The Dark Light Years

CHAPTER NINE

It was an American sage back in the nineteenth century who coined the slogan since used so successfully on the wrappers of every Happy Hypersleep tablet, “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” Thoreau certainly had a point when he observed that anxiety and even misery feed in the breast of those often most concerned with put-ting up a brave show of happiness; yet such is the constitution of human nature that the reverse holds equally true, and under conditions commonly regarded as most likely to create misery, a man may lead a life of quiet happiness.

The gates of St. Alban’s prison swung open and emitted the prison bus. It bowled out beneath the aluminum legend over the portal that read “To Understand Is To Forgive”, and headed for the region of the metropolis called The Gay Ghetto.

Or so the area was most generally known. Its inhabitants called it The Knackers, or Joburg, or Wonderland, or Sucker City, or indeed any less savory name that occurred to them. The area had been established by a government enlightened enough to realize that some men, while being far from criminal in intent, are incapable of living within the exacting framework of civilization; which is to say that they do not share the goals and incentives of the majority of their fellow beings; which is to say that they see no point in working from ten till four day in and day out for the privilege of maintaining a woman in wed-lock and x or n number of children. This body of men, which numbered geniuses and neurotics in equal proportions (frequently within the same anatomy), was allowed to settle within the Gay Ghetto, which — because it was unsupervised in any way by the forces of law — soon became the nesting ground also of criminals.

Within the ruinous square mile of this human game reserve, a unique society formed; it looked at the monstrous machinery of living that ground on beyond its walls with the same mixture of fear and moral disapproval with which the monstrous machinery regarded it.

The prison taxi halted at the end of a steep brick street. The two released prisoners, Rodney Walthamstone and his ex-cell mate, climbed out. At once the taxi swerved and drove away, its door automatically sliding shut as it went.

Walthamstone looked about him with unease.

The drearily respectable dolls’ houses on either side of the street hunched their thin shoulders behind dog-soiled railings, averting their gaze from the strip of waste that began where they left off.

Beyond the waste rose the wall of the Gay Ghetto. Some of the wall was wall; some of it was formed from little old houses into which concrete had been poured until the little old houses were solid.

“Is this it?” Walthamstone asked.

“This is it, Wal. This is freedom. We can live here with-out anybody mucking us about.”

The early sunshine, a snaggle-toothed old trickster, lay its transient gold and broken shadows across the uninviting flank of the Ghetto, of Joburg, of Paradise, of Bums’ Berg, of Queer Street, of Floppers.

Tid started towards it, saw that Walthamstone hesitated, grasped his hand, and pulled him along.

“I ought to write to my old Aunt Flo and Hank Quilter and tell ’em what I’m doing,” Walthamstone said. He stood between the old life and the new, naturally fearful. Although Tid was his own age, Tid was so much more sure of himself.

“You can think about that later,” Tid said.

“There was other blokes on the starship….”

“Like I tell you, Wal, only suckers allow themselves to enlist on spaceships. I got a cousin Jack, he signed on for Charon; he’s perched out on that miserable billiard ball, fighting Brazilians. Come on, Wal.”

The grubby hand tightened on the grubby wrist.

“Perhaps I’m being stupid. Perhaps I got all mixed up in jug,” Walthamstone said.

“That’s what jug is meant for.”

“My poor old aunt. She’s always been so kind to me.”

“Don’t make me weep. You know I’ll be kind to you too.”

Giving up the grueling battle to express himself, Walthamstone moved forward and was led like a lost soul towards the entrance to Avernus. But the ascent to this Avernus was not easy. No portals stood wide. They climbed over rubble and litter towards the solid houses.

One of the houses had a door which creaked open when Tid pulled it. A tongue of sunlight licked in with their untrusting glances. Within, the solid concrete had been chipped into a sort of chimney with steps in the side. Without another word to his friend, Tid began to climb; left with no option, Walthamstone followed. In the gloom on either side of him he saw tiny grottoes, some no bigger than open mouths; and there were cysts and bubbles; and clots and blemishes; all of which had formed in the liquid concrete when it had first been poured down through the rafters and engulfed the house.

