Quicksand Read online

  UW1245

  DAW sf

  No. 203 . . . $1.50

  John Brunner

  QUICKSAND

  To solve her enigma was to undermine all knowledge

  The girl walked naked

  out of nowhere on a winter night

  and to psychiatrist Paul Fidler it

  was as if one of his own obsessive

  visions of disaster took human form,

  bringing nightmares to life.

  Piquantly lovely, she belonged to no

  known racial type. Of high intelli-

  gence, she spoke a language no one

  could be found to understand. Most re-

  markable of all, commonplace objects

  like clothing and cars were a mystery

  to her.

  Has she truly been cast adrift from

  her own familiar world into another

  branch of the universe?

  Such was the frightening surmise

  that gradually seemed to be the only

  answer Paul could come up with. But

  it implied things that he had never

  dared to dream.

  QUICKSAND

  John Brunner

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher

  -----------------------------

  1301 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N. Y. 10019

  Published by

  THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  OF CANADA LIMITED

  Copyright ©, 1967 by Brunner Fact and Fiction Ltd.

  A DAW Book, by arrangement with

  Doubleday & Co., Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Paul Lehr

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any

  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely

  coincidental.

  He holds up, warning, the crossed cones of time:

  Here, narrowing into now, the Past and Future

  Are quicksand.

  -- Randall Jarrell

  The Knight, Death, and the Devil

  First Printing, July 1976

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  DAW sf

  Books

  --------

  PRINTED IN CANADA

  COVER PRINTED IN U.S.A.

  *1*

  For a long moment after opening the door of the sitting-room Paul Fidler was literally frightened.

  -- The wrong door? The right door with the wrong room beyond it!

  His hand had reached for the bell-push on the wall, a foot past the doorjamb, and encountered books on a shelf. Startled, he had looked instead of taking for granted and seen the big table in a new place, the chairs in a new arrangement, everything moved to a different location.

  -- Mrs Gowler at her tricks again?

  She was a widow of fifty, childless, to whom Chent Hospital had become a sort of outsize extended family; she had spent ten years here, sometimes as a patient, sometimes as a member of the maintenance staff doing cleaning work and washing-up, because she had nowhere else in the world to go and nobody to care whether she lived or died. And once or twice a year the signal would come that her lucid phase was ending: one would walk into a room and find everything topsy-turvy, perhaps even the carpet turned over. Meantime Mrs Gowler would have gone humming to her next task, unaware of any departure from routine.

  But this wasn't her doing. All that happened was that two sorely needed, long-awaited new bookcases had been delivered and someone had spent the afternoon filling them with medical journals previously kept on the table in untidy stacks.

  -- Glad I'm the first to arrive for tea. The look on my face just then must have been a sight! Talk about reversion to infantile behaviour!

  But that wasn't a subject he cared to dwell on. As a child he had sometimes been haunted by the fear that he would waken one morning into a world of strangers: parents who didn't recognise him as their son, a school which didn't remember having him as a pupil. And once, much later, it had all seemed to come true.

  -- Shut up. What a fuss about some new furniture!

  Sighing, he recalled that the bookcases now covered the bell-push. Glancing around to see if there was a substitute, be grimaced.

  -- If only the change extended to that hideous wallpaper. . . . Not in this year's budget. Anyhow: have to wait for a change of matron before we get some good taste around this place.

  On the side-table, a little hand-bell. He picked it up and gave it a shake. Simultaneous to the tenth of a second, the clock in the tower overhead ground towards striking, and he cringed. For most of the day he'd managed to avoid noticing it, but last night, during his turn of duty . . .

  Bang boom clink . Pause. Boom clink bang. Pause.

  -- Christ. Doesn't it get on anyone's nerves but mine?

  Clink boom bang. Clink bang boom. And with a sense of relief from unspeakable torture he heard it progress into the calm sequence of the hourly chime: bong bong bong bong.

  -- No wonder that poor fellow that Matron told me about tried to climb the clock-tower in '63. Probably wanted to silence the cracked bell.

  Speaking of bells . . . He was just about to ring a second time when Lil, the cook's helper, put her head around the door.

  "Oh, it's you, Doctor. Sorry -- that thing's going to take a bit of getting used to. Not so loud as the electric. Tea up in a couple of shakes!"

  Waiting, Paul put his hand randomly into the bookcase hiding the bell-push, drew out and opened a magazine.

