Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

Next moment, our calm surface was a furious sea. Jubal slipped and fell on to one knee. I grabbed him, and almost went overboard myself. A series of giant waves plunged outwards from the shore. The first one rocked us, the second one overturned our flimsy craft completely.

I came to the surface coughing and snorting. J-Casta rose at my side. We were just in time to see the float slip completely under: it sank in no time, carrying the pilot with it. I had not even seen his face, poor fellow.

Jubal came up by the fisherman, who had also overturned. But dugouts do not sink. We owe our lives to those hollowed tree trunks. They were righted, and Jubal and his henchman climbed into one, while I climbed into the other. The waves were still fierce, but had attained a sort of regularity which allowed us to cope with them.

The breakthrough was now a quarter of a mile long. Water poured from it with unabated force, a mighty waterfall where land had been before. We skirted it painfully, making a landing as near to it as we dared.

The rest of that day, under its blinding arch of sky, passed in various stages of confusion and fear.

It was two and a half hours before we were taken off the strip of shore. We were not idle in that time, although every few minutes Jubal paused to curse the fact that he was stranded and powerless. Miraculous as it seems, there were some survivors from the obliterated village, women mostly; we helped to get them ashore and built fires for them.

Meanwhile, Dam Authority planes began to circle the area. We managed to attract the attention of one, which landed by our party. Jubal changed at once; now that he had a machine and men who, unlike the villagers, were in his command, he worked with a silent purpose allowing of no question.

Over the vision, he ordered the rest of the floats to attend to the villagers’ needs. We sped back to Mokulgu.

On the way, Jubal spoke to Owenstown. They took his news almost without comment. They reported that Victoria was still sinking, although the rate had now steadied. A twenty-four-hour a day airlift was about to go into operation, dropping solid blocks of marble on to the lake bed. There, a fault about three miles square had been located; four frogmen had been lost, drowned.

‘It’s like tossing pennies into the ocean,’ Jubal said.

I was thinking of the frogmen, sucked irresistibly down the fault. They would be swept through underground waterways, battered and pulped, to be spat out eventually into our lake.

Vision from Mokulgu, coming on just before we landed there, reported a breach in the lake banks, some twenty miles north of the town. At a word from Jubal, we switched plans and veered north at once to see just how extensive the damage was.

The break was at a tiny cluster of huts dignified by the name of Ulatuama. Several men, the crew of a Dam Authority patrol boat, were working furiously at a widening gap. The damage had been caused by the very waves which had swamped us, and I learnt that a small, disused lock had stood here, relic of an earlier irrigation scheme; so the weakness had been of man’s making. Beyond the lock had been a dried-up channel some twenty yards wide; this was now a swollen, plunging river.

‘Is this serious?’ I asked Jubal. ‘Isn’t it a good way of getting rid of surplus water?’

He gave me a withering look. ‘Where are we if we lose control?’ he demanded. ‘If this thing here runs away with us, the combined waters of Victoria and Tanganyika will flood down into the Congo.’

Even as he spoke, the bank to the south of the escaping waters crumbled; several yards were swept away, their place instantly taken by the current.

We flew back to Mokulgu. Jubal visioned the mayor and got permission to broadcast to the city. I did not hear him speak; reaction had set in, and I had to go and sit quietly at home with Sloe fussing daintily round me. Although you ‘know’ from a child that Earth is a planet, it is only when you drift towards it from space, seeing it hang round and finite ahead, that you can realise the fact. And so, although I had always ‘known’ man was puny, it was the sight of that vast collapsing slab of mountain which had driven the fact into my marrow.

To guess the sort of sentiments Jubal broadcast to the city was easy. He would talk of ‘rallying round in this our time of crisis’. He would speak of the need for ‘all hands uniting against our ancient enemy, Nature’. He would come over big on the tanks; he would be big, his fists clenched, his eyes ablaze. He was in touch with the people. And they would do what he said, for Jubal carried conviction. Perhaps I envied my half-brother.

Labour and supplies began to pour north to mend the damaged bank. Jubal, meanwhile, thought up a typically flamboyant scheme. Tilly , one of the lake steamers, was pressed into service and loaded full of rock and clay by steam shovel. With Jubal standing on the bridge, it was manœuvred into the centre of the danger area and scuttled. Half in and half out of the rushing water, it now formed a base from which a new dam could be built to stem the flood. Watched by a cheering crowd, Jubal and crew skimmed to safety in a motor boat.

‘We shall conquer if we have to dam the water with our bodies,’ he cried. A thousand cheering throats told him how much they liked this idea.

The pitch of crisis which had then been engendered was maintained all through the next two days. For most of that time it rained, and men fought to erect their barrier on clinging mud. Jubal’s popularity – and consequently his influence – underwent a rapid diminution. The reason for this was two-fold. He quarrelled with J-Casta, whose suggestion to throw open the new dam to relieve pressure elsewhere was refused, and he ran into stiff opposition from Mokulgu Town Council.

This august body, composed of the avariciously successful and the successfully avaricious, was annoyed about Tilly . Tilly belonged to the local government, and Jubal had, in effect, stolen it. The men from the factories who had downed tools to fight the water were summoned back to work: the Dam Authority must tend its own affairs.

Jubal merely sneered at this dangerous pique and visioned Leopoldsville. In the briefest possible time, he had the army helping him.

It was at dawn on the morning of the third day that he visioned me to go down and see him. I said adieu to Sloe and took a float over to Ulatuama.

Jubal stood alone by the water’s edge. The sun was still swathed in mist, and he looked cold and pinched. Behind him, dimly outlined figures moved to and fro, like allegorical figures on a frieze. He surveyed me curiously before speaking.

‘The work’s nearly done, Rog,’ he said. He looked as if he needed sleep, but he added energetically, pointing across the lake: ‘Then we tackle the main job of plugging that waterfall.’

I looked across the silent lake. The far shore was invisible, but out of the layers of mist rose Mount Kangosi. Even at this distance, in the early morning hush, came the faint roar of the new waterfall. And there was another sound, intermittent but persistent: beyond the mountain, they were bombing fault lines. That way they hoped to cause a collapse which would plug Victoria’s escape routes. So far, they had had no success, but the bombing went on, making a battlefield of what had once been glorious country.

‘Sorry I haven’t seen anything of you and Sloe,’ Jubal said. I disliked his tone.

‘You’ve been busy. Sloe called you on the vision.’

‘Oh that. Come on into my hut, Rog.’

We walked over to a temporary structure; the grass was overloaded with dew. In Jubal’s hut, J-Casta was dressing, smoking a cheroot as he dexterously pulled on a shirt. He gave me a surly greeting, whose antagonism I sensed was directed through me at Jubal.