The Complete Short Stories

I stood up and walked softly across to her, looked down at her strange face, its skin smooth and grey, like some pharaonic bride in a basalt dream. Then, beside me at the door I noticed the hunched figure of the chauffeur. His peaked cap hid his face, but the two watchful eyes were fixed on me like small coals.

As we left, hundreds of sleeping sand-rays were dotted about the moonlit floor of the desert. We stepped between them and moved away silently in the Cadillac.

When I reached the villa I went straight into the study, ready to start work on assembling the next issue. During the return ride I had quickly decided on the principal cue-themes and key-images which I would play into the VT sets. All programmed for maximum repetition, within twenty-four hours I would have a folio of moon-sick, muse-mad dithyrambs which would stagger Aurora Day by their heartfelt simplicity and inspiration.

As I entered the study my shoe caught on something sharp. I bent down in the darkness, and found a torn strip of computer circuitry embedded in the white leather flooring.

When I switched on the light I saw that someone had smashed the three VT sets, pounding them to a twisted pulp in a savage excess of violence.

Mine had not been the only targets. Next morning, as I sat at my desk contemplating the three wrecked computers, the telephone rang with news of similar outrages all the way down the Stars. Tony Sapphire’s 50-watt IBM had been hammered to pieces, and Raymond Mayo’s four new Philco Versomatics had been smashed beyond hope of repair. As far as I could gather, not a single VT set had been left untouched. The previous evening, between the hours of six and midnight, someone had moved rapidly down the Stars, slipped into the studios and apartments and singlemindedly wrecked every VT set.

I had a good idea who. As I climbed out of the Cadillac on my return from Aurora I had noticed two heavy wrenches on the seat beside the chauffeur. However, I decided not to call the police and prefer charges. For one thing, the problem of filling Wave IX now looked almost insoluble. When I telephoned Graphis Press I found, more or less as expected, that all Aurora’s copy had been mysteriously mislaid.

The problem remained — what would I put in the issue? I couldn’t afford to miss an edition or my subscribers would fade away like ghosts.

I telephoned Aurora and pointed this out.

‘We should go to press again within a week, otherwise our contract expires and I’ll never get another. And reimbursing a year’s advance subscriptions would bankrupt me. We’ve simply got to find some copy. As the new managing editor have you any suggestions?’

Aurora chuckled. ‘I suppose you’re thinking that I might mysteriously reassemble all those smashed machines?’

‘It’s an idea,’ I agreed, waving at Tony Sapphire who had just called in. ‘Otherwise I’m afraid we’re never going to get any copy.’

‘I can’t understand you,’ Aurora replied: ‘Surely there’s one very simple method.’

‘Is there? What’s that?’

‘Write some yourself!’

Before I could protest she burst into a peal of high laughter. ‘I gather there are some twenty-three able-bodied versifiers and so-called poets in Vermilion Sands’ — this was exactly the number of places broken into the previous evening — ‘well, let’s see some of them versify.’

‘Aurora!’ I snapped. ‘You can’t be serious. Listen, for heaven’s sake, this is no joking—’

But she had put the phone down. I turned to Tony Sapphire, then sat back limply and contemplated an intact tape spool I had recovered from one of the sets. ‘It looks as if I’ve had it. Did you hear that — "Write some yourself"?’

‘She must be insane,’ Tony agreed.

‘It’s all part of this tragic obsession of hers,’ I explained, lowering my voice. ‘She genuinely believes she’s the Muse of Poetry, returned to earth to re-inspire the dying race of poets. Last night she referred to the myth of Melander and Corydon. I think she’s seriously waiting for some young poet to give his life for her.’

Tony nodded. ‘She’s missing the point, though. Fifty years ago a few people wrote poetry, but no one read it. Now no one writes it either. The VT set merely simplifies the whole process.’

I agreed with him, but of course Tony was somewhat prejudiced there, being one of those people who believed that literature was in essence both unreadable and unwritable. The automatic novel he had been ‘writing’ was over ten million words long, intended to be one of those gigantic grotesques that tower over the highways of literary history, terrifying the unwary traveller. Unfortunately he had never bothered to get it printed, and the memory drum which carried the electronic coding had been wrecked in the previous night’s pogrom.