Cryptozoic! Page 8

  Franklin blinked somewhat, as if it were a hobby he was taking up.

  "I'd say by the evidence of these reports of yours that you had almost utterly neglected the scientific side of things. You wasted your time skylarking about. You didn't even stick to the era you were consigned to."

  Privately, Bush felt the truth of what Franklin said. This -- perhaps fortunately -- prevented him from saying anything. He cleared his throat instead; the fist in the teeth, the boot in the testicles, were advancing again.

  "On the other hand, you pick up a lot of stuff about people."

  Bush nodded. He had spotted that Franklin did not care much for his failure to reply, and felt a little better.

  Franklin leaned across the desk and pointed a finger at Bush's face as if suddenly detecting something strange in the room. "The objectives of this Institute have changed since your day, Bush. You're out of date -- we have more important things to worry about now than your 'greater scientific understanding.' You'd better get that idea out of your mind. But it was never in very firm, was it? Well, we're on your side now."

  He watched to see the effect this reprieve had on Bush, a sneer on his face. Bush hung his head, disgraced to find such base support for his betrayal of science. Regarding himself as an artist, he had loftily thought of himself as in some measure opposed to science, a supporter of the particular against the general; he saw suddenly how faint, how wishy-washy the notion was; his sort of nonsense had helped this other sort of opposition to science, which he recognized -- perhaps from the very smell of this bullying room -- as altogether antithetical to human values. He'd gone badly wrong if Franklin could say, even as a sour joke, that they were both on the same side.

  His courage came back. He got up. "You're right. I'm out of date! I'm a flop! Okay, I resign from the Institute. I'll hand in my notice right away."

  The other man permitted himself one blink. "Sit down, Bush, I haven't finished yet. You are out of date as you say. Under the present system of employment, and for the duration of the emergency -- I suppose you have grasped there is an emergency?. -- no man can leave his job."

  " I could leave. I'd just refuse to mind-travel!"

  "Then you would be imprisoned, or perhaps worse. Sit down, or shall I call some of our new staff? Better! Look, Bush, I'll give it to you straight -- the economy is being wrecked because people are all mind-traveling, going by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands! They're getting hold of bootleg CSD; it comes in from abroad. They're disaffected elements, and they represent a threat to the regime -- to you and me, Bush. We want men to go back there in mind and check on what's happening, trained men. You'd do a good job there with your talents -- and it is a good job, well-paid, too -- the General sees to that. A month's intensive training and we are going to send you back with proper status, provided you're sensible."

  Trying to sort through what the man said, Bush asked, "Sensible? How do you mean, sensible?"

  "Useful. A functioning part of the community. You've got to give up this idea of chasing your own personality down the ages."

  When he had let that sink in, Franklin added, "Forget all that business about wanting to be an artist. That's all finished, washed up! There's no market or opportunity for works of art any more, and anyhow, you've lost the knack now, haven't you? Borrow proved that to you, surely!"

  Bush bowed his head. Then he forced his eyes to meet the slippery ones behind the little lenses watching him from the other side of the table.

  "Okay," he managed to say. It was a complete submission to Franklin's argument, an acceptance of everything he had said, an admission that he was useless in any role but that of spy or snoop or informer, or whatever they would call it: but even as he delivered himself over to what he recognized instinctively as the enemy, he was born anew in courage and determination, for he saw that his one chance as an artist was to move again as a mind-traveler -- saw, moreover, that he was less an artist than a mind-traveler, the first of a new breed whose entire metier was mind-travel, that he would rather die than lose this weird liberty of the mind; and as a corollary to that discovery, he saw that by understanding his personality on this new basis he might eventually come to deliver a new form of art expressing the changed world-view, the new and schizophrenic Zeitgeist.

  Just momentarily, as he glared at Franklin, great joy broke upon Bush; he saw he still had the chance to speak to the world (or the few) of his vision, his unique vision; and then he thought how insignificant he would make the mock-ups of Roger Borrow look; and by that petty step, he came back to reality and the hum of the recorder and Franklin's nose and spectacles.

  It was Franklin's turn to rise. "If you wait downstairs, they will bring your personal belongings down to you."

  "And my pay?"

  "And your pay. Some of it. The rest will be issued as post-emergency credits. You can go home then. The next course starts Monday; you're on leave till then -- don't do anything silly, of course. A truck will pick you up Monday morning early. Be ready! Understood?"

  Malice made Bush say, "Well, it's been nice seeing you again, Franklin. And what does Dr. Wenlock think to all the changes?"

  Franklin gave one of his blinks. "You've been away too long, Bush. Wenlock went out of his mind some while ago. To tell you the truth, he's in a mental institution."

  Chapter 6

  THE CLOCK ANALOGY

  It was beginning to rain as he walked past the carious tree stumps and the wall by which rapist and raped had lain together; he climbed the steps to find his father had locked the door. Only after much ringing and knocking and shouting through the letter box did he persuade his father to come down and open up.

