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I looked across the silent lake. The far shore was invisible, but out of the layers of mist rose Mount Kangosi. Even at this distance, in the early morning hush, came the faint roar of the new waterfall. And there was another sound, intermittent but persistent: beyond the mountain, they were bombing fault lines. That way they hoped to cause a collapse which would plug Victoria’s escape routes. So far, they had had no success, but the bombing went on, making a battlefield of what had once been glorious country.
‘Sorry I haven’t seen anything of you and Sloe,’ Jubal said. I disliked his tone.
‘You’ve been busy. Sloe called you on the vision.’
‘Oh that. Come on into my hut, Rog.’
We walked over to a temporary structure; the grass was overloaded with dew. In Jubal’s hut, J-Casta was dressing, smoking a cheroot as he dexterously pulled on a shirt. He gave me a surly greeting, whose antagonism I sensed was directed through me at Jubal.
As soon as the latter closed the door, he said: ‘Rog, promise me something.’
‘Tell me what.’
‘If anything happens to me, I want you to marry Sloe. She’s your sort.’
Concealing my irritation, I said: ‘That’s hardly a reasonable request.’
‘You and she get on well together, don’t you?’
‘Certainly. But you see my outlook on life is … well, for one thing I like to stay detached. An observer, you know, observing. I just want to sample the landscapes and the food and the women of the solar system. I don’t want to marry, just move on at the right time. Sloe’s very nice but – ’
My ghastly inability to express the pressure of inner feeling was upon me. In women I like flamboyance, wit and a high spirit, but I tire quickly of it and then have to seek its manifestation elsewhere. Besides, Sloe frankly had had her sensibilities blunted from living with Jubal. He now chose to misunderstand my hesitations.
‘Are you standing there trying to tell me that you’ve already tired of whatever you’ve been doing behind my back?’ he demanded. ‘You – you – ’ He called me a dirty name; I forgot to make allowances for the strain he had been undergoing, and lost my temper.
‘Oh, calm down,’ I snapped. ‘You’re overtired and overwrought, and probably over-sexed too. I’ve not touched your little woman – I like to drink from pure streams. So you can put the entire notion out of your head.’
He rushed at me with his shoulders hunched and fists swinging. It was an embarrassing moment. I am against violence, and believe in the power of words, but I did the only possible thing: spring to one side and catch him a heavy blow over the heart.
Poor Jubal! No doubt, in his frustration against the forces of nature, he was using me only as a safety valve. But with shame, I will now confess what savage pleasure that blow gave me; I was filled with lust to strike him again. I can perceive dimly how atrocities such as the Massacre came about. As Jubal turned on me, I flung myself at him, breaking down, his defences, piling blows into his chest. It was, I suppose, a form of self-expression.
J-Casta stopped it, breaking in between us and thrusting his ugly face into mine, his hand like a clamp round my wrist.
‘Pack it up,’ he said. ‘I’d gladly do the job myself, but this is not the time.’
As he spoke, the hut trembled. We were hard pressed to keep our feet, staggering together like drunken men.
‘Now what – ’ Jubal said, and flung open the door. I caught a rectangular view of trees and mist, men running, and the emergency dam sailing away on a smooth black slide of escaping water. The banks were collapsing!
Glimpsing the scene, Jubal instantly attempted to slam the door shut again. He was too late. The wave struck us, battering the cabin off its flimsy foundations. Jubal cried sharply as he was tossed against a wall. Next moment we were floundering in a hell of flying furniture and water.
Swept along on a giant sluice, the cabin turned over and over like a dice. That I was preserved was a merest accident. Through a maze of foam, I saw a heavy bunk crashing towards me, and managed to flounder aside in time. It missed me by a finger’s width and broke straight through the boarding wall. I was swept helplessly after it.
When I surfaced, the cabin was out of sight and I was being borne along at a great rate; and the ugly scene in the cabin was something fruitless that happened a million years ago. Nearly wrenching my arm off in the process, I seized a tree which was still standing, and clung on. Once I had recovered my breath, I was able to climb out of the water entirely, wedge myself between two branches and regain my breath.
The scene was one of awesome desolation. I had what in less calamitous circumstances might have been called ‘a good view’ of it all.
A lake spread all round me, its surface moving smartly and with apparent purpose. Its forward line, already far away, was marked by a high yellow cascade. In its wake stretched a miscellany of objects, of which only the trees stood out clearly. Most of the trees were eucalyptus: this area had probably been reclaimed marsh.
To the north, the old shore-line of the lake still stood. The ground was higher there and solid rock jutted stolidly into the flood.
To the south, the shore-line was being joyously chewed away. Mokulgu had about half an hour left before it was swamped and obliterated. I wondered how the Mokulgu Town Council were coping with the situation.
