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He thought of the amazing sunshine and the eternal smell of cooking fats and the robshaws clacking by and this girl and her friend chattering in a little attic – and the orchestral crash as the ship arrived, making them forget their sentences; but all remote, centuries ago.
‘It’s a funny noise it makes,’ he said. ‘The sound of a time ship breaking out of the time barrier.’
‘It scares the chickens,’ she said.
Silence. Surrey wanted to produce something else to say, to keep the girl sitting with him, but nothing would dissolve into words. He neglected the factor of her own human curiosity, which made her keen to stay; she inquired again if he would like a drink, and then said: ‘Would it be good for you if you told me something about it?’
‘I’d call that a leading question.’
‘It’s very – bad ahead, isn’t it? I mean, the papers say …’ She hesitated nervously.
‘What do they say?’ he asked.
‘Oh, you know, they say that it’s bad. But they don’t really explain; they don’t seem to understand.’
‘That’s the whole key to it,’ he told her. ‘We don’t seem to understand. If I talked to you all night, you still wouldn’t understand. I wouldn’t understand …’
She was beautiful, sitting there with her little lute in her hand. And he had traveled far away beyond her lute and her beauty, far beyond nationality or even music; it had all gone into the dreary dust of the planet, all gone – final – nothing left – except degradation. And puzzlement.
‘I’ll try and tell you,’ he said. ‘What was that tune you were just singing? Chinese song?’
‘No, it was Malayan. It’s an old song, very old, called “Terang Boelan”. It’s about – oh, moonlight, you know, that kind of thing. It’s sentimental.’
‘I didn’t even know what language it was in, but perhaps in a way I understood it.’
‘You said you were going to tell me about the future,’ she told him gently.
‘Yes. Of course. It’s a sort of tremendous relief work we’re doing. You know what they call it: The Intertemporal Red Cross. It’s accurate, but when you’ve actually been … ahead, it seems a silly, flashy title. I don’t know, perhaps not. I’m not sure of anything any more.’
He stared out at the darkness; it was going to rain. When he began to speak again, his voice was firmer.
The IRC is really organized by the Paulls (he said to the Chinese girl). They call themselves the Paulls; we should call them the technological élite of the Three Thousand, One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Century. That’s a terribly long way ahead – we, with our twenty-four centuries since Christ, can hardly visualise it. Our ship stopped there, in their time. It was very austere: the Paulls are austere people. They live only on mountains overlooking the oceans, and have moved mountains to every coast for their own edification.
The Paulls are unlike us, yet they are brothers compared with the men we are helping, the Failed Men.
Time travel had been invented long before the age of the Paulls, but it is they who perfected it, they who accidentally discovered the plight of the Failed Men, and they who manage the terrific business of relief. For the world of the Paulls, rich as it is – will be – has insufficient resources to cope with the task without vitiating its strength. So it organised the fleet of time ships, the IRC, to collect supplies from different ages and bear them out ahead to the Failed Men.
Five different ages are co-operating on the project, under the Paull leadership. There are the Middle People, as the Paulls call them. They are a race of philosophers, mainly pastoral, and we found them haughty; they live about twenty thousand centuries ahead of the Paulls. Oh, it’s a long time … And there are – but never mind that! They had little to do with us, or we with them.
We – this present day, was the only age without time travel of the five. The Paulls chose us because we happen to have peace and plenty. And do you know what they call us? The Children. The Children! We, with all our weary sophistication … Perhaps they’re right; they have a method of Gestalt reasoning absolutely beyond our wildest pretensions.
You know, I remember once on the voyage out ahead, I asked one of the Paulls why they had never visited our age before; and he said: ‘But we have. We broke at the nineteenth century and again at the twenty-sixth. That’s pretty close spacing! And that’s how we knew so much about you.’
They have so much experience, you see. They can walk around for a day in one century and tell you what’ll be happening the next six or seven. It’s a difference of outlook, I suppose; something as simple as that.
