Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

The new picture. The room down the road where Pauline was taken every morning. It was full of small people, some like her, in frocks, some with short hair and fierce movements. And big people, walking between their seats, again with marks on cards, trying with despairing faces to make them comprehend incomprehensible things by gestures of the hand and fingers.

The push picture. Something needed, strange as sunlight, something lost, lost as laughter …

The pill worked like a time-bomb and Pauline was asleep where only the neurosis of puzzlement could insidiously follow.

Mrs. Snowden switched the globe off and sank into a chair. They had been showing a silent film: the latest scientific advances had thrown entertainment back to where it had been in her grandfather’s young days. For a moment she had watched the silent gestures, followed by a wall of dialogue:

‘Jean: Then – you knew he was not my father, Denis?

‘Denis: From the first moment we met in Madrid.

‘Jean: And I swore none should ever know.’

Sighing, Mrs. Snowden switched the poor stuff off, and sank down with a hand over her forehead. TV merely accentuated her isolation, everyone’s isolation. She thought mockingly of the newspaper phrase describing this conflict, The Civilised War, and wished momentarily for one of the old, rough kind with doodlebugs and H-bombs; then, you could achieve a sort of Henry Moore-ish anonymity, crouching with massed others underground. Now, your individuality was forced on to you, till self-consciousness became a burden that sank you in an ocean of loneliness.

Right at the beginning of this war, Mrs. Snowden’s husband had left for the duration. He was on secret work – where, she had no idea. Up till two years ago, she received a card from him each Christmas; then he had missed a year; then, in the paper shortage, the sending of cards had been forbidden. So whether he lived or not she did not know; the question now raised curiously little excitement in her. Heart-sickness had ceased to be relevant.

Mrs. Snowden had come to live here in her old home with her parents after she had been declared redundant at the university, when all but the practical Chairs closed down. In the lean winters, first her mother, then her father died. Then her married daughter was killed in a sound raid; Pauline, a tiny babe, had come to live with her.

It was all impersonal, dry facts, she thought. You stated the facts to explain how the situation arose; but to explain the situation …

Nobody in the world could hear a sound. That was the only important fact.

She jumped up and flicked aside an edge of curtain. A rag of dirty daylight was still propped over the serried chimney-tops. The more those houses crowded, the more they isolated her. This should be a time for madness, she said aloud, misting the pane; something grand and horrid to break the chain of days. And her eyes swept the treble row of old textbooks over her bureau: Jackson’s Eighteen Nineties, Montgomery’s Early Twentieth Century Science Fiction, Slade’s Novelists of the Psychological Era, Wilson’s Zola , Nollybend’s Wilson … a row of dodos, as defunct as the courses of Eng. Lit. they had once nourished.

‘Dead!’ she exclaimed. ‘A culture in Coventry!’ she whispered, and went to get something to eat.

‘Tough old hag,’ she told herself. ‘You’ll survive.’

The food was the usual vibro-culture, tasteless, filling, insubstantial. The hospitals of England held as many beri-beri cases as wounded. Sound ruled the whole deaf world. It wrecked the buildings, killed the soldiers, shattered the tympanums and ballooned synthesized proteins from mixtures of amino acids.

The Sound Revolution had come at the dawn of this new century, following thirty years of peace. Progress had taken a new direction. It had all been simple and complete; you just flushed the right electrostatic stress through the right quartz plates and – bingo! You could do anything! The most spectacular result was a global conflict.

The Powers warred under certain humane agreements: gas, fission and fusion weapons were forbidden. It was to be, indeed, a Civilised War. VM (vibratory motion) had the field to itself. It learnt to expand living vegetable cells a thousand-fold, so that a potato would last for two years’ dinners; it learnt to pulverize brick and metal, so that cities could comfortably be turned to a thin dust; it learnt to twist the human ear into an echoing, useless coil of gristle. There seemed no limit to its adaptability.

Mrs. Snowden ate her blown-up yeast with dignity, and thought of other things. She thought – for lately she had been straining after wider horizons – of the course of human history, its paradoxical sameness and variety, and then something made her look up to the tube over the mantelpiece.

The tube was a piece of standard equipment in every home. It was a crude ear, designed to announce when the local siren was giving a sound raid alarm.

She glanced indifferently at it. The lycopodium seed was stirring sluggishly in its tube; damp must be getting in, it was not patterning properly. She went on eating, gloomily wondering about the future generations: how much of the vital essence of tradition would be lost through this blanket of deafness?

Correct procedure would have been for her, at the stirring of the seed, to collect Pauline and stand out in the open. When the siren went, everyone else left their homes and stood patiently under the bare sky; then, if the sounds swept their buildings, they would be temporarily smothered by dust as the building vanished, but suffer no other harm. Mrs. Snowden could no longer be bothered with this nonsense.

To her mind, it was undignified to stand in the chill air, meekly waiting. If enemy planes circled overhead, she would have had defiance to spur her out; but nowadays there was only the quiet sky, the eternal silence and the abrupt pulverization – or the anti-climax, when everyone filed sheepishly back to bed.

She took her plate into the kitchen. As she came back into the living-room, a reproduction of Mellor’s ‘Egyptian Girl’ fell silently onto the floor, shattering frame and glass.

Mrs. Snowden went and stared at it. Then, on impulse, she hurried over to the window and peered out. The encircling houses had gone.

Letting the curtain fall back into place, she rushed from the room and up the stairs. She was shaking Pauline before she regained control of herself, and then could not tell whether panic or exultation had sent her scurrying.

‘The houses have gone! The houses have gone!’

Silence, in which the little girl woke sluggishly.

Mrs. Snowden hustled her downstairs and out on to the front lawn, letting a bright swathe of light cut across the empty flower-beds. Somewhere, high and silent overhead, a monitor might be hovering, but she was too excited to care.

By a freak of chance, their house stood alone. Around them for miles stretched a new desert, undulant, still settling. The novelty, the difference, of it was something wonderful: not a catastrophe, a liberation.

Then they saw the giants.

Vague in the distance, they were nevertheless real enough, although incredible. They were tall – how tall? – ten, fifteen feet? More? With horror Mrs. Snowden thought they were enemy troops. This was the latest application of the sound: it enlarged the human cell now, as easily as it enlarged vegetable cells. She had the brief idea she had read that human giants could not survive, or were impossible or something, and then the thought was gone, swept away in fear.

The giants were still growing. They were taller than a house now, thirty feet or more high. They began to mop and mow, like drunken dancers.