The Eighty-Minute Hour by Aldiss Brian

Author:Aldiss, Brian [Aldiss, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NewBook, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780330245470
Goodreads: 1118310
Publisher: Macmillan/Pan
Published: 1974-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

‘In your world of illusion, you may feel free, Mr May, though I personally doubt whether even a poor creature on a root-trip is in any real sense evading determinism. Does the thought make your poor romantic psyche shrivel, so that you retreat into a subjective world?’

He took no offence from her words. Her presence was offence enough.

Mildly, he said, ‘I merely remarked that you were being subjective. We’re aU subjective at times. What you just said about the psyche withering is contradicted by what you said a moment ago about your poet - Vercors, isn’t it? Just looking round me, I see a number of people obviously in full psychic health.’

‘Vercors is a poet, yes. But a bad one. He imitates. He’s deriva-tive. Fancy turning out a poem on this intractable dry gulch of a world in a Keatsian mode … ‘ Her glassy gaze swivelled round the canteen, the desiccated flesh of her cheeks turned towards people, male and female, moving briskly about with trays, her ear-folds trained themselves on the various levels of noise, the wattles of her neck took in the food lying on plates, the implements conveying pieces of that food up to waiting, moving mouths.

‘I see existence here. Not psychic health.’

‘People don’t smile less warmly -’

‘People who may not realise they have already undergone psychic attrition and death.’

‘Mrs Chaplain … ‘ His abhorrence of her choked his words.

She leaned towards him. ‘Why did you insist on talking to me? I advised you not to. I function as a doctor on living bodies. I have nothing to communicate to the sort of world in which you function. You do not understand bodies. I have ceased to understand minds.’

She stood up. Her old hard flat body rose on the opposite side of the small round table. Belatedly, he got up.

‘Goodbye: she said, ‘Mr May.’ With a last blaze of the evil eye, she marched off. The food she had brought to the table lay untouched.

Dagenfort stood where he was.

People like Mrs Chaplain had the gift of death: they were not only misanthropic but the cause of misanthropy in others. Intuition told him that the living vein of hatred in her must be refreshed from its source, Auden Chaplain. Auden Chaplain was alive; the rumour from I.D.I. was true.

Leda had left the canteen. He had met her once, many years before he started work with Auden Chaplain. She had been younger than he, although she now looked so much older. She’s a cancer victim, he thought. They’d met - where? In his motor-racing days. But he had already started out on that other track, the one that led to discovering the release factor which sent pituitary hormones flowing from the brain to the gonads.

Yes, it was after a big race. In San Francisco. She was a serious but attractive young woman, about to be engaged to the young, sinister, striking Dr Chaplain, already notorious for some dangerous operations on human beings, already the centre of the debate

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