Manalone

by Colin Kapp

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Why is the government deliberately destroying all trace of Man's past? Why are the laws of gravity and momentum strangely altered? Why has the world's population continually increased without the predicted eco-crisis taking place? Why is there an international conspiracy to conceal the future of the human race? These are just some of the reality-shattering questions that face Manalone, a brilliant computer scientist, when he tries to find out exactly what has happened to humanity. Manalone, outcast from society, must fight the entire machinery of a ruthless police state to discover the truth. And the truth is an awful, chilling one, that sounds only too real in today's world.

Release date: December 14, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 191

Sample

As he was caught up by the hysterical pressures of the giga-metropolis, Manalone felt his pulse quicken with a near-sensual thrill. He was unsure whether these barbarous visual assaults caused his heightened suggestibility, or whether they were only a contributory part. The combined weight of all the urgent stimuli; the lights, the noise, the insanely ceaseless traffic, and the continuous press of people – all conspired to throw him into a mildly hypnotic state. He became persuaded that anything could happen, not only around him, but also to himself.

It was a state of mind for which he had an almost addictive fascination, yet one which he resented because it encroached savagely into his private inner life. Lights cascaded and exploded before his eyes, their commercial messages insignificant against the total psychedelia. They inhibited the objectivity of his thinking, yet clawed out fantasies of undoubted attraction. Even the great darknesses between the displays were pregnant with things half-dredged from his mind and then destroyed before they could be appreciated.

Charing Cross Hover-rail Terminal was the womb which delivered him into this city of unrealities. As he passed through the auto-barrier into the vastness of the great hall, the objectivity which had caused him to make the journey was beginning to fade under the attack of the kaleidoscopic lights. He was a captive target for every trick in the electronic ad-men’s books. Three-dimensional sound transmissions swarmed around his head like a wreath of invisible bees, loud with commercial trivia. Incredibly attractive hostesses, in the legal minimum of clothing, held out their arms and invited him to visit them at their favourite nightcells. Manalone took a perverse delight in walking deliberately through the coaxing images, knowing them to be but virtual image projections of some skilful photo-play.

Outside the Terminal it was night, but here was no such thing as darkness. Even the sky seemed to be patterned with throbbing, incandescent words. Virtual image projections were not permitted on public thoroughfares. All the figures that he now encountered under the shrieking lights of the Strand were humanly solid if none the less unreal because of outlandish costume or cosmetic whim. The peculiar fashions of the younger Breve, especially, had always struck him as being born out of perversity. Manalone’s own clothes were ultra-conservative, and now marked him surely as an out-of-town uninitiate. But, discomforted or not, he was psychologically unable to conform.

Nevertheless, the colourful and mildly erotic crowds through which he pushed his way entrained his imagination in all kinds of speculative fantasies. These he entertained but briefly. The real purpose of his visit was the investigation of an enigma. It took a perceptive connoisseur of life like Paul Raper to detect the problematical and the intriguing things which lay buried under the mundane. When he did detect a prime curiosity, it was usually left to Manalone to find the explanations. Raper lived life; Manalone fought to understand it. In this way the two men were complementary.

On the north side of Trafalgar Square the illuminated displays of the great commercial galleries were so intense and exotic as to be nearly unendurable. Time and again Manalone was trapped by the unfathomable shifting of the great tri-di abstractions, whose complexities offered a completely different interpretation to every person who watched them. The effect of the displays was mildly tonic, inasmuch as his emergent subconsciousness gave him a clear subjective image of several pairs of accusing eyes. He recognized this vision of conscience to be a warning. He had no clear idea why violence in photo-play should be illegal whilst in real life it was commonplace, but the law was explicit. In the interests of science, Manalone was going to have to break the law.

Ten blocks later brought him into Psychedilly. He was told that the name had once been Piccadilly, but that had been a long time ago. The new electronic age had fostered the more apt name to a point where even the street signs had forgotten the old. For Manalone, this was the hub of the universe. This was the explosive nuclear core of the fantastic giga-metropolis of London. It was a spinning, spitting, sparkling, whirlwind of a place, where impressions piled one upon the other so fast that it was difficult to avoid being swamped by the sheer weight of sensations.

Somehow Manalone fought his way through the crowded streets, becoming increasingly bemused by the distracting pressures of the electronic carnival. In the crush he hopelessly lost his way, but gained a bearing generally north. This he followed until he broke out into the quietly welcoming relief of the back streets and concrete valleys which huddled in guilty silence behind the shattering glare and noise of Psychedilly proper.

The abrupt transition from electronic insanity to the dark canyons of masonry in which he now stood, cleared his head and reminded him of the hazards of the undertaking. He was now in underworld territory, the retreat of the shadier elements of society who made a living on the fringes of the great lights. The clubs and cells of its large, dilapidated and dirty streets were designed to cater for almost any appetite. In the streets one ran a continuous risk of being accosted by pimps, beggars, would-be guides, and those who made a living demanding money with menaces. There was also the ever present risk of being caught in a police trap.

From the information which Paul Raper had given him, Manalone had come prepared to follow his own most direct route. In losing his way, he had entered the district at the wrong point. He dared not hesitate lest he should attract the attention of the undesirables who called to him from dark recesses. He pressed on, deeper into the maze of streets, trying to equate the street names with the sector of the map he had memorized. Then, after a couple more turnings, he found a combination that he remembered, and with swift re-orientation, he hurried on his way.

When he reached the cell which was his destination, he found the door closed and the whole property heavy with the air of emptiness. He knocked, but received no answer, though he had the uncomfortable feeling of being watched by someone unseen. Finally the door was opened and he entered into an ill-lit hallway which was pungent with some aromatic which defied interpretation by his keenly analytic nose.

Methodically he offered Paul Raper’s card and the message which it bore on the reverse. The suspicion which had been paramount in the doorkeeper’s mind was instantly dispelled. Paul’s influence in unlikely places was something which never ceased to amaze the introspective Manalone. The doorkeeper pocketed the exorbitant fee which followed, and nodded towards the bar.

‘The show’ll be a bit late,’ he said. ‘We got to get the projector fixed again. I’ll call you when it’s ready.’

Manalone made his way to the bar. This was a dingy room, poorly and unimaginatively lit, in which a few skinny hostesses exchanged cryptic and unexplained flashes of reminiscence with the solitary pallid youth who metered the drinks. After a brief glance, the girls ignored Manalone, presumably considering him unworthy of their time. Manalone took his drink to a decrepit sofa and sipped its syrupy sweetness in the shadow of a plastic plant, awaiting the passing of the time. Scarcely ever in the whole of his experience had he felt so completely out of place or at such a loss as how to act. The skinny hostesses continued to ignore him, and the whole atmosphere assumed the characteristic form of limbo which was so much a feature of Manalone’s life.

He was ever the observer. Somehow he never quite seemed to qualify as a participant in the game. His role was that of a presence, acknowledged but never really accepted. His quiet, academic mien seemed to stifle most adventures before they got started, and the patiently searching intelligence by which he made his living was so manifest that it dissuaded many adventurers from forcing their attentions upon him. Always he found himself set slightly apart.

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. . .