The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘There!’ Parrodyce exclaimed. ‘Now get up.’

Carefully Wyvern stood up. His heart beat furiously as he searched himself for the first indication of harm the drug might produce. He was all right now, and now, but in a minute, in twenty seconds –?

‘What have you pumped into me?’ he gasped.

‘Oh – I think I will not tell you; it is better your mind should not be at rest. Get on this chair here.’

He sat in the dentist’s chair, and was secured by steel bands which clamped round his throat and ankles. Parrodyce went back to his cabinets, glancing at his wrist watch as he did so.

‘Just wait for that injection to take effect,’ he said ‘and then we’ll start the questioning and see how much of a potential mind-reader you are.’

Wyvern watched the plump man’s nonchalance, thinking, ‘He’s acting a part to me; here I am helpless, yet he finds it necessary to put up some sort of a front. Is it just to scare me?’

With the same careful nonchalance, Parrodyce flipped on a slow-moving tape of dance music, an import from Turkey. He sat with his chin in his hands, listening to someone else’s nostalgia.

‘What if it’s spring, if you’re not embraceable?

I feel no joy, joy is untraceable;

Don’t even hear the birds, hear only your parting words:

“Life goes on; no one’s Irreplaceable”.’

Like the drowsy beat of the music, giddiness swept over Wyvern in spasms. He was away from reality now, a mere ball of sensation expanding and contracting rhythmically from infinite size to a pinpoint, each heartbeat a rush to become either an atom or a universe: yet all the while the silent concrete room bellowed in his ears.

And now the Inquisitor was leaning over him. Wyvern saw him as a fish might see a corpse dangled bulge-eyed over its rippling pool. The corpse’s mouth was opening and shutting; it seemed to be saying ‘Irreplaceable’, but every syllable was followed by the gurgle in Wyvern’s tympanum: ‘Irgugregugplagugcegugagugbull, irgugreguggugplagugcegugagugbull.’

The human mind, like the body, has its strange, secret reserves. Among the madness and noise there was a split second when Wyvern was entirely in possession of himself. In that moment, he acted upon his earlier decision trap of his mind, pouring out loathing to the utmost of his strength – and was met with a counter-surge of telepathic force!

On the instant of ego-union between them, Wyvern learnt much; he knew, for instance, as unmistakably as one recognises a brother, that Parrodyce was the drunken telepath he had bumped into years ago in London; and then he dropped deep into unconsciousness.

III

Eugene Parrodyce talked rapidly.

Sweat stood out on his forehead, like grease on a bit of dirty vellum. As he spoke, he held a bitter-tasting beaker of liquid to Wyvern’s lips, letting it slop down his chin while he concentrated on what he was saying. With the sense of urgency harrying him, he had not unlocked the bands round Wyvern’s throat and ankles; but instead of standing over him, he now knelt before him.

‘Open up again, Wyvern,’ he whispered. ‘For heaven’s sake open your mind up again, and let me in. Why’re you closed down on me? You know it’s dangerous to be talking to you like this – for all I know, they’ve got secret microphones about the place, although they may be too disorganised to have thought of it yet. But H might come in. He came down here once before. If you’d only open up again for a second, we’d get everything cleared up between us – more than we’ll ever be able to do by talking.’

‘Shut up!’ Wyvern said.

The bitter liquid cleared the fire in his body.

‘Release my hands and neck, and let me sit up,’ he said.

‘You – you won’t try anything stupid, will you?’

‘Keep my ankles locked if you’re afraid I’m going to murder you.’

Abjectly, muttering apologies, Parrodyce released the chafed wrists and neck from their bands; he left ankles locked, as Wyvern had suggested. And talk burst from him again.

‘We must communicate, Wyvern! Be sensible! We’re the only ones who have this gift – this great gift. You must let me in: I’ve so much so say and explain …’

‘Shut up!’ Wyvern said. ‘I won’t open my mind to you again. I’d be sick if I did. You’re a walking cess-pit.’

‘Oh, it’s easy to insult me now, now you know my secret –’

‘Parrodyce – you had me here unconscious. Why didn’t you kill me then?’

