The Best of Science Fiction 12

"Mentiras! You think we Mexicans are so stupid? No doubt you have a suitcase full of this filth in your hotel room." Alfaro was standing by the table smiling. He showed a police badge. "I am the F.B.I. señor ... the Federal Police of Mexico. Allow me." He took the note and held it up to the light smiling he handed it back to me. He said something to Rodriguez who walked out and stood by the fountain. I noticed for the first time that he was not carrying a pistol. Alfaro looked after him shaking his head sadly. "You have time for a coffee señor ? I will tell you a story."

"That's enough!" I pulled a card out of my wallet and snapped crisply "I am District Supervisor Lee of the American Narcotics Department and I am arresting you and your accomplice Rodriguez for acting in concert to promote the sale of narcotics ... caffeine among other drugs ... "

A hand touched my shoulder. I looked up. A grey-haired Irishman was standing there with calm authority the face portentous and distant as if I were recovering consciousness after a blow on the head. They do not always remember. "Go over there by the fountain, Bill. I'll look into this." I could feel his eyes on my back see the sad head shake hear him order two coffees in excellent Spanish ... dry fountain empty square silver paper in the wind frayed sounds of distant city ... everything grey and fuzzy ... my mind isn't working right ... who are you over there telling the story of Harry and Bill? ... The square clicked back into focus. My mind cleared. I walked toward the café with calm authority.

In being aware of the bodily experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life ... my theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time.

(A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World)

... The subjective reality of fiction depends, not on the spacio-temporal coordinates assigned to it, but on the author's direct or indirect experience of reality, on his frames of reference for the interpretation of reality, on his ability to abstract and synthesise fictional experiences, and on his selection of symbolic media capable of evoking these experiences completely for his readers.

(Reginald Bretnor, Modern Science Fiction)

In his B.B.C. interview, Ballard spoke of the distinction between 'manifest' and 'latent' reality, and the necessity for portraying three distinct aspects of reality in fiction: the objective physical level, the subjective level of consciousness and perception, and the public-image level of other people's perceptions. Too often, he pointed out, we dismiss as 'fictional' many elements of our environment which have attained projective reality in spite of their fictional origins. The fact is, a television spectacle is as real a part of one's experience as a walk down the street; nor does the memory of a hallucination differ intrinsically from the memory of a fireworks display.

After the supper dishes were done there was a general movement from the Adler kitchen to the Adler living room.

It was led by Gottfried Helmuth Adler, commonly known as Gott. He was thinking how they should be coming from a dining room, yes, with coloured maids, not from a kitchen. In a large brandy snifter he was carrying what had been left in the shaker from the martinis, a colourless elixir weakened by melted ice yet somewhat stronger than his wife was supposed to know. This monster drink was a regular part of Gott's carefully thought-out program for getting safely through the end of the day.

"After the seventeenth hour of creation God got sneaky," Gott Adler once put it to himself.

He sat down in his leather-upholstered easy chair, flipped open Plutarch's Lives left-handed, glanced down through the lower halves of his executive bifocals at the paragraph in the biography of Caesar he'd been reading before dinner, then, without moving his head, looked through the upper halves back toward the kitchen.

After Gott came Jane Adler, his wife. She sat down at her drawing table, where pad, pencils, knife, art gum, distemper paints, water, brushes, and rags were laid out neatly.

Then came little Heinie Adler, wearing a spaceman's transparent helmet with a large hole in the top for ventilation. He went and stood beside this arrangement of objects: first a long wooden box about knee-high with a smaller box on top and propped against the latter a toy control panel of blue and silver plastic, on which only one lever moved at all; next, facing the panel, a child's wooden chair; then back of the chair another long wooden box lined up with the first.

"Goodbye Mama, goodbye Papa." Heinie called. "I'm going to take a trip in my spaceship."

"Be back in time for bed," his mother said.

"Hot jets!" murmured his father.

Heinie got in, touched the control panel twice, and then sat motionless in the little wooden chair, looking straight ahead.

A fourth person came into the living room from the kitchen — the Man in the Black Flannel Suit. He moved with the sick jerkiness and had the slack putty-gray features of a figure of the imagination that hasn't been fully developed. (There was a fifth person in the house, but even Gott didn't know about him yet.) The Man in the Black Flannel Suit made a stiff gesture at Gott and gaped his mouth to talk to him, but the latter silently writhed his lips in a "Not yet, you fool!" and nodded curtly toward the sofa opposite his easy chair.

"Gott," Jane said, hovering a pencil over the pad, "you've lately taken to acting as if you were talking to someone who isn't there."

"I have, my dear?" her husband replied with a smile as he turned a page, but not lifting his face from his book. "Well, talking to oneself is the sovereign guard against madness."

"I thought it worked the other way," Jane said.

"No," Gott informed her.

Jane wondered what she should draw and saw she had very faintly sketched on a small scale the outlines of a child, done in sticks-and-blobs like Paul Klee or kindergarten art. She could do another 'Children's Clubhouse', she supposed, but where should she put it this time?

The old electric clock with brass fittings that stood on the mantel began to wheeze shrilly, "Mystery, mystery, mystery, mystery." It struck Jane as a good omen for her picture. She smiled.

Gott took a slow pull from his goblet and felt the scentless vodka bite just enough and his skin shiver and the room waver pleasantly for a moment with shadows chasing across it. Then he swung the pupils of his eyes upward and looked across at the Man in the Black Flannel Suit, noting with approval that he was sitting rigidly on the sofa. Gott conducted his side of the following conversation without making a sound or parting his lips more than a quarter of an inch, just flaring his nostrils from time to time.

black flannel: Now if I may have your attention for a space, Mr. Adler —

gott: Speak when you're spoken to! Remember, I created you.

black flannel: I respect your belief. Have you been getting any messages?

gott: The number 6669 turned up three times today in orders and estimates. I received an airmail advertisement beginning 'Are you ready for big success?' though the rest of the ad didn't signify. As I opened the envelope the minute hand of my desk clock was pointing at the faceless statue of Mercury on the Commerce Building. When I was leaving the office my secretary droned at me, "A representative of the Inner Circle will call on you tonight," though when I questioned her, she claimed that she'd said, "Was the letter to Innes-Burkel and Company all right?" Because she is aware of my deafness, I could hardly challenge her. In any case she sounded sincere. If those were messages from the Inner Circle, I received them. But seriously I doubt the existence of that clandestine organisation. Other explanations seem to me more likely — for instance, that I am developing a psychosis. I do not believe in the Inner Circle.