The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ was evident that Erewhon had a rapid rotation speed. The monstrous black disc was already almost at zenith; surrounded by a halo of distorted starglow, it loured over the little ship like a milestone about to fall. Hesitantly, Sharn put up his hand to see if he could touch it.

      Malravin tugged at his arm.

      ‘There’s nothing there,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible. It’s a dream, a figment. It’s the sort of thing you see in a dream. And how do you feel now? Very light now, as in a dream! It’s just a nightmare, and you’ll –’

      ‘You’re talking bloody nonsense, Malravin. You’re trying to escape into madness if you pretend it isn’t there. You wait till it falls down and crushes us all flat into the rock – then you’ll see whether it’s a dream or not!’

      Malravin broke from him and ran to the air lock. He opened the door and climbed in, beckoning to Sharn. Sharn stood where he was, laughing. The other’s absurd notion, so obviously a product of fear, had set Sharn into a high good humour. He did – Malravin was right there – feel much lighter than he had done; it made him light-headed.

      ‘Challenge,’ he said. ‘Challenge and response. The whole history of life can be related in those terms. That must go into the book. Those that do not respond go to the wall.’

      ‘It’s some sort of a nightmare, Eddy! What is that thing up there? It’s no sun! Come in here, for God’s sake!’ Malravin called from the safety of the air lock.

      ‘You fool, this is no dream or I’d be a figment of it, and you know that’s nonsense. You’re losing your head, that’s all.’

      In his contempt for Malravin, he turned his back on the man, and began to stride over the plain. Each stride took him a long floating way. He switched off his intercom, and at once the fellow’s voice was cut out of existence. In the helmet fell a perfect peace.

      He found he was not afraid to look up at the lumbering beast in the sky.

      ‘Put anything into words and it loses that touch of tabu to which fear attaches. That thing is a thing overhead. It may be some sort of a physical body. It may be some sort of a whirlpool operating in space in a way we do not yet understand. It may be an effect in space itself, caused by the stresses in the heart of a nebula. There must be all sorts of unexpected pressures there. So I put the thing into words and it ceases to worry me.’

      He had got only to chapter four in the autobiography he was writing, but he saw that it would be necessary at some point – perhaps at the focal point of the book – to explain what prompted a man to go into deep space, and what sustained him when he got there. This experience on Erewhon was valuable, an intellectual experience as much as anything. It would be something to recall in the years to come – if that beast did not fall and squash him! It was leaping at him, directly overhead.

      Again he was down full length, yelling into the dead microphone. He was too light to nuzzle properly, heavily, deeply, into the ground, and he cried his dismay till the helmet rang with sound.

      He stopped the noise abruptly.

      ‘Got dizzy,’ he told himself. He shut his eyes, squeezing up his face to do so. ‘Don’t relax your control over yourself, Ed. Think of those fools in the ship, how they’d laugh. Remember nothing can hurt a man who has enough resilience.’ He opened his eyes. The next thing would be to get up. He switched on his helmet light

      The ground was moving beneath him. For a while he stared fascinated at it. A light dust of grit and sand crawled over the solid rock at an unhurried but steady pace. He put his metal claw into it, and it piled against the barrier like water against a dam. Must be quite a wind blowing, Sharn told himself. Looking along the ground, he saw the particles trundled slowly towards the west. The west was veiled in the cloud-like atmosphere; into it, the great grinding shape of Big Bertha was sinking at a noticeable rate.

      Now other fears overcame him. He saw Erewhon for what it was, a fragment of rock twirling over and over. He – the ship – the others – they clung to this bit of rock like flies, and – and – no, that was something he couldn’t face, not alone out here. Something else occurred to him. Planetoids as small as Erewhon did not possess atmospheres. So this atmosphere had been something else fairly recently; he saw it as an ice casing, embalming the rock. Suddenly, more than irrational fear made him want to run – there was a logical reason as well. He switched on his mike and began to shout as he stumbled back towards the ship: ‘I’m coming back, fellers, open up! Open up, I’m coming back!’

      Some of the drive casing was off. Malravin’s feet protruded from the cluttered cavity. He was in there with an arc lamp, still patiently working on the directional cyboscope.

      The other three sat round in bucket seats, talking. Sharn had changed his clothes, towelled himself down, and had a hot cup of Stimulous. Baron and the captain smoked mescahales.

      ‘We’ve established that Erewhon’s period of rotation is two hours, five minutes odd,’ Dominguey told Sharn. ‘That gives us about an hour of night when the ship is shielded from Big Bertha by the bulk of the planetoid. Sunset of the night after next will fall just before twenty hours, Galactic Mean. At twenty hours, all governmental ships keep open-listed for distress signals. Shielded from Bertha’s noise, we stand our best chance of contacting the Grandon and the Brinkdale then. There’s hope for us yet!’

      Sharn nodded, Baron said, ‘You’re too much the optimist, Billy. Nobody can ever get to rescue us.’ He spoke in an amused, confident tone.

      ‘How’s that again?’

      ‘I said nobody can ever reach us, man. Consider it like this, man. We left ordinary space behind when we started burying into the nebula to get here. This little spot involves a number of paradoxes, doesn’t it? I mean, we agree that there’s nowhere else like this place in the universe, don’t we?’

      ‘No we don’t,’ Dominguey said. ‘We agree that in less than eleven hundred years of galactic exploration we have covered only a small section of one arm of one galaxy. We don’t know enough as yet to be capable of labelling an unusual situation paradoxical. Though I’ll agree it’s a poor spot for a picnic. Now, you were saying?’

      ‘Don’t try and be funny, Billy. This is not the place for humour – not even graveyard humour.’ Baron smiled as if the remark had a significance only he knew. He gestured with one hand, gracefully. ‘We are in a place that cannot possibly exist. That monstrous thing up in space cannot be a sun or any known body, or we would have got a spectroscopic reading from it. It cannot be a dead sun, or we would not see it as we do. This planetoid cannot be a planetoid, for in reality it would be so near Bertha it would be swept into it by irresistible gravitational forces. You were right to call it Erewhon. That’s what it is – Nowhere.’

      Sharn spoke. ‘You’re playing with Malravin’s silly theory, Baron. You’re pretending we are in a nightmare. Let me assure you such assumptions are based entirely on withdrawal –’

      ‘I don’t want to hear!’ Baron said. The smile on his lips became gentler. ‘You wouldn’t understand, Sharn. You are so clever you prefer to tell me what I think rather than hear what I think. But I’m going to tell you what I think. I don’t think we are undergoing a nightmare. I think we are dead.’

      Sharn rose, and began pacing behind his seat.

      ‘Dominguey, you don’t think this?’

      ‘I don’t feel dead.’

      ‘Good. СКАЧАТЬ