The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a narrow wooden gate in the high barracks wall. A sentry stood at the gate.

      The fugitive stopped, took aim and, as the sentry hastily raised his light machine-gun, fired. He was running again before the sentry hit the stones. Sounds of whistles far behind spurred him on.

      The wooden gate splintered and fell open, before he got to it. Outside on the hill track, the sports car stood. The driver, who had broken down the gate, was already jumping back into his seat. The nervous man in the mac held a back door open for the killer; directly he had scrambled in, the nervous man followed. The car was already on the move again.

      They bucked down the track at sixty, skirting the high walls of the barracks. They slowed to turn down a slope, slipping and crashing through wet bracken, and curved among sparse trees. In a clearing they accelerated again, licked past a ruined bandstand and onto a gravelled road.

      Rain was falling more heavily when, two minutes later, they swerved sharply left and climbed again. This track curved among pines and brought them suddenly into a chalk pit, once used as a small arms range.

      In the middle of the range, a light passenger type spaceship waited, its single port open.

      The killer broke from the car and ran across to the ship. He climbed in, ascending the narrow companionway. The pilot, swivelling in his seat, held a levelled revolver until he got a good look at the newcomer’s face; then he dropped it and turned to the controls.

      ‘Take off in one minute forty-five seconds,’ he said. ‘Strap yourself in quickly.’

      Stratton Hall was a big, eighteenth century building a few miles from Norwich. Across the weed-infested courtyard stood a small stable. A horse and rider approached it over the hummocky turf, moving quietly through the downpour. At the stable door, the rider dismounted and led Nicky into the dry. As he did so, he broke off the mental union with the animal; instantly, the wild, wordless chiaroscuros of his vision disappeared, and he was back in his own senses.

      The feeling of refreshment left Conrad Wyvern. At once, the memory of his sister’s death returned to him. He rubbed Nicky down less thoroughly than usual, watered him and turned to go.

      He had ridden bare-back from East Hingham, as always. As always, he had taken the overland route, avoiding roads, so that Nicky could go unshod. He himself went with no shoes or weapon, and a piece of rope securing his trousers. The Flyspies which covered the country were good at detecting metal, and Wyvern kept his journeys to East Hingham as secret as possible.

      It was eleven o’clock, Treble Summertime, as he peered out of the stable, and already growing dark. The rain fell steadily; the harvests would be ruined, turning sour on the stalk. Squinting up at the west gable of the house, Wyvern could see the Flyspy attached to the Hall resting in its recharge cradle, its double vane idle. Even as he looked, the rotors moved and it climbed pot-bellied out of its metal nest, circling the building like a tired barn-owl after mice.

      The Flyspies were one of the few new inventions of the ill-financed Republics. At that, thought Wyvern, they weren’t much good. Certainly, they detected any moving metal, but that was something easily circumvented, as he had proved, to his own satisfaction. Their television eye was poor – useless in this light – and he walked over to the rear of the Hall with no effort at concealment, although the machine hovered fairly near.

      He slipped quietly in and went up what had been the servants’ staircase to his own rooms to change his clothes. As he did so, he chewed over the evening’s events.

      The disused railway station at East Hingham had established itself as a Black Market. You could buy anything there from a box of safety matches (for ten shillings) to a ticket on a moon-bound ship (no upper price limit). Wyvern’s sister Lucie was one of the organisers. Surreptitiously, the place thrived; the Republic, desperately short of manpower after the Fourth War, left it unmolested.

      But when Wyvern had got there this evening, the station was a shambles.

      He found an old woman dying in the ticket office. As he gave her a drink of water, she rendered him a broken account of the raid.

      ‘They – Our Leader’s soldiers – drove down in trucks,’ she said. ‘They surrounded the place. Anyone who ran out got shot. Then they came in – very rough! Interrogated us – asked us all questions, you know. I was only after a blanket, if I could get one. I thought it might be cheaper at this time of year.’

      ‘What about Lucie?’

      ‘Your sister was rounded up with the other organisers, sir. They were cross-questioned too, and stood against the far wall. Later, they were hustled out, into a lorry, I think. But she passed a note to someone. It must have been for you.’

      ‘Who did she pass it to?’ Wyvern asked urgently.

      ‘A little more water, please. It was to … I can’t think … It was to Birdie Byers, who kept the post office – when there was a post. But I think he was shot. We was all shot, sir. Oh – if you’d seen … They weren’t meant to shoot. The officer called out to stop. But they were young chaps – crazy. Crazy! All crazy. I’ll never forget …’

      She interrupted herself with a burst of coughing, which turned to weeping. Five minutes later she was mercifully dead.

      Wyvern searched grimly for Byers, the old postmaster. He found him at last some yards down the railway line in the direction of Stratton. The old man lay dead, face down in a clump of docks. In his hand was clutched a note. It read: CON – THEY ARE AFTER TELEPATHS FOR BIG BERT. YOU MUST LEAVE. LOVE EVER, LUCE.

      Conrad crushed it, tears in his eyes, knowing he would never see his sister again.

      The message was fairly clear to him. Big Bert was Bert the Brain, the giant electronic computer situated in the British Republics Sector on the Moon. He could guess why Our Beloved Leader and his gang of thugs should want a telepath for it: he had heard the state secrets which turned into ugly public rumours …

      The message told Wyvern something else. It told him that his sister remembered he had the freak power. When they were small children together he had once revealed the secret to her. The indescribable blending of egos had terrified them both; Wyvern never repeated the experiment, and neither of them ever referred to it again. Yet she had not forgotten.

      And when Jim Bull’s Gestapo got to work on her – would she not, perhaps under narcotics, give up her secret? If she did so, Wyvern would be a doomed man.

      Lucie was right: he must go. But where? America, now more rigidly isolationist than ever before, licking its terrible internal wounds? Russia, where rumour said anarchy prevailed? The new state of Indasia, hostile to the rest of the world? Turkey, the crackpot state which had risen by virtue of the general collapse? The still-warring African republics?

      Wyvern toweled himself down, thinking hard. Telepaths were as rare as total eclipses; no doubt the State would like the aid of one. Wyvern had willingly revealed his wild talent to no human but Lucie. He kept it shut away in a tight compartment. For if he tried to ‘read people’s minds’ (as popular parlance inexactly put it), the people would be instantly as aware of his mental presence as if he were shouting. And although his power was of limited range, it flowed out in all directions, so that he was unable to confine it quietly to one desired receiver.

      The power had been erratic throughout childhood; with puberty it had come into real being. But Wyvern kept it locked away during the hopeless years of war and devastation. Only occasionally, СКАЧАТЬ