Now Then (v1.0) - John Brunner, page 6
“Max, are you sure-?”
“Sure I’m up to it? Hell, yes. It wasn’t my leg that was chopped off, was it?”
He shrugged into the coat, awkwardly for his hurt hand, and relented enough to kiss her cheek before opening the door. She didn’t respond; when the door closed behind him, she was still just standing there.
VIII
“You realize it’s not just a matter of pushing a button and reading a dial?” Anderson said, and gave a wry smile. Max wondered if he had used the phrase to Laura some time; it would account for her saying almost exactly the same.
Anderson was a fresh-faced man, with crisp fair hair and big blue eyes. He was probably in his mid-thirties, and looked younger. Max had immediately taken to him.
“I know it’s a delicate job,” he said, feeling in his pocket for the bone. “Also it’s probably expensive. But I’ll pay whatever’s necessary. This is the thing I want dated.”
He handed the bone over. Anderson studied it.
“Human?” he said eventually. Max nodded. “Where’s it from?”
“It was found in the possession of a patient of mine, and we haven’t any other clue to his identity,” Max explained. It occurred to him when he had spoken that that wasn’t wholly true, and he made a mental note to get hold of the knife as well.
“I see. Another thing I ought to warn you of is that it’s very difficult to date something either very recent or very ancient. But I imagine you have some special reason for thinking this may not be just any odd bone?” Anderson cocked his head.
“The man may possibly be a philologist,” Max said. “In which case, it’s conceivable this is an archeological relic which he’s picked up. I can’t see any reason why he should have it otherwise.”
He was appalled at the glibness of his fabrications.
“Fair enough,” Anderson nodded, rising. “Well, I can tell you right away whether it’s worth making the attempt, anyhow. You probably know that C-14 from nuclear tests is fouling up die radio-carbon, method, which depends on measuring the rate of decay of natural C-14. Fallout contaminates things sometimes and gives a spuriously recent reading. Hang on while I check the count from this—I may be able to say right off that it isn’t worth trying.”
He went through an inner door and closed it behind him. Max heard voices, indistinct and random-sounding. He leaned back and looked about him, wishing his hand would stop hurting.
The room was small but pleasant, its light walls shelved with books and archeological souvenirs. On a table in the corner was a stack of pre-prints from a scientific journal, which Anderson was apparently sorting into envelopes for mailing.
What was he doing here, anyway? The facile story he had told Anderson didn’t rationalize the action to himself. He was probably on an idiotic false trail. After all, he could hardly have explained what he thought that trail might be.
The door opened and Anderson came back, his face grave.
“Have you been carrying that bone about with you?” he demanded.
“Only this morning. Why?”
“Because it’s hot!” Anderson plumped himself into his chair. “It’s absolutely impossible to get any kind of dating for it—I don’t know where it’s been, but it’s giving a count so high it must have been in a—a nuclear testing zone, or something!” He wiped his face. “I don’t know if it’s high enough to harm anyone, but I’d watch myself if I were you. Oh, of course, you’re a doctor, aren’t you? So you know about risks of that sort.”
Max gave a thoughtful nod. “I see. What have you done with it?”
“Well, I’ve left it there in a lead-foil envelope. If you want it back, you’d better have the envelope as well, but I think it would be safer for everyone if you allowed me to have it buried good and deep.”
“I would like it back,” Max said. “It may be rather important.”
“Your funeral,” Anderson shrugged, and leaned back to call through the door of the adjacent room.
When he had left Anderson, he walked at random along the street, thinking deeply. He wasn’t surprised at the radioactivity of the bone—it was predictable that if Smiffershon himself was contaminated the bone would be also. But he was disappointed at Anderson’s flat dismissal of any chance that it might be dated; he should have known that was the most probable outcome and he had ignored it.
Disappointed? He caught himself making the assumption, and out of honesty added a rider: yes, but also relieved.
