The Complete Short Stories Read online

  Anderson, fortunately, had unwittingly made him realize the pointlessness of this course.

  After Powers had resigned from the Clinic he still continued to drive in once a week for his check-up, now little more than a formality. On what turned out to be the last occasion Anderson had perfunctorily taken his blood-count, noting Powers' slacker facial muscles, fading pupil reflexes and unshaven cheeks.

  He smiled sympathetically at Powers across the desk, wondering what to say to him. Once he had put on a show of encouragement with the more intelligent patients, even tried to provide some sort of explanation. But Powers was too difficult to reach - neurosurgeon extraordinary, a man always out on the periphery, only at ease working with unfamiliar materials. To himself he thought: I'm sorry, Robert. What can I say - 'Even the sun is growing cooler'-? He watched Powers drum his fingers restlessly on the enamel desk top, his eyes glancing at the spinal level charts hung around the office. Despite his unkempt appearance - he had been wearing the same unironed shirt and dirty white plimsolls a week ago - Powers looked composed and self-possessed, like a Conradian beachcomber more or less reconciled to his own weaknesses.

  'What are you doing with yourself, Robert?' he asked. 'Are you still going over to Whitby's lab?'

  'As much as I can. It takes me half an hour to cross the lake, and I keep on sleeping through the alarm clock. I may leave my place and move in there permanently.'

  Anderson frowned. 'Is there much point? As far as I could make out Whitby's work was pretty speculative - , He broke off, realizing the implied criticism of Powers' own disastrous work at the Clinic, but Powers seemed to ignore this, was examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling. 'Anyway, wouldn't it be better to stay where you are, among your own things, read through Toynbee and Spengler again?'

  Powers laughed shortly. 'That's the last thing I want to do. I want to forget Toynbee and Spengler, not try to remember them. In fact, Paul, I'd like to forget everything. I don't know whether I've got enough time, though. How much can you forget in three months?'

  'Everything, I suppose, if you want to. But don't try to race the clock.'

  Powers nodded quietly, repeating this last remark to himself. Racing the clock was exactly what he had been doing. As he stood up and said goodbye to Anderson he suddenly decided to throw away his alarm clock, escape from his futile obsession with time. To remind himself he unfastened his wristwatch and scrambled the setting, then slipped it into his pocket. Making his way out to the car park he reflected on the freedom this simple act gave him. He would explore the lateral byways now, the side doors, as it were, in the corridors of time. Three months could be an eternity.

  He picked his car out of the line and strolled over to it, shielding his eyes from the heavy sunlight beating down across the parabolic sweep of the lecture theatre roof. He was about to climb in when he saw that someone had traced with a finger across the dust caked over the windshield: 96,688,365,498,721 Looking over his shoulder, he recognized the white Packard parked next to him, peered inside and saw a lean-faced young man with blond sun-bleached hair and a high cerebrotonic forehead watching him behind dark glasses. Sitting beside him at the wheel was a raven-haired girl whom he had often seen around the psychology department. She had intelligent but somehow rather oblique eyes, and Powers remembered that the younger doctors called her 'the girl from Mars'.

  'Hello, Kaldren,' Powers said to the young man. 'Still following me around?'

  Kaldren nodded. 'Most of the time, doctor.' He sized Powers up shrewdly. 'We haven't seen very much of you recently, as a matter of fact. Anderson said you'd resigned, and we noticed your laboratory was closed.'

  Powers shrugged. 'I felt I needed a rest. As you'll understand, there's a good deal that needs re-thinking.'

  Kaidren frowned half-mockingly. 'Sorry to hear that, doctor. But don't let these temporary setbacks depress you.' He noticed the girl watching Powers with interest. 'Coma's a fan of yours. I gave her your papers from American Journal of Psychiatry, and she's read through the whole file.'

  The girl smiled pleasantly at Powers, for a moment dispelling the hostility between the two mei. When Powers nodded to her she leaned across Kaldren and said: 'Actually I've just finished Noguchi's autobiography the great Japanese doctor who discovered the spirochaete. Somehow you remind me of him - there's so much of yourself in all the patients you worked on.'

