The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

Hopes like bats, pain like a driving sleet seemed to batter against Wyvern’s face, blinding his psychic sense.

On all sides of him, three-dimensionally as it appeared, crowded scenes from the man’s past life, scudding by, falling out of darkness into more darkness. The backgrounds were mainly of an appalling drabness, the faces in the foreground often twisted into hatred; here a girl’s countenance smiled like a lamp, there envy burned in a rival’s face; everywhere callousness, besottedness, a life run to see. Wyvern sank grimly through the sediment.

He was hopelessly lost in the labyrinth, walled up in night while fifty movie projectors played fifty different films on him. And the projectors faltered and dimmed. He had to be quick: the man with the impossible smile was dying.

The patterned mists cleared for a moment. Something came clearly through from the man, his identity and his latest crime:

‘I, George Dorgen, killed Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader.’

It came not in words but pictures, a cramped figure on a deadly mission, breaking through a bathroom wall, shooting a man in his shower. Then it all burst like a bubble and Dorgen was lying on this very bed; he had fled to the Moon, he thought himself safe, and then the man with the knife and the soft shoes entered the bedroom …

Then that bubble of memory also burst, burst into the garish colour of pain. It flowed round, over, through Wyvern, drowning him, bearing him seven seas down in another’s futility. It bore him Everest-deep, changing its hues, fading and cooling. It carried him where no lungs could live, and then it was going, gargling away into a whirlpool down the hole in the universe where all life goes. It broke foaming over Wyvern’s head, pouring away like a mill-race, tearing to take him with it, sucking at his body, whipping about his legs, screaming as it slid over the bare nerve-ends of Dorgen’s ocean-mind-bed.

The last drop drained. The little universe collapsed with one inexorable implosion. Dorgen was dead.

For a long time, clutching his pebble of extraordinary information, Wyvern slumped against the rickety bed. He was vitiated. His body had no strength: his eyes would not open: his mind was dead. There was only the memory of a killer who slayed an innocent man downstairs to come up here and kill another killer; and that killer had killed Jim Bull, the killer.

Kill, kill, kill. Wyvern feebly resolved never to use his mental power again, unless …

Suddenly he remembered Eileen South. As far as he could tell in the chaos of Dorgen’s mind, the man had no knowledge of her at all, her identity or her whereabouts. But the mere thought of Eileen revived Wyvern. After a while, he picked himself up off the floor.

It came to him decisively that he must get away from it all. Life was too foul, too complicated. He must get to the American Sector, or Turksdome, anywhere.

He came weakly out on to the landing.

Two men in the uniform of the New Police stood shoulder to shoulder at the bottom of the stairs. Revolvers were clasped in their fists.

‘Come on down quietly,’ said one of them, ‘or we’ll blow your guts out.’

The stairs creaked one by one as he trod on them, obeying.

The next three hours were full of uniforms and questions.

After his first interrogation at Police Headquarters, Wyvern was put into an ordinary cell. That interrogation was made by a police sergeant with a man in plain clothes looking on. Then he was taken from the cell and questioned again, this time by a police captain and two men in plain clothes, after which he was taken to a special box-like cell.

The back wall of this cell was fitted with a steel bench. When the door of the cell closed it was so shaped that the prisoner was forced to sit on the bench; there was no room to do anything else. The wall was of glass and Wyvern estimated, every bit of two feet thick. He sat in his pillory like a fish in an aquarium.

He had been sitting there for about an hour when a man entered the bare room on the other side of the glass. The man was sleek and blank and neat and had a brown beard. He advanced to the glass and said, ‘Your cell is wired for sound so that we can talk comfortably. You will talk, I will listen. Your case is very serious.’

His voice was clipped; he did indeed make it sound serious.

Hell’s bells, it is serious, Wyvern thought. I’m spending all my time recently being browbeaten by big and little autocrats. If I ever get out of here, I shall suffer from persecution complex for the rest of my days.

‘I’ve told your people my story twice,’ he said aloud. ‘I omitted nothing. That fat police sergeant will give you a copy of my statement.’

The beard made no comment.

‘A customer went into the earth shop and found the proprietor dead, stabbed,’ the beard said stonily. ‘Police were called. They heard a movement in the room above. You appeared. You were arrested. In the room you had just vacated, another body was found. Our weapon experts say the same blade did both jobs. Obviously, you are Number One suspect. I think it worth your while to tell your story again.’

