The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

Rick gasped proudly, passing a hand over his brow. ‘It always makes me jump.’

      ‘It makes me jump too,’ said Neata flatly, leading a night-dressed Goya into the room.

      This device whereby consumers could be individually named was the latest, and possibly cleverest, accomplishment of telly. The announcer had actually named no names; instead, at the correct moment, a signal transmitted from the studio activated a circuit at the receiving end which, in every individual home, promptly bellowed out the surname of the head consumer of the family.

      Neata pressed the Relaxtable, and a section of it sprang into a bed. Goya was put in, and given her cup of steaming, happy-dreaming Howlett’s. She had hardly drunk the last mouthful before she sank down on the pillow, yawning.

      ‘Sleep well!’ Neata said gently, pressing the child’s earplugs into place. She felt tired herself, she hardly knew why. It would be a relief when her turn came for Howlett’s and Payne’s Painless Plugs.

      There was no switching the screens off and now that telly provided a twenty-four hour service, the aids to sleep were a necessity.

      ‘This is Green Star, B channel,’ announced the screens. ‘The Dewlap Chair Hour!!!’

      ‘Must we watch this?’ Neata asked, as three dancing, screaming nudes burst into view, legs waving, bosoms bouncing.

      ‘We could try Green Star A.’

      Green Star A had a play, which had already begun. They tried Green Star C, but that had a travel programme on, and Rick was bored by other countries – and a little afraid of them. They turned back to the Dewlap Hour, and gradually relaxed into semi-mindlessness.

      There were three other coloured star systems, each with three channels, at their disposal, theoretically at least. But Green Star was the official consumer system for their consumer-class; obviously it would be wasteful for the Sheridans to watch White Star, which advertised commodities they could not afford, such as shower-purges, stratostruts, tellysolids and bingoproofs.

      If they did watch White Star, there was, unfortunately, no guarantee that telly was not watching them. For since the installation of ‘wave-bounce’, some ten years ago, every wall screen was a reciprocal – which meant, in plain language, that every viewer could be viewed from telly. This innovation was the source of some of the very best programmes, for viewers could sit and watch themselves viewing telly.

      Dewlap was showing one of the numerous and ever-popular panel games. Three blindfold men and a blindfold woman were being passed patent custards, cake-mixes and detergents; they had to distinguish between the different commodities by taste alone. A compere in shirt sleeves awarded blows over the head for incorrect guesses.

      Just tonight – perhaps because it was Christmas – the sight of Gilbert Lardner having his head tapped failed to enthral Rick. He began to walk about the Gazing room, quite an easy matter since, except for the Relaxtable in which Goya lay drugged, there was a complete absence of furniture.

      Catching Neata’s curious gaze upon him, Rick moved out into the garden. It was not fair to distract her from her viewing.

      The snow still fell, still by courtesy of Home-Count Climatic. He did not feel the cool night air, snug in his Moxon’s Mockwool. Absently, he ran his hand over the helic, its blunt vanes, its atomic motor, its telly suppressor, its wheels. All maintenance, of course, was done by the helic drome: there was nothing he could fiddle with. Indeed, there was nothing he could do at all.

      Like a sensible fellow, like all his sensible neighbours – whom he had hardly so much as seen – he went back indoors and sat before the screens.

      Five minutes later came the unprecedented knock at the door.

      The shortage of arable land in England, acute in the twentieth century, became critical in the twenty-first. Mankind’s way of reproducing himself being what it is, the more houses that were erected on the dwindling acres, the more houses were needed. These two problems, which were really but facets of one problem, were solved dramatically and unexpectedly. After telly’s twenty-four-hour services were introduced, it was realised by those who had the interests of the nation at heart (a phrase denoting those who were paid from public taxes) that nine-tenths of the people needed neither windows nor friends: telly was all in all to them.

      A house without windows can be built in any surroundings. It can be built in rows of hundreds or blocks of thousands. Nor need roads be a hindrance to this agglomeration: an airborne population needs no roads.

      A house without friends is freed from ostentation. There is no longer any urge to keep up with the Joneses, or whoever may come in. One needs, in fact, only two rooms: a room in which to watch the screens, and a room in which to store the Meat Bars and other items which the screens hypnotize one into buying.

      So telly changed the face of England almost overnight. The Sheridan house, like a great many others, was in the midst of a nest of houses stretching for a mile or more in all directions; it could be reached only by something small enough to alight in the garden.

      So for many reasons the knock on the door was very much a surprise.

      ‘Whoever can it be?’ asked Rick uneasily.

      ‘I don’t know,’ Neata said. She too had heard rumours of a subversive movement; a momentary – and not unpleasing – vision attended her of two masked men coming in and smashing the wall screens. But of course masked men would not bother to knock.

      ‘Perhaps it’s somebody from Grinbaum’s Meat Bars,’ suggested Rick, ‘I forgot to buy any today.’

      ‘Don’t be so silly, Rick,’ his wife said impatiently. ‘You know their factory must be purely automatic. Go and see who it is.’

      That was something he had not thought of. You had to hand it to women … He got up and went reluctantly to open the door, smoothing his hair and his tie on the way.

      A solid-looking individual stood in the drifting snow. His helic was parked against Rick’s. He wore some sort of a cloak over his Mock-wool: obviously, he was of a higher consumer-class than the Sheridans.

      ‘Er …’ said Rick.

      ‘May I come in?’ asked the stranger in the sort of voice always hailed on the screens as resonant. ‘I’m an escaped criminal.’

      ‘Er …’

      ‘I’m not dangerous. Don’t be alarmed.’

      ‘The little girl’s in bed,’ Rick said, clutching at the first excuse which entered his head.

      ‘Have no fear,’ said the stranger, still resonantly, ‘kidnapping is not one of the numerous offences on my crime sheet.’

      He swept magnificently past Rick, through the dark Disposing room and into the Gazer. Neata jumped up as he entered. He bowed low and pulled the cloak from his shoulders with an eloquent gesture which scattered snow over the room.

      ‘Madam, forgive my intrusion,’ he said, the organ note more noticeable than ever. ‘I throw myself upon your mercy.’

      ‘Ooh, you talk like someone on a panel game,’ Neata gasped.

      ‘I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart,’ said the stranger, and announced himself as Black Jack Gabriel.

      Rick hardly heard. He was taking in the thick-set figure in its smart attire, and the curiously impressive streak of white hair on the leonine head (the fellow must be thirty if he was a day). He also took in the meaningful way Neata and Black Jack were looking at each other.

      ‘I’m Neata Sheridan, and this is my husband, Rick,’ Neata was saying.

      ‘A delightful name,’ said Black Jack, bowing at Rick and grinning ingratiatingly.

      ‘It’s only short for Rickmansworth,’ said Neata, a little acidly.

      Black Jack, standing facing but entirely ignoring the screens, began to speak. He was a born elocutionist,