The Complete Short Stories

Tomorrow is a Million Years

In the evening the time-winds would blow across the Sea of Dreams, and the silver wreck of the excursion module would loom across the jewelled sand to where Glanville lay in the pavilion by the edge of the reef. During the first week after the crash, when he could barely move his head, he had seen the images of the Santa Maria and the Golden Hind sailing towards him through the copper sand, the fading light of the sunset illuminating the ornamental casements of the high stern-castles. Later, sitting up in the surgical chair, he had seen the spectral crews of these spectral ships, their dark figures watching him from the quarter-decks. Once, when he could walk again, Glanville went out on to the surface of the lake, his wife guiding his elbow as he hobbled on his stick. Two hundred yards from the module he had suddenly seen an immense ship materialize from the wreck and move through the sand towards them, its square sails lifted by the time-winds. In the cerise light Glanville recognized the two bow anchors jutting like tusks, the tryworks amidships, and the whaling irons and harpoons. Judith held his arm, drawing him back to the pavilion, but Glanville knocked away her hand.

Rolling slowly, the great ship crested silently through the sand, its hull towering above them as if they had been watching from a skiff twenty yards off its starboard bow. As it swept by with a faint sigh of sand, the whisper of the time-winds, Glanville pointed to the three men looking down at them from the quarter-rail, the tallest with stern eyes and a face like biscuit, the second jaunty, the third ruddy and pipe-smoking.

‘Can you see them?’ Glanville shouted. ‘Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, the mates of the Pequod!’ Glanville pointed to the helm, where a wild-eyed old man gazed at the edge of the reef on which he seemed collision-bent. ‘Ahab…!’ he cried in warning. But the ship had reached the reef, and then in an instant faded across the clinker-like rocks, its mizzen-sail lit for a last moment by the dying light.

‘The Pequod! My God, you could see the crew, Ishmael and Tashtego… Ahab was there, and the mates, Melville’s three momentous men! Did you see them, Judith?’

His wife nodded, helping him on towards the pavilion, her frown hidden in the dusk light. Glanville knew perfectly well that she never saw the spectral ships, but nonetheless she seemed to sense that something vast and strange moved across the sand-lake out of the time-winds. For the moment, she was more interested in making certain that he recovered from the long flight and the absurd accident when the excursion module had crashed on landing.

‘But why the Pequod?’ Glanville asked, as they sat in their chairs on the veranda of the pavilion. He mopped his plump, unshaven face with a flowered handkerchief. ‘The Golden Hind and the Santa Maria, yes… ships of discovery; Drake circumnavigating the globe has a certain resemblance to ourselves half-crossing the universe — but Crusoe’s ship would have been more appropriate, don’t you agree?’

‘Why?’ Judith glanced at the sand inundating the slatted metal floor of the veranda. She filled her glass with soda from the siphon, and then played with the sparkling fluid, watching the bubbles with her severe eyes. ‘Because we’re marooned?’

‘No…’ Irritated by his wife’s reply, Glanville turned to face her. Sometimes her phlegmatic attitude annoyed him she seemed almost to enjoy deflating his mood of optimism, however forced that might be. ‘What I meant was that Crusoe, like ourselves here, made a new world for himself out of the pieces of the old he brought with him. We can do the same, Judith.’ He paused, wondering how to re-assert his physical authority, and then said with quiet emphasis: ‘We’re not marooned.’

His wife nodded, her long face expressionless. Barely moving her head, she looked up at the night sky visible beyond the edge of the awning. High above them, a single point of light traversed the starless sky, its intermittent beacon punctuating its way towards the northern pole. ‘No, we’re not marooned — not for long, anyway, with that up there. It won’t be long at all before Captain Thornwald catches up with us.’

Glanville stared into the bottom of his glass. Unlike his wife, he took little pleasure in the sight of the automatic emergency beacon of the control ship broadcasting their position to the universe at large. ‘He’ll catch up with us, all right. That’s the luck of the thing. Instead of having him always at our heels we’ll finally be free of him for ever. They won’t send anyone after Thornwald.’

‘Perhaps not.’ Judith tapped the metal table. ‘But how do you propose to get rid of him — don’t tell me you’re going to be locked together in mortal combat? At the moment you can hardly move one foot after the other.’

Glanville smiled, with an effort ignoring the sarcasm in his wife’s voice. Whatever the qualities of skill, shrewdness and even courage, of a kind, that had brought them here, she still regarded him as something of an obscure joke. At times he wondered whether it would have been better to have left her behind. Alone here, on this lost world, he would have had no one to remind him of his sagging, middle-aged figure, his little indecisions and fantasies. He would have been able to sit back in front of the long sunsets and enjoy the strange poetry of the Sea of Dreams.

