Кингсли Эмис - Something Strange

Norbu looked surprised and sorry. ‘I think you’re wrong.’

You might as well go now,’ Volsci said. ‘Ila will be waiting.’

Yes,’ Norbu said. He looked extremely sorry now.

Irmy felt quite sorry too. ‘Good-bye, Norbu,’ she said.

Myri smiled to herself. It was good, even better than she had remembered — there was no point in being modest inside one’s own mind. She must be a real writer in spite of Bruno’s scoffing, or how could she have invented these characters, who were so utterly unlike anybody she knew, and then put them into a situation that was so completely outside her experience? The only thing she was not sure about was whether she might not have overplayed the part about feeling or dwelt on it at too great length. Perhaps extremely sorry was a little heavy; she replaced it by sorrier than before. Excellent: now there was just the right touch of restraint in the middle of all the feeling. She decided she could finish off the scene in a few lines.

‘Probably see you at some cocktail hour,’ Volsci said, she wrote, then looked up with a frown as the buzzer sounded at her door. She crossed her tiny wedge-shaped room — its rear wall was part of the outer wall of the sphere, but it had no port — threw the lock and found Bruno on the threshold. He was breathing fast, as if he had been hurrying or lifting a heavy weight, and she saw with distaste that there were drops of sweat on his thick skin. He pushed past her and sat down on her bed, his mouth open.

‘What is it?’ she asked, displeased. The afternoon was a private time unless some other arrangement were made at lunch.

‘I don’t know what it is. I think I must be ill.’

‘Ill? But you can’t be. Only people on Earth get ill. Nobody on a station is ever ill: Base told us that. Illness is caused by — ’

‘I don’t think I believe some of the things that Base says.’

‘But who can we believe if we don’t believe Base?’

Bruno evidently did not hear her question. He said: ‘I had to come to you — Lia’s no good for this. Please let me stay with you, I’ve got so much to say.’

‘It’s no use, Bruno. Clovis is the one who has me. I thought you understood that I didn’t — ’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ he said impatiently. ‘Where I need you is in thinking. Though that’s connected with the other, the having. I don’t expect you to see that. I’ve only just begun to see it myself.’

Myri could make nothing of this last part. ‘Thinking? Thinking about what?’

He bit his lip and shut his eyes for a moment. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘It was the analyser that set my mind going. Almost every other day it breaks down. And the computer, the counters, the repellers, the scanners and the rest of them — they’re always breaking down too, and so are their power supplies. But not the purifier or the fluid-reconstitutor or the fruit and vegetable growers or the heaters or the main power source. Why not?’.

‘Well, they’re less complicated. How can a fruit grower go wrong? A chemical tank and a water tank is all there is to it. You ask Lia about that.’

‘All right. Try answering this, then. The strange happenings. If they’re illusions, why are they always outside the sphere? Why are there never any inside?’

‘Perhaps there are,’ Myri said.

‘Don’t. I don’t want that. I shouldn’t like that. I want everything in here to be real. Are you real? I must believe you are.’

‘Of course I’m real.’ She was now thoroughly puzzled.

‘And it makes a difference, doesn’t it? It’s very important that you and everything else should be real, everything in the sphere. But tell me: whatever’s arranging these happenings must be pretty powerful if it can fool our instruments and our senses so completely and consistently, and yet it can’t do anything — anything we recognise as strange, that is — inside this puny little steel skin. Why not?’

‘Presumably it has its limitations. We should be pleased.’

‘Yes. All right, next point. You remember the time I tried to sit up in the lounge after midnight and stay awake?’

‘That was silly. Nobody can stay awake after midnight. Standing Orders were quite clear on that point.’

‘Yes, they were, weren’t they?’ Bruno seemed to be trying to grin. ‘Do you remember my telling you how I couldn’t account for being in my own bed as usual when the music woke us — you remember the big music? And — this is what I’m really after — do you remember how we all agreed at breakfast that life in space must have conditioned us in such a way that falling asleep at a fixed time had become an automatic mechanism? You remember that?’

‘Naturally I do.’

‘Right. Two questions, then. Does that strike you as a likely explanation? That sort of complete self-conditioning in all four of us after… just a number of months?’

‘Not when you put it like that,’

‘But we all agreed on it, didn’t we? Without hesitation.’

Myri, leaning against a side wall, fidgeted. He was being not pleasant in a new way, one that made her want to stop him talking even while he was thinking at his best. ‘What’s your other question, Bruno?’ Her voice sounded unusual to, her.

‘Ah, you’re feeling it too, are you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you will in a minute. Try my other question. The night of the music was a long time ago, soon after we arrived here, but you remember it clearly. So do I. And yet when I try to remember what I was doing only a couple of months earlier, on Earth, finishing up my life there, getting ready for this, it’s just a vague blur. Nothing stands out.’

‘It’s all so remote.’

‘Maybe. But I remember the trip clearly enough, don’t you?’

Myri caught her breath. I feel surprised, she told herself. Or something like that. I feel the way Bruno looked when he left the lunch table. She said nothing.

‘You’re feeling it now all right, aren’t you?’ He was watching her closely with his narrow eyes. ‘Let me try to describe, it. A surprise that goes on and on. Puzzlement. Symptoms of physical exertion or strain. And above all a… a sort of discomfort, only in the mind. Like having a sharp object pressed against a tender part of your body, except that this is in your mind.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘A difficulty of vocabulary.’

The loudspeaker above the door clicked on and Clovis’s voice said: ‘Attention. Strange happening. Assemble in the lounge at once. Strange happening.’

Myri and Bruno stopped staring at each other and hurried out along the narrow corridor. Clovis and Lia were already in the lounge, looking out of the port.

Apparently only a few feet beyond the steelhard glass, and illuminated from some invisible source, were two floating figures. The detail was excellent, and the four inside the sphere could distinguish without difficulty every fold in the naked skin of the two caricatures of humanity presented, it seemed, for their thorough inspection, a presumption given added weight by the slow rotation of the pair that enabled their every portion to be scrutinised. Except for a scrubby growth at the base of the skull, they were hairless. The limbs were foreshortened, lacking the normal narrowing at the joints, and the bellies protuberant. One had male characteristics, the other female, yet in neither case were these complete. From each open, wet, quivering toothless mouth there came a loud, clearly audible yelling, higher in pitch than any those in the sphere could have produced, and of an unfamiliar emotional range.

‘Well, I wonder how long this will last,’ Clovis said.

‘Is it worth trying the repellers on them?’ Lia asked. ‘What does the radar say? Does it see them?’