Beloved Son Page 4

The boy seems to have had a great affection for a family friend, John Heathcote. Mysterious Heathcote of the Slow Chambers, of course. What was the man really doing that produced the Slow Chambers as a by-product? And where does little mate Albert come into it? Did it have anything to do with his selection as Commander? That would need more than plain or fancy nepotism. In any case, Heathcote has been kept damned near incommunicado; few have ever heard of him. So what was he doing?

  I do love a good myst’ry, Mum! At least my spying will have some personal curiosity to disguise the shabby taste of it.

  (A cut.)

  Heathcote’s unknown work spins in my head. As a group, biologists are the most dangerous men alive. The bomb we’ve learned to live with and pollution we will handle. But biologists!

  What they have achieved since the sixties is enough to put the fear of hellfire into Jehovah himself. Artificial inovulation, the gerontological drugs, brain regrowth and the mechanics of gene manipulation – these are already with us, imperfect and unready but with us.

  They are only a beginning.

  Consider the implications, and retch.

  (A cut.)

  Thirty-two days out and at last a little extra-curricular activity. Ivan and I are psychiatrists foremost; we didn’t expect much call on our services as GPs, but today it came.

  (Here an interpolated note in Campion’s handwriting: ‘What the hell are or were GPs?’)

  You might imagine you would have to work hard to injure yourself in a one-eighth gravity field. Not so. What breaks bones is not weight or impact, but torsion. Fraser, climbing flywise up a set of store racks instead of using the platform jack, caught his toe under a bottom ledge with an armful of photographic plates, came down on his arse and elbow, breaking the elbow and jarring his spine. To do it he must have been flailing like a manic windmill.

  There’s not much serious about a clean break, though an elbow is a nasty place to have it, but his spine is painful and only rest and ray lamp will do much good. Therefore –

  And here’s the rub.

  Albert suggested putting him at once into Slow Chamber. The idea was right but hasty. We must be sure first that the break is knitting correctly, and it is better to wait until the time, some twenty days from now, when the first three will undergo decelerated living.

  It was only a moment’s exchange of phrases but it made everybody suddenly aware of the imminence of sleep. And just as suddenly they came alive with reasons why their turns should be deferred, enlarging on the important work which will suffer from interruption at this critical time and … etc.

  Such schemings among the intelligentsia will cut little ice with Albert, who can be a philistine bastard when he wants.

  Fraser was not rostered for the vats so soon, but Albert can alter the listing if he considers the circumstances warrant it. It means placing an extra workload on Matthews but he accepts it placidly and has made complicated arrangements with Fraser for splitting and re-programming their responsibilities. Fraser was resigned and presented no problem, but he sparked one.

  (Another cut. The narrative picked up again in mid-scene but it was plain what had occurred.)

  Only Kulayev persisted in demanding deferment. He wasn’t noisy, only interminably reasonable in that fashion which makes refusal seem officious. Albert listened and said nothing at all, which is just as wearing a defence, until Pete talked himself into taking a step too far, pointing out in his still reasonable way that he could not be coerced.

  ‘I have free will and the list can be adjusted.’

  Albert spoke at last and just as reasonably. ‘Only by making complicated accommodations with possible injustice to others. We must avoid that.’

  Pete pushed error petulantly further. ‘You have authority now, Albert, but it will be all one in forty years’ time. In the long run you cannot force me against my wish.’

  ‘I can,’ said Albert, ‘unassisted.’

  It was not a threat. A statement, almost amiable. And naked. Those hands and wrists could deal with any of us.

  ‘This is violent autocracy! You will have to answer for your actions eventually.’

  ‘It will be all one,’ said Albert, ‘in forty years’ time.’

  Pete turned to Ivan, mutely asking backing, and Ivan, without readable expression, said a few sentences in Russian which froze Pete as though he had been assaulted in hard fact.

  So much for the intelligentsia when they are afraid of the dark.

