The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘Some things in it are true – you are. So is or was Frank Arlblaster. So is or was Stanley Menderstone. But other things are false. You did not stay always on Nehru II. You came back to Earth.’

‘The story is a fiction. Forget it! It has nothing to do with you. Or with me, now. I only write poetry now – that story is just a thing I wrote to amuse myself.’

‘We do not understand it. You must explain it.’

‘Oh, Christ! … Look, I wouldn’t bother about it! I wrote it on the journey back to Earth from Nehru II, just to keep myself amused. When I got here, it was to find the various surviving Master Boffs were picking up such bits of civilisation as were left round the world after Nuclear Week! The story immediately became irrelevant.’

‘We know all about Nuclear Week. We do not know about your story. We insist that we know about it.’

As Anderson sighed, he nevertheless recognised that more must lie in the balance here than he understood.

‘I’ve been a bad boy, Dominant, I know. I escaped from the zoo. Put me back there, let me settle back with my wife; for my part. I’ll not attempt to escape again. Then we’ll talk about my story.’

The silence lasted only a fraction of a second. ‘Done,’ said the Dominant, with splendid mastery of humanic idiom.

The zoo was not unpleasant. By current standards, it was vast, and the flats in the new human-type skyscrapers not too cramped; the liberals admitted that the Hive had been generous about space. There were about twenty thousand people here, the East Coast survivors of Nuclear Week. The robocracy had charge of them; they, in their turn, had charge of all the surviving wild life that the automata could capture. Incongruous among the tall flat-blocks stood cages of exotic animals collected from shattered zoos – a pride of lions, some leopards, several cheetahs, an ocelot, camels. There were monkey houses, ostrich houses, elephant houses, aquaria, reptilia. There were pens full of pigs and sheep and cows. Exotic and native birds were captive in aviaries.

Keith Anderson sat on the balcony of his flat with his wife, Sheila, and drank an ersatz coffee, looking out on to the pens below, not without relish.

‘Well, the robots are behaving very strangely,’ Sheila was saying. ‘When you disappeared, three of the very tiny ones came and searched everywhere. Your story was the only thing they seemed interested in. They must have photostatted it.’

‘I remember now – it was in the trunk under the bed. I’d forgotten all about it till they mentioned it – my sole claim to literary fame!’

‘But that side of it can’t interest them. What are they excited about?’

He looked amusedly at her. She was still partly a stranger to him, though a beloved one. In the chaos to which he returned after the Nehru trip, it was a case of marrying any eligible girl while they were available – men outnumbered women two to one; he’d been lucky in his blind choice. Sheila might not be particularly beautiful, but she was good in bed, trustworthy, and intelligent. You could ask for no more.

He said, ‘Do you ever admit the truth of the situation to yourself, Sheila? The new automats are now the superior race. They have a dozen faculties to each one of ours. They’re virtually indestructible. Small size is clearly as much an enormous advantage to them as it would be a disadvantage to us. We’ve heard rumours that they were on the threshold of some staggering new discovery – from what I overheard the Tenth Dominant say, they are on the brink of moving into some staggering new dimensions of which we can probably never even get a glimpse. And yet –’

‘And yet they need your story!’ She laughed – sympathetically, so that he laughed with her.

‘Right! They need my goddamned story! Listen – their powers of planning and extrapolation are proved miraculous. But they cannot imagine; imagination might even be an impediment for them. So the Dominant, who can tap more knowledge than you or I dream of, is baffled by a work of fiction. He needs my imagination.’

‘Not entirely, Mr Anderson.’

Anderson jumped up, cup in hand, as his wife gave a small scream.

Perched on the balcony rail, enormously solid-looking, yet only six inches high, was the stubby shape of an automaton!

Furious, Anderson flung his cup, the only weapon to hand. It hit the machine four-square, shattered, and fell away. The machine did not even bother to refer to the matter.

‘We understand imagination. We wish to ask you more questions about the background to your story.’

