The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
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saw that his own usefulness was almost at an end. One of them was going to die shortly, and Parrodyce looked the likelier candidate so far.
‘Well, I didn’t need much help from you after all,’ Rakister said, almost as if reading the other’s thoughts. ‘I was afraid we might have more than one dumb double-striper to cope with.’
They stood beside the big, lagged, oxygen pipes; four of them ran straight from darkness to darkness, in a tolerably wide tunnel stretching from outside the dome to the centre of the city. A notice on the wall proclaimed, ‘It is Dangerous to touch these Pipes unless Insulated Gloves are worn’. It was colder than a vault; their breath clouded and fell as rime on to the pipes.
‘There should be a lung-piper’s hut here,’ Rakister said. He took the torch and swung it round.
The ‘hut’ was a deep alcove a couple of yards down the tunnel. They switched on an electric light and went in. Hoses hung on the wall, tools were stacked in racks. There were also two space suits.
‘Get ’em on,’ Rakister said briefly.
The suits felt icy and were difficult to put on. They helped each other, trembling with cold. One of Parrodyce’s teeth began to ache.
‘We’ve got no time to lose,’ he said, and then realised it was something he was repeating over and over.
At last they were into the suits. With relief they switched on the heating circuits.
‘Don’t close your face-plate yet,’ Rakister said. ‘Then we can talk without using the intercom; someone else might be listening in over it. You go on first down the corridor; I’ll follow. Stop at the outer lock.’
Very nice, Parrodyce thought. And at the lock you can shoot me if you feel like it. Do you feel like it? I can’t tell. I can’t tell what anyone ever thinks, despite this freak gift I have. So I walk down this tunnel of darkness, round-shouldered, with a gun following. Perhaps someone more observant would know what Rakister felt like. He may have given himself away by some tiny item, just as Wyvern was betrayed by an impossible smile.
Just ahead of him in the long tunnel, the oxygen pipes were punctuated with taps worked by wheels. Hoses could be attached to these taps and the liquid syphoned off if a section of pipe had to be emptied for repairs. The taps pointed back down the tunnel the way they had come.
Parrodyce had no two thoughts about the matter.
Judging his distance, he flicked off the torch and ran to the nearest wheel. As he heaved it round, he heard Rakister call in astonishment. Then the liquid oxygen was jetting out; he could feel it thundering through the cock. And he was shouting, cheering, blaspheming.
He switched the tap off after a long minute and flashed his torch.
Quickly he slammed his face plate shut. The lenses of his spectacles had iced over, and he had to wait till the suit heater had coped with the trouble before he could see again. The liquid he had released was boiling, misting up into the corridor, multiplying, writhing, blue, beastly, raw: the stuff of life in killer mood. Half hidden in the vapour, a figure lay across the pipes, frozen there. Parrodyce hurried away from it, a little nauseated.
It was not far to the overhead airlock. He climbed the ladder and heaved himself in, closing the hatch behind him with relief.
Three minutes later he was stepping out of the side of the hangar on to the moon’s surface.
He had never been out alone. It was terrifying! He stood in the shadow of the dome and it was absolutely black. Parrodyce could not see the ground, the hangar or any particle of himself.
Some distance away – he could not tell how far – the world began, an intensely bright world with a biting background of peaks and stars that might have been only at arm’s length. And in the foreground of this chunk of world, a line of figures were making towards a tracked bus; they bore a coffin with them; Fezzi Forta’s boys were on their way.
Pulling himself together, Parrodyce forced himself to march across the black void to the light. He got to the vehicle as the last of the Turks was boarding. They hauled him up without question.
Gloating to himself, Parrodyce began to plan his next move. He had forgotten Wyvern; he was thinking of the telepathic girl.
VIII
‘To say it in a way you would understand it,’ Bert the Brain explained, ‘I was so surprised I was speechless. I have not been out of order at all. I have been out of action, voluntarily. The amount of knowledge you gave me to digest was more than the total volume I have received since I was started – not, I mean, your conscious knowledge, which was comparatively negligible, but the inherited and latent knowledge in you.’
‘I did not realise,’ Wyvern said, ‘that in that brief contact you had with me on the operating table you had learnt all you could.’
‘You had expected the process to be what you call painful,’ the brain answered. ‘I suppose the operation was brief, as you tell time; but once I had grasped one strand of the pattern I could predict and interpret the whole design. It is intensely interesting.’
Conversing with Bert was unlike ego-union. That process was always, basically, a clash of opposing forces, or a locking together of magnetic North and South. Bert had no character; his voice was thin water in the brain. Nothing was there of good or evil, personal ambition, altruism; he was intellect without will, potentiality without promise. There was no threat in him. He was power, but Wyvern was in command. Yet Wyvern was not satisfied.
‘Now that you have the power of ego-union with others,’ he asked, ‘could you do a sort of hook-up with everyone?’
‘Yes – through you. Only if you were in ego-union with them.’
Wyvern knew the machine would be reading the satisfaction his answer brought, and at once it added, ‘After that, I would have their pattern and could communicate with them on my own.’
‘Which is how you communicate with me now, although we are not joined by power cables?’
‘Precisely. I am supplying the stimulus, you supply the power.’ It was a remark Wyvern would soon ruefully recall.
He drifted in a limbo. It was only a moment since he had dissolved before H’s secretary’s eyes, but his time values had altered, together with all his other senses. His vision, for instance, was diffused throughout his body; he was seeing through his cell structure, and on all sides stretched a wall of glass marbles – or so it appeared. Actually, Bert told him, he was viewing the carefully stacked elements of his own body. Using the latent knowledge in Wyvern’s own mind, Bert had unbonded his biochemical position; he was now escaping from the secretary in a wafer of matter a fraction of a millimetre thick – but the endless array of marbles seemed not to move.
‘You can resume normal structure now,’ the machine advised.
‘How?’
‘I will guide.’
‘Where?’
‘I cannot say what the place is.’
‘How can you see it?’
‘Through your senses.’
‘Yet I cannot see it.’
‘You will learn.’
And resuming normal structure was easy. Yet it was difficult. Snapping the fingers is easy; yet a one-year-old babe cannot manage it.
Wyvern was in a blank little office which looked disused. He was starving.
‘This is only about fifty yards from where I found you,’ the wire voice in his head announced.
‘I’m starving!’ Wyvern cried.
He staggered over to the swivel chair and collapsed into it. He still wore the clothes he had