Overhead, the sun now shining clear, bars of pink, wispy cloud flecked the blue sky. The pink and the blue were of the exact vulgar tints found in two-colour prints of the early twentieth century AD – that is, a hundred years before the Massacre. I was almost happy to see this lack of taste in the sky matching the lack of stability elsewhere. I was almost happy: but I was weeping.
‘They visioned me that one of the floats had picked you up – and not Jubal. Is there any hope for him, Rog, or is that a foolish question?’
‘I can’t give you a sensible answer. He was a strong swimmer. They may find him yet.’
I spoke to Sloe over the heads of a crowd of people. Mokulgu, surely enough, had been washed away. The survivors, homeless and bereaved, crowded on to high ground. Sloe had generously thrown open most of her house as a sort of rest-camp-cum-soup-kitchen. She superintended everything with a cool authority which suitably concealed her personal feelings. For that I was grateful: Sloe’s feelings must be no affair of mine.
She smiled at me before turning to address someone behind her. Already the light was taking on the intensity of early evening. Above the babble of voices round me came the deep song of speeding water. It would continue for months yet: Africa was ruptured at her very heart, beyond man’s mending.
Instead of flowing northward, fertilizing its old valley, Victoria crashed into our lake, adding its burden to the weight of water rolling west. While twenty-one million people perished of drought in Egypt, as many perished of flood and typhoid in the Congo.
I seemed to know what was coming as I stood in the crowded room, knowing Jubal dead, knowing the nation of Africa to be bleeding to death. We were dying of our own wounds.
The ten years to follow would be as terrible as the ten years of the Massacre, when every member of the white race had been slain.
Now we negroes, in our turn, stood at the bar of history.
Tradesman’s Exit (#ulink_04140692-3a39-5e88-94d1-1e954e05b851)
When it comes to human nature, there’s nobody to beat Henshaw. He has the humanest nature I have ever met: how he kept it intact working 33 years for old Sowerby, I don’t know. He once told me that his secret was that he suffered fools gladly; however that may be, we always get on splendidly together.
‘Nick your chin every morning to let him see you’ve shaved, say “Morning, sir” when he comes in, and you’ll be OK’, Henshaw told me, the day I started work at Sowerby’s. The ‘he’ he referred to was Sowerby; the way Henshaw pronounced it, it was a fitting epithet.
Apart from an almost faceless woman who came from ten till one each day, to add up figures in the ledgers, Henshaw and I were Sowerby’s only staff. Sowerby’s is a poky bookshop and stationers the Chancery Lane end of High Holborn. Its aspect is prim but seedy; it is surrounded by piles of masonry too loud to be called building and too lewd to be called architecture. (That’s what I once heard an intellectual say; we used to get them in from the insurance offices nearby.)
I stared at Henshaw; thin and dry, 54, with a poor head of hair that made him look like a shabby eagle. He wore dim, stately suits. He was a tradesman and a gentleman, but a tradesman first, and being a gent did not stop him being a good sort.
Henshaw stared at me; thin but shiny, 24, with thick, rimless glasses and a detestably round face. My ice-blue suit was my only suit, and my digs were in Tabernacle Place. I was miraculously ignorant then.
For some reason, Henshaw liked me. Now I’ve cultivated my intelligence a bit with correspondence schools he might not like me so much.
The business of his getting the sack did not crop up until I had been 18 months at Sowerby’s. Henshaw was a permanent fixture sort of chap; only an old swine like Sowerby could have thought of sacking him at all.
Not that Sowerby was a nuisance. Each day, he came in, passed around the stands and tables to the back of the shop, climbed up three steps and entered a tiny cubicle lined with dirt and leather. There he stayed till closing. At a misty window set in his wall we occasionally saw his beer-coloured eyes watching us.
‘I don’t believe he is anyone at all,’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘I think he’s empty.’
‘You shouldn’t say that,’ Henshaw advised, turning his head away from the misty peephole to add, ‘because the little ferret probably lip-reads.’
‘I don’t believe he exists,’ I said, likewise turning away and pretending to polish a cobweb.
‘He’s just terribly shy. When we’ve gone and the shop’s closed and the blind’s down, he whips off all his clothes and dances in the window.’
People sometimes entered Sowerby’s and bought pencils, or books on primitive peoples. In the lunch hour, while I gutsed a bun in the background, we were sometimes quite crowded. The customers would scrape their bodies round our trays, picking up volumes here and there. Occasionally I would have to serve. I’d put on a really crack Foyles accent and say, ‘Out of stock’, or ‘Out of print’, or ‘Banned as obscene’, just as Henshaw had taught me.
To him I owe my wealth of book lore.
