The Monster Trilogy. Brian Aldiss
gazed up into the air, and uttered an epigram.
‘I fear a night-time on Venus means a lifetime on Mercury.’
‘You wretches live in the dark,’ Joe Bodenland said. ‘Don’t you hate your own sickness?’
He expected no answer, speaking abstractedly as he finger-tipped the keyboard in the train’s chief control panel. The driver stood by, silent, offering no reply. The information had been squeezed out of him, like paste from a half-empty tube.
‘If you’ve told me right, we should be back in 1999 any minute.’
Bodenland watched the scattering figures in a globe-screen, peering through the half-dark.
As the time train slowed, the grey light lifted to something brighter. The driver screamed with fear, in his first real display of emotion.
‘Save me – I’m photophobic. We’re all photophobic. It would be the end —’
‘Wouldn’t that be a relief? Get under that tarpaulin.’
Even as he indicated the tarpaulin stacked on a rack with fire-fighting equipment, the driver pulled it out and crawled under it, to lie quaking on the floor near Clift’s body.
The light flickered, strengthened. The train jerked to a halt. Generators died. Silence closed in.
Rain pattered softly against the train body. It fell slowly, vertically, filtering down from the canopy of foliage overhead. All round the train stood mighty boles of trees, strong as stone columns.
‘What …’ Pulling down a handle, Bodenland opened the sliding door and stared out.
They had materialized in a swamp. Dark water lay ahead, bubbles rising slowly to its surface. Everywhere was green. The air hummed with winged life like sequins. He stared out in amazement, admiration mingling with his puzzlement.
The rain was no more than a drip, steady, confidential. The moist warm air comforted him. He stood looking out, breathing slowly, returning to his old self.
As he remained there, taking in the mighty forest, he became aware of the breath going in and out at his nostrils. The barrel of his chest was not unmoving; it worked at its own regular speed, drawing the air down into his lungs. This reflex action, which would continue all his days, was a part of the biological pleasure of being alive.
A snake that might have been an anaconda unwound itself from a branch and slid away into the ferns. Still he stared. It looked like the Louisiana swamps, and yet – a dragonfly with a five foot wingspan came dashing at him, its body armoured in iridiscent green. He dashed it away from his face. No, this wasn’t Louisiana.
Gathering his wits, he turned back into the cab. The train gave a lurch sideways.
The LCD co-ordinates had ceased to spin. Bodenland stared at them incredulously, and then checked other readings. They had materialized some 270 million years before his present, in the Carboniferous Age.
The cab rocked under his feet and tilted a few more degrees to one side. Black water lapped over the lip of the door up to his feet. Staring out, he saw that the weight of the train was bearing it rapidly down into the swamp.
‘You,’ he said, shaking the supine driver under his cover. ‘I’m going to pitch you out into that swamp unless you tell me fast how we get out of here.’
‘It’s the secret over-ride. I forgot to tell you about it – I’ll help you all I can, since you were merciful to me …’
‘Okay, you remember now. What do we do?’
The dark water came washing in as the driver said, ‘The override is designed to stop unauthorized persons meddling with the time-controls. Only the space controls responded to your instructions, the rest went into reverse.’
While he was speaking, the train tilted again and Clift’s body slid towards the door.
‘What do we do, apart from drown?’
‘The train is programmed for its next stop and I can’t change that. Best thing is to complete that journey, after which the programme’s finished and the over-ride cuts out. So you just switch on, cancelling the previous co-ordinates you punched in.’
The water was pouring in now, splashing the men. A bejewelled fly swung in and orbited Bodenland’s head.
‘Where’s this pre-programmed journey taking us?’
With an extra surge of water, a warty shape rose from the swamp, steadying itself with a clumsy foot at the doorway. A flat amphibian head looked at them. Two toad eyes stared, as if without sight. A wide mouth cracked open. A goitre in the yellow throat throbbed. The head darted forward as Bodenland instinctively jumped back, clinging to a support.
The lipless frog mouth fastened on Clift’s body. With a leisurely movement, the amphibian withdrew, bearing its meal with it down into the waters of the swamp. It disappeared from view and the black surface closed over it.
Bodenland slammed the sliding door shut and staggered to the keyboard. He punched on the Start pressure-pads, heard the roar of generators, which died as the engine seemed to lift.
The outer world with its majestic colonnades of trees blurred, whited out, faded to grey and down the colour spectrum, until zero-light of time quanta came in. The driver sat up in the dirty water swilling about him and peered haggard-faced from his tarpaulin.
Drained by the excitements of the last few hours, appalled by the loss of his friend, Bodenland watched the numerals juggling with themselves in the oily wells of the display panel. He came to with a start, realizing he might fall asleep.
Making an effort, he got down a length of thin cable and secured the driver with it, before locking the door to the corridor.
He stood over his captive, who began to plead for mercy.
‘You don’t have a great store of courage.’
‘I don’t need courage. You need the courage. I know you have ten thousand adversaries against you.’
Bodenland looked down, contemplating kicking the creature, before overcoming the impulse.
‘Where are we programmed for?’ he asked, thinking that almost anywhere was preferable to the Carboniferous.
‘We have to visit Transylvania,’ said the driver. ‘But the programme is set only as far as London, in year 1896, where we let off a powerful female agent.’
‘Oh yes? And what’s she up to?’
‘She has business at the home of a man living near London, a man by the name of Bram Stoker.’
She went over to look at the little glass panel of the air-conditioning unit. It was functioning perfectly. Nevertheless, the motel suite felt arid to her, lifeless, airless, after her flight through the sky.
Mina Legrand’s rooms were on the second floor. Her years in Europe prompted her to open a window and let in a breeze, sanitized by the nearby desert. Enterprise sprawled out there, the park and sign of the Moonlite Motel, and, beyond them, the highway, on which were strung one-storey buildings, a store or two, and a used car lot, with a Mexican food joint marking the edge of town. Pick-ups drove by, their occupants preparing to squeeze what they could from the evening. Already dusk was settling in.
Turning from the window, she shucked off her green cover-alls and her underwear and stepped into the shower.
Despite the pleasure of the hot water coursing over her body, gloom settled on her. She hated to be alone. She hated solitude more of late. And perhaps Joe had been absent more of late. Now she would be seeing less of Larry, too. And there were the deaths in the back of her mind, never to disappear. Sky-diving was different; paradoxically, it took her away from loneliness.