The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

The other tugged the harder. Veins stood out on his forehead; one of his fellows had him by the trousers. It was only this that made him release Wyvern, and take a firmer grip on the passenger seat. Wyvern hauled himself back to the controls.

Their rate of fall was accelerating. The face of a building slid by, desperately close. These in-dome helicopters were light-weight jobs, designed only to carry a maximum of two people. The extra load would be almost buckling the vanes!

Ahead was another block. They slanted past it, and were making for a lower part of the city, drifting towards Mandalay Gate. As Wyvern calculated it, they would be down before they struck the side of the dome. At that, they would probably hit a building first. He flung open the other door, preparing to jump and run at the first opportunity, if his flagging strength would allow him to. Beneath him swung a pattern of upturned faces and pointing hands. Another ’copter soared up nearby; a telecamera projected from its cabin window.

So H and his secretary would probably already know where Wyvern was!

He edged closer to the opening.

‘Don’t be an idiot!’ the lean voice said inside his mind. ‘Your human limbs are fragile and you do not yet know how to grow more. Don’t jump! Let them catch you. They will think it in their own interest to keep you alive and restore you to health, for they do not realise I have already extracted from you all I wish. Sit tight.’

It was good advice. But Wyvern neither took it or disregarded it, for that moment they struck a street pylon. The ’copter wrapped itself lovingly round the pylon and slithered to the ground with a mighty rending of metal. Existence became an affair of stars.

Everything was going to be well.

With that conviction Wyvern woke. He’d been back in his dreams to Stratton, walking among the beech copses, riding Nicky over the sweet bracken, swimming in the infant Yare.

And somehow in the dream everything had sorted itself out so easily. He had been refuelled, and the big computer had scooped him back to earth and the régime had crumbled and then Eileen South had appeared and then … And then he woke up.

He was in a hospital bed again.

Plus ça change, he thought wearily. But at least he had been fed intravenously. His limbs had plumped out, the hollows had gone from his cheeks. And they had removed the terminals from his body. Wyvern felt his head; stubble ran crisply over it, and the wire cage had gone. He looked human again. He sat up, feeling wonderful.

So Bert had been right! They wanted him alive; they would think the computer still had everything to learn from him. If H’s secretary suspected the truth, it hardly seemed likely he would dare tell H that Wyvern had just disappeared before his eyes; for the new Leader, a materialist if ever Wyvern saw one, would dismiss the notion as fantastic. Which it was.

They would couple him back on to the machine – and he would vanish again. But this time for good.

‘Hey!’ he called. The sooner they fetched him the better. He could face them; he could face anything with Bert on his side.

It occurred to him then: if they intended to couple him up again, why had they removed the terminals from his body?

‘Bert!’ he cried inside his head. ‘Bert!’

The machine did not answer, only the silence of the skull where its answer should have been.

Two guards entered the room, the usual wall-faced-looking entities who clicked for these bully jobs.

‘Get up,’ one said in a wall-faced voice.

Wyvern did not like it. He hesitated, until an impatient movement from one of the guns decided him. He climbed out of bed.

‘Put that coat on and come this way,’ one of the guards said, indicating a greatcoat on a peg. ‘And don’t attempt to engage us in any kind of conversation.’

Wyvern wondered remotely what kind of conversation it would have been possible to engage them in, but it seemed a poor time for argument; meekly, he did as he was told. He was marched along a passage and up a flight of stairs, and locked into a featureless waiting room. Beyond the door he could hear voices and footsteps.

Uneasily he thought of all captives in man’s chequered history who from behind locked doors had listened to the unsettling clatter of boots and commands. It would have been better, he reflected, if the moon had never been attainable, than it should be a mere extension of Earth’s hard mazes.

He recalled a song and its casually grim words:

‘Life goes on; no one’s Irreplaceable.’

Again he called Big Bert, but it was still mysteriously silent.

The door was flung open, this time by two different guards. They bundled him out to a yard and into a waiting van, climbing up after him. The vehicle moved off with a lurch and began to travel at speed. At one point, Wyvern thought he heard a shot fired at it.

A quarter of an hour later he was again standing before Colonel H and his secretary.

Colonel H was hardly recognisable. His face was hushed and heavy and his head was carried with a peculiar alertness not noticeable previously; he looked, Wyvern thought for the first time, a man to be reckoned with. He slammed a suitcase shut and stood up, glowering at Wyvern.

‘Come through here,’ he commanded without any preliminaries, gesturing to an adjoining room.

Wyvern walked through. The secretary made to follow, but H thrust out his hand.

‘You can stay here and cope with the paper work,’ he said sarcastically. ‘I’ll deal with this hero.’

He closed the door, and Wyvern and he were alone. The room was bare but for a metal stool and a blank telescreen in the ceiling. It would be years, at the present rate of so-called progress, before the warrens constructed on the moon were properly furnished; by and large, they looked less inviting than the craters outside.

H also looked ugly. Wyvern began another mental call for Big Bert, but still there was no reply.

‘So you have me again,’ he observed.

‘I only want the answer to one question, and then I’m going to shoot you,’ H said.

‘That wouldn’t be very clever of you,’ Wyvern said. not without trepidation, ‘or have you run another telepath to earth?’

‘Not Parrodyce, if that’s who you’re thinking of – and he’s got nothing better than a dose of gamma coming to him when we catch up with him. What you reckon we want another telepath for, eh?’

‘To teach your computer to mind read, as you said,’ Wyvern replied.

‘You’ve already done that,’ the Colonel said.

How had he found out? Had they found out, perhaps, from Bert itself? H did not leave Wyvern long in doubt.

‘You fool,’ he said savagely, ‘didn’t you realise that when you were communicating with Big Bert anyone within fifty yards could pick it up? One of the officers who pulled your ’copter down got out of the crash as lightly as you – the other two broke their necks, by the way – and he told us everything that went over between you.’

It was convincing, crushing, final. The only excuse Wyvern had for not having realised it before was that the usual staggering thought emanations of ego-union had been absent during communication with Bert. Bert was not human: he had intellect but no ego. With him, it had been altogether a quiet, unsensational business. But Wyvern, of course, had opened his mind and had been sending at his usual strength. In the pressure of events, he had not realised it – and nor had Big Bert, which was significant; for it showed that the machine, being man-built, could on occasion act like a man and proceed without sifting all available data.

Even if he had realised that fact, he could have done no differently. It had been essential for Wyvern to communicate with Bert. The past was unalterable; and now the future seemed inevitable. For him, death only lay ahead; for mankind, whom Wyvern had imagined he could help, lay the long terror of spies loose in their very heads. And yet – and yet Big Bert had spoken only to Wyvern …

The hostile silence was broken by Colonel H.

‘So you see you are of no further use to us,’ he said, and slowly drew a revolver from his hip holster.

‘Then why did you go to all the trouble of reviving me and removing the wire network after my helicopter crashed?’

‘Because I want the answer to one question.’

‘And that?’