Eighty Minute Hour

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And the blossoming sight, as it swept by and was replaced by the stupider nullity of night jerked her out of her passive mood.

She jumped up, shaking off the sucking embrace of the chair.

She was confronted by a pair of glassily triumphant eyes.

‘Mother!’

‘Sit down!’

She balanced herself against the animal surge of acceleration, light on her small feet, still shedding a warm trickle of water down one leg. A line from a favourite poem of her uncle’s tracered past her attention and she blurted a frightened misquotation.

‘You are, but what you are –’ And the words triggered their own answer.

‘You’re not my mother! You’re a holman!’

She started to scream, unloading the decibels from her ten-year-old lungs right into that frozen expression of triumph. By then, they were no more than a zoomastiginum in the upper air.

VII (#u3c328d58-fbdc-5028-a5e4-2912748e8ae5)

‘Harry! Harry!’ he bawled through the pouring rain. He’d bawled for his father like that, in the old man’s dying days. Maybe it just meant he was a shouting man. ‘Harry, for crabs’ sakes!’

Harry looked round, weary on his little eminence, still clutching his tired sword. Mud and blood were plastered over the clothes plastered to his meagre body.

‘What d’you want?’

‘Harry, if you weren’t doing this, what would you most like to be doing?’

Harry and Julliann roared with laughter. They came and stood closer bellowing like old warthogs at Julliann’s joke. Gururn looked on puzzled, false mouth plastered across his splanchnocranium. He did not get the joke. He did not get jokes.

‘Hey, Conan, relax, will you? – There’s a lull in the storm!’ Harry the Hawk called to him.

Gururn made some sort of a gesture, shambled towards the others, his two human friends in this inhuman desert. The fight between their gigantic ally Milwrack and the Whistling Hunchback still continued over the ridge; the elements were joining in, though growing somewhat atmospherically bored. Every clout across shoulder, every fall on to knees, every whistling grunt from Whistling Hunchback, was celebrated in the heavens by a lightning flash, a gust of north wind, or a fresh cloudful of hail, slung down like chilled buckshot over the battle area. Now and again, an eagle was tossed in too, Boreas-borne. As if intelligent enough to be scared, Harry’s goshawk clung bedraggled to its master’s shoulder, clung there throughout the battle with the ravening Adolescents, losing the odd feather, croaking the odd word of encouragement to its master.

The trio stood there resting, steaming.

Mud poured past their ankles like failed chocolate pudding.

‘Let’s go and look at the guys we killed. It will help keep our spirits up,’ Julliann said. He also had a theory that he should always keep his mob on the move, so that they had no time to think about their wounds or his failure to pay their social security.

They trudged over high ground, exchanging mud for old heaped snowbanks such as pervaded the whole region they had been travelling for so long. The spectacular suns overhead lit them like automobile headlights, making the going ever more difficult.

‘I’ve passed nothing but ice and snow for days,’ Harry grumbled.

‘A cup of really hot toddy could change that fast.’

The first corpse they came on was lying face down in the dirt. Julliann rolled him over with a boot. It was an Adolescent, encased in green leather. Half his cranium and the top of his face had been sliced off – not wisely, maybe, but too well. Julliann bent suddenly and prodded with a finger in the mess of semi-rigid brains.

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ Harry said. ‘I hope you’re going to wash your hands afterwards. What are you looking for anyway? Chewing gum?’

For answer, Julliann came up with a little amber bead. It rolled into the palm of his hand. He held it for inspection under Harry’s nose. Harry moved his nose away. The bead was shaped like a sucked lozenge with two thread-fine horns only a few microns long protruding at one end.

‘Know what that is? It’s an electrode.’ A fleck of gory matter still adhered.

‘How did you know it was there?’

‘I didn’t know, but I expected to find it. I saw one in spilled brains yesterday, and another a couple of days back.’

‘You must look harder at spilled brains than I do, partner! Now tell me what an electrode is!’

