The Complete Short Stories

‘I’ll tell you, Maxted, it took me a year to get that recording,’ Sheringham was saying. He straddled Maxted, gesturing with the siphon. ‘A year. Do you know how ugly a year can be?’ For a moment he paused, then tore himself from the memory. ‘Last Saturday, just after midnight, you and Susan were lying back in this same chair. You know, Maxted, there are audio-probes everywhere here. Slim as pencils, with a six-inch focus. I had four in that headrest alone.’ He added, as a footnote: ‘The wind is your own breathing, fairly heavy at the time, if I remember; your interlocked pulses produced the thunder effect.’

Maxted drifted in a wash of sound.

Some while later Sheringham’s face filled his eyes, beard wagging, mouth working wildly.

‘Maxted! You’ve only two more guesses, so for God’s sake concentrate,’ he shouted irritably, his voice almost lost among the thunder rolling from the sea. ‘Come on, man, what is it? Maxted!’ he bellowed. He leapt for the nearest loudspeaker and drove up the volume. The sound boomed out of the patio, reverberating into the night.

Maxted had almost gone now, his fading identity a small featureless island nearly eroded by the waves beating across it.

Sheringham knelt down and shouted into his ear.

‘Maxted, can you hear the sea? Do you know where you’re drowning?’

A succession of gigantic flaccid waves, each more lumbering and enveloping than the last, rode down upon them.

‘In a kiss!’ Sheringham screamed. ‘A kiss!’

The island slipped and slid away into the molten shelf of the sea.

1958

The Waiting Grounds

Whether Henry Talus, my predecessor at Murak Radio Observatory, knew about the Waiting Grounds I can’t say. On the whole it seems obvious he must have done, and that the three weeks he spent handing the station over to me — a job which could easily have been done in three days were merely to give him sufficient time to decide whether or not to tell me about them. Certainly he never did, and the implied judgment against me is one I haven’t yet faced up to.

I remember that on the first evening after my arrival at Murak he asked me a question I’ve been puzzling over ever since.

We were up on the lounge deck of the observatory, looking out at the sand-reefs and fossil cones of the volcano jungle glowing in the false dusk, the great 250-foot steel bowl of the telescope humming faintly in the air above us.

‘Tell me, Quaine,’ Talus suddenly asked, ‘where would you like to be when the world ends?’

‘I haven’t really thought about it,’ I admitted. ‘Is there any urgency?’

‘Urgency?’ Talus smiled at me thinly, his eyes amiable but assessing me shrewdly. ‘Wait until you’ve been here a little longer.’

He had almost finished his last tour at the observatory and I assumed he was referring to the desolation around us which he, after fifteen years, was leaving thanklessly to my entire care. Later, of course, I realized how wrong I was, just as I misjudged the whole of Talus’s closed, complex personality.

He was a lean, ascetic-looking man of about fifty, withheld and moody, as I discovered the moment I debarked from the freighter flying me in to Murak — instead of greeting me at the ramp he sat in the half-track a hundred yards away at the edge of the port, watching silently through dark glasses as I heaved my suitcases across the burning, lava-thick sunlight, legs weary after the massive deceleration, stumbling in the unfamiliar gravity.

The gesture seemed characteristic. Talus’s manner was aloof and sardonic; everything he said had the same deliberately ambiguous overtones, that air of private mystery recluses and extreme introjects assume as a defence. Not that Talus was in any way pathological — no one could spend fifteen years, even with six-monthly leaves, virtually alone on a remote planetary clinker like Murak without developing a few curious mannerisms. In fact, as I all too soon realized, what was really remarkable about Talus was the degree to which he had preserved his sanity, not surrendered it.

He listened keenly to the latest news from Earth.

‘The first pilotless launchings- to Proxima Centauri are scheduled for 2250… the UN Assembly at Lake Success have just declared themselves a sovereign state… V-R Day celebrations are to be discontinued — you must have heard it all on the radiocasts.’

‘I haven’t got a radio here,’ Tallis said. ‘Apart from the one up there, and that’s tuned to the big spiral networks in Andromeda. On Murak we listen only to the important news.’

I nearly retorted that by the time it reached Murak the news, however important, would be a million years old, but on that first evening I was preoccupied with adjusting myself to an unfamiliar planetary environment — notably a denser atmosphere, slightly higher (1.2 E) gravity, vicious temperature swings from -30° to +160° — and programming new routines to fit myself into Murak’s 18-hour day.

Above all, there was the prospect of two years of near-absolute isolation.