemical Activity Zero), conserving air, nutrients, and power.

Of the four who retained, to varying degrees, that peculiar state called by its possessors ‘full consciousness’, we have met one before – Dr Glamis Fevertrees, last seen with Zoomer arranged tastefully about her feet. She still wore his pendant round her neck.

Also conscious was the cool, dapper, and scholarly Professor Jules de l’Isle-Evens, once a high-ranking scientific adviser to the EEC in Brussels before the EEC signed on with Cap-Comm, whereupon de l’Isle-Evens, an independent man, had joined the D.N.

The other two aware crew-members were Guy Gisbone, who, like many other technical men, had been involved with the massive Operation Sex-Trigger under the aegis of Auden Chaplain, before WWIII; and the perky and spotty Dimittis, who was referred to – not always behind his back – as ‘the cabin-boy’.

All four were busy. None was happy.

Doomwitch was the first D.N. spy-bell to be launched, whereas the Cap-Comm powers had virtually the free run of space. Its appointed task was to maintain constant watch and chart of all Cap-Comm space-going operations and feed them back to Tokyo, the new D.N. capital. But it had been detected by enemy posts near Jupiter almost before taking up position.

The enmity between Cap-Comm and D.N. was not yet formalised by anything so crass as a war-footing – indeed, nations still remained embarrassed at finding themselves on the opposing side to nations with whom they had been allied in WWIII, only three years before. But a state of tension existed, which the unscrupulous para-combine of Smix-Smith took full advantage of.

Guy Gisbone and the glamorous Dr Glamis lay on couches on their stomachs – not the most comfortable of positions for Gisbone, a well-fleshed man with plenty of belly – surveying the trajectories of shipping in the region of Mars. They had six monitors to watch, most of them filled with blank space most of the time, any one of which could have its contents switched to one of two larger screens if the contents proved important enough.

The profusion of screens caused a certain amount of headache. In addition, Jupiter, as omnipresent to Doomwitch as a hunch on a hunchback’s shoulder, was causing a static storm – Jupiter IV being in transit – and distorting images.

In the lab behind the observation bay in which Glamis and Gisbone were working, Jules de l’Isle-Evens sat with lightbrush and screen, working on an arachnoid-like polygraph, the coordinates of which he was plotting from a notebook.

Dimittis was cooking flapjacks.

All four joined in their computer-song.

GLAMIS

The inter-reactions of the biosphere

Proceeding at their statutory pace

Produced an ocean-vat of amino-acid.

From there the stages, difficult but placid,

That led us upwards to the human race

Are now deterministically clear.

JULES

The next step onwards has an equal clarity.

Like ripples on a lake-face interlocking,

Each stage becomes more complex than the last,

Governed by mathematic law. Thus, fast,

We recognise the new scheme time is clocking;

Computers have with mankind now gained parity.

QUARTET

Yes, this is the riddle that peasants and commuters

Put to each other in Nineteen Nine Nine

As they dig up their fields or they drive in a line –

As they slump by their holocubes or go to dine out –

Yes, this is the riddle that peasants and commuters

Put to themselves in that terrible moment of doubt –

‘Are we compos mentis enough for computers?’

GISBONE

The biochemic interweaving force

That we call Nature, aeons back devised,

From cell and jell, computers light enough

To work effectively and fast, be tough,

And utilize a power-source micro-sized –

Computers called the human brain, of course.

DIMITTIS

Their brains began to take the world and mark it

For conquest by platoons of eager tools.

The latest tool – how clever can you get?! –

Thinks clearer, faster, than the brains do yet.

In truth, it makes them all look floundering fools:

They gone and priced themselves out of the market!

QUARTET

Yes, this is the riddle that girls, boys, and neuters

Put to each other in Nineteen Nine Nine

As they look to the future and try to divine

If it’s worth procreating or even mating this year –

Yes, this is the riddle that girls, boys, and neuters

Put to themselves in that terrible moment of fear –

‘Are we compos mentis enough for computers?’

Glamis restored a lock of hair to its correct position and turned again to her screens. Combinationist politician’s hostess during her first marriage, priestess in the Swinging Church of Jesus Christ’s Free Will during her second, subjective manipulationist in defiance mensiatry during her third, now she was a jill-of-all-trades in the expanding post-war world during her final divorce.