Because, whatever the nature of the realization he was groping towards, he was sure of one thing.
It terrified him.
He needed to order his muddled, half-formulated think-ing. Finding himself on the point of passing a cafe, he turned and went in to order a cup of coffee. He let it grow cold in front of him as he attempted to list on a paper napkin all the factors that blended in the barely-glimpsed pattern he felt was weaving.
A tramp comes out of the night. He has heterochylia. He is seen by the one doctor in a thousand who can diagnose his complaint and make sure his life is saved.
In dreams, a man’s finger-bone has been seen—before the advent of the tramp. The tramp has a finger-bone with him.
A corresponding bone is chopped from the hand of the man who dreamed the dreams.
Heterochylia is a disease attributed to radiation damage of the developing foetus. When this man was in the womb, background radiation was at its natural level—there was no fallout in the nineteen-twenties.
Eating fat is suicide to a sufferer from heterochylia.
Someone must have known this; knowing it, has enabled the man to survive to an astonishingly unlikely age.
He is contaminated with radioactivity. After a week of hospital hygiene, he fogs X-ray plates. This is not just a case of a man being dusted with radioactive particles; they are inside him, in bone, muscle and gland. The thyroid showed bright white on the X-ray plates—radio-iodine. The brain glowed—radio-phosphorus, perhaps. The bone glowed—radio-strontium.
But he lives, and talks. And what he says is in a language which experts declare might be descended from English after many generations “in the context of a totally non-industrialized society.”
The face of the tramp is the face of the man in the dream who holds the little bone.
He hesitated before adding the last item to the list—it could so easily be the result of normal subconscious image-blending. But he felt obscurely driven to include it as significant.
Then he sat back and stared at what he had written, and was as helpless as before. He wished he could confide in someone: Diana, for choice. But she had been so erratic and disturbed since Jimmy’s death that he would not dare to try and make her understand how he felt.
Gordon Faulkner? The Prof? No, you couldn’t make level-headed scientifically trained men like those two accept your wild guesswork. And, after all, what did it analyze down to? No more than a notion that the tramp was odd, that the way he was odd was vitally important.
No single thing he had noted down was intrinsically meaningful. In combination, they spoke aloud to Max himself. For anyone else, though, they would probably be a random grouping.
Laura had said something about Smiffershon being a philologist out of his mind. In that case, would his real name be Smithson? Max recalled his inspired guess. He couldn’t remember whether he had told Laura about it or not. If he had had his wits about him he would have asked her on the phone this morning; since he hadn’t done so, and had no idea how to contact her except through Faulkner—who wouldn’t be willing to talk to him today— he could only speculate.
In exasperation he pushed his notes aside and drew his cup of coffee towards him. It had gone quite cold, and a skin had formed on top. He was mechanically preparing to lift it off with the back of the spoon, when a thought struck him.
Skin. That was how Laura had derived Smiffershon’s word for a blanket, ki-yun. He could see how the word might have changed, all right. But he couldn’t see how the world could change to the point at which someone’s only term for a covering would be a sound meaning animal-hide.
God! How far in the past was that epoch of human technical development, for practically everyone on Earth? How far in the past was a day when woven fabrics were unknown?
Or…
He was still holding the spoon, a fraction of an inch away from the side of the cup. As the horror dawned on him, he heard the spoon begin to rattle tinnily in time with the trembling of his hand.
Or how near in the future?
He never remembered afterwards where he wandered to, blind and dizzy with appalling terror, all his attention fixed on the vista of destruction ahead. In imagination he was seeing Smiffershon’s world. Not this tidy green island sown with prosperous, crowded cities, its people well-fed, warmly housed, smartly clothed.
But an island turned to one great blasted heath, where the greenery sickened on the branch and animals brought forth misshapen young.
Oh, it fitted! Everything fitted!
