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‘It worked! I swear it worked!’ Stevens told the older man.
‘Did you try them with reasoning?’ Sylvester asked eagerly.
‘Yes – at least, I did my best. But I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, and then I chucked it up. I remembered what you said, that if they were masters of the galaxy they must be practical men to stay there, and that if we dangled before their variegated noses a practical dinkum which they hadn’t got they’d be queuing up for it.’
‘And they hadn’t got an instantaneous communicator!’ Sylvester exclaimed, bursting into a hoot of laughter.
‘Naturally not, the thing being an impossibility, as our scientists proved long ago! But the funny bit was, Syl, they accidentally told me they hadn’t got one. And I didn’t even have to employ that argument for having no mind-readers present.’
‘So that little bit of recording we fixed up behind your ugly great ear did the trick?’
‘It sounded so absolutely genuine I almost believed it was the real thing,’ Stevens said enthusiastically. ‘I’m convinced we’ve won the day with that gadget.’
And then, perversely, the sense of triumph that had buoyed him all the way home deserted him. The trick was no longer clever: to have duped the Ultralords gave him suddenly nothing but disappointment. With listless surprise at this reaction, he realized he knew himself less well than he had believed.
He glanced at the gibbous Earth, low over Luna’s mountains: it was the colour of verdigris.
All the while, Sylvester chattered on excitedly.
‘Phew! You knock at least nine years off the ten I’ve aged since you left! When do we get the verdict, Dave? – the mighty Yea or Nay!’
‘Any time now – but I’m convinced the Ultralords are in the bag. Some of the mammoth ears present must have picked your voice up.’
Sylvester commenced to beat Stevens’s back again. Then he sobered and said: ‘Now we’ll have to think about stalling them when they come and ask for portable sub-radios. Still, that can wait; after all, we didn’t actually tell them we had them! Meanwhile, I’ve been stalling off the news-hounds here – the Galactics can’t prove more awkward than they’ve been. Then the President wants to see you – but before that there’s a drink waiting for you, and Edwina is sitting nursing it.’
‘Lead the way!’ Stevens said, a little more happily.
‘You look a bit gloomy all of a sudden,’ Sylvester commented. ‘Tired, I expect?’
‘It has been a strain …’
As he spoke, the door of his transport slammed shut behind him and the craft lifted purposefully off the field, silent on its cosmic drive. Stevens waved it a solemn farewell and turned away quickly, hurrying with Sylvester across to the domes of Luna One. A chillness was creeping over him again.
Our Council of the Ultralords must be certain it pronounces the correct verdict when aliens such as Stevens are under examination; consequently, it has to have telepaths present during the trials. All it asks is, simply, integrity in the defendants – that is the simple touchstone: yet it is too difficult for many of them. The men of Earth tortured themselves chasing phantoms, cooking up chimeras. Stevens had integrity, yet would not trust to it. Those who are convicted of dishonesty perish; we have no room for them.
The robot craft swung away from Luna and headed at full speed towards Earth, the motors in its warhead ticking expectantly, counting out the seconds to annihilation.
And that, of course, would be the end of the story – for Earth at least. It would have been completely destroyed, as is usual in such distressing cases, but Mordregon, who was amused by Stevens’s bluff, decided that, after all, the warped brains of Earthmen might be useful in coping with the warped brains of the enemy Eleventh Galaxy. He called it ‘an expedient war-time measure’.
Quietly, he deflected the speeding missile from its target, ordering it to return home. He sent this message by sub-radio, of course; dangerous aliens must necessarily be deluded at times.
Dumb Show (#ulink_62cf500c-5a92-5a86-b8c5-ad3ee30eabaf)
Mrs. Snowden was slowly being worn down. She had reached the stage now where she carried about with her a square of card on which the word DON’T was written in large letters. It was kept tucked inside her cardigan, ready to be produced at a moment’s notice and flashed before Pauline’s eyes.
The ill-matched pair, the grubby girl of three and the shabby-elegant lady of fifty-eight, came up to the side door of their house, Pauline capering over the flagstones, Mrs. Snowden walking slowly with her eyes on the bare border. Spring was reluctantly here, but the tepid earth hardly acknowledged it; even the daffodils had failed to put in an appearance this year.
