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‘Now we’re getting somewhere!’ I exclaimed, thinking smugly that it just needed persistence and a twenty-fifth-century brain.
The old woman clanged again.
‘What’s that?’ I asked eagerly.
‘She says they’re still striving after spirituality.’
We both groaned. The lead was merely a dead end.
‘It’s no good,’ the Paull said gently. ‘Give up.’
‘One last question! Tell the old girl we cannot understand the nature of what has happened to her race. Was it a catastrophe and what was its nature?’
‘Can but try. Don’t imagine this hasn’t been done before, though – it’s purely for your benefit.’
He spoke. She answered briefly.
‘She says it was an “antwerto”. That means it was a catastrophe to end all catastrophes.’
‘Well, at least we’re definite on that.’
‘Oh yes, they failed all right, whatever it was they were after,’ the Paull said sombrely.
‘The nature of the catastrophe?’
‘She just gives me an innocent little word, “struback”. Unfortunately, we don’t know what it means.’
‘I see. Ask her if it has something to do with evolution.’
‘My dear man, this is all a waste of time! I know the answers, as far as they exist, without speaking to this woman at all.’
‘Ask her if “struback” means something to do with a possible way they were evolving or meaning to evolve,’ I persisted.
He asked her. The ill-matched three of us stood there for a long time while the old woman moaned her reply. At last she was silent.
‘She says struback has some vague connection with evolution,’ the commander told me.
‘Is that all?’
‘Far from it, but that’s what it boils down to! “Time impresses itself on man as evolution,” she says.’
‘Ask her if the nature of the catastrophe was at least partly religious.’
When she had replied, the commander laughed shortly and said: ‘She wants to know what “religious” means. And I’m sorry but I’m not going to stand here while you tell her.’
‘But just because she doesn’t know what it means doesn’t mean to say the failure, the catastrophe, wasn’t religious in essence.’
‘Nothing means to say anything here,’ the commander said angrily. Then he realised he was only talking to one of the Children; he went on more gently: ‘Suppose that instead of coming ahead, we had gone back in time. Suppose we met a prehistoric tribe of hunters. We learn their language. We want to use the word “luck”. In their superstitious minds the concept – and consequently the word – does not exist. We have to use a substitute they can accept: “accident”, or “good-happening”, or “bad-happening”, as the case may be. They understand that all right, but by it they mean something entirely different from our intention. We have not broken through the barrier at all, merely become further entangled in it. The same trap is operating here.
‘And now, please excuse me.’
Struback. A long, hollow syllable, followed by a short click. Night after night, I turned that word over in my tired mind. It became the symbol of the Failed Men, but never anything more.
Most of the others caught the worry. Some drifted away in a kind of trance, some went into the wards. The tractors became undermanned. Reinforcements, of course, were arriving from the present. The present! I could not think of it that way. The time of the Failed Men became my present, and my past and future, too.
I worked with the translator banks again, unable to accept defeat. I had this idea in my head that the Failed Men had been trying – and possibly involuntarily – to turn into something superior to man, a sort of super-being, and I was intensely curious about this.
‘Tell me,’ I demanded of an old man, speaking through the banks, ‘when you all first had this idea, or when it came to you, you were all glad then?’
His answer came: ‘Where there is failure there is only degradation. You cannot understand the degradation, because you are not of us. There is only degradation and misery and you do not comprehend – ’
‘Wait! I’m trying to comprehend! Help me, can’t you? Tell me why it was so degrading, why you failed, how you failed.’
‘The degradation was the failure,’ he said. ‘The failure was the struback, the struback was the misery.’
‘You mean there was just misery, even at the beginning of the experiment?’
‘There was no beginning, only a finish, and that was the result.’
I clutched my head.
‘Wasn’t burying yourself a beginning?’
‘No.’
‘What was it?’
‘It was only a part of the attempt.’
‘What attempt?’
‘You are so stupid. Can you not see? The attempt we were making for the resolution of the problematical problem in the result of our united resolve to solve the problem.’
‘Which problem?’