  Powers smiled wanly at her, then his eyes turned and locked involuntarily on Kaldren's. They stared at each other sombrely for a moment, and a small tic in Kaldren's right cheek began to flicker irritatingly. He flexed his facial muscles, after a few seconds mastered it with an effort, obviously annoyed that Powers should have witnessed this brief embarrassment.

  'How did the clinic go today?' Powers asked. 'Have you had anymore... headaches?'

  Kaldren's mouth snapped shut, he looked suddenly irritable. 'Whose care am I in, doctor? Yours or Anderson's? Is that the sort of question you should be asking now?'

  Powers gestured deprecatingly. 'Perhaps not.' He cleared his throat; the heat was ebbing the blood from his head and he felt tired and eager to get away from them. He turned towards his car, then realized that Kaldren would probably follow, either try to crowd him into the ditch or block the road and make Powers sit in his dust all the way back to the lake. Kaldren was capable of any madness.

  'Well, I've got to go and collect something,' he said, adding in a firmer voice: 'Get in touch with me, though, if you can't reach Anderson.'

  He waved and walked off behind the line of cars. From the reflection in the windows he could see Kaldren looking back and watching him closely.

  He entered the Neurology wing, paused thankfully in the cool foyer, nodding to the two nurses and the armed guard at the reception desk. For some reason the terminals sleeping in the adjacent dormitory block attracted hordes of would-be sightseers, most of them cranks with some magical anti-narcoma remedy, or merely the idly curious, but a good number of quite normal people, many of whom had travelled thousands of miles, impelled towards the Clinic by some strange instinct, like animals migrating to a preview of their racial graveyards.

  He walked along the corridor to the supervisor's office overlooking the recreation deck, borrowed the key and made his way out through the tennis courts and callisthenics rigs to the enclosed swimming pool at the far end. It had been disused for months, and only Powers' visits kept the lock free. Stepping through, he closed it behind him and walked past the peeling wooden stands to the deep end.

  Putting a foot up on the diving board, he looked down at Whitby's ideogram. Damp leaves and bits of paper obscured it, but the outlines were just distinguishable. It covered almost the entire floor of the pool and at first glance appeared to represent a huge solar disc, with four radiating diamond-shaped arms, a crude Jungian mandala.

  Wondering what had prompted Whitby to carve the device before his death, Powers noticed something moving through the debris in the centre of the disc. A black, horny-shelled animal about a foot long was nosing about in the slush, heaving itself on tired legs. Its shell was articulated, and vaguely resembled an armadillo's. Reaching the edge of the disc, it stopped and hesitated, then slowly backed away into the centre again, apparently unwilling or unable to cross the narrow groove.

  Powers looked around, then stepped into one of the changing stalls and pulled a small wooden clothes locker off its rusty wall bracket. Carrying it under one arm, he climbed down the chromium ladder into the pool and walked carefully across the slithery floor towards the animal. As he approached it sidled away from him, but he trapped it easily, using the lid to lever it into the box.

  The animal was heavy, at least the weight of a brick. Powers tapped its massive olive-black carapace with his knuckle, noting the triangular warty head jutting out below its rim like a turtle's, the thickened pads beneath the first digits of the pentadactyl forelimbs.

  He watched the three-lidded eyes blinking at him anxiously from the bottom of the box.

 
; 'Expecting some really hot weather?' he murmured. 'That lead umbrella you're carrying around should keep you cool.'

  He closed the lid, climbed out of the pool and made his way back to the supervisor's office, then carried the box out to his car.

  Kaidren continues to reproach me (Powers wrote in his diary). For some reason he seems unwilling to accept his isolation, is elaborating a series of private rituals to replace the missing hours of sleep. Perhaps I should tell him of my own approaching zero, but he'd probably regard this as the final unbearable insult, that I should have in excess what he so desperately yearns for. God knows what might happen. Fortunately the nightmarish visions appear to have receded for the time being...

  Pushing the diary away, Powers leaned forward across the desk and stared out through the window at the white floor of the lake bed stretching towards the hills along the horizon. Three miles away, on the far shore, he could see the circular bowl of the radio-telescope revolving slowly in the clear afternoon air, as Kaldren tirelessly trapped the sky, sluicing in millions of cubic parsecs of sterile ether, like the nomads who trapped the sea along the shores of the Persian Gulf.