The plump man didn’t answer. He shook his head helplessly, his eyes fixed on Wyvern’s, tears blurring his gaze. He was trying to break through Wyvern’s shield. Wyvern could feel him like a blind man padding behind locked mental doors.

‘Stop it!’ he said. ‘You aren’t coming in. I won’t have you. You’re too foul, Parrodyce!’

‘Yes, yes, I am foul,’ the other agreed eagerly. ‘But can’t you see we are brothers really in this. You’ve got to help me get out of here. You’ve –’

‘Oh no,’ Wyvern said. ‘You’ve got to help me get out of here. And first of all there are several things I want to know.’

‘Let’s connect – then you can know everything!’

‘Question and answer will do me, you dog! How did you get this job?’

Parrodyce knelt back wretchedly. He wrung his hands as if he were washing them; Wyvern had read of this gesture but had never before seen it actually performed. On top of everything else he had suffered, this man’s sudden transformation had considerably shaken him. From a torturer, Parrodyce had turned into a sobbing wreck: Wyvern had regained consciousness to find the creature slobbering round his neck.

‘A telepath is an ideal inquisitor,’ Parrodyce was saying now. ‘Don’t you see, when I had someone shut up safe in here – so that nobody outside could feel what I was doing – I could explore his mind when he was drugged and read every secret he had. When they came round, even if they were allowed to get away alive, they didn’t know what had happened to them. And – and I always delivered the goods to H. I couldn’t fail. And I didn’t dare fail –’

‘But why did you do it?’

‘I – I – Let me into your mind! I’ll explain then.’

‘You filthy vampire! No, I won’t let you in,’ Wyvern said. And Wyvern had no need for explanation. Their second of ego-union had given him the real truth: Parrodyce was a pathological coward; full of fear himself, he could only exist on the fear of others.

Yet it was not so much this shameless exhibition of fear which revolted Wyvern. Rather, it was to find that a fellow telepath had slipped so far from everything regarded as decent in human conduct. Isolated from others of his kind, Wyvern had vaguely imagined that a telepathic community (supposing such a thing should ever exist or had existed) would be free from vice; given such a powerful instruments of understanding, surely it would always consider the feelings of its fellows which it could learn so easily? Now he saw the fallacy of his assumption; telepathy was a gift which lay in its place alongside all the other human traits, good or bad. There could no more be a true brotherhood of telepaths than there could be a true brotherhood of man.

‘Get these bands off my legs,’ Wyvern ordered. ‘You’re going to let me go free out of here.’

‘No! Oh no, I can’t let you go now I’ve found you!’

‘Wait! Colonel H’s little pal told me there was another telepath. What was his name – Grimslade? What did you do to him?’

‘You mean Grisewood? I never got near enough to him to communicate … Don’t remind me of him – he died horribly, when they tried to couple him to Big Bert. That must be the worst pain of all; I pray I never come to that!’

‘Get these shackles off me!’ Wyvern said.

Tears ran from Parrodyce’s eyes. His spectacles misted. He fumbled at the locks by Wyvern’s ankles. When they were undone, he lay helplessly where he was at the foot of the chair.

‘You’re going to betray me to H! You’re going to betray me,’ he muttered, over and over again.

‘If I betrayed you, I’d betray myself,’ Wyvern said in a hard voice. He was testing out his legs; they just held him. Parrodyce, too, got slowly to his feet.

‘That’s right,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘If you betray me you betray yourself.’

He mended visibly. Some degree of colour returned to his face. He could see there was hope for himself.

‘I can get you safely out of here by just giving the word,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it at once.’

He turned and went slowly back to his cabinets. He began to speak into a concealed phone in something like his old manner. When he finished, he pushed the phone back and came and put his hand on Wyvern’s arm.

‘I’m in control of myself again now,’ he said. ‘It was the shock of finding another telepath at last. I must have a drink. Let me give you one, too. They only allow me a stingy bit each day, or I try to drown my sorrows.’

Wyvern curtly refused the drink when it was offered. Parrodyce drank it off and poured himself another.