The chimney brought them out to an upper window at the back. Tid gave a cheer and turned to help Walthamstone.

They squatted on the window-sill. The ground sloped down from the sill, where it had been piled as an embankment for no other apparent purpose than to grow as fine a crop of cow parsley, tall grass, and elder as you could wish to see.

This wilderness was divided by paths, some of which ran round the upper windows of the solid houses, some of which sloped down into the Ghetto. Already people stirred there, a child of seven ran naked, whooping from door-step to doorstep with a newspaper hat on its head. Ancient facades grew down into the earth, tatty and grand with a patina of old dirt and new sun.

“Me dear old shanty town!” Tid cried. He ran down one of the tracks, a foam of flower about his knees.

Hesitating only a moment, Walthamstone ran down after his lover.

Bruce Ainson assumed his coat with a fine air of desperation, while Enid stood at the other end of the hall, watching him with her hands clasped. He wanted her to start to speak, so that he could say, “Don’t say anything!”, but she had nothing else to say. He looked sideways at her, and a shaft of compassion pierced through his self-concern.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

She smiled, made a gesture. He closed the door and was gone.

Outside, he paid ten tubbies into the corner sinker and rose to the local traffic level. Abstractedly, he climbed into a moving chair that skied him up to the non-stop level and racked itself on to one of the robot monobuses. As he sped towards distant London, Bruce dwelt on the scene he had just made with Enid after the news in the paper hit him.

Yes, he had behaved badly. He had behaved badly because he did not, in such a crisis, see the point of behaving well. One was as moral as one could be, as well-intentioned, as well-controlled, as intelligent, as innocent; and then the flood of days brought down with it (from some ghastly unseen headwaters, whence it had been travelling for unguessed time) some vile fetid thing that had to be faced and survived. Why should one behave other than badly before such beastliness?

Now the mood, the shaky exhilaration of the mood, was passing. He had shed it on Enid. He would have to behave well before Mihaly.

But did life have to be quite so vile a draught? Dimly, he recognized one of the drives that had carried him through the years of study necessary to gain him his Master Explorer’s certificate. He had hoped to find a world, hiding beyond reach of sight of Earth in the dark light years, a world of beings for whom diurnal existence was not such an encumbrance to the spirit. He wanted to know how it was done.

Now it looked as if he’d never have the chance again.

Reaching the tremendous new Outflank Ring that circled high about outer London, Ainson changed on to a district level and headed for the quarter where Sir Mihaly Pasztor worked. Ten minutes later, he was stalling impatiently before the Director’s secretary.

“I doubt if he can see you this morning, Mr. Ainson, since you have no appointment.”

“He has to see me, my dear girl; will you please announce me?”

Pecking doubtfully at the nail of her little finger, the girl disappeared into the inner office. She emerged a minute later, standing aside without speaking to admit Ainson into Mihaly’s room. Ainson swept by her with irritation; that was a girl he had always been careful to smile and nod at; her answering show of friendliness had been nothing but pretence.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you when it’s obvious you are very busy,” he said to the Director. Mihaly did not immediately assure his old friend that it was perfectly all right. He maintained a steady pacing by the window and asked. “What brings you here, Bruce? How’s Enid?”

Ignoring the irrelevance of this last question, Ainson said, “I should think you might guess what has brought me here.”

“It would be better if you told me.”

Pulling a newspaper from his pocket, Ainson dropped it on Pasztor’s desk.

“You must have seen the paper. This confounded American ship, the Gansas, or whatever it’s called, leaves next week to look for the home planet of our ETA’s.”

“I hope they will have luck.”

“Don’t you realize the absolute disgrace of it? I have not been invited to join the expedition. Every day I expected a word from them. It hasn’t come. Surely there must be a mistake?”