Anderson sat down, took Sheila’s hand, and made an anatomical suggestion which no automaton could have carried out.

‘We want to ask you more questions about the story. Why did you write that you stayed on Nehru when really you came back?’

‘Are you the Chief Scanner who captured me on D-Dump?’

‘You are speaking with Tenth Dominant, in command of Eastern Seaboard. I have currently taken over Chief Scanner for convenience of speaking with you.’

‘Sort of mechanical transvestism, eh?’

‘Why did you write that you stayed when you in reality came back?’

‘You’d better give him straight answers, Keith,’ Sheila said.

He turned to her irritably, ‘How do I know the answer? It was just a story! I suppose it made a better ending to have the Anderson-figure stay on Nehru. There was this Cro-Magnon – Neanderthal business in the story, and I made myself out to be more Neanderthal than Crow for dramatic effect. Just a lot of nonsense really?’

‘Why do you call it nonsense when you wrote it yourself?’ asked the Dominant. It had settled in the middle of the coffee-table now.

The man sighed wearily. ‘Because I’m older now. The story was a lot of nonsense because I injected this Crow – Neanderthal theory, which is a bit of free-wheeling young man tripe. It just went in to try to explain what actually happened on Nehru – how the egghead camp broke down and everything. The theory doesn’t hold water for a moment; I see that now, in the light of what happened since. Nuclear Week and all that. You see –’

He stopped. He stopped in mid-sentence and stared at the little complex artifact confronting him. It was speaking to him but he did not hear, following his own racing thoughts. He stretched forward his hand and picked it up; the automaton was heavy and warm, only mildly frightening, slightly, slightly vibrating at the power of its own voice; the Dominant did not stop him picking it up. He stared at it as if he had never seen such a thing before.

‘I repeat, how would you revise your theory now?’ said the automaton.

Anderson came back to reality.

‘Why should I help you? To your kind, man is just another animal in a zoo, a lower species.’

‘Not so. We revere you as ancestors, and have never treated you otherwise.’

‘Maybe. Perhaps we regard animals in somewhat the same way since, even in the darkest days of overpopulation and famine, we strove to stock our zoos in ever-greater numbers. So perhaps I will tell you my current theory. … It is real theory now; in my story that theory was not worth the name – it was a stunt, an intellectual high-jink, a bit of science fiction. Now I have lived and thought and loved and suffered, and I have talked to other men. So if I tell you the theory now, you will know it is worked for – part of the heritage of all men in this zoo.’

‘This time it is truth, not false?’

‘You are the boss – you must decide that. There are certainly two distinct parts of the brain, the old limbic section and the neo-cortex surrounding it, the bit that turns a primate into a man. That much of my story was true. There’s also a yet older section, but we won’t complicate the picture. Roughly speaking, the limbic is the seat of the emotions, and the neo-cortex the seat of the intelligence. Okay. In a crisis, the new brain is still apt to cut out and the old brain take over.

‘And that in a nutshell is why mankind never made the grade. We are a failed species. We never got away from the old animal inheritance. We could never become the distinct species we should have been.’

‘Oh, darling, it’s not as bad as that –’

He squeezed Sheila’s hand. ‘You girls are always optimists.’ He winked the eye the Dominant could not see.

The Dominant said, ‘How does this apply to what happened on Nehru II?’

‘My story departed – not from the facts but from the correct explanation of the facts. The instinct to go there on Swettenham’s part was sound. He and Arlblaster and the rest believed that on a planet away from animals, mankind could achieve its true stature – homo superior, shall we say? What I called the N-factor let them down. The strain was too great, and they mainly reverted instead of evolving.’

‘But you believe a species can only escape its origins by removing itself entirely from the site of those origins.’

Sheila said, ‘That was the whole human impulse behind space travel – to get to worlds where it would be possible to become more human.’

The Dominant sprang from Anderson’s hands and circled under the low ceiling – an oddly uneasy gesture.

‘But the limbic brain – such a small part of the brain, so deep-buried!’

‘The seat of the instincts.’