The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

I nodded. ‘Paul’s way of handling things is all wrong,’ I said. ‘It’s not only a question of whether neurotics are born not made – Stoneward produces crazy, mixed-up people efficiently enough, but they all have vacuums inside them by the time he’s through, they can’t create after he has been at them. The reason’s simply that he himself has a vacuum inside. Underneath, he knows it, too; of that I’m certain.’

‘Do we let him carry on?’

That’s the godawful curse with Normals; I know well enough how Paul Stoneward feels about them. Even a man like Beynon, lousy with authority, passes the buck whenever he can. Basic lack of imagination, I suppose.

‘I know I have the same stamp on my folder as he does,’ I said ‘and that should make me on his side. But Paul’s just out there doing mischief from which no good can come. Let me get on to Senator Willcroft at Peace Department.’

‘You can’t worry him!’ Beynon said in alarm.

‘Can’t I? Sit back and watch me, Beynon. Willcroft’s in charge of this project and I’m going to have it out with him straight. I want to save that girl if there’s still time.’

It was dark when Stoneward got Penelope to the lot. The afternoon’s infant breeze had become a wind with a will of its own. Alexander had trundled off, maybe to the nearest river. Callously Paul loaned the girl a torch, watching the erratic beam of it hunt for lawn and ramblers and verandah and brick with pink and pistachio trim. When she fell onto nyloned knees, head drooping, he went over, squatting on his haunches by her.

Penelope had found a dahlia. It must have been one of the bunch she was tending before Stoneward appeared; the disintegrators had missed it. She clutched it, her eyes bowl-full of tears. Almost it seemed as if the flower brought her understanding.

‘Whatever you are, you are wicked,’ she said unsteadily. ‘You have done all – all this. I don’t know why or how … You must be the devil.’

‘The devil was a bore without a sense of humour; I’m not flattered,’ Stoneward said.

She brought her hand, that pebble-smooth hand, up and smote him over his handsome mouth.

‘Why?’ she said, her voice rising unmanageably, ‘just tell me why, for pity’s sake, have you done this to us?’

‘I love you, so I will tell you,’ he said, calmed by the hurt of her hand. ‘I work for civilisation. I love civilisation more than any blank and pretty-faced mediocrity in the world. Unfortunately civilisation has got stuck right in a rut. When sociology really got itself established as a science at the end of last century, formulae were developed which enabled everyone to fit exactly into his or her social niche; maybe you’ve heard? And for anyone with any little residual twinges of emotion, a wide range of drugs was made tastily available. The end result was the complete – well, almost complete – banishment of mental upset from the world. Unprecedented calm and content settled like fog, and this is me lamenting it. Three boozy boos for the Age of Content.’

They squatted together facing each other, the fallen torch casting shadows upward over their figures. Penelope still clutched the dahlia but had forgotten it. In the blind-blowing dark, they had lost their identities. They might have been things on Easter Island.

‘Civilisation is dying day by day, because the people who made it and continued it have gone,’ Stoneward said, speaking naturally now he was saying something he believed. ‘Everything we value was produced by malcontents or psychotics – men who could not shape themselves to the world as it was, and tried to reshape it to fit them. Our first ancestor who came down out of a tree only did it because the trees weren’t good enough for him. The guy who invented the wheel was just too goddammed cussed to lend a hand with the sledge like the rest. The guy who first kindled fire only did it to prove to himself that he was a cut above the other jerks. So it’s been all along. Your inventor, your artist – he’s got something to work out. But now, now no-one has a thing to work out!’

‘Except you,’ Penelope said.

Stoneward rested his finger on her knees, playing a small, silent tune there.

‘I’m the one in a million who still has a chip on his shoulder; no society is absolutely perfect, thank God!’ he said. ‘Yes, Penny, Pennyworth, Penelope, my darling Pente Loop, I am the Joker in the pack. The few neurotics left in the country are now all Government employed, trying to cope with the dangers of stagnation. We act as random factors, jerking dull citizens here and there into awareness. You Normals live in life as if it were a house: it’s not, it’s a tiger ride. I’ve sold Congress my own way of waking people – at least for a trial period. It’s violent but it’s effective; I reckon you’ll admit that, Penelope. You’ll never be the same girl again, will you, eh?’

She did not answer, just looked at him as if he had melted.