I suppose you’ll remember better than I when the Paulls first broke here, as you are actually on the spot. I was at home then, doing a peaceful job; it hadn’t been so peaceful I might not have volunteered for the IRC What a storm it caused! A good deal of panic in with the excitement. Yes, we proved ourselves children then, and in the adulation we paid the Paulls while they toured the world’s capitals. During the three months they waited here while we organised supplies and men, they must have been in a fury of impatience to be off; yet they revealed nothing, giving their unsensational lectures on the plight of the Failed Men and smiling for the three-dee cameras.
All the while money poured in for the cause, and the piles of canned food and medical supplies filled the holds of the big ship. We were like kids throwing credits to street beggars; all sorts of stuff of no earthly use went into that ship. What would a Failed Man do with a launderer or a cycloview machine? At last we were off, with all the world’s bands playing like mad and the ship breaking with noise enough to drown all bands and startle your chickens – off for the time of the Failed Men!
‘I think I’d like that drink you offered me now,’ Surrey said to the Chinese girl, breaking off his narrative.
‘Certainly.’ She snapped her fingers at arm’s length, her hand in the light from the restaurant, her face in the gloom, eyes fixed on his eyes.
‘The Paulls had told you it was going to be tough,’ she said.
‘Yes. We underwent pretty rough mental training from them before leaving the here and now. Many of the men were weeded out. But I got through. They elected me Steersman. I was top of their first class.’
Surrey was silent a moment, surprised to hear pride in his own voice. Pride left, after that experience! Yet there was no pride in him; it was just the voice running in an old channel, the naked soul crouching in an ancient husk of character.
The drink arrived. The Chinese girl had one too, a long one in a misty glass; she put her lute down to drink it. Surrey took a sip of his and then resumed the story.
We were travelling ahead! It was a schoolboy’s dream come true. Yet our excitement soon became blunted by monotony. There is nothing simultaneous in time travel, as people have imagined. It took us two ship’s months to reach the Paulls’ age, and there all but one of them left us to continue on alone into the future.
They had the other ages to supervise, and many organisational problems to attend to; yet I sometimes wonder if they did not use those problems as an excuse, to save their having to visit the age of the Failed Men. Perhaps they thought us less sensitive, and therefore better fitted for the job.
And so we went ahead again. The office of Steersman was almost honorary, entailing merely the switching off of power when the journey was automatically ended. We sat about and talked, we chosen few, reading or viewing in the excellent libraries the Paulls had installed. Time passed quickly enough, yet we were glad when we arrived.
Glad!
The age of the Failed Men is far in the future: many hundred millions of years ahead, or thousands of millions; the Paulls would never tell us the exact number. Does it matter? It was a long time … There’s plenty of time – too much – more than anyone will ever need.
We stepped out onto that day’s Earth. I had childishly expected – oh, to see the sun stuck at the horizon, or turned purple, or the sky full of moons, or something equally dramatic; but there was not even a shadow over the fair land, and the earth had not aged a day. Only man had aged.
The Failed Men differed from us anatomically and spiritually; it was the former quality which struck us first. They looked like a group of dejected oddities sitting among piles of supplies, and we wanted to laugh. The humorists among us called them ‘the Zombies’ at first – but in a few days there were no humorists left among us.
The Failed Men had no real hands. From their wrists grew five long and prehensile fingers, and the middle digit touched the ground lightly when they walked, for their spines curved in an arc and their heads were thrust far forward. To counter this, their skulls had elongated into boat shapes, scaphocephalic fashion. They had no eyebrows, nor indeed a brow at all, nor any hair at all, although the pores of their skin stood out flakily, giving them a fluffy appearance from a distance.
When they looked at you their eyes held no meaning; they were blanked with a surfeit of experience, as though they had now regained a horrible sort of innocence. When they spoke to you, their voices were hollow and their sentences as short and painful as a child’s toothache. We could not understand their language, except through the electronic translator banks given us by the Paulls.
