The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

will give you a copy of my statement.’

      The beard made no comment.

      ‘A customer went into the earth shop and found the proprietor dead, stabbed,’ the beard said stonily. ‘Police were called. They heard a movement in the room above. You appeared. You were arrested. In the room you had just vacated, another body was found. Our weapon experts say the same blade did both jobs. Obviously, you are Number One suspect. I think it worth your while to tell your story again.’

      ‘It’s all circumstantial,’ Wyvern snapped. ‘Do I have to tell you people your business? Why haven’t you taken my fingerprints? Take them at once and compare them with the ones on the knife. You’ll find I never even touched it. I’ve told you who I am, I’ve told you what I’m doing on Luna – ring through and check with the government at once. I demand it!’

      The beard let this outburst die on the hot air.

      ‘I think it worth your while to tell your story again,’ he repeated.

      Wyvern sighed. Then he capitulated and said what he had said before. With certain simplifications, he told only truth. His motive for entering the shop he had altered, to avoid any mention of Eileen; he merely made himself out to be a tourist in search of local colour who had accidentally stumbled on a corpse, etc., etc. And another alteration had come at the end of the story.

      It became obvious to Wyvern as he recounted the discovery of Dorgen that he was getting entangled in a political murder; indeed, it was being pinned on him for reasons best known to the police. There was one obvious way to extricate himself, and he took it. He had to describe the real murderer, as he had been reflected in Dorgen’s dying mind. Once that murderer was caught, he, Wyvern, was cleared.

      And so he said – and found himself now saying it for the third time, ‘Dorgen could still talk when I reached him. He was able to describe the killer as a tall fellow with a square face, blue jowls, small black moustache, black bushy eyebrows, hair black with a prominent streak of white in it. Hairy hands and arms.’

      ‘Dorgen told you this before he died?’ the neat man with the beard asked.

      ‘I just said he did,’ Wyvern said. His voice rasped; they would not, surely, be on the alert for telepaths up here. His story was perfectly convincing.

      ‘With his dying breath,’ Wyvern added, ‘Dorgen said, “I killed Our Beloved Leader”.’

      The beard took a precise step or two in each direction, running a fingernail lightly along the thick glass as he walked.

      ‘Now may I go?’ Wyvern asked. ‘I have been detained quite long enough already, it seems to me. You know where to contact me if you wish.’

      ‘It is not as easy as that,’ the beard said. ‘Nothing is easy in this world, Wyvern. Men behave foolishly. We are not, for example, at all happy about some aspects of your story. Everything is very complicated; you must be kept here a little longer yet.’

      He turned to go, adding, ‘You may congratulate yourself at least on having a front seat while history is in the making.’

      ‘I never had a seat I hated more.’

      The other left without comment.

      Almost as soon as he had gone, the light in the outer compartment went out. A bright bulb out of reach above Wyvern’s head was now the only source of illumination, and it so shone on to the glass before his eyes that he could hardly see into the other part of the room beyond the glass. Once, he thought someone slipped in and observed him, but could not be sure.

      The light threw considerable heat on to his head and neck. Cramp crawled and tingled in his legs. Disquiet increased with discomfort. He just hoped this infernal delay meant they were combing the Sector for Dorgen’s slayer; but he could not help reading more sinister motives into this custody.

      At least they had no reason to suspect him of powers of ego-union – he hoped. To have that discovered would involve him in a nasty fate. He recalled, as he sat waiting, the thing Parrodyce had said when they were talking about H’s projected coupling of another telepath to Big Bert: ‘That must be the worst pain of all; I pray I never come to it.’

      If they did find out about Wyvern, it would be remarkably convenient for them. The monster computer was only a hundred yards away, in the centre of the British Sector!

      Wyvern’s reveries were interrupted by the opening of a grill behind his head. A basin full of patent cereal and condensed milk was thrust in upon him. He ate and dozed. Broken fantasias on Dorgen’s past sleazed through his sleep.

      He came suddenly back to full consciousness, and sat bolt upright, his blood racing heavily. Beyond the glass, the shadowy forms of Colonel H and his secretary were watching him! Involuntarily, Wyvern was reminded of the ghosts which haunted Julius Caesar before his death.

      The urge was strong to speak to them, to try and establish communication, to render them human, but he fought it down and stayed silent, wondering what horrible coincidence had brought them to the scene at this time. He had thought them still on Earth.

      H’s small features were drawn closer together than ever, as if all the venom of him concentrated itself towards the end of his nose. He came forward at last and pressed his hands against the glass.

      ‘What did Dorgen say to you?’ he asked in a terrible voice.

      ‘He told me he killed Our Beloved Leader,’ Wyvern said.

      When H spoke again, his words charged Wyvern full of understanding and fear; he realised for the first time the meaning of that impossible smile carved onto Dorgen’s face; he realised how it had made him betray himself into a future too ghastly to contemplate; for H said, ‘You are a telepath, Wyvern! That cur Dorgen was dumb: he had his tongue cut out twenty years ago.’

      V

      The moon should have been the ideal place for the régime of the British Republics to thrive in: scenery and policy alike were arid and uncompromising. Only in the sense of having been rough-hewn by time did either of them approach beauty; they functioned by virtue of the accidents of the past. And lunar colony and police state alike required a continual maximum effort to maintain equilibrium.

      Yet the régime did not thrive here; the intransigence of the one clashed with the intransigence of the other. Luna had always been a trouble spot. There seemed to be no room for any law but the harsh natural ones, and on these stony shores of space politics secured little foothold. With the death of Our Beloved Leader, revolt against the powers-that-be broke forth again. It was to quell this insurrection that Colonel H had arrived at the British sector.

      He took immediate advantage of the chance which threw Wyvern into his power almost as he landed. For, if the lunar base – with Bert the Brain and its potentialities for military conquest – was the key to his future, Wyvern gave him the power to turn that key. Wyvern was a telepath. From Wyvern Bert should learn the ability to read the minds of the whole population; and when it could do that, H was firmly in the saddle.

      ‘Take him down to Bu-X!’ Colonel H ordered. ‘And be careful with him. Don’t repeat the mistakes you made with Grisewood.’

      They took Wyvern away struggling.

      ‘Right,’ the Colonel said to his secretary. ‘Now arrange with Radio Imbrium for me to televise to the people at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow in the role of Beloved Leader. I don’t think we’d better fix it for any earlier than that.’

      He turned resolutely to the formidable mass of reports on his desk. They were without exception smudged and hard to read: the imported Turkish typewriters were unsatisfactory in every way. He made a note on a memo pad to enquire into the possibilities of setting up a typewriter factory when he got back to Norwich. Then he turned again to the papers, hunching his shoulders grimly. He was not cut out for paper work.

      The secretary returned from the telephone, looking spruce