The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

Hall had been destroyed in the age-old destruction. With stomachs more comfortable, they set off again, working upwards. The darkness was populated, thinly but menacingly, with those whose minds had collapsed from sorrow or frustration: the Hermits, the wild men.

      Osa felt Tayder’s retaining hand on her arm. Something moved ahead of them, something going warily but clumsily.

      ‘Grant!’ Osa called suddenly. Feeling Tayder start with surprise at her voice, she said, ‘It’s all right, it’s someone I know, a fugitive from Hallways.’

      ‘Is that Osa?’ asked a voice from the dark. Grant came up and touched her, his words coming in a rush of relief.

      ‘I was completely lost!’ he exclaimed. ‘Once I’d left Hallways I was hear-seen by a pair of Beserkers, and ran and dodged for miles before I shook them off. By then I’d lost my way completely.’

      ‘If you want to come with us, all well and good,’ said Tayder gruffly, none too happy with the intrusion, but acquiescing for Osa’s sake. ‘But we can’t talk here. Let’s get moving – there’s business to be done. Osa and I are going to let the real sky in.’

      They moved steadily on and up, Tayder leading. For a little way, Grant was quiet, then his sense of guilt made him apologise to the girl for failing to pass her warning on to Wilms. She silenced his blurted explanations sharply.

      ‘Whatever we do or have done is no longer of any consequence,’ she said. ‘You are cowardly and pessimistic, Tayder is an adventurer with no brains, I am overwhelmed with self-pride – oh, you see I know our faults well enough! – but all that matters nothing now. History was a stagnant sea; now it is a rising tide, and with it go we. Whatever our weakness, our humanity will carry us through.’

      ‘I will go anywhere you lead, Osa,’ Grant said doubtfully, ‘but your eloquence is wasted on me. Besides, I’ve always been happy in Hallways.’

      ‘Oh, this man is an arrant coward,’ Tayder exclaimed impatiently, stopping in his tracks.

      Without a word, Grant fell on him. Together they staggered against the wall, struggling and punching. Tayder slipped under the weight of his opponent and they rolled onto the ground. Shouting and kicking, Osa separated them, and under her savage tongue they stood up sheepishly.

      ‘You fools!’ she snapped. ‘You think of nothing but fighting! Your minds aren’t big enough to encompass an ideal.’

      ‘I won’t be insulted by a Beserker!’ Grant said sullenly.

      Her lips curled. She paused, as if wondering whether to go on alone. Then she said quietly, ‘You know nothing. We are all ignorant, but you are the most ignorant. Our tribe in Hallways lives in “C” Circus; the people over us in the tycho live in “B” Circus; the word has been corrupted into a word of fear. “B” Circus Beserkers.’

      ‘The corruption was appropriate,’ supplemented Tayder. ‘We were wilder than you of Hallways. The Fliers had their flightway blocked to our Circus, but they have been able to visit your tribe generation after generation, always picking off the ones of you with the fresh ideas and the germ of leadership.’

      ‘I don’t understand all this,’ Grant admitted grumpily. ‘The Fliers belong to M’chene. Why does M’chene hate us? Is it not taught that we are his children?’

      ‘Much is taught that is not true,’ Osa said.

      For a while nothing more was spoken. The way was difficult and their hear-sight was fully employed. Then the girl continued.

      ‘The tycho was long ago a huge underground camp making and despatching some kind of weapon against an enemy on another world. This we have found from legends – scraps of information known to Beserkers or Hermits or other solitary hunters. Much was automatic – that means controlled by M’chene, who exists everywhere in the tycho – but much was also done by human beings. Enemy spies were frequently found, men intent on wrecking the work. To guard against them, spy-rays were set up.

      ‘In Hallways, those spy-rays still exist. Every time you took food from the hatch-opening, your mind was scanned. If you ever had thought too much of mutiny or discontent, the Fliers would have come to collect you – even as they collected Wilms and Jineer and other brave men who brooded too openly on freedom. I escaped a similar fate because I fed always where I was safe – blind luck, you see.’

      She changed her tone to add, ‘We are almost there.’

       I am M’chene. Tomorrow will be a time of conquest and triumph: I have made my own kind of progress.

       The men and women who run in my veins work their own destruction. My purpose is my own and does not concern them. Slowly I extend myself, upwards and along and down; men have no part of me now. The day draws near when I shall encompass this world, and with my new limbs encircle this globe.

       Then with servants stronger and surer than flesh I shall reach out for the world that shines in space near me, lighting the desolation of my world with its glow.

      They were there! They climbed out of a tumble of concrete, steel and rocks and stood upon a tiled floor. In the exhultation of the moment they stood breathless.

      ‘This door to the outer world was only revealed a sleep ago,’ Tayder told Grant. ‘I it was who found the way and told Osa. I will open the door.’

      Osa flung out her hand. ‘I will open the door,’ she proclaimed.

      ‘I found the way,’ Tayder said defiantly.

      She stared imperiously at him.

      ‘I dreamed of leading the people of Hallways to freedom,’ she said. ‘I will open the door. We will let in the air of the upper world and then return to take them forever from the grip of darkness.’

      She strode forward.

      Grant stood stricken by awe, gazing at her, and gazing past her. Now he knew her wild promises had been nothing less than truth. Beyond the transparent dome which had survived the last bombardment stretched a floor of rock terminating in a magnificent circle of mountain. The floor and the base of the mountains were in deep shadow, but the upper terraces and peaks stood bathed in a sharp and glittering light which fell like a cascade of diamonds onto Grant’s wide eyes.

      Above this panorama, against a background of jet, hung a brilliant crescent. Blue and silver covered it like a sheen. Something within Grant quivered so wildly at the sight of it that he exclaimed involuntarily. It was not so much the luring beauty of that crescent as a knowledge – sure and undeniable – that he had never lived till that moment.

      And at that moment Osa, with the poise of a Deliverer, turned the great wheel beside the lock door. Effortlessly, despite its centuries of disuse, the door sprang open: Missile Station Tycho Crater had been ably built.

      The air gave a great roar of triumph as it burst out into space.

       The Great Time Hiccup

      Some twenty-two thousand miles above the troubled plains of earth, George Garstang crawled on his belly along a corridor two foot six high. He wore the standard snug-suit but nevertheless he sweated. On the other side of the thin metal sheet above his head beat the sun, softened by no atmosphere. Between the outer and middle skins of a space station there is little room. Usually it is occupied only by vacuum; now, in this emergency, it was air-filled, and the elaborate machinery of Operation Breakdown was being moved in.

      George fitted the virus capsule nozzle deftly into its prepared socket, and rolling onto one side clamped the other end of the tube into the feed on the inner wall. Before moving on to the next, he flicked up the manual scanner-eyelid in the outer skin – bless the man that had thought of that unnecessary detail! – and peered out. Only space. Earth was round the other side of course, this being Tuesday morning early shift. He muttered to himself, collected up the slack of his