The bombs would not only smash the cities. In the dry days of summer they would light hundred-mile fires, to burn farm and field and forest until the rains of autumn, and leave behind next year’s dustbowl. The sheep for wool, the flax for linen, the factories for nylon and the ships for cotton: gone. So Smiffershon had no word for a woven cloth. He got his garments the ancient way, by stripping a beast naked. No wonder his face was scarred; no wonder he was capable of killing a mere Alsatian dog—he must have faced animals far more savage!
Smiffershon must be a long way from the disaster itself—otherwise he would know rags, at least. And the fact that he didn’t pointed to further conclusions.
Humanity must be fighting a losing battle. All hope of rebuilding had been sapped away; now the ambition was no higher than simply to stay alive.
But how? If they had no sheep for wool, this didn’t necessarily imply they had no farms; it did, though, say that the ground was poor, the yield meagre. Poisoned. Saturated by the curse on the third and fourth generation, as Smiffershon’s body was saturated. As lines of inheritance met and blended, the recessive mutations were appearing—in wheat and oats, in cattle and pigs, and inevitably in man. The fact that Smiffershon was alive meant that the memory of how to hold heterochylia at bay had endured when knowledge of weaving was lost. The disease must be a commonplace for that to happen.
An ocean of terror was drowning Max Harrow now.
When they had forgotten everything else, these people would remember that the curse had been brought upon them by their forebears, who had thrown away a comfortable, prosperous world and condemned their grandchildren to a living hell. Was it that hate which had fanned their last flicker of will to a roaring blaze capable of burning down the wall of time itself? He thought it must be. He could conceive no other explanation which fitted.
So, then, certain among them sought ways to tell the past what it had done—and found them. Maybe some genetic accident conferred the skill; maybe it had always been within the potentiality of human beings, and had never previously been activated by so powerful a motive.
He visualized individuals (what would you call them— shamans, medicine-men?) focusing hatred like an electric arc on relics of the happier past; human relics, tools, weapons and bones. Like his own finger-bone. That was what it must be, this little scrap of another world which, given flesh, would complete his maimed hand. The bone was his, come back to him.
Some psychic factor—he realized the inadequacy of the terms he was inventing, and didn’t care, having no time for niceties—which might possibly be the recent memory of Jimmy’s death from the same disease sapping his vitality, rived open the barrier separating Smiffershon from the object of his hate. How thick a barrier—ten generations, twenty? It made no difference.
Max struggled to visualize how it must have been for him to be pitched naked into an alien universe, where cities stood and millions of people went about incomprehensible activities, where no one could understand him, 57
where his only link with familiar things consisted in the bone he desperately clutched. That same thread of non-physical causality which had united Max’s mind in dreaming with the environment of the future hell-on-earth would have drawn Smiffershon blindly towards the owner of the bone, equipping himself on the way with a discarded coat and boots from a rubbish pile, and a knife with a broken tip. What would he have done, but for the chance of taking food that poisoned him? Killed?
In the caverns of his skull Max cried silently that that would have been better. He would rather be dead than facing in full awareness the horror of the truth that had come to him.
IX
“Prof! Prof!”
In the airy corridor Lensch paused and glanced back. On seeing the haggard figure running towards him, pursued by an anxious male nurse and accompanied by the startled looks of a dozen staff and out-patients, he felt his jaw drop.
“Max—good God!” he exclaimed. “What have you been doing to yourself? You look terrible!”
“Prof, I’ve got to speak to you.” Eyes alight with an awful inhuman brilliance, Max clutched at the professor’s arm. The bandage on his left hand was dirty and the ends had come untied and been crudely re-knotted; his cheeks were stubbly and a smear of grime crossed his forehead; his clothes were crumpled and his shoes dusty.
“Why, of course, Max,” Lensch agreed solicitously. He gave a curt jerk of his head at the male nurse who was hovering behind Max now, signaling him to go away, and the man obeyed with obvious reluctance.
