Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

He saw in sober fact that his kind might have reached the end of its time. Year by year, as the living died, the empty rooms about him would multiply, like the cells of a giant hive which no bees visited, until they filled the world. The time would come when he would be a monster, alone in the rooms, in the tracks of his search, in the labyrinth of his hollow footsteps.

Over the room, as over the face of an inquisitor, was written his future. Its wound was inescapable, for he had found it for himself. He opened his mouth, to cry or suck in air, as though someone had flung him under a cascade. Only one thing, one person, could make that future tolerable.

He ran out into the corridor, flaying the echoes again.

“It’s me — Timberlane! Is anyone here, for God’s sake?”

And a voice near at hand called, “Algy, oh, Algy!”

She lay in a composing room among a litter of broken and discarded flongs. Like the rest of the building, it bore every sign of a long desertion. Her captors had tied her to the supports of a heavy metal bench on which lay discarded galleys of lead type, and she had been unable to break free. She estimated she had been lying there since midnight.

“You’re all right? Are you all right?” Timberlane kept asking, rubbing her bruised arms and legs after he had wrenched apart the plastic straps that bound her.

“I’m perfectly all right,” Martha said, beginning to weep. “He was quite a gentleman, he didn’t rape me! I suppose I am very lucky. He didn’t rape me.”

Timberlane put his arms round her. For minutes they crouched together on the littered floor, glad in the sensible warmth and solidity of each other’s bodies.

After a while, Martha was able to tell her story. The taxi-driver who had whipped her away from the front of the Thesaurus Club had driven her only a few blocks into a private garage. She thought she might be able to identify the spot. She remembered that the garage had a motor boat stored overhead. She was frightened, and fought the taxi-driver when he tried to pull her out of the car. Another man appeared, wearing a white handkerchief over his face. He carried a chloroform-impregnated pad. Between them, the men forced the pad over Martha’s nose and mouth, and she became unconscious.

She roused to find herself in another car, a larger one. She thought they were travelling through a suburb or semi-country; there were trees and low-lying houses flashing by outside, and another girl lying inertly by her side. Then a man in the front seat saw she was rousing, leant over, and forced her to breathe more chloroform.

When Martha woke again, she was in a bedroom. She sprawled over a bed, lying against the girl who had been in the car with her. They both roused and tried to pull themselves together. The room they were in was without windows; they thought it was a large room partitioned into two. A dark woman entered and led Martha into another room. She was brought before a man in a mask, and allowed to sit on a chair. The man told her that she was lucky to be chosen, and that there was no need to be frightened. His boss had fallen in love with her, and would treat her well if she would live with him; the flowers had been sent to her as a token of the honesty of his intentions. Angry and frightened though she was, Martha kept quiet at this point.

She had then been taken to the “boss” in a third room. He wore a domino. His face was thin, and deficient in chin. His jaw looked grey in the bright light. He rose when Martha entered and spoke in a gentle husky voice. He told her he was rich and lonely, and needed her company as well as her body. She asked how many girls he required to overcome his loneliness; he said huffily that the other girl was for a friend of his. He and his friend were shy men, and had to resort to this method of introduction; he was not a criminal, and he had no intention of harming her.

Very well, Martha had said, let me go. She told him she was engaged to be married.

The man sat in a swivel-chair behind a table. Chair and table stood on a dais. The man moved very little. He looked at her for a long while in silence, until she became very sick and scared. What chiefly scared her was her belief that this man was in an obscure way scared of her, and would go to considerable lengths to alter this situation.

“You should not get married,” he said at last. “You can’t have babies. Women don’t have babies any more, now that radiation sickness is so fashionable. Men used to hate those beastly little bawling ugly brats so much, and now their secret dreams have been fulfilled, and women can be used for nice things. You and I could do nice things.

“You’re lovely, with those legs and breasts and eyes of yours. But you’re only flesh and blood, like me. A little thing like a scalpel could cut right into you and make you unfit for nice things. I often say to my friends, ‘Even the loveliest girl can’t stand up to a little scalpel.’ I’m sure you’d rather do nice things, a girl like you, eh?”

Martha repeated shakily that she was going to get married.

Again he sat in silence, not moving. When he spoke again it was with less interest, and on a different tack.

He said he liked her attractive foreign accent. He had a large bombproof shelter underground, stocked with two years’ supplies of food and drink. He had a private plane. They could winter in Florida, if she would sign an agreement with him. They could do nice things.

She told him he had ugly thumbs and fingers. She would have nothing to do with anyone with hands like that.

He rang a bell. Two men ran in and seized Martha. They held Martha while the man in the domino came down off his dais and kissed her and ran his hands under her clothes and over her body. She struggled and kicked his ankle. His mouth trembled. She called him a coward. He ordered her to be taken out. The two men dragged her back into the bedroom and held her down on the bed, while the other girl cried in a corner. In outrage, Martha screamed as loudly as she could. The men put her out with another chloroformed pad.

When she came back to her senses, it was the cold air of night that roused her. She was being hustled into the deserted Sufferance Press building and tied to the bench.

She had been frightened and sick all night. When she heard someone below, she had not dared to call out until Timberlane had uttered his name, fearing the kidnappers had come back for her.

“That vile, loathsome creature! I’d tear his throat out if I got hold of him… Darling — you’re sure that’s all he did to you?”

“Yes — in an obscure way, I felt he’d got the thrill he was after — something in my fear he needed — I don’t know.”

“He was a maniac, whoever he was,” Timberlane said, pressing her close to him, running his hands through her hair. “Thank God he was mad the way he was and did you no real harm. Oh my darling, it’s like a miracle to have you again. I’ll never let you go.”

“All the same, I shouldn’t stay too close, love, until I’ve had a bath,” she said, laughing shakily. Having told her tale, something of her normal composure was back. “You must have been in a state when you saw the taxi speeding away with me, poor darling.”

“Dyson and Jack were a great help. I left a note for Jack at the billet in case I ran into trouble. The police’ll get this slimy little pervert. The details you have should be enough to track him down.”

“Do you think so? I’m sure I’d be okay on an identification parade, if they’d let me look at their thumbs. I keep wondering — I’ve been wondering all night — whatever happened to the other girl. What happens if you give in to a man like that, I don’t know.”

Suddenly she burst into tears and wrapped her arms about Timberlane’s waist. He helped her to her feet, and they sat side by side on frames in which leaden sentences were set backwards on and upside down. He put his arm round her and wiped her face with his handkerchief. Her painted eyebrows had come off, smeared across her forehead; licking the handkerchief, he cleaned their remains away.