The Dark Light Years

CHAPTER FOUR

The news editor of the Windsor Circuit struck the pedal bar of his technivision and scowled at the representation of his chief reporter’s face as it appeared on the screen.

“Where the hell are you, Adrian? Get down to the bloody spaceport as you were told. The Mariestopes is due within half an hour.”

The left half of Adrian Bucker’s countenance screwed itself into a wince. He leant nearer to his screen until his nose opaqued and the vision misted and said, “Don’t be like that, Ralph. I’ve got a local angle on the trip that you’ll fairly lap up.”

“I don’t want a local angle, I want you down at that ruddy spaceport right away, my lad.”

Bucker winced the right side of his face and began talking fast.

“Listen, Ralph. I’m in “The Angel’s Head’ — the pub right on the Thames. I’ve got an old girl here called Florence Walthamstone. She’s lived in Windsor all her life, remembers when the Great Park was a park, all that sort of stuff. She’s got a nephew called Rodney Walthamstone who’s a rating on the Mariestopes.

She’s just been showing me a letter from him in which he describes these alien animals they’re bringing home, and I thought that if we ran a picture of her, with a quote from the letter — you know, Local Lad Helps Capture Those Monsters — it would look—”

“That’s enough, I’ve heard enough. This thing’s the biggest news of the decade and you imagine we need a local angle to put it over? Give the old girl her letter back, thank her very much for the offer, pay for her drink, pat her dear wrinkled cheeks, and then get down to that bloody spaceport and interview Bargerone or I’ll have your skin for flypaper.”

“Okay, okay, Ralph, have it the way you want it. There was a time when you were open to suggestions.” Having cut the circuit, Bucker added, “And I’ve got one I could make right now.”

He pushed out of the booth, and jostled his way through a heavy-bodied, heavy-drinking mass of men and women to a tall old woman crushed into the corner of the bar. She was lifting a glass of dark brown to her lips, her little finger genteelly cocked at an angle.

“Was your editor excited?” she asked, splashing slightly.

“Stood on his head. Look, Miss Walthamstone, I’m sorry about this, but I’ve got to get down to the spaceport. Perhaps we can do a special interview with you later. Now I’ve got your number; don’t bother to ring us, we’ll ring you, right, eh? Very nice to meet you.”

As he gulped the last of his drink down, she said, “Oh, but you ought to let me pay for that one, Mr.—”

“Very kind of you, if you insist, very kind, Miss Walthamstone. ’Bye then.”

He flung himself among the filling stomachs. She called his name. He looked back furiously from the middle of the fray.

“Have a word with Rodney if you see him. He’d be ever so glad to tell you anything. He’s a very nice boy.”

He fought his way to the door, muttering, “Excuse me, excuse me,” over and over, like a curse.

The reception bays at the spaceport were crowded. Ordinary and extraordinary citizens packed every roof and window. In a roped-off section of the tarmac stood representatives of various governments, including the Minister for Martian Affairs, and of various services, including the Director of the London Exozoo. Beyond the enclosure, the band of a well-known regiment, uniformed in anachronistically bright colors, marched about playing Suppers Light Cavalry Overture and selections of Irish melodies. Ice cream was hawked, newspapers were sold, pockets were picked. The Mariestopes slid through a layer of nimbostratus and settled on its haunches in a distant part of the field.

It began to rain.

The band embarked on a lively rendering of the twentieth-century air “Sentimental Journey” without adding much luster to the proceedings. As such occasions usually are, this occasion was dull, its interest diffused. The spraying of the entire hull of the ship with germicidal sprays took some while. A hatch opened, a little overalled figure appeared in the opening, was cheered, and disappeared again. A thousand children asked if that was Captain Bargerone and were told not to be silly.

At length a ramp came out like a reluctant tongue and lolled against the ground. Transport — three small buses, two trucks, an ambulance, various luggage tenders, a private car. and several military vehicles — converged on to the great ship from different parts of the port. And finally a line of human beings began to move hastily down the ramp with bowed heads and dived into the shelter of the vehicles. The crowd cheered; it had come to cheer.

In a reception hall, the gentlemen of the press had made the air blue with the smoke of their mescahales before Captain Bargerone was thrust in upon them. Flashes sizzled and danced as he smiled defensively at them.