‘It’s all circumstantial,’ Wyvern snapped. ‘Do I have to tell you people your business? Why haven’t you taken my fingerprints? Take them at once and compare them with the ones on the knife. You’ll find I never even touched it. I’ve told you who I am, I’ve told you what I’m doing on Luna – ring through and check with the government at once. I demand it!’

The beard let this outburst die on the hot air.

‘I think it worth your while to tell your story again,’ he repeated.

Wyvern sighed. Then he capitulated and said what he had said before. With certain simplifications, he told only truth. His motive for entering the shop he had altered, to avoid any mention of Eileen; he merely made himself out to be a tourist in search of local colour who had accidentally stumbled on a corpse, etc., etc. And another alteration had come at the end of the story.

It became obvious to Wyvern as he recounted the discovery of Dorgen that he was getting entangled in a political murder; indeed, it was being pinned on him for reasons best known to the police. There was one obvious way to extricate himself, and he took it. He had to describe the real murderer, as he had been reflected in Dorgen’s dying mind. Once that murderer was caught, he, Wyvern, was cleared.

And so he said – and found himself now saying it for the third time, ‘Dorgen could still talk when I reached him. He was able to describe the killer as a tall fellow with a square face, blue jowls, small black moustache, black bushy eyebrows, hair black with a prominent streak of white in it. Hairy hands and arms.’

‘Dorgen told you this before he died?’ the neat man with the beard asked.

‘I just said he did,’ Wyvern said. His voice rasped; they would not, surely, be on the alert for telepaths up here. His story was perfectly convincing.

‘With his dying breath,’ Wyvern added, ‘Dorgen said, “I killed Our Beloved Leader”.’

The beard took a precise step or two in each direction, running a fingernail lightly along the thick glass as he walked.

‘Now may I go?’ Wyvern asked. ‘I have been detained quite long enough already, it seems to me. You know where to contact me if you wish.’

‘It is not as easy as that,’ the beard said. ‘Nothing is easy in this world, Wyvern. Men behave foolishly. We are not, for example, at all happy about some aspects of your story. Everything is very complicated; you must be kept here a little longer yet.’

He turned to go, adding, ‘You may congratulate yourself at least on having a front seat while history is in the making.’

‘I never had a seat I hated more.’

The other left without comment.

Almost as soon as he had gone, the light in the outer compartment went out. A bright bulb out of reach above Wyvern’s head was now the only source of illumination, and it so shone on to the glass before his eyes that he could hardly see into the other part of the room beyond the glass. Once, he thought someone slipped in and observed him, but could not be sure.

The light threw considerable heat on to his head and neck. Cramp crawled and tingled in his legs. Disquiet increased with discomfort. He just hoped this infernal delay meant they were combing the Sector for Dorgen’s slayer; but he could not help reading more sinister motives into this custody.

At least they had no reason to suspect him of powers of ego-union – he hoped. To have that discovered would involve him in a nasty fate. He recalled, as he sat waiting, the thing Parrodyce had said when they were talking about H’s projected coupling of another telepath to Big Bert: ‘That must be the worst pain of all; I pray I never come to it.’

If they did find out about Wyvern, it would be remarkably convenient for them. The monster computer was only a hundred yards away, in the centre of the British Sector!

Wyvern’s reveries were interrupted by the opening of a grill behind his head. A basin full of patent cereal and condensed milk was thrust in upon him. He ate and dozed. Broken fantasias on Dorgen’s past sleazed through his sleep.

He came suddenly back to full consciousness, and sat bolt upright, his blood racing heavily. Beyond the glass, the shadowy forms of Colonel H and his secretary were watching him! Involuntarily, Wyvern was reminded of the ghosts which haunted Julius Caesar before his death.

The urge was strong to speak to them, to try and establish communication, to render them human, but he fought it down and stayed silent, wondering what horrible coincidence had brought them to the scene at this time. He had thought them still on Earth.

H’s small features were drawn closer together than ever, as if all the venom of him concentrated itself towards the end of his nose. He came forward at last and pressed his hands against the glass.

‘What did Dorgen say to you?’ he asked in a terrible voice.

‘He told me he killed Our Beloved Leader,’ Wyvern said.