They looked a mournful sight, but at first we were not too disturbed; we didn’t, you see, quite grasp the nature of the problem. Also, we were very busy, reclaiming more Failed Men from the ground.
Four great aid centres had been established on the earth. Of the other four races in the IRC, two managed sanatoria construction and equipment; another, nursing, feeding and staffing; and the fourth, communication, rehabilitation and liaison between centres. And we – ‘the Children’! – our job was to exhume the Failed Men and bring them to the centres: a job for the simple group! Between us we all had to get the race of man started again – back into harness.
All told, I suppose there are only about six million Failed Men spread over the earth. We had to go out and dig them up. We had specially made tractors with multiple blades on the front which dug slowly and gently into the soil.
The Failed Men had ‘cemetery areas’; we called them that, although they had not been designed as cemeteries. It was like a bad dream. Working day and night, we trundled forward, furrowing up the earth as you strip back a soiled bed. In the mould, a face would appear, an arm with the long fingers, a pair of legs, tumbling into the light. We would stop the machine and get down to the body, digging with trowels around it. So we would exhume another man or woman – it was hard to tell which they were.
They would be in coma. Their eyes would open, staring like peek-a-boo dolls, then close again with a click. We’d patch them up with an injection, stack them on stretchers and send them back in a load to base. It was a harrowing job, and no pun intended.
When the corpses had had some attention and care, they revived. Within a month they would be up and walking, trundling about the hospital grounds in that round-shouldered way, their great boat-heads nodding at every step. And then it was I talked to them and tried to understand.
The translator banks, being Paull-made, were the best possible. But their limitations were the limitations of our own language. If the Failed Men said their word for ‘sun’, the machine said ‘sun’ to us, and we understood by that the same thing the Failed Men intended. But away from the few concrete, common facts of our experience, the business was less easy. Less synonyms, more overtones; it was the old linguistic problem, but magnified here by the ages which lay between us.
I remember tackling one old woman on our first spell back at the centre. I say old, but for all I know she was sweet sixteen; they just looked ancient.
‘I hope you don’t mind being dug – er, rescued?’ I asked politely.
‘Not at all. A pleasure,’ the banks said for her. Polite stereotypes. No real meaning in any language, but the best machine in the world makes them sound sillier than they are.
‘Would you mind if we discussed this whole thing?’
‘What object?’ the banks asked for her.
I’d asked the wrong question. I did not mean thing-object, but thing-matter. That sort of trip-up kept getting in the way of our discussion; the translator spoke better English than I.
‘Can we talk about your problem?’ I asked her, trying again.
‘I have no problem. My problem has been resolved.’
‘I should be interested to hear about it.’
‘What do you require to know about it? I will tell you anything.’
That at least was promising. Willing if not co-operative; they had long ago forgotten the principle of co-operation.
‘You know I come from the distant past to help you?’ The banks translated me undramatically.
‘Yes. It is noble of you all to interrupt your lives for us,’ she said.
‘Oh no; we want to see the race of man starting off again on a right track. We believe it should not die away. We are glad to help, and are sorry you took the wrong track.’
‘When we started, we were on a track others before us – you – had made.’ It was not defiant, just a fact being stated.
‘But the deviation was yours. You made it by an act of will. I’m not condemning; obviously you would not have taken that way had you known it would end in failure.’
She answered. I gathered she was just faintly angry, probably burning all the emotion in her. Her hollow voice spanged and doomed away, and the translator banks gave out simultaneously in fluent English. Only it didn’t make sense.
It went something like this: ‘Ah, but what you do not realise, because your realising is completely undeveloped and unstarted, is how to fail. Failing is not failing unless it is defeat, and this defeat of ours – if you realise it is a failing – is only a failure. A final failure. But as such, it is only a matter of a result, because in time this realisation tends to breed only the realisation of the result of failure; whereas the resolution of our failure, as opposed to the failure – ’
‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘No! Save the modern poetry or the philosophical treatise for later. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m sorry. We’ll take it for granted there was some sort of a failure. Are you going to be able to make a success of this new start we’re giving you?’