She looked good, younger than her sister Loomis, and with slightly less reptile ancestry under the eyes.

‘It appears to be a Smix-Smith tight-beam traveller on Six,’ she told Gisbone, rattling off coordinates and switching magnifications.

‘Got it,’ Gisbone said. A faint dotted trace arced across his screen, with blackness behind it. Then the whole picture broke and flared into colour. All the other screens before them did the same. They were confronted by a row of late Kandinskis.

‘Switch to L-Beam,’ said the computer calmly. Even on the alternate system, the Kandinskis remained, vibrating vigorously.

Gisbone had already hit the alarm button.

Glamis locked her monitor and switched to tape. She rolled over to Gisbone’s couch to watch, or help if necessary.

De l’Isle-Evens let the cobweb graph ride on into darkness and switched his own link through to the observation panel.

Dimittis allowed a flapjack to burn and, swallowing another, ran through from the galley.

‘Check chronology!’ Gisbone gasped.

‘Checking,’ de l’Isle-Evens said quietly.

They watched the battle on the screen – momentarily, until a metal mouth spat copy and spoke.

‘Chronology check. Space-time coordinates X on Alpha. Date line variant, dip minus zero zero eight three forty-one gaffs. Trace-subject now subjectivated at Western time 1999, March twenty, thirteen twenty-one hours.’

They didn’t even waste time looking at each other. De l’lsle-Evens was rattling on the master-terminal.

‘That’s it,’ he said, reading off the passing figures from his screen. ‘It’s another time-prolapse. The Smix-Smith tight-beam traveller we were tagging has disappeared, together with its surrounding continuum … minus 008341 gaffs … that’s – here it is –’

Dimittis had got there first, using his greasy fingers.

‘The ship prolapsed two years, eight months, and a bit,’ he read out. ‘The slip is on the increase.’

‘Two and two-thirds years! Okay, that’s it …’

The watchers rose from their couches, their faces sober. Behind them, disregarded, little encapsuled lives gestured under the glazed jelly surfaces of the monitors. The four of them moved into the lab. Glamis sucked her generous lower lip. Nobody spoke. Their life-forces flowed out, mingled with the banal hum of sophisticated machineries, spread to join the enveloping currencies of the universe.

‘Someone had better put it into words,’ Gisbone said. ‘This is the second time. We can’t write this off as some unaccountable electronic fault. We can’t blame this one on Jupiter playing up …’

He had to force himself to go on. ‘For reasons we have yet to discover, aberrations are developing in the universe time-flow. The hitherto uninterrupted, ceaseless, remorseless flow of time is disrupted …’

‘At least the disruption appears to be extremely localised,’ Dimittis said.

Glamis gave a laugh with a hint of hysteria in it. ‘For God’s sake, let’s not start adjusting to such a – an unutterable situation!’

‘Besides, this extreme localisation, if it goes on, may prove to be the most uncomfortable feature of the phenomenon,’ de l’Isle-Evens said, thoughtfully.

‘How come?’

‘Well, if we all – the entire solar system nexus – aberrated backwards on the time-scale, we’d experience little practical effect, surely? The star-fields would change if the backward shift were really enormous but, if the shift were slight – just a few years – why, then it might be extremely hard to detect any effect from such an aberration.’

‘Say, think of that, imagine the whole solar system slipping back in time to the beginning of the universe … And nobody even noticing … What a song you could make out of that idea!’

‘Dimittis, stick to the point,’ de l’Isle-Evens said severely. ‘Besides, there is evidence to suggest that the system would – were such an unlikely event to occur – the system would not long survive bombardments of proto-radiations.’

Brushing this idle speculation aside, Gisbone said, ‘In any event, we can’t stay here. We have the proof that this unprecedented event is happening; that a Smix-Smith ship got zocked back in time before our eyes. We must take the proof to earth and present it to the D.N. Congress – the forthcoming meeting at Friendship might be a useful opportunity. If anything can be done, it must be done before – Well, we don’t dare guess what sort of madness might seize people if this temporal deterioration continues.’

