Uncertain Midnight

by Edmund Cooper

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

They called him the Survivor - a 20th Century man 'reborn' in 2113. After a devastating atomic holocaust, mankind had now turned to the machine to solve his problems. Which led to the androids - descended from the robot, they were hardly distinguishable from real humans. By the year 2113 they ran society - leaving man to a life of leisure. It was into this world that John Markham emerged after spending 146 years of suspended animation in an underground deep-freeze unit. But his new lease of life was likely to be a short one. A man with his outdated ideas could be very dangerous - a fact the androids realized only too well.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 184

Sample

The Uncertain Midnight is my first novel; and for this reason alone I have a special affection for it. I suppose most writers have similar feelings about their first-born. When the novel first-appeared, it was received very favourably; and its success was not confined to the United Kingdom. Over the years it has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese. It is in its second printing in the U.S.A., its, second printing in Italy and its third printing in West Germany. In 1969 it was adapted as a ten-part television serial in the French language and has also been shown in Switzerland and Belgium. The serial was chosen- to represent Swiss Television at the 1969 Prix Futura in Berlin.

The book has been out of print in this country for several years; and I am particularly pleased that it is now possible to bring out a new edition. An earlier paperback edition was published as Deadly Image, after the title of the American paperback edition. At the time, my New York publishers thought it a more appropriate title; but now, as then, I prefer the original.

From my remarks so far, it will be apparent that the novel was written a long time ago. When I consider the science fiction that has since been translated into science fact, I realise that it was a very long time ago. it was before the Space Age, before the development of lasers, before it was possible to give a man a new human heart. it was written when the population of the world was about eight hundred million less than it is now. In short, The Uncertain Midnight was completed in the autumn of 1957.

It is a regrettable fact that war is a great stimulus to science. Radar, rockets and the peaceful use of atomic energy are among the many products of war stimulus. In The Uncertain Midnight, I wrote briefly of an atomic war in the late nineteen-sixties. it was not my intention to predict such a war. As we know, it never happened; and I hope fervently that atomic weapons (once belonging only to the realm of science fiction) will never be used again. The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are peanuts compared to what is available now.

But, for the purposes of the story, the war stimulus was used to generate the rapid evolutionary progression of computers-robots-androids. However, a war is not really needed to bring about the existence of androids. All that is needed, I believe, is time and the tireless ingenuity of mankind.

But, though machines may become very complex, will it ever be possible to regard them as living beings? That was the question that began to fascinate me in the spring of 1957. Ironically, as scientific research intensifies, as the secrets of D.N. A. are unravelled and the prospect of laboratory-created life looms before us, the question is reversed. Shall we come to regard living beings as machines?

And, in the end, will the history of man be reduced to the dynamic competition of machines against machines?

Less than one human generation ago, ENIAC, the first large electronic computer — a monster conglomeration of 18,006 vacuum tubes — was built at the University of Pennsylvania. It became obsolete, comparatively senile, at twelve years old. During one human generation, computers have passed through several evolutionary phases. ENIAC is now regarded as a dinosaur among computers. How many generations of computers will have developed in one more human generation? And what will the end of this rapid evolutionary process be?

I certainly don’t know. I am just a compulsive guesser, an addict of possibilities. And, I hope, an entertainer.

EDMUND COOPER

Autumn: 1970

FIRST, there was pain; and after the awareness of pain, a flock of dark shadows fluttering like silent birds against a backcloth of darkness. Then cloudy images, and in their wake a vague feeling of identity. Then dreams, drifting by without meaning until suddenly the symbols dropped into focus and the meaning took on greater reality than the dreams.

In a remote twilight of consciousness, memories burned like minute candles. He watched them, fascinated, shaken by the stupendous sense of being alive.

A girl’s face surged toward him out of the mist, recognisable. it was Katy’s face — Katy as he had first known her. She came near and smiled. She was wearing a candy-striped blouse and carrying an armful of documents. That was when they had first met, when he was installing the heat-exchange unit in the block of offices where she worked.

‘Hello,’ said Katy. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

‘You bet I would.’ But it was not his voice speaking. it was the voice of a ghost.

Katy turned away and disappeared. Presently she returned with two steaming mugs of coffee. The ghost said thank you and told her that his name was John Markham, that he was twenty-two years old, that he had lived in London for only a few months, that his home was in Yorkshire, that he like Beethoven and Gershwin, and chess and musical comedies. And he told her that one day he would ship out to the moon.