‘I’m kept down here,’ he said. ‘My life’s pure misery, Wyvern, I swear it is. They’ve given me an assistant just recently, a fellow called Joe Rakister. The company’s good for me – it’s just someone to talk to, you know. I’ve become quite fond of Rakister, in my own way, you know. But all the while I’m afraid he’s really one of H’s men, sent to spy on me. I’m getting a bag of nerves, Wyvern; I never used to be like this, even during the Fourth War. I suppose it’s the feed-back effect of the torture. I don’t get any pleasure out of it. At least – well, I’m sorry afterwards. Sick, you know. In my dreams they come back and do all the things to me I’ve done to them.’

His hand started quivering. He put the glass down, biting his lip, and suddenly swung round to confront Wyvern.

‘For God’s sake do something for me,’ he begged.

‘What?’

‘If you ever get the chance – I want you to communicate with me. Oh, I know what it must be like for you: free-diving in a cesspool … But you’ve got to find what I’ve got wrong with me, Wyvern. You’ve got to go down and find it, and try and put it right. It must be something buried right down in my id, I don’t know what: something someone did to me when I was a kid in a pram, perhaps. Psychiatrists can’t do anything. But you could! You’re telepathic, Wyvern! You could put me straight again, Wyvern.’

Yes, Parrodyce was right. He was just one of the bits of horrible mess man had infested his world with. If you could, you put it right; even if it did no ultimate good, the gesture satisfied you yourself. And that was something.

‘If I get the chance, I will, Parrodyce,’ Wyvern said. ‘Now I want to go.’

Parrodyce thanked him hopelessly, and handed him over to the nurse.

‘I spoke to H’s secretary,’ were Parrodyce’s last words. ‘You’ll be allowed out the main gate.’

He went back into his silent torture chamber, polishing his spectacles and shaking his head.

The nurse handed Wyvern over to the corporal. The corporal gave him his clothes and watched him dress.

‘Not a mark on you, except that bruised shin,’ he exclaimed wonderingly.

‘Where are my belongings?’ Wyvern asked.

‘Just going to get them. In a hurry, aren’t you?’

He produced them in an old toffee tin. Wyvern looked rapidly through them; everything was there except two items: the ticket to Luna and his passport. He looked sharply up at the corporal.

‘Something missing?’ the latter asked. ‘This was the Colonel’s secretary’s orders. He told me to give you this.’

He produced a grubby envelope from a tunic pocket. It contained the Luna ticket and the passport, torn to tiny shreds.

A private soldier led Wyvern upstairs and out across the barrack square. It was still raining. Wyvern had no coat, but he scarcely noticed the wet. With a minimum of formality, he was let through the gate into freedom: they had ceased to be interested in him.

He had no option but to walk home, exhausted as he felt. Before dawn, the rain ceased. The sun rose behind cloud. The country was fine and still, trees bending in luxuriant summer growth, dripping moisture into the ground. Grass blades shimmered like harmless spears. The birds rejoiced in the new daylight.

At last Stratton Hall was in sight. It would be empty now, except for the two old servants, as empty as Wyvern felt. He had no hope. Somewhere, thousands of miles away, was a girl he might have loved. Now he would never get to her. There was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

A car engine sounded behind him as he turned into the drive gates. Instinctively, he flinched. Had they come to get him back again already? Perhaps he shouldn’t have returned here at all; he could have lost his identity and become one of the many nomads who tramped the countryside.

But the driver of the car wore no uniform. He pulled up in a spray of mud and called out, ‘Is this place Stratton Hall?’ He looked about eighty, but his voice was young and sharp.

‘Yes.’

‘You just going in? Well I’m Government Mail. Give this to Mr Conrad Wyvern for me, and spare me half a mile.’

He was off. Wyvern looked blankly at the green envelope. He stuffed it in a damp pocket and trudged up the drive. A side door had been carelessly left open. The servants seemed to be still asleep; even the Flyspy was not stirring in its metal nest.

Wyvern sank wearily onto his bed before opening the envelope and reading its contents. Then he sat recalling the discontented voice of Captain Runton saying: ‘There’s a lot of reorganisation needed here – everyone lives in watertight compartments. No government department knows what the next one is up to.’ He began to smile. Then he began to laugh. He laughed helplessly, stupidly, until he was out of breath.

He had just received a government warrant to report to the Ss Aqualung at 1200 hours on that date for service on Luna. The warrant overrode any such formalities as passports or tickets.

