The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ you’re useless. Too well-meaning. It’s weak to be well-intentioned. Why don’t I face up to how blackly corrupt the world is, and junk my pathetic thé dansant optimism? Why not just go and screw Selina, never mind her troubles, get some joy myself, which is what I really want to do, and to hell with Laura and the rest. As for Tess … it’s just my fool optimism makes me think she cared in the first place …’

      He went and sat down in his place, between d’Exiteuil and Vasili Rugorsky. The two men were laughing together. Rugorsky said, ‘Dr d’Exiteuil owes an apology to you, Thomas.’

      D’Exiteuil said, ‘You were right about the miraculous, in saying that it can happen. I believe you did observe a UFO earlier today.’

      He produced a copy of the local evening newspaper. It featured a photograph of rooftops and a blurred object in the sky. Black headlines proclaimed, ‘Flying Hardware over Ermalpa – Have they Come from Outer Space?’

      ‘You see,’ said d’Exiteuil, reading, ‘Hundreds of people leaving their offices and factories at midday saw bright objects in the sky over the centre of the city. An Alitalia DC-9 landing at the airport sighted a flight of three flying beneath the plane and heading along the coast in the direction of Palermo. The objects were capable of staying stationary and then of moving off at colossal speeds.

      ‘Some of the objects were cigar-shaped, others the more familiar saucer shape. There were similar previous sightings a month ago. The Air Force is correlating all reports and would be glad to receive any photographs of the flying hardware.’

      Squire stared at the print and the photograph in silence.

      ‘It’s a form of madness,’ Rugorsky said. ‘You see, these people are well-meaning, but they want to make a drama, like all under-developed people. One child’s balloon floating in the sky and they can feel free to imagine an air force of extra-terrestrials. Theatre rules them, not reasoning.’

      ‘But Squire saw one. You didn’t want a drama, did you, Tom? I don’t know, there were sightings over Paris recently. I begin to think there must be something in it after all. I mean, this has been going on for years …’

      ‘There 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 СКАЧАТЬ