However, once he had disposed of Captain Thornwald she might at last take him seriously. ‘Don’t worry, there’ll be no mortal combat — we’ll let the time-winds blow over him.’

Undeterred, Judith said: ‘You’ll let one of your spectral ships run him down? But perhaps he won’t see them.’

Glanville gazed out at the dark grottoes of the sand-reef that fringed the northern shore of the lake two miles away. Despite its uniformity the lake-systems covered the entire planet — the flat perspectives of the landscape fascinated him. ‘It doesn’t matter whether he sees them or not. By the way, the Pequod this evening… it’s a pity you missed Ahab. They were all there, exactly as Melville described them in Moby Dick.’

His wife stood up, as if aware that he might begin one of his rhapsodies again. She brushed away the white sand that lay like lace across the blue brocade of her gown. ‘I hope you’re right. Perhaps you’ll see the Flying Dutchman next.’

Distracted by his thoughts, Glanville watched her tall figure move away across the gradient of the beach, following the tide-line formed by the sand blown off the lake’s surface. The Flying Dutchman? A curious remark. By coming to this remote planet they themselves would lose seven years of their lives by time-dilation if they ever chose to return home, by coincidence the period that elapsed while the condemned Dutchman roved the seas… Every seven years he would come ashore, free to stay there only if he found the love of a faithful woman.

Was he himself the Dutchman? Perhaps, in a remote sense. Or Thornwald? He and Judith had met during the preliminary inquiries and, incredible though it seemed, there might have been something between them — it was difficult to believe that Thornwald would have pursued them this far, sacrificing all hopes of seniority and promotion, over a minor emigration infringement. The bacterial scattering might be serious on some planets, but they had restricted themselves to arid worlds on an empty edge of the universe.

Glanville looked out at the wreck of the excursion module. For a moment there was a glimmer of royals and topgallants, as if the entire CuttySark was about to disgorge itself from the sand. This strange phenomenon, a consequence of the time-sickness brought on by the vast distances of interstellar space, had revealed itself more and more during their long flight. The farther they penetrated into deep space, the greater the nostalgia of the human mind and its eagerness to transform any man-made objects, such as the spaceships in which they travelled, into their archaic forebears. Judith, for some reason, had been immune, but Glanville had seen a succession of extraordinary visions, fragments of the myths and dreams of the Earth’s past, reborn out of the dead lakes and fossil seas of the alien worlds.

Judith, of course, not only lacked all imagination but felt no sense of guilt — Glanville’s crime, the memory of which he had almost completely repressed, was no responsibility of hers, man and wife though they might be. Besides, the failures of which she silently accused him every day were those of character, more serious in her eyes than embezzlement, grand larceny or even murder. It was precisely this that made possible his plan to deal once and for all with Captain Thornwald.

Three weeks later, when Thornwald arrived, Glanville had recovered completely from the accident. From the top of the sand-reef overhanging the western edge of the lake he watched the police captain’s capsule land two hundred yards from the pavilion. Judith stood under the awning on the veranda, one hand raised to ward off the dust kicked up by the retro-jets. She had never questioned Glanville’s strategy for dealing with Thornwald, but now and then he had noticed her glancing upwards at the beacon of the control ship, as if calculating the number of days it would take Thornwald to catch up with them. Glanville was surprised by her patience. Once, a week before Thornwald arrived, he almost challenged her to say whether she really believed he would be able to outwit the police captain. By a curious irony, he realized that she probably did but if so, why did she still despise him?

As the starboard hatch of the capsule fell back, Glanville stood up on the edge of the reef and began to wave with both arms. He made his way down the side of the reef, then jumped the last five feet to the lake floor and ran across to the capsule. ‘Thornwald! Captain, it’s good to see you!’

Framed within the steel collar of his suit, the policeman’s tired face looked up at Glanville through the open hatch. He stood up with an effort and accepted Glanville’s hand, then climbed down on to the ground. Careful not to turn his back on Glanville, he unzipped his suit and glanced quickly at the pavilion and the wreck of the excursion module.

Glanville strolled to and fro around him. Thornwald’s cautious manner, the hand near the weapon in his holster, for some reason amused him. ‘Captain, you made a superb landing, beautiful marksmanship — getting here at all, for that matter. You saw the beacon, I suppose, but even so…’ When Thornwald was about to speak, Glanville rattled on: ‘No, of course I didn’t leave it on deliberately — damn it, we actually crashed! Can you imagine it, after coming all this way — very nearly broke our necks. Luckily, Judith was all right, not a scratch on her. She’ll be glad to see you, Captain.’