  His father had absorbed most of the rest of the whisky. With Bush's back pay, they bought more that evening, and were drunk that night and the next day. The drunkenness was a reliable substitute for the friendship they could not quite establish. It also helped to blot out the terror in Bush's mind.

  On the next day, the Thursday, James Bush took his son to inspect his mother's grave. They were both sober and heavy then, needing a dose of melancholy. The cemetery was ancient and abandoned, pitched on such a steep and windy hill that grass would grow only on one side of the mounds. It seemed an uncharacteristic place for Elizabeth Lavinia, Beloved Wife of James Bush, to lie. Bush wondered for the first time how she had felt indoors that long day when he was locked out in the garden. Now she was locked out for good, her soul cast onto a steeper, longer beach than any known to Earth's history.

  "Her parents were Catholic. She gave up all belief at the age of six."

  "Six?" It seemed a curious time to give up any belief; his father might as welt have said "six in the evening."

  "Something happened to her when she was six that convinced her there was no God. She'd never tell me what it was."

  Bush said nothing. His father had kept off the subject of religion since he had returned from the interview with Franklin. Now he teetered on the brink again; the moment was abominably favorable. Bush began to whistle irritatingly under his breath to counteract his father's advantage. Even the thought of religion irritated him.

  He did not believe the story about his mother's loss of faith, or whatever it had been, at the age of six. Had such an event occurred, he would often have heard about it from both his parents, who were not ones to tuck away their woes.

  "Better be getting back then, Dad, I suppose." He shuffled his feet. James Bush did not move. He stood looking down at his wife's grave, absently scratching one buttock. Observing him, Bush saw his father put on one of his sanctimonious expressions, which was followed by something perhaps more sincere, perhaps a general empty feeling of puzzlement about what he and Ted and the rest of mankind and the whole writhing bundle of animate things were supposed to be doing with life anyway. Bush found that more alarming than the sanctimonious expression; he was aware enough of where his own enervating self-questioning came from. He hoped his father's years of flirtation with belief were dead and buried;
resurrection now would come inconveniently.

  "Looks like rain."

  "She just didn't know where she stood with God. But she wanted to be buried here. 'Our reasons live their own existences,' as the poet Skellett puts it."

  "Can we get a bus back?"

  "Yes. You'd be surprised -- you can't get a headstone for love or money, nowadays. See this one? I made it myself. How do you like it, Ted? Reinforced concrete, and I did the lettering before it was dry."

  "Very professional."

  "You don't think it should just have been 'E. Lavinia'? She never used the Elizabeth."

  "It's fine as it is, Dad."

  "I was pleased with it."

  "Yes."

  "Sorry you weren't here for it all. It didn't seem right without you.

  So her life ended, not just under that mound where the trickle of water down the hill had already commenced to erode one side of it, but in the exchange of trivialities between her husband and son. As Bush told himself that, he felt convinced that neither of them would come here again. There was a limit to the pointlessness humans could endure.

  "But isn't it all bloody pointless?" he said. "Who was she? I don't know, and I doubt whether you do. Was there a point to her life -- and if so, what? When she was six? If that tale's true, then the rest of her life was anti-climax, and she'd have done better to live her days backwards, with the cancer healing and she getting young again and eventually gaining her baby faith!"

  He checked himself on the verge of terror, and they began to move away from the grave.

  His father said, "We didn't ask that sort of question when we got married."

  "I'm sorry, Father. Let's go home. I didn't mean what I said -- you always had more sense than I did. It's just -- "

  "You were the point of her life, just as much as me."

  "That's all nonsense, unless you believe the whole purose of the human race is simply to breed another generaon and another . . ."

  His father began to walk rapidly downhill, towards the collapsing lych gate.

  It was a cold day. The dentist's house felt damp and they lunched poorly on fried potatoes and salt. Food was short and appallingly dear. In the afternoon, Bush read some of the old magazines down in the waiting room. A patient miraculously appeared, hugging a suppurating gum-boil in a scarf, and Bush scowled at the disturbance.

  Through the distorting pages of the magazines, he gained a picture of the factors that had gradually brought about the present situation. He had traveled carelessly through life, quarreling, love-making, talking, painting, without any stay to his appetites or reference to the currents that moved through his generation. He saw now that one of the occasional reactions against a high-powered industrial society had set in some years earlier, expressing itself as a fad for the gas-lit glories of the long-dead Victorian Age. Such reactions soon blew over when they had nothing to feed themselves on and a new fad came to distract attention. But in the twenty-seventies, the new thing was mind-travel, or its possibility, which stoked rather than damped the public nostalgia. In a surprisingly short time, certainly by the mid-eighties, the advanced civilizations of the world had reoriented themselves towards the past -- the far distant pre-historic past, since that was paradoxically the easiest to reach, the second law of thermodynamics not extending itself to cover the lower reaches of the human mind. A generation grew up which dedicated itself, its energies and abilities, to escaping from their own time. Every human activity was hit, from the tourist trade (Florida's sands, the Mediterranean beaches, were as deserted as in Victorian times) to the steel industry, from entertainment to philosophy.