‘It is not a new start,’ she said, beginning reasonably enough. ‘Once you have had the result, a start is no longer a result. It is merely in the result of failing and all that is in the case is the start or the failure – depending, for us, on the start, for you on the failure. And you can surely see that even here failure depends abnormally on the beginning of the result, which concerns us more than the failure, simply because it is the result. What you don’t see is the failure of the result of the result’s failure to start a result – ’
‘Stop!’ I shouted again.
I went to the Paull commander. I told him the thing was beginning to become an obsession with me.
‘It is with all of us,’ he replied.
‘But if only I could grasp a fraction of their problem! Look, we come out here all this way ahead to help them – and still we don’t know what we’re helping them from.’
‘We know why we’re helping them, Edmark. The burden of carrying on the race, of breeding a new and more stable generation, is on them. Keep your eye on that, if possible.’
Perhaps his smile was a shade too placating; it made me remember that to him we were ‘the Children’.
‘Look,’ I said pugnaciously. ‘If those shambling failures can’t tell us what’s happened to them, you can. Either you tell me, or we pack up and go home. Our fellows have the creeps, I tell you! Now what – explicitly – is or was wrong with these Zombies?’
The commander laughed.
‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘We don’t know, and that’s all there is to it.’
He stood up then, austere, tall. He went and looked out of the window, hands behind his back, and I could tell by his eyes he was looking at Failed Men, down there in the pale afternoon.
He turned and said to me: ‘This sanatorium was designed for Failed Men. But we’re filling up with relief staff instead; they’ve let the problem get them by the throats.’
‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘I shall be there myself if I don’t get to the root of it, racing the others up the wall.’
He held up his hand.
‘That’s what they all say. But there is no root of it to get at, or none we can comprehend, or else we are part of the root ourselves. If you could only categorise their failure it would be something: religious, spiritual, economic …’
‘So it’s got you too!’ I said.
‘Look,’ I said suddenly. ‘You’ve got the time ships. Go back and see what the problem was!’
The solution was so simple I couldn’t think how they had overlooked it; but of course they hadn’t overlooked it.
‘We’ve been,’ the commander said briefly. ‘A problem of the mind – presuming it was a mental problem – cannot be seen. All we saw was the six million of them singly burying themselves in these shallow graves. The process covered over a century; some of them had been under for three hundred years before we rescued them. No, it’s no good; the problem from our point of view is linguistic.’
‘The translator banks are no good,’ I said sweepingly. ‘It’s all too delicate a job for a machine. Could you lend me a human interpreter?’
He came himself, in the end. He didn’t want to, but he wanted to. And how would a machine cope with that statement? Yet to you and me it’s perfectly comprehensible.
A woman, one of the Failed Men, was walking slowly across the courtyard as we got outside. It might have been the one I had already spoken to, I don’t know. I didn’t recognise her and she gave no sign of recognising me. Anyhow, we stopped her and tried our luck.
‘Ask her why they buried themselves, for a start,’ I said.
The Paull translated and she doomed briefly in reply.
‘She says it was considered necessary, as it aided the union before the beginning of the attempt,’ he told me.
‘Ask her what union.’
Exchange of dooms.
‘The union of the union that they were attempting. Whatever that means.’
‘Did both “unions” sound the same to you?’
‘One was inflected, as it was in the possessive case,’ the Paull said. ‘Otherwise they seemed just alike.’
‘Ask her – ask her if they were all trying to change themselves into something other than human – you know, into spirits or fairies or ghosts.’
‘They’ve only got a word for spirit. Or rather, they’ve got four words for spirit: spirit of soul; spirit of place; spirit of a non-substantive, such as “spirit of adventure”; and another sort of spirit I cannot define – we haven’t an exact analogy for it.’
‘Hell’s bells! Well, try her with spirit of soul.’
Again the melancholy rattle of exchange. Then the commander, with some surprise, said: ‘She says, Yes, they were striving to attain spirituality.’
