The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘And now we give you a personal message from Colonel H,’ the unseen commentator said. ‘Friends, Colonel H! – Head of the New Police, Chief Nursemaid of State, Our Late Beloved Leader’s Closest Friend!’

Colonel H lowered into the cameras. Aping the old Prussian style, his hair was clipped to a short stubble, so that it looked now as if it stood on end with his fury. His features were small, almost pinched, their niggardliness emphasised by two heavy bars of dark eyebrow and a protruding jaw. He was less popular generally than Jim Bull but more feared.

‘Republicans!’ he began, as one who should say ‘curs’, ‘Our Beloved Leader has been killed – raped of his life by bloody brutes. We have all lost a friend! We have all lost our best friend! By allowing him to die we have betrayed him and his high ideals. We must suffer! We must scourge ourselves! We shall suffer – and we shall be scourged! We have been too easy, and the time for easiness is not yet, not while there are still maniacs among us.

‘I shall take over temporary leadership until a new Beloved Leader is elected by republican methods. I mean to make tight the chinks in our security curtain. The way will be hard, republicans, but I know you will suffer gladly for the sake of truth.

‘Meanwhile, it makes me happy to announce that the two murderers of Our Late Beloved Leader have just been apprehended by our splendid New Police. Here they are for you all to view – and loathe. Their punishment will be announced later.’

The scowling visage faded.

On the screen, a bullet-riddled sports car lay overturned near a roadside garage. A motley crowd of soldiers and civilians jostled round it. An officer stood on top of a tank, bellowing his lungs out through a megaphone. Nobody paid him any attention. It was pouring with grey rain.

The camera panned between the crowd. Two terrified men stood against the overturned car. One, the driver, silently hugged a shattered arm; the other, a small fellow in a blue mac, stood to attention and wept.

‘These are the blood-crazed, reactionary killers!’ screamed the commentator.

‘Crikey!’ Plunkett exclaimed, ‘they don’t look capable of passing dud cheques!’

‘Stand by for shots from the British Republics Sector of the Moon!’ the commentator said.

The familiar domes like great cloches faded in. Utilitarian architecture, ventilation towers, mobs of people surging back and forth, waving sticks, shaking fists.

‘These true republicans demonstrate their loyalty to the new Leader, Colonel H,’ cried the commentator. ‘They savagely mourn the grave loss of Our Late Beloved Leader!’

‘They don’t, you know,’ a youngster of Wyvern’s party exclaimed. ‘I reckon they are rioting!’

It certainly looked as if that was the case. The colony had scant respect for any Earth authority, but Jim Bull had been an old spacer, and as such his word had always carried some weight. The sound track was cut in, and the viewers heard an ugly roaring. And then, for Wyvern, the miracle happened. The camera swooped into close-up, facing a swirling knot of people. In the background, a girl passed, taking no notice of the agitators.

And her thoughts came over clearly to Wyvern!

She was a telepath! He glanced quickly at the other twelve viewers, but they obviously noticed nothing. Somehow, over the ether, her thoughts had been filtered out for all but another telepath: and her thoughts were in turmoil.

Wyvern watched her almost incredulously, his eyes strained to the reproduction of her figure. And she was thinking, in profound anxiety, ‘Got to follow him. 108, JJ Lane: that’s his destination. Heavens, I’m sending – must stop!’

That was all; but with the thought ‘I’ came, vaguely, her name: Eileen something – Eileen South, it had seemed to Wyvern.

She ceased sending. In a moment, she disappeared behind a pillar. The camera lost her. Wyvern forced himself to begin breathing again.

Who the ‘him’ was Eileen South had to follow, he could not grasp; but floating behind the pronoun had been another phrase in her mind; ‘the impossible smile’.

Of one thing he was sure. He had to get to Luna – he had to find Eileen South; she was his kind.

II

Around the factories and the quaint housing estates – dating back to the fifties of the previous century and already in decay – which fringed the capital of the Republic, a clutter of prefabricated buildings had gathered like rubbish along the high tide mark of a beach. Refugees and traders from London and the shattered Midlands accumulated here in all the disorder of an oriental bazaar.

It was to this region that Wyvern drove in his shooting brake the next morning. He had a small collections of canvases under his arm – a Dufy, two Paul Nashes and a Sutherland, the last of his father’s fine collection. Wyvern knew of no other way to raise the required money for a lunar ticket quickly. In this quarter, they bought anything – at their own price.

After half an hour, Wyvern emerged with five thousand, five hundred pounds in greasy tenners; it was about a half of what the Dufy alone was worth. But it bought a ticket on the moonship Aqualung, leaving at midday the next day.

That gave him twenty-four-hours to wait. He just hoped he would still be at liberty when the time came. But the officials at Thorpe spaceport had seemed casual enough: his passport had been checked, his papers examined, and not a word said. He drove home in a state of modest triumph.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, soon after he had got back to Stratton, he was arrested by the New Police.

At four-thirty, after a bumpy lorry-ride which he spent handcuffed to the frame of the lorry, he found himself back in Norwich again.

The New Police had taken over a big department store on one corner of the market square; it swarmed with activity. Still handcuffed, Wyvern was taken through a side door up to the second floor and left with a Captain Runton, who nodded to him in abstracted fashion and continued to direct some builders working there.

This floor was still being converted to police use. Once, it had been a spacious restaurant; now, flimsy partitions were transforming it into a nest of tiny offices.

‘Let’s see, what are you here for?’ the Captain asked Wyvern mildly.

‘It’s no good asking me: I don’t know,’ Wyvern said, truthfully.

‘You don’t what?’

‘Know, I don’t know,’ Wyvern said.

‘Sorry, there’s so much banging here! You have to watch these fellows or they down tools. I think they suspect they are not going to get paid for this job.’

A swinging plank narrowly missed his ear. He ducked under a partition frame.

‘Now,’ he shouted, above a fresh outburst of hammering. ‘We’ve found in practice that the quickest thing for everyone is for you to confess at once, without mucking about.’

‘Confess what?’

‘The crime.’

‘What crime?’

‘What what? Oh, what crime? Why man, the crime for which you were brought here.’

‘You’ll have to tell me what it is first,’ Wyvern said grimly.

‘Oh hell, I suppose I’ll have to take you down and look at your bloody papers,’ Captain Runton said sourly. ‘It won’t pay you to be unco-operative, you know.’

He bellowed to the workmen to keep hard at it and led the way to a lift. They descended to the basement and Runton pushed Wyvern into his room; cocking his leg up on the edge of a desk, Runton read carefully through the ill-typed report someone had left on his pad.

Wyvern looked round. Tarnished mirrors greeted him, and glass-fronted cupboards with cracked glass, containing cardboard boxes and big rubber bouncing balls for children. He saw little wooden spades, yachting caps, a dusty poster saying ‘The Glorious Norfolk Broads’. Nothing very frightening: he wondered why he felt frightened.

The captain of police was looking at him.

‘So you’re Conrad Wyvern, one of the inventors of cruxtistics?’ he said.

‘Is that why I’ve been arrested?’

Runton went and sat heavily down in the room’s only chair. His behind was running to fat and his hair thinning. It was a wonder how he did it on the lean rations. No doubt he had lost his family and spent long evenings feeling sorry for himself, drinking. He looked the typical man of his age: comfortless, unlovable.