  Amid the brewing of a world slump, only the Wenlock Institutes prospered. There one could enrol for moderately expensive courses to be taught the Wenlock discipline that unlocked the ancient bars of the mind. There one could purchase the moderately expensive drugs that helped one on one's way to the plesiosaur-haunted seas. And at the mind-stations, Wenlock-owned, one could keep a moderately expensive anchorage in the world of passing time while one disappeared -- forever, if the cash held out.

  Like other human systems, the Wenlock system, although as humanitarian as its founder, was fallible. In many countries, it was denounced as a dangerous monopoly; in others, it came at once under the direction of the government. And, of course, less well-meaning persons ferreted out the secrets of its disciplines and drugs, and put their own versions on the market. Many a refrigerator in many an empty apaitment held dishes of blood and tissue culture while the absconding family played hookey in Gondwanaland.

  Within the Wenlock empire, too, all was not well. An article in Dental World for January of the previous year entitled "The Discipline and Dental Pay" first brought the name of Norman Silverstone to Bush's attention, and then he came across it again in one or two of the other tattered magazines. As a commentator pointed out, the whole theory of mind-travel rested on few facts and a mass of supposition, rather as the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had, at the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Silverstone played Jung to Wenlock's Freud. Although nobody could deny the fact of mind-travel, there were several who denied that Wenlock's was the correct interpretation of what it was. Most powerful among these was Wenlock's one-time friend and associate, Silverstone. Silverstone maintained that the human mind could certainly be freed from the psychotic barrier behind which it had built its time-locked supremacy over the rest of the animal kingdom; but he claimed that there were yet more extraordinary powers to be released, and that the limitations of mind-travel, debarring most human travelers from most of historic time, were evidence of the fact that the discipline was but a fragment -- probably a distorted fragment -- of a greater whole.

  Silverstone was of a retiring disposition, a man who refused to be interviewed or photographed, and his occasional contributions to the dispute were so abstruse that it could hardly be said that he constituted a too-formidable opposition to Wenlock. Nevertheless, he and his followers provided an instrument that proved useful to governments wanting to have a hand in the administration of the local institutes and mind-stations.

  For obvious reasons, the supply of antique magazines stopped at the time of the revolution, but Bush thought he could see clearly enough the ensuing train of events. In most countries, the severe slump conditions would be accentuated by stock market crashes; unemployed men would march on the capital; the half-starved would riot; tougher governments would be called for, by haves and have-nots alike, although for different reasons. He sat in the untidy room, inventing discomforts.

  The unsettled conditions, would not last. The nations would recover, as they had recovered before. He already had a sign that General Bolt's regime might be of limited duration -- almost a mystical sign, although at the time it had gone almost unheeded. When he was standing in Room 3, locked in a sort of fit and waiting for the summons before Franklin, the Dark Woman had appeared. At the time, his mind had been too preoccupied for this visitant from the future to register fully with him. But he realized now that, shadowy as she was, she had glowed slightly, for all the world like a phantom in the mock-Victorian pageants his mother had taken him to as a boy. It could mean only one thing: that in her age, she was standing in the open; in other words, the Institute was demolished in her day; which argued that the General's protective wing would not always be there. Not always, but his phantom watcher might be five hundred years ahead, which was a long time. Well, there was hope. The most dreadful things passed.

  He looked round the waiting room. She was not with him at present. However faithful she was, she had to have some time off duty. Then he thought: Or is she a figment of my imagination, my anima? Aren't I radically unbalanced, by turns cowardly and over-bold, under-sexed and sex-obsessed? Maybe the Dark Woman is just a projection of my dissociated personality.

  But she was more than that. She was the future, for its own reasons keeping an eye on him. The future was everywhere in his age, as if they would dam his generatio
n in and repel its angry wave so that the flood of discontent flowed away from it, leaving it Olympian and safe! They had discovered a way of moving among the ages of man.

  Bush tried to speculate about the future, gave up, and slipped out of the house for a walk. He could not reason constructively since he had been placed under Franklin's training orders. His life was about to be turned upside down. Indeed, he hardly understood what was going on. In the nights he thought he heard his mother's voice.

  He tried to think about Ann, but she seemed as remote as the Devonian in which he had found her. He tried to think about his father, but there was nothing new to think. He thought about Mrs. Annivale, whom he had now met, but that made him uncomfortable. Mrs. Annivale was not half as horrible as he had pictured her. She was, he judged, no more than his own age and still had something of youth about her. She smiled pleasantly, was friendly and natural, seemed genuinely to like his father, and her mind did not seem too entirely banal. But she was no business of his.