The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

Not wishing to see any more, Birdlip left his office and headed for his partner’s room.

As he hurried down the corridor, he was stopped by a stranger. Uniform, in these days of individualism, was a thing of the past; nevertheless, the stranger wore something approaching a uniform: a hat reproducing a swashbuckling Eighteenth Century design, a plastic plume: a Nineteenth or Twentieth Century tunic that, with its multiplicity of pockets, gave its wearer the appearance of a perambulating chest of drawers: Twenty-First Century skirt-trousers with mobled borsts; and boots hand painted with a contemporary tartan paint.

Covering his surprise with a parade of convention, Birdlip said, ‘Warm today, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps you can help me. My name’s Captain Pavment, Captain Warren Pavment. The doorbot sent me up here, but I have lost my way.’

As he spoke, the captain pulled forth a gleaming metal badge. At once a voice by their side murmured conspiratorially, ‘… kish annexation of the Suezzeus Canal on Mars …’ dying gradually as the badge was put away again.

‘RSPCR? Delighted to help you, Captain. Who or what are you looking for?’

‘I wish to interview a certain Frederick Freud, employed in this building,’ said Pavment, becoming suddenly official now that the sight of his own badge had reassured him. ‘Could you kindly inform me whereabouts his whereabouts is?’

‘Certainly. I’m going to see Mr Freud myself. Pray follow me. Nothing serious, I hope, Captain?’

‘Let us say nothing that should not yield to questioning.’

As he led the way, Birdlip said, ‘Perhaps I should introduce myself. I am January Birdlip, senior partner of this firm. I shall be very glad to do anything I can to help.’

‘Perhaps you’d better join our little discussion, Mr Birdlip, since the – irregularities have taken place on your premises.’

They knocked and entered Freud’s room.

Freud stood looking over a small section of city. London was quieter than it had been since before Tactitus’ ‘uncouth warriors’ had run to meet the Roman invaders landing there twenty-two centuries ago. Dwindling population had emptied its avenues; the extinction of legislators, financiers, tycoons, speculators, and planners had left acres of it desolate but intact, decaying but not destroyed, stranded like a ship without cars yet not without awe upon the strand of history.

Freud turned around and said, ‘It’s hot, isn’t it? I think I’m going home, Jan.’

‘Before you go, Freddie, this gentleman here is Captain Pavment of the RSPCR.’

‘He will be after I’ve left, too, won’t he?’ Freud asked in mock puzzlement.

‘I’ve come on a certain matter, sir,’ Pavment said, firmly but respectfully. ‘I think it might be better if your roman here left the room.’

Making a small gesture of defeat, Freud sat down on the edge of his desk and said, ‘Bucket, get out of the room.’

‘Yessir.’ Bucket left.

Pavment cleared his throat and said, ‘Perhaps you know what I’ve come about, Mr Freud.’

‘You blighters have had a spycast onto me, I suppose? Here we’ve reached a peaceful period of history, when for the first time man is content to pursue his own interests without messing up his neighbors, and you people deliberately follow a contrary policy of interference. You’re nothing but conformists!’

‘The RSPCR is a voluntary body.’

‘Precisely what I dislike about it. You volunteer to stick your nose into other people’s affairs. Well, say what you have to say and get it over with.’

Birdlip fidgeted unhappily near the door.

‘If you’d like me to leave –’

Both men motioned him to silence, and Pavment said, ‘The situation is not as simple as you think, sir, as the RSPCR well know. This is, as you say, an age when men get along with each other better than they’ve ever done; but current opinion gives the reason for this as either progress or the fact that there are now fewer men to get along with.’

‘Both excellent reasons, I’d say,’ Birdlip said.

‘The RSPCR believes there is a much better reason. Man no longer clashes with his fellow man because he can relieve all his antagonisms on his mechanicals – and nowadays there are four romen and countless robots to every one person. Romen are civilisation’s whipping boys, just as once Negroes, Jews, Catholics, or any of the old minorities were.’

‘Speaking as a Negro myself,’ said January Birdlip, ‘I’m all for the change.’

‘But see what follows,’ said Pavment. ‘In the old days, a man’s sickness, by being vented on his fellows, became known, and thus could be treated. Now it is vented on his roman, and the roman never tells. So the man’s neuroses take root in him and flourish by indulgence.’

Growing red in the face, Freud said, ‘Oh, that doesn’t follow, surely.’