‘Can’t understand it at all,’ Mrs. Snowden told herself. ‘Nothing ever happens to daffodils.’ And then she went on to compile a list of things that nevertheless might have happened: frost – it had been a hard winter; soil-starvation – no manure since the outbreak of hostilities, seven years ago; ants; mice; cats; the sounds – that seemed most likely. Sound did anything, these days.
Pauline rapped primly on the little brass knocker and vanished into the hall. Mrs. Snowden paused in the porch, stopping to look at the houses on the other side of her high brick wall. When this house had been built, it had stood in open fields; now drab little semi-detacheds surrounded it on three sides. She paused and hated them. Catching herself at it, she tried instead to admire the late afternoon light falling on the huddled roofs; the sunshine fell in languid, horizontal strokes – but it had no meaning for her, except as a sign that it was nearly time to blackout again.
She went heavily into the house, closing the door. Inside, night had already commenced.
Her granddaughter marched round the drawing-room, banging a tin lid against her head. That way, she could hear the noise it made. Mrs. Snowden reached for the DON’T card, then let her hand drop; the action was becoming automatic, and she must guard against it. She went to the gram-wire-TV cabinet, of which only the last compartment was now of use, and switched on. Conditions at home were a little better since the recapture of Iceland, and there were now broadcasts for an hour and a half every evening.
Circuits warmed, a picture burned in the half-globe. A man and woman danced solemnly, without music. To Mrs. Snowden it looked as meaningless as turning a book of blank pages, but Pauline stopped her march and came to stare. She smiled at the dancing couple; her lips moved; she was talking to them.
DON’T, screamed Mrs. Snowden’s sudden, dumb card.
Pauline made a face and answered back. She jumped away as her grandmother reached forward, leaping, prancing over the chairs, shouting defiance.
In fury, Mrs. Snowden skimmed the card across the room, crying angrily, hating to be reminded of her infirmity, waving her narrow hands. She collapsed onto a music stool – music, that dear, extinct thing! – and wept. Her own anger in her own head had sounded a million cotton-wool miles away, emphasizing the isolation. At this point she always crumpled.
The little girl came to her delicately, treading and staring with impertinence, knowing she had the victory. She pulled a sweet face and twizzled on her heel. Lack of hearing did not worry her; the silence she had known in the womb had never left her. Her indifference seemed a mockery.
‘You little beast!’ Mrs. Snowden said. ‘You cruel, ignorant, little beast!’
Pauline replied, the little babblings which would never turn into words, the little noises no human ear could hear. Then she walked quietly over to the windows, pointed out at the sickening day, and began to draw the curtains. Controlling herself with an effort, Mrs. Snowden stood up. Thank goodness the child had some sense; they must blackout. First she retrieved her DON’T card from behind the ancient twentieth-century settee, and then they went together through the house, tugging the folds of black velvet across the glass.
Now Pauline was skipping again. How she did it on the low calories was a matter for wonder. Perhaps, thought Mrs. Snowden, it was a blessing to be responsible for the child; so, she kept contact with life. She even caught an echo of gaiety herself, so that they hurried from room to room like bearers of good news, pulling blackness over them, then sweeping on the sonic lights. Up the stairs, pausing at the landing window, racing into the bedrooms, till new citadels were created from all the shabby darknesses. Pauline collapsed laughing on her bed. Seizing her, tickling now and again, Mrs. Snowden undressed her and tucked her between the fraying sheets.
She kissed the girl good night, put out the light, closed the door, and then went slowly round, putting out all the other lights, downstairs, putting all the lights out there.
Directly she had gone, Pauline climbed out of bed, stamped into the bathroom, opened the little medicine cupboard, took out the bottle with the label ‘Sleeping Pills’. Unscrewing the top, she swallowed a pill, pulling a pig’s eyes face at herself in the looking-glass as she did so. Then she put the bottle back on its shelf and slammed the little door, hugging to herself this noisy secret.
None of these things had names for her. Having no names, they had only misty meanings. The very edges of them were blurred, for all objects were grouped together in only two vast categories: those-that-concerned-her and those-that-did-not-concern-her.
