The girl’s expression was imperious, although her voice was quiet. Because of this, because also of her curious accent and use of words which I have not attempted to imitate - the others, particularly Bailey, did not realise what she had said. To me the girl’s attitude demanded action. I took her firmly by the arm and marched her along the passages - until we came to the first open cell. Strangely enough this action induced no sense of sickness in either of us.
‘Now see here, Ling, you’re not in China anymore. We’re all captives in this place. We’ve got to keep solidly together, otherwise we’re lost. It’s our only strength, to give support to each other. If it means putting up with a man like Bailey you’ve just got to do it.’
Even in my own ears this sounded flat and feeble, which is always the way with moderation and reason; it always sounds flat and feeble compared to an unrelenting fanatic or bigot. Certainly Ling was not impressed. She looked me over coolly, head-to-toe, and made the announcement, ‘The time will come when it will be a pity you are not ten years younger.’
I was taking this as a left-handed compliment when she added another statement.
‘I shall choose the Australian.’
‘I think you’ll have trouble from the American girl.’ Ling laughed - I suppose it was a laugh. The eyes I noticed were an intense green, the teeth a shining white. The girl must be using the soapy solution in the shower baths. It tasted pretty horrible but it allowed one to clean away the vegetable marrow food on which we were obliged to subsist.
I gave it up. The best I could see in Ling’s point of view was that her ideology represented a last link with Earth. Perhaps it was her way of keeping sane, but it was entirely beyond me to understand it. I was much more impressed at the way Ling always contrived to look neat, always in the same smock.
We were undereating, because unless you were actively hungry there was no point in consuming the tasteless vegetable marrow stuff. It was mushy with a lot of moisture in it. Even so. I was surprised we managed without needing to drink, for there was no possibility of drinking the one source of fluid, the liquid in the shower bath. I could only think we were generating a lot of water internally, through oxidising the vegetable marrow material. Every now and then we had an intense desire to chew something really hard. I used to bite away at the cord from my rucksack, often for an hour at a time.
The natural effect of the undereating was that we were nearly all losing weight. I had lost most of the excess ten pounds or so which I never seemed to get rid of back on Earth. Ernst Schmidt had lost a lot more, so much in fact that he had discarded my anorak. He went around now only in the bathing trunks, which he had tightened in quite a bit. Getting fit had become a passion with the German. He had taken to running through the passages according to a systematic schedule, ten laps from the cathedral and back again for every hour he was awake. Sometimes I accompanied him, to give my muscles a little exercise, but I could never be so regular about it. He commented on this one day.
‘A strange difference of temperament, Professor. We often have these little runs together, but you can’t quite keep them up. Of course I understand you have not the same need as I. But even if you had the need, you couldn’t keep them up. No, I think not.’
‘Personal temperament?’
‘It is an interesting question. Both personal and national, I think. A misleading thing in politics - and in business - is the description given to your people. Anglo-Saxons, eh? What is an Anglo-Saxon, Professor, a sort of German maybe?’
‘We’re always supposed to be a kind of first cousins. There’s the similarity of language for one thing.’
‘Accidental, imposed by a handful of conquerors. Look at me. I speak English. If you will pardon me, I speak it with an American accent. Does that make me an American? Obviously not. I speak this way because Americans have conquered my particular world, the business world.’
‘Go on.’
‘It is a pity we have no mirrors in this place? If we had a mirror, let me tell you how you would see yourself. You would see a tallish man, with a fair skin, a big red beard and blue eyes. You would see a Celt not a German. Your people are Celts, Professor, not Germans, and that is the true source of the difference in our temperaments, you and I.’
‘So you think it goes a long way back?’
‘Three thousand years or more, to the time when we Germans threw you Celts out of Europe. Yes, we understand a lot about each other, you and I, but we understand each other because we have fought each other for a long time now, not because we are the same.’
I was surprised at the turn of the conversation. Schmidt must have noticed something of this in my face.
‘Ah, you wonder how I can tell you these things? Because these things are my real interest, not the packing of meat, for who should be interested in the packing of meat?’
‘What does all this lead you to?’
‘We Germans can pursue a goal relentlessly to the end. You Celts can never do so. You have what I think is called an easy going streak. It was this streak which made the Romans admire you so much in ancient times. But it was this weakness which very nearly cost you the whole of Europe, my friend.’
‘To be easy going can mean reserve, you know, reserve energy in times of real crisis.’
‘Ah, you are thinking of winning the last battle. It was like that in each of the wars of this century, wasn’t it? You won the last battles, you won those wars. Yet from victory each time you emerged weaker than before. We Germans emerged each time stronger, even from defeat.’