“I think it is impossible there should be a mistake in such a matter, Bruce.”

“I see. Then it’s a public disgrace.” Ainson stood there looking at his friend. Or was he really a friend?

Was it not a gross misuse of the term, just because they had been acquainted for a number of years? He had admired the many sides of Pasztor’s character, had admired him for the success of his technidramas, had admired his leader-ship on the First Charon Expedition, had admired him for being a man of action.

Now he saw more deeply; he saw that this was merely a playboy of action, a dramatist’s idea of a man of action, an imitation that revealed its spuriousness at last by the calmness with which, from his safe seat at the Exozoo, he watched Ms friend’s discomfiture.

“Mihaly, although I am a year older than you, I am not yet ready to accept a safe seat back on Earth; I’m a man of action, and I’m still capable of action. I think I can say without false modesty that they still have need of men like me at the frontiers of the known universe. I was the man who discovered the ETA’s, and I haven’t for-gotten that, if others have. I should be on the Gansas when she goes into TP next week. You could still pull strings and get me on to her, if you wanted. I ask you — I beg you to do this for me, and swear I will never ask you another favor. I just cannot bear the disgrace of being passed over in a vital moment like this.”

Mihaly pulled a wry face, cupped an elbow and rubbed his chin.

“Would you care for a drink, Bruce?”

“Certainly not. Why do you always insist on offering me one when you know I don’t drink?”

“You must excuse me if I have a little one. It is not normally my habit at this early time of morning.” As he went over to a pair of small doors set in the wall, he said, “Perhaps you will feel better, or perhaps worse, if I tell you that you are not alone in your disgrace. Here at the Exozoo we have our disappointments. We have not made the progress in communication with these poor ETA’s that we had hoped to do.”

“I thought that one of them had suddenly started spouting English?”

“Spouting is right. A series of jumbled phrases with amazingly accurate imitations of the various voices that originally spoke them. I recognized my own voice quite clearly. Of course we have it all on tape. But, unfortunately, this development did not come soon enough to save the axe from falling. I have received word from the Minister for Extra-Terrestrial Affairs that all research with the ETA’s is to close down forthwith.”

Unwilling though he was to be diverted from his own concerns, Ainson was startled.

“By the Buzzardian universe! They can’t just close it down! This — we’ve got here the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of man. They — I don’t understand. They can’t close it down.”

Pasztor poured himself a small whisky and sipped it.

“Unfortunately, the Minister’s attitude is understand-able enough. I’m as shocked at this development as you are, Bruce, but I see how it comes about. It is not easy to make the general public or even a minister see that the business of understanding another race — or even deciding how its intelligence is to be measured beside ours — is not something that can be done in a couple of months. Let me put it bluntly, Bruce; you are thought to have been lax, and the suspicion has spread — just a feeling in the winds, no more — that we are similarly at fault. That feeling has made the minister’s job a little more easy, that is all.”

“But he cannot stop the work Bodley Temple and the others are doing.”

“I went to see him last evening. He has stopped it. This afternoon the ETA’s are being handed over to the Exobiology Department.”

“Exobiology! Why, Mihaly, why? There is a conspiracy!”

“With an optimism I personally regard as unfounded, the Minister reasons like this. Within a couple of months, the Gansas will have located more ETA’s — a whole planet full of them, in fact. Many of the basic questions, such as how far advanced the creatures are, will then be answered, and on the basis of those answers a new and much more effective attempt to communicate with them can be launched.”

A sort of shaking took Ainson’s body. This confirmed all he had ever suspected about the powers ranged against him. Blindly, he took a lighted mescahale from Pasztor and sucked its fragrance into his lungs. Slowly his vision cleared; he said, “Supposing all this were so; something more must lie behind the minister’s move.”

The Director helped himself to another drink.

“I inferred as much myself last evening. The minister gave me a reason which, like it or not, we must accept.”

