The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘It is, sir. I recognised him.’

Rainy pushed past them, striding toward the open cottage door.

‘Funnily enough I had another man yesterday persuade me to take him on,’ he said, quite unconscious of his brother’s dazed look. ‘Man name of Jagger Bank. He’s down in the orchard now, feeding the pigs. … Lot of people just lately leaving town. See them walking down the road – year ago, never saw a human soul on foot. … Well, it’ll be all the same a century from now. Come on in, Jan, if you want.’

It was his longest speech. He sat down on a sound homemade chair and fell silent, emptied of news. The harness he placed carefully on the table before him. His brother came into the dim room, noted that its confusion had increased since his last visit, flicked a dirty shirt off a chair, and also sat down. Hippo entered the room and stood by the door, his neat functional lines and the chaste ornamentation on his breastplates contrasting with the disorder about him.

‘Was your Pursewarden an engineer, Rainy?’

‘Don’t know. Didn’t think to ask. We talked mostly about wood, the little we said.’

A silence fell, filled with Birdlip’s customary uneasy mixture of love, sorrow, and murderous irritation at the complacence of his brother.

‘Any news?’ he asked sharply.

‘Looks like being a better harvest for once.’

He never asked for Jan’s news.

Looking about Birdlip saw Rainy’s old run of the Prescience Library half buried under clothes and apple boxes and disinfectant bottles.

‘Do you ever look at your library for relaxation?’ he asked, nodding toward the books.

‘Haven’t bothered for a long time.’

Silence. Desperately, Birdlip said, ‘You know my partner Freud still carries the series on. Its reputation has never stood higher. We’ll soon be bringing out volume Number Five Hundred, and we’re looking for some special title to mark the event. Of course we’ve already been through all the Wells, Stapledon, Clarke, Asimov, all the plums. You haven’t any suggestions, I suppose?’

‘Non-Stop?’ said Rainy at random.

‘That was Number Ninety-Nine. You chose it yourself.’ Exasperatedly he stood up. ‘Rainy, you’re no better. That proves it. You are completely indifferent to all the important things of life. You won’t see an analyst. You’ve turned into a vegetable, and I begin to believe you’ll never come back to normal life.’

Rainy smiled, one hand running along the harness on the table before him.

‘This is normal life, Jan, life close to the soil, the smell of earth, sun, or rain coming through your window –’

‘The smell of your sweaty shirts on the dining table! The stink of pigs!’

‘Free from the contamination of the centuries –’

‘Back to mediaeval squalor!’

‘Living in contact with eternal things, absolved from an overdependence on mechanical devices, eating the food that springs out of the soil –’

‘I can consume nothing that has been in contact with mud.’

‘Above all, not fretting about what other people do or don’t do, freed from all the artifices of the arts –’

‘Stop, Rainy! Enough. You’ve made your point. I’ve heard your catechism before, your hymn to the simple life. Although it pains me to say it, I find the simple life a bore, a brutish bore. What’s more, I doubt if I shall be able to face another visit to you in the future.’

Entirely unperturbed, Rainy smiled and said, ‘Perhaps one day you’ll walk in here like Pursewarden and Jagger Bank and ask for a job. Then we’ll be able to enjoy living without argument.’

‘Who’s Jagger Bank?’ Birdlip asked, curiosity causing him to swerve temporarily from his indignation.

‘I’ve already told you who he is. He’s another fellow who just joined me. Rolled up yesterday. Right now he’s down in the orchard feeding the pigs. Job like that would do you good too, Jan.’

‘Hippo!’ said Birdlip. ‘Start the car at once.’ He stepped over a crate of insecticide and made for the door.

The maid for the door of the main entrance to Birdlip Brothers was a slender and predominantly plastic roman called Belitre, who intoned, ‘Good morning, Mr Birdlip’ in a dulcet voice as he swept by next morning.

Birdlip hardly noticed her. All the previous afternoon, following his visit to Rainbow, he had sat at home with Mrs Birdlip nestling by his side and read the manuscript entitled An Explanation of Man’s Superfluous Activities. As an intellectual, he found much of its argument abstruse; as a man, he found its conclusions appalling; as a publisher, he felt sure he had a winner on his hands. His left elbow tingled, his indication always that he was on the verge of literary discovery.

Consequently, he charged through his main doors with enthusiasm, humming under his breath, ‘Who said I can hardly remember …’ A blast of hot air greeted him and stopped him in his tracks.

‘Pontius!’ he roared, so fiercely that Belitre rattled.

Pontius was the janitor, an elderly and rather smelly roman of the now obsolete petrol-fuelled type, a Ford ‘Indefatigable’ of 2140 vintage. He came wheezing up on his tracks in response to Birdlip’s cry.

‘Sir,’ he said.

‘Pontius, are you or are you not in charge down here? Why has the heating not been repaired yet?’

‘Some putput people are working on it now, sir,’ said Pontius, stammering slightly through his worn speech circuits. ‘They’re down in the basements at putput present, sir.’

‘Drat their eyes,’ said Birdlip irritably, and, ‘Get some water in your radiator, Pontius – I won’t have you steaming in the building,’ said Birdlip pettishly, as he made off in the direction of a basement.

Abasement or superiority alike were practically unknown between roman and roman. They were, after all, all equal in the sight of man.

So ‘Good morning, Belitre,’ and ‘Good morning, Hippocrates,’ said Hippo and Belitre respectively as the former came up the main steps of Birdlip’s a few minutes after his master.

‘Do you think he has read it yet?’ asked Hippo.

‘He had it under his arm as he entered.’

‘Do you think it has had any effect on him yet?’

‘I detected that his respiratory rate was faster than normal.’

‘Strange, this breathing system of theirs,’ said Hippo in a reverent irrelevance, and he passed into the overheated building unsmilingly.

Frowningly, Birdlip surveyed the scene down in his control room. His brother would never have tolerated such chaos in the days before he had his breakdown, or whatever it was.

Three of his staff romen were at work with a strange roman, who presumably came from the engineer’s; they had dismantled one panel of the boiler control system, although Birdlip could hear that the robot fireman was still operating by the cluck of the oil feeds. A ferrety young man with dyed blue side-whiskers, the current teenage cult, was directing the romen between mouthfuls bitten from an overgrown plankton pie; he – alas! – he would be the human engineer.

Cogswell, still deactivated, still in one corner, stood frozen in an idiot roman gesture. No, thought Birdlip confusedly, since the heat had deactivated him, he could hardly be described as being frozen into any gesture. Anyhow, there the creature was, with Gavotte and his assistant Fleetfeet at work on him.

Fury at seeing the choreus Gavotte still on the premises drove Birdlip to tackle him first. Laying down his manuscript, he advanced and said, ‘I thought you’d have been finished by now, Gavotte.’

Gavotte gave a friendly little rictal jerk of his mouth and said, ‘Nice to see you, Mr Birdlip. Sorry to be so long about it, but you see I was expecting a ha ha human assistant as well as Fleetfeet. We have such a lot of trouble with men going absent these days. It wouldn’t do any harm to revive the police forces that they used to have in the Olden Days; they used to track missing people –’