She trailed loudly back to her bed in the silence there was no breaking, making pig’s eyes all the way to ward off the darkness. Once in bed, she began to think; it was because of these pictures she stole her grandmother’s pills: they fought the pictures and turned them eventually into an all-night nothing.
Predominant was the aching picture. A warmth, a face, a comforting – it was at once the vaguest yet most vivid picture; someone soft who carried and cared for her; someone who now never came; someone who now provoked only the water scalding from her eyes.
Elbowing that picture away came the boring picture. This tall, old-smelling person who had suddenly become everything after the other had gone; her stiff fingers, bad over buttons; her slowness about the stove; her meaningless marks on cards; all the dull mystery of who she was and what she did.
The new picture. The room down the road where Pauline was taken every morning. It was full of small people, some like her, in frocks, some with short hair and fierce movements. And big people, walking between their seats, again with marks on cards, trying with despairing faces to make them comprehend incomprehensible things by gestures of the hand and fingers.
The push picture. Something needed, strange as sunlight, something lost, lost as laughter …
The pill worked like a time-bomb and Pauline was asleep where only the neurosis of puzzlement could insidiously follow.
Mrs. Snowden switched the globe off and sank into a chair. They had been showing a silent film: the latest scientific advances had thrown entertainment back to where it had been in her grandfather’s young days. For a moment she had watched the silent gestures, followed by a wall of dialogue:
‘Jean: Then – you knew he was not my father, Denis?
‘Denis: From the first moment we met in Madrid.
‘Jean: And I swore none should ever know.’
Sighing, Mrs. Snowden switched the poor stuff off, and sank down with a hand over her forehead. TV merely accentuated her isolation, everyone’s isolation. She thought mockingly of the newspaper phrase describing this conflict, The Civilised War, and wished momentarily for one of the old, rough kind with doodlebugs and H-bombs; then, you could achieve a sort of Henry Moore-ish anonymity, crouching with massed others underground. Now, your individuality was forced on to you, till self-consciousness became a burden that sank you in an ocean of loneliness.
Right at the beginning of this war, Mrs. Snowden’s husband had left for the duration. He was on secret work – where, she had no idea. Up till two years ago, she received a card from him each Christmas; then he had missed a year; then, in the paper shortage, the sending of cards had been forbidden. So whether he lived or not she did not know; the question now raised curiously little excitement in her. Heart-sickness had ceased to be relevant.
Mrs. Snowden had come to live here in her old home with her parents after she had been declared redundant at the university, when all but the practical Chairs closed down. In the lean winters, first her mother, then her father died. Then her married daughter was killed in a sound raid; Pauline, a tiny babe, had come to live with her.
It was all impersonal, dry facts, she thought. You stated the facts to explain how the situation arose; but to explain the situation …
Nobody in the world could hear a sound. That was the only important fact.
She jumped up and flicked aside an edge of curtain. A rag of dirty daylight was still propped over the serried chimney-tops. The more those houses crowded, the more they isolated her. This should be a time for madness, she said aloud, misting the pane; something grand and horrid to break the chain of days. And her eyes swept the treble row of old textbooks over her bureau: Jackson’s Eighteen Nineties, Montgomery’s Early Twentieth Century Science Fiction, Slade’s Novelists of the Psychological Era, Wilson’s Zola, Nollybend’s Wilson … a row of dodos, as defunct as the courses of Eng. Lit. they had once nourished.
‘Dead!’ she exclaimed. ‘A culture in Coventry!’ she whispered, and went to get something to eat.
‘Tough old hag,’ she told herself. ‘You’ll survive.’
The food was the usual vibro-culture, tasteless, filling, insubstantial. The hospitals of England held as many beri-beri cases as wounded. Sound ruled the whole deaf world. It wrecked the buildings, killed the soldiers, shattered the tympanums and ballooned synthesized proteins from mixtures of amino acids.
The Sound Revolution had come at the dawn of this new century, following thirty years of peace. Progress had taken a new direction. It had all been simple and complete; you just flushed the right electrostatic stress through the right quartz plates and – bingo! You could do anything! The most spectacular result was a global conflict.
