The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

wakefulness. They never exerted themselves during the day, but somehow when they climbed back into their beds they slept soundly enough.

      The only excitement of the day occurred when they first opened the store. The store was a small room between the kitchen and the blue room. In the far wall was set a wide shelf, and upon this shelf their existence depended. Here, all their supplies ‘arrived’. They would lock the door of the bare room last thing, and when they returned in the morning their needs – food, linen, a new washing machine – would be awaiting them on the shelf. That was just an accepted feature of their existence; they never questioned it among themselves.

      On this morning, Dapple and May were ready with the meal before the four men came down. Dapple even had to go to the foot of the wide stairs and call before Pief appeared, so that the opening of the store had to be postponed till after they had eaten; for although the opening had in no way become a ceremony, the women were nervous about going in alone. It was one of those things …

      ‘I hope to get some tobacco,’ Harley said as he unlocked the door. ‘I’m nearly out of it.’

      They walked in and looked at the shelf. It was all but empty.

      ‘No food,’ observed May, hands on her aproned waist. ‘We shall be on short rations today.’

      It was not the first time this had happened. Once – how long ago now? – they kept little track of time – no food had appeared for three days and the shelf had remained empty. They had accepted the shortage placidly.

      ‘We shall eat you before we starve, May,’ Pief said, and they laughed briefly to acknowledge the joke, although Pief had cracked it last time too. Pief was an unobtrusive little man, not the sort one would notice in a crowd. His small jokes were his most precious possession.

      Two packets only lay on the ledge. One was Harley’s tobacco, one was a pack of cards. Harley pocketed the one with a grunt and displayed the other, slipping the pack from its wrapping and fanning it towards the others.

      ‘Anyone play?’ he asked.

      ‘Poker,’ Jagger said.

      ‘Canasta.’

      ‘Gin rummy.’

      ‘We’ll play later,’ Calvin said. ‘It’ll pass the time in the evening.’ The cards would be a challenge to them; they would have to sit together to play, around a table, facing each other.

      Nothing was in operation to separate them, but there seemed no strong force to keep them together, once the tiny business of opening the store was over. Jagger worked the vacuum cleaner down the hall, past the front door that did not open, and rode it up the stairs to clean the upper landings; not that the place was dirty, but cleaning was something you did anyway in the morning. The women sat with Pief, desultorily discussing how to manage the rationing, but after that they lost contact with each other and drifted away on their own. Calvin and Harley had already strolled off in different directions.

      The house was a rambling affair. It had few windows, and such as there were did not open, were unbreakable, and admitted no light. Darkness lay everywhere; illumination from an invisible source followed one’s entry into a room – the black had to be entered before it faded. Every room was furnished, but with odd pieces that bore little relation to each other, as if there was no purpose for the room. Rooms equipped for purposeless beings have that air about them.

      No plan was discernible on first or second floor or in the long, empty attics. Only familiarity could reduce the mazelike quality of room and corridor. At least there was ample time for familiarity.

      Harley spent a long while walking about, hands in pockets. At one point he met Dapple; she was drooping gracefully over a sketchbook, amateurishly copying a picture that hung on one of the walls – a picture of the room in which she sat. They exchanged a few words, then Harley moved on.

      Something lurked in the edge of his mind like a spider in the corner of its web. He stepped into what they called the piano room, and then he realised what was worrying him. Almost furtively, he glanced around as the darkness slipped away, and then looked at the big piano. Some strange things had arrived on the shelf from time to time and had been distributed over the house; one of them stood on top of the piano now.

      It was a model, heavy and about two feet high, squat, almost round, with a sharp nose and four buttressed vanes. Harley knew what it was. It was a ground-to-space ship, a model of the burly ferries that lumbered up to the spaceships proper.

      That had caused them more unsettlement than when the piano itself had appeared in the store. Keeping his eyes on the model, Harley seated himself on the piano stool and sat tensely, trying to draw something from the rear of his mind … something connected with spaceships.

      Whatever it was, it was unpleasant, and it dodged backwards whenever he thought he had laid a mental finger on it. So it always eluded him. If only he could discuss it with someone, it might be teased out of its hiding place. Unpleasant; menacing, yet with a promise entangled in the menace.

      If he could get at it, meet it boldly face to face, he could do … something definite. And until he had faced it, he could not even say what the something definite was he wanted to do.

      A footfall behind him. Without turning, Harley deftly pushed up the piano lid and ran a finger along the keys. Only then did he look back carelessly over his shoulder. Calvin stood there, hands in pockets, looking solid and comfortable.

      ‘Saw the light in here,’ he said easily. ‘I thought I’d drop in as I was passing.’

      ‘I was thinking I would play the piano awhile,’ Harley answered with a smile. The thing was not discussable, even with a near acquaintance like Calvin because … because of the nature of the thing … because one had to behave like a normal, unworried human being. That, at least, was sound and clear and gave him comfort: behave like a normal human being.

      Reassured, he pulled a gentle tumble of music from the keyboard. He played well. They all played well. Dapple, May, Pief … as soon as they had assembled the piano, they had all played well. Was that – natural? Harley shot a glance at Calvin. The stocky man leaned against the instrument, back to that disconcerting model, not a care in the world. Nothing showed on his face but an expression of bland amiability. They were all amiable, never quarrelling together.

      The six of them gathered for a scanty lunch, their talk was trite and cheerful, and then the afternoon followed on the same pattern as the morning, as all the other mornings: secure, comfortable, aimless. Only to Harley did the pattern seem slightly out of focus; he now had a clue to the problem. It was small enough, but in the dead calm of their days it was large enough.

      May had dropped the clue. When she helped herself to jelly, Jagger laughingly accused her of taking more than her fair share. Dapple, who always defended May, said: ‘She’s taken less than you, Jagger.’

      ‘No,’ May corrected, ‘I think I have more than anyone else. I took it for an interior motive.’

      It was the kind of pun anyone made at times. But Harley carried it away to consider. He paced around one of the silent rooms. Interior, ulterior motives … Did the others here feel the disquiet he felt? Had they a reason for concealing that disquiet? And another question:

      Where was ‘here’?

      He shut that one down sharply.

      Deal with one thing at a time. Grope your way gently to the abyss. Categorise your knowledge.

      One: Earth was getting slightly the worst of a cold war with Nitity.

      Two: the Nititians possessed the alarming ability of being able to assume the identical appearance of their enemies.

      Three: by this means they could permeate human society.

      Four: Earth was unable to view the Nititian civilisation from inside.

      Inside … a wave of claustrophobia swept over Harley as he realised that these cardinal facts he knew bore no relation to this little world inside. They came, by what means