He yelled as he finished speaking and swung his sword. Julliann and Gururn turned as two and stood shoulder to shoulder. The feral kids were coming again, driving their bull-roaring bikes, their Yankos and Vastis, skidding over the firm, armed with lances and pikes.

‘Whoooooooargh!’ roared Gururn. He was a good man to have in a battle, pronunciation apart.

The contest was less unequal than it looked. On this broken ground, the bikes made poor going and could, with a well-timed swing, be kicked over. So long had the Adolescents been in the saddle that they were helpless out of it, their atrophied leg muscles unable to bear the weight of their bodies. Also, they had a tendency to run each other over and stab one another in the back with the lances.

It was sixty-four against three. The three triumphed, but it was a dashed close-run thing. Afterwards, they threw a torch on the broken bikes and sat round warming themselves by the fire.

‘We could sleep if only it would get dark. Not a chance of that with all these suns clattering round the sky.’

‘Never seen anything like it,’ Gururn mumbled.

Julliann did not answer. He closed his eyes and tried to think the logic-line of his life clear. It made no sense even to him, and he was no intellectual. There had been other occasions when he had tried to sort things out, and something in his brain just switched –

‘Julliann, Julliann …’

He roused, was himself again.

‘Let go of my shoulder, what are you shaking me for?’

‘Are you all right? You flung that bead away and then you went sort of numb.’ Harry’s face was flecked with fear and saliva.

‘Let me alone!’

They saw a sausage-shaped mauve sun rising at a rate of knots. It took some believing. The supernatural nature of the struggle between Milwrack and the Hunchback was being somewhat overplayed.

He slumped before the crackling Yankos in misery, not daring to think about what he needed to think about but could not. How many people had had electrodes inserted in their skulls?

He jumped up and screamed, ‘They’re meddling with us! They’re meddling with us! This isn’t happening! It’s an illusion!’

Harry jumped up, scattering goshawk. ‘That again! You need a toddy too, pal! Let’s go and join up with Milwrack.’

The goshawk circled round the snowed-out rocks, banking tightly, returned, and took a really firm grip on Harry’s right shoulder.

VIII (#u3c328d58-fbdc-5028-a5e4-2912748e8ae5)

Smix-Smith was not so much a corporation, more a lay of wife, an executive wit had once remarked, referring to his uxorious boss. But humour was filed swiftly away when the boss was on the scene. Even when the boss’s dopple was on the scene.

Attica Saigon Smix came out of Texmissions Bay at full tilt, caused by the incline of the ramp on winch his stretcher ran. The vehicle had its course prescribed. It moved through the mammoth building at close to the speed of sound, down corridors of widths scarcely greater than its own, now and again shuttling into elevator shafts and becoming its own cage. It ejected its human-type burden into a small but luxuriously appointed presidential anteroom to the World Executive Council Chamber, code name Beta Suite, on the walls of which hung, among other treasures, the only Tiepolo etching in the world to survive the war. It depicted the flight into Egypt, and was reputed to be more valuable than Egypt itself.

As he climbed off the stretcher, Attica Saigon Smix was greeted by one of his secretaries for state, Chambers Technical Dictionary (for so this intellectual bonhommous kyllosic Christian member of the Kikuyu tribe had been christened). Chambers offered a potted version of recent events. Attica Saigon Smix read it through swiftly as he entered the council chamber.

Ten members of the executive were present round the traditional table. He wondered if any of them had been through the same complicated transcendences to get here as he. Lights above their seats indicated whether they were their own embodiments or projects of some kind. Two members were companalogs, which C.C. found it convenient to have around. For the rest, all had been top-level members – until a few fleeting but crippled years ago – of various national governments. Ex-red Russian and Chinese sat down with ex-democratic Netherlanders, ex-fascist South Americans, and Americans like Dwight Castle.