With some of his officers standing behind him, he stood and spoke quietly and unsensationally in a very English way (Bargerone was French) about how much space there was out there and how many worlds there were and how devoted his crew had been except for an unfortunate strike on the way home for which someone, he hoped, was going to get it hot; and he finished by saying that on a very pleasant planet which the USGN had graciously decided should be known as Clementina they had captured or killed some large animals with interesting characteristics. Some of these characteristics he described. The animals had two heads, each of which held a brain. The two brains together weighed 2,000 grammes — a quarter more than man’s. These animals, ETA’s or rhinomen, as the crew called them, had six limbs which ended in undoubted equivalents of hands. Unfortunately the strike had hindered the study of the remarkable creatures, but there seemed a fair reason to suppose that they had a language of their own and must therefore, despite their ugliness and dirty habits, be regarded as more or less — but of course nobody could be certain as yet, and it might take many months of patient research before we could be certain — as an intelligent form of life on a par with man and capable of having a civilization of their own, on a planet as yet unknown to man. Two of them were preserved in captivity and would go to the Exozoo for study.

When the speech was over, reporters closed round Bargerone.

“You’re saying these rhinos don’t live on Clementina?”

“We have reason to suppose not.”

“What reason?”

(“Smile for the Subud Times, please, Captain.”) “We think they were on a visit there, just as we were.”

“You mean they travelled in a spaceship?”

“In a sense, yes. But they may just have been taken along on the trip as experimental animals — or dumped there, like Captain Cook’s pigs dumped on Tahiti or wherever it was.”

(“More profile, Captain, if you please.”) “Well, did you see their spaceship?”

“Er well, we think we actually have… er, their space-ship in our hold.”

“Give, then, Captain, this is big! Why the secrecy? Have you captured their spaceship or have you not?”

(“And over this way. sir.”) “We think we have. That is, it has the properties of a spaceship, but it, er — no TP drive naturally, but an interesting drive, and, well, it sounds silly but you see the hull is made of wood. A very high-density wood.” Captain Bargerone wiped his face clear of expression.

“Oh now look. Captain, you’re joking….”

In the mob of photographers, phototects, and reporters, Adrian Bucker could get nowhere near the captain. He elbowed his way across to a tall nervous man who stood behind Bargerone, scowling out of one of the long windows at the crowds milling about in the light rain.

“Would you tell me how you feel about these aliens you brought back to Earth, sir?” Bucker asked.

“Are they animals or are they people?”

Hardly hearing, Bruce Ainson sent his gaze probing over the crowds outside. He thought he had caught a glimpse of his good-for-nothing son, Aylmer, wearing his usual hangdog expression as he plunged through the mob.

“Swine,” he said.

“You mean they look like swine or they act like swine?”

The explorer turned to stare at the reporter.

“I’m Bucker of the Windsor Circuit, sir. My paper would be interested in anything you could tell us about these creatures. You think they are animals, am I right in saying?”

“What would you say mankind is, Mr. Bucker, civilized beings or animals? Have we ever met a new race without corrupting it or destroying it? Look at the Polynesians, the Guanches, the American Indians, the Tasmanians “

“Yes, sir, I get your point, but would you say these aliens….”

“Oh, they have intelligence, as has any mammal; these are mammals. But their behavior or lack of behavior is baffling because we must not think anthropomorphically about them. Have they ethics, have they consciences? Are they capable of being corrupted as the Eskimos and Indians were? Are they perhaps capable of corrupting us? We have to ask ourselves a lot of searching questions before we are capable of seeing these rhinomen clearly. That is my feeling on the matter.”

“That is very interesting. What you are saying is that we have to develop a new way of thinking, is that it?”

“No, no, no, I hardly think this is a problem I can discuss with a newspaper representative, but man places too much trust in his intellect; what we need is a new way of feeling, a more reverent…. I was getting somewhere with those two unhappy creatures we have captive — establishing trust, you know, after we had slaughtered their companions and taken them prisoner, and what is happening to them now?

They’re going to be a sideshow ha the Exozoo. The Director, Sir Mihaly Pasztor, is an old friend of mine; I shall complain to him.”

“Heck, people want to see the beasts! How do we know they have feelings like ours?”

“Your view, Mr. Bucker. is probably the view of the damn fool majority. Excuse me, I have a technical! to make.”

Ainson hurried from the building, where the wedge of people instantly closed in and held him tight. He stood helpless there while a lorry moved slowly by, buoyed along with cheers, cries and exclamations from the onlookers. Through the bars at the back of the lorry, the two ETA’s stared down on the onlookers. They made no sound. They were large and grey, beings at once forlorn and formidable.

Their gaze rested on Bruce Ainson. They gave no sign of recognition. Suddenly chilled, he turned and began to worm his way through the press of wet mackintoshes.

The ship was emptying and being emptied. Cranes dipped their great beaks into the ship’s vitals, coming up with nets full of cartons, boxes, crates, and canisters. Sewage lighters swarmed, sucking out the waste from the metal creature’s alimentary canal. The hull bled men in little gouts. The great whale Mariestopes was stranded and powerless, beached far from its starry native deeps.

