The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

for his empty seat now gets a whip-hand over us, we may as well go straight round to the Bureau and draw our death certificates – and I’ll be in front of the queue!’

      There was a roar of approval, but on the whole they sounded peaceable enough.

      JJ was not a savoury quarter. It had lodgings and snuff palaces and a blue cinema, and even one of the gadarenes beloved by spacemen on the search for orgies, thriving among the many tiny shops. 108 was an ‘earth shop’, the lunar version of a pawnbroker’s, so called because here were stocked all the innumerable little articles in daily use but manufactured only on the home planet. Over the shop was a small flat. A descriptive word out of an ancient thriller crossed Wyvern’s mind: seedy. This shop, this flat, was seedy.

      He pushed open the shop door and went in.

      The place was poky and ill-stocked. If you thumped your fist on the counter, you could crack the veneer – but some irate customer had thought of that already. In a cubicle at the back, the proprietor slouched over a telephone. He did not look up when Wyvern entered.

      Somewhere out of sight, a man in soft shoes ran heavily down a staircase, burst open a door and let it slam behind him.

      Still the proprietor did not move.

      ‘I want some service,’ Wyvern said sharply. ‘Are you asleep?’

      Still no movement.

      ‘Listen, I want to buy some informa –’ Wyvern’s voice died as he saw the deep stain on the man’s tunic in the region of his stomach. He pushed up the flap of the counter and went round.

      The fellow was dead, although still warm and still bleeding. He peered into eternity with a fixed, mercenary stare. His call to the exchange had never gone through, and he was beyond needing it now. The lunar ground had no worms; this stabbed body would keep for ever in its coffin.

      And did this mean the only link with Eileen South was broken? Wyvern’s thoughts twisted unhappily.

      Then he remembered hearing a man running downstairs; that could have been the murderer of the proprietor.

      He pulled open a flimsy side door and backstairs were revealed. After a second’s hesitation, he ran up them three at a time. At the top were two doors, one open. Wyvern entered at the double.

      A man lay on a bed dying. He was curled up clutching at dirty blankets, with a heavy knife in his ribs. In his agony, he rolled on to his back, driving the knife further home. He sighed wearily and seemed to relax.

      On his face, an impossible smile stretched from ear to ear.

      Wyvern knelt by the side of the bed. This man was no newcomer to violence. He looked every inch a thug. Old scars stretched from either end of his mouth right up his cheekbones, giving him, even in the midst of pain, that look of ghastly hilarity. He was clearly beyond help and fading fast. He rolled convulsively over again, burying his face in the bedding.

      Here was the link with Eileen South. There was only one thing Wyvern could do, loath as he was to do it. He opened up his mind and entered into ego-union with the dying man …

      *

      A garble of voices, beating like rain on a roof. A welter of regret, cruel as frightened fangs. Fear, foamlike. Anger. Vindictiveness, blasphemy, pain: shutters banging in December’s storm. Memory. Stupidity, the sparse lanterns going out in the mediaeval alleys of his mind. Warped ways. And, even now, even yet, hope.

      Hopes like bats, pain like a driving sleet seemed to batter against Wyvern’s face, blinding his psychic sense.

      On all sides of him, three-dimensionally as it appeared, crowded scenes from the man’s past life, scudding by, falling out of darkness into more darkness. The backgrounds were mainly of an appalling drabness, the faces in the foreground often twisted into hatred; here a girl’s countenance smiled like a lamp, there envy burned in a rival’s face; everywhere callousness, besottedness, a life run to see. Wyvern sank grimly through the sediment.

      He was hopelessly lost in the labyrinth, walled up in night while fifty movie projectors played fifty different films on him. And the projectors faltered and dimmed. He had to be quick: the man with the impossible smile was dying.

      The patterned mists cleared for a moment. Something came clearly through from the man, his identity and his latest crime:

      ‘I, George Dorgen, killed Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader.’

      It came not in words but pictures, a cramped figure on a deadly mission, breaking through a bathroom wall, shooting a man in his shower. Then it all burst like a bubble and Dorgen was lying on this very bed; he had fled to the Moon, he thought himself safe, and then the man with the knife and the soft shoes entered the bedroom …

      Then that bubble of memory also burst, burst into the garish colour of pain. It flowed round, over, through Wyvern, drowning him, bearing him seven seas down in another’s futility. It bore him Everest-deep, changing its hues, fading and cooling. It carried him where no lungs could live, and then it was going, gargling away into a whirlpool down the hole in the universe where all life goes. It broke foaming over Wyvern’s head, pouring away like a mill-race, tearing to take him with it, sucking at his body, whipping about his legs, screaming as it slid over the bare nerve-ends of Dorgen’s ocean-mind-bed.

      The last drop drained. The little universe collapsed with one inexorable implosion. Dorgen was dead.

      For a long time, clutching his pebble of extraordinary information, Wyvern slumped against the rickety bed. He was vitiated. His body had no strength: his eyes would not open: his mind was dead. There was only the memory of a killer who slayed an innocent man downstairs to come up here and kill another killer; and that killer had killed Jim Bull, the killer.

      Kill, kill, kill. Wyvern feebly resolved never to use his mental power again, unless …

      Suddenly he remembered Eileen South. As far as he could tell in the chaos of Dorgen’s mind, the man had no knowledge of her at all, her identity or her whereabouts. But the mere thought of Eileen revived Wyvern. After a while, he picked himself up off the floor.

      It came to him decisively that he must get away from it all. Life was too foul, too complicated. He must get to the American Sector, or Turksdome, anywhere.

      He came weakly out on to the landing.

      Two men in the uniform of the New Police stood shoulder to shoulder at the bottom of the stairs. Revolvers were clasped in their fists.

      ‘Come on down quietly,’ said one of them, ‘or we’ll blow your guts out.’

      The stairs creaked one by one as he trod on them, obeying.

      The next three hours were full of uniforms and questions.

      After his first interrogation at Police Headquarters, Wyvern was put into an ordinary cell. That interrogation was made by a police sergeant with a man in plain clothes looking on. Then he was taken from the cell and questioned again, this time by a police captain and two men in plain clothes, after which he was taken to a special box-like cell.

      The back wall of this cell was fitted with a steel bench. When the door of the cell closed it was so shaped that the prisoner was forced to sit on the bench; there was no room to do anything else. The wall was of glass and Wyvern estimated, every bit of two feet thick. He sat in his pillory like a fish in an aquarium.

      He had been sitting there for about an hour when a man entered the bare room on the other side of the glass. The man was sleek and blank and neat and had a brown beard. He advanced to the glass and said, ‘Your cell is wired for sound so that we can talk comfortably. You will talk, I will listen. Your case is very serious.’

      His voice was clipped; he did indeed make it sound serious.

      Hell’s bells, it is serious, Wyvern thought. I’m spending all my time recently being browbeaten by big and little autocrats. If I ever get out of here, I shall suffer from persecution complex for the rest of my