Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

‘In other words, you’ve got half the image orthicon in the record and the rest outside?’

‘Exactly. Unfortunately it meant a much smaller fine-mesh screen to get in the groove, so that the signal is chopped. However, you’ll see enough to get a good scare. From there, it’s plain sailing. These are the leads to the cathode ray tube – ’

‘What about your sound circuit?’ he asked.

‘Same as normal – our normal. Grooves run between the video grooves. They’re insulated, of course. Featherweight pickup. Twenty-eight revs per minute. I’ve just had to put a little boost on the amplifier. Shall I switch on?’ My palms were sweating.

Harry stared blankly out of the window and whispered to himself: ‘A television recording!’ Then he said: ‘Seems a funny thing to want to have.’

‘It comes from a funny civilisation,’ I answered.

‘Switch on,’ he said.

The screen came alive with a shot of the police station in which the evidence on the smoof had been gathered. What a station it was, an ugly saucer-shaped metal affair built into and round the asteroid Eros, which had been pressed into a new orbit to swing it as far out as Jupiter and as near in as Mercury. Lord, but it looked dismal – and half-finished. Perhaps, after all, I had not fixed the disc up too well, because we got a flicker of stills, some discontinuous, and most with a shower of ‘noise’ across them, so that you could not help getting the idea that our descendants were slipshod, imagination outriding inclination, invention outpacing execution.

We flicked inside the Eros station. Dirt, peeling walls, and a great bank of instruments a block long, before which a broken-nosed officer slouched. ‘Exterminate der wrongdoer!’ he said, as a voice announced him as High Space-Dick Hagger. He had been in charge of this smoof’s case since –

Grimy sheds that only on this second showing I realised to be dwelling quarters. This time I caught a name too. Bristol. Pronounced Brissol. Or perhaps it was Brussels, after all. Either way – ugh! Just a lot of giant shanties with ugly plumbing, stretching out to a mile-wide desert, after which they began again and spread to the horizon. The desert was a landing-ground for rockets after their long supersonic glide in from space. We saw one come in – and plough straight into the shanties. Explosion. Fire. ‘Dis was smoof work,’ said the terse commentator.

We saw the shanties up again. There was a shot of the inside of somewhere, and then more shanties; they flickered – vanished, and there was a forest there instead. ‘More smoof work. Time-sliding …’

‘Good for them!’ I whispered. Those trees were the first bit of beauty we had seen.

Venus next. A human settlement, half underground, on a mountain range. Clouds, desolation. The commentary was desperately hard to follow, the language sounding like some kind of verbal shorthand. We were evidently having a flashback. Men crawled in the muck of a ravine, erecting more buildings, drilling, blasting, and all the while weighed down with space suits. ‘Foul atmosphere. Carbon doxide n’ bacillae,’ the commentary grunted.

Inside this outpost, we saw colonists living like animals and scientists living like tramps. Atomic lighting and straw beds. A crude sort of vivisection was going on – and the subjects were human beings. A snow shower of static blurred the image. Then we were peering from the outpost across the dreary gulches of Venus. A chain of human beings passed the window in single file. They were poorly clad and wore no space suits; a close-up showed us, sickeningly, why. They could breathe the unbreathable Venusian air. An operation had been performed; their nostrils were blocked with living flesh, and a complex, multi-flanged nose was grafted into their windpipes.

‘So were first, smots created,’ said the commentator. ‘Dey never returned. Dey multiplied in hidden recesses o’ planet. Some o’ dem cross-bred with true Venusians and formed smoofs. Smot and smoof greatest menace …’

We were shown pithily just what a menace they were. They started as a new race without background or tradition, loathing the planet that was now their home, but with the knowledge of hate and of the weapons of science, to which they speedily added a few kinks of their own. In five generations they had space travel and in seven they had split the space-time band and were able, in space, to travel for some distance back and forward in time. Our commentator barked an explanation of all this that seemed to consist mainly of formulae, but it was obvious that humanity had been unable to duplicate the discovery of the semi-human race. Fortunately, the smot and smoof were able to time travel only from space, which meant that their big, rickety spaceships moved a century back and then released a scout which could blast down and land, wreaking what havoc it could, and later rejoin its parent ship; but the warp effect involved was only operative in free space and by the enormous nuclear directors that needed a giant vessel to carry them. So the police forces of Earth, spread out in grim fortresses over the whole barbarous ring of inner planets, were given sitting targets – provided the targets would sit in the present.

Under a state of affairs where your yesterday might hourly be cut from under you or your future be already shattered, humanity and its concerns suffered a staggering blow. Ethics, logic, the sane comforts of a continuous memory, were now swept away. Rigid martial law was universally declared, air, army and space forces turned into an ubiquitous police force.

Harry and I sat helpless before this glimpse into chaos, where tomorrow flickered helplessly to keep up with the brutal revision of yesterday. It was by these stab-in-the-back methods that Bristol or Brussels was demolished, and other centres followed the same fate. The forces of the smoof seemed to be spreading destruction everywhere; the only hope for man was that the semi-humans seemed to have run into another race in their future who possessed weapons the smoof could not withstand.

We saw a smoof ship captured by Earth’s police, and its crew, with one exception, massacred without mercy on the spot, the exception, a smoof of some importance, being taken to Eros station. He was the subject of our criminal file; his wan, noseless features slid across the screen. There was an interval – an explosion – the station crumbled into ruin – smoofs appeared from a giant ship visible through a gaping hole – the hole disappeared, the station re-integrated – the smoofs vanished – reappeared – were shot down – vanished. Timesliding – an earthquake in human metabolism. The scene blurred and trembled, filmed crazily from a high angle on automatic; Hollywood’s patient art of focus and composition has been lost in this dizzy totalitarian future. Abruptly, there was nothing.

‘Time lines crossed?’ Harry asked from a wrinkled face.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It comes on again in a minute.’

It did. It was quite different. Still squalor, still Eros, but all changed. Other men carried on the hunt. High Space-Dick Hagger had a good nose but freckles and a bald head. The very symbols on his uniform had changed.

‘Der smoof was rescued. Gone into der past – noo machines carrying them further back than ever,’ the commentator grunted. ‘Record revideoed 2/xii/12/309 – we hope.’

There it ended. It had only taken about twenty minutes, but in that time I suppose we had both lost something of our souls – the same something those unhappy descendants of ours had long forgotten amid kaleidoscoping events. And in the last seconds of vision a detail I had not noticed before: across that dreary new instrument room a man walked, near enough to the recording eye for us to see his face clearly. It was Harry Crossway.