‘The RSPCR has evidence that mental sickness is far more widely prevalent than anyone in our laissez-faire society suspects. So when we find a roman being treated cruelly, we try to prevent it, for we know it signifies a sick man. What happens to the roman is immaterial: but we try to direct the man to treatment.

‘Now you, Mr Freud – half an hour ago you were thrashing your roman with a bullwhip which you keep in that cupboard over there. The incident was one of many, nor was it just a healthy outburst of sadism. Its overtones of guilt and despair were symptoms of deep sickness.’

‘Can this be true, Freddie?’ Birdlip asked – quite unnecessarily, for Freud’s face, even the attitude in which he crouched, showed the truth. He produced a handkerchief and shakily wiped his brow.

‘Oh, it’s true enough, Jan; why deny it? I’ve always hated romen. I’d better tell you what they did to my sister – in fact, what they are doing, and not so very far from here. …’

Not so very far from there, Captain Pavment’s copter was parked, awaiting his return. In it, also waiting, sat the roman Toggle peering into the small spycast screen. On the screen, a tiny Freud said, ‘I’ve always hated romen.’

Flipping a switch which put him in communication with a secret headquarters in the Paddington area, Toggle said, ‘I hope you are recording all this. It should be of particular interest to the Human Sociological Study Group.’

A metallic voice from the other end said, ‘We are receiving you loud and clear.’

‘London Clear is one of the little artificial islands on Lake Mediterranean. There my sister and I spent our childhood and were brought up by romen,’ Freddie Freud said, looking anywhere but at Birdlip and the captain.

‘We are twins, Maureen and I. My mother had entered into Free Association with my father, who left for Touchdown, Venus, before we came into the world and has, to our knowledge, never returned. Our mother died in childbirth. There’s one item they haven’t got automated yet.

‘The romen that brought us up were as all romen always are – never unkind, never impatient, never unjust, never anything but their damned self-sufficient selves. No matter what Maureen and I did, even if we kicked them or spat on them or peed on them, we could elicit from them no reaction, no sign of love or anger, no hint of haste or weariness – nothing!

‘Do you wonder we both grew up loathing their gallium guts – and yet at the same time being dependent on them? In both of us a permanent and absolutely hopeless love-hate relationship with romen has been established. You see I face the fact quite clearly.’

Birdlip said, ‘You told me you had a sister, Freddie, but you said she died at the time of the Great Venusian Plague.’

‘Would she had! No, I can’t say that, but you should see how she lives now. Occasionally I have gone quite alone to see her. She lives in Paddington with the romen.’

‘With the romen?’ Pavment echoed. ‘How?’

Freud’s manner grew more distraught.

‘You see we found as we grew up that there was one way in which we had power over the romen – power to stir emotion in them, I mean, apart from the built-in power to command. Having no sex, romen are curious about it. … Overwhelmingly curious. …

‘I can’t tell you the indecencies they put us through when we reached puberty. …

‘Well, to cut a long and nasty story short, Maureen lives with the romen of Paddington. They look after her, supply her with stolen food, clothes, and the rest, while in return she – satisfies their curiosity.’

Greatly to his own embarrassment, Birdlip let out a shrill squeal of laughter. It broke up the atmosphere of the confessional.

‘This is a valuable bit of data, Mr Freud,’ Pavment said, nodding his head in approval, while the plastic plume in his hat shimmied with a secret delight.

‘If that’s all you make of it, be blowed to you,’ Freud said. He rose. ‘Just what you think you can do for either myself or my sister, I won’t ask, but in any case our way of life is set and we must look after ourselves.’

Pavment answered with something of the same lack of colour in his words. ‘That is entirely your decision. The RSPCR is a very small organisation; we couldn’t coerce if we wanted to –’

‘– that happily is the situation with most organisations nowadays –’

‘– but your evidence will be incorporated in a report we are preparing to place before the World Government.’

‘Very well, Captain. Now perhaps you’ll leave, and remove your officialdom from my presence. I have work to do.’

Before Pavment could say more, Birdlip inserted himself before his partner, patted his arm and said, ‘I laughed purely out of nervousness then, Freddie. Please don’t think I’m not sympathetic about your troubles. Now I see why you didn’t want our romen and Bucket particularly fitted with homing devices.’

‘God, it’s hot in here,’ Freud replied, sinking down and mopping his face. ‘Okay, Jan, thanks, but say no more; it’s not a topic I exactly care to dwell on. I’m going home; I don’t feel well. … Who was it said that life was a comedy to the man who thinks, a tragedy to the man who feels?’