IV

For the first part of the brief journey to the moon, Wyvern slept. Even when he felt himself again, he hardly left his tiny cabin.

The ship was almost full, despite many reports of trouble in the British Republics Sector following the death of Our Beloved Leader, for most of the passengers were on official business, and so could not make cancellations even if they wished it. They had stood about uneasily at Thorpe Field before take-off, grey little people making small British jokes about having to get away from the rain at all costs; Wyvern avoided them, purposely arriving late and keeping to himself.

A painful attempt at pre-Republican luxury had been aimed at aboard. There was a selection of drinks at the bar; perfumes were on sale; a bookstall sold something besides the eternal grey-paged numbers of On, the official magazine of the régime. Wyvern bought a modern Turkish novel. Turkey alone, neutral during two atomic wars, maintained something of an international culture. Haven of refugees from all over the globe, it produced a stream of literature and teleplays in all languages. Istanbul was again ‘the incomparable city’, as it had been over a thousand years ago.

The novel cheered Wyvern. It was technically competent, humorous and absolutely superficial; its characters moved gaily through their paces in a non-political setting. It all served to restore Wyvern’s equilibrium, as it was meant to do. It also directed his thoughts to Eileen South.

She did not know of Conrad Wyvern’s existence; he had never met her. Yet such were their natures that he felt he knew her better than an ordinary man might know his own wife. He had caught the essence of her as surely as a grape traps the essence of the sun.

He would find her. In the circumscribed environments of the moon, and with his powers, that would not be too difficult. And then? Then they might perhaps escape together to the American Sector; thanks be to goodness there was nothing like an extradition order these days, with international law a thing of the past.

It was possible that the New Police might have radioed ahead to have him arrested on landing; if they wished, they could have it done – lack of passport would be adequate reason, were one even needed. But they had, as far as Wyvern knew, nothing definite against him; the tearing up of the ticket had been no more than a spiteful gesture. No doubt, Wyvern thought ruefully, his Dufy probably hung on H’s secretary’s wall by now.

A man called Head, from Government Warfare, greeted Wyvern when he left the Aqualung. He shook hands respectfully. Wyvern was still a free citizen, as far as the term ‘free’ applied at all these days. The Aqualung had landed on the chill expanse of field outside the huddled domes of the British Luna community. Through the ports, the strange city was visible, stewing in sunlight. They transferred from the ship straight into a buggy, which crawled into the vast maw of one of the airlocks. There they underwent the tedious process of decontamination: no infections were allowed to enter the closed system of the Sector, where they might circulate all too easily.

Head apologised a hundred times for the lengthy delay.

At last they were officially cleared and allowed to pass into the dome proper.

They drove to a civil servant’s hotel on a laner, a small vehicle running on a monorail among the lanes, as the narrow avenues of the British Sector were called. The hotel accommodation was adequate, although utilitarian, like everything else up here. Head apologised for it all, taking the blame for the entire economic framework upon his own narrow shoulders.

‘And I shall call for you punctually tomorrow morning, Mr Wyvern,’ he said, smiling deferentially. ‘There will be a busy day ahead of us then, I dare surmise, so I will leave you now to get what I trust will be an excellent night’s rest. The bed looks at least comfortable, and no doubt you are fatigued by your journey. The water should be on at this time of the evening.’

After more profuse expressions of solicitude for Wyvern’s comfort, Head left.

His amiable talk of mornings and evenings had been a mere convention: it would be sunlight for the next week, and the cloche-like domes had up their polarscreens.

As soon as he was alone, restlessness seized Wyvern. Eileen was somewhere near, perhaps within a mile. He shaved, changed his suit and went downstairs. There were few people about, mostly male and as grey and official-looking as the people on the ship. One brightly dressed woman walked elegantly into the bar; she was possibly Turkish. A synthetic orchestra was playing the ‘Atomics’ from Dinkuhl’s Managerial Suite.

Wyvern carefully studied a map of the British Sector framed in the foyer. The name ‘JJ Lane’ roused his heart excitedly: that was the name of the lane to which Eileen had been going. He went and ordered a dinner in better spirits.