It was during these rush hours that the disappearances started. Something about jurisprudence went missing on Monday, and on Wednesday it was a marked copy of Atrocities in China. On Friday it was a first edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Westward Ho!, if my memory serves me right.
‘How do you know they’ve been pinched?’ I asked Henshaw.
‘That Westward Ho!’s been there longer than me: it was always too pricey,’ Henshaw said. ‘As for the others, you didn’t sell them, nor did I. Ergo, old chum, some fly boy’s whipped ’em.’
It was the very next morning, Saturday, and I was in our packing room (8 by 6) smarming back my hair in the mirror; Henshaw came in and said, ‘Hey, Nobby, guess what. I’ve got the push.’
‘You’re kidding!’ I exclaimed, wiping the brilliantine off my comb. But when I looked up I could perceive like a flash he was serious. For one thing, he was out of puff; that’s how it takes you, poor devil, when you are 54.
Apparently, Sowerby had popped out of his cubicle on Friday night as Henshaw was getting his raincoat on. He said that Henshaw was in charge of the shop: it was his responsibility to see those three books were replaced. If they weren’t back by Monday night, Henshaw must leave the following Saturday.
‘Silly little B, what’ll he do without you?’ I asked. ‘If you leave, Mr. Henshaw, I come too.’
He was touched at this, and found us some chewing gum in one of his pockets.
‘That may not be necessary,’ he said. ‘I reckon I know the thief. If I spotted him and phoned the police, could you tackle him, Nob?’
Bravely refraining from asking the thief’s size, I said I would. Henshaw told me to look out for a cadaverous chap with bow tie and plastic mack.
On Monday morning I had to deliver a fat account book at Lincoln’s Inn, a heavy affair with blank pages, which cost about five times as much as any book with printed pages. As I re-entered Sowerby’s, my place of rightful employment, at eleven-thirty hours – sorry, I’m talking like the statement I had to make later! As I nipped in, there was this cadaverous fellow with a bow tie and plastic mack, picking over the erotica.
Henshaw was up a ladder, innocent as you please, dusting a run of Hellenic Journal; who Helen was I couldn’t care less, but she had never been given such a going over. He slipped me down a note which read ‘Thief (q.v.) – with Accomplice – are here. Police phoned for – two plain clothes also in shop now – watching suspect (cf.) – awaiting false move. Don’t let on’.
Looking innocuous, I barged round the shop slapping books into place. Several so-called customers were about, but I soon decided which the two coppers were. Once was spotty with huge black glasses, loitering by Travel; the other was cheery and clean-looking, and standing quite near Cadaverous, looking about. He winked at me, a gesture I returned.
The thief’s accomplice was also easy to guess. He stood over by the Art case, face buried in A Hundred Further Studies; he was well set up, with polish or something on his shoes – the confidence type.
Drama! My young life took on a new aspect. I winked at Plain Clothes again, and he winked back. Henshaw was making faces at me and my head was reeling. Here was a chance for me to do some jurisprudence in my own right.
Cadaverous moved to the further wall of the shop. Seizing my chance, I sidled up to Plain Clothes and said out of the corner of my mouth, ‘If you’re going to make an arrest, I’m here to help.’
‘Thanks’, he said, conferring a warm glow on me.
After a moment, which he evidently spent thinking, he asked, ‘Who was it you wanted arrested, kid?’
So they had not even got that far! I pointed to Cadaverous with my elbow.
‘Supposing me and you manoeuvre him outside?’ Plain Clothes said. ‘We could tackle him out there. Are you game?’
Nodding my head dumbly, I watched him go over to Cadaverous and mutter something. What it was I’ll never know, but I can guess. Then they approached, Cadaverous smiling enough to split his face, and we left the shop arm in arm.
Directly we were outside, they both bashed me on the head, sending me sprawling, and ran like mad in the direction of Gamage’s.
It pains me to say that the two real plain clothes men, the spotty one with glasses and the one with shiny shoes, were very rude as they helped Henshaw drag me back into Sowerby’s. Even now, after Henshaw and I have been doing this quiet packing job at the Lane auctioneer’s for three months, what they said still pains me. I had cost old Henshaw his job, but Henshaw was too human to fly off the handle.
‘The way he walked up to that accomplice like a kid asking for toffee,’ one copper sneered to the other, glancing carnivorously at me.
‘What’s the good of carrying on like that?’ Henshaw asked them. ‘Can’t you see it’s a case of arrested development?’
That was a puzzling remark; you might almost think he meant me.
‘But they weren’t arrested,’ I said.
‘It’s not exactly what I meant,’ said Henshaw.
With Esmond in Mind (#ulink_f8685444-b715-5d69-8cc0-e842430412c4)
The autofly sank deeper and deeper into the layers of buildings – its motor humming at steady pitch. Uneasily, Laurie Roberts trimmed his muon screen to avoid an upcoming fly. The traffic in these buildings was getting worse.