‘Yes, you go home. In fact I think I’ll go home, too. It’s extremely hot in here, isn’t it? There’s trouble down below with the heat control. We’ll get someone to look into it tomorrow morning. Perhaps you’ll have a look yourself.’

Still talking, he backed to the door and left, with a final nervous grin at Freud and Pavment, who were heavily engaged in grinning nervously at each other.

Glimpses into other people’s secret lives always distressed him. It would be a relief to be home with Mrs Birdlip. He was outside and into his car, leaving for once without Hippo, before he remembered he had an appointment at seventeen-fifty.

Dash the appointment, he thought. Fortunately people could afford to wait these days. He wanted to see Mrs Birdlip. Mrs Birdlip was a nice comfortable little woman. She made loose covers of brightly patterned chintzes to dress her romen servants in.

Next morning, when Birdlip entered his office, a new manuscript awaited him on his desk – a pleasant enough event for a firm mainly specialising in reprints. He seated himself at the desk, then realised how outrageously hot it was.

Angrily, he banged the button of the new homing control on his desk.

Hippo appeared.

‘Oh, you’re there, Hippo. Did you go home last night?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘To a place of shelter with other romen.’

‘Uh. Hippo, this confounded heating system is always going wrong. We had trouble last week, and then it cured itself. Ring the engineers; get them to come around; I will speak to them. Tell them to send a human this time.’

‘Sir, you had an appointment yesterday at seventeen-fifty.’

‘What has that to do with it?’

‘It was an appointment with a human engineer. You ordered him last week when the heating malfunctioned. His name was Pursewarden.’

‘Never mind his name. What did you do?’

‘As you were gone, sir, I sent him away.’

‘Ye gods! What was his name?’

‘His name was Pursewarden, sir.’

‘Get him on the phone and say I want the system repaired today. Tell him to get on with it whether I am here or not. …’ Irritation and frustration seized him, provoked by the heat. ‘And as a matter of fact I shan’t be here. I’m going to see my brother.’

‘Your brother Rainbow, sir?’

‘Since I have only one brother, yes, you fool. Is Mr Freud in yet? No? Well, I want you to come with me. Leave instructions with Bucket; tell him all I’ve told you to tell Mr Freud. … And look lively,’ he added, collecting the manuscript off the desk as he spoke. ‘I have an irrational urge to be on the way.’

On the way, he leafed through the manuscript. It was entitled An Explanation of Man’s Superfluous Activities. At first, Birdlip found the text yielded no more enticement than the title, sown as it was in desiccated phrases and bedded out in a laboured style. Persevering with it, he realized that the author – whose name, Isaac Toolust, meant nothing to him – had formulated a grand and alarming theory covering many human traits which had not before been subjected to what proved a chillingly objective examination.

He looked up. They had stopped.

To one side of the road were the rolling hedgeless miles of Kent with giant wharley crops ripening under the sun; in the copper distance a machine glinted, tending them with metal motherliness. On the other side, rupturing the flow of cultivation, lay Gafia Farm, a higgledy-piggledy of low buildings, trees and clutter, sizzling in sun and pig smell.

Hippo detached himself from the arm bracket that kept him steady when the car was in motion, climbed out, and held the door open for Birdlip.

Man and roman trudged into the yard.

A mild-eyed fellow was stacking sawed logs in a shed. He came out as Birdlip approached and nodded to him without speaking. Birdlip had never seen him on previous visits to his brother’s farm.

‘Is Rainy about, please?’ Birdlip asked.

‘Around the back. Help yourself.’

The fellow was back at his logs almost before Birdlip moved away.

They found Rainbow Birdlip around the back of the cottage, as predicted. Jan’s younger brother was standing under a tree cleaning horse harness with his own hands; Birdlip was taken for a moment by a sense of being in the presence of history; the feeling could have been no stronger had Rainy been discovered painting himself with woad.

‘Rainy!’ Birdlip said.

His brother looked up, gave him a placid greeting, and continued to polish. As usual he was wrapped in a metre-thick blanket of content. Conversation strangled itself in Birdlip’s throat, but he forced himself to speak.

‘I perceive you have a new helper out in front, Rainy.’

Rainy showed relaxed interest. He strolled over, carrying the harness over one shoulder.

‘That’s right, Jan. Fellow walked in and asked for a job. I said he could have one if he didn’t work too hard. Only got here an hour or so ago.’

‘He soon got to work.’

‘Couldn’t wait! Reckoned he’d never felt a bit of non-man-made timber before. Him thirty-five and all. Begged to be allowed to handle logs. Nice fellow. Name of Pursewarden.’