  Later I asked Ivan what he had said. It was this, and I gather it sounds less stilted in Russian: ‘Does your psyche demand punishment? You asked for a spanking, saw the upraised hand and changed your mind. You should now be at peace.’

  Ivan is a tradesman and knows when to be rough.

  (A cut of, apparently, two or three weeks.)

  I gather that the great problem with anabiotic freezing has been the cessation of the various metabolic functions at differing temperatures rather than all petering out comfortably at a given point. Differential regulation would have required several tons of machinery per vat to take over each relinquishing function and so keep the subject – sleeper? neo-corpse? cop-out? – minimally alive. And as much more for the revival process, involving complex mechanical massage, heart stimulation, muscle toning and God wot.

  Heathcote’s chemical processes invade the functions at their seat of operation and bring them to harmonised activity with only a mild temperature drop (about ten degrees) to assist the slowing. All this is accomplished with a single bank of machinery about the size of a double wardrobe, into which the vat is sunk. And freezing is forever out of date.

  Fraser was first to go. He didn’t like it any more than the others but had nerved himself to a show of insouciance, and of course overdid it.

  With his still painful back and splinted arm, we had to help him into the plastic overall after going through the routine of plugging the orifices of the body (are you listening, Death?) which he resented stoically but which even a man with the use of both hands can’t do successfully for himself.

  Ribald jokes all round.

  Then we ran the tubes into his nostrils, sealed the overall and lowered him into the vat. He grinned comfortlessly as the transparent carapace closed over him; air hissed out as the lid lowered itself to the level of the immersion fluid.

  Through the fluid a flexible arm snaked out, syringe-tipped, pierced the loose plastic and moved slowly over the left inner elbow, seeking a vein. And I wonder who devised that piece of mechanical magicianry? The soporific went in and the needle withdrew, hesitated a second as it heated and sealed the perforation in the plastic, and snapped into invisibility in the wall of the vat. Fraser seemed to sleep immediately; there was a low hum as the refrigerators started.

  The rest was repetition of syringes entering and withdrawing as one by one the telltales lit to signify that a stage had been completed. It took about an hour. Fraser was very white but hadn’t the look of death; shallow breath, every couple of minutes, was perceptible if you watched for it.

  We put the other two in simultaneously, Streich nervously talkative, Kulayev nervously silent. As Albert marked the resuscitation dates on the carapaces I couldn’t resist asking him, ‘Mechanical and electrical faults you can handle, but how about chemical upsets?’

  He told me, blank-faced, ‘We’d have to wake them and hope we were in time.’

  ‘And if? There’s always an if.’

  ‘Then they die.’ He paused on that, then said, ‘And we break out the medical alcohol and get drunk and forget it for a couple of hours. For your interest, I helped design and build that machinery. It won’t fail.’

  Did you indeed? Were you that close to Heathcote? Are the Slow Chambers relevant to what worries Ian? Is that what the ‘others’ are? Preservees?

  Can Albert be as phlegmatic as he seems? Ivan has asked and I have made believe to wonder with him.

  Albert isn’t.

  At last I have done what breeding and instinct revolted agai
nst but which is part of my job; I have played back the film taken by his cabin camera. A dull business it has been, but productive after a fashion.

  He reads, studies Russian and German from tapes and writes a lot. The ceiling camera catches most of what seems to be a private journal; I’ll have to read it some day, but not yet; even a psychiatrist shies from final indecencies when he does not understand the necessity for them.

  The others appear in his cabin now and then but their visits show more about them than about him. He is not an outgoing type; I keep remembering the little son of brilliant parents, enduring solitude.

  One scene, private to the point of acute embarrassment, enacted several times, holds my attention. I can make little of it and that little is only a dubious guess.

  Albert stands before the mirror, birthday naked, observing himself in a series of gestures and postures. It is not a ritual; the movements are random, not repeated in a sequence, seemingly dictated by emotional whim. That is all, but what is he doing and why?