Thornwald nodded slowly, his eyes following Glanville’s pudgy, sweating figure as it roved about the capsule. A tall, stooped man with a tough, pessimistic face and all the wariness of a long-serving policeman, he seemed somehow unsettled by Glanville’s manic gaiety.

Glanville pointed to the pavilion. ‘Come on, we’ll have lunch, you must be tired out.’ He gestured at the sand-lake and the blank sky. ‘Nothing much here, I know, but it’s restful. After a few days—’

‘Glanville!’ Thornwald stopped. Face set, he put a hand out as if to touch Glanville’s shoulder. ‘You realize why I’m here?’

‘Of course, Captain.’ Glanville gave him an easy smile. ‘For heaven’s sake, stop looking so serious. I’m not going to escape. There’s nowhere to go.’

‘As long as you realize that.’ Thornwald plodded forward through the top surface of fine sand, his feet placed carefully as if testing the validity of this planet with its euphoric tenant. ‘You can have something to eat, then we’ll get ready to go back.’

‘If you like, Captain. Still, there’s no desperate hurry. Seven years here and back, what difference will a few hours or even days make? All those whipper-snappers you left behind you in the department will be chief commissioners now; I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry. Besides, the emigration laws may even have been changed..

Thornwald nodded dourly. Glanville was about to introduce him to Judith, standing quietly on the veranda twenty feet from him, but suddenly Thornwald stopped and glanced across the lake, as if searching for an invisible marksman hidden among the reefs.

‘All right?’ Glanville asked. Changing the pitch and tempo of his voice, he remarked quietly: ‘I call it the Sea of Dreams. We’re a long way from home, Captain, remember that. There are strange visions here at sunset. Keep your back turned on them.’ He waved at Judith, who was watching them approach with pursed lips. ‘Captain Thornwald, my dear. Rescue at last.’

‘Of a kind.’ She faced Thornwald who stood beside Glanville, as if hesitating to enter the pavilion. ‘I hope you feel all this is necessary, Captain. Revenge is a poor motive for justice.’

Glanville cleared his throat. ‘Well, yes, my dear, but… Come on, Captain, sit down, we’ll have a drink. Judith, could you…?

After a pause she nodded and went into the pavilion.

Glanville made a temporizing gesture. ‘A difficult moment, Captain. But as you know, Judith was always rather headstrong.’

Thornwald nodded, watching Glanville as the latter drew the chair around the table. He pointed to the wreck of the excursion module. ‘How badly was it damaged? We’ll have a look at it later.’

‘A waste of time, Captain. It’s a complete write-off.’

Thornwald scrutinized the wreck. ‘Even so, I’ll want to decontaminate it before we leave.’

‘Isn’t that pointless? — no one will ever come here. The whole planet is dead. Anyway, there’s a good deal of fuel in the tanks; if you short a circuit with your sprays the whole thing could go up.’ Glanville looked around impatiently. ‘Where are those drinks? Judith is..

He started to stand up, and found Thornwald following him to the door of the pavilion. ‘It’s all right, Captain.’

Thornwald leaned stolidly on the door. He looked down at Glanville’s plump, sweating face. ‘Let me help you.’

Glanville shrugged and beckoned him forward, but then stopped. ‘Captain, for heaven’s sake! If I wanted to escape I wouldn’t have been waiting for you here. Believe me, I haven’t got a gun hidden away in a whisky bottle or something — I just don’t want a scene between you and Judith.’

Thornwald nodded, then waited in the doorway. When Glanville returned with the tray he went back to his seat, eyes searching the pavilion and the surrounding beach as if looking for a missing element in a puzzle. ‘Glanville, I have to prefer charges against you — you’re aware what you face when you get back?’

Glanville shrugged. ‘Of course. But after all, the offence was comparatively trivial, wasn’t it?’ He reached for Thornwald’s bulky flight-suit which was spread across the veranda-rail. ‘Let me move this out of the sun. Where’s Judith gone?’

As Thornwald glanced at the door of the pavilion Glanville reached down to the steel pencil in the right knee of the suit. He withdrew it from the slot, then deliberately dropped it to the metal floor.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘A torch?’ His thumb pushed back the nozzle and then moved quickly to the spring tab.

‘Don’t press that!’ Thornwald was on his feet. ‘It’s a radio reflector, you’ll fill the place with—’ He reached across the table and tried to grasp it from Glanville, then flung up his forearm to protect his face.

A blinding jet of vaporized aluminium suddenly erupted from the nozzle of Glanville’s hand, gushing out like a firework. Within two or three seconds its spangled cloud filled the veranda, painting the walls and ceiling. Thornwald kicked aside the table and buried his face in his hands, his hair and forehead covered with the silver paint.