Just as they had once carved up their own states, these men now settled down amicably with their ex-enemies to carve up the earth, together with such portions of the solar system as could be appropriated, discovering with alacrity and pleasure how much they had in common with their opposite numbers.

How H.G. Wells, Wendell Willkie, and other valiant dreamers of the World State would have cheered to see their vision made actual! At last, major ideological differences, the plague of the twentieth century, had been healed. ‘United World!’ was now slogan and actuality.

Those few billions of human beings who objected to the idea for one reason or another were being eliminated as fast as the limited efficiency of the postwar machine allowed.

As he settled into his seat at the head of the table, Attica Saigon Smix nodded to the committee. One curt nod. All-inclusive. Nevertheless, though all were included, some were more included than others – in particular, John Thunderbird Smith.

John Thunderbird Smith was one of the companalogs, a particularly terrible-looking creature owing to the glittering spodumene substance in its ocular proprioceptors and a certain graininess in its overall composition. (It had been known, when debate was most furious, to become just slightly, nastily, translucent, as if in grisly warning of what might happen to the rest of them.)

Taking the initiative immediately, Attica Saigon Smix said, ‘This is Full Emergency. Some of you are present here in person. Don’t let it occur again. Send dopples of some kind. You are not expendable.’ He wondered if any of them had found a bolt-hole as safe and undetectable as he and Loomis had done. ‘Let’s begin business.’

Before the words had separated from the carbon dioxide in Smix’s mouth, Thunderbird Smith said, ‘We must not leave Beta Suite until we have decided how to program C.C. best to meet the crisis.’

‘Which crisis is that?’ Sun Hat Sent, the Chinese delegate, inquired.

Briefly, with a human gesture of despair, Thunderbird Smith let his gaze rest in pleading on the oil portrait of Sir Noël Coward on the wall next to the Tiepolo.

‘The crisis, the new crisis we have code-named Operation Seventh Seal. You have summary sheets before you. They may be précised as follows, and I accept the deductions arrived at by C.C. in its AAA8334 circuits, the circuits dealing with malfunctions of the external world. During the War of Continuance, as most of us recall, certain thermonuclear components were employed in hand weapons upwards to full-scale multi-megaton aerial-descent devices. The most noteworthy of such devices delivered adjacent to this region was an old-fashioned but considerable device of a fission-fusion-fission type, targeted on the ground-area Iron Gates Dam, power-centre of the Yugoslav-Hungarian Dissident Powers.

‘That device was comparatively clean. Nevertheless, its fireball generated a temperature estimated at 500,500,000 degrees Celsius.

‘Later devices attained higher maxima, temperature-wise. The Operation Snowfire raids on Luna, in which the satellite was completely destructed, attained maxima somewhat in excess of one hundred times the Iron Gates device, being able to draw on a planetary core as an additional heat-boost.’

‘This is steam under the bridge – let’s get to the nitty-gritty, Smith,’ said Savro Palachinki, who had been old-fashioned enough to arrive incorporesano.

With another agonised glance at the features of the man who had provided inspiration for the nomenclature of the chambers they were in, Thunderbird Smith continued, ‘This background is an integral part of the Seventh Seal emergency. In brief, improved devices developed towards war-end attained temperatures and pressures in excess of a thousand times those found at the heart of the sun. We are still living with – and in some unhappy cases dying with – the after-effects of these remarkable scientific achievements.’

The one woman at the table, Sue Fox, said, ‘At the risk of interrupting, Mr Thunderbird Smith, we should consider these aspects of the victorious peace as no longer worth discussion. After all, the cease-fire was signed over five years ago. As I have explained before, the radio-turbulences of spaceflight, the continued escalation of world temperature norms, the electrical storms, and of course the soaring cancer-death rate – in which we all take such a sympathetic interest – these after-effects of war, vexing though they may be, would nevertheless have manifested themselves, even if perhaps less dramatically, in the ordinarycourseofprogress, war or no war. And we should therefore cease to keep harping on them!’

‘Sue’s right,’ Dwight Castle declared. It was the only thing he said all meeting.