The ghost talked so much because he was a lonely ghost. Since he was fresh from the provinces, London had swallowed him at a single gulp, and he was afraid of dissolving away entirely in the city’s cavernous stomach.

Katy laughed. She tossed back her golden hair and laughed. She thought the moon idea was just the modern -equivalent of running away to sea, and she was surprised at — almost resentful? of — the possibilities of deep space travel. Of course there were the satellites, the space plat forms and all the other crazy machines that men kept putting in the sky. But somehow they didn’t belong any more. Not to ordinary people. They were just — and literally — out of this world … No, she didn’t like Beethoven, but Gershwin was still all right. And had he seen The Commissar and the Deb? .

The ghost had not seen it, nor even heard of it. He had been too busy poring over fuel statistics, free flight trajectories and accelerating G forces in his room in the suburbs. But here was a chance to get to know Katy, to destroy his consuming loneliness. He offered to get tickets for the show…

He didn’t watch The Commissar and the Deb nor hear much of the many hit songs. Instead he watched Katy, and heard her occasional excited whispers magnified to a quiet thunderous murmur in some strange hollow dimension. He had known then that he would marry her and that he would never ship out to the moon.

Now his body lay on a trolley in a room whose temperature had climbed infinitely slowly over a period of days. There was still a heavy hoar-frost on his hair, eyebrows and stubbly chin. But the frozen clothes, caked with ice crystals, had been carefully cut away. And in his stillness, his gaunt nakedness, the possibility of life was utterly fantastic but real. He was a corpse with a beam of steady white light playing on his chest directly above the heart. But he was a corpse whose heart was beginning to stir feebly; a corpse who had begun to dream. A corpse That was being resurrected, drawn mercilessly down long corridors of pain …

Katy… the honeymoon … A cheap furnished cottage on the East Anglian coast, where they could have the luxury of a home of their own for two full weeks before they returned to a bed-sitting-room in the city.

The seashore. Bathing. Katy changing her wet costume under the eroding cliffs. Her body was thin and brown arid hard, yet her breasts flowed out from it with starling softness,, somehow emphasising the duality of woman.

Katy was proud of her body. In the evenings before she came to bed she would stand in front of the long mirror admiring it, turning Slowly to watch the play of light and shadow on her arms, her shoulders and the tiny roundness of her belly.

He, the ghost, was proud of it, too. Watching her, his longing became more than longing, grew into a spearhead of necessity That was rarely demolished even when they had exhausted all the gambits of love.

Eventually there was a baby — Johnny-Boy. Fat-faced, loud, implacable. The legacy of that carefree honeymoon—Johnny-Boy climbing over tables, chairs, Katy, blueprints, everything. Johnny-Boy, whose expensive upkeep accounted for most of their spare money and turned the possibility of a car into a fast receding mirage.

The ghost had enjoyed being a father. it was something positive, something purposeful. More important than spaceflight, because Johnny-Boy belonged to Katy and Katy belonged to him…

Another wave of darkness in the body under the beam of light. Succeeding waves of oblivion and pain. And still the temperature climbing, the hoar-frost receding hour by hour. Figures bending over the inert body, unfelt injections. Unfelt pain…

Childhood! The ghost discovered that he had once been a child himself … Rain and sunlight in the Yorkshire dales. Trout in the summer streams. Toboggan rides on the bleak December hills. A schoolroom.

‘Markham!’

‘Sir?’

‘what is fifty per cent of point five of a half?’

‘One-eighth, sir.’

‘Expressed as a decimal?’

‘Point one two five, sir.’

‘Expressed as a percentage?’

‘Twelve and a half percent, sir.’

‘You’d better get that scholarship, Markham.’

“Yes, sir.’

And with the scholarship came a world That was wider than that of childhood.

I say, Markham, what are you going to do when you leave this dump?’

‘Haven’t thought about it yet, Stringer. what about you?’

‘My Dad says he can fix me up in International Refrigeration. Like me to ask him if he can get you in, too?

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, don’t be a drip. We’ll stick together.’

The body on the trolley moved. it was the first movement; a nostril twitching. White-coated figures observed the movement. More injections. No pain now — only a divine sense of non-attachment. And the images came brighter, faster, more confused.

Johnny-Boy at the zoo. Elephants. A small hand clutching a coin. ‘I want to go on the big one, Daddy. With the man with the black face.’

And Katy: ‘He can’t go alone, John.’