‘The problem,’ he said wearily. ‘The problem of the resolution of this case into the start of failure. It does not matter how the resolution is accomplished provided all the cases are the same, but in a diversity of cases the start determines the resolution and the finish arbitrarily determines the beginning of the case. But the arbitrary factor is itself inherent in the beginning of the case, and of the case itself. Consequently our case is in the same case, and the failure was because of the start, the start being our resolution.’
It was hopeless. ‘You are really trying to explain?’ I asked weakly.
‘No, young man,’ he said. ‘I am telling you about the failure. You are the struback.’
And he walked away.
Surrey looked hopelessly across at the Chinese girl. She tapped her fingers on the table.
‘What did he mean, “You are the struback”?’ she asked.
‘Anything or nothing,’ he said wildly. ‘It would have been no good asking him to elucidate – I shouldn’t have understood the elucidation. You see it’s all either too complex or too simple for us to grasp.’
‘But surely – ’ she said, and then hesitated.
‘The Failed Men could only think in abstractions,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that was a factor involved in their failure – I don’t know. You see, language is the most intrinsic product of any culture; you can’t comprehend the language till you’ve understood the culture – and how do you understand a culture till you know its language?’
Surrey looked helplessly at the girl’s little lute with its own trapped tongue. Suddenly, the hot silence of the night was shattered by a great orchestral crash half a mile away.
‘Another cartload of nervous wrecks coming home,’ he told her grimly. ‘You’d better go and see to your chickens.’
Non-Stop (#ulink_a96f3b7d-495f-578f-842e-595be9c20515)
I
Brandyholm, eyes tensed into slits, peered down through the ceaselessly moving stalks before him. He lay on the edge of Sternstairs with Gwenny close behind him, his hand clutching the dazer: somewhere below them, a herd of pigs moved stealthily in search of food. He glanced back at the girl for a second, motioning her to stay where she was; that was the last time he saw her. Her bright eyes flashed an encouragement that, with the fever of the hunt upon him, he scarcely bothered to take notice of.
Slowly he worked his way down the great slope, the ponics separating stiffly at his touch. A pig squeaked a short distance away. The hunter paused. This herd was approaching, he had only to wait for them. Crouching like a sprinter, he rested the dazer on one knee and watched.
Gwenny called his name once: ‘Tom!’ There was a scuffle and the sound of men crashing through the ponic tangle above him. The pigs took fright at once and darted away to safety. Brandyholm was already blundering swiftly back up Sternstairs.
As he reached the spot where he had left his woman, an arrow twanged angrily past his shoulder. He dropped to his face in a fury. The Forwards had struck again. It was useless to try and pursue them down the corridors; he would be impaled as soon as he came up to them.
Immediately, impotent rage boiled up in Brandyholm. It was spiced with fear, fear of what the Lieutenant would say when he learnt the tribe had lost another female to the enemy, but Brandyholm let it wash through him almost with pleasure. He thrashed on the ground, kicking and tearing at the earth, his face distorted.
At last this state of mindlessness left him. Weak and abandoned, he lay in a shallow ditch he had worked round him. As he breathed less rapidly, his face regained its normal pallor. Idly, he rubbed at the hard ridges under him; their existence dawning on him, he knelt up and studied them. Regularly spaced ledges of metal … no reason existed to doubt that they ran from top to bottom of the great incline of Sternstairs, covered by the needly humus formed of countless dead ponic leaves.
‘More fuel for the ship theory,’ he muttered, sullenly kicking the soil level again; little he cared one way or the other for the ship theory. Shouldering his dazer, he turned back to Quarters to make his humiliating report. The ponic seeds clicked like beads as he roughly parted their slender stems and barged his way home.
Once Brandyholm was past the barricades, it was only a short while before he stood in front of the aged Lieutenant. The latter, guard-flanked, concealed his eyes carefully beneath bushy white eyebrows.
‘Expansion to your ego, sir,’ Brandyholm said humbly.
‘At your expense,’ came the stock response, and then Lieutenant Greene asked sternly, ‘Why are you back in Quarters at this time, hunter?’