The Powers warred under certain humane agreements: gas, fission and fusion weapons were forbidden. It was to be, indeed, a Civilised War. VM (vibratory motion) had the field to itself. It learnt to expand living vegetable cells a thousand-fold, so that a potato would last for two years’ dinners; it learnt to pulverize brick and metal, so that cities could comfortably be turned to a thin dust; it learnt to twist the human ear into an echoing, useless coil of gristle. There seemed no limit to its adaptability.
Mrs. Snowden ate her blown-up yeast with dignity, and thought of other things. She thought – for lately she had been straining after wider horizons – of the course of human history, its paradoxical sameness and variety, and then something made her look up to the tube over the mantelpiece.
The tube was a piece of standard equipment in every home. It was a crude ear, designed to announce when the local siren was giving a sound raid alarm.
She glanced indifferently at it. The lycopodium seed was stirring sluggishly in its tube; damp must be getting in, it was not patterning properly. She went on eating, gloomily wondering about the future generations: how much of the vital essence of tradition would be lost through this blanket of deafness?
Correct procedure would have been for her, at the stirring of the seed, to collect Pauline and stand out in the open. When the siren went, everyone else left their homes and stood patiently under the bare sky; then, if the sounds swept their buildings, they would be temporarily smothered by dust as the building vanished, but suffer no other harm. Mrs. Snowden could no longer be bothered with this nonsense.
To her mind, it was undignified to stand in the chill air, meekly waiting. If enemy planes circled overhead, she would have had defiance to spur her out; but nowadays there was only the quiet sky, the eternal silence and the abrupt pulverization – or the anti-climax, when everyone filed sheepishly back to bed.
She took her plate into the kitchen. As she came back into the living-room, a reproduction of Mellor’s ‘Egyptian Girl’ fell silently onto the floor, shattering frame and glass.
Mrs. Snowden went and stared at it. Then, on impulse, she hurried over to the window and peered out. The encircling houses had gone.
Letting the curtain fall back into place, she rushed from the room and up the stairs. She was shaking Pauline before she regained control of herself, and then could not tell whether panic or exultation had sent her scurrying.
‘The houses have gone! The houses have gone!’
Silence, in which the little girl woke sluggishly.
Mrs. Snowden hustled her downstairs and out on to the front lawn, letting a bright swathe of light cut across the empty flower-beds. Somewhere, high and silent overhead, a monitor might be hovering, but she was too excited to care.
By a freak of chance, their house stood alone. Around them for miles stretched a new desert, undulant, still settling. The novelty, the difference, of it was something wonderful: not a catastrophe, a liberation.
Then they saw the giants.
Vague in the distance, they were nevertheless real enough, although incredible. They were tall – how tall? – ten, fifteen feet? More? With horror Mrs. Snowden thought they were enemy troops. This was the latest application of the sound: it enlarged the human cell now, as easily as it enlarged vegetable cells. She had the brief idea she had read that human giants could not survive, or were impossible or something, and then the thought was gone, swept away in fear.
The giants were still growing. They were taller than a house now, thirty feet or more high. They began to mop and mow, like drunken dancers.
Unreality touched her. Pauline was crying.
A coolness swept her limbs. She trembled involuntarily. A personal alarm now, terror because something unknown was at her blood. She raised a hand to her eyes. It loomed away from her. Her arm extended. She was growing.
She knew then that the giants were no enemy troops; they were victims. You get everyone out of their houses. One type of VM levels the houses. Another inflates the people, blowing them up like grotesque rubber dummies. Simple. Scientific. Civilised.
Mrs. Snowden swayed like a pole. She took a clumsy step to keep her balance. Dizzily, she peered at her blank bedroom window, staggering away to avoid falling into the house. No pain. The circuits were disrupted. Only numbness: numbness and maniac growth.
She could still crazily see the dancing giants. Now she understood why they danced. They were trying to adapt. Before they could do so, their metabolism burnt out. They sprawled into the desert, giant dusty corpses, full of sound and silence.
She thought: It’s the first excitement for years, amusedly, before her heart failed under its giant load.
She toppled; the DON’T card fluttered gaily from her bosom, spinning and filtering to the ground.