‘Pursewarden? Pursewarden? Where have I heard that name before?’

‘It is the surname of the human engineer with whom you had the appointment that you did not keep,’ Hippo said.

‘Thank you, Hippo. Your wonderful memory! Of course it is. This can’t be the same man.’

‘It is, sir. I recognised him.’

Rainy pushed past them, striding toward the open cottage door.

‘Funnily enough I had another man yesterday persuade me to take him on,’ he said, quite unconscious of his brother’s dazed look. ‘Man name of Jagger Bank. He’s down in the orchard now, feeding the pigs. … Lot of people just lately leaving town. See them walking down the road – year ago, never saw a human soul on foot. … Well, it’ll be all the same a century from now. Come on in, Jan, if you want.’

It was his longest speech. He sat down on a sound homemade chair and fell silent, emptied of news. The harness he placed carefully on the table before him. His brother came into the dim room, noted that its confusion had increased since his last visit, flicked a dirty shirt off a chair, and also sat down. Hippo entered the room and stood by the door, his neat functional lines and the chaste ornamentation on his breastplates contrasting with the disorder about him.

‘Was your Pursewarden an engineer, Rainy?’

‘Don’t know. Didn’t think to ask. We talked mostly about wood, the little we said.’

A silence fell, filled with Birdlip’s customary uneasy mixture of love, sorrow, and murderous irritation at the complacence of his brother.

‘Any news?’ he asked sharply.

‘Looks like being a better harvest for once.’

He never asked for Jan’s news.

Looking about Birdlip saw Rainy’s old run of the Prescience Library half buried under clothes and apple boxes and disinfectant bottles.

‘Do you ever look at your library for relaxation?’ he asked, nodding toward the books.

‘Haven’t bothered for a long time.’

Silence. Desperately, Birdlip said, ‘You know my partner Freud still carries the series on. Its reputation has never stood higher. We’ll soon be bringing out volume Number Five Hundred, and we’re looking for some special title to mark the event. Of course we’ve already been through all the Wells, Stapledon, Clarke, Asimov, all the plums. You haven’t any suggestions, I suppose?’

‘Non-Stop?’ said Rainy at random.

‘That was Number Ninety-Nine. You chose it yourself.’ Exasperatedly he stood up. ‘Rainy, you’re no better. That proves it. You are completely indifferent to all the important things of life. You won’t see an analyst. You’ve turned into a vegetable, and I begin to believe you’ll never come back to normal life.’

Rainy smiled, one hand running along the harness on the table before him.

‘This is normal life, Jan, life close to the soil, the smell of earth, sun, or rain coming through your window –’

‘The smell of your sweaty shirts on the dining table! The stink of pigs!’

‘Free from the contamination of the centuries –’

‘Back to mediaeval squalor!’

‘Living in contact with eternal things, absolved from an overdependence on mechanical devices, eating the food that springs out of the soil –’

‘I can consume nothing that has been in contact with mud.’

‘Above all, not fretting about what other people do or don’t do, freed from all the artifices of the arts –’

‘Stop, Rainy! Enough. You’ve made your point. I’ve heard your catechism before, your hymn to the simple life. Although it pains me to say it, I find the simple life a bore, a brutish bore. What’s more, I doubt if I shall be able to face another visit to you in the future.’

Entirely unperturbed, Rainy smiled and said, ‘Perhaps one day you’ll walk in here like Pursewarden and Jagger Bank and ask for a job. Then we’ll be able to enjoy living without argument.’

‘Who’s Jagger Bank?’ Birdlip asked, curiosity causing him to swerve temporarily from his indignation.

‘I’ve already told you who he is. He’s another fellow who just joined me. Rolled up yesterday. Right now he’s down in the orchard feeding the pigs. Job like that would do you good too, Jan.’

‘Hippo!’ said Birdlip. ‘Start the car at once.’ He stepped over a crate of insecticide and made for the door.

The maid for the door of the main entrance to Birdlip Brothers was a slender and predominantly plastic roman called Belitre, who intoned, ‘Good morning, Mr Birdlip’ in a dulcet voice as he swept by next morning.

Birdlip hardly noticed her. All the previous afternoon, following his visit to Rainbow, he had sat at home with Mrs Birdlip nestling by his side and read the manuscript entitled An Explanation of Man’s Superfluous Activities. As an intellectual, he found much of its argument abstruse; as a man, he found its conclusions appalling; as a publisher, he felt sure he had a winner on his hands. His left elbow tingled, his indication always that he was on the verge of literary discovery.

