The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
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are sightings everywhere. It’s a cargo cult merely.’
‘I think it’s good publicity for the conference. I shall phone the newspaper. Excuse me.’
As d’Exiteuil left, Squire told the Russian, ‘I know I saw something. Since I don’t know what I saw, it belongs in the category of You-Foe. But now that I see this report in the newspaper I confess I find my belief weakening. Perhaps, as you say, it was a child’s balloon – first hanging motionless, then swirled away in an updraught.’
‘Notice that all photos of flying saucers show them about the same size, whatever the text claims – and blurred. The cameramen think these things are at infinity, and so they focus their cameras at infinity. Maybe the objects could be only fifty feet away, just above the rooftops. Then if they move on a wind gust at forty miles an hour, they appear to move four thousand miles an hour because the mind believes them not near but at infinity.’
‘Modern cameras focus automatically, Vasili … I was immediately convinced that I saw a You-Foe. I didn’t want to see one.’
‘No, you didn’t want to see one. But you were typical in interpreting what you saw as a part of high-technology. The power of the imagination is to create images, and even science progresses by images, images of what is possible. So, the Greeks thought that the heart was a fire, because they knew fire. The heart could not be visualized as a pump until the Renaissance, when pumps were invented.’
‘But there are flying saucer visions in the Bible, or what sound like visions. Ezekiel and all that.’
‘Hindsight, Tom. You must not believe anything but cause and effect. Always cause and effect. That belief supports all of science and our culture. I may piss on a fire to put it out, but I cannot light it that way.’
This response silenced Squire.
Many candidates were still dawdling at the entrance to the conference hall, as if reluctant to enter. Squire decided on a quick tour of the ground floor, hoping to catch sight of Ajdini. Instead, he was captured by d’Exiteuil, who came bustling cheerfully out of a telephone kiosk and put an arm about Squire’s shoulders.
‘A reporter from Oggi in Ermalpa is coming round to interview me. Perhaps we have a success on our hands after all. How are you enjoying the events, Tom? We have both been so busy that we have hardly made any conversation in two days. I must thank you for your contribution, by the way. And Geo Camaion is okay – don’t worry. Aren’t there some interesting people here?’
‘I wish there was more time for private talk, but one always feels that way at conferences. Rugorsky is an attractive character.’
D’Exiteuil squeezed him. ‘And I believe that Selina Ajdini has caught your eye. She certainly catches mine. Ah, Tom, if I were younger … While I am here, my dear Séverine is also at a conference on education in New Orleans. We are so often apart, and one does get lonely. It’s difficult to be human, eh? Our volume of proceedings will be important. How are you enjoying the standard of the papers? Krawstadt was fiery, yes?’
‘You know how difficult I am, Jacques – I believe that many papers would be better and clearer if all the Marxist jargon was dropped. The underlying assumptions that the Western world is about to collapse and a bloody good job if it does is malicious, treasonous …’
D’Exiteuil tut-tutted and shook his head decidedly.
‘You are not an academic, but you must understand that after all we must speak in a proper rigorous language; you even referred to that necessity in your speech. There’s nothing to fear except imprecision. Marxism is our analytical tool, a method of cognition. It’s a method, no more, designed for our scientific age. You understand that, I think.’
Squire looked disconcerted. ‘You must know a lot more about Marx than I do, Jacques. He bores me. But Marx would not have accepted what you say for one minute. “Method of cognition”? Karl Marx believed only in a crude dialectic which reinforced the inevitability of revolution. That’s what Marxism is really all about, isn’t it? The overthrow of the established order.’
‘Tut, that’s old-fashioned. That’s vulgar Marxism, such as you might find a British trade unionist spouting.’
‘Haven’t vulgar and academic Marxism, to use your terms, got that much in common, that they sanction anything in the way of aggression or sabotage or repression as long as it ruins society, so that some imaginary classless utopia, of which the ghastly living doppelganger is the Soviet Union, may rise from the ashes?’
‘You’ve been reading the Tory press, Tom. You don’t really think that the state of affairs in France or Britain is all that could be desired, do you?’
‘Of course I don’t. But with equal certainty, I can foresee the sort of blackguards who would grab power if our present social structures collapsed or were brought low. You don’t answer my question. You do work for revolution, don’t you?’
‘Well, capitalism is in decay, you have to face the fact.’ He laughed.
‘A definitive answer. That it’s a lie helps to show the weakness of your case. I might as well say that communism is dead in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Indeed, that’s a more accurate statement than yours, because communism is dead on its home ground. It has been proved not to work, and its shibboleths are kept going only by force, by the exertion of power by an entrenched gang of criminals.
‘Marx said that capitalism was dying over a century ago, and that bit of nonsense has been parroted ever since. He made a mistake, a big historical mistake, because what he observed was capitalism in a raw early state. Our societies have improved beyond recognition since then, and will improve faster if only we shrug off this dead preaching which impedes – it doesn’t hasten – social justice.
‘If the West collapsed, then we should have not the millennium, as you pretend, but a period in which freedom and justice go to the wall, as they have done in Russia, when the effectively aggressive bastards on the Left would smash up every virtue in the old order and anyone who stood for its values. Which does, incidentally, include all left-wing intellectuals like you.’
D’Exiteuil stood stock still in the middle of the corridor, folded his arms, stroked his beard.
‘Please don’t provoke me with such nonsense. From you of all people, such paranoia. I expect you to be more civilized. Why are you saying this?’
‘I’m not paranoid. I’m probably not particularly civilized either. But it doesn’t take a very wise man to see how the contagion spreads. Every strike, every failure in the economy, and you feel the more entitled to declare boldly that capitalism is done for. Every time you do so, claiming the backing of some sort of invalid “scientific” theory, you are assisting the destructive forces who foment trouble inside industries and inside the trade unions. That’s how your vulgar and your academic Marxists aid and abet each other.
‘You may not dream of revolution personally because I should think you have sense enough to value your skin, but whenever you mouth those ugly phrases you bring nearer the day when it is legal for a thug with an armband to kick you in the guts for as long as he wants.
‘If you like that sort of thing, okay, head for one of those countries where your catch-phrases are the going religion, but while you remain here have the decency to respect the civilized blessings, including the rule of law, however capricious, under which you are given the chance to enjoy your life.’
The Frenchman was rigid; his face had flushed a dull red.
‘You’re crazy, talking to me like this. Are you trying to attack me personally or the entire conference? Every point of view is welcome, yours or Cantania’s or Krawstadt’s, but we have to aim for some common critical language. It’s the diagnosis that has upset you … Hm … you really are scared beneath the surface. You must be symptomatic of the whole bourgeois world, already sweating at the collar because you know the day is coming.’
Squire grunted contemptuously. ‘The day is coming! Listen to your own phrases. “The day is