The ghost laughing. ‘Then you take him, darling.’

The zoo faded … Katy undressing, big with child again. The ghost watching her, still finding her beautiful after six years. How could a ghost know that it was six years, even in a dream? How does a ghost know anything?

‘We should have waited, Katy - about the baby, I mean.’

Katy smiled.’ “Nobody asked you, sir,” she said.’

‘We’ll never have enough money to buy the house.’

‘We will.’ Katy always knew better than the ghost. ‘And " anyway, if we have our family while we’re young, darling, we’ll have so much more time for each other.’

The ghost said, ‘I’m greedy. I want it now.’

‘Take back your baby, then!’

‘I’ll get a better job. That’s the answer, more money.’

International Refrigeration, Limited. Cheesebody’s office. Cigar smoke. Why wouldn’t anyone called Cheesebody change his name? It only costs a fiver. Deed poll.

‘It’s a big thing, Mr. Markham. A big thing!’

Cheesebody nodding over his cigar like an owl wishing to created the illusion of humanity. Bald head, pot belly, no soul. Pawed all his secretaries until they left him.

‘I’m aware of that, sir.’ The ghost was looking keen, resourceful. This was his big moment.

‘A lot of responsibility for a young man, Mr. Markham. Can’t fool about with government contracts, you know. They say December 1967, they mean December 1967.’

‘I can handle it, sir.’

You’d better … Know something, Markham? We’re doing fifty of these underground units all over the country. Know why they want ’em so deep?’

‘Bomb-proof,’ suggested the ghost.

‘Radiation-proof,’ corrected Cheesebody. Armageddon, Mr. Markham. It’s got to come sooner or later, what? Then open the deep-freeze units and bring out the uncontaminated food.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘No point in winning the war if we have to dine on radioactive sausages, what?’ A great balloon of laughter shaking in Cheesebody’s stomach.

‘No, sir.’ The ghost smiled dutifully.

‘Big responsibility, Markham. The nation’s future, you know.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, you’d better get down to Epping Forest and familiarise yourself with the project. Get to know your opposite number on the construction side. Maybe have to butter him … I understand the first chamber will be ready for installation at the end of the month.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Epping Forest. Fifteen miles north of the City. Epping in autumn, with the leaves red and gold; and the rustle of crisp, multi-colored waves blown tumbling along the concrete highways. The sudden stillness of trees, and then a wind-whipped turbulence bringing them to life, scattering the leaves in a dance of death.

Autumn and falling leaves — and bulldozers, excavators, tractors, trucks. Men sweating in the late sunlight. Burrowing into the earth like moles; creating tunnels, chambers. More tunnels, more chambers. Churning angrily and noisily into the patient skin of the earth.

‘B Chamber ready, Mr. Markham.’

‘Right. Check the powered exchange.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘C Chamber ready, Mr. Markham.’

‘The hell it is! Tear out the roof insulation and start again.’

‘D Chamber’s O.K. now, Mr. Markham.’

‘Give it a week of self-drive. Get me a graph of the fall.’

‘E Chamber completed, sir.’

‘Put it on automatic exchange. Storing begins next week. Here’s the lay-out tables.’

Ice caves hollowed from the warm and living soil. Convoys of trucks bringing the food that would save the Cheesebodys of England from a diet of contaminated sausages. Wheat, dried milk, beef, fat, sugar, dehydrated fruit. A hundred tons, a thousand tons, a hundred thousand tons. This was the big pile-up.

The ghost was happy then. It wasn’t a pointless preparation for a suicidal war that nobody believed in. It was just a job. A good job, a big job, an important job. One that bought a house in Hampstead for Katy and Johnny-Boy and Little Sara. One that bought a car and a holiday and tailor-made clothes.

There was the leisurely drive back to Hampstead in the evenings, with sunlight turning the road into a ribbon of fire, and the leaves scurrying in the wake of the car…

The body shivered under the beam of light. Muscles contracted. Eyelids flickered. The hoar-frost had faded into dew, and the corpse was no longer a corpse but a man bathed in ice-cold sweat. A man with no pain, but too many memories. A man who had no right to be alive.

The dreams fell into a kaleidoscope: the memories rotated, producing colorful patterns.

‘Have you seen The Commissar and the Deb?’

‘Tear out the insulation,’ said the ghost.

‘What is fifty per cent of point five of a half?’

The ghost laughed. ‘A radioactive sausage.’