  We know queerly little about each other. During our training we did not live together; we had private lives and weren’t together as much as it seemed. Each had special functions requiring separate preparation; even physical exercise was tutored individually by instructors who treated each according to his body’s need.

  So we do not know what people in close contact usually know – what the others look like under their clothes. We know the obvious things – Kulayev is tall and thinnish, Streich inclines to pudginess, Albert is muscular – but I doubt whether any of us has seen the others stripped.

  In Albert this seems important.

  To the casual eye he is something of a shambles. He is fairly tall and you might guess his weight (wrongly) at seventy-five or so kilos. He is plain old-fashioned ugly; his is a coarse, over-nosed, over-mouthed, over-structured face, belonging to a wharf labourer who has had a hard life. Imagine if you can a wharfie who reads Russell, Plato, Pound and Joyce and will spend a happy hour splitting hairs in such realms as philology and the Minoan scripts – and likes to putter with machinery and to construct surreal models of indescribable visions from any material that comes to hand – and can play the piano with petrifying accuracy and no feeling for music whatsoever.

  His hands, so dextrous and flexible, belong to a homicidal butcher and his shoes would be size 12.

  His scruffiness is proverbial; at first I thought he simply had no clothes sense, but now I feel there is something deliberate about it, a meditated act of self-denigration. He can reduce a tailored suit to a flour sack simply by putting it on and in overalls he makes conventional shapelessness a joke.

  Think of all that as Albert contorts before his mirror.

  He is much bigger than he appears to be, having a physique to make the gods mutter surly envy. Yet he scowls at himself, examines himself with the distaste of someone picking over soiled underwear, and turns about and scowls again and flexes his hands and twists his torso and goes through a dozen meaningless acts.

  But no behaviour is meaningless and this private performance could be crucial.

  From the past comes a memory of a book called, I think, Goodnight, Sweet Prince. It seems that John Barrymore, a famous Hamlet of the first half of the century, had a pathological aversion to tights. Accordingly he stood for hours before his dressing-room mirror, loathing the tights and getting himself accustomed to them, feeling that he looked like a posturing fool and forcing himself to overcome the feeling before it should permeate his playing of the role. Apparently he succeeded, as his Hamlet is part of theatrical history.

  What to make of a man who hates a body anyone else would trade a sizeable stretch of his years to possess? This could be the key to his personality. If so it will turn in time.

  That was the end of the clip.

  Q: Why did they give him command?

  A: Because he was no use for anything else. QED.

  Q: Why, then, was he sent at all?

  A: To hold him on ice for forty-two years while the ‘others’ … did what?

  In the back of Jackson’s mind a watchful imp leapt a gap of facts to land on an idea. Raft was thirty-four when he left and is forty-two (biological) age now. And it is forty-two years since they started out, so the ‘others’ …

  The imp of intuition had done all it could. The coincidence was plain but not the connection.

  4

  The next clip consisted of two sheets only, from Raft’s journal. They began: Fifty-three days from home …

  Jackson was cheated, affronted, denied. Not even a prose-poem close-up of the red furnace of Barnard’s Star! Just a damned great jump to the end. I’ll have every word they preserved if it takes me a year to read them.

  Fifty-three days from home and Columbus has behaved as a thing of perfection. In an age of planned obsolescence she was built to function at top performance for centuries and is bringing us home without creak or murmur.

  It hasn’t been monotonous. The waking years were programmed to the limit and we needed every minute of them. Particularly Ewan who has had to do the work of two …

  I must admit to having no difficulty in forgetting how we lost Gordon Fraser. He was an unbearable bastard. To the others he was an amusing personality, a joker and a teller of tales; to me he gave an unrelenting sarcastic bitching, as if my very presence insulted his professionalism.

  Then one day he was no longer here. He woke from slow met on his third session, opened his eyes – and died. Looking back, it was an unsettling death. Just died – that was all.

