Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘Switch to whisky. That’s still real. In fact I’m going to take a bottle home tonight. Can you lend me twenty-five quid?’

Until almost the other day, we on the time-travel project knew much more about the twenty-first century than about the remaining years of our own. Persistent instabilities in the TIOPEPE had had unpredictable and disturbing consequences whenever we set our objective any nearer than 1995. One such attempt had put Simpson down in what we afterwards computed to have been 8200 or so, where he had immediately found himself being chased across country by a number of creatures resembling giant vegetable marrows covered in scales and with half a dozen legs apiece, doubtless from some other planet, but he had had no leisure or desire to observe them closely, let alone set about looking for a drink. Our second attempt at a short-range projection, thanks to an unsuspected build-up of negative feedback, had landed the unlucky fellow back in the days of the Black Death, and resulted in a three months’ quarantine inside the lab for the lot of us.

The period of confinement, however, meant that we got a lot of work done. Rabaiotti and I really settled down to the instability problem, and by the end of the three months had come up with an answer, a kind of elaborate anti-overshoot servomechanism now known as the TAITTINGER — Temporal Accuracy Injector and Time-Travel Indeterminacy Nullifier (General Electric and Rank). We duly reported our success to the authorities and sat back to await instructions, which promptly arrived.

On Easter Tuesday, 1975, we received orders to report on how far the occupation of Mars was going to have gone by 1983. Within twenty-four hours we had everything lined up and shot Simpson forward eight years to the day.

In all technical respects, the operation could not have gone off better. Simpson reappeared in the receiver exactly on schedule, alive and well. Or fairly well. He looked haggard and in the depths of gloom, though that was nothing out of the ordinary after a time-trip. What startled us was that he had clearly been in a fight, his face battered and his clothing torn and dirty. Schneider gave him a tranquillizing shot and started to clean him up.

‘What happened, man?’ the Director demanded. ‘What did they do to you?’

‘Oh, this,’ Simpson said, indicating his face. ‘That’s nothing. It’s what I saw and heard… Listen, all of you. We’ve got to sell up and buy an island somewhere. Somewhere they can’t get at us.’

‘You mean there’s going to be an invasion or something?’ Schneider asked.

Simpson shook his head slowly. ‘Oh no. I’d have come across the results of anything like that in my trips to the 2000s, wouldn’t I? No, it’s just… the life we’re going to be leading. So soon. Give me a drink. A strong one.’

Schneider frowned, but made no other objection when I poured a stiff shot from the medicine-cupboard brandy bottle and passed it to Simpson. He downed it in two gulps and, hesitantly at first, told us his tale.

At first sight, London seemed quite unchanged: demolition and construction works everywhere, vast unoccupied blocks already beginning to deteriorate, road repairs at hundred-metre intervals with their familiar two-man work-gangs, barely moving crowds overflowing the pavements, and the traffic averaging perhaps three kilometres an hour, little if at all lower than the 1975 rate. About half of it consisted of private cars towing trailers piled with coloured plastic bins or containers, which was a novelty, but Simpson let it lie for the moment, and concentrated on making his way from his arrival-point — a w.c. in the Oxford Circus public lavatory, pre-probed by the TIAMARIA and found vacant for the necessary few seconds — down Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus.

Arrived there on foot no more than half an hour later, he again found a very recognizable scene. The Eros statue had gone, and this gave him a brief pang, but it was unexpectedly reassuring to find the drop-outs still there (so to speak) in their hundreds on the main traffic island and the surrounding pavements, sleeping and meditating and taking trips, twanging their electric rebahbs — the Moorish thing had really caught on, then — and playing their transwristors, chanting their traditional slogans in tribute to the victories of Greater Vietnam and the glorious dead of the London School of Economics, no doubt fornicating here and there among the discarded hypodermics and the piles of leaflets, assaulting passers-by and fighting the occasional policeman. Several times, Simpson heard American accents among the main stream of pedestrians, and concluded that this had remained a major stop on the sight-seeing route between Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London.

Within twenty minutes he had reached St James’s Square and was climbing the steps of the London Library, the facilities of which had proved invaluable on several of his previous, longer-range trips. But this time the doors were closed and the building was evidently deserted. This was a considerable set-back. In a fit of anxious irritation he thumped violently at the woodwork.

‘Shut, mate,’ called a cheerful voice behind him.

‘So I see.’ Simpson descended the steps and approached the speaker, a middle-aged man in overalls who, cigarette in mouth, was leaning against the door of a car parked at the kerb. ‘Do you happen to know why?’

‘Know why? You forgotten what day it is?’

‘Wednesday. What about it?’

‘What about it? It’s Easter Wednesday. Don’t expect anything to be open today, do you? Where’ve you been, anyhow?’

‘Oh, abroad. Only got back this morning.’

‘Where abroad? Same everywhere, I thought, bar Israel.’

‘I’ve been in space too,’ Simpson said, improvising hastily. ‘You know, Mars and so on.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ The man lost interest at once.

‘Do I understand you to say everything ’s shut? All the libraries and reading-rooms, all that?’

‘That’s right. It’s the Easter slack period, see. Good Wednesday through to Easter Friday and then the weekend. As usual.’

Simpson was shocked and shaken. The ordinary six-day Easter holiday, from Good Thursday to Easter Tuesday, was fair and reasonable, but this was insane. ‘So nothing’ll be open before Monday morning.’

‘Tuesday afternoon. Chum, you really have been in space, haven’t you?’

‘Sorry… Look, where can I buy a newspaper?’

‘A newspaper ?’ The stranger reacted as if Simpson had inquired about the purchase of an elephant. ‘In the slack period?’

‘Oh yes. So I’d have to wait for that until… today week.’

‘You’d get a News-Standard then, yeah. If you want a daily it’ll be tomorrow week. It must be, let’s see, the Times-Guardian ’s turn. That’s right, it was the Express-Telegraph last week, the week before Easter, rather.’

‘Thanks,’ Simpson said dully. He was striving to think how he could gain access to some public source of information before his time was up and he had to return. ‘Er… I’ve got a report to write for my firm. In a hurry. About, well, recent events. Is there anywhere at all, any agency, any Government department, research centre, emergency service that might…?’

The man was staring at Simpson and smiling broadly, with the expression of a contemporary garage mechanic, say, telling a customer that the spare part for his car had not turned up, but much intensified. It was obviously a rare and delicious experience for him to have found somebody so well qualified to be informed that he could not get what he wanted anywhere on Earth (and no doubt on the planets, too). ‘There’s nothing, friend,’ he said finally. ‘Nothing at all. Think yourself lucky you haven’t got a broken leg, eh?’