Authors: Brian Aldiss
“Thank God for chillies,” Dyson said. “They could put a bit of fire into sawdust. I’ve often wondered if chillies aren’t the things the scientists are really looking for in all their megabuck’s worth of research into a way of restoring our poor old shattered genes.”
“Could be,” Timberlane assented. “Bet you they invent synthetic chillies first.”
He got to bed after a final nightcap and fell asleep at once. When he woke next morning, he phoned the police station straightaway, but they had nothing new to offer him. Moodily, he washed and dressed for breakfast, and went down the hall to collect his mail from the mail slot.
A hand-delivered letter awaited him in the rack. He tore it open to find a sheet of paper bearing the words:
“If you want your girl back, take a look in God’s Sufferance Press. Go alone, for her sake. Then call off the cops.”
Suddenly, he wanted no breakfast. He almost ran to the hall phone booth and thumbed through the appropriate volume of the phone directory. There it was, under an old-style non-vision number: God’s Sufferance Press, and its address. Should he ring first or go straight around? He hated the feeling of indecision that flooded him. He dialled and got the disconnected tone.
Hurrying back to his room, he wrote a hasty note to Pilbeam, giving the address to which he was going, and left it on the pillow of his unmade bunk. He pocketed his revolver.
He walked down to the end of the street, picked up a taxi from the regular rank, and told the driver to take it as fast as he could. Once over the Anacostia Bridge, they hit tight traffic as the capital moved in to do its day’s work. Even swamped as it was by wartime congestion, Washington kept its beauty; as they filtered past the Capitol, the sward about it now peppered with emergency office buildings, and swung westward along Pennsylvania Avenue, the white stone caught a flush from the clear sky. The permanence and proportion of the buildings gave Timberlane a little reassurance.
Later, as they headed north, the impression of dignity and justice was broken. Here the unsettlement of the times found expression. Name and sign altering was in full swing. Property changed hands rapidly; office furniture vans and military lorries delivered or removed furniture. And there were other buildings standing unaccountably silent and empty. Sometimes a whole street seemed deserted, as if its inhabitants had fled from a plague. In one such street, Timberlane noticed, stood the travel offices of overseas airlines and the tourist bureaux of Denmark, Finland, Turkey. The shutters were up; private travel had closed down for the duration, and the big airliners were under United Nations’ charge, flying medical aid to war victims.
Some districts showed evidence of suitcase damage, though an attempt had been made to cover the desolation with large advertisement hoardings. Like all the great cities of the world, this one, behind its gay smile, revealed the rotting cavities that nobody was able to fill.
“Here’s your destination, bud, but it don’t look like anybody’s at home,” the taxi driver said. “Do you want me to wait around?”
“No, thank you.” He paid the man, who saluted and drove off.
The home of the God’s Sufferance Press was a drably pretentious five-storey building dating from the turn of the previous century. For-sale notices were plastered over its windows. The iron folding gates giving access to the main swing door were secured in place with a strong chain and padlock. By the name plates on the porch, Timberlane saw how the Press had occupied itself. It was mainly a religious publisher catering to children, issuing such periodicals as
The Children’s Sunday Magazine, The Boys’ Bugle, Girls’ Guidance,
more popular lines such as
Bible Thrills, Gospel Thrills, Holy Adventures,
and the educational line,
Sufferance Readers.
A torn bill slid across the porch and wrapped itself around Timberlane’s leg. He turned away. On the opposite side of the road a large apartment house rose. He surveyed the windows, trying to see if anyone was watching him. As he stood there, several people hurried by without looking at him.
There was a side alley flanked by a high wall. He went down it, treading through rubbish. He slid one hand to his revolver, and held it ready for action in his pocket. With pleasure he felt a primitive ferocity grow in his chest; he wanted to smash somebody’s face in. The alley led to a waste lot at the back. In the middle distance, framed between two shoulders of wall, an old black man with round shoulders flew a kite, leaning dangerously back to watch its course over the rooftops.
Before Timberlane reached the lot, he came upon a side door into the Press. It had been broken open; two of the little squares of glass in its upper half were shattered, and it stood ajar. He paused against the wall, remembered procedure for army house-to-house fighting, kicked the door open, and ran through it for cover.
In the gloom, he peered cautiously about. Not a movement, or a whisper of movement. Silence. The Big Accident had decimated the rat population. It had been almost as hard on cats, and human hunger for meat had probably accounted for most of the rest of the feline population; so that if rats came back, they would be more difficult than ever to check. But as yet this gaunt building obviously needed no cat.
He was in a broken-down store. An ancient raincoat on a peg spoke mutely of desertion. Piles of children’s religious reading stood about gathering dust, their potential purchasers either dead or forever unborn and unconceived. Only the footsteps across the floor to an inner passage were new.
He followed the prints across the room, into the passage, and along it to the main hall, conscious of the sound of his own footsteps. Above grimy swing doors, through which dim figures could be seen passing in the street, was a bust and an inscription in marble: “Suffer the Little Children and Let Them Come to Me.”
“They suffered all right,” Timberlane said to himself.
He started a search downstairs, growing less cautious as he went along. Stagnation lay here like a malediction. Standing under the blind eyes of the founder, he looked up the stairs.
“I’m here, you bastards. Where are you?” he shouted. “What have you done with Martha?” The noise of his own voice shocked him. He stood frozen as it echoed up the elevator shaft into the regions above. Then he took the steps two at a time, gun out before him, with the safety catch off.
At the top he paused. Still the silence. He walked reverberatingly down the corridor and threw open a door. It slammed back on its hinges, knocking over an ancient blackboard and easel. This was some kind of editorial room, by the look of it. He stared out of the window down onto the waste lot; he looked for the old Negro flying a kite, recalling him almost as one recalls a friend. The old man had gone, or could not be seen. Nobody could be seen, not a human, not a dog.
