Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

Mickie Houston was strikingly self-centred. But with his looks, his voice and his style – and his wife – he had gone far. And meant to go further.

Rickie Houston was strikingly beautiful. She looked even more lovely than usual as she said to her husband, ‘Don’t take the time-travel drug, darling. I have a terrible feeling it will kill you!’

Mickie Houston kissed her and said, ‘And I have a terrific feeling it may make me immortal!’

The exchange was overheard by a gossip columnist, and soon became famous. Not only was the controversy over the new time-travel drug raging (for this was in 1969), but Rickie and Mickie were the toasts of the switched-on pop world, the duo who finally knocked the groups from the charts.

The extra publicity encouraged Mickie to go ahead with his idea. He went to the famous London clinic where the drug was being administered to the few who were reckless or rich enough to pay for the injection.

The specialist shook his head and said gravely, ‘The effects of LSKK, the so-called time-travel drug, are very strange, Mr Houston. It’s not an experience to be undertaken lightly. We have a duty to warn any potential time-travellers that they take their life in their hands when they undergo the injection.’

‘Yeah, I heard all that jazz from my wife.’

‘Really? What your wife may not have told you is that the effects of the drug are subjective, just like the effects of LSD. With LSKK, you find yourself travelling through the sort of time in which you believe.

‘Thus, a Hindu who took LSKK would find himself travelling through vast cycles of time, since that concept accords with his religion. A holy man who believes only in God’s time would find he travelled straight into God’s presence. But for the average Englishman, like yourself, who believes time and progress go on straight ahead for ever, well, he will find himself doing just that.’

‘Ha, but I’m not the average Englishman! I don’t believe in time-travel at all. It’s just a lot of mystical nonsense and you’re cashing in on the fashion for it.’

The specialist put on a ghastly genial smile.

‘You’re just doing this for publicity, eh?’

‘All I believe in is the present. I live for the living moment, that’s me!’

That’s what Mickie said as the needle sank into his arm and 250ccs of LSKK coursed through his veins. Cameramen were there to record the moment, and Rickie kissed him. Truth to tell, he was a little tired of her, so that even the prospect of never seeing her again did not worry him. Strewn throughout time, he visualised an endless line of pretty girls.

Even as Rickie’s lips touched his, Mickie Houston disappeared.

Powered by LSKK, he drifted into the future, the staggering future where the centuries are thicker than the cells in the bloodstream. For most time-travellers, the effect of LSKK soon wore off and they settled to rest one by one in a remote time at a certain hour of a certain day, as even the leaf that blows furthest from an autumn tree will eventually come to rest somewhere.

But because Mickie believed only in the present moment, he drifted on for ever, imprisoned in his bubble of time like a bubble in a glacier.

Fixed in the gesture of kissing Rickie, he watched the millennia float by. He never wearied, since none of his personal time passed. But outside time passed; the world wearied. The great concourse of the human race began to thin.

Generation after generation had looked on with admiration and amusement as the handsome young man in old-fashioned clothes drifted through their lives, standing always on the same spot in the same romantic attitude. Indeed, Mickie had become something of a world-myth. A small green park was created round him in the midst of the fantastic city. The thousand thousand generations came to look at him here. But the mighty stream dwindled to a trickle eventually. Fixed in his bubble, Mickie saw the trees of the park grown shaggy and old and seamed. Eventually they fell one by one, and the great building behind them. The city was dying, and the human race with it. Few people came to see the world-myth now.

Another race of beings had inherited Earth, phantasmal beings like comets, blazing in solitary beauty like comets that had grown to prefer forests to the deserts of space. The sun that shone upon their millions of centuries of peace and fruitfulness shrank to the apparent size of a grape; it emitted an intense white light like a magnesium flare. So it seemed there was always moonlight on earth.

Still an occasional human came, fur-clad, to the place where Mickie stood imprisoned on the plain. Finally, two humans came together, very small and silent, to look at him for the best part of a magnesium-white day.

They asked each other, ‘He will be the last of our kind; but is he dead or is he immortal?’ So they echoed the once-famous exchange that Mickie and Rickie had had, so very long ago.

No one else ever came again. Even the comet-people faded eventually. Eventually, even the sun faded. Even the stars burned dim and faded. The universe had grown old. Time itself faded and … slowly … came to a stop …

There, poised on the brink of the last second of eternal time, Mickie stood transfixed in his bubble.

And with his lips still pursed in the moment of that long-gone kiss, he asked himself the final question, ‘Am I dead or am I immortal?’

Down the Up Escalation 6 Down the Up Escalation 7 Full Sun 8 Just Passing Through 9 Multi-Value Motorway 10 The Night that All Time Broke Out 11 Randy’s Syndrome 12 Still Trajectories 13 Two Modern Myths (Reflection on Mars and Ultimate Construction) 14 Wonder Weapon 15 …And the Stagnation of the Heart 16 Drake-Man Route 17 Dreamer, Schemer 18 Dream of Distance 19 Send her Victorious 20 The Serpent of Kundalini 21 The Tell-Tale Heart-Machine 22 Total Environment 23 The Village Swindler 24 When I Was Very Jung 25 The Worm that Flies 26 The Firmament Theorem 27 Greeks Bringing Knee-High Gifts 28 The Humming Heads 29 The Moment of Eclipse 30 Ouspenski’s Astrabahn 31 Since the Assassination 32 So Far From Prague 33 The Soft Predicament 34 Supertoys Last All Summer Long 35 That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art… 36 Working in the Spaceship Yards About the Author Also by Brian Aldiss About the Publisher

Being alone in the house, not feeling too well, I kept the television burning for company. The volume was low. Three men mouthed almost soundlessly about the Chinese rôle in the Vietnam war. Getting my head down, I turned to my aunt Laura’s manuscript.

She had a new hairstyle these days. She looked very good; she was seventy-three, my aunt, and you were not intended to take her for anything less; but you could mistake her for ageless. Now she had written her first book – ‘a sort of autobiography’, she told me when she handed the bundle over. Terrible apprehension gripped me. I had to rest my head in my hand. Another heart attack coming.

On the screen, figures scrambling over mountain. All unclear. Either my eyesight going or a captured Chinese newsreel. Strings of animals – you couldn’t see what, film slightly overexposed. Could be reindeer crossing snow, donkeys crossing sand. I could hear them now, knocking, knocking, very cold.

A helicopter crashing towards the ground? Manuscript coming very close, my legs, my lips, the noise I was making.

There was a ship embedded in the ice. You’d hardly know there was a river. Snow had piled up over the piled-up ice.

Surrounding land was flat. There was music, distorted stuff from a radio, accordions, and balalaikas. The music came from a wooden house. From its misty windows, they saw the ship, sunk in the rotted light. A thing moved along the road, clearing away the day’s load of ice, ugly in form and movement. Four people sat in the room with the unpleasant music; two of them were girls in their late teens, flat faces with sharp eyes; they were studying at the university. Their parents ate a salad, two forks, one plate. Both man and woman had been imprisoned in a nearby concentration camp in Stalin’s time. The camp had gone now. Built elsewhere, for other reasons.