Manalone made friends only with difficulty, and of the few friendships he had, only a couple were more than superficial. His fund of small-talk was insignificant, and few of his acquaintances either could or cared to follow the usually tortuous depths of Manalone’s own mode of thinking. Perhaps this trait, inherited from his mother, had generated the element of foresight by which they had christened him Manalone. Whatever the reason, the name had suited him well.
At length he refilled his glass. The drink was deceptively potent, and as the alcohol became perceptible in his bloodstream he began again to haunt the old, familiar, introspective grounds.
‘You’re a
man alone, Manalone. A creep! You know that, don’t you? You can’t mix, and you’ve given up trying. And do you know why? It’s because you’re scared of life … and scared of other people knowing that you’re scared. So you clam up. You won’t let anybody in … and you’ve lost the ability to get out to them. Boy, what a deal!’
Manalone inspected his glass and wondered idly how, with the content of sugars almost up to saturation, the makers had still found room to blend in so much alcohol. He decided that its psychological effects were only explicable by the assumption that a high proportion of the alcohol was anything other than ethyl.
Buoyed by the spirit of scientific discovery, he drank up and ordered another. From habit he made the mistake of offering his ComCredit card in payment. Whilst this had been acceptable in every other establishment he had ever entered, it was here met with a blank demand for cash, and a look which fully justified the findings of his earlier introspection.
Mumbling something incomprehensible, he produced the necessary coins and retired to hide his confusion behind the plastic plant. The rebuke he gave himself was quite inevitable.
‘Watch it, Manalone! You may be a bright-eyed genius to some – but you didn’t ought to be allowed out on your own.’
Gradually
the bar filled with other patrons. Some of them were middle-aged, and only a few seemed to typify the kind of person Manalone associated with this form of entertainment. All the rest were Breve, insulated by the invisible barrier of age from the rest of the company.
Manalone had never been able to explain to himself why the ages around the teens should isolate themselves so remarkably from the rest of humanity. The Breve had their own styles of dress, their own music, their own language, and their own codes. All of these were in constant evolution and remained almost incomprehensible to the older generation. They led a pattern of life which was violent, hectic, noisy, arrogant, and egotistic; as if the very pith of life itself had to be squeezed dry in the few short years before maturity began. Manalone was not too certain, but it could be they were right.
With typical insularity, the Breve moved together into one corner of the room, treating the rest of the patrons with obvious contempt. All of them, even the girls, were armed with vicious riot weapons. The fact that they broke a table to suit their joint convenience passed unremarked by the suddenly subdued staff. Nobody willingly antagonized the numberless legions of the Breve.
The Breve shouted a few rude phrases to some of the other patrons, but Manalone was completely ignored, and for this he was glad. The last thing he wanted was to get involved in an incident which might involve attention from the police. The recorders and electronic gear he carried in his pockets would take a great deal of explaining. And even the truth would sound improbable.
About an hour later, they were invited down to the cellar. Here a makeshift cinema had been established. The room was comfortable enough as regards the seating, but made crude by the presence at the rear of two large and very ancient cine-projectors which appeared to have been substantially modified by the addition of sundry cams and wheels. Manalone dared not appear too interested in the devices, but he guessed they had been adapted to take films of sizes and pitches no longer in current use. He was no expert on cine-photography, but he was fairly certain that some of the film stock which could be shown on these projectors must be very ancient indeed.
The room was
furnished with couches instead of the usual seats, and the audience, enabled to sit two by two, had a measure of space and comfort not to be found in more public places of entertainment. Fortunately the Breve moved towards the back, leaving Manalone to gain an opportune position near the screen yet separated by several seats from any fellow patron.
The film itself was an old, clumsy and violent piece of photo-play, quite unlike the sophisticated sugar-sickly and generally insipid offerings being currently produced by the state cine-studios. It had a lusty truthfulness in its approach inasmuch as it treated violence unselfconsciously, and its rawness carried a refreshing draught of sanity which outweighed the shortcomings of its production technique. Its rare allusions to love were naive and ridiculous in this ultra-permissive age, and were treated with wry derision by the Breve. Manalone remained unmoved. As ever, he was an observer, not a participant.
The slight plot of the story was one of old-time gangsters and their battles with the police. There were many bloody and badly staged fights, and an unrealistic series of car chases which frequently resulted in the violent destruction of the vehicles. For Manalone, this was the whole point of the exercise, and the reason why the timers and recorders in his pockets were recording the intervals marked by his fingers and the occasional clicking of his tongue.
He was timing the interval taken for a car to fall from a bridge or cliff-edge to its destruction on a rocky table below. The height of the fall he mentally estimated in terms of car lengths, and his fingers expressed the results in binary notation on to one recorder, whilst a second one gave him a full sound-track for identification purposes. Several millisecond timers were also wired into the sequence. The only facility he lacked was a camera-visual record, and this he could not arrange because of the difficulty of concealing the apparatus. Nevertheless his analysis of the data he was collecting by the equipment he had brought would tell him much that he needed to know. He now began to appreciate Paul Raper’s excitement at the find. Even as he watched he felt the hair rising on the back of his neck.
‘Steady,
Manalone! If you’re not drunk there has to be a rational explanation for this. And if you are drunk … there still has to be a rational explanation. All you have to do is find it.’
He was not drunk. Not even slightly now. Whilst he had not yet performed the calculations he knew instinctively that the fall-rate portrayed was impossibly slow. This was not due to camera technique or the speed of projection, since all the allied events remained credible. A second factor was that the results of impact, either vehicle to vehicle or vehicle to ground, were improbably severe. The momentum was all wrong. The slightest car to car contact caused a fantastic amount of damage to an apparently normal steel body, and the results of falls were catastrophic. This was a picture of a consistent physical world which had no existence as far as he knew.
