The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

She snapped her fingers at arm’s length, her hand in the light from the restaurant, her face in the gloom, eyes fixed on his eyes.

      ‘The Paulls had told you it was going to be tough,’ she said.

      ‘Yes. We underwent pretty rough mental training from them before leaving the here and now. Many of the men were weeded out. But I got through. They elected me Steersman. I was top of their first class.’

      Surrey was silent a moment, surprised to hear pride in his own voice. Pride left, after that experience! Yet there was no pride in him; it was just the voice running in an old channel, the naked soul crouching in an ancient husk of character.

      The drink arrived. The Chinese girl had one too, a long one in a misty glass; she put her lute down to drink it. Surrey took a sip of his and then resumed the story.

      We were travelling ahead! It was a schoolboy’s dream come true. Yet our excitement soon became blunted by monotony. There is nothing simultaneous in time travel, as people have imagined. It took us two ship’s months to reach the Paulls’ age, and there all but one of them left us to continue on alone into the future.

      They had the other ages to supervise, and many organisational problems to attend to; yet I sometimes wonder if they did not use those problems as an excuse, to save their having to visit the age of the Failed Men. Perhaps they thought us less sensitive, and therefore better fitted for the job.

      And so we went ahead again. The office of Steersman was almost honorary, entailing merely the switching off of power when the journey was automatically ended. We sat about and talked, we chosen few, reading or viewing in the excellent libraries the Paulls had installed. Time passed quickly enough, yet we were glad when we arrived.

      Glad!

      The age of the Failed Men is far in the future: many hundred millions of years ahead, or thousands of millions; the Paulls would never tell us the exact number. Does it matter? It was a long time … There’s plenty of time – too much – more than anyone will ever need.

      We stepped out onto that day’s Earth. I had childishly expected – oh, to see the sun stuck at the horizon, or turned purple, or the sky full of moons, or something equally dramatic; but there was not even a shadow over the fair land, and the earth had not aged a day. Only man had aged.

      The Failed Men differed from us anatomically and spiritually; it was the former quality which struck us first. They looked like a group of dejected oddities sitting among piles of supplies, and we wanted to laugh. The humorists among us called them ‘the Zombies’ at first – but in a few days there were no humorists left among us.

      The Failed Men had no real hands. From their wrists grew five long and prehensile fingers, and the middle digit touched the ground lightly when they walked, for their spines curved in an arc and their heads were thrust far forward. To counter this, their skulls had elongated into boat shapes, scaphocephalic fashion. They had no eyebrows, nor indeed a brow at all, nor any hair at all, although the pores of their skin stood out flakily, giving them a fluffy appearance from a distance.

      When they looked at you their eyes held no meaning; they were blanked with a surfeit of experience, as though they had now regained a horrible sort of innocence. When they spoke to you, their voices were hollow and their sentences as short and painful as a child’s toothache. We could not understand their language, except through the electronic translator banks given us by the Paulls.

      They looked a mournful sight, but at first we were not too disturbed; we didn’t, you see, quite grasp the nature of the problem. Also, we were very busy, reclaiming more Failed Men from the ground.

      Four great aid centres had been established on the earth. Of the other four races in the IRC, two managed sanatoria construction and equipment; another, nursing, feeding and staffing; and the fourth, communication, rehabilitation and liaison between centres. And we – ‘the Children’! – our job was to exhume the Failed Men and bring them to the centres: a job for the simple group! Between us we all had to get the race of man started again – back into harness.

      All told, I suppose there are only about six million Failed Men spread over the earth. We had to go out and dig them up. We had specially made tractors with multiple blades on the front which dug slowly and gently into the soil.

      The Failed Men had ‘cemetery areas’; we called them that, although they had not been designed as cemeteries. It was like a bad dream. Working day and night, we trundled forward, furrowing up the earth as you strip back a soiled bed. In the mould, a face would appear, an arm with the long fingers, a pair of legs, tumbling into the light. We would stop the machine and get down to the body, digging with trowels around it. So we would exhume another man or woman – it was hard to tell which they were.

      They would be in coma. Their eyes would open, staring like peek-a-boo dolls, then close again with a click. We’d patch them up with an injection, stack them on stretchers and send them back in a load to base. It was a harrowing job, and no pun intended.

      When the corpses had had some attention and care, they revived. Within a month they would be up and walking, trundling about the hospital grounds in that round-shouldered way, their great boat-heads nodding at every step. And then it was I talked to them and tried to understand.

      The translator banks, being Paull-made, were the best possible. But their limitations were the limitations of our own language. If the Failed Men said their word for ‘sun’, the machine said ‘sun’ to us, and we understood by that the same thing the Failed Men intended. But away from the few concrete, common facts of our experience, the business was less easy. Less synonyms, more overtones; it was the old linguistic problem, but magnified here by the ages which lay between us.

      I remember tackling one old woman on our first spell back at the centre. I say old, but for all I know she was sweet sixteen; they just looked ancient.

      ‘I hope you don’t mind being dug – er, rescued?’ I asked politely.

      ‘Not at all. A pleasure,’ the banks said for her. Polite stereotypes. No real meaning in any language, but the best machine in the world makes them sound sillier than they are.

      ‘Would you mind if we discussed this whole thing?’

      ‘What object?’ the banks asked for her.

      I’d asked the wrong question. I did not mean thing-object, but thing-matter. That sort of trip-up kept getting in the way of our discussion; the translator spoke better English than I.

      ‘Can we talk about your problem?’ I asked her, trying again.

      ‘I have no problem. My problem has been resolved.’

      ‘I should be interested to hear about it.’

      ‘What do you require to know about it? I will tell you anything.’

      That at least was promising. Willing if not co-operative; they had long ago forgotten the principle of co-operation.

      ‘You know I come from the distant past to help you?’ The banks translated me undramatically.

      ‘Yes. It is noble of you all to interrupt your lives for us,’ she said.

      ‘Oh no; we want to see the race of man starting off again on a right track. We believe it should not die away. We are glad to help, and are sorry you took the wrong track.’

      ‘When we started, we were on a track others before us – you – had made.’ It was not defiant, just a fact being stated.

      ‘But the deviation was yours. You made it by an act of will. I’m not condemning; obviously you would not have taken that way had you known it would end in failure.’

      She answered. I gathered she was just faintly angry, probably burning all the emotion in her. Her hollow voice spanged and doomed away, and the translator banks gave out simultaneously in fluent English. Only it didn’t make sense.

      It went something like this: ‘Ah, but what you do not realise, because your realising is completely undeveloped and unstarted, is how to fail. Failing