Consequently, he charged through his main doors with enthusiasm, humming under his breath, ‘Who said I can hardly remember …’ A blast of hot air greeted him and stopped him in his tracks.

‘Pontius!’ he roared, so fiercely that Belitre rattled.

Pontius was the janitor, an elderly and rather smelly roman of the now obsolete petrol-fuelled type, a Ford ‘Indefatigable’ of 2140 vintage. He came wheezing up on his tracks in response to Birdlip’s cry.

‘Sir,’ he said.

‘Pontius, are you or are you not in charge down here? Why has the heating not been repaired yet?’

‘Some putput people are working on it now, sir,’ said Pontius, stammering slightly through his worn speech circuits. ‘They’re down in the basements at putput present, sir.’

‘Drat their eyes,’ said Birdlip irritably, and, ‘Get some water in your radiator, Pontius – I won’t have you steaming in the building,’ said Birdlip pettishly, as he made off in the direction of a basement.

Abasement or superiority alike were practically unknown between roman and roman. They were, after all, all equal in the sight of man.

So ‘Good morning, Belitre,’ and ‘Good morning, Hippocrates,’ said Hippo and Belitre respectively as the former came up the main steps of Birdlip’s a few minutes after his master.

‘Do you think he has read it yet?’ asked Hippo.

‘He had it under his arm as he entered.’

‘Do you think it has had any effect on him yet?’

‘I detected that his respiratory rate was faster than normal.’

‘Strange, this breathing system of theirs,’ said Hippo in a reverent irrelevance, and he passed into the overheated building unsmilingly.

Frowningly, Birdlip surveyed the scene down in his control room. His brother would never have tolerated such chaos in the days before he had his breakdown, or whatever it was.

Three of his staff romen were at work with a strange roman, who presumably came from the engineer’s; they had dismantled one panel of the boiler control system, although Birdlip could hear that the robot fireman was still operating by the cluck of the oil feeds. A ferrety young man with dyed blue side-whiskers, the current teenage cult, was directing the romen between mouthfuls bitten from an overgrown plankton pie; he – alas! – he would be the human engineer.

Cogswell, still deactivated, still in one corner, stood frozen in an idiot roman gesture. No, thought Birdlip confusedly, since the heat had deactivated him, he could hardly be described as being frozen into any gesture. Anyhow, there the creature was, with Gavotte and his assistant Fleetfeet at work on him.

Fury at seeing the choreus Gavotte still on the premises drove Birdlip to tackle him first. Laying down his manuscript, he advanced and said, ‘I thought you’d have been finished by now, Gavotte.’

Gavotte gave a friendly little rictal jerk of his mouth and said, ‘Nice to see you, Mr Birdlip. Sorry to be so long about it, but you see I was expecting a ha ha human assistant as well as Fleetfeet. We have such a lot of trouble with men going absent these days. It wouldn’t do any harm to revive the police forces that they used to have in the Olden Days; they used to track missing people –’

The blue-whiskered youth with pie attached interrupted his ingestion to cry, ‘Back in the good old Twentieth Cen! Those were the days, cinemas and atomic wars and skyscrapers and lots of people! Wish I’d been alive then, eh, Gavvy! Loads of the old duh duh duh duh.’

Turning on the new enemy, Birdlip levelled his sights and said, ‘You are a student of history, I see.’

‘Well, I watched the wavies since I was a kid, you might say,’ said the whiskers unabashed. ‘All the noise they had then, and these old railway trains they used to ride around in reading those great big bits of paper, talk about laugh! Then all these games they used to play, running around after balls in funny clothes, makes you weep. And then those policemen like you say, Gav, huk huk huk huk huk, you’re dead. Some lark!’

‘You’re from the engineers?’ Birdlip asked, bringing his tone of voice from the deep freeze department.

The blue whiskers shook in agreement.

‘Old Pursewarden derailed day before yesterday. Buffo, he was off! Psst phee-whip, join the ranks of missing persons! They’re all jacking off one by one. Reckon I’ll be manager by Christmas. Yuppo these Butch, giddin mate, knock and wait, the monager’s engarged, eff you please.’

Frost formed on Birdlip’s sweating brow.

‘And what are you doing at the moment?’ he asked.

‘Just knocking back the last of this deelicious pie.’

Gavotte said, coming forward to salvage the sunken conversation, ‘As I was saying, I hoped that one of our most expert humans, Mr Jagger Bank, would be along to help me, but he also –’

‘Would you repeat that name again,’ said Birdlip, falling into tautology in his astonishment.

