The Collected Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell Part 14

'One of these days you'll die of moderation. He'd have to push it a long way further before it took.'

'If Mounth were as dishonest as you want me to believe,' I said, 'the last people he'd challenge would be telepaths.'

Soon Mounth's contract came up for renewal. He didn't want more money; he wanted five shows a fortnight, and he got them. He also wanted me to direct. Most of my work was finding itself in the violence box. I'd felt Mounth's slight pained disapproval and had been distressed, because I respected him enough to identify achievement with his esteem. I agreed to direct Truthlight.

Then he began to extend his range from popular targets and the socially crucial to the accepted and applauded: gardeners, architects, tribalist percussionists. Not that his approach had ever been inflexibly hostile, of course; some of them came out smiling, perhaps even inspired. But more came out gripping their expressions as if they were the only part of them left unshaken, and probably they were.

The worst case was Clement, the lightpainter. 'And this is a copy of your most famous work,' Mounth said to him. 'It's been manufactured frequently. I'd like you to take another look at it with us. This long thin beam going in between these two round pink areas: now what are these? They have a kind of soft rather motherly quality, wouldn't you say? And why does this little jagged ray keep trying to escape? I'm sure you can tell us, but let me help.'

After that it became unbearable, and at last Clement walked out of the studio with n.o.body behind his eyes. Mounth saw my disquiet or perhaps he felt it, for he was looking at me when he said 'We mustn't be too ready to call things beautiful. Real beauty's beautiful all the way through.' I stopped my head nodding and determined to wait until I knew how Clement had been affected.

Others were quicker to condemn Mounth. Although, or perhaps because, Truthlight had the highest ratings in the career of holocasts or of tridi for that matter, every show was pelted with calls and letters of censure, anger, hatred. Mounth ignored the anonymous but often read out and answered the most pointed of the rest, complete with names and addresses, after his interviews. Then one accusation began to recur: that he was extending the range of his interviews so as not to run out of targets rather than from honest feeling. This time he was hurt and he asked me to help him answer.

We took the holocameras into the north side. Exteriors were still appallingly expensive, but Holoshows agreed this once.

Mounth stood among the rubblegardens which the gardeners had constructed to unify the environment. I had the holocameras watch some children collecting plastic bottles and cans to build a rubbush outside their five-miler, then turned them back to Mounth.

'When I lived here it wasn't a garden,' he said. 'We didn't build with rubble, we hurt each other with it. Over there is where I broke someone's hand with a stone because he wouldn't share his beer with me. And just there under the five-miler is where I thought I'd discovered what s.e.x was about, all sweat and blood and haste and sharp bits of stone. I'm better than I was but I've a long way to go, and I want you all go there with me. Someday I'll get married, but not until I'm worthy to. Tell me my feelings don't make sense, then tell me what else does. We all want improvement, it doesn't matter what our politics are. That's why I do what I do.' As the holocameras returned to the children waiting for the adhesive on the bush to set I realized that Mounth hadn't been using his body or his image at all. He had answered with pure honest faith.

For the rest of his answer we took the next Truthlight to see his parents. We began at their front door. Everyone has a personal front door and a lift behind it, of course, but few have their own maintenance man living on the next level down. I posed Mounth's parents against the window and a clear twenty-five miles, and I was about to instruct the holocameras to track when I saw Mounth looking at me, and I realized that if anyone was falsifying to make a point it was I.

'I'm disappointed and a little hurt,' he said. 'You still don't quite believe my answers.' Maird, I said, silently, and effaced myself and let the holocameras gaze at his parents: chafing a little against each other but largely calm and self-contained, somewhat bemused by all the technicians, a little bewildered still after two years by their new demandingly clean and tidy home. 'This was the first thing I wanted to achieve, and the easiest,' was all Mounth said.

But it wasn't long after that I first looked up and frowned. While the attacks on him became more vicious, the letters and calls of support multiplied. More than one pleaded with him to interview the only group he'd consistently avoided, the government.

'I've pledged myself not to interfere in politics,' he said. 'To do so would be to interfere with democracy. So I can't lead you in that area, at least not directly. But I hope I don't have to. I hope' (and Thaw mirrored my frown and nodded) 'you've learned from me.'

Then, almost as if responding to Mounth's implicit challenge, the government produced thrones.

