Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘What’s the fighting like here?’

‘Oh, excellent. The governor of the boozer gets it under way at ten-thirty sharp, just outside on the corner. I did hear a whisper that he’s going to allow broken bottles for the last five minutes tonight. The police should be with us by then. They’re very keen round here.’

‘At the Feathers, you know, they kick off at ten-fifteen inside the bar. Don’t know whether I agree with that.’

‘No. After all, it’s only the finale of the evening.’

‘Absolutely. Shouldn’t make it too important.’

‘Definitely not. Getting tight’s the object of the exercise.’

‘Quite. By the way, who’s that fellow next to you?’

‘No idea. Wine-bar type, if you ask me.’

‘Hasn’t touched his gherkins. Refused fresh bitter. Shouldn’t be here at all.’

‘Couldn’t agree more. I mean, look at his clothes.’

‘Wonder how long since they were slept in.’

‘If they ever have been.’

‘Disgusting.’

‘And what would you like to follow, love?’

This last was the barmaid. Simpson raised his head and gave a long yell of fury, bewilderment, horror and protest. Then he ran from the room and went on running until he was back at the point where the TIOPEPE was to pick him up. With shaking fingers he put the trance-pill into his mouth.

The Director broke the silence that followed the end of Simpson’s story. ‘Well, it’s a long time ahead, anyway,’ he said with an attempt at cheerfulness.

‘Is it?’ Simpson shouted. ‘Do you think that sort of situation develops in a couple of weeks? It’s starting to happen already. Wine-snobbery spreading, more and more of this drinking what you ought to drink instead of what you like. Self-conscious insistence on the virtues of pubs and beer because the wrong people are beginning to drink wine. It’ll be here in our time, don’t you worry. You just wait.’

‘Ah, now, Simpson, you’re tired and overwrought. A glass of champagne will soon make you see things in a different light.’

‘Slip away with me afterwards,’ I murmured. ‘We’ll have a good go at the beer down in town.’

Simpson gave a long yell — much like the one, probably, he vented at the end of his visit to 2010. Springing to his feet, he rushed away down the lab to where Schneider kept the medical stores.

‘What’s he up to?’ the Director puffed as we hurried in pursuit. ‘Is he going to try and poison himself?’

‘Not straight away, sir, I imagine.’

‘How do you mean, Baker?’

‘Look at that bottle he’s got hold of, sir. Can’t you see what it is?’

‘But… I can’t believe my eyes. Surely it’s…’

‘Yes, sir. Surgical spirit.’

The (technical) success of Simpson’s trip to the year 2010 encouraged the authorities to have similar experiments conducted for a variety of time-objectives. Some curious and occasionally alarming pieces of information about the future came to our knowledge in this way; I’m thinking less of politics than of developments in the domain of drink.

For instance, let me take this opportunity of warning every youngster who likes any kind of draught beer and has a high life-expectancy to drink as much of the stuff as he can while he can, because they’re going to stop making it in 2016. Again, just six months ago Simpson found that, in the world of 2045, alcoholic diseases as a whole accounted for almost exactly a third of all deaths, or nearly as many as transport accidents and suicide combined. This was universally put down to the marketing, from 2039 onwards, of wines and spirits free of all the congeneric elements that cause hangovers, and yet at the same time indistinguishable from the untreated liquors even under the most searching tests — a triumph of biochemitechnology man had been teasingly on the brink of since about the time I was downing my first pints of beer.

Anyway, by a lucky accident, the authorities suddenly became anxious to know the result of the 2048 Presidential election in America, and so Simpson was able to travel to that year and bring back news, not only of the successful Rosicrucian candidate’s impending installation at the Black House, but also of the rigorous outlawing of the new drink process and everything connected with it. After one veiled reference to the matter in conversation, Simpson had considered himself lucky to escape undamaged from the bar of the Travellers’ Club.

For a time, our section’s exploration of the rather more distant future was blocked by a persistent fault in the TIOPEPE, whereby the projection circuits cut off at approximately 83.63 years in advance of time-present. Then, one day in 1974, an inspired guess of Rabaiotti’s put things right, and within a week Simpson was off to 2145. We were all there in the lab as usual to see him back safely. After Schneider had given him the usual relaxing shots, Simpson came out with some grave news. A quarrel about spy-flights over the moons of Saturn had set Wales and Mars — the two major powers in the Inner Planets at that period — at each other’s throats and precipitated a system-wide nuclear war in 2101. Half of Venus, and areas on Earth the size of Europe, had been virtually obliterated.

Rabaiotti was the first to speak when Simpson had stopped. ‘Far enough off not to bother most of our great-grandchildren, anyway,’ he said.

‘That’s true. But what a prospect.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Well, no use glooming, Baker,’ the Director said. ‘Nothing we can do about it. We’ve got a full half-hour before the official conference — tell us what’s happened to drink.’

Simpson rubbed his bald head and sighed. I noticed that his eyes were bloodshot, but then they nearly always were after one of these trips. A very conscientious alcohologist, old Simpson. ‘You’re not going to like it.’

We didn’t.

Simpson’s landing in 2145 had been a fair enough success, but there had been an unaccountable error in the ground-level estimates, conducted a week earlier by means of our latest brain-child, the TIAMARIA (Temporal Inspection Apparatus and Meteor-ological-Astronomical-Regional-Interrelation Assessor). This had allowed him to materialize twelve feet up in the air and given him a nasty fall — on to a flower-bed, by an unearned piece of luck, but shaking him severely. What followed shook him still further.

The nuclear war had set everything back so much that the reconstructed world he found himself in was little more unfamiliar than the ones he had found on earlier, shorter-range time-trips. His official report, disturbing as it was, proved easy enough to compile, and he had a couple of hours to spare before the TIOPEPE’s field should snatch him back to the present. He selected a restaurant within easy range of his purse — the TIAMARIA’s cameras, plus our counterfeiters in the Temporal Treasury, had taken care of the currency problem all right — found a vacant table, and asked for a drink before dinner.

‘Certainly, sir,’ the waiter said. ‘The Martian manatee-milk is specially good today. Or there’s a new delivery of Iapetan carnivorous-lemon juice, if you’ve a liking for the unusual. Very, uh, full-blooded, sir.’

Simpson swallowed. ‘I’m sure,’ he said, ‘but I was thinking of something — you know — a little stronger?’

The waiter’s manner suffered an abrupt change. ‘Oh, you mean booze, do you?’ he said coldly. ‘Sometimes I wonder what this town’s coming to, honest. All right, I’ll see what I can do.’

The ‘booze’ arrived on a tin tray in three chunky cans arranged like equal slices of a round cake. The nearest one had the word BEAR crudely stamped on it. Simpson poured some muddy brown liquid from it into a glass. It tasted like last week’s swipes topped up with a little industrial alcohol. Then he tried the can stamped BOOJLY. (We all agreed later that this must be a corruption of ‘Beaujolais’.) That was like red ink topped up with a good deal of industrial alcohol. Lastly there was BANDY. Industrial alcohol topped up with a little cold tea.