The meal was simple: soup, a choice of two main dishes, a sweet, ice cream and something labelled coffee which was obviously and unsuccessfully synthetic. The only touch of the exotic was a Martian sauce served with the creamed fish; the new colony had begun to export something other than fissionables. With the present state of world affairs, food was scarcer than uranium.

Once he had eaten, Wyvern went determinedly to bed. But no sooner was the light out and the window polared, than restlessness seized him. Tomorrow might be too late, he thought. Suppose the New Police arrived in the night? He got up and dressed, his fingers suddenly frantic with haste.

As far as Wyvern could tell, he left the hotel unobserved.

The distance to JJ Lane was short, and he decided to walk there. The British Sector had been planned with mathematical precision even before the first lunar landings, in the days of the First H-War; the thoroughfares running East – West were called ‘Walks’, and numbered; the thoroughfares running North – South were called ‘Lanes’, and designated by the letters of the alphabet, which had to stand doubled after the first twenty-six Lanes, to adhere to the plan.

Unfortunately, some British muddle-headedness had crept into the design. Where the German and American Sectors adhered with mathematical precision to their planners’ blueprints, the British had succumbed to a traditional love of crooked lanes. JJ, in fact, out on the periphery, actually cut Five Walk in two places. The plan had been further botched by additions on the wrong side of town, so that Wyvern’s hotel, for example, stood in Minus Nine. Despite these complications, it was only ten minutes before he turned into JJ.

Eileen South had been going to follow someone to 108. As he too moved in that direction, Wyvern ran over in his mind all he knew of this business. To begin with, something must greatly have surprised her to break through her guard and make her radiate for a moment. There had been no hint in her thought of having met another telepath, which surely would have emerged if she had done. And that indicated that whoever she was going to follow – a non-telepath – had been radiating very strongly to get through. Whoever he was, Eileen’s thought showed he was a stranger to her, and something about him evoked in her mind that curious phrase: ‘the impossible smile’.

Of a sudden, Wyvern found himself needing to know much more about this stranger to whose house he was going. The stranger was the only link with Eileen; and the stranger had a secret disturbing him powerfully enough to radiate to Eileen accidentally, although her power was shut down.

Wyvern knew this feeling well. If he opened his own mind to become aware of the minds about him, those minds would be as aware of him as he of them; they would be wireless receivers picking up his broadcast. Yet when his mind was closed, he still retained an abnormal sensitivity which might be agitated by agitation about him. The troubledness would loom up to him like buildings swimming on oil in a dense fog: some town halls, most merely suburban villas, one perhaps a cathedral of worry.

As he came into JJ, Wyvern met a growing mob of people. They were a rough-looking lot, although quiet enough at present, their attention fixed on a haggard man who was addressing them. Wyvern caught something of what he was saying.

‘… this skinflint régime. And things aren’t going to get any better, friends. No! They’re going to get worse – and they’re going to go on getting worse. It was bad enough with Jim Bull in control. He was a black-hearted rogue! But he was an old spacer! You don’t need me to remind you he was with Wattleton on the third Venus expedition; it was Jim Bull coaxed the old Elizabeth home. He knew what it was like up here.

‘Now Jim Bull’s dead. And I tell you this for nothing, friends – if any of the Earthbound pack that is squabbling for his empty seat now gets a whip-hand over us, we may as well go straight round to the Bureau and draw our death certificates – and I’ll be in front of the queue!’

There was a roar of approval, but on the whole they sounded peaceable enough.

JJ was not a savoury quarter. It had lodgings and snuff palaces and a blue cinema, and even one of the gadarenes beloved by spacemen on the search for orgies, thriving among the many tiny shops. 108 was an ‘earth shop’, the lunar version of a pawnbroker’s, so called because here were stocked all the innumerable little articles in daily use but manufactured only on the home planet. Over the shop was a small flat. A descriptive word out of an ancient thriller crossed Wyvern’s mind: seedy. This shop, this flat, was seedy.

He pushed open the shop door and went in.

The place was poky and ill-stocked. If you thumped your fist on the counter, you could crack the veneer – but some irate customer had thought of that already. In a cubicle at the back, the proprietor slouched over a telephone. He did not look up when Wyvern entered.