Cryptozoic! Page 10

  Bush presented them with the Forbidden Recipe Whisky. As he sat down with them, he found Sergeant Pond was among them, Pond whose kindest word in the last month had been to damn them for a ruddy herd of ruptured bleeding camels. Pond who had bayed at them like a bloodhound and worried them like a terrier.

  Pond put his arm about Bush. "You been my besh squad you boys! What'm I going to do without you? Another ruddy shower of recuits in tomorrow, needing their noshesh wiped all the time. You're my friensh!"

  Gritting his teeth, Bush poured some Forbidden Recipe on top of the brown liquid already in Pond's mug.

  "Yer my besh frien', Bush." the sergeant said. His maltreated voice, grinding along in low gear, could hardly be heard for the band now starting up, as some of the brighter or more stupid lads began to whistle and shout and sing and beat a crude rhythm out on waste bins, mess tins, and other instruments. Bracing himself, Bush took a swig of the Black Wombat, and was instantly three parts drunk.

  Four hours later, almost every man in the barracks room was in a sodden stupor. Pond had staggered away into the night, and the squaddies had either fallen into bed or been thrown there by hearty companions. One man stood alone at the far end of the room by a window flung wide, still clutching a bottle, and singing a lewd song.

  "But the way he caught the butler Was the dirtest way of all . . ."

  Finally there was silence, and darkness. Bush lay on his bed, wakeful under a feeling of terror that had an illusive familiarity about it.

  "I'm not dying, am I?" he whispered. He could hear voices. There seemed to be four men round his bed, two in white coats, two in black. One of them said, "He can't understand a thing you say; it's all turned to his own needs. He imagines himself in another place, perhaps another time. Isn't he a committed insect?"

  The thought of insects goaded Bush into sitting upright. The gaunt bleak room full of insensible bodies stretched away in all directions. The four men still stood at his bedside. Humoring his fantasy, he said, "Where do you fellows think I am?"

  "Quietly!" one of the phantoms admonished. "You'll wake the others in the wardrobe. You're suffering from anoxia, with ordinary hallucinations."

  "But the window's open," he protested. "Where is this, anyway?"

  "The Carlfield Mental Hospital. We are looking after you; we believe you are an amniote egg."

  "Your meeting's scrambled," he said. He sank down again, overwhelmed by sensations of drunkenness and futility. These men could do nothing for him or to him. On his pillow, a yawning pit of sleep awaited him.

  He made it to the lecture hut on time next morning, despite a throbbing head. Howes and Stanhope arrived in a few minutes. They were in civilian clothes. The course was over -- until the next one began. In the square, the disbanded Ten Squad was moving about in unfamiliar clothes, heading away from home or duty, bawling final ribaldries at each other.

  The officers sat down on the bench next to Bush, and Stanhope began to talk in a business-like way.

  "We know you will be honored by the mission the government has in mind for you. However, before we tell you what it is, we feel it necessary to give you some of the wider background.

  "This is a time of great uncertainty, nationally and internationally, as you are by now aware. The new theory of time has upset the status quo. This is particularly so in the West -- America and Europe, which have for historic reasons always been very time-conscious areas. In the East, things are much as they ever were. Duration means a different thing to a Chinaman or Indian than it does to us.

  "General Peregrine Bolt had to step in and take over because this country of ours was on the brink of economic ruin. A strong hand is going to be needed for a long while, until we adjust to the new conditions -- meanwhile, we are in the paradoxical position of having to accept aid from the East."

  Bush's aching head prompted him to say, "Hence the Black Wombat Special, I suppose."

  He observed that Stanhope looked blank, whereas Howes caught the reference.

  "You will see that it is imperative that no new disruptions come along to upset the order we are trying to build."

  "What sort of disruptions do you mean?"

  Stanhope looked embarrassed. Howes said, "Ideas are sometimes worse than armed uprisings. As an intellectual, you should know that."

  "I'm not an intellectual."

  "I'm sorry. Suppose a conflicting idea should now arise about the nature of time? It might throw us back to where we were a few months ago."

  Understanding began to creep over Bush. These two men seemed so harmless, so marginal (and Stanhope was really not particularly bright); but they were sitting here like two evil uncles at a sick child's bedside, telling him bad fairy stories -- stories that might reveal the whole secret of . . . of the regime's, and consequently Bolt's, fears; of the neuroses of the age. . . . It was something in Howes' face that prompted this feeling; he was being as frank as he dared, he was also hiding something; the classic dilemma of an intelligent man in a totalitarian society.