“What was the reason?”

“The war. We are comfortable here, we are apt to forget this crippling war with Brazil that has dragged on for so long. Brazil have captured Square 503, and it looks as if our casualties have been higher than announced. What interests the government at present more than the possibility of talking with the ETA’s is the possibility that they do not experience pain. If there is some substance circulating in their arteries that confers complete analgesia, then the government want to know about it. It is obviously a potential war weapon.

“So, the official reasoning goes, we must find out how these beings tick. We must make the best use of them.”

Ainson rubbed his head. The war! More insanity! It had never entered his mind.

“I knew it would happen! I knew it would! So they are going to cut our two ETA’s up,” he said. His voice sounded like a creaking door.

“They are going to cut them up in the most refined way.

They are going to sink electrodes into their brains, to see if pain can be induced. They will try a little over-heating here, a little freezing there. In short, they will try to discover if the ETA’s freedom from pain really exists: and if it exists, whether it is engendered by a natural in-sensitivity or brought about by an anti-body. I have pro-tested against the whole business, but I might as well have kept quiet. I’m as upset as you are.”

Ainson clenched a fist and shook it vigorously close to his stomach.

“Lattimore is behind all this. I knew he was my enemy directly I saw him! You should never have let—”

“Oh don’t be foolish, Bruce! Lattimore has nothing whatever to do with it. Can’t you see this is the sort of bloody stupid thing that happens whenever something important is involved. It’s the people who have the power rather than the people who have the knowledge who get the ultimate say. Sometimes I really think mankind is a bit mad.”

“They’re all mad. Fancy not begging me to go on the Gansas! I discovered these creatures, I know them! The Gansas needs me! You must do what you can, Mihaly, for the sake of an old friend.”

Grimly, Pasztor shook his head.

“I can do nothing for you, I have explained why I my-self am temporarily not very much in favor. You must do what you can for yourself, as we all must. Besides, there is a war on.”

“Now you are using that same excuse! People have all been against me, always. My father was. So’s my wife, my son — now you. I thought better of you, Mihaly. It’s a public disgrace if I’m not on the Gansas when she hits vacuum, and I don’t know what I’ll do.”

Mihaly shifted uncomfortably, hugged his whisky glass and stared at the floor.

“You didn’t really expect better of me, Bruce. At heart, you know you never expect better of anybody.”

“I certainly shan’t in future. You don’t wonder a man grows bitter. My God, what really is there to live for!” He stood up, stubbing the end of his mescahale into a disposer. “I can see myself out,” he said. In a state approaching elevation, he left the room, forging past the covertly interested secretary. Of course he didn’t feel as badly as he led Mihaly, that trumped up little Hungarian, to believe; it would do the fellow good to see that some people had real sufferings, and weren’t just poseurs.

He fell back on an earlier track of thought. You didn’t go through the business of searching for new planets — with all the sweat and sacrifice that that entailed — merely because you hoped some day to find a race of beings to whom life was not just a burden for anyone with any sort of sensitivity. No, there was another side to that coin! You went because life on Earth was such hell, because, to be quite precise, living with other human beings was such a messy job.

Not that it was so wonderful on board ship — that bastard Bargerone, he was to blame for all this trouble — but at least on a ship everyone had his position, his station, and there were rules to keep him to it, and punish him if he did not keep to it. Perhaps that was the secret of the exploring spirit. Yes, perhaps that had always been the knowledge in the hearts of the other great explorers! Taxing though the unknown realms were, they held no dangers like those that lurked in the breast of friends and family.

Better the devils you don’t know, than those that know you!

He headed for home in fine angry contentment. Hadn’t he always thought that things would turn out like this!

When the Master Explorer had left his office, Sir Mihaly Pasztor drained his glass, set it down, and walked heavily over to the door of his small adjourning room. He opened it. A young man sat in the large cupped hand of a chair, smoking a mescahale as if he would eat it. He was of willowy build, with a neat beard that made him look older than his eighteen years. His usually intelligent face, as he turned it now in a mute question towards Mihaly, was merely heavy and glum.