‘Agreed, we must try to get in touch with the right people,’ Glamis said. ‘But I can guess what has caused this time prolapse – as I suspect you can. World War III, of course. For five years, all the big powers shot holes in space and thought nothing of it. Their immense nuclear disturbances ruptured the fabric of space-time – not just space but interrelated time as well. This is the ultimate in pollution – mankind’s pollution of the whole continuum!’

It did not need a psychiatrist to understand why there was an odd ring of triumph in her voice. We feel good when our worst fears have been confirmed. Temporarily, at least.

The ruin of the space-time universe was enough to make every last right-thinking conservationist cheer, as they went, slipping, falling, plummeting back into their own histories, shrieking ‘I told you so-o-o-o-o …’

The crew of the Doomwitch stood around, each perhaps wishing that it had been his or her turn in semi-deep when this happened. They would have to go back to earth in the flesh to bear convincingly tidings of such weight, gloom, and eccentricity. Yet all of them on the station, stiffs included, were renegades – worse, neutrals – hunted by one feuding party or another of the thousand ragged-nerved splinter groups left bobbing in the wake of the Big War. The fun wasn’t going to be fun.

‘Well,’ said Guy Gisbone, hitching his trousers.

The alarm buzzed, raising vibrations along the sutures of their skulls.

Glamis was the first back to the screens.

‘Oh, the holy ruptured everlasting scab-devouring sainthoods!’ she exclaimed.

Every screen was showing Kandinski, continuous performance.

The terminals were mouthing babble.

Loudspeakers squeaked and gibbered.

Metallic mouths spat read-outs of unmitigated jabber-wocky.

‘This just has to mean –’ she said.

‘It can’t mean –’ Gisbone said.

‘Don’t say we’ve slipped back in time, too!’ Dimittis groaned.

De l’Isle-Evens was not usually a man of action. But the shuttered visual-observation ports were behind his terminal, above the serried comp-buffer-units and drum-memories. He was there in a couple of strides, and had his hand on the flip button.

He paused.

They watched him.

He flipped the button and the shutters folded back as quick as a child’s eyelids.

Jupiter had gone!

They were peering out into empty space.

The disoriented instrumentation chattered like rutting marmosets.

V

Mike Surinat said, ‘The apostles of apostasy are slaves of obedience to an iron whim.’

‘Obedience is for talent; only genius disobeys involuntarily.’

‘I disobey, thou disregardest, he revolts me.’

‘You’re out! You changed the person! It was “disobeys”, not “disobey”, right, Mike?’

‘Right, you’re out, Monty! Your turn, Dinah.’

‘Oh – “Genius is an infinite capacity for taking and giving pain in the neck.”’

‘The Infinite has reality only for immature minds.’

‘She who minds the baby rules the man.’ That was Choggles Chaplain, Mike’s ten-year-old niece. She spoke while looking at the swollen form of Dinah Sorbutt, so noticeably viviparous.

‘She who weeps least, weeps best.’

‘We are proverbial! “Least said, least mended!”’

‘“A waterproof cup is a wonder only if mended.” Not very bright, I’m afraid!’

‘Hm. I wonder whoever the troublemaker was who invented the idea of equality?’ Dinah.

There were now only three of them left in the game, so it was Mike’s turn again.

‘“Impossible! Wonderful! So what?” are the three cries uttered at the birth of anything ever invented.’

Dinah Sorbutt squealed with delight. ‘You’re out, Mike! You broke the rules! You took two words from my sentence, not one!’

‘Not at all. One of your words is always sufficient, Dinah. I took “Invented” merely.’

‘And “ever”! What about lousy old “ever”? You took “ever” too, so you’re out, and that just leaves Choggles and me.’

‘But, my darling bitch, you didn’t say “ever”. You said, did you not, “whoever”? And “whoever” is not “ever”, any more than “milestone” is “tone”. You are out for challenging incorrectly!’

‘Oh, your cruddy, non-sparking, complex, complicated word-games! How I loathe them! The world disintegrates and we play word-games!’

‘Had the whole world been innocently occupied playing my cruddy complex, complicated – whatever that is – word-games these last few years, it would not now be in its admitted state of disintegration.’

The vexed Miss Sorbutt, though heavily into the last days of her pregnancy, jumped to her feet and dived into the pool. The spray she sent up scattered itself in random but equable distribution over Mike Surinat and his niece.

