The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

The Dead Immortal (#ulink_385c5eeb-b078-5569-bf2e-cd405aed7c27)

Mickie Houston was strikingly self-centred. But with his looks, his voice and his style – and his wife – he had gone far. And meant to go further.

Rickie Houston was strikingly beautiful. She looked even more lovely than usual as she said to her husband, ‘Don’t take the time-travel drug, darling. I have a terrible feeling it will kill you!’

Mickie Houston kissed her and said, ‘And I have a terrific feeling it may make me immortal!’

The exchange was overheard by a gossip columnist, and soon became famous. Not only was the controversy over the new time-travel drug raging (for this was in 1969), but Rickie and Mickie were the toasts of the switched-on pop world, the duo who finally knocked the groups from the charts.

The extra publicity encouraged Mickie to go ahead with his idea. He went to the famous London clinic where the drug was being administered to the few who were reckless or rich enough to pay for the injection.

The specialist shook his head and said gravely, ‘The effects of LSKK, the so-called time-travel drug, are very strange, Mr Houston. It’s not an experience to be undertaken lightly. We have a duty to warn any potential time-travellers that they take their life in their hands when they undergo the injection.’

‘Yeah, I heard all that jazz from my wife.’

‘Really? What your wife may not have told you is that the effects of the drug are subjective, just like the effects of LSD. With LSKK, you find yourself travelling through the sort of time in which you believe.

‘Thus, a Hindu who took LSKK would find himself travelling through vast cycles of time, since that concept accords with his religion. A holy man who believes only in God’s time would find he travelled straight into God’s presence. But for the average Englishman, like yourself, who believes time and progress go on straight ahead for ever, well, he will find himself doing just that.’

‘Ha, but I’m not the average Englishman! I don’t believe in time-travel at all. It’s just a lot of mystical nonsense and you’re cashing in on the fashion for it.’

The specialist put on a ghastly genial smile.

‘You’re just doing this for publicity, eh?’

‘All I believe in is the present. I live for the living moment, that’s me!’

That’s what Mickie said as the needle sank into his arm and 250ccs of LSKK coursed through his veins. Cameramen were there to record the moment, and Rickie kissed him. Truth to tell, he was a little tired of her, so that even the prospect of never seeing her again did not worry him. Strewn throughout time, he visualised an endless line of pretty girls.

Even as Rickie’s lips touched his, Mickie Houston disappeared.

Powered by LSKK, he drifted into the future, the staggering future where the centuries are thicker than the cells in the bloodstream. For most time-travellers, the effect of LSKK soon wore off and they settled to rest one by one in a remote time at a certain hour of a certain day, as even the leaf that blows furthest from an autumn tree will eventually come to rest somewhere.

But because Mickie believed only in the present moment, he drifted on for ever, imprisoned in his bubble of time like a bubble in a glacier.

Fixed in the gesture of kissing Rickie, he watched the millennia float by. He never wearied, since none of his personal time passed. But outside time passed; the world wearied. The great concourse of the human race began to thin.

Generation after generation had looked on with admiration and amusement as the handsome young man in old-fashioned clothes drifted through their lives, standing always on the same spot in the same romantic attitude. Indeed, Mickie had become something of a world-myth. A small green park was created round him in the midst of the fantastic city. The thousand thousand generations came to look at him here. But the mighty stream dwindled to a trickle eventually. Fixed in his bubble, Mickie saw the trees of the park grown shaggy and old and seamed. Eventually they fell one by one, and the great building behind them. The city was dying, and the human race with it. Few people came to see the world-myth now.

Another race of beings had inherited Earth, phantasmal beings like comets, blazing in solitary beauty like comets that had grown to prefer forests to the deserts of space. The sun that shone upon their millions of centuries of peace and fruitfulness shrank to the apparent size of a grape; it emitted an intense white light like a magnesium flare. So it seemed there was always moonlight on earth.

Still an occasional human came, fur-clad, to the place where Mickie stood imprisoned on the plain. Finally, two humans came together, very small and silent, to look at him for the best part of a magnesium-white day.

They asked each other, ‘He will be the last of our kind; but is he dead or is he immortal?’ So they echoed the once-famous exchange that Mickie and Rickie had had, so very long ago.

No one else ever came again. Even the comet-people faded eventually. Eventually, even the sun faded. Even the stars burned dim and faded. The universe had grown old. Time itself faded and … slowly … came to a stop …

There, poised on the brink of the last second of eternal time, Mickie stood transfixed in his bubble.