  Howes told Bush, "It's the question of time, you see. All that man is, all that he has built -- although, as Captain Stanhope says, this is more true of the West than the East -- has been founded on the idea that time is unidirectional: like the flow of water through a sluice gate, shall we say? But this was man's invented idea, and the little he knew of the truth he kept suppressed down in the dark basements of his being, the undermind, as we call it. Occasionally, intimations of the truth have leaked through, to frighten him. Precognitive experiences or dreams, extra-sensory perceptions, the sense of déjŕ vu, and so on -- almost anything that could ever be dismissed as magical or superstitious -- were such leakages and directly contradicted the precious theory of unidirectional time. Which was why they were so passionately laughed out of court."

  "And your alternative to unidirectional time?"

  "Co-continuous time. You know that. You believe it. You went through the Wenlock discipline. Space-time being what it is, past and present are at par in terms of energy. Imagine a featureless world without day or night or organic processes: we'd have no basis there for any concept of time, even an incorrect one like unidirectionalism, because there would be no way of establishing time differences from a human point of view. The error, the very concept of time-flow, is in the human consciousness, not in the external universe: the creed that causes us to speak of mind-travel rather than time-travel, as some would originally have preferred.

  "Such is Wenlock's discovery and it gives us something to work on. Any other rival theories must be squashed, in case they throw us back into chaos again."

  And I take it there are rival theories?"

  He knew what was coming even before Stanhope answered (this was Stanhope's domain, the world of security, so much simpler than the realm of speculation): "You know there are rival theories. The renegade Silverstone, once a colleague of Wenlock's, is uttering dangerous and misleading nonsense."

  "Heresy, eh?"

  "Don't joke, Bush. Not heresy but treason. Silverstone is guilty of treason by uttering ideas calculated to upset the security of the state. He must be eliminated."

  Bush guessed what came next. The madmen who visited him in the night could have guessed. By the very nature of his thinking, Silverstone would be an accomplished mind-traveler. The regime would require another such to go and eradicate him -- and Bush was another such.

  Howes must have read Bush's expression, for he said, "That is your mission, Bush, and I hope you prove worthy of the honor. You have to hunt down Silverstone and kill him. We know he is somewhere at large in time, probably under an assumed name; we shall give you every assistance."

  Snapping open the case he was nursing, he produced a bulky file and held it out to Bush.

  "You are going to be given forty-eight hours' leave and then you will be equipped and required to mind-travel until you find the traitor Silverstone. We shall see that your father is provided for; he will appreciate the Black Wombat. You will study these documen
ts and make youself familiar with Silverstone's case in every way possible . . . except that of inflicting on yourself the man's treasonable theories."

  Catching an edge of irony in Howes' voice, Bush glanced up, but the officer stared at him blank-faced, and Bush dropped his gaze to the dossier. On the top of it lay a photograph of Silverstone, one of the rare ones. It showed a man with long straggly white hair and an untidy grey moustache. His nose was long and curved. Although his eyes in the photo were serious and abstracted, a half-smile lurked about the lips. When Bush had last seen him, his hair had been cut and dyed and his moustache shaved off, but he had no difficulty in recognizing Stein.

  "I'll see what I can do, gentlemen," he said. "I shall enjoy the assignment."

  The captains rose and shook his hand.

  Chapter 8

  A WORD FROM WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  A battered truck drove Bush from the barracks and deposited him at his father's house. Besides his kit, he carried half a case of Black Wombat Special, a present from a grateful government.

  He stood on the pavement, watching the truck out of sight. Spring had sunk into dusty summer. The truck seemed hardly able to chug up the road for dust. If the municipal services did not get organized again, the whole road would eventually silt up. Grass and thistles were growing along the gutters. In the dentist's garden, the cherry tree stumps were hidden by a riot of cow parsley and nettles, like tokens of unidirectional change.

  Bush stood and sampled what it felt like to be away from the horrible life of Ten Squad. It was rather like escaping from a straitjacket. He could not enter the little house just yet; it looked too confining, and he needed time to breathe. He needed time to breathe. . . . He stood and laughed, thinking of a mobile he could construct, with glittering metal shards representing minutes and seconds being pumped through a pair of bird cages. It would be a small thing to work on until his gift came back.

  Hiding the case of whisky among the cow parsley, he began to walk down the road in the direction the truck had taken. No one was about. The scene was colorless. He thought about sex. He tried to remember Mrs. Annivale and Ann, but could hardly conjure up their faces. Over the last month, he had been so hard-driven that all sexual urges had left him; even the vision of an hospitably crooked leg and thigh had ceased to torment him.

  The madness of military discipline he had taken as a sign that mankind was sick in some deep way; otherwise, how could the generations have tolerated that stifling of the individual will? But now he was experiencing one reward that came from such harsh monasticism.

  He walked in the by-streets, found an old pond at the end of one, marveled that he could not remember it. He stood staring into its muddy shallows, cluttered with derelict things, drowned boots and wheels and tins.

  Voices came from near at hand. A ruined building stood by the pond; the voices seemed to originate there. Bush started listening when he caught the name Bolt.

