The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

farther on a fellow was being sick into a privet hedge. And there was a café with a sign saying ‘The Iceberg’. Deserted chairs and tables stood outside on an ill-lit veranda; Surrey climbed the two steps and sat wearily down. This was luxury.

      The light was poor. Surrey sat alone. Inside the café several people were eating, and a girl sang, accompanying herself on a stringed, lute-like instrument. He couldn’t understand the words, but it was simple and nostalgic, her voice conveying more than the music; he closed his eyes, letting the top spin within him, the top of his emotions. The girl stopped her singing suddenly, as if tired, and walked onto the veranda to stare into the night. Surrey opened his eyes and looked at her.

      ‘Come and talk to me,’ he called.

      She turned her head haughtily to the shadows where he sat, and then turned it back. Evidently, she had met with that sort of invitation before. Surrey clenched his fists in frustration; here he sat, isolated in space and time, needing comfort, needing … oh, nothing could heal him, but salves existed … The loneliness welled up inside, forcing him to speak again.

      ‘I’m from the ship,’ he said, unable to hold back a note of pleading.

      At that, she came over and took a seat facing him. She was Chinese, and wore the timeless slit dress of her race, big daisies chasing themselves over the gentle contours of her body.

      ‘Of course I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘But I can see in your eyes … that you are from the ship.’ She trembled slightly and asked: ‘May I get you a drink?’

      Surrey shook his head. ‘Just to have you sitting there …’

      He was feeling better. Irrationally, a voice inside said: ‘Well, you’ve been through a harsh experience, but now that you’re back again you can recover, can’t you, go back to what you were?’ The voice frequently asked that, but the answer was always No; the experience was still spreading inside, like cancer.

      ‘I heard your ship come in,’ the Chinese girl said. ‘I live just near here – Bukit Timah Road, if you know it, and I was at my window, talking with a friend.’

      He thought of the amazing sunshine and the eternal smell of cooking fats and the robshaws clacking by and this girl and her friend chattering in a little attic – and the orchestral crash as the ship arrived, making them forget their sentences; but all remote, centuries ago.

      ‘It’s a funny noise it makes,’ he said. ‘The sound of a time ship breaking out of the time barrier.’

      ‘It scares the chickens,’ she said.

      Silence. Surrey wanted to produce something else to say, to keep the girl sitting with him, but nothing would dissolve into words. He neglected the factor of her own human curiosity, which made her keen to stay; she inquired again if he would like a drink, and then said: ‘Would it be good for you if you told me something about it?’

      ‘I’d call that a leading question.’

      ‘It’s very – bad ahead, isn’t it? I mean, the papers say …’ She hesitated nervously.

      ‘What do they say?’ he asked.

      ‘Oh, you know, they say that it’s bad. But they don’t really explain; they don’t seem to understand.’

      ‘That’s the whole key to it,’ he told her. ‘We don’t seem to understand. If I talked to you all night, you still wouldn’t understand. I wouldn’t understand …’

      She was beautiful, sitting there with her little lute in her hand. And he had traveled far away beyond her lute and her beauty, far beyond nationality or even music; it had all gone into the dreary dust of the planet, all gone – final – nothing left – except degradation. And puzzlement.

      ‘I’ll try and tell you,’ he said. ‘What was that tune you were just singing? Chinese song?’

      ‘No, it was Malayan. It’s an old song, very old, called “Terang Boelan”. It’s about – oh, moonlight, you know, that kind of thing. It’s sentimental.’

      ‘I didn’t even know what language it was in, but perhaps in a way I understood it.’

      ‘You said you were going to tell me about the future,’ she told him gently.

      ‘Yes. Of course. It’s a sort of tremendous relief work we’re doing. You know what they call it: The Intertemporal Red Cross. It’s accurate, but when you’ve actually been … ahead, it seems a silly, flashy title. I don’t know, perhaps not. I’m not sure of anything any more.’

      He stared out at the darkness; it was going to rain. When he began to speak again, his voice was firmer.

      The IRC is really organized by the Paulls (he said to the Chinese girl). They call themselves the Paulls; we should call them the technological élite of the Three Thousand, One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Century. That’s a terribly long way ahead – we, with our twenty-four centuries since Christ, can hardly visualise it. Our ship stopped there, in their time. It was very austere: the Paulls are austere people. They live only on mountains overlooking the oceans, and have moved mountains to every coast for their own edification.

      The Paulls are unlike us, yet they are brothers compared with the men we are helping, the Failed Men.

      Time travel had been invented long before the age of the Paulls, but it is they who perfected it, they who accidentally discovered the plight of the Failed Men, and they who manage the terrific business of relief. For the world of the Paulls, rich as it is – will be – has insufficient resources to cope with the task without vitiating its strength. So it organised the fleet of time ships, the IRC, to collect supplies from different ages and bear them out ahead to the Failed Men.

      Five different ages are co-operating on the project, under the Paull leadership. There are the Middle People, as the Paulls call them. They are a race of philosophers, mainly pastoral, and we found them haughty; they live about twenty thousand centuries ahead of the Paulls. Oh, it’s a long time … And there are – but never mind that! They had little to do with us, or we with them.

      We – this present day, was the only age without time travel of the five. The Paulls chose us because we happen to have peace and plenty. And do you know what they call us? The Children. The Children! We, with all our weary sophistication … Perhaps they’re right; they have a method of Gestalt reasoning absolutely beyond our wildest pretensions.

      You know, I remember once on the voyage out ahead, I asked one of the Paulls why they had never visited our age before; and he said: ‘But we have. We broke at the nineteenth century and again at the twenty-sixth. That’s pretty close spacing! And that’s how we knew so much about you.’

      They have so much experience, you see. They can walk around for a day in one century and tell you what’ll be happening the next six or seven. It’s a difference of outlook, I suppose; something as simple as that.

      I suppose you’ll remember better than I when the Paulls first broke here, as you are actually on the spot. I was at home then, doing a peaceful job; it hadn’t been so peaceful I might not have volunteered for the IRC What a storm it caused! A good deal of panic in with the excitement. Yes, we proved ourselves children then, and in the adulation we paid the Paulls while they toured the world’s capitals. During the three months they waited here while we organised supplies and men, they must have been in a fury of impatience to be off; yet they revealed nothing, giving their unsensational lectures on the plight of the Failed Men and smiling for the three-dee cameras.

      All the while money poured in for the cause, and the piles of canned food and medical supplies filled the holds of the big ship. We were like kids throwing credits to street beggars; all sorts of stuff of no earthly use went into that ship. What would a Failed Man do with a launderer or a cycloview machine? At last we were off, with all the world’s bands playing like mad and the ship breaking with noise enough to drown all bands and startle your chickens – off for the time of the Failed Men!

      ‘I think I’d like that drink you