And with his lips still pursed in the moment of that long-gone kiss, he asked himself the final question, ‘Am I dead or am I immortal?’

Down the Up Escalation (#ulink_34e5bdfb-0f8a-5529-81a0-0cbf1ac0e540)

Being alone in the house, not feeling too well, I kept the television burning for company. The volume was low. Three men mouthed almost soundlessly about the Chinese rôle in the Vietnam war. Getting my head down, I turned to my aunt Laura’s manuscript.

She had a new hairstyle these days. She looked very good; she was seventy-three, my aunt, and you were not intended to take her for anything less; but you could mistake her for ageless. Now she had written her first book – ‘a sort of autobiography’, she told me when she handed the bundle over. Terrible apprehension gripped me. I had to rest my head in my hand. Another heart attack coming.

On the screen, figures scrambling over mountain. All unclear. Either my eyesight going or a captured Chinese newsreel. Strings of animals – you couldn’t see what, film slightly overexposed. Could be reindeer crossing snow, donkeys crossing sand. I could hear them now, knocking, knocking, very cold.

A helicopter crashing towards the ground? Manuscript coming very close, my legs, my lips, the noise I was making.

There was a ship embedded in the ice. You’d hardly know there was a river. Snow had piled up over the piled-up ice.

Surrounding land was flat. There was music, distorted stuff from a radio, accordions, and balalaikas. The music came from a wooden house. From its misty windows, they saw the ship, sunk in the rotted light. A thing moved along the road, clearing away the day’s load of ice, ugly in form and movement. Four people sat in the room with the unpleasant music; two of them were girls in their late teens, flat faces with sharp eyes; they were studying at the university. Their parents ate a salad, two forks, one plate. Both man and woman had been imprisoned in a nearby concentration camp in Stalin’s time. The camp had gone now. Built elsewhere, for other reasons.

The ship was free of ice, sailing along in a sea of mist. It was no longer a pleasure ship but a research ship. Men were singing. They sang that they sailed on a lake as big as Australia.

‘They aren’t men. They are horses!’ My aunt.

‘There are horses aboard.’

‘I certainly don’t see any men.’

‘Funny-looking horses.’

‘Did you see a wolf then?’

‘I mean, more like ponies. Shaggy. Small and shaggy. Is that gun loaded?’

‘Naturally. They’re forest ponies – I mean to say, not ponies but reindeer. “The curse of the devil”, they call them.’

‘It’s the bloody rotten light! They do look like reindeer. But they must be men.’

‘Ever looked one in the eye? They are the most frightening animals.’

My father was talking to me again, speaking over the phone. It had been so long. I had forgotten how I loved him, how I missed him. All I remembered was that I had gone with my two brothers to his funeral; but that must have been someone else’s funeral, someone else’s father. So many people, good people, were dying.

I poured my smiles down the telephone, heart full of delight, easy. He was embarking on one of his marvellous stories. I gulped down his sentences.

‘That burial business was all a joke – a swindle. I collected two thousand pounds for that, you know, Bruce. No, I’m lying! Two and a half. It was chicken feed, of course, compared with some of the swindles I’ve been in. Did I ever tell you how Ginger Robbins and I got demobbed in Singapore at the end of the war, 1945? We bought a defunct trawler off a couple of Chinese business men – very nice old fatties called Pee – marvellous name! Ginger and I had both kept our uniforms, and we marched into a transit camp and got a detail of men organised – young rookies, all saluting us like mad – you’d have laughed! We got them to load a big LCT engine into a five-tonner, and we all drove out of camp without a question being asked, and – wham! – straight down to the docks and our old tub. It was boiling bloody hot, and you should have seen those squaddies sweat as they unloaded the engine and man-handled –’

‘Shit, Dad, this is all very funny and all that,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got some work to do, you know. Don’t think I’m not enjoying a great reminiscence, but I have to damned work, see? Okay?’

I rang off.

I put my head between my hands and – no, I could not manage weeping. I just put my head between my hands and wondered why I did what I did. Subconscious working, of course. I tried to plan out a science fiction story about a race of men who had only subconsciousnesses. Their consciousnesses had been painlessly removed by surgery.

They moved faster without their burdening consciousnesses, wearing lunatic smiles or lunatic frowns. Directly after the operation, scars still moist, they had restarted World War II, some assuming the roles of Nazis or Japanese or Jugoslav partisans or British fighter pilots in kinky boots. Many even chose to be Italians, the role of Mussolini being so keenly desired that at one time there were a dozen Duces striding about, keeping company with the droves of Hitlers.