‘Want to go on with the game, Choggles?’ he asked her.

‘No, thanks, Uncle. You’re always so shirty if I beat you. Isn’t he, Durrant?’ I was sitting with them and had been out of the running for some rounds.

‘If you beat me, it is because you cheat by introducing school slang into your jejeune sentences,’ Surinat told her. ‘I am “shirty” – to quote the latest example of what I mean – with your cheating, not your winning.’

‘So you say!’ She too jumped up. He was after her but she got away. She followed Dinah into the great octagonal pool.

Night like a great sea lay over their slice of the world. The pool itself, milky with underwater light, floated in the dark. Swimming in it was rather like being in a titanic womb. Perhaps Dinah Sorbutt found comfort in some such reflection. She drifted lazily and mountainously as Choggles butterflied up to her.

‘Can I feel the baby kicking again? Nobody’s looking, except perhaps my brother, and he won’t mind.’

‘Choggles, darling, please leave me alone. I’m not just a baby machine.’

‘I’m supposed to take an interest! Oh, please, Dinah! After all, I may have to go through the ghastly business myself one day. You’d think they’d dream up a less cumbersome way of carrying on the human race. I mean, you look ever so enormous …’

She duck-dived under Dinah, to come up panting on the other side.

‘You may only get one chance to bear a child,’ Dinah said, ‘now that the government controls fertility in both men and women.’

‘Well, that’s progress. Anyhow, it’s saved us from an overpopulated world, hasn’t it? That – and the millions slaughtered in the war.’

Dinah said primly, ‘Many people think the fertility-switch reduces humanity to the level of machines and animals.’

‘We can’t be both machines and animals,’ Choggles said, reasonably. ‘In any case, you needn’t lecture me about all that. People of ten really dislike being lectured, you know. And besides, it’s wasted on me. Don’t forget that the Schally-Chaplain switch is named after my father, though we don’t talk about him.’

‘I know all about that, child. I’m just tired of your following me. Go and follow your uncle Mike, if you’re so mad about him.’

‘Don’t be personal – I didn’t ever ask you who the father of your foetus was, did I? Though of course I’ve guessed! Are you going to have the child delivered in a state maternity home?’

‘Of course. It’s compulsory.’

‘You know why that is, don’t you? It’s so that they can fix the baby with the switch! Mike told me.’

‘Stop it!’

‘You could get it done privately at a private clinic, I should think – you know, like those gorgeous old abortion-clinics you sometimes see in holodramas.’

Dinah started to swim slowly away. ‘That would be illegal. When the computer opens the fertility-switch to allow you to conceive, the fact is recorded, and they check to see that you go to a proper maternity home.’

‘Does it hurt the baby – the insertion of the Schally-Chaplain switch, I mean? My father did the operation on me himself.’

‘Oh, go away! I don’t want to talk about it!’ Dinah started kicking and splashing.

‘You’d better not over-exert yourself, Dinah, or you might give birth in the pool! Do you think that’s possible? Perhaps it would grow up amphibious …’

In the end, Choggles swam disconsolately away. Communication was really only in its elementary stages. She would have to say that to Mike; he might laugh, but Mike’s laughter was always partly against himself.

As she thought about Mike, she saw he had been standing at one end of the pool. Now he was turning, disappearing into the darkness.

He also, at one remove, had been thinking of parturition and the processes of species-continuance which appeared to be mankind’s sole blind objective. Now that science had finally taken control of that objective, after centuries of blundering attempts to do so, the human race would be subtly and inevitably changed.

He walked away into the dark. Behind him, the pool was a drop of amniotic fluid and a beacon for moths – except that moths and similar night creatures were fended off by a bumper beam a few metres above ground level.

Above night level floated the sound of Slavonski Brod guests, their idle laughter, their carefully directed nothings. The mating game and the horrid struggle for existence were here brought to heel – reduced to flirtations and mild egocentricities.

Surinat avoided the crowd about the pool-side bar and turned among the trees. Darkness he loved. Darkness was more suited to the human condition than daylight. There would come a time when darkness was continual, unpunctuated by any little local lamps. The idea rested him.

Of course, that time was billions of years ahead. A lot of suffering had to be got through before that. But the human brain – the human brain was always enfolded, under its thick encompassing bone, in darkness.