Ten Tales Tall and True

A New World

Millions of people lived in rooms joined by long windowless corridors. The work which kept their world going (or seemed to, because they were taught that it did, and nobody can ever be taught the exact truth) their work was done on machines in the rooms where they lived, and the machines rewarded them by telling them how much they earned. Big earners could borrow money which got them better rooms. The machines, the money-lending and most of the rooms belonged to three or four organizations. There was also a government and a method of choosing it which allowed everyone, every five years, to press a button marked STAY or CHANGE. This kept or altered the faces of the politicians. The politicians paid themselves for governing, and also drew incomes from the organizations which owned everything, but governing and owning were regarded as separate activities, so the personal links between them were dismissed as coincidences or accepted as inevitable. Yet many folk — even big earners in comfortable rooms — felt enclosed without knowing exactly what enclosed them. When the government announced that it now governed a wholly new world many people were greatly excited, because their history associated new worlds with freedom and wide spaces.

I imagine a man, not young or especially talented, but intelligent and hopeful, who pays for the privilege of emigrating to the new world. This costs nearly all he has, but on the new world he can win back four times as much in a few years if he works extra hard. He goes to a room full of people like himself. Eventually a door slides open and they filter down a passage to the interior of their transport. It resembles a small cinema. The émigrés sit watching a screen on which appears deep blackness spotted with little lights, the universe they are told they are travelling through. One of the lights grows so big that it is recognizable as a blue and white cloud-swept globe whose surface is mainly sun-reflecting ocean, then all lights are extinguished and, without alarm, our man falls asleep. He has been told that a spell of unconsciousness will ease his arrival in the new world.

He wakens on his feet, facing a clerk across a counter. The clerk hands him a numbered disc, points to a corridor, and tells him to walk down it and wait outside a door with the same number. These instructions are easy to follow. Our man is so stupefied by his recent sleep that he walks a long way before remembering he is supposed to be in a new world. It may be a different world, for the corridor is narrower than the corridors he is used to, and coloured matt brown instead of shiny green, but it has the same lack of windows. The only new thing he notices is a strong smell of fresh paint.

He walks very far before finding the door. A man of his own sort sits on a bench in front of it staring morosely at the floor between his shoes. He does not look up when our man sits beside him. A long time passes. Our man grows impatient. The corridor is so narrow that his knees are not much more than a foot from the door he faces. There is nothing to look at but brown paintwork. At length he murmurs sarcastically, “So this is our new world.”

His neighbour glances at him briefly with quick little shake of the head. An equally long time passes before our man says, almost explosively, “They promised me more room! Where is it? Where is it?”

The door opens, an empty metal trolley is pushed obliquely through and smashes hard into our man’s legs. With a scream he staggers to his feet and hobbles backward away from the trolley, which is pushed by someone in a khaki dust-coat who is so big that his shoulders brush the walls on each side and also the ceiling: the low ceiling makes the trolley-pusher bend his head so far forward that our man, retreating sideways now and stammering words of pain and entreaty, stares up not at a face but at a bloated bald scalp. He cannot see if his pursuer is brutally herding him or merely pushing a trolley. In sheer panic our man is about to yell for help when a voice says, “What’s happening here? Leave the man alone Henry!” and his hand is seized in a comforting grip. The pain in his legs vanishes at once, or is forgotten.

His hand is held by another man of his own type, but a sympathetic and competent one who is leading him away from the trolley-man. Our man, not yet recovered from a brutal assault of a kind he has only experienced in childhood, is childishly grateful for the pressure of the friendly hand.

“I’m sure you were doing nothing wrong,” says the stranger pleasantly, “You were probably just complaining. Henry gets cross when he hears one of our sort complain. Class prejudice is the root of it. What were you complaining about? Lack of space, perhaps?”

Our man looks into the friendly, guileless face beside him and, after a moment, nods: which may be the worst mistake of his life, but for a while he does not notice this. The comforting handclasp, the increasing distance from Henry who falls farther behind with each brisk step they take, is accompanied by a feeling that the corridors are becoming spacious, the walls farther apart, the ceiling higher. His companion also seems larger and for a while this too is a comfort, a return to a time when he could be protected from bullies by bigger people who liked him. But he is shrinking, and the smaller he gets the more desperately he clutches the hand which is reducing his human stature. At last, when his arm is dragged so straight above his head that in another moment it will swing him clear of the floor, his companion releases him, smiles down at him, wags a kindly forefinger and says, “Now you have all the space you need. But remember, God is trapped in you! He will not let you rest until you amount to more than this.’

The stranger goes through a door, closing it carefully after him. Our man stares up at a knob which is now and forever out of his reach.