‘Because of a tenacity of purpose?’
‘Correct, Professor.’
‘What is it you are really telling me, Herr Schmidt? That in whatever should lie ahead of us you will come out best?’
‘A leader will emerge among us. It will be a man, an intelligent man. This leaves the choice between the two of us. Of the others the one is a buffoon, the other a simple countryman. Which of us it will be, I am not sure yet.’
‘Don’t be too easy going, Herr Schmidt. You contradict yourself.’
Schmidt laughed. Then he became more serious.
‘In a known situation a German will always win. He will win because all his energies are directed to a clear-cut purpose. In an unknown situation it is all much less sure.’
I mention these events in some detail because there were three points in them which came together. Hattie Foulds and her cockfights, Ling and the whipping she would have liked to administer on the person of Bill Bailey, and now Schmidt’s reference to himself as a meat-packer. It made a consistent theory, except for one very big snag, Daghri. I had a long serious talk with the Indian. He denied all my suggestions with such poise and dignity that I felt I simply must believe his protestations of innocence. My theory just had to be wrong. I became depressed about it. Mary noticed the depression and wanted to know what it was all about. I decided to tell her of the things in my mind.
‘Every one of us is affecting an attitude, or considering some problem,’ I began.
‘How do you know? About me for instance.’
‘You are considering the moral problem of whether you should permit yourself to bear children into captivity.’
Mary looked me full in the face and nodded.
‘My problem from the beginning,’ I went on, ‘has been to understand something of the psychology of the creatures running this ship. Zoomen, is the way I like to think of them. What the hell are they doing and why?
Obviously taking samples of living creatures, perhaps everywhere throughout the Galaxy.’
‘You mean there might be animals from other planets on this ship?’
‘Quite certainly, I would think. Through the walls of this cathedral, through the passage walls there will be other “quarters”, other rooms and passages with other specimens in them.’
‘Literally, a zoo!’
‘Literally. Yet my curiosity about those other compartments and their contents is less than my curiosity about the human content of this particular compartment. There are nine of us, four of us from the British Isles, an American girl, a Chinese girl, an Indian, a German and an Australian. What kind of a distribution is that? Seven out of nine white. Can you really believe interstellar zoomen have a colour prejudice?’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t easy to grab people, they took the first they could get.’
‘Doesn’t hold water. Geographically they snatched us from places as wide apart as Europe, America, India, Australia and China. They snatched McClay, Daghri and myself from the quiet countryside, they took you from the busy streets of London, Ling from a crowded town, Schmidt and Giselda Home from the suburbs of Chicago. It doesn’t seem as if the snatching process presented the slightest difficulty to them.’
‘Have you any idea of how it was done?’
‘Not really. I just visualise it like picking up bits of fluff with a vacuum cleaner. They simply held a nozzle over you and you disappeared into the works.’
‘To come out in this place.’
‘It must have been something like that. Where had we got to, this colour business. Differences in colour might seem very unimportant to these zoomen. We only see these differences, like the differences between you and Ling, because an enormous proportion of the human brain is given over to the analysis of what are really extremely fine distinctions. It could be the zoomen hardly notice these distinctions, and if they do they don’t think them worth bothering about.’
‘Then perhaps there was some other method of choice?’
‘Must have been. If humans were snatched at random, a good half would be yellow or black. You’d only get a distribution as queer as this one if you had some system or other. But not a colour system.’
‘Sounds like a contradiction.’
‘Not necessarily. Right at the beginning it occurred to me that justice might be the criterion.’
‘Justice!’
‘Look, if you were taking a number of humans into lifelong captivity, it might occur to you to choose the very people who had themselves shown the least feeling for the captivity of other animals, or for the lives of other animals.’
‘My coat!’
‘Yes, your mink coat must have marked you out from the crowd in the street. The zoomen spotted it, and at the blink of an eye you were into their vacuum cleaner.’
Mary shuddered and then smiled wryly,
‘I always thought of it as such a beautiful coat, warm and splendid to look at. You really believe it was the coat? I only use it for a pillow now.’
‘A lot of things fit the same picture. Schmidt was a meat-packer. Giselda Home’s father was in the same business, stuffing bloody bits of animals into tins.’
Mary was quite excited, her own plight forgotten as the puzzle fitted into place.
‘And McClay reared the animals, and Bailey was a butcher, an actual slaughterer.’
‘And the cockfights for Hattie Foulds.’
‘But what about you, and Ling, and Daghri?’