Brandyholm explained how his woman had been taken. As he listened, the Lieutenant’s nostrils filled with mucus, his mouth slowly elongated and overflowed with saliva until his chin glistened. At the same time, his eyes widened and his frame began to shake violently. Through his fear, Brandyholm had to admit it was a splendid, daunting performance.
Its climax came when the Lieutenant fell to the floor and lay limp. Two guards, faces twitching, stood protectively over his body.
‘He’ll kill himself doing that, one day soon,’ Brandyholm thought, but it gave him little reassurance for the present.
At length the Lieutenant climbed slowly to his feet, his rage dispersed, and said as he brushed his clothes down, ‘This woman, Gwenny Tod – did she not bear you a child?’
‘Many periods ago, sir. It was a girl child and died of crying soon after it was born. She is little use as a child-bearer.’
‘She is another woman lost to the Forwards,’ said Lieutenant Greene sharply. ‘We have not so many people here that we can afford to give them away, fertile or not.’
‘I didn’t give – ’
‘You should have been more alert. You should have known they were trailing. Six lashes before sleep!’
The sentence was duly administered under the angry eyes of most of the Greene tribe. Back paining, but mind greatly eased by its degradation, Brandyholm slouched back to his room. There, Carappa the Priest awaited him, sitting patiently on his haunches with his big belly dangling. He rarely called at this late hour, and Brandyholm stood stiffly before him, waiting for him to speak first.
‘Expansion to your ego, son.’
‘At your expense, father.’
‘And turmoil in my id,’ capped the priest piously, making the customary genuflection of rage, without however troubling to rise.
Brandyholm sat down on his bunk and cautiously removed the shirt from his bloody back. It took him a long time. When it was off, he flung it on the floor and spat at it, missing. He said nothing.
‘Your sentence was an unfair one?’ the priest asked.
‘Eminently,’ Brandyholm said with surly satisfaction. ‘Crooner received twice as many strokes yesterday for a much more trivial matter – working too slowly in the gardens.’
‘Crooner is always slow,’ said the priest absently.
The other made no reply. Outside his room, the bright expanse of Quarters was deserted; it was sleep, all but the guards were in bed. And beyond the barricades, beyond the ponic tangle, Gwenny was in bed … somebody else’s bed.
Carappa came over to him, leaning heavily against the bunk.
‘You are bitter, son?’
‘Very bitter, father. I feel I would like to kill somebody.’
‘You shall. You shall. It is good you should feel so. Never grow resigned, my son; that way is death for us all.’
Brandyholm glanced in the priest’s direction, and saw with horror that Carappa’s eyes were seeking his. The strongest tabu in their society was directed against one man looking another straight in the eyes; honest and well-intentioned men gave each other only side glances. A priest especially should have observed this rule. He shrank back on the bed when Carappa gripped his shoulder.
‘Do you ever feel like running amok, Tom?’
Brandyholm’s heart beat uncomfortably at the question. Several of the best and most savage men of Quarters had run amok, bursting through the village with their dazers burning, and afterwards living like solitary man-eaters in the unexplored areas of ponic tangle, afraid to return and face their punishment. He knew it was a manly, even an admirable thing to do; but it was not a priest’s business to incite it. A priest should unite, not disrupt his village, by bringing the frustration in men’s minds to the surface, where it could flow freely without curdling into neurosis.
‘Look at me, Tom. Answer me.’
‘Why are you speaking to me like this?’ he asked, with his face to the wall.
‘I want to know what you are made of.’
You know what the litany teaches us, father. We are the sons of cowards and our days are passed in fear.’
‘You believe that, Tom?’
‘Naturally. It is the Teaching.’
‘Then would you follow me where I led you – even out of Quarters, into Dead Ways?’
He was silent, wondering, thinking not with his brain but with the uneasy corpuscles of his blood.
‘That would require courage,’ he replied at last.
The priest slapped his great thighs and yawned enthusiastically. ‘No, Tom, you lie, true to the liars that begot you. We should be fleeing from Quarters – escaping, evading the responsibilities of grown men in society. It would be a back-to-nature act, a fruitless attempt to return to the ancestral womb. It would be the very depth and abysm of cowardice to leave here. Now will you come with me?’