Perhaps their inventor was a government man. If he wasn't he must have been shrewd, for he forestalled any battle with the government's arbitary puritanism by selling the throne direct to them. Which meant monopoly; but since the throne wasn't a medium in the strict sense the government couldn't be accused of using it for dictatorial purposes.

What the throne was, n.o.body outside the manufacturing process knew. The workers were gagged by the secrets act; the thrones were on hire to subscribers and mustn't be tampered with on pain of prosecution; the power source was concealed and government-controlled, switched on for a quarter of an hour each evening and otherwise apparently dormant except as an alarm system to betray those who tried to dismantle their thrones. We were rea.s.sured that the thrones were physically and mentally harmless. After initial widespread distrust we confirmed the statement for ourselves; and discovered what the thrones did.

Imagine: anything. The thrones made that both an offer and an equation. Sit in your throne, pull the crown forward on its arm and cap your skull with it and there it is, surrounding you and solid: your imagination. It's as though all your senses have become eidetic, and that's as close as you'll come to understanding what you're doing. Don't drift, because if you lose control you'll only be disappointed; construct your quarter of an hour toward a climax and you'll feel enriched, not disillusioned, when you take off the crown. Don't look for advertising; listen to your friends who've tried it.

So we did, and the government thrived, and Mounth disapproved. 'If you want to ignore what's wrong with the world now's your chance,' he said. 'Don't change it, just make a world for yourself. But that world's a selfish world and you shut other people out. I don't even want to think how many people must look at their wife or their husband wearing a crown, and wonder. You won't let yourselves be seduced by advertising, haven't you the will not to be seduced by yourselves?'

I'd been one of the first to hire a throne; I knew Mounth believed what he was saying but that didn't mean he was right all the time. This was too large an issue even for him, I thought, he would have to content himself with comment and with the support of those who agreed with him.

I didn't delude myself long. First we fought the thrones for ratings. Holoshows would have asked him if he hadn't suggested it to them, and so Truthlight was moved to overlap both sides of thronetime. Somehow Mounth arranged for the first set of ratings to reach him before anyone else saw them; but we all knew what they showed when Mounth strode out of Holoshows, looking at n.o.body. Not all the audience he lost when the thrones were about to be switched on even bothered to return to Truthlight when thronetime was over.

Then he seemed to resign himself to the att.i.tude I'd predicted, though from the first I was disturbed by the way he did so. On the next Truthlight he didn't have a victim; he read out attacks and answered them, and seemed to be dawdling until thronetime. But there was a tension, a sense that he was delaying for some reason. A minute before thronetime he began to stare silently at the chronometer. We and the holocameras gazed at him. Thronetime clicked into place and he turned to the holocameras.

'Now I can talk to all of you who believe we have free will and that it's worth having,' he said. 'Now the others aren't listening. I think they must be the ones who tell us no murder is premeditated.'

'And he's talking maird if he contradicts them,' Thaw said in my ear.

'Well, perhaps they're right and we've taken care of that problem,' Mounth said. 'Let's leave aside those of you who are old or alone and wouldn't care if they were premeditated, shall we? And let's look at something everyone seems to have forgotten. If premeditated murders became common, if murder became an everyday activity, then the tension that produced them wouldn't be high enough for the social telepaths to track down. There'd be only one way to stop them, as there used to be, and that's the death penalty. Don't say anything yet,' he said. Think about it. And if you think this is just a fantasy of mine, I may surprise you.'

'All the evidence shows there are fewer murders now the thrones are channelling tension,' Thaw told him when he'd finished. And the social telepaths prevented most of the rest, reading emotional tensions unauthorized, by one of those inconsistencies without which no society functions. It was a job in which they could use their talents, and one in which they could feel disliked for what they did rather than what they were: preventing violence by talkouts based on telepathic readings, and if necessary by hypnotic sessions involving a panel of four, popularly regarded as the evil tamperer and the others not seeing, hearing, admitting what he was about. I suddenly realized that Mounth's faith in himself had borne him above and past that sort of work without a glance.

'Fewer murders, are there?' he said to Thaw. 'In that case you needn't worry how my hypothetical murders are punished.'

In the next few days his method began to pay off, perhaps even more spectacularly than he'd antic.i.p.ated. Letters and calls of support mounted and toppled off his desk, and all from people who'd been crowned during Truthlight but now were angrily demonstrating their free will. Mounth smiled slightly each time he returned to his desk from reading our files on the government. I had no idea what he was planning, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be involved.