God, this is what it’s like to be left alone in the world, he subvocalized. And another thought followed: Better get used to it now, youngster; one day you may be left alone in the world.
He was not a particularly imaginative man. Although for almost all the years of his life he had been confronted with the knowledge of the extinction mankind had unleashed upon itself, the optimism of youth helped him to believe either that conditions would right themselves naturally (nature had recovered from so many outrages before) or that one of the lines of research being pursued in a score of countries would turn up a restorative (surely a multi-billion-dollar-a-year programme could not be entirely wasted). The level-headed pessimism of the DOUCH project had brought his wishful thinking to a standstill.
He saw in sober fact that his kind might have reached the end of its time. Year by year, as the living died, the empty rooms about him would multiply, like the cells of a giant hive that no bees visited, until they filled the world. The time would come when he would be a monster, alone in the rooms, in the tracks of his search, in the labyrinth of his hollow footsteps.
Over the room, as over the face of an inquisitor, was written his future. Its wound was inescapable, for he had found it for himself. He opened his mouth, to cry or suck in air, as though someone had flung him under a cascade. Only one thing, one person, could make that future tolerable.
He ran out into the corridor, flaying the echoes again.
“It’s me — Timberlane! Is anyone here, for God’s sake?”
And a voice near at hand called, “Algy, oh, Algy!”
She lay in a composing room among a litter of broken and discarded flongs. Like the rest of the building, it bore every sign of a long desertion. Her captors had tied her to the supports of a heavy metal bench on which lay discarded galleys of lead type, and she had been unable to break free. She estimated she had been lying there since midnight.
“You’re all right? Are you all right?” Timberlane kept asking, rubbing her bruised arms and legs after he had wrenched apart the plastic straps that bound her.
“I’m perfectly all right,” Martha said, beginning to weep. “He was quite a gentleman, he didn’t rape me! I suppose I am very lucky. He didn’t rape me.”
Timberlane put his arms around her. For minutes they crouched together on the littered floor, glad in the sensible warmth and solidity of each other’s bodies.
After a while, Martha was able to tell her story. The taxi driver who had whipped her away from the front of the Thesaurus Club had driven her only a few blocks into a private garage. She thought she might be able to identify the spot. She remembered that the garage had a motorboat stored overhead. She was frightened, and fought the taxi driver when he tried to pull her out of the car. Another man appeared, wearing a white handkerchief over his face. He carried a chloroform-impregnated pad. Between them, the men forced the pad over Martha’s nose and mouth, and she became unconscious.
She roused to find herself in another car, a larger one. She thought they were travelling through a suburb or semi-country; there were trees and low-lying houses flashing by outside, and another girl lying inertly by her side. Then a man in the front seat saw she was rousing, leaned over, and forced her to breathe more chloroform.
When Martha woke again, she was in a bedroom. She was sprawled over a bed, lying against the girl who had been in the car with her. They both roused and tried to pull themselves together. The room they were in was without windows; they thought it was a large room partitioned into two. A dark woman entered and led Martha into another room. She was brought before a man in a mask, and allowed to sit on a chair. The man told her that she was lucky to be chosen, and that there was no need to be frightened. His boss had fallen in love with her, and would treat her well if she would live with him; the flowers had been sent to her as a token of the honesty of his intentions. Angry and frightened though she was, Martha kept quiet at this point.
She had then been taken to the “boss,” in a third room. He wore a domino. His face was thin, and deficient in chin. His jaw looked grey in the bright light. He rose when Martha entered, and spoke in a gentle, husky voice. He told her he was rich and lonely, and needed her company as well as her body. She asked how many girls he required to overcome his loneliness; he said huffily that the other girl was for a friend of his. He and his friend were shy men, and had to resort to this method of introduction; he was not a criminal, and he had no intention of harming her.
Very well, Martha had said, let me go. She told him she was engaged to be married.
The man sat in a swivel chair behind a table. Chair and table stood on a dais. The man moved very little. He looked at her for a long while in silence, until she became very sick and scared.
What chiefly scared her was her belief that this man was in an obscure way scared of her, and would go to considerable lengths to alter this situation.
“You should not get married,” he said at last. “You can’t have babies. Women don’t have babies anymore, now that radiation sickness is so fashionable. Men used to hate those little bawling ugly brats so much, and now their secret dreams have been fulfilled, and women can be used for nice things. You and I could do nice things.
“You’re lovely, with those legs and breasts and eyes of yours. But you’re only flesh and blood, like me. A little thing like a scalpel could cut right into you and make you unfit for nice things. I often say to my friends, ‘Even the loveliest girl can’t stand up to a little scalpel.’ I’m sure you’d rather do nice things, a girl like you, eh?”
Martha repeated shakily that she was going to get married.
Again he sat in silence, not moving. When he spoke again it was with less interest, and on a different tack.
He said he liked her attractive foreign accent. He had a large bomb-proof shelter underground, stocked with a two-year supply of food and drink. He had a private plane. They could winter in Florida, if she would sign an agreement with him. They could do nice things.
She told him he had ugly thumbs and fingers. She would have nothing to do with anyone with hands like that.
He rang a bell. Two men ran in and seized Martha. They held Martha while the man in the domino came down off his dais and kissed her and ran his hands under her clothes and over her body. She struggled and kicked his ankle. His mouth trembled. She called him a coward. He ordered her taken out. The two men dragged her back into the bedroom and held her down on the bed, while the other girl cried in a corner. In outrage, Martha screamed as loudly as she could. The men put her out with another chloroformed pad.