  Behind him the air-conditioner murmured quietly, cooling the pale blue walls half-hidden in the dim light. Outside the air was bright and oppressive, the heat waves rippling up from the clumps of gold-tinted cacti below the Clinic blurring the sharp terraces of the twenty-storey Neurology block. There, in the silent dormitories behind the sealed shutters, the terminals slept their long dreamless sleep. There were now over 500 of them in the Clinic, the vanguard of a vast somnambulist army massing for its last march. Only five years had elapsed since the first narcoma syndrome had, been recognized, but already huge government hospitals in the east were being readied for intakes in the thousands, as more and more cases came to light.

  Powers felt suddenly tired, and glanced at his wrist, wondering how long he had to 8 o'clock, his bedtime for the next week or so. Already he missed the dusk, soon would wake to his last dawn.

  His watch was in his hip-pocket. He remembered his decision not to use his timepieces, and sat back and stared at the bookshelves beside the desk. There were rows of green-covered AEC publications he had removed from Whitby's library, papers in which the biologist described his work out in the Pacific after the H-tests. Many of them Powers knew almost by heart, read a hundred times in an effort to grasp Whitby's last conclusions. Toynbee would certainly be easier to forget.

  His eyes dimmed momentarily, as the tall black wall in the rear of his mind cast its great shadow over his brain. He reached for the diary, thinking of the girl in Kaldren's car - Coma he had called her, another of his insane jokes - and her reference to Noguchi. Actually the comparison should have been made with Whitby, not himself; the monsters in the lab were nothing more than fragmented mirrors of Whitby's mind, like the grotesque radio-shielded frog he had found that morning in the swimming pool.

  Thinking of the girl Coma, and the heartening smile she had given him, he wrote: Woke 6-33 am. Last session with Anderson. He made it plain he's seen enough of me, and from now on I'm better alone. To sleep 8-00? (these countdowns terrify me.)

  He paused, then added: Goodbye, Eniwetok.

  Two

  He saw the girl again the next day at Whitby's laboratory. He had driven over after breakfast with the new specimen, eager to get it into a vivarium before it died. The only previous armoured mutant he had come across had nearly broken his neck. Speeding along the lake road a month or so earlier he had struck it with the offside front wheel, expecting the small creature to flatten instantly. Instead its hard lead-packed shell had remained rigid, even though the organism within it had been pulped, had flung the car heavily into the ditch. He had gone back for the shell, later weighed it at the laboratory, found it contained over 600 grammes of lead.

  Quite a number of plants and animals were building up heavy metals as radiological shields. In the hills behind the beach house a couple of old-time prospectors were renovating the derelict gold-panning equipment abandoned over eighty years ago. They had noticed the bright yellow tints of the cacti, run an analysis and found that the plants were assimilating gold in extractable quantities, although the soil concentrations were unworkable. Oak Ridge was at last paying a dividend!!

  Waking that morning just after 6-45 - ten minutes later than the previous day (he had switched on the radio, heard one of the regular morning programmes as he climbed out of bed) - he had eaten a light unwanted breakfast, then spent an hour packing away some of the books in his library, crating them up and taping on address labels to his brother.

  He reached Whitby's laboratory half an hour later. This was housed in a 100-foot-wide geodesic dome built beside his chalet on the west shore of the lake about a mile from Kaldren's summer house. The chalet had been closed after Whitby's suicide, and many of the experimental plants and animals had died before Powers had managed to receive permission to use the laboratory.

  As he turned into the driveway he saw the girl standing on the apex of the yellow-ribbed dome, her slim figure silhouetted against the sky. She waved to him, then began to step down across the glass polyhedrons and jumped nimbly into the driveway beside the car.

  'Hello,' she said, giving him a welcoming smile. 'I came over to see your zoo. Kaldren said you wouldn't let me in if he came so I made him stay behind.'

  She waited for Powers to say something while he searched for his keys, then volunteered: 'If you like, I can wash your shirt.'

  Powers grinned at her, peered down ruefully at his dust-stained sleeves. 'Not a bad idea. I thought I was beginning to look a little uncared-for.' He unlocked the door, took Coma's arm. 'I don't know why Kaldren told you that - he's welcome here any time he likes.'