In a stonish mental haze, Freud staggered down to the basement, his face white. Completely ignoring the drama of the moment, he broke up the tableau with his own bombshell.

‘Jan,’ he said, ‘you have betrayed me. Bucket has been fitted with a homing device behind my back. I can only consider this a profound insult to me personally, and I wish to tender my resignation herewith.’

Birdlip gaped at him, fighting against a feeling that he was the victim of a conspiracy.

‘It was agreed between us,’ he said at last, ‘that Bucket should not be fitted with the device. Nor did I rescind that order, Freddie, of that I can assure you.’

‘Bucket has admitted that he spent last night when the office was closed in Paddington,’ Freud said sternly.

Fingers twitched at Birdlip’s sleeve, attracting his attention. Nervously Gavotte hoisted his trousers and said, ‘Er, I’m afraid I may be the ha ha guilty party ha ha here. I installed a homing device in Bucket, I fear. Nobody told me otherwise.’

‘When was this?’

‘Well, Bucket was done just after Fleetfeet and I fixed Hippo. You two gentlemen were closeted with that gentleman with tartan boots – Captain Pavment, did I hear his name was? Bucket came out of the room and Fleetfeet and I fixed him up there and then. Nobody told me otherwise. I mean, I had no instructions.’

Something like beatitude dawned on Freud’s face as the misunderstanding became clear to him. The three men began a complicated ritual of protest and apology.

Side-whiskers, meanwhile, having finished his pie, consulted with his roman, who had found the cause of the trouble. They began to unpack a new chronometer from the store, pulling it from its carton with a shower of plastic shavings that expanded until they covered the table and dropped down onto the floor.

‘Stick all that junk into the furnace while I get on fitting this in place, Rustybum,’ Side-whiskers ordered. He commenced to whistle between his teeth while the roman obediently brushed everything off the table and deposited it down the furnace chute.

Freud and Birdlip were exceptionally genial after the squall. Taking advantage of a mood that he recognised could be but temporary, Gavotte said, ‘I took the liberty of having a look over your shelves yesterday, Mr Birdlip. Some interesting books you have there, if you don’t mind my saying.’

‘Compliments always welcome,’ said Birdlip, mollified enough by Freud’s apologies to be civil, even to Gavotte. ‘What in particular were you looking at?’

‘All those old science fiction stories took my fancy. Pity nobody writes anything like it nowadays.’

‘We live in a completely different society,’ Freud said. ‘With the coming of personal automation and romen labour, the old Renaissance and Neo-Modern socioeconomic system that depended on the banker and an active middle class died away. Do I make myself clear?’

‘So clear I can’t quite grasp your meaning,’ said Gavotte, standing on one leg and cringing to starboard.

‘Well, put it another way. The bourgeois society is defunct, killed by what we call personal automation. The mass of the bourgeoisie, who once were the fermenting middle layers of Western civilisation, have been replaced by romen – who do not ferment. This happily produces a stagnant culture; they are always most comfortable to live in.’

Gavotte nodded and cleared his throat intelligently.

Birdlip said, ‘The interesting literary point is that the death of the novel, and consequently of the science fiction novel, coincided with the death of the old way of life. The novel was, if you care so to express it, a by-product of the Renaissance and Neo-Modern ages; born in the Sixteenth Century, it died in the Twenty-First. Why? Because it was essentially a bourgeois art form: essentially a love of gossip – though often in a refined form, as in Proust’s work – to which we happily are no longer addicted.

‘Interestingly enough, the decay of large organisations such as the old police forces and national states can be traced to the same factor, this true product of civilisation, the lack of curiosity about the people next door. One must not oversimplify, of course –’

‘Governor, if you were oversimplifying, I’m a roman’s auntie,’ Bluewhiskers said, leaning back in mock-admiration. ‘You boys can’t half jet with the old wordage. Tell us more!’

‘It’s too hot,’ said Birdlip sharply.

But Gavotte, with an honourable earnestness from which the world’s great bores are made, said, ‘And I suppose reading science fiction helps you understand all this culture stuff?’

‘You have a point there,’ agreed Freud.

‘Well, it wasn’t my point really. I read it in one of Mr Birdlip’s books upstairs – New Charts of Hell, I think it was called.’

‘Oh, that. Yes, well, that’s an interesting book historically. Not only does it give a fair picture of the humble pioneers of the field, but it was the first book to bring into literary currency the still widely used term “comic inferno.”’