THREE.

WHEN Mounth acted n.o.body had a chance to antic.i.p.ate. I was just one of the audience, gazing and gaping as he listed the ministers, all the most personally unattractive members of the government, who'd been murdered by their secretaries and aides during the past fortnight's thronetimes.'

'I hardly need to be more honest, but I shall be,' he said. 'I watched most of these murders happen, and I had no authority to do so. But our government has never punished unauthorized telepathy when it's been used in the service of the law. If I misjudged and must be punished, then I accept. But,' he said with wide-eyed innocence to the holocameras, 'in that case our government must accept that these murders are the purest harmless fantasy and do nothing about them.'

When some of those he'd named were demoted he ignored them; he was sure of himself. Once our reporters had established that three of the aides had been dismissed, Mounth pounced.

'I was going to suggest that these people could be examined by social telepaths, but now it seems I needn't,' he said. 'The government lawyers say they want to talk to me about my behaviour. I've said of course they can, here on Truth-light in front of us all. I believe there's a question we all want to ask them. Something on these lines: if these murders aren't a serious matter why have these people been dismissed? If even the government's as worried as that, what are we supposed to do? Not knowing if we've been murdered, is that supposed to rea.s.sure us? Do they want us to say never mind, it isn't real? Haven't they been telling us it's absolutely real, isn't that the whole appeal of it? Then where's the law in all this. Is it pretending not to notice? We can't dismiss our murderers, haven't we ordinary people the right to demand protection?'

At the side of my eye Thaw's face turned and loomed at me. I met his expression, for we both knew that Mounth was taking an extraordinary chance in describing himself that way. I saw in Thaw's eyes, and felt moving uneasily in my mind, a sudden conviction that he would succeed.

'Aren't we ent.i.tled to ask that these murders are stopped in the only way that works?' Mounth said. 'Are you thinking you don't need protection? How do you know? I can't be sure, can you? Wouldn't you rather know you're safe? If you agree don't call, don't write. Think it to me. Think it now.' And in millions of rooms his smile slowly grew and warmed and embraced his audience.

I didn't direct the first of the Truthlights on the law. A trainee director took over on my free nights, and was overwhelmed by the chance to handle such material. Before the show began I wandered into the studio to make sure no technical disasters were threatening. Thaw, whom Holoshows had self-protectively asked to mediate, was making his way to the stage. I was wis.h.i.+ng him good luck when a reporter looked in to give us the news. Mounth had foregone his protective cube as a gesture to the lawyers, and was waiting at the back of the studio to walk on and face the panel.

We closed in on him; 'Clement, the artist you broke down,' I said. 'He's killed himself.'

'He would have in any case. He had a death-wish.'

'I don't think so,' I said.

'It was in his work and I read it in him. He destroyed what he couldn't bear. Truth does that to some people, I'm afraid.'

When I arrived home thronetime had just started, and I sat in my throne and murdered Mounth.

And next morning I was entering my office when Thaw caught up with me. 'Someone murdered Mounth last night,' he said. 'At least, they did until he felt them doing it. It's all recorded. Come and see.'

I followed him, not caring. I thought he was being unnecessarily oblique in breaking the news to me, but perhaps he hoped to convert me to his view of Mounth. If so he hardly needed bother; Mounth would have me dismissed in no time. I sat on a stool in the playback room, beneath the first words of IF YOU VISITED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE YESTERDAY DON'T YOU THINK YOU SHOULD SEE HOW YOU LOOKED, and Mounth opened from a bud of light in mid-air before me, melting a little at the edges until the recording stabilized.

Long before the murder I was watching numbly, knowing Mounth had won against the lawyers.

'If you murder someone and a clone is immediately produced with the identical personality of your victim and total continuity, you're still guilty of murder, not attempted murder,' he said. 'That's not a hypothesis, it's a preventive legal precedent which was established to antic.i.p.ate the event. If you killed the clone you would be guilty of murder in that instance too, that was also established. But this means that in law if you kill something indistinguishable from a human victim you are guilty of murder. And the whole point about the throne experience is to make it indistinguishable from reality. If that's the case it must be so in law as well. I suppose it's too late to ask the government to switch off all the thrones and repossess them. But the least they must do is retain the social telepaths to be sensitive enough to antic.i.p.ate these murders.'

'Where's he getting all this?' I said.

