Quicksand

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 forbiddingly 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.