‘Leave me out of it. I can make a good case against myself. Ling and Daghri are the critical ones. You see there isn’t much animal-eating among Asiatic populations, really because they haven’t enough in the way of feeding stuffs to be able to rear animals for slaughter. This seemed to me to be the reason why only two Asiatic people had been taken. It occurred to me that possibly even these two might have been chosen in some other way.’
‘What about Ling?’
‘Well, to Ling people are no more than animals. I’ve little doubt Ling has had many a person whipped at her immediate discretion, at her pleasure even for all I know.’
‘And Daghri?’
‘Daghri is the contradiction, the disproof of everything. Daghri is a Hindu. Hinduism is a complicated religion, but one important part of it forbids the eating of animals.’
‘Perhaps Daghri doesn’t have much use for that aspect of his religion.’
‘Exactly what I thought. I charged him with it directly, more or less accusing him of some form of violence against either animals or humans. He denied it with the utmost dignity.’
‘Maybe he was lying.’
‘Why should he lie?’
‘Perhaps because he’s ashamed. You know, Daghri is different in another way. What odds would you give of taking nine people at random and of finding none with strong religious beliefs?’
‘Very small, I would imagine.’
‘Yet none of us has strong religious beliefs, except Daghri.’
I saw exactly what Mary meant. To Daghri, religion might be no more than a sham. Perhaps the Indian was no more than a gifted liar.
Not long after this conversation Daghri disappeared. For a while I thought he had retired, possibly in shame, to his box-like cell. In one of my runs with Schmidt I noticed all the cells open. Daghri was not to be found in any one of them. We searched high and low, but Daghri simply was not there. ‘High and low’ is an obvious exaggeration, for there wasn’t any possible hiding place in our asceptic accommodations. It was rather that we looked everywhere many times. Daghri was gone. The general consensus was that the poor fellow has been abstracted by the zoomen for
‘experiments’. I was of a similar mind at first, then it all clicked into place. I rushed into the cathedral. The others quickly followed, so we were assembled there, eight of us now. I studied the star pattern on the wall. We hadn’t bothered with it of late, treating it more as a decoration than as a source of information.
What a fool I’d been! I should have noticed the slight shift of the patterns back to their original forms. Owing to the motion of the ship, the stars had moved very slightly, but now they had moved back. The planets were there too, the planets of our own solar system. The double Earth-Moon was there. So was the sunlight replacing artificial light at the entrance of the passageways - there was a small subtle difference.
‘We’re being taken back,’ I heard someone say.
I knew we were not being taken back. Daghri had been taken back, the contradiction had been removed. My instinct had been right; Daghri had been telling the truth. Daghri had ill-treated no animal; Daghri was saved, but not so the rest of us. The planets moved across the wall, just as before. We were on our way out again.
The others couldn’t believe it at first, then they didn’t want to believe it, but at last, as the hours passed, they were forced to believe it. Disintegration set in quickly. Giselda Home gave way badly. She seemed big and strong, but really she was only an overdeveloped kid. I thought she might be better alone, so I took her back to her own cell. She nodded and went in. Silently, from behind me, Ling glided after Giselda Home. I shouted to Ling to come out and leave the girl alone. Ling turned with a look of haughty indifference on her face. At that very moment the panel of the cell closed. There was just a fleeting fraction of a second in which I saw the expression on Ling’s face changed from indifference to triumph.
The others gathered outside the cell. We could hear nothing from inside, for the panel was completely sound proof. The Chinese girl had judged the situation quite exactly. Giselda Home was near the edge of sanity. With cutting and sadistic words, and with the force of an intense personality, Ling would push her over that edge.
The panel slid open. Horror-stricken, I gazed inside. Horror dissolved to laughter. Gone was Ling’s neat smock. Blood was oozing from long scratches on Giselda Home’s face. Ling had evidently fought cat-like, as I would have anticipated. Giselda Home had fought in a different style. One swinging fist must have hit Ling on the mouth, for it was now puffy and bleeding. A fist had also whacked the Chinese girl a real beauty on the left eye. Ling staggered out, leaving Giselda Home with a big smile on her face.
‘Gee, that was real good,’ said the American girl.
It was two days, two waking and sleeping periods, before I saw Ling again. She still contrived to appear reserved and haughty, even though the furious set-to had left her with the blackest eye I ever saw and with hardly any remnants of clothing.
‘The American girl and I, we will share the Australian,’ Ling said. ‘It is a pity you are not five years younger,’ she added.
Mary took it all with a great calmness.
‘I’d become reconciled to it, captivity I mean. This really proves the zoomen have a sense of justice, to go back all that way to put Daghri home again.’