  We still don’t know why; the machine seemed in perfect order and we used it again thereafter. Perhaps there are side effects of the process undetected as yet. Ivan wouldn’t risk complete autopsy but insisted we bring him home in near-zero vat conditions for expert examination. There should be no decay at all.

  His death put the terror of ending into them. Only determination kept them to the Slow Chamber routine once trust had been shaken. My determination, that is, plus the certainty of a food problem if we tried to spend the rest of the trip in wakefulness.

  Otherwise the years have been undramatic. Until last night.

  I don’t know what possessed me. The pressure must have been piling up since long before we left Earth, but had become so much part of my life and thought that I had lost conscious notice of it. Like living on a busy intersection: after a week or two you no longer hear the traffic.

  I am neither ashamed nor regretful, only surprised at the power of a private knowledge that has been battened down too long. I have broken the instruction to secrecy but, as Pete said long ago, ‘It will be all one in forty years’, and the forty years are up.

  We were having a mild session with the ethyl alcohol, of which we have far more than we need, but I was not drunk. You don’t get drunk on two fairly weak drinks, mostly orange juice.

  Something in me wanted to create a sensation; perhaps dinkum cobber Albert wanted to show that he’s really somebody, with or without a doctorate. He showed.

  Jackson threw down the clip. What about it? Did the death of Fraser have significance, or the fact of a few bored scientists getting on the tank with home in sight?

  Ah, the instruction to secrecy. Raft actually knows something. It had better concern Heathcote or I stop trying.

  Then he thought that whatever Raft had revealed, six people now knew it, and those belonged to five different national groups, though their nations no longer existed as they had known them.

  No, four groups. Forget unfortunate Britain.

  All friendly at the moment, but who could see tomorrow?

  Another damned big headache for the Ombudsmen, for if the revelation were of moment not even Security could simply suppress the voyagers. The general public might not care a hoot about space travellers but the physicists and radiologists would. And the bloody biologists also, he supposed.

  With a premonition of disaster he took up the final clip.

  It was headed: ‘Further Section From The L
indley Mentascripts.’

  Albert, Old Silence, tonight you scooped the pool! Winner took all and left the expert competition to contemplate its unconsidered futures.

  I know now why that fine body bothers you so much, and with only seven weeks to planetfall I must break into that clutch of obsessions before it does you harm.

  With home only a meteoric stone’s throw away it was natural that community discussions should return to what we may come home to. Ivan and I have worked like moles to undermine personal and national barriers, and predictions have become much freer; politics and national propensities and the undertones of war have been added bluntly to the influences determining prophecy.

  Yet it was to be expected that Joe and Pete would avoid their own subject; they are specialists enough to be uneasy but not ‘in-group’ scientists enough to be sure.

  They are sure now.

  From the beginning Albert has only tolerated these harmless bull sessions, now and then silencing them with a brassy conversation stopper. Tonight he boiled over.

  He thinks, like most people, that he can hold a little alcohol without interference to his mental processes; but no bodily function is strained without payment and in fact his tolerance is abnormally low. A couple of ounces of ‘starman’s gin’ was enough to snap a restraint leashed for years.

  I must use the wardroom tapes to get this six-way conversation accurate. My recall is good, but not perfect.

  So that’s how you two produce dialogue like playwrights. I should have realised it’s the real thing edited into English.

  We were at the one-world concept again, Ivan and I arguing against the likelihood on political and psychological grounds and Ewan supporting us with practical points, such as ‘What would they do with the armed services? The unemployment problem would be staggering. And the financial aspect – big business couldn’t survive the loss of military contracts. It would take a century of de-escalation to bring it off.’

  So we were left with our enmities and fears and national boundaries. He had some faith, though, in the emergence of an intellectual élite, a hierarchy of brains confined to about ten per cent of the population, a self-perpetuating genetic pool of wisdom, guiding government.