“Come into my office with me,” Lensch said, taking Max’s arm. “Sit down. You’re overwrought—and what have you been doing to yourself, anyway?”
He closed the door and moved to his desk. Max slumped into a chair facing him, like a badly stuffed doll.
“I’ve been wandering about all night,” he said, and made a vague gesture of dismissal. “That doesn’t matter. Thank God I’ve got in to see you at last—I had to kick up a hell of a row in the foyer before the stupid fools would let me inside at all.”
Worried, Lensch folded his hands, set his elbows on the
desk and leaned forward. ‘‘What you need, Max-” he
began.
“What I need is for someone to listen to me,” Max cut in. “Nothing else—is that clear?”
“I-”
“Shut up and listen to me, for God’s sake!” Max blazed. “If I can’t talk to someone I’ll go crazy, I know it.”
“Very well,” Lensch agreed after a pause. “Let me warn you first that I haven’t got much time—only about ten minutes before I have to go and do the anaesthetic for FitzPrior’s amputation—and second that I’m going to make a condition. If I listen to you, you must in turn promise that when you’ve spoken your mind you’ll do what I tell you, which will include having your hand dressed again, taking a sedative, and going straight home and to bed for at least twenty-four hours. Do you understand me? If you won’t promise that, I’ll have you put to bed here.”
The boom of authority in his tone pierced Max’s wild mood. He gave a sullen nod of acceptance, and Lensch looked satisfied.
“Now what is it you want so much to tell me, Max?”
Max licked his lips. After the waking nightmare in which he had spent the seemingly endless hours of darkness, to be back in the familiar atmosphere of the hospital had come as a shock. He felt the urgency and certainty of his conviction slipping away, and whereas even a few minutes ago he had been sure of his ability to persuade anybody he had an important message to convey, now the calm-faced Lensch opposite him looked like a monster of doubt and scepticism.
He said at last, “I know who Smiffershon is. I know where he comes from and why he’s here.”
“And this information has reduced you to such a state?” Lensch said, giving a faint smile. “It must be very alarming. Go on,” he added encouragingly.
With an access of bitterness, Max did so. Lensch’s expression of patient interest, his professional mask, slipped by swift degrees as he listened, and he revealed shocked dismay. Watching him, seeing how he was failing to make any impact, Max grew desperate; of course it was incredible to think that a man alive here and now was a refugee 59 from a future where all Earth was polluted with radioactivity—but what other explanation fitted the facts?
He brought his recital to a halt. He hadn’t said everything he had meant to, but what was the use of going on? Numbly he awaited Lensch’s reaction.
At length the professor stirred in his chair. Looking down at his hands resting on the desk-top, he said, “Max, you have constructed a very ingenious hypothesis. But I’m afraid that’s all. You should have told me, or someone, about these evil dreams you began to have after the death of your son. If you’d done so, you would have spared yourself this huge elaboration of them into … what can one call it? A personal myth, perhaps.”
“I see,” Max said, looking at the floor in front of his feet placed tidily side by side. “You think this is a-”
“Max!” Lensch cut in sharply. “I would not speak so frankly to you but for the fact that I detected doubt in your own voice while you were talking to me. Isn’t that true? You aren’t looking for someone to listen to you, but for someone who will confirm your ideas and say, ‘Yes, this is so, it must be as you say.’ And the reason is because there’s a gap in your hypothesis. You’re unable to explain how Smiffershon could come from—from the future, and be here now, except by inventing empty double-talk phrases.”
Max felt himself coloring.
“I see it’s true, and that you know it,” Lensch said. “I imagined you would be too sensible wholly to accept your inventions, and I’m delighted at being proved right.”
A phone on his desk buzzed; he touched a switch and said, “Lensch. Yes?”
“Mr. Kidwelly is here, Professor, and would like you to go with him and see Mr. FitzPrior before the operation.” “Tell him I will join him in just a couple of minutes,” Lensch said and clicked the switch off.