I want to go on the big one, Daddy. With the man with the black face.’

‘You can’t fool about with government contracts,’ explained the ghost.

‘Stop!’

The body on the trolley had spoken. The white figures huddled over it like giant seagulls inspecting the harvest of the tide. For a moment the man opened his eyes and stared at them vaguely, seeing only what was not in the room. The beam of light That was directed on his chest became more intense. He closed his eyes again, knowing that this was just another dream.

Another dream… Katy.

‘Will there be a war, John ?’

‘Of course there won’t. Not unless the top men go completely off their rockers. We can’t afford it. Nobody can.’

‘They’re spending an awful lot of money on your iceboxes.’

‘We should worry,’ said the ghost with a cynical smile. ‘We’re getting some of it.’

Katy began to darn a pair of socks. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I lie awake at night, thinking about the kind of world Johnny-Boy and Sara will grow up in.’

The ghost sat on the arm of her chair and laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘You think too much. You aren’t equipped for it. They’ll be all right, Katy. Every generation has its problems.’

‘They’re talking about rearmament again.’

‘It’s the season for it,’ said the ghost. ‘It comes round regularly, like football and cricket.’

‘You’re sure there won’t be a war, darling?’

‘I’m damn sure,’ said the ghost. ‘We may be nuts, but we aren’t that nutty. Let’s go to bed.’

Katy smiles. ‘If that’s the way you’re feeling …’ She put away the sewing basket, stood up and stretched. The ghost took her in his arms.

‘No’ said the man on the trolley, ‘there can’t be a war!’ But in the quiet room the statement was somehow translated into a question issuing urgently from the lips of one who knew he was no longer dead. Carefully the white-robed figures toweled the icy dew from his naked body. Then they switched off the beam of light, laid a sheet over him and then a blanket. The crisis was past. Now he could begin to get warm quickly. One of them, gently raised his head, gave him a drink. He did not open his eyes; but the liquid became an elixir, filling his throat and stomach with the fire of life.

Epping … white and still. No drifting leaves now; only the hanging whiteness of snow on laden trees. But still the endless caravan of food trucks crawling like fat, heavy beetles down to the deep-freeze chambers.

‘G Chamber full and sealed, Mr. Markham.’

‘Good. How many loads over?’

‘Nine, sir.’

‘Divert to K.’

‘H Chamber sealed, Mr. Markham.’

‘Any left?’

‘Three.’

‘Divert to K.’

‘I Chamber complete and closed, sir.’

‘I Divert the residue to K.’

Epping — still as a Christmas card, lovely as a dream country, except for the groaning convoys of trucks. Only one more chamber left to fill, then the job would be over and the trucks would depart; and only the ghost and a maintenance team would stay behind. The forest would forgive all the indignity of digging and boring and churning. The forest would forgive and forget. The dispossessed would return and reclaim their lost territory. First the birds; then the rabbits, squirrels, foxes, rats, stoats, moles, badgers. The silent community of the wild.

Epping and Christmas. The world of evening. A tiny tree with blown glass bubbles and colored lights in the sitting room. Firelight dancing intimately over walls and furniture. The vague roar of London shut completely out of a private universe.

Johnny-Boy and his electric train. Sara with a teddy-bear twice her size. Katy opening the parcel that contained her first fur coat.

Johnny-Boy goggling. I want to make it pull ten full trucks, Daddy. You be the guard.’

Sara squealing. ‘Teddy-bear-Daddy-bear, Teddy-bear, Daddy-bear.’

Katy posing. ‘Pardon me, Duchess, but that happens to be my fur coat!’

A massed choir:

Oh bring all ye faithful

Food to Epping Forest.

Freeze it and store it for evermore.

Come and dehydrate

Milk and meat and raisins!

Then pack it all in boxes

In half a million boxes

In deeply frozen chambers —

All sealed up!

Merry Christmas Katy, Johnny-Boy, Sara. Merry Christmas London, Moscow, Washington. Peace on earth, goodwill to men. The worlds gone sane…

The man on the trolley began to sing: ‘Oh bring all ye faithful… ’ He stopped, opened his eyes, stared at the white figures around him and screamed. Then he shut his eyes tight, rolled onto his side and slowly, painfully, brought his knees up to his chin. The last dream was the worst. The last dream was the last reality. Everything else was an illusion, the product of a mind that was trying to escape, and couldn’t.

January, Epping. Rain, sleet,. . .