The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ signal follows wherever you go. But by entering a recess which led to an unused room, opening the door slightly and crouching in the doorway, Harley found that the faulty landing light dimmed off and left him in the dark.

      He was neither happy nor comfortable. His brain seethed in a conflict he hardly understood. He was alarmed to think he had broken the rules, and frightened of the creaking darkness about him. But the suspense did not last for long.

      The corridor light came back on. Jagger was leaving his bedroom, taking no precaution to be silent. The door swung loudly shut behind him. Harley caught a glimpse of his face before he turned and made for the stairs; he looked noncommittal, but serene – like a man going off duty. He went downstairs in bouncy, jaunty fashion.

      Jagger should have been in bed asleep. A law of nature had been defied.

      Unhesitatingly, Harley followed. He had been prepared for something and something had happened, but his flesh crawled with fright. The light-headed notion came to him that he might disintegrate with fear. All the same, he kept doggedly on down the stairs, feet noiseless on the heavy carpet.

      Jagger had rounded a corner. He was whistling quietly as he went. Harley heard him unlock a door. That would be the store – no other doors were locked. The whistling faded.

      The store was open. No sound came from within. Cautiously, Harley peered inside. The far wall had swung open about a central pivot, revealing a passage beyond. For minutes Harley could not move, staring fixedly at this breach.

      Finally, and with a sense of suffocation, he entered the store. Jagger had gone through – there. Harley also went through. Somewhere he did not know, somewhere whose existence he had not guessed … Somewhere that wasn’t the house … The passage was short and had two doors, one at the end rather like a cage door (Harley did not recognise an elevator when he saw one), one in the side, narrow and with a window.

      This window was transparent. Harley looked through it and then fell back, choking. Dizziness swept in and shook him by the throat.

      Stars shone outside.

      With an effort, he mastered himself and made his way back upstairs, lurching against the banisters. They had all been living under a ghastly misapprehension …

      He barged into Calvin’s room and the light lit. A faint, sweet smell was in the air, and Calvin lay on his broad back, fast asleep.

      ‘Calvin! Wake up!’ Harley shouted.

      The sleeper never moved. Harley was suddenly aware of his own loneliness and the eerie feel of the great house about him. Bending over the bed, he shook Calvin violently by the shoulders and slapped his face.

      Calvin groaned and opened one eye.

      ‘Wake up, man,’ Harley said. ‘Something terrible’s going on here.’

      The other propped himself on one elbow, communicated fear rousing him thoroughly.

      ‘Jagger’s left the house,’ Harley told him. ‘There’s a way outside. We’re – we’ve got to find out what we are.’ His voice rose to an hysterical pitch. He was shaking Calvin again. ‘We must find out what’s wrong here. Either we are victims of some ghastly experiment – or we’re all monsters!’

      And as he spoke, before his staring eyes, beneath his clutching hands, Calvin began to wrinkle up and fold and blur, his eyes running together and his great torso contracting. Something else – something lively and alive – was forming in his place.

      Harley only stopped yelling when, having plunged downstairs, the sight of the stars through the small window steadied him. He had to get out, wherever ‘out’ was.

      He pulled the small door open and stood in fresh night air.

      Harley’s eye was not accustomed to judging distances. It took him some while to realise the nature of his surroundings, to realise that mountains stood distantly against the starlit sky, and that he himself stood on a platform twelve feet above the ground. Some distance away, lights gleamed, throwing bright rectangles onto an expanse of tarmac.

      There was a steel ladder at the edge of the platform. Biting his lip, Harley approached it and climbed clumsily down. He was shaking violently with cold and fear. When his feet touched solid ground, he began to run. Once he looked back; the house perched on its platform like a frog hunched on top of a rattrap.

      He stopped abruptly then, in almost dark. Abhorrence jerked up inside him like retching. The high, crackling stars and the pale serration of the mountains began to spin, and he clenched his fists to hold on to consciousness. That house, whatever it was, was the embodiment of all the coldness in his mind. Harley said to himself: ‘Whatever has been done to me, I’ve been cheated. Someone has robbed me of something so thoroughly I don’t even know what it is. It’s been a cheat, a cheat …’ And he choked on the idea of those years that had been pilfered from him. No thought: thought scorched the synapses and ran like acid through the brain. Action only! His leg muscles jerked into movement again.

      Buildings loomed about him. He simply ran for the nearest light and burst into the nearest door. Then he pulled up sharp, panting and blinking the harsh illumination out of his pupils.

      The walls of the room were covered with graphs and charts. In the centre of the room was a wide desk with vision-screen and loudspeaker on it. It was a businesslike room with overloaded ashtrays and a state of ordered untidiness. A thin man sat alertly at the desk; he had a thin mouth.

      Four other men stood in the room; all were armed, none seemed surprised to see him. The man at the desk wore a neat suit; the others were in uniform.

      Harley leaned on the doorjamb and sobbed. He could find no words to say.

      ‘It has taken you four years to get out of there,’ the thin man said. He had a thin voice.

      ‘Come and look at this,’ he said, indicating the screen before him. With an effort, Harley complied; his legs worked like rickety crutches.

      On the screen, clear and real, was Calvin’s bedroom. The outer wall gaped, and through it two uniformed men were dragging a strange creature, a wiry, mechanical-looking being that had once been called Calvin.

      ‘Calvin was a Nititian,’ Harley observed dully. He was conscious of a sort of stupid surprise at his own observation.

      The thin man nodded approvingly.

      ‘Enemy infiltrations constituted quite a threat,’ he said. ‘Nowhere on Earth was safe from them; they can kill a man, dispose of him, and turn into exact replicas of him. Makes things difficult … We lost a lot of state secrets that way. But Nititian ships have to land here to disembark the Non-Men and to pick them up again after their work is done. That is the weak link in their chain.

      ‘We interrupted one such shipload and bagged them singly after they had assumed human form. We subjected them to artificial amnesia and put small groups of them into different environments for study. This is the Army Institute for Investigation of Non-Men, by the way. We’ve learned a lot … quite enough to combat the menace … Your group, of course, was one such.’

      Harley asked in a gritty voice: ‘Why did you put me in with them?’

      The thin man rattled a ruler between his teeth before answering.

      ‘Each group СКАЧАТЬ