Somehow I couldn’t tell Mary. I knew the zoomen hadn’t made any mistake about Daghri. It was an experiment, done quite deliberately to see how we would react. The zoomen just couldn’t have read me so accurately and Daghri so badly. With Daghri gone, we made eight, four couples - the animals came into the Ark. Another thing, choose a smallish number. Being an irrational creature a human might say, seven. A really rational creature would always choose a binary number, eight.
Mary put a hand lightly on my arm.
‘You never said what it was you had done.’
‘My sin was the worst of you all. My sin was that I was a consumer. I ate the poor creatures McClay reared on his farm, the animals Bailey slaughtered, the bloody bits Schmidt stuffed into tins.’
‘But millions do the same. I did, everybody does!’
‘Yes, but they know not what they do. I knew what I was doing. For twenty years now I’ve been clear in my mind about it. Yet I’ve gone on taking the line of least resistance. I made minor adjustments, like eating more fish and less meat, but I never faced the real problem. I knew what I was doing.’
The weeks passed, then the months. For some time, Mary and I have shared the same cell for sleeping. We had no trouble with the sickness, even when we shared my rucksack for a pillow. The same favour was not immediately extended to the others. The favour perhaps was granted because I had kept my small scrap of knowledge about the zoomen strictly to myself.
The day did come, however, when the others were allowed into physical contact. There was no mistaking the day, for Bill Bailey appeared in the cathedral clad only in his now tattered underpants, shouting,
‘Bloody miracle. We got on last night, real good and proper.’ Then he was off, high stepping, knees up, like a boxer trotting along the road. Round and round the cathedral he went chanting,
‘Raw eggs, raw eggs, mother. Oh, for a bloody basin of raw eggs.’
Giselda Home was standing nearby.
‘What does it mean?’ she asked rather shyly.
‘It means, my dear, that we’re only nine months away from our destination,’ I answered.
* * * *
This narrative was discovered in curious circumstances many many years after it was written, indeed long long after it had become impossible to identify Meall Ghaordie, the mountain mentioned by its author.
Landing on a distant planetary system, the crew of the fifth deep interstellar mission was astonished to discover what seemed like a remarkable new species of humanoid. The language spoken by the creatures was quite unintelligible in its details but in the broad pattern of its sounds it was strikingly similar to an archaic human language.
The creatures lived a wild nomadic existence. Yet they were imbued with a strong religious sense, a religion apparently centering around a.
‘covenant’, guarded day and night in a remote stronghold. It was there, in a remote mountain valley, that the creatures assembled for their most solemn religious ceremonies. By a technologically-advanced subterfuge, access to the ‘covenant’ was at length obtained. It turned out to be the story of the
‘Professor’, reproduced above without amendations or omissions. It was written in a small book of the pattern of an ancient diary. This it was the creatures guarded with such abandoned ferocity, although not a word of it did they understand.
The manuscript has undoubtedly created many more problems than it has solved. What meaning can be attached to the fanciful, anatomical references? What was ‘Munro-bagging’? These questions are still the subject of bitter debate among savants. Who were the sinister zoomen?
Could it be that the Professor and his party turned out to be too hot to handle, in a biological sense of course, and that the zoomen were forced to dump them on the first vacant planet? The pity is that the ‘Professor’ did not continue his narrative. His writing materials must soon have become exhausted, for the above narrative almost fills his diary.
It was the appearance of the creatures which misled the fifth expedition into thinking they were dealing with humanoids, not humans. It was the unique combination of flaming red hair with intense green, mongoloid eyes. Did these characteristics become dominant in the mixed gene pool of the Professor’s party, or was the true explanation more direct and elementary?
* * * *
KINGSLEY AMIS: Something Strange
Like J. B. Priestley, who was included in Volume one, Kingsley Amis involved himself in the negotiations over an Arts Council grant for the floundering New Worlds magazine in 1967, having already declared a life-long interest in science fiction.
Kingsley William Amis was born on April 16th, 1922, and was educated at the City of London school and St John’s College, Oxford, where he earned his MA. Serving in the Army between 1942 and 1945, he later became a Lecturer in English at the University of Swansea from 1949
to 1961. He shot to fame in 1954 with the publication of his humorous novel Lucky Jim.
In the Spring of 1959 he was invited to give a series of lectures at Princeton University as part of the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism. Amis chose as his subject matter, science fiction. Reworked and lengthened these lectures were published in 1960 as New Maps of Hell. Whilst Amis classifies most early and much current sf as banal, he nevertheless champions the genre as a valuable vehicle for social comment which could never be attained in any other stream of literature.