The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

flew through a heavy rain shower, which dappled the grey surface of the lake. Then we were over the reported disturbance. A dull brown stain, a blot on a bright new garment, spread over the water, from the steep eastern shore to about half a mile out.

      ‘Put us down, pilot,’ Jubal ordered.

      We sank, and kissed the lake. Several hundred yards away rose the base of Mount Kangosi. I looked with admiration up the slope; great slabs of rock stood out from the verdure; crouching at the bottom of this colossus was a village, part of it forced by the steepness of the incline to stand out on piles into the lake.

      ‘Leave everything to me, boss,’ J-Casta said, grabbing a hand asdic from the port locker and climbing out on to the float. We followed. It seemed likely that the disturbance was due to a slight subsidence in the side of the lake basin. Such subsidences, Jubal said, were not uncommon, but in this case it might provide a link with Lake Victoria. If they could pin-point the position of the new fault, frogmen would be sent down to investigate.

      ‘We’re going to have company,’ Jubal remarked to me, waving a hand over the water.

      A dozen or so dugouts lay between us and the shore. Each bore two or three shining-skinned fishermen. The two canoes nearest us had swung round and were now being paddled towards our float.

      I watched them with more interest than I gave to the asdic sweep. Men like these sturdy fishermen had existed here for countless generations, unchanged: before white men had known of them, before Rome’s legions had destroyed the vineyards of Carthage, before – who knows if not before the heady uprush of civilisation elsewhere? – such men had fished quietly in this great lake. They seem not to have advanced at all, so rapidly does the world move; but perhaps when all other races have fallen away, burnt out and exhausted, these steady villages will come into a kingdom of their own. I would elect to live in that realm.

      A man in the leading canoe stood up, raising his hand in greeting. I replied, glancing over his shoulder at the curtain of green behind him. Something caught my eye.

      Above some yards of bare rock, a hundred feet up the slope, two magnificent Mvules – African teak trees – grew. A china blue bird dipped suddenly from one of the trees and sped far and fast away over the water, fighting to outpace its reflection. And the tree itself began to cant slowly from the vertical into a horizontal position.

      Jubal had binoculars round his neck. My curiosity aroused, I reached to borrow them. Even as I did so, I saw a spring of water start from the base of the Mvules. A rock was dislodged. I saw it hurtle down into bush below, starting in turn a trail of earth and stones which fell down almost on to the thatched roofs of the village. The spring began to spurt more freely now. It gleamed in the sun: it looked beautiful but I was alarmed.

      ‘Look!’ I pointed.

      Both Jubal and the fisherman followed the line of my outstretched arm. J-Casta continued to bend over his metal box.

      Even as I pointed, the cliff shuddered. The other Mvule went down. Like an envelope being torn, the rock split horizontally and a tongue of water burst from it. The split widened, the water became a wall, pouring out and down.

      The sound of the splitting came clear and hard to our startled ears. Then came the roar of the water, bursting down the hillside. It washed everything before it. I saw trees, bushes and boulders hurried down in it. I saw the original fissure lengthen and lengthen like a cruel smile, cutting through the ground as fast as fire. Other cracks started, running uphill and across: every one of them began to spout water.

      The fishermen stood up, shouting as their homes were swept away by the first fury of the flood.

      And then the entire lower mountainside began to slip. With a cumulative roar, mud, water and rock rolled down into the lake. Where they had been, a solid torrent cascaded out, one mighty wall of angry water. The escaping flow from Lake Victoria had found its outlet!

      Next moment, our calm surface was a furious sea. Jubal slipped and fell on to one knee. I grabbed him, and almost went overboard myself. A series of giant waves plunged outwards from the shore. The first one rocked us, the second one overturned our flimsy craft completely.

      I came to the surface coughing and snorting. J-Casta rose at my side. We were just in time to see the float slip completely under: it sank in no time, carrying the pilot with it. I had not even seen his face, poor fellow.

      Jubal came up by the fisherman, who had also overturned. But dugouts do not sink. We owe our lives to those hollowed tree trunks. They were righted, and Jubal and his henchman climbed into one, while I climbed into the other. The waves were still fierce, but had attained a sort of regularity which allowed us to cope with them.

      The breakthrough was now a quarter of a mile long. Water poured from it with unabated force, a mighty waterfall where land had been before. We skirted it painfully, making a landing as near to it as we dared.

      The rest of that day, under its blinding arch of sky, passed in various stages of confusion and fear.

      It was two and a half hours before we were taken off the strip of shore. We were not idle in that time, although every few minutes Jubal paused to curse the fact that he was stranded and powerless. Miraculous as it seems, there were some survivors from the obliterated village, women mostly; we helped to get them ashore and built fires for them.

      Meanwhile, Dam Authority planes began to circle the area. We managed to attract the attention of one, which landed by our party. Jubal changed at once; now that he had a machine and men who, unlike the villagers, were in his command, he worked with a silent purpose allowing of no question.

      Over the vision, he ordered the rest of the floats to attend to the villagers’ needs. We sped back to Mokulgu.

      On the way, Jubal spoke to Owenstown. They took his news almost without comment. They reported that Victoria was still sinking, although the rate had now steadied. A twenty-four-hour a day airlift was about to go into operation, dropping solid blocks of marble on to the lake bed. There, a fault about three miles square had been located; four frogmen had been lost, drowned.

      ‘It’s like tossing pennies into the ocean,’ Jubal said.

      I was thinking of the frogmen, sucked irresistibly down the fault. They would be swept through underground waterways, battered and pulped, to be spat out eventually into our lake.

      Vision from Mokulgu, coming on just before we landed there, reported a breach in the lake banks, some twenty miles north of the town. At a word from Jubal, we switched plans and veered north at once to see just how extensive the damage was.

      The break was at a tiny cluster of huts dignified by the name of Ulatuama. Several men, the crew of a Dam Authority patrol boat, were working furiously at a widening gap. The damage had been caused by the very waves which had swamped us, and I learnt that a small, disused lock had stood here, relic of an earlier irrigation scheme; so the weakness had been of man’s making. Beyond the lock had been a dried-up channel some twenty yards wide; this was now a swollen, plunging river.

      ‘Is this serious?’ I asked Jubal. ‘Isn’t it a good way of getting rid of surplus water?’

      He gave me a withering look. ‘Where are we if we lose control?’ he demanded. ‘If this thing here runs away with us, the combined waters of Victoria and Tanganyika will flood down into the Congo.’

      Even as he spoke, the bank to the south of the escaping waters crumbled; several yards were swept away, their place instantly taken by the current.

      We flew back to Mokulgu. Jubal visioned the mayor and got permission to broadcast to the city. I did not hear him speak; reaction had set in, and I had to go and sit quietly at home with Sloe fussing daintily round me. Although you ‘know’ from a child that Earth is a planet, it is only when you drift towards it from space, seeing it hang round and finite ahead, that you can realise the fact. And so, although I had always ‘known’ man was puny, it was the sight of that vast collapsing slab of mountain which had driven the fact into my marrow.

      To guess the sort of sentiments Jubal broadcast to the city was