  "We'd better step up the treatment, hadn't we?"

  "Before Bolt does!"

  "The sooner the better. This afternoon, if we can get the message through; we were only held up for lack of Ł.s.d. I'll provide the contact."

  They mentioned another name. Treason? Or maybe it was Gleason.

  Bush moved cautiously over to the crumbling building and peered through a foggy window. In the murk, two Negroes were talking to two white men. He was suddenly extremely frightened of being caught by them. Making his way quietly from the vicinity of the pond, he started running and did not stop until he was panting outside the dentist's. By that time, he was uncertain whether he had actually seen what he thought he had seen, or whether his nerves were not playing him false. He was a little upset by his mother's death, and needed to get away.

  Taking up his kit and the case of whisky, he hurried into the house.

  James Bush unstoppered a bottle of the Indian whisky, poured some for Mrs. Annivale, Bush, and himself, and listened moodily as Bush spoke of the new life of action on which he was about to embark. He had been instructed not to mention Silverstone. He told them he was going to patrol the past, claimed that his days of idleness were over, that he would be a man of action from now on, getting very excited, waving his arms about.

  "They succeeded with you!" his father exclaimed. "Just a month and they succeeded! They shaved your head and took away your intelligence too. What are you? You talk about action! Action's nothing, pah!"

  "You'd rather be dead drunk than act!"

  "So I would! Though not on this Indian muck, for preference. Pity you were illiterate, or you'd remember what Wordsworth said."

  "To hell with bloody Wordsworth!"

  "I'll tell you what bloody Wordsworth said!"

  "I don't want to know what he said!"

  "I'm going to tell you just the same!" He rose and started shouting at Bush. Bush jumped up and grabbed his father's wrists. They stood there glaring at each other as the old man recited.

  "'Action is transitory -- a step, a blow, The motion of a muscle, this way or that -- 'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed: Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity.'

  "How about that then, eh?"

  "Bloody unidirectional nonsense!" Pushing his father away, he staggered out of the room. He was going to trick them all. They didn't realize that everything that happened was part of being an artist. Wordsworth should have had enough sense to recognize his own fallacy: action was as much a part of suffering as inaction.

  In the inaction of the next two days, he found another goad to suffer with. He had fallen in with the course of events, he told himself, not only because it might work to his advantage, but because by so doing he gained some security for his father. But if the government patronage only extended to whisky, it was not going to help a great deal; he had, in fact, set his father on an abrupt downward path.

  It was when they were well embarked upon the fourth bottle of Black Wombat that James Bush switched on the television. A view of peaceful countryside swam into the bowl; over it was superimposed a message; "Stand By for an Important Announcement"; a military band played.

  "Treason!" Bush exclaimed. He went down on his knees before the set, fiddling with the controls.

  A man with two heads appeared. They merged into one as Bush twiddled and he said, "Following severe disturbances up and down the country, martial law was declared last night in all big cities. The so-called government of General Bolt has proved itself ineffective. This morning, representatives of the Popular Action party took over governmental headquarters after limited military action. The welfare of our country is now in the hands of Admiral Gleason, who will exercise complete command over the government and armed forces, pending the restoration of normal governmental procedures. Admiral Gleason will speak to the nation now. Admiral Gleason!"

  Amid the noise of drums, the viewpoint switched to a room in which a broad old man in uniform stood behind a desk. The cameras moved in until only his head and shoulders could be seen. He had a heavy and inflexible face, the expression of which did not alter during his brief speech. His large obtrusive jaw bit his sentences out of his mouth, while the tone of them carried a reminder for Bush of Sergeant Pond's growl.

  "We live in an uncertain time of transition. We must all accept severe restrictions if we are to pull through the next critical year successfully. Popular Action, the party I represent, has stepped in to ensure that the nation emerges successfully from its troubles. The corrupt regime which we have overthrown concealed from us all how bankrupt we are. General Bolt was a traitor. We have documentary evidence that he was about to flee to India, taking with him illegally acquired bullion and art treasures. It was my painful duty to witness the execution of General Bolt yesterday evening, carried out in full legality on behalf of the people of this nation.

  "I ask you all to give me your full cooperation. Action is the party of the people, but Action cannot brook any ill-advised activity from the people a
t this grave time. All traitors who supported Bolt will be rounded up for trial within the next few days; you are asked to assist in their arrest. I will not beat about the bush. I have to tell you that we have enemies abroad who would gladly take advantage of us in our time of weakness. The sooner we can dispose of the enemies within our gates, the sooner we shall be able to impose a strong peace, nationally and internationally.

  "Let our watchword be Union through Action. United, we shall win through all our hardships."

  His final words started the snare drums again. Gleason stood glaring forward into the camera, never blinking, until he was faded out and James Bush reached over his son's shoulder and switched the bowl off.