The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

Some distance away – he could not tell how far – the world began, an intensely bright world with a biting background of peaks and stars that might have been only at arm’s length. And in the foreground of this chunk of world, a line of figures were making towards a tracked bus; they bore a coffin with them; Fezzi Forta’s boys were on their way.

Pulling himself together, Parrodyce forced himself to march across the black void to the light. He got to the vehicle as the last of the Turks was boarding. They hauled him up without question.

Gloating to himself, Parrodyce began to plan his next move. He had forgotten Wyvern; he was thinking of the telepathic girl.

VIII

‘To say it in a way you would understand it,’ Bert the Brain explained, ‘I was so surprised I was speechless. I have not been out of order at all. I have been out of action, voluntarily. The amount of knowledge you gave me to digest was more than the total volume I have received since I was started – not, I mean, your conscious knowledge, which was comparatively negligible, but the inherited and latent knowledge in you.’

‘I did not realise,’ Wyvern said, ‘that in that brief contact you had with me on the operating table you had learnt all you could.’

‘You had expected the process to be what you call painful,’ the brain answered. ‘I suppose the operation was brief, as you tell time; but once I had grasped one strand of the pattern I could predict and interpret the whole design. It is intensely interesting.’

Conversing with Bert was unlike ego-union. That process was always, basically, a clash of opposing forces, or a locking together of magnetic North and South. Bert had no character; his voice was thin water in the brain. Nothing was there of good or evil, personal ambition, altruism; he was intellect without will, potentiality without promise. There was no threat in him. He was power, but Wyvern was in command. Yet Wyvern was not satisfied.

‘Now that you have the power of ego-union with others,’ he asked, ‘could you do a sort of hook-up with everyone?’

‘Yes – through you. Only if you were in ego-union with them.’

Wyvern knew the machine would be reading the satisfaction his answer brought, and at once it added, ‘After that, I would have their pattern and could communicate with them on my own.’

‘Which is how you communicate with me now, although we are not joined by power cables?’

‘Precisely. I am supplying the stimulus, you supply the power.’ It was a remark Wyvern would soon ruefully recall.

He drifted in a limbo. It was only a moment since he had dissolved before H’s secretary’s eyes, but his time values had altered, together with all his other senses. His vision, for instance, was diffused throughout his body; he was seeing through his cell structure, and on all sides stretched a wall of glass marbles – or so it appeared. Actually, Bert told him, he was viewing the carefully stacked elements of his own body. Using the latent knowledge in Wyvern’s own mind, Bert had unbonded his biochemical position; he was now escaping from the secretary in a wafer of matter a fraction of a millimetre thick – but the endless array of marbles seemed not to move.

‘You can resume normal structure now,’ the machine advised.

‘How?’

‘I will guide.’

‘Where?’

‘I cannot say what the place is.’

‘How can you see it?’

‘Through your senses.’

‘Yet I cannot see it.’

‘You will learn.’

And resuming normal structure was easy. Yet it was difficult. Snapping the fingers is easy; yet a one-year-old babe cannot manage it.

Wyvern was in a blank little office which looked disused. He was starving.

‘This is only about fifty yards from where I found you,’ the wire voice in his head announced.

‘I’m starving!’ Wyvern cried.

He staggered over to the swivel chair and collapsed into it. He still wore the clothes he had taken from the guard, William; he was still peppered with terminals, and the basket of wire still crowned his head. But his flesh seemed to have atrophied, his bones showed, the skin stretched tight over his temples. His stomach felt like a walnut. He was in the last stages of starvation.

Bert realised his plight immediately.

‘This is my fault,’ it exclaimed. ‘I had neglected a basic factor of human metabolism. You feed every five waking hours to maintain energy. That energy is easily consumed, and of course the sub-molecular transposition has entirely drained your energy supplies. I told you you were supplying the power. You must go in search of food at once.’

‘I worked that one out for myself,’ Wyvern said bitterly.

He staggered towards the doorway, wondering where he was, what aid he was likely to get. His hopes sank directly he looked outside: the corridor stretching either way was painted a drab grey and brown, the standard army colours. The opposite wall of the corridor was all glass, Wyvern looked out; he was on the top floor of a tall building. Overhead he could see the domes with their polar shields up.

‘Not hopeful,’ he messaged to the machine.

Without bothering to take any precautions, he walked down the corridor, past two closed doors, to a self-service lift. A notice on it read: UP – HELICOPTERS ONLY. OUT OF BOUNDS TO OTHER RANKS. Wyvern pushed his way in.

‘Going up,’ he said, and went up.

He emerged on top of the building in what at first was blinding light. When he got his bearings, he saw there were several army personnel about, officers in uniform, men in dungarees. Several helicopters were parked in a line, with one just landing.

Wyvern was beyond making any sort of pretence at concealment, nor was it easy to see what exactly he could have done to hide. He merely walked up to the nearest helicopter and flung open the cabin door. Someone called out to him at once.

‘The one this end if you don’t mind, sir.’

Nodding curtly in reply to the mechanic who had shouted, Wyvern walked as steadily as he could down the line of air vehicles. As he reached the one designated, the mechanic pulled open the door and said humbly, ‘May I just see your pass, sir, please.’

‘Do I look as if I was on pleasure?’ Wyvern asked, swinging himself up into the little cabin.

Indeed he looked a formidable sight. His gaunt form was clad still in the guard’s white overall, and his basket-work halo still loomed over his skull.

‘I must see your pass, sir; you know that,’ the mechanic persisted.

‘Oh, very well, man,’ Wyvern said. In one of the overall pockets there was a blank report card. He flicked it through the cabin door. As the mechanic swung to retrieve it, Wyvern switched on the engine and revved the rotors.

The mechanic was quick on the uptake. He wasted no time examining the card, but flung a spanner wildly at Wyvern; it missed, clanging harmlessly against the metal fuselage. At the same time he was yelling at a group of three officers who had been standing nearby, watching Wyvern curiously. They dashed at the machine.

It was beginning to lift when the first officer grabbed at the swinging door. Grimly, Wyvern applied full power. His altitude reached ten feet – and stayed there, the motors labouring angrily. The first officer was dragging himself up. The other officers were also hanging on. The mechanic ran just below the wheels, yelling blue murder and jumping to seize the axle.

‘For heaven’s sake, do something,’ Wyvern gasped to the brain.

‘I can’t. I’d kill you!’ Bert replied. ‘If I drained off any more of your resources, you’d go out like a light.’

Under the combined weight of the officers, the helicopter listed badly. If anything, it was losing height. They slid over to the edge of the building, a wounded bird swarming with rats. Carried away with excitement, the mechanic made one last jump for the axle, missed, and went plummetting into the depths below.

Wyvern’s leg was seized. He looked frantically round for a weapon with which to break the officer’s grasp, but there was nothing loose. Through the window he could see the faces of the two others, clinging and bellowing. He kicked furiously, but his strength was nothing; he began to slide diagonally across the floor of the helicopter.

‘Let go, you crazy fool!’ he shouted. ‘Let go or you’ll kill us all!’