Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

‘I didn’t even know what language it was in, but perhaps in a way I understood it.’

‘You said you were going to tell me about the future,’ she told him gently.

‘Yes. Of course. It’s a sort of tremendous relief work we’re doing. You know what they call it: The Intertemporal Red Cross. It’s accurate, but when you’ve actually been … ahead, it seems a silly, flashy title. I don’t know, perhaps not. I’m not sure of anything any more.’

He stared out at the darkness; it was going to rain. When he began to speak again, his voice was firmer.

The IRC is really organized by the Paulls (he said to the Chinese girl). They call themselves the Paulls; we should call them the technological élite of the Three Thousand, One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Century. That’s a terribly long way ahead – we, with our twenty-four centuries since Christ, can hardly visualise it. Our ship stopped there, in their time. It was very austere: the Paulls are austere people. They live only on mountains overlooking the oceans, and have moved mountains to every coast for their own edification.

The Paulls are unlike us, yet they are brothers compared with the men we are helping, the Failed Men.

Time travel had been invented long before the age of the Paulls, but it is they who perfected it, they who accidentally discovered the plight of the Failed Men, and they who manage the terrific business of relief. For the world of the Paulls, rich as it is – will be – has insufficient resources to cope with the task without vitiating its strength. So it organised the fleet of time ships, the IRC, to collect supplies from different ages and bear them out ahead to the Failed Men.

Five different ages are co-operating on the project, under the Paull leadership. There are the Middle People, as the Paulls call them. They are a race of philosophers, mainly pastoral, and we found them haughty; they live about twenty thousand centuries ahead of the Paulls. Oh, it’s a long time … And there are – but never mind that! They had little to do with us, or we with them.

We – this present day, was the only age without time travel of the five. The Paulls chose us because we happen to have peace and plenty. And do you know what they call us? The Children. The Children! We, with all our weary sophistication … Perhaps they’re right; they have a method of Gestalt reasoning absolutely beyond our wildest pretensions.

You know, I remember once on the voyage out ahead, I asked one of the Paulls why they had never visited our age before; and he said: ‘But we have. We broke at the nineteenth century and again at the twenty-sixth. That’s pretty close spacing! And that’s how we knew so much about you.’

They have so much experience , you see. They can walk around for a day in one century and tell you what’ll be happening the next six or seven. It’s a difference of outlook, I suppose; something as simple as that.

I suppose you’ll remember better than I when the Paulls first broke here, as you are actually on the spot. I was at home then, doing a peaceful job; it hadn’t been so peaceful I might not have volunteered for the IRC What a storm it caused! A good deal of panic in with the excitement. Yes, we proved ourselves children then, and in the adulation we paid the Paulls while they toured the world’s capitals. During the three months they waited here while we organised supplies and men, they must have been in a fury of impatience to be off; yet they revealed nothing, giving their unsensational lectures on the plight of the Failed Men and smiling for the three-dee cameras.

All the while money poured in for the cause, and the piles of canned food and medical supplies filled the holds of the big ship. We were like kids throwing credits to street beggars; all sorts of stuff of no earthly use went into that ship. What would a Failed Man do with a launderer or a cycloview machine? At last we were off, with all the world’s bands playing like mad and the ship breaking with noise enough to drown all bands and startle your chickens – off for the time of the Failed Men!

‘I think I’d like that drink you offered me now,’ Surrey said to the Chinese girl, breaking off his narrative.

‘Certainly.’ She snapped her fingers at arm’s length, her hand in the light from the restaurant, her face in the gloom, eyes fixed on his eyes.

‘The Paulls had told you it was going to be tough,’ she said.

‘Yes. We underwent pretty rough mental training from them before leaving the here and now. Many of the men were weeded out. But I got through. They elected me Steersman. I was top of their first class.’

Surrey was silent a moment, surprised to hear pride in his own voice. Pride left, after that experience! Yet there was no pride in him; it was just the voice running in an old channel, the naked soul crouching in an ancient husk of character.

The drink arrived. The Chinese girl had one too, a long one in a misty glass; she put her lute down to drink it. Surrey took a sip of his and then resumed the story.

We were travelling ahead! It was a schoolboy’s dream come true. Yet our excitement soon became blunted by monotony. There is nothing simultaneous in time travel, as people have imagined. It took us two ship’s months to reach the Paulls’ age, and there all but one of them left us to continue on alone into the future.

They had the other ages to supervise, and many organisational problems to attend to; yet I sometimes wonder if they did not use those problems as an excuse, to save their having to visit the age of the Failed Men. Perhaps they thought us less sensitive, and therefore better fitted for the job.

And so we went ahead again. The office of Steersman was almost honorary, entailing merely the switching off of power when the journey was automatically ended. We sat about and talked, we chosen few, reading or viewing in the excellent libraries the Paulls had installed. Time passed quickly enough, yet we were glad when we arrived.

Glad!

The age of the Failed Men is far in the future: many hundred millions of years ahead, or thousands of millions; the Paulls would never tell us the exact number. Does it matter? It was a long time … There’s plenty of time – too much – more than anyone will ever need.

We stepped out onto that day’s Earth. I had childishly expected – oh, to see the sun stuck at the horizon, or turned purple, or the sky full of moons, or something equally dramatic; but there was not even a shadow over the fair land, and the earth had not aged a day. Only man had aged.

The Failed Men differed from us anatomically and spiritually; it was the former quality which struck us first. They looked like a group of dejected oddities sitting among piles of supplies, and we wanted to laugh. The humorists among us called them ‘the Zombies’ at first – but in a few days there were no humorists left among us.

The Failed Men had no real hands. From their wrists grew five long and prehensile fingers, and the middle digit touched the ground lightly when they walked, for their spines curved in an arc and their heads were thrust far forward. To counter this, their skulls had elongated into boat shapes, scaphocephalic fashion. They had no eyebrows, nor indeed a brow at all, nor any hair at all, although the pores of their skin stood out flakily, giving them a fluffy appearance from a distance.

When they looked at you their eyes held no meaning; they were blanked with a surfeit of experience, as though they had now regained a horrible sort of innocence. When they spoke to you, their voices were hollow and their sentences as short and painful as a child’s toothache. We could not understand their language, except through the electronic translator banks given us by the Paulls.