Glanville backed to the steps, flecks of the paint spattering his arms and chest, hosing the jet directly at the policeman. He tossed the canister on to the floor, where its last spurts gusted out into the sunlight, swept up by the convection currents like a swarm of fireflies. Then, head down, Glanville turned and ran towards the edge of the sandreef fifty yards away.

Two hours later, as he crouched deep in the grottoes of the reef on the west shore of the lake, Glanville watched with amusement as Thornwald’s silver-painted figure stepped out of the pavilion into the sunlight. The cloud of vapour above the pavilion had settled, and the drab grey panels of the roof and sides were now a brilliant aluminized silver, shining in the sunlight like a temple. Framed in the doorway was Judith, watching as Thornwald walked slowly towards his capsule. Apart from the two clear handprints across his face, his entire body was covered with the aluminium particles. His hair glittered in the sunlight like silver foil.

‘Glanville…!’ Thornwald’s voice, slightly querulous, echoed in the galleries of the reef. The flap of his holster was open, but the weapon still lay within its sheath, and Glanville guessed that he had no intention of trying to track him through the galleries and corridors of the reef. The columns of fused sand could barely support their own weight; every few hours there would be a dull eruption as one or other of the great pillar-systems collapsed into a cloud of dust.

Grinning to himself, Glanville watched Thornwald glance back at the pavilion. Evidently intrigued by this duel between the two men, Judith had sat down on the veranda, watching like some mediaeval lady at a tourney.

The police captain moved towards the reef, his legs stiff and awkward, as if self-conscious of his glittering form. Chortling, Glanville scraped the sand from the curved reef over his head and rubbed it into the flecks of silver paint on his sleeves and trousers. As he drank from the flask of water he had hidden in the reef three days earlier, he glanced at his watch. It was nearly three o’clock — within four hours phantoms would move across the sandlake. He patted the parcel wrapped in grey plastic sheeting on the ledge beside him.

At seven o’clock the time-winds began to blow across the Sea of Dreams. As the sun fell away behind the western ridges, the long shadows of the sand-reefs crossed the lake-floor, dimming the quartz-veins as if closing off a maze of secret pathways.

Crouched at the foot of the reef, Glanville edged along the beach, his sand-smeared figure barely visible in the darkness. Four hundred yards away, Thornwald sat alone on the veranda of the pavilion, his silver figure illuminated in the last cerise rays of the sun. Watching him across the lake-bed, Glanville assumed that already the timewinds were moving towards him, carrying strange images of ships and phantom seas, perhaps of mermaids and hallucinatory monsters. Thornwald sat stiffly in his chair, one hand on the rail in front of him.

Glanville moved along the beach, picking his way between the veins of frosted quartz. As the wreck of the excursion module and the smaller capsule near by came between himself and the pavilion, he began to see the faint outlines of a low-hulled ship, a schooner or brigantine, with its sails reefed, as if waiting at anchor in some pirate lagoon. Ignoring it, Glanville crept into a shallow fault that crossed the lake, its floor some three feet below the surrounding surface. Catching his breath, he undid the parcel, then carried the object inside it under one arm as he set off towards the glimmering wreck of the module.

Twenty minutes later Glanville stepped out from his vantage point behind the excursion module. Around him rode the spectral hulks of two square-sailed ships, their bows dipping through the warm sand. Intent on the pavilion ahead of him, where the silver figure of Thornwald had stood up like an electrified ghost, Glanville stepped through the translucent image of an anchor-cable that curved down into the surface of the lake in front of him. Holding the object he had taken from the parcel above his head like a lantern, he walked steadily towards the pavilion.

The hulls of the ships rode silently at their anchors behind him as he reached the edge of the lake. Thirty yards away, the silver paint around the pavilion speckled the sand with a sheen of false moonlight, but the remainder of the beach and lake were in a profound darkness. As he walked the last yards to the pavilion with a slow rhythmic stride, Glanville could see clearly Thornwald’s tall figure pressed against the wall of the veranda, his appalled face, in the shape of his own hands, staring at the apparition in front of him. As Glanville reached the steps Thornwald made a passive gesture at him, one hand raised towards the pistol lying on the table.

Quickly, Glanville threw aside the object he had carried with him. He seized the pistol before Thornwald could move, then whispered, more to himself than to Thornwald: ‘Strange seas, Captain, I warned you…’ He crouched down and began to back away along the veranda, the pistol levelled at Thornwald’s chest.