Attica Saigon Smix saw that it was time he took over. By diving in before the woman stopped talking, he was on launch before Thunderbird Smith, who, being machine and therefore not quite human, remained silent.

‘We have harped on these things, these malfunctions of our biosphere, simply because they are now part of existence. Now we have to deal with a malfunction of one section of the environment about which we know remarkably little, whose functionings we have hitherto been privileged to take for granted: time. Time itself. The orderly function of time, just like the orderly function of space, has become at least partially inoperative through what you, Mrs Fox, chose to call “the ordinary course of progress”.’

‘C.C. is already working on the formulae of space-time displacement,’ Thunderbird Smith said. ‘Unfortunately, figures are scarce as yet. Positive proof of time-malfunction was provided by the disappearance of a spy-bell under observation near Jupiter in Code Area Conquest, its exact coordinates being known. Our reasons for believing that the spy-bell lapsed with the space surrounding it into a matrix hitherto regarded as past are set in Technical Appendix Two A before you. Please familiarise yourselves with the exposition.’

‘What other evidence have we that this highly unlikely state of affairs obtains?’ Savro Palachinki asked, biliously eyeing his way through the photostats of formulae before him. ‘How do we know this isn’t just C.C. chuntering to itself, with all due respect?’

‘We already take for granted other sorts of space opened up to us through the space-holes or warps caused by intensive gravitational thermonuclear disruption,’ Attica Saigon Smix said. ‘We must now face up to the fact that more than one time can exist simultaneously.’

‘Reports coming in confirm that remark,’ Thunderbird Smith said. ‘I am receiving formulations of them now.’ It did not stop him talking.

‘We believe we know exactly what phenomena in the physical world we are witnessing. Data are arriving to buttress the hypothesis. Thus it ever was in the history of scientific understanding. Right here in Beta Suite, only three days back, we discussed a report from State Swazi in Africa which announced that a Zulu War had broken out in Transvaal. The Zulu nation was being led by one Cetewayo. C.C. dismissed this at the time as unfounded, the factors being unbased in reality. It now seems as if a whole portion of South Africa has slipped back into the year 1879 or thereabouts.’

Chambers, standing behind Attica Saigon Smix, passed him a note. Smix read it out. The icterus index of his face was high. His hand trembled. ‘Gentlemen, Russian troops advancing through East Rumelia are strongly attacking the Ottoman Army outside Adrianople. This report is dated 18th January 1878… Where and what is or are East Rumelia, the Ottoman Army, and Adrianople?’

‘Russians! Russian troops? This concerns me!’ Savro Palachinki exclaimed, jumping up from the table. ‘I will send a dopple in my place as soon as inhumanly possible!’

Another note passed on from Chambers.

‘Gentlemen, control yourselves. Britain has invaded Afghanistan. Remember Britain?’

Someone else was jumping up and crying out.

Another note.

‘Please, gentlemen – the Khedive of Egypt has been deposed by the Sultan, whoever those persons may be, in a communiqué dated June, 1879.’

‘Carapace! It’s spreading!’ Sue Fox cried. ‘We’ll find ourselves in the last century before we know it!’

Another note handed forward by the unflustered Chambers.

‘Please, friends – order! Montenegro has occupied Dulcigno. Does anyone know where Dulcigno is? Or Montenegro? Please?’

‘C.C. will straighten matters out!’ John Thunderbird Smith called above the din. ‘These anomalies in the functioning of the natural order cannot be tolerated.’

His last words were lost in a general hubbub of alarm, as Attica Saigon Smix announced the outbreak of war in the Pacific, Chile against Bolivia and Peru.

IX (#ulink_c527f7e7-f3b7-5eea-8c37-5c624393f559)

The little figures identifiable as Smith, Smix, Palachinki, Fox, Sent, and others glowed and gestured in a monitor screen far away, safe below the stately pile of Slavonski Brod Grad.