  -- Chlorpromazine three times daily? What's new about that? Oh: this stuff fluphenazine enanthate. Relief for up to twenty-eight days from a single injection. I should know about this; it sounds useful. Only . . .

  Only somehow the words wouldn't assemble into a meaningful pattern. Recollection of the letter in his pocket kept getting in the way.

  "Your tea, Doctor!"

  Lil standing there impatiently with the cup and saucer, two biscuits balanced precariously beside the spoon. He accepted the tea, already stewed sour although he'd got here a minute early. Stirring it listlessly long past the point at which the sugar dissolved, he let his eyes roam to the window.

  Most of the day a lid of grey cloud like dirty cotton-wool dressings had lain over the district, shedding halfhearted rain at intervals. Now, with not long to go before sunset, a cold wind was brooming the clouds eastward and wan sunlight was leaking through.

  -- Does that view seem as horrible to other people as it does to me? Lord, I must, stop this, or I'll be back to another of those childhood obsessions: the endless questions about solipsism and how do you know that what I see as red is the same as what you see as red?

  When he first came here, he'd liked this country: irregular, dramatic, as if the red rock underneath the red soil were heaving itself up preparatory to the titanic effort of building the mountains of Wales. A landscape appropriate to castles, fit setting for heroic deeds and grand gestures.

  -- I suppose it takes a Paul Fidler to make it a backdrop for failure.

  He checked that thought instantly, but it wouldn't depart from him. Everything in view seemed to reinforce it. The parklike grounds had once been a fine estate, and still were scrupulously tended, partly by the patients as a valuable form of occupational therapy. But now rather than a vast garden they constituted a sort of no-man's-land dividing the hospital from the ordinary life of town and village beyond. Ignorant of that, one might admire their stately beauty; informed, Paul associated to wire entanglements and minefields.

  And the hills leaped about the flat-floored valley: they had once appeared grand to him. Now they seemed constricting, a planned wall excluding the greater world. Some barely grey-green, some, in this month of February, spined with naked trees, some f
orbiddingly dense with conifers, they encircled town, hospital, Paul Fidler. Through this window, though not from his own office, it was possible to see the point at which the single main road breached the ring, but even there he was unable to imagine open country, escape, freedom. For at this angle the two spool-shaped cooling towers of the power station seemed to stand guard over the exit from the valley, watch-posts of the forces prisoning him.

  -- It's not right for a man to be glad his wife isn't coming home at the promised time.

  Fact. Inarguable. All day he'd been edging away from the admission. Now it had sneaked past his defences. And . . .

  -- Damn it, I can't lie to myself. I am glad.

  He set aside his tea, barely tasted, and drew out Iris's letter. For the latest of many times he glanced at the opening lines.

  No address. No date apart from the curt "Tues." And no salutation. That fitted. One could hardly call a husband "Dear Paul" like a chance acquaintance, and while the "darling" came readily enough in speech, putting it starkly on paper would by now be so dishonest even Iris would feel the incongruity.

  "I'm afraid I shall be away a bit longer than I expected. Bertie and Meg insist on my staying with them another few days and I can't turn them down. I'm sure you won't mind too dreadfully. . . ."

  No point in rereading the whole thing. Jerkily he slid it back into his pocket.

  -- It is a relief. Excuses? Why bother? I know exactly why I'm pleased. Not for the reason I gave when she said she wanted to go and would I mind: because I'm more free to study when I'm on my own. But because being with Iris is a daylong and even a nightlong strain.

  He felt a little better for this access of candour. But considering all the consequences which must inevitably flow from it was more than he could contrive at the moment; as always happened to him when he was confronted with a point of crisis in his life, possibilities multiplied and multiplied in his imagination until they were beyond counting, and some of them seemed almost physically real, they were so vivid. He simply stood at the window and stared out, noting without paying much attention that the wind from the west was now bringing up cloud of its own to close the gap of lighter sky which had briefly relieved the greyness of the February day.

  *2*

  "What's wrong, Paul? Has the cata got your tonia?"

  He started and swung around. There were exactly two things he disliked about Mirza Bakshad, and both had just happened to him: the man's capacity for moving without a whisper of sound, and his delight in excruciating deformations of English.

  "Oh . . . hullo, Mirza."

  The Pakistani plumped himself into the best armchair and stretched elegantly. "The bookcases turned up, I see," he commented. "Not before time, either. . . . Lil! Li-il! "

  Still without moving from the window, Paul watched the girl bring the tea and biscuits.