Then the door on his left opened and before he could move the translucent figure of his wife stepped from the interior of the pavilion and knocked the weapon from his hand.

He turned to her angrily, then shouted at the headless spectre that stepped through him and strode off towards the dark ships moored in the centre of the lake.

Two hours after dawn the next morning Captain Thornwald finished his preparations for departure. In the last minutes he stood on the veranda, gazing out at the even sunlight over the empty lake as he wiped away the last traces of the aluminium paint with a solvent sponge. He looked down at the seated figure of Glanville tied to the chair by the table. Despite the events of the previous night, Glanville now seemed composed and relaxed, a trace even of humour playing about his soft mouth.

Something about this bizarre amiability made Thornwald shudder. He secured the pistol in his holster — another evening by this insane lake and he would be pointing it at his own head.

‘Captain…’ Glanville glanced at him with docile eyes, then shrugged his fat shoulders inside the ropes. ‘When are you going to untie these? We’ll be leaving soon.’

Thornwald threw the sponge on to the silver sand below the pavilion. ‘I’ll be going soon, Glanville. You’re staying here.’ When Glanville began to protest, he said: ‘I don’t think there’s much point in your leaving. As you said, you’ve built your own little world here.’

‘But…’ Glanville searched the captain’s face. ‘Frankly, Thornwald, I can’t understand you. Why did you come here in the first place, then? Where’s Judith, by the way? She’s around here somewhere.’

Thornwald paused, steeling himself against the name and the memory of the previous night. ‘Yes, she’s around here, all right.’ As if testing some unconscious element of Glanville’s memory, he said clearly: ‘She’s in the module, as a matter of fact.’

‘The module?’ Glanville pulled at his ropes, then squinted over his shoulder into the sunlight. ‘But I told her not to go there. When’s she coming back?’

‘She’ll be back, don’t worry. This evening, I imagine, when the timewinds blow, though I don’t want to be here when she comes. This sea of yours had bad dreams, Glanville.’

‘What do you mean?’

Thornwald walked across the veranda. ‘Glanville, have you any idea why I’m here, why I’ve hunted you all this way?’

‘God only knows — something to do with the emigration laws.’

‘Emigration laws?’ Thornwald shook his head. ‘Any charges there would be minor.’ After a pause, he said: ‘Murder, Glanville.’

Glanville looked up with real surprise. ‘Murder? You’re out of your mind! Of whom, for heaven’s sake?’

Thornwald patted the raw skin around his chin. The pale image of his hands still clung to his face. ‘Of your wife.’

‘Judith? But she’s here, you idiot! You saw her yourself when you arrived!’

‘You saw her, Glanville. I didn’t. But I realized that you’d brought her here with you when you started playing her part, using that mincing crazy voice of yours. You weren’t very keen on my going out to the module. Then, last night, you brought something from it for me.’

Thornwald walked across the veranda, averting his eyes from the wreck of the module. He remembered the insane vision he had seen the previous evening as he sat watching for Glanville, waiting for this madman who had absconded with the body of his murdered wife. The time-winds had carried across to him the image of a spectral ship whose rotting timbers had formed a strange portcullis in the evening sun — a dungeon-grate. Then, suddenly, he had seen a terrifying apparition walking across this sea of blood towards him, the nightmare commander of this ship of Hell, a tall woman with the slow rhythmic stride of his own requiem. ‘Her locks were yellow as gold… the nightmare life-in-death was she, who thicks man’s blood with cold.’ Aghast* at the sight of Judith’s head on this lamia, he had barely recognized Glanville, her mad Mariner, bearing her head like a wild lantern before he snatched the pistol.

Glanville flexed his shoulders against the ropes. ‘Captain, I don’t know about Judith… she’s not too happy here, and we’ve never got on with just ourselves for company. I’d like to come with you.’

‘I’m sorry, Glanville, there’s not much point — you’re in the right place here.’

‘But, Captain, aren’t you exceeding your authority? If there is a murder charge..

‘Not "captain", Glanville — "commissioner". I was promoted before I left, and that gives me absolute discretion in these cases. I think this planet is remote enough; no one’s likely to come here and disturb you.’

He went over to Glanville and looked down at him, then took a clasp knife from his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘You should be able to get a hand around that if you stand up. Goodbye, Glanville, I’ll leave you here in your gilded hell.’

‘But Thornwald… Commissioner!’ Glanville swung himself round in the chair. ‘Where’s Judith? Call her.’

Thornwald glanced back across the sunlight. ‘I can’t, Glanville. But you’ll see her soon. This evening, when the timewinds blow, they’ll bring her back to you, a dead woman from the dead sea.’

He set off towards the capsule across the jewelled sand.