Eighty Minute Hour. Brian Aldiss

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       VIII

      Smix-Smith was not so much a corporation, more a lay of wife, an executive wit had once remarked, referring to his uxorious boss. But humour was filed swiftly away when the boss was on the scene. Even when the boss’s dopple was on the scene.

      Attica Saigon Smix came out of Texmissions Bay at full tilt, caused by the incline of the ramp on winch his stretcher ran. The vehicle had its course prescribed. It moved through the mammoth building at close to the speed of sound, down corridors of widths scarcely greater than its own, now and again shuttling into elevator shafts and becoming its own cage. It ejected its human-type burden into a small but luxuriously appointed presidential anteroom to the World Executive Council Chamber, code name Beta Suite, on the walls of which hung, among other treasures, the only Tiepolo etching in the world to survive the war. It depicted the flight into Egypt, and was reputed to be more valuable than Egypt itself.

      As he climbed off the stretcher, Attica Saigon Smix was greeted by one of his secretaries for state, Chambers Technical Dictionary (for so this intellectual bonhommous kyllosic Christian member of the Kikuyu tribe had been christened). Chambers offered a potted version of recent events. Attica Saigon Smix read it through swiftly as he entered the council chamber.

      Ten members of the executive were present round the traditional table. He wondered if any of them had been through the same complicated transcendences to get here as he. Lights above their seats indicated whether they were their own embodiments or projects of some kind. Two members were companalogs, which C.C. found it convenient to have around. For the rest, all had been top-level members – until a few fleeting but crippled years ago – of various national governments. Ex-red Russian and Chinese sat down with ex-democratic Netherlanders, ex-fascist South Americans, and Americans like Dwight Castle.

      Just as they had once carved up their own states, these men now settled down amicably with their ex-enemies to carve up the earth, together with such portions of the solar system as could be appropriated, discovering with alacrity and pleasure how much they had in common with their opposite numbers.

      How H.G. Wells, Wendell Willkie, and other valiant dreamers of the World State would have cheered to see their vision made actual! At last, major ideological differences, the plague of the twentieth century, had been healed. ‘United World!’ was now slogan and actuality.

      Those few billions of human beings who objected to the idea for one reason or another were being eliminated as fast as the limited efficiency of the postwar machine allowed.

      As he settled into his seat at the head of the table, Attica Saigon Smix nodded to the committee. One curt nod. All-inclusive. Nevertheless, though all were included, some were more included than others – in particular, John Thunderbird Smith.

      John Thunderbird Smith was one of the companalogs, a particularly terrible-looking creature owing to the glittering spodumene substance in its ocular proprioceptors and a certain graininess in its overall composition. (It had been known, when debate was most furious, to become just slightly, nastily, translucent, as if in grisly warning of what might happen to the rest of them.)

      Taking the initiative immediately, Attica Saigon Smix said, ‘This is Full Emergency. Some of you are present here in person. Don’t let it occur again. Send dopples of some kind. You are not expendable.’ He wondered if any of them had found a bolt-hole as safe and undetectable as he and Loomis had done. ‘Let’s begin business.’

      Before the words had separated from the carbon dioxide in Smix’s mouth, Thunderbird Smith said, ‘We must not leave Beta Suite until we have decided how to program C.C. best to meet the crisis.’

      ‘Which crisis is that?’ Sun Hat Sent, the Chinese delegate, inquired.

      Briefly, with a human gesture of despair, Thunderbird Smith let his gaze rest in pleading on the oil portrait of Sir Noël Coward on the wall next to the Tiepolo.

      ‘The crisis, the new crisis we have code-named Operation Seventh Seal. You have summary sheets before you. They may be précised as follows, and I accept the deductions arrived at by C.C. in its AAA8334 circuits, the circuits dealing with malfunctions of the external world. During the War of Continuance, as most of us recall, certain thermonuclear components were employed in hand weapons upwards to full-scale multi-megaton aerial-descent devices. The most noteworthy of such devices delivered adjacent to this region was an old-fashioned but considerable device of a fission-fusion-fission type, targeted on the ground-area Iron Gates Dam, power-centre of the Yugoslav-Hungarian Dissident Powers.

      ‘That device was comparatively clean. Nevertheless, its fireball generated a temperature estimated at 500,500,000 degrees Celsius.

      ‘Later devices attained higher maxima, temperature-wise. The Operation Snowfire raids on Luna, in which the satellite was completely destructed, attained maxima somewhat in excess of one hundred times the Iron Gates device, being able to draw on a planetary core as an additional heat-boost.’

      ‘This is steam under the bridge – let’s get to the nitty-gritty, Smith,’ said Savro Palachinki, who had been old-fashioned enough to arrive in corpore sano.

      With another agonised glance at the features of the man who had provided inspiration for the nomenclature of the chambers they were in, Thunderbird Smith continued, ‘This background is an integral part of the Seventh Seal emergency. In brief, improved devices developed towards war-end attained temperatures and pressures in excess of a thousand times those found at the heart of the sun. We are still living with – and in some unhappy cases dying with – the after-effects of these remarkable scientific achievements.’

      The one woman at the table, Sue Fox, said, ‘At the risk of interrupting, Mr Thunderbird Smith, we should consider these aspects of the victorious peace as no longer worth discussion. After all, the cease-fire was signed over five years ago. As I have explained before, the radio-turbulences of spaceflight, the continued escalation of world temperature norms, the electrical storms, and of course the soaring cancer-death rate – in which we all take such a sympathetic interest – these after-effects of war, vexing though they may be, would nevertheless have manifested themselves, even if perhaps less dramatically, in the ordinary course of progress, war or no war. And we should therefore cease to keep harping on them!’

      ‘Sue’s right,’ Dwight Castle declared. It was the only thing he said all meeting.

      Attica Saigon Smix saw that it was time he took over. By diving in before the woman stopped talking, he was on launch before Thunderbird Smith, who, being machine and therefore not quite human, remained silent.

      ‘We have harped on these things, these malfunctions of our biosphere, simply because they are now part of existence. Now we have to deal with a malfunction of one section of the environment about which we know remarkably little, whose functionings we have hitherto been privileged to take for granted: time. Time itself. The orderly function of time, just like the orderly function of space, has become at least partially inoperative through what you, Mrs Fox, chose to call “the ordinary course of progress”.’

      ‘C.C. is already working on the formulae of space-time displacement,’ Thunderbird Smith said. ‘Unfortunately, figures are scarce as yet. Positive proof of time-malfunction was provided by the disappearance of a spy-bell under observation near Jupiter in Code Area Conquest, its exact coordinates being known. Our reasons for believing that the spy-bell lapsed with the space surrounding it into СКАЧАТЬ