  "Iced!" Mirza noted with satisfaction. "My favourites!"

  "Saved them for you specially, Doctor," Lil told him, and giggled out of the room.

  -- Blast Mirza. Doesn't anything ever go wrong with his life?

  But the twinge of bitterness didn't last in Paul's mind. Mirza was diabolically handsome, indecently intelligent and quite without false modesty: how could anyone help liking him?

  -- Although, of course, Iris . . .

  The Pakistani sipped his tea, grimaced, and put the cup on the arm of his chair. He touched the trace-line of moustache along his upper lip as though making sure it was still there, and fixed his bright black gaze on Paul.

  "You really do look under the weather. What's the matter?"

  Paul shrugged, kicking around a hard chair to sit on.

  "You closemouthed English," Mirza sighed. "It's a marvel you aren't all stark raving bonkers in this country. Or are you? Sometimes I get the impression . . . Well, I'll guess, then. A rough session with Soppy Al?"

  He meant Dr Knox Alsop, the consultant with whom Paul worked most closely.

  "No, he wasn't in today," Paul muttered. "Put it off to tomorrow. Some committee meeting he had to attend."

  "Then it's probably Hole-in-head. Hm?" Mirza cocked his right eyebrow to a disturbing angle.

  One of these days Dr Joseph Holinshed, medical superintendent of the hospital, was going to learn about the series of punning nicknames Mirza had coined for his superiors, and feathers would fly. As yet, though, he seemed to have remained aloof from earshot of them.

  "It's partly him," Paul conceded. A frigid exchange with Holinshed was becoming almost a daily feature of his work, and this morning had conformed to the pattern.

  "Only partly? Holy Joe is the largest single obstacle to getting one's work done around this place, and occasionally I experience this urge to lock him accidentally in the disturbed female ward overnight. Then perhaps he'd catch on to what's really happening." A casual gesture implying dismissal of a whole range of alternative possibilities. "That leaves your lovely but unsociable wife. What's she done to you this time?"

  "Changed her mind about coming home tomorrow," Paul admitted reluctantly.

  There was a short silence, during which the two men faced each other directly, Paul wanting to turn aside but somehow lacking the will-power, Mirza biting down on his lower lip in an expression eloquent of concern.

  He said at length, "What can I say, Paul? If I speak my mind I risk making you think I'm offended because of the way she treated me. I'm not -- enough of the attitude customary at home under the Raj leaked through my arrogant skull for me to half-expect women like her to snub wogs like me. It's what she does to you that bothers me. She wants to boss you about, and that's bad."

  "Now look here, Mirza!" Paul began, and realised with an appalling shock that it stopped there; the words he needed to counter the charge didn't exist.

  He was saved from having to bluster, however, by the arrival of others of the junior medical staff: Phil Kerans, Natalie Rudge, Ferdie Silva. At once, with the more-than-British tact of which he was invariably capable, Mirza was away on a ludicrous fantasy about Holinshed, and they were laughing together, allowing Paul to sit by quietly and even crack a passable smile of his own.

  -- Without Mirza, what the hell would I do?

  Sufficiently distracted to swallow his sour cool tea without tasting it, he considered his colleagues.

  -- Relating to other people: a jargon phrase we use to blanket the spectrum love-to-hate. But human beings don't follow tidy lines on graphs. They diverge at odd angles into n dimensions. Where can one plot the location of indifference? Somewhere in mid-air above the surface of the paper? It leads neither to affection nor to detestation. It's a point in a void.

  Not that he was totally indifferent to these coworkers. Just . . . somewhat indifferent.

  -- A state worse yet?

  Take Irish Phil Kerans. At forty-plus he knew he was never going where Mirza certainly and Paul presumably were going, to consultant status. He'd do a reasonable job in this or another hospital until he retired: an average, neutral person. He seemed no longer to resent the fact. Paul matched his own probable future against Kerans's, and could draw no conclusions from the comparison.

  -- Natalie?

  When he had first seen her it had been from behind, and he had immediately been attracted by her sleek black hair glistening under a fluorescent light. It had been a shock when she turned to be introduced and he saw the bad complexion and receding chin which made her not downright ugly but just plain. Yet she had an amazing talent for warming the cold withdrawn personalities of chronic geriatric cases.

  -- Do I like her? As with Phil, the answer is: yes/no. A reaction equidistant between liking and disliking but far off the line which would lead me to either.