Pauline had already overtopped her grandmother. The young system was greedy for growth. She uttered a cry of wonder as her head rocked up to the dark sky. She saw her grandmother fall. She saw the tiny fan of sonic light from their tiny front door. She trod into the desert to keep her balance. She started to run. She saw the ground dwindle. She felt the warmth of the stars, the curvature of the earth.
In her brain, the delighted thoughts were wasps in a honey pot, bees in a hive, flies in a chapel, gnats in a factory, midges in a Sahara, sparks up an everlasting flue, a comet falling for ever in a noiseless void, a voice singing in a new universe.
The Failed Men (#ulink_336584f5-5488-571d-810a-0f7fd2e87776)
‘It’s too crowded here!’ he exclaimed aloud. ‘It’s too crowded! It’s too CROWDED!’
He swung around, his mouth open, his face contorted like a squeezed lemon, nearly knocking a passer-by off the pavement. The passer-by bowed, smiled forgivingly and passed on, his eyes clearly saying: ‘Let him be – it’s one of the poor devils off the ship.’
‘It’s too crowded,’ Surrey Edmark said again at the retreating back. It was night. He stood hatless under the glare of the New Orchard Road lights, bewildered by the flowing cosmopolitan life of Singapore about him. People: thousands of ’em, touchable; put out a hand gently, feel alpaca, silk, nylon, satin, plain, patterned, or crazily flowered; thousands within screaming distance. If you screamed, just how many of those dirty, clean, pink, brown, desirable or offensive convoluted ears would scoop up your decibels?
No, he told himself, no screaming, please. These people who swarm like phantoms about you are real; they wouldn’t like it. And your doctor, who did not consider you fit to leave the observation ward – he’s real enough; he wouldn’t like it if he learned you had been screaming in a main street. And you yourself – how real were you? How real was anything when you had recently had perfect proof that all was finished? Really finished: rolled up and done with and discarded and forgotten.
That dusty line of thought must be avoided. He needed somewhere quiet, a place to sit and breathe deeply. Everyone must be deceived; he must hide the fused, dead feeling inside; then he could go back home. But he had also to try and hide the deadness from himself, and that needed more cunning. Like alpha particles, a sense of futility had riddled him, and he was mortally sick.
Surrey noticed a turning just ahead. Thankfully he went to it and branched out of the crowds into a dim, narrow thoroughfare. He passed three women in short dresses smoking together; farther on a fellow was being sick into a privet hedge. And there was a café with a sign saying ‘The Iceberg’. Deserted chairs and tables stood outside on an ill-lit veranda; Surrey climbed the two steps and sat wearily down. This was luxury.
The light was poor. Surrey sat alone. Inside the café several people were eating, and a girl sang, accompanying herself on a stringed, lute-like instrument. He couldn’t understand the words, but it was simple and nostalgic, her voice conveying more than the music; he closed his eyes, letting the top spin within him, the top of his emotions. The girl stopped her singing suddenly, as if tired, and walked onto the veranda to stare into the night. Surrey opened his eyes and looked at her.
‘Come and talk to me,’ he called.
She turned her head haughtily to the shadows where he sat, and then turned it back. Evidently, she had met with that sort of invitation before. Surrey clenched his fists in frustration; here he sat, isolated in space and time, needing comfort, needing … oh, nothing could heal him, but salves existed … The loneliness welled up inside, forcing him to speak again.
‘I’m from the ship,’ he said, unable to hold back a note of pleading.
At that, she came over and took a seat facing him. She was Chinese, and wore the timeless slit dress of her race, big daisies chasing themselves over the gentle contours of her body.
‘Of course I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘But I can see in your eyes … that you are from the ship.’ She trembled slightly and asked: ‘May I get you a drink?’
Surrey shook his head. ‘Just to have you sitting there …’
He was feeling better. Irrationally, a voice inside said: ‘Well, you’ve been through a harsh experience, but now that you’re back again you can recover, can’t you, go back to what you were?’ The voice frequently asked that, but the answer was always No; the experience was still spreading inside, like cancer.
‘I heard your ship come in,’ the Chinese girl said. ‘I live just near here – Bukit Timah Road, if you know it, and I was at my window, talking with a friend.’