Walthamstone and Ginger Duffield followed Quilter to one of the exit ducts. Quilter was loaded with kit and due to catch an ionosphere jet from another corner of the port to the U.S.A. in half an hour’s time. They paused on the lip of the ship and looked out quizzically, inhaling the strange-tasting air.

“Look at it, worst weather in the universe,” Waltham-stone complained. “I’m staying in here till it stops, I tell you straight.”

“Catch a taxi.” Duffield suggested.

“’Tisn’t worth it. My aunt’s place is only half a mile away. My bike’s over there in the P.T.O.’s offices.

I’ll cycle when the rain clears — if it does.”

“Does the P.T.O. let you leave your bike there free between flights?” Duffield asked with interest.

Anxious not to get involved in what promised to become a rather English conversation, Quilter shrugged a duffel bag more comfortably on to his shoulders and said, “Say, you men, come on over to the flight canteen and have a nice warm British synthbeer with me before I go.”

“We ought to celebrate the fact that you have just left the Exploration Corps,” Walthamstone said.

“Shall we go along, Ginger?”

“Did they stamp your paybook ‘Discharged’ and sign you off officially?” Duffield asked.

“I only signed on a Flight-by-flight basis,” Quilter explained. “All perfectly legal, Duffield, you old barrack-room lawyer, you. Don’t you ever relax?”

“You know my motto, Hank. Observe it and you won’t go wrong: ‘They’ll twist you if they can.’”

“I knew a bloke a bit ago who forgot to get his 535 cleared by the Quarter-master before he was demobbed, and they had him back. They did, they caught him for another five years. He’s serving on Charon now, helping to win the war.”

“Are you coming for this beer or aren’t you?”

“I’d better come,” Walthamstone said. “We may never see you again after this bird in Dodge City gets at you, from what you’ve told me about her. I’d run a mile from that sort of girl, myself.”

He moved tentatively out into the fine drizzle; Quilter followed, glancing back over his shoulder at Duffield.

“Are you coming, Ginger, or aren’t you?”

Duffield looked crafty.

“I’m not leaving this ship till I get my strike pay, mate,” he said.

Explorer Phipps was home. He had embraced his parents and was hanging his coat in the hall. They stood behind him, managing to look discontented even while they smiled. Shabby, round-shouldered, they gave him the grumbling welcome he knew so well. They spoke in turn, two monologues that never made a dialogue.

“Come along in the sitting-room, Gussie. It’s warmer in there,” his mother said. “You’ll be cold after leaving the ship. I’ll get a cup of tea in a minute.”

“Had a bit of trouble with the central heating. Shouldn’t need it now we’re into June, but it has been usually chilly for the time of year. It’s such a job to get anyone to come and look at anything. I don’t know what’s happening to people. They don’t seem to want your custom nowadays.”

“Tell him about the new doctor, Henry. Terribly rude man, absolutely no education or manners at all.

And dirty finger-nails — fancy expecting to examine anyone with dirty finger-nails.”

“Of course, it’s the war that’s to blame. It’s brought an entirely different type of man to the surface.

Brazil shows no sign of weakening, and meanwhile the government—”

“The poor boy doesn’t want to hear about the war directly he gets home, Henry. They’ve even started rationing some foodstuffs! All we hear is propaganda, propaganda, on the techni. And the quality of things has deteriorated too. I had to buy a new saucepan last week—”

“Settle yourself down here, Gussie. Of course it’s the war that’s to blame. I don’t know what’s to become of us all. The news from Sector 160 is so depressing, isn’t it?”

Phipps said, “Out in the galaxy, nobody takes any interest in the war. I must say it all sounds a bit of a shower to me.”

“Haven’t lost your patriotism, have you, Gussie?” his father asked.

“What’s patriotism but an extension of egotism?” Phipps asked, and was glad to see his father’s chest, momentarily puffed, shrink again.

His mother broke a tense silence by saying, “Anyhow, dear, you’ll see a difference in England while you’re on leave. How long have you got, by the way?”

Little as the parental chatter enthralled Phipps, this sudden question discomforted him, as mother and father waited eagerly for his answer. He knew that stifling feeling of old. They wanted nothing of him, only that he was there to be spoken to. They wanted nothing from him but his life.

“I shall only be staying here for a week. That charming part-Chinese girl that I met last leave, Ah Chi, is in the Far East on a painting holiday. Next Thursday I fly to Macao to stay with her.”

Familiarity again. He knew his father’s would-be piteous shake of the head, that particular pursing of his mother’s lips as if she nursed a lemon pip there. Before they could speak, he rose to his feet.

“I’ll just go upstairs and unpack my grip, if you’ll both excuse me.”