“Your father has gone, Aylmer.” Mihaly said. “I recognized his voice. He sounded all overwrought as usual.” They moved back into the office.

Aylmer slipped his mescahale into the disposer on the desk and asked. “What was he after? Anything to do with me?”

“Not really. He wanted me to get him aboard the Gansas.”

Their eyes met. The young sullen face began to smile. Together, they burst into laughter.

“Like son, like father! You didn’t tell him, I hope, that I had come with an exactly similar request?”

“Of course not. He had enough to be unhappy about for one day.” As he spoke, Mihaly rummaged in his desk. “Now don’t be offended if I push you off fast, young man, but I have a lot of work to do. You are sure that you still want to join the Exploration Corps?”

“You know I do. Uncle Mihaly. I feel I cannot stay on Earth any more. My parents have made that impossible for me, at least for the present. I want to get out into space, away.”

Mihaly nodded sympathetically. He’d heard the same sentiments so often, and never discouraged them, if only because he once thought that way himself. When you were young you never realized that there was no “away”, only — even in the most distant galaxy — endless locations haunted by the self. He laid out some documents on the top of the desk.

“These are the various papers you will need. A friend of mine, Bryant Lattimore of the USGN Flight Advice, has explained things to David Pestalozzi, who will captain the Gansas on this run. Because your father is well known, it has been thought wiser to have you ship under an assumed name. Accordingly, you will be known as Samuel Melmoth. I hope you won’t mind that?”

“Why should I mind? I’m very grateful for all you have done, and I have no particular fondness for my own name.”

He clenched his fists above his head and beamed with triumph.

How easy it was to be excited when you were young, Mihaly thought. How hard for real friendship to spring up between two different generations — one could communicate, but it was often like two different species signaling to each other across a gulf.

“What happened to that girl you were mixed up with?” he asked.

“Oh, her!” The sour look returned for a moment. “She was a dead loss.”

“I hope you’ll forgive my curiosity, Aylmer, but was she not the cause of your being turned out of your father’s house? What did the two of you do that your father regarded as so unforgiveable?”

Aylmer looked restless.

“Come, you can tell me, surely.” Mihaly said, with impatience. “I am a broadminded man, a man of the world, nothing like your father.”

Aylmer smiled. “That’s funny, I always thought that in many ways you and father were rather alike. For instance, you have this background of space travel; and then neither of you likes the hygienic synthetic foods and you still eat old-fashioned foods, such as — well, bits of animal cooked.” He made a gesture of disgust and said, “But if it satisfies your curiosity, you may as well know that father came in unexpectedly one night on his last leave when I had my girl on my bed. I was kissing her between the thighs when he opened the door. The sight nearly drove him off his nut! Does it shock you too?”

Looking down at his desk, Mihaly shook his head and said, “My dear Aylmer. what shocks me is that I should appear to you like your father. This business of food — can’t you see how generation by generation we are getting farther and farther divorced from nature? This craving for synthetic food is one more instance of man’s denial of his animal nature. We are a mixture of animal and spirit, and to deny one side of our nature is to impoverish the other.”

“The Stone Age men used the same argument, I dare-say, to whoever started cooking their food. But we live in the Buzzardian universe now, and must think accordingly. You must see, Uncle, that we’ve come too far for us to be able to argue any longer about what is ‘natural’ and what isn’t.”

“Oh? Why then are you disgusted about my eating ‘bits of animal’?”

“Because that is inherently… well, it’s just disgusting.”

“You’d better go, Aylmer, I have the business of handing over my two aliens to the vivisectors. I wish you well.”

“Cheer up, Uncle, we’ll be bringing you lots more to experiment on!” And with that thoughtless word of encouragement, Aylmer Ainson was stuffing the documents into his pocket, waving, leaving.