The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

wondered remotely what kind of conversation it would have been possible to engage them in, but it seemed a poor time for argument; meekly, he did as he was told. He was marched along a passage and up a flight of stairs, and locked into a featureless waiting room. Beyond the door he could hear voices and footsteps.

      Uneasily he thought of all captives in man’s chequered history who from behind locked doors had listened to the unsettling clatter of boots and commands. It would have been better, he reflected, if the moon had never been attainable, than it should be a mere extension of Earth’s hard mazes.

      He recalled a song and its casually grim words:

      ‘Life goes on; no one’s Irreplaceable.’

      Again he called Big Bert, but it was still mysteriously silent.

      The door was flung open, this time by two different guards. They bundled him out to a yard and into a waiting van, climbing up after him. The vehicle moved off with a lurch and began to travel at speed. At one point, Wyvern thought he heard a shot fired at it.

      A quarter of an hour later he was again standing before Colonel H and his secretary.

      Colonel H was hardly recognisable. His face was hushed and heavy and his head was carried with a peculiar alertness not noticeable previously; he looked, Wyvern thought for the first time, a man to be reckoned with. He slammed a suitcase shut and stood up, glowering at Wyvern.

      ‘Come through here,’ he commanded without any preliminaries, gesturing to an adjoining room.

      Wyvern walked through. The secretary made to follow, but H thrust out his hand.

      ‘You can stay here and cope with the paper work,’ he said sarcastically. ‘I’ll deal with this hero.’

      He closed the door, and Wyvern and he were alone. The room was bare but for a metal stool and a blank telescreen in the ceiling. It would be years, at the present rate of so-called progress, before the warrens constructed on the moon were properly furnished; by and large, they looked less inviting than the craters outside.

      H also looked ugly. Wyvern began another mental call for Big Bert, but still there was no reply.

      ‘So you have me again,’ he observed.

      ‘I only want the answer to one question, and then I’m going to shoot you,’ H said.

      ‘That wouldn’t be very clever of you,’ Wyvern said. not without trepidation, ‘or have you run another telepath to earth?’

      ‘Not Parrodyce, if that’s who you’re thinking of – and he’s got nothing better than a dose of gamma coming to him when we catch up with him. What you reckon we want another telepath for, eh?’

      ‘To teach your computer to mind read, as you said,’ Wyvern replied.

      ‘You’ve already done that,’ the Colonel said.

      How had he found out? Had they found out, perhaps, from Bert itself? H did not leave Wyvern long in doubt.

      ‘You fool,’ he said savagely, ‘didn’t you realise that when you were communicating with Big Bert anyone within fifty yards could pick it up? One of the officers who pulled your ’copter down got out of the crash as lightly as you – the other two broke their necks, by the way – and he told us everything that went over between you.’

      It was convincing, crushing, final. The only excuse Wyvern had for not having realised it before was that the usual staggering thought emanations of ego-union had been absent during communication with Bert. Bert was not human: he had intellect but no ego. With him, it had been altogether a quiet, unsensational business. But Wyvern, of course, had opened his mind and had been sending at his usual strength. In the pressure of events, he had not realised it – and nor had Big Bert, which was significant; for it showed that the machine, being man-built, could on occasion act like a man and proceed without sifting all available data.

      Even if he had realised that fact, he could have done no differently. It had been essential for Wyvern to communicate with Bert. The past was unalterable; and now the future seemed inevitable. For him, death only lay ahead; for mankind, whom Wyvern had imagined he could help, lay the long terror of spies loose in their very heads. And yet – and yet Big Bert had spoken only to Wyvern …

      The hostile silence was broken by Colonel H.

      ‘So you see you are of no further use to us,’ he said, and slowly drew a revolver from his hip holster.

      ‘Then why did you go to all the trouble of reviving me and removing the wire network after my helicopter crashed?’

      ‘Because I want the answer to one question.’

      ‘And that?’

      Colonel H paused as if sorting his words carefully.

      Then he said: ‘The machine was instructed to learn from you. It followed those instructions. It learnt the secrets of your freak mind so quickly that we were deceived, and when it closed itself down we could only presume there had been a failure somewhere before it had got to the information. We were wrong there, as we soon discovered. But the point I am interested in is this: when the brain opened itself up again and collaborated with you, it was acting directly contrary to its instructions. How and why was that possible?’

      Wyvern leant against the cold wall. The revolver was lowered. The problem was indeed one in which he was deeply, vitally interested – yet at present his brain was working only on the surface.

      ‘Perhaps the brain found out about something you never have – the sacredness of human life!’ he said.

      ‘Sacredness!’ He exploded. ‘That sort of cant went out of date back in nineteen fifty! It’s absolute rubbish! Your trouble is, you’ve had 3,000 calories a day all your life. It’s put fat on your brain. You just think of me as a roughneck, Wyvern, don’t you? You’re wrong, wrong right down to your guts. I’m the new élite, I’ve learnt the facts of the modern world! I don’t rule just by bullets – I rule by the iron rod of demography. At the end of the second world war, back in nineteen forty something, the world’s population was only about 2,700 million; they couldn’t visualise totalitarianism in England then, unless it was forced on ’em from outside. That’s what they were guarding against, but it sneaked in and coshed ’em from behind. Why? Because world population – despite all the intervening bloodletting – had doubled. It’s something like 5,500 million now!’

      ‘Are you trying to make some sort of apology?’ Wyvern asked.

      ‘No! It’s bare facts. Growing population gobbling up dwindling resources. Average calorie intake falling. Fiercer struggles for less food, nation envying nation. Your bloated electorate turns into a starving rabble; below 2,000 calories a day, they forget what ballot slips are, they forget the subtle distinctions between things like Conservatism and Socialism. They have to be ruled by whips and bullets. You see, Wyvern, it’s a law of nature.

      ‘Take a damn good look at me, Wyvern. I’m Mother Nature personified!’