This posed the problem. Here was either an extremely clever piece of faked photography – serving an unlikely and unnecessary role as an incidental in a cheap budget gangster film … or else the film had been made at some time or place where the ordinary laws of physics did not quite apply …
‘Slow down a moment, Manalone! You’ve gone up a blind alley somewhere.’
Both propositions were absurd. The cost of faking those scenes to produce that particular effect could easily have cost more than the budget expended on the entire film. As for the second proposition, that was even less likely than the first. Such a system of physics could be reconciled only by setting up a model of the physical world which had characteristics entirely different from those of actuality.
‘Which brings the rare conclusion that a film like that could never have been made. So what are you doing watching it, Manalone?’
With so many questions unanswered, Manalone pondered on the possibility of obtaining a copy of the film. Since it was illegal photo-play, he doubted if a direct approach would be effective. He briefly considered the possibility of snatching a spool and making a run for it. A knowledge of the long stairs outside the door and his unfamiliarity with the dubious streets in the vicinity warned him that he would be unlikely to get away with it.
‘Besides
which, Manalone, you haven’t got the guts!’
The Breve would obviously enjoy such an excuse to start a rumpus, which might well attract the police. Also a man running through the streets clasping a large reel of film to his chest was unlikely to escape attention. All things considered, he would have to make do with the information he had already collected.
At length the film was finished and the lights came on. There were no titles and no credits nor any clues as to the age of the film or its origin. He allowed the Breve to go out first, and shuffled as close to the projectors as the seating would allow. The width of the film was unfamiliar to him, and certainly far wider than anything he knew in current use. He made a mental estimate of its width for future reference. Then he was climbing the badly lit stairs, with his pockets bulging with recorded enigma, and a headful of perplexity.
As he emerged into the dim and unfamiliar streets, he looked around to gain his bearings, feeling uncomfortable and slightly lost. The Breve had moved across the street to form an argumentative congregation around the windows of a small shop. He carefully avoided them, and began to pick his way back towards the lights of Psychedilly. It was now quite late, but apparently the population of the district grew in proportion to the lateness of the hour. Marked by the formality of his dress, he was approached several times by procurers, whom he waved away before they had a chance to relate the peculiar virtues of their wares. Not until he was back under the impersonal cloak of the great lights did he relax and stop to look for a drink. He found a dive-bar which seemed suitably quiet, and climbed down into its artificially ornate warmth.
It was at this point that Manalone’s own passion for isolation led him to witness an unusual incident. He had found an empty table which was partially under the open staircase which led in from the street outside. Scarcely had he sat down than he became aware that the party of Breve who had been at the cinema-cell had just come down the stairs. He could see their faces quite plainly through the stair treads, as they scanned the area as if expecting to find someone who was not apparent.
He marked
the incident and thought nothing more of it until the Breve, having failed to find whoever it was for whom they were looking, turned abruptly and with needless noise and clatter headed back out again. As they did so, one of their number halted halfway up the stair and spoke into what was certainly a police wrist-transceiver. He was only a short distance away from Manalone at this point, but his voice was lost in the ambient noise.
Had he looked downwards, the Breve must certainly have seen Manalone’s eyes watching him interestedly through the intervals between the stairs. Fortunately he was too intent on watching his own group who were maintaining a noisy diversion in the doorway. Manalone was fascinated. The possibility of a special police team dressed and acting like genuine Breve, was something he had never considered before. The more he thought about it, the more logical it became. For controlling such a rebellious yet formless movement as the Breve, infiltration was obviously a more efficient method than outside observation. He wondered idly what nature of quarry they were hunting, and if it was in any way connected with the illegal photo-play which he had seen earlier.
‘They’re looking for you, Manalone,’
he said to himself amusedly.
‘Something terribly subversive … like swearing at the autophone system or dropping toffee papers on the flower beds in Hotham Park. Manalone the terrible … always ready with a damning epithet to quell recalcitrant machinery, and never slow with a vicious sweet-wrapper to demonstrate his rejection of the Establishment. Manalone, you’re a right villain! Curious thing, though. If the police know that film is running, why don’t they close it down? Or could it be they’re leaving it … as a deliberate means of getting to know … precisely whom it attracts …?’
Returning
to the Hover-rail Terminal, Manalone studied the indicators carefully. He was pleased to find that the five-minute frequency of service to Bognor was being maintained despite the lateness of the hour. Such was the population density of London that even the remote suburb of Bognor pressured the facilities of the unique fast Hover-rail system into the small hours. He approached the autobarrier and dialled his destination, then dropped his ComCredit card into the appropriate slot. The machine read the encoded details on the card, verified his credit with the national credit computer, and issued him with a ticket. This done, the barrier cycled to enable him to pass on to the platform.
The car was already waiting, a sleek metal bullet sitting astride the feeder-rail, cushion deflated whilst the passengers hurried aboard. Manalone was fortunate in travelling late, inasmuch as he was able to board the first car of his choice. The barrier was programmed to admit only the normal complement of a car to the platform. One could frequently wait for up to six cars before admission was allowed. At this hour he even met the unaccustomed extravagance of finding several empty seats and a car hostess who actually had time to be civil.
Having a choice of seats, he dropped into his favourite position, fastened his seat-belt, and luxuriated in having room to stretch his legs. Only one other person joined the car after Manalone, and he curiously, opted to stay in the already fully occupied rear of the car. Manalone, always the acutest of observers, noted the fact and then dismissed it. Machinery could be wayward, infuriating and fallible, but at least he could establish a working relationship with it. But people, he could never understand.