Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

As he talked, he drew in a second horizontal line under the first, commencing at eleven and running forward to oh-four Tuesday.

‘There we were jerked back again, into mid-Monday afternoon. That session lasted till just after oh-six fifteen Tuesday. So we come to the final – we hope! – jerk-back.’

He commenced a fourth bar just before his ‘lip’ line.

‘And now we come out of it here, oh-six fifteen hours. There’s your pattern.’

He held it up for Dick’s inspection.

‘Pretty,’ Dick commented cautiously.

‘Ugly,’ Anderson said. ‘This happens to be a tight little coil of time-folds. The last hiccup was a month ago now, if I’ve managed to keep my memory straight, and then there were only two throwbacks, each lasting about three weeks.’

‘Quite right,’ Dick agreed. ‘That one was pleasant – I got my leave played over three times.’

‘The first hiccup of all was a year ago, when everyone did their previous eleven months over again – in consequence of which I can boast a sister who had the same baby twice.’ He fell silent, thinking, too, of how during that terrible period he had believed himself insane, only to emerge at the end of it into a world where everyone held the same suspicion about themselves.

‘What are you getting at with all this, Andy? It’s time to feed.’ He patted his stomach lovingly.

‘I’m demonstrating the obvious, and heaven help you if you have to hear it all over again later. The time snags are getting closer together and become more repetitive each dose. Suggest anything?’

‘Yes, food,’ Dick said.

They moved along the narrow curving corridor with their newcomers’ gait, and floated into the mess. A food smell filtered thinly through an aroma of scrubbed table.

‘Anything else?’ Anderson persisted, refusing to be interrupted by a dab of porridge and two half-size rashers.

‘The storm’s getting worse, you mean?’ Dick asked, wiping his spoon fastidiously on his handkerchief.

‘Yes – we’re moving into it, or it’s closing in on us; whichever way round is right, the effect on us is the same.’

Dick Proust pulled a wry face only partly on account of the porridge.

‘What happens in the middle of the storm?’ he asked.

Anderson shrugged. ‘Who can say? Maybe we’ll be frozen in our time tracks. Maybe we’ll become as hopelessly entangled as adhesive tape when it loops back on itself. But using the analogy of a weather storm, which is the only analogy we can work with, a space storm will have varying ridges of pressure. On this side of it, we’ve been jerked back in time. As yet, according to the radio-eyes, we’re only on the fringes of the upset. We may yet be jerked back whole years at a time – centuries.’

His friend nodded grimly. ‘In other words, it might be more comfortable to die now – except that even death’s no refuge when you can be flicked back ten years at a breath. Man! It’s bad … And on the other side of the storm?’

‘That may be even worse. You may be flung head first into your own future. Think over the possibilities of that!’

Betson entered the mess and strolled over to them smiling. Bald and cherubic in appearance, the mainspring of Operation Breakdown, he wore his burden lightly.

‘What’s the matter with you two?’ he enquired. ‘You bear that jaded look! Feeling self-conscious with the ghosts of Gray – and Proust – future hanging over you?’

‘That is quite a feeling,’ Anderson admitted, and explained. Then he had to explain his lip.

Betson grinned. ‘Don’t blame that little cable-monkey. I know him – George Garstang’s his name. He’s seen their end of the job through in time, and it’s no fun either between skins, doing his job. That and the hiccup effect have worn his sense of proportion thin. Remember, Andy, all we have to do is keep IIy 244 warm. Everything should be ready to squirt in two hours. Then we climb into the orbital rockets, abandon station, and go down and drink the airs of Lethe.’

He rubbed his hands and added, ‘Doesn’t the prospect of five years at half-throttle appeal?’

‘Not to this boy,’ Dick said. ‘But I can’t think of a better solution.’

They took their used plates over to the hatch and walked with Betson to the upper deck. Here, all the usual equipment had been scrapped and every available inch housed the perikaryon cultures. Here, it was quiet except for a boiling-kettle noise from the solar converters. Two biologists walked watchfully by the container machinery, which was already siphoning the virus into the ejection canisters. These canisters would spin down in a chain round the globe, dissolving under friction a few thousand yards from surface, spreading their vital contents over every square mile of land.

‘Anything further we can do?’ Anderson asked.

Betson puffed out his cheeks until he looked like an ugly, intelligent baby. ‘Hope two hours passes without getting a reef-knot in it,’ he suggested.

He walked over to the nearest viewer and flipped it on. The wide-angle lens showed a well-furnished view of space: the corona, the night-side of Earth beautiful in moonlight, the moon. It looked almost cosy, with none of the blankness of deep space in it.

The same thought came to all the three men. The storm did not show. There was no sign in these blank depths of the light-year wide disturbance that hurtled through the System at a speed of something like a hundred thousand miles every second.

‘Odd thing,’ Anderson commented, laying a cool finger on his hot lip. ‘These interstellar storms have been known of in theory for a long time, long before we even got to the moon. The radarscopes have detected them moving beyond the galaxy. This one was traced all the way here, but somehow a whirlpool of nothing seemed no cause for worry.’

Betson switched the view off and they turned away. Even the shallows of heaven do not bear looking at for long.

‘It’s never any good just knowing a thing in theory,’ he said. ‘We talked glibly about space-time, never realising exactly how integrated the two were. A storm in space is a storm in time – disrupt one, you disrupt the other.’

An inspection lid above their heads slid open and a ladder whirred down. A man climbed down it and it returned smoothly into the bulkhead. The man was George Garstang, complete with red face and backache.

He unzipped his snug-suit, straightened his short figure and said respectfully to Betson, ‘That’s the last rejection nozzles all finished in this section, sir. They should be wound up everywhere in another half hour.’

Involuntarily, they all sighed with relief.

‘Everything else is ready for action. We’ll put zero hour sixty minutes ahead,’ Betson said decisively. ‘I’ll phone Centre, we’ll push it through before we are jerked back again.’

As he moved away, George caught sight of Anderson. He took in the long, sober face with its pouting upper lip and half-smiled. Then he rubbed a grimy palm against his suit.

‘Sorry I lost my temper last night,’ he said. ‘I only meant to do it once, you know – not four times.’

Anderson smiled. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘We’ve all had a bad time. Tempers’ll run slower at half-speed …’

George finished his drink and said, ‘You go ahead with your neurosis, Joe. I may be ignorant but I’m sane.’

‘Yes,’ Anderson said quietly. ‘One of the aspects of the problem that most concerns us is that if the virus fails it will be the sensitive and intelligent portion of the world who will crack first.’

George leaned forward and struck him across the mouth. (Anderson lied; they were all cracking together.)

Anderson broke into a sharp wailing cry.

‘Hush, dear, hush,’ his mother whispered, wrapping the blue christening robe more securely and rocking him gently.