The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ could you ask for? Personally, I asked for nothing more; I had had enough by the time I came across this situation for the fiftieth time. It was not boredom so much as bravery. The Denebians weren’t what they used to be. However mindless and merciless they got, I was no longer scared. I developed immunity. Yet, for all that, I liked things the way they were. The more unsociably those aliens behaved, the more I realized how superior we Earthmen were.

      Then things became less straightforward. I was rifling through Microscopic Sex Wonder during the boom year of 1951 when I realised that Deneb was no longer the same. They’d dared to alter the plot!

      This time, the aliens didn’t appear when the flag was hoisted. Everything was peaceful – too peaceful. Our three chums wandered among beautiful trees, or they found charming people like themselves but nicer, with sweet old mums sitting knitting on the porch, and Pa sucking a corn cob and spittin’ to avoid bunches of rosy-cheeked kids, or else they found nothing there at all except the waving grass.

      You remember what happened, don’t you? Those beautiful trees, that grand old granny, those cheeky kids, that expanse of nothing, that sneaky grass, was really our old Denebians in disguise. Yes, sir! Freud had hit SF by this date, and the old slobbering hordes were back in full force only nastier, because they could thought-wrap themselves as grannies or grass and get into the ship and cause chaos. That was a terrible era, and I don’t know how I survived it. Story after story, I had to face utter mind-wrenching terror.

      I grew to love it.

      Then they went and changed the plot again! I knew just how things were going and was all set to relax when the editors or whoever it is that insists on these things – for sure it’s not the writers – altered the orthodoxy.

      I can pinpoint the date exactly when I realized something had gone wrong. I had bought the Jannish – sorry, the January issue of The Monthly of Whimsey and Whammo-Science, 1960, and was leafing through this story by Piledriver Jones entitled ‘On Deneb Deep My Pleasure Stalks’. Funny, I thought, the title doesn’t sound right, they’ve started mucking around with the titles now, is nothing sacred? But since I wanted to find out if a pleasure stalk was what I thought it was (it wasn’t), I forced myself to read on.

      You can’t fail to recall the story, not only because it has since been anthologised fifty-two times and won a Hank, but because it started a new trend. This is the one where they arrive on Deneb IV all right, in this funny ship that rides solar winds, but some sort of bug gets them and they all grow extra limbs; the captain alone grows twelve big toes, fourteen left arms, a spare pair of buttocks, two girl’s knees, and a horse’s head. And then they sit around and talk philosophy, not minding at all, until in the end it turns out that back on Earth things are even worse because people are terribly short of horse’s heads and buttocks and knee caps and things.

      Let’s have no false modesty – I can adjust to anything. But it needs about twenty years to adjust to that sort of plot. And what happened? Already, already, they’ve altered the line again. That’s what I mean about change running hog wild.

      Just this year the new orthodoxy has set in. Look at this month’s crop of magazines – it’s not a very big crop these days, because people won’t read unless they know what to expect – look at Monolog, look at Off, look at Odious Fantasy and Lewd Worlds and Gallimaufry, and what do you find? Not a darned one of them has a story set on Deneb IV!

      Not a darned one of them has a story set on any alien planet! They’re all Earth stories, everyone, though Monolog has this nine-part serial set in England at the time of the Norman Conquest, with William the Conqueror finding cases of telepathy among the peasants. Otherwise, nothing! Russians, psi powers, medicine, psychology, sociology, politics, traffic problems, robots, nuclear wars, funny little tales about fellows meeting aliens and not realising it, oh yes, no shortage of all that sort of stuff, and, of course, plenty of drowned, crystallised, rainless, bug-ridden, childless, adultless, metal-less, doodless, witless worlds, all of them Earth. But not a single story set on another planet.

      I’d chuck in my hand. I would. I’d give up. I’d never bother to try and read another SF story in another magazine in my life. There just happens to be one small thing that gives me grounds for hope.

      Lewd Worlds has a little cameo, not more than a thousand words long, about this chap who seduces this girl and then creeps into his back yard and builds his own rocket ship. He has this secret perverted desire to reach the stars, see?

      It’s only a matter of sweating it out a few more years, boys. We’ll get back to Deneb one day. The times they are a-changing.

       The Impossible Smile

      I

      June 1st, 2020: Norwich, Capital of the British Republics. A sports car growled through the empty streets. Pouring rain was turning the evening green as the car ran slowly up the hill towards the barracks. Beside the driver a nervous man in a blue mac consulted his wrist watch every two seconds. He swallowed continually, peering out at the curtain of rain, muttering when the great barrack wall loomed into view.

      The barracks, after some hasty redecoration, had been converted into a palace fortress for Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader of the State. Behind the plaster of the newly decorated rooms, a man crouched. The room was a bathroom belonging to the Leader’s suite, and the man was

      armed.

      For forty-two hours the armed man had waited in his two-foot-wide hiding place. He had dozed without daring to sleep, afraid of breaking through the wafer of plaster before him. He had provisions, a luminous watch – and his gun. He heard someone enter the bathroom.

      Fixing his right eye to a hair-thin crack, he watched and waited. The man in the bathroom was out of his line of vision as yet; by the sound of it, he was undressing. Grinning his strange grin, the assassin twitched his leg muscles to exercise them. Soon, praise be, he’d need to move fast.

      The man in the bathroom went over to the shower, presenting his bare back to the plaster wall; as he turned on the shower, he presented his profile. This was it! For this second the forty-two hours had been endured.

      The assassin pushed aside the flimsy plaster and fired three times. Jim Bull, ex-spacehand, ex-firebrand, fell dead, head under the tepid spray. The water began to turn gravy-coloured as it drained away.

      Still clutching his gun, the killer slid sideways in his recess to an old lift shaft. He jumped twelve feet onto a carefully planted mattress, and was on the ground floor. He flung back the folding lift door whose rusty padlock had been previously attended to, and emerged into a stone corridor at the back of the barrack block.

      A soldier in shirt sleeves a few yards down the corridor turned and boggled as the killer flung open a window and jumped into the wet evening. Belatedly, the soldier called, ‘Hey!’

      The killer ran round a wash-house, cursing his cramped legs, skirted the deserted cookhouse, dodged the swill bins and doubled into the closed way leading to the gym. Two sergeants were approaching him.

      They stared in surprise. But the killer wore Army uniform with corporal’s stripes. He winked at them as he passed. The sergeants continued to walk slowly on.

      He bolted into the open again at the gym, turned left at the NAAFI, jumped the low hedge into the officers’ quarters and swerved behind the bike shed.

      Now he was in the small laundry square, the СКАЧАТЬ