'Look at his face, look at the strain,' Thaw said, poking his stick at Mounth's nose. 'He was using us on the panel as a pool. There was nothing we could have done about it short of getting up and leaving, because if we'd challenged him to quote the references he'd been reading he would simply have picked them out from behind the question. Now look, here it comes, the murder.'

Mounth was staring directly at me, smiling with a triumph so confident it hardly bothered to smile. 'Excuse me a moment. There's someone out there getting ready to murder me,' he said. 'A young man called, now let me find his name, Harri Sams. Why is he doing that, I wonder? Ah, because his mother watches Truthlight and because he's heard me saying he won't be able to do exactly what he likes. I don't think he's going to succeed. No, he's off the throne. Thank you, Mrs. Sams, that's right, you keep him away from it. Sorry I had to bring you the news, but I'm sure you can handle it.'

Thaw was watching me. 'Nothing occurs to you about all that?' he said.

'No, nothing.'

'Good. Then do me just one favour. Don't think about it. Wait and see.'

I didn't intend to think about it; I was too busy thinking of anything my mind could grab that didn't relate to Mounth and the possibility that he'd felt me murdering him. I had a grim suspicion that he might make that revelation and my dismissal one of the high points of tonight's show. Or maybe he'd been too preoccupied with Sams. Taking the hint from that hope, I preoccupied myself with explaining to last night's trainee that the secret of directing Truthlight was to be un.o.btrusive, even static; he'd been so drawn to Mounth's enthusiasm that toward the end of the show Mounth's head had swelled and sat decapitated in millions of homes, addressing an invisible panel. Then I filled myself with setting up tonight's show and with the fact that since last night's had been more successful than even Mounth had expected, this one would be merely a rerun for the less intelligent and for those who'd been crowned during last night's. Mounth rested in his office and read the response of his supporters. I'd heard that the simplest preoccupations were the best proof against telepaths.

Tell me that day lasted less than a year, the clock told me so but I didn't believe it. Every so often I felt rising to the surface of my mind like the threat of a deafening belch the growing desire to go and tell Mounth I knew he knew I'd killed him, and I would chatter faster and louder to the technicians until it went away. We set up the holocameras so as to contain Mounth and the panel, and placed another pair on standby in case we should need to cut to an emergency setup (always disconcerting in a live holocast: a sudden blurring into a cube of light, then behind the walls of light the figures have s.h.i.+fted). Then the panel began to arrive, and we waited for Mounth.

Mounth strode onto the stage as the Truthlight theme rang out, a two-bar determinedly rising theme on baritone steel drums, and we knew what sort of show it wasn't going to be. As the lawyers had taken their places I'd hoped they might have produced some answers overnight, but their expressions were those of a cast repeating a dismal rehearsal. Only Thaw had his keep-hoping look, and I felt this had more to do with his philosophy than with the situation. Everyone in Holoshows was watching the show, but they'd already accepted there would be no surprises. This was just a recapitulation before the lawyers were called in to talk by the government, then Truthlight would abandon the theme unless Mounth's arguments were denied. The audience which had been persuaded by last night's Truthlight switched this one off after the first few minutes.

'Even within your own walls you mustn't do harm,' Mounth was saying when I began to hear the Truthlight theme. Bom bom, bom bam. At first I thought it had crept into my head uninvited, then as it grew a little less faint I realized it was somewhere in the building. Perhaps someone was playing back last night's Truthlight to catch Mounth in a contradiction.

'They try to tell us there are fewer murders with the thrones,' Mounth said. 'But we can see that exactly the opposite is true.' He was ignoring the Truthlight theme, which was repeating like a cramped recording loop and growing louder, loud enough to be picked up by the holocast. One of the off-duty audience moved toward the studio door.

'On the contrary, people who would never have thought of murder are now being encouraged to try it and take it for granted,' Mounth said, and I suddenly realized that the theme wasn't only growing louder, it was actually approaching. More than that, an aggressive rather desperate quality was gaining on it, betraying that it was the sound of a human voice. As I realized that, the studio doors were thrown open and in he came, singing.

He was a young man, fas.h.i.+onably-bald head s.h.i.+ning, his eyes gazing at Mounth and brighter still. He strode up the studio aisle, roaring the Truthlight theme. An oddmind, I thought, struggling to squeeze my face shut against laughter. Let someone else throw him out, I'm the director. I signalled the cameramen not to cut. As I did so Mounth shouted 'Sams!' and grabbed Thaw's stick and hurled it at the young man.