‘Reckon old Cornbags Alexander has blo-o-own away to limbo,’ Stoneward sighed. ‘You’ll have to grow some real dreams now, little girl, now you see what a false dream security was …’

‘So you even have an intellectual front to cover all you’ve done,’ she exclaimed slowly. ‘You wanted to see into me, not realising how reciprocal the process was – and consequently I’ve seen into you. You’re – you’re just miserably unhappy, Paul. You boost yourself up as a joker, but you’re not. You’re not even the knave. You’re just the extra, faceless card that sometimes gets stuck into a new deck. You’re – even with Congress behind you! – you’re nothing, you can be nothing …’

He had put his sharp elbows on his thighs and rested his chin in his hands as if he was listening his ears off. Instead, he was crying his eyes out. The little crystals elongated and flashed down to the torchlight.

‘Paul,’ she said sharply.

Paul Stoneward could not cry at all elegantly. He needed practice, that guy.

‘I just … I can’t go any further,’ he said brokenly. ‘Penny, you got to help pick me up.’

It was about then I came round the corner of Fawdree’s Fadeless Fabrics with the gun in my hand, out of breath and angry, but so happy to have made Senator Willcroft see things my way. Strange to reflect how that first view of my future wife should be of her with her arms round the man I killed.

Even the hunters are hunted: in this or any other rotten age.

Neanderthal Planet (#u05be873d-20e3-5cbf-a745-617b6ac1fde3)

Hidden machines varied the five axioms of the Scanning Place. They ran through a series of arbitrary systems, consisting of Kolmogorovian finite sets, counterpointed harmonically by a one-to one assignment of non-negative real numbers, so that the parietal areas shifted constantly in strict relationship projected by the Master Boff deep under Manhattan.

Chief Scanner – he affected the name of Euler – patiently watched the modulations as he awaited a call. Self-consistency: that was the principle in action. It should govern all phases of life. It was the aesthetic principle of machines. Yet, not five kilometres away, the wild robots sported and rampaged in the bush.

Amber light burned on his beta panel.

Instantaneously, he modulated his call-number.

The incoming signal decoded itself as ‘We’ve spotted Anderson, Chief.’ The anonymous vane-bug reported coordinates and signed off.

It had taken them Boff knew how long – seven days – to locate Anderson after his escape. They had done the logical thing and searched far afield for him. But man was not logical; he had stayed almost within the shadow of the New York dome. Euler beamed an impulse into a Hive Mind channel, calling off the search.

He fired his jets and took off.

The axioms yawned out above him. He passed into the open, flying over the poly-polyhedrons of New Newyork. As the buildings went through their transparency phases, he saw them swarming with his own kind. He could open out channels to any one of them, if required; and, as chief, he could, if required, switch any one of them to automatic, to his own control, just as the Dominants could automate him if the need arose.

Euler ‘saw’ a sound-complex signal below him, and dived, deretracting a vane to land silently. He came down by a half-track that had transmitted the signal.

It gave its call-number and beamed, ‘Anderson is eight hundred metres ahead, Chief. If you join me, we will move forward.’

‘What support have we?’ A single dense impulse.

‘Three more like me, sir. Plus incapacitating gear.’

‘This man must not be destructed.’

‘We comprehend, Chief.’ Total exchange of signals occupied less than a microsecond.

He clamped himself magnetically to the half-track, and they rolled forward. The ground was broken and littered by piles of debris, on the soil of which coarse weeds grew. Beyond it all, the huge fossil of old New York, still under its force jelly, grey, unwithering because unliving. Only the bright multi-shapes of the new complex relieved a whole country full of desolation.

The half-track stopped, unable to go farther or it would betray their presence; Euler unclamped and phased himself into complete transparency. He extended four telescopic legs that lifted him several inches from the ground and began to move cautiously forward.

This region was designated D-Dump. The whole area was an artificial plateau, created by the debris of the old humanoid technology when it had finally been scrapped in favour of the more rational modern system. In the forty years since then, it had been covered by soil from the new development sites. Under the soil here, like a subconscious mind crammed with jewels and blood, lay the impedimenta of an all-but-vanished race.

Euler moved carefully forward over the broken ground, his legs adjusting to its irregularities. When he saw movement ahead, he stopped to observe.

Old human-type houses had grown up on the dump. Euler’s vision zoomed and he saw they were parodies of human habitation, mocked up from the discarded trove of the dump, with old auto panels for windows and dented computer panels for doors and toasters for doorsteps. Outside the houses, in a parody of a street, macabre humans played. Jerk stamp jerk clank jerk clang stamp stomp clang.

They executed slow rhythmic dances to an intricate pattern, heads nodding, clapping their own hands, turning to clap others’ hands. Some were grotesquely male, some grotesquely female. In the doorways, or sitting on old refrigerators, other grotesques looked on.

These were the humots – old-type human-designed robots of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, useless in an all-automaton world, scrapped when the old technology was scrapped. While their charges could be maintained, they functioned on, here in one last ghetto.

Unseen, Euler stalked through them, scanning for Anderson.