Walcot. Brian Aldiss

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      He indicated a wide hole in the rock. Cracks meandered in several directions from the crater, like tributaries running into the sea. The interior of the crater was more or less smooth, except where a portion had been cut away. A rusty pick lay beside the cut.

      ‘Get down in it, lad,’ he said.

      You did as you were bid, climbing into the rock. The lip of the crater came above your head, obscuring sight of anything beyond the crater but the blue sky. You recollected that experience much later in life. As you stared at the layered rock, Loftus explained what you were seeing. A thin broken dark band of what resembled rust separated two types of rock.

      ‘The burn marks where the asteroid struck.’ He squatted, so that his bare knees gleamed, to pick up a fragment and show it you. ‘We call this stuff breccia. A small asteroid came in from space and left this burn signature in the rocks. It struck about forty million years ago, long before France or mankind itself was thought of. See how the stratum above the burn is quite dark. Then comes lighter rock. There, fossils begin. Just a few. I’d guess this darker rock signifies at least five hundred thousand years of ocean which followed the asteroid strike.’

      He picked at it and laid a fragment in the palm of his left hand.

      ‘What are the fossils?’ you asked.

      ‘Nothing important. Squirrels. A thing like a present-day fox –’

      You listened to this matter-of-fact account, and all the while you were staring at the exposed rock face, the grits and stone of which Earth’s crust was composed, which would have meant nothing to ordinary people. Yet, given knowledge – the sort of knowledge you longed to acquire – a terrestrial drama lay before you. It was an enigma which, given knowledge, could meet with understanding. This was an explanation for the terrible catastrophe, the sudden destruction, which had puzzled Hugh Miller. A key turned in your mind.

      ‘It’s amazing, Sir,’ you said. ‘Everyone ought to know about this place!’

      ‘It’s not important,’ Mr Loftus said, indifferently. ‘It’s been examined and recorded. Hundreds of such impacts have been recorded all over the world. It goes to demonstrate what geologists already understand, that our planet, throughout the eons, has been constantly bombarded by comets, meteors, asteroids and assorted bits of rock.’

      You had never before heard anyone use the phrase ‘our planet’ for the Earth. It seemed to weaken you, to make your legs tremble.

      ‘All that time,’ you murmured.

      ‘From time immemorial up to the present day.’

      ‘But it is important, Sir,’ you insisted weakly.

      ‘No. Not in itself. It’s been recorded. Rock fragments have been analysed and their iridium content noted. It’s now an item in a ledger in the Paris Institute of Geology.’

      ‘Coo, I’d like to find something like this myself, Sir! What’s iridium?’

      Loftus went on to explain that the metal iridium was rare on the surface of the Earth, but abundant in the meteoritic dust arriving from space. You found it hard to tell from his attitude whether he believed you knew more of such matters than you did, or whether he thought you a complete ignoramus on whom further explanation was wasted.

      You were entirely taken up by this connection between ‘our planet’ and the objects which arrived from distant places beyond your most fervid imagining. You were seized by a glimpse of the solar system as a whole. A new light, you felt, was lit in your intellect.

      Yes, I think I did feel that.

      I’m telling you, you did.

       If only that light had not failed throughout many years of my life … Isn’t such knowledge, well, cleansing?

      In some cases, yes.

      Mr Loftus had pronounced the little crater to be without importance. But for you it was important; it set you on what was eventually to become your future career. You were not much interested in disinterring Roman villas; you wished to concentrate on the drama of battered ‘our planet’ itself, and of the creatures cast up on the beaches of existence upon it – for instance the creatures to be found in the old red sandstone.

      As Mr Loftus extended a hand to help you out of the dig, you stammered your gratitude to him for bringing you to this remote spot, which chthonic activity had raised high above the ancient sea bed.

      ‘You may care,’ said he, in his dry voice, ‘to remember the dictum of Goethe, who says, “Think in order to act, act in order to think.”’

      ‘Please, Sir, who is Goethe?’

      ‘Why, he is the great German thinker, boy. Johann Wolfgang Goethe.’

      Boy-like, as the two of you descended the hill, you again following the legs and the boots, you managed to assure yourself that you had discovered the importance of thought – of thinking about everything – long before this Goethe fellow came upon the scene.

      Also at your school was a cousin of yours, by name Thomas Sidney Wilberforce. You never knew him well and rarely associated with him. Something about him you found disturbing; boy-like, you did not attempt to discover what it was.

      Sidney was known to his class as ‘Sad Sid’. He had suffered much as you had done; whereas you had soon grown out of it, Sid never managed to do so. His parents, Jeremy and the skittish Flo, rather like your mother, had not wanted a son. Flo had ill-advisedly set her heart on a girl, a little girl she could dress in frilly petticoats and fancy dresses, to be an image of her own, younger self.

      Jeremy, gloomy by nature, became even gloomier at the sight of baby Sidney. He felt he had failed Flo. Indeed, his sense of failure had deepened during the war, when he had done nothing heroic, had never been in action. His war service had been spent on Salisbury Plain, organizing troop movements.

      Sidney soon became aware he was unwanted; he drank in that impression with his mother’s milk. He got up to mischief in order to draw attention to himself; the effect was merely to inspire further disapproval. In the market place one day, he happened to see a small girl in a pushchair, clutching a doll. Sidney snatched up the doll and ran off with it.

      Now began a painful performance where Sad Sid endeavoured to act the part of a little girl, pretending to make a fuss over the doll, which he christened Dribble. Flo and Jeremy, entirely without understanding, were disgusted by this display. Sidney hated the doll. Dribble became a symbol of his degradation. For that reason, he took it with him everywhere. When laid horizontally, Dribble uttered a faint cry and closed its staring blue eyes with a click.

      One day, you were invited over to play with Sidney. You did not wish to go, but Mary and Flo insisted you should be friends with Sid. You were baffled by Dribble. You would not hold it when Sid invited you to. Sidney dropped the doll on a hard floor. Dribble’s china head broke open. The crude mechanism operating the eyes was revealed.

      Sidney was appalled by what he had done. His face turned as pale as ashes. You stared down at the broken head in horror, thinking of your sister, Sonia. It was almost as if a murder had been committed: you asked to go home.

      There followed a row in the Wilberforce household, about which you heard only remotely. СКАЧАТЬ