The heavy end of the stick whipped round and struck Sams between the eyes. He fell. And I'd turned to call cut when I saw Thaw's face as he leapt.

He'd levered himself painfully but swiftly to his feet behind Mounth. And as if his face were a frame three expressions fell into place just separate enough not to be simultaneous: astonishment, comprehension, decision. Sams had fallen just within the transmitted holostage, but only his back as far down as his hips would be visible to the audience unless they were morbid enough to crawl round for a closer look. Thaw launched himself from his stool and fell short of Sams. He dragged himself rapidly across the stage on hands and knees-I'd never seen him move so fast-and slipped his hand beneath Sams' chest. 'He's dead,' he said, and his hand came out displaying a knife.

'He had a knife,' Mounth said.

'We've all seen that,' Thaw said before Mounth's lips had finished moving.

'He was singing to cover his thoughts. He was going to kill me.'

'Were you in his mind?'

'Only just in time.'

'Were you in anyone else's mind?'

'What? No, of course not.'

'Not in mine?'

'Why should I have needed to be?'

'If you weren't,' Thaw said, and his words were following Mounth's so closely they seemed to be attached and Mounth's mind couldn't move ahead of or through them, 'how did you know my stick was behind you to reach for?'

A cameraman gestured to me for authority to cut. I shook my head furiously, and Thaw pulled himself up with his stick.

'Why did you throw my stick?' he said, riding the pause and forcing the pace faster.

'I knew he had a knife.'

'So did we at the time you mentioned it.'

'Only because you were so quick.'

'Weren't you a bit quick to kill him?'

'To stop him killing me. I know everyone else can see that.'

'Remember Clement?' Thaw said, and I wondered how long he could juggle faster than Mounth could follow.

'Of course I do.'

'The artist you said killed himself because he had a death-wish?'

'That's true. He had.'

'I think if anyone has a death-wish you have.'

'I can see what you're doing!' Mounth cried, and suddenly so could I, but Thaw's voice was on top of him.

'You spend weeks arguing for the death penalty and then you commit a murder that certainly looks premeditated to me. You didn't have to look for my stick. You knew it was Sams coming to spoil your show and you got ready to murder him. It's a complicated way to fulfil your death-wish but that's what it sounds like to me. What does it sound like to everyone else? Do you think he's been trying to get himself executed? Think it to us. Think it now.'

Maybe you've been in a room where someone hates you. Possibly you've experienced a roomful of them. Try to imagine almost instantaneously becoming the focus of millions of people, many of them hating you, many believing that your whole career has been directed at achieving your death, and the rest simply bewildered. That's what Mounth must have felt, for when Holoshows tried to investigate n.o.body came forward to say they'd supported him. Imagine it, and try to feel it as if you're built on belief in yourself and everyone else's belief in you. Mounth did, and that was why he s.n.a.t.c.hed the knife from Thaw. And then went weak or stumbled? Maybe. And fell on the knife.

And that was when I called cut.

Before the governors dismissed him Thaw told them: 'I didn't think he'd do that. I was being, ironic and, yes, I wanted him to experience his role turned against him. But whether or not you like it, Mounth's death wasn't the important point. If Sams would have killed him that proves that if you inhibit thronetime murders you promote the real thing. We have to decide which we prefer. And that's what I'm going to tell the government.'

Now Thaw works for the government. We still meet sometimes, when he holds the government and Holoshows apart. He often insists to me that he didn't intend Mounth to die. Of course persuasion is his job. At any rate, we agree on one point. The ratings showed that as soon as Mounth fell on the knife almost everyone switched off and didn't wait for me to cut. The experience Mounth had offered was over, and his dying was too realistic and ba.n.a.l. For once we were glad that we hadn't started a trend.

The Man In The Underpa.s.s (1975).

I'm Lynn. I'm nearly eleven. I was born in Liverpool, in Tuebrook.

I go to Tuebrook County Primary School. This year I've been taking my little brother Jim to the Infants. Every morning we walk to school. It's only six hundred yards away. I know that because our cla.s.s had to find out for Mrs Chandler for a project. We cross one street and then walk up Buckingham Road. At the end we go down the underpa.s.s under West Derby Road. My little brother calls it underpants. And then just at the other end, there's the school.