  'What have you got in there?' Coma asked, pointing at the wooden box he was carrying as they walked between the gear-laden benches.

  'A distant cousin of ours I found. Interesting little chap. I'll introduce you in a moment.'

  Sliding partitions divided the dome into four chambers. Two of them were storerooms, filled with spare tanks, apparatus, cartons of animal food and test rigs. They crossed the third section, almost filled by a powerful X-ray projector, a giant 250 amp G.E. Maxitron, angled on to a revolving table, concrete shielding blocks lying around ready for use like huge building bricks.

  The fourth chamber contained Powers' zoo, the vivaria jammed together along the benches and in the sinks, big coloured cardboard charts and memos pinned on to the draught hoods above them, a tangle of rubber tubing and power leads trailing across the floor. As they walked past the lines of tanks dim forms shifted behind the frosted glass, and at the far end of the aisle there was a sudden scurrying in a large cage by Powers" desk.

  Putting the box down on his chair, he picked a packet of peanuts off the desk and went over to the cage. A small black-haired chimpanzee wearing a dented jet pilot's helmet swarmed deftly up the bars to him, chirped happily and then jumped down to a miniature control panel against the rear wall of the cage. Rapidly it flicked a series of buttons and toggles, and a succession of coloured lights lit up like a juke box and jangled out a two-second blast of music.

  'Good boy,' Powers said encouragingly, patting the chimp's back and shovelling the peanuts into its hands. 'You're getting much too clever for that one, aren't you?'

  The chimp tossed the peanuts into the back of its throat with the smooth, easy motions of a conjuror, jabbering at Powers in a singsong voice.

  Coma laughed and took some of the nuts from Powers. 'He's sweet. I think he's talking to you.'

  Powers nodded. 'Quite right, he is. Actually he's got a two-hundredword vocabulary, but his voice box scrambles it all up.' He opened a small refrigerator by the desk, took out half a packet of sliced bread and passed a couple of pieces to the chimp. It picked an electric toaster off the floor and placed it in the middle of a low wobbling table in the centre of the cage, whipped the pieces into the slots. Powers pressed a tab on the switchboard beside the cage an
d the toaster began to crackle softly.

  'He's one of the brightest we've had here, about as intelligent as a five-year-old child, though much more selfsufficient in a lot of ways.' The two pieces of toast jumped out of their slots and the chimp caught them neatly, nonchalantly patting its helmet each time, then ambled off into a small ramshackle kennel and relaxed back with one arm out of a window, sliding the toast into its mouth.

  'He built that house himself,' Powers went on, switching off the toaster. 'Not a bad effort, really.' He pointed to a yellow polythene bucket by the front door of the kennel, from which a battered-looking geranium protruded. 'Tends that plant, cleans up the cage, pours out an endless stream of wisecracks. Pleasant fellow all round.'

  Coma was smiling broadly to herself. 'Why the space helmet, though?'

  Powers hesitated. 'Oh, it - er - it's for his own protection. Sometimes he gets rather bad headaches. His predecessors all - , He broke off and turned away. 'Let's have a look at some of the other inmates.'

  He moved down the line of tanks, beckoning Coma with him. 'We'll start at the beginning.' He lifted the glass lid off one of the tanks, and Coma peered down into a shallow bath of water, where a small round organism with slender tendrils was nestling in a rockery of shells and pebbles.

  'Sea anemone. Or was. Simple coelenterate with an open-ended body cavity.' He pointed down to a thickened ridge of tissue around the base. 'It's sealed up the cavity, converted the channel into a rudimentary notochord, first plant ever to develop a nervous system. Later the tendrils will knot themselves into a ganglion, but already they're sensitive to colour. Look.' He borrowed the violet handkerchief in Coma's breast-pocket, spread it across the tank. The tendrils flexed and stiffened, began to weave slowly, as if they were trying to focus.

  'The strange thing is that they're completely insensitive to white light. Normally the tendrils register shifting pressure gradients, like the tympanic diaphragms in your ears. Now it's almost as if they can hear primary colours, suggests it's re-adapting itself for a non-aquatic existence in a static world of violent colour contrasts.'