With London’s population now close on seventy million, that was hardly surprising. Year by year, more strata of houses were added to the existing layers. Everybody said it couldn’t go on any longer, yet it did. London, centre of world trade, blessed with its sunny climate, attracted population irresistibly from all over the Seven Systems.
Laurie glanced at his dials. He was just sinking through Stratum 17A, Square 80. It might be the Grand Bank of Neptune, it might be some pretty girl’s bedroom. Laurie wished he could materialise and see, but lowering the muon screen would instantly pulverise him; besides, he hadn’t far to go now, and he was really in a hurry.
He could not recall a time when he had not been in a hurry. Everyone in the seventeenth A-century was in a hurry: that was the inevitable result of a competitive way of living. Laurie’s one man illusion-repair outfit was a pretty hand-to-mouth job, allowing no time for relaxation.
He scythed forward now, cutting through Stratum 20. There was romance for you! Stratum 20 had been the old pre-muon age London, when people had had to build on the ground. Then intrapenetrability had been discovered, and progress had really gone ahead. The old existing thoroughfares (built for their quaint old automobiles and railways) had been filled in with new buildings; nothing and nobody could get anywhere without a muon screen – but power was reasonably cheap and everyone had them. After that the erection of new layers above and below the city began. London expanded like a self-fertilizing bun. The result was a capital worthy of a galactic race.
Not that that concerned Laurie particularly at present. He was too intent on finding his way down to Strata 29, where a client, Granville Esmond, awaited his services. An autobeam stopped him at 28 – that would be more upcoming traffic – and then he filtered the fly down and sent it clicking along to the appropriate square in which Mr. Esmond lived.
As soon as he arrived, Laurie dialled Esmond’s number. It came up, interlocked, and the muon screen was safely released. Laurie climbed out, glancing at once over his little vehicle with its proud sign: ‘Roberts’ Radiopsi Repairs. I’ll Mend Your Illusions.’ The new paint had been slightly scratched, presumably by a proton shower which had sneaked through his screen; the port projector needed retuning, and Laurie made a mental note to attend to it in the morning.
Mr. Esmond’s materialising hall was as small as the statues of the realm would allow. The tiny autofly filled it. Which was all you could expect if you knew this end of Strata 29; it was decidedly a shabby-genteel neighbourhood.
Mr. Esmond himself stood at the inner, muon-proof door. Although he was a complete stranger to Laurie, his type was familiar.
He wore green flannel shorts, a trylon sneaking-jacket and leather shirt with twill plugging pieces. His boots were aluminium retreads equipped with the standard speakers, leakers and signature keys. His hair, greying now, was worn in a snood. It was, in fact, a thoroughly old-fashioned outfit.
‘Please come in, Mr. Roberts,’ Esmond said in a sad voice. ‘Although I’m afraid you’ll find the flat rather untidy. I’ve had to manage by myself ever since my wife died.’
Laurie surveyed the old man’s face with interest. He hardly looked the type who would marry; the lines of his mouth were prim and ascetic; his face was the face of a self-denier.
There was a green fleck to his withered flesh which Laurie could not account for until he saw the rest of the house. Then he had Esmond placed: he was a retired Venusian civil servant. About him and his home was the air, at once conservative and eccentric, of one who has travelled far and got nowhere.
In the middle of a light years’ wide sphere of civilisation, incorrigible Venus lay, a frontier planet after sixteen centuries of more or less continuous occupation. The transformation of planetary atmosphere had never been a success and the hardy natives – who survived in any atmosphere – were difficult to rule. Venusian jurisdiction could point to thousands of men like Granville Esmond, who spent the greater part of their lives keeping order in remote provinces, far from their own kind.
The walls of Esmond’s poor little living room were covered with framed stereos, the cheap, motionless kind: views of the desolate land, the subterranean villages, groups of local Earthmen in sports kit, a close up of Mrs. Esmond in a sixties hat, looking strangely like her husband. And there were other mementos, a smogwood carving, a chunk of venustone, a native weave rug on the floor.
‘I spent twenty-nine years on our sister planet,’ Esmond said proudly, seeing Laurie’s glance.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘Oh, don’t apologise, it’s nice to have someone to see my – ah, trophies: I’m very much alone.’ The words seemed wrenched out of him; he immediately covered the confession by adding, ‘My illusion room’s through here, if you’d come, please.’
He gestured to a door and then said hurriedly, ‘I’m afraid it’s rather worn … The upkeep’s very expensive, you know. But I couldn’t bear to be without it: it helps remind me of happier times.’
He stood there as if barring the door, smiling in a weak, apologetic way.
