Rudolf Mallory was one of the many pathetic pieces of human flotsam on the tide of the 20th-century neurosis. He was a man who had reached the end of his rope, death seemed pleasant by comparison... He tried to take the easy way out, but something went wrong. Unknown to Mallory other men had problems too. Separated by vast distances of time and space, Rumal, citizen of an advanced humanoid society, with a strangely different technology had also decided to end it all... Time and Space are almost perfect but rare warps and blemishes do exist in the continuum. They can produce peculiar events. The Englishman from 1963 suddenly found himself on the other side of the galaxy. Rumal found himself in England. They had been unable to solve their own problems - could they solve each other's?
Release date:
July 31, 2014
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
320
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IT was a cold, grey, miserable, fog-bound December day in a cold grey fog-bound December capital. Rudolf Mallory looked out of the suburban window of a small, drab, suburban house. In the distance he could hear trains. Trains reminded him that he had about eight-and-a-half minutes in which to finish his breakfast, put on his overcoat and get down to the station. Fortunately the station was not far away. That was, perhaps, the one advantage that accrued from living in the vicinity of the iron road.
As Mallory finished his small dish of cornflakes, saturated with a rather unappetising mixture of milk-and-water, he was aware of an unpleasant pain in his toe. He was used to these unpleasant pains in his toe, and scarcely gave them a second thought, but this one was even more trouble than usual. He scratched it judiciously with the heel of the other shoe. The leather squeaked a little as he did so. His wife, Mabel, who was sitting opposite, looked up disapprovingly:
“You’ll ruin those shoes, Rudolf!”
“Yes, my dear,” replied Rudolf resignedly, and desisted from scratching the chilblain. Mabel was always aware when he scratched chilblains with his heel and she always told him not to. Still, of course, she was right about the shoes. Mabel was right about everything—at least in Mabel’s opinion! She did her best, he supposed, and her best was very good, considering their circumstances. His eldest son Matthew, who was just six, knocked over the jam at that moment. Mark, who was five, reached for it at the same time, and he and Matthew began a noisy altercation. Young Luke who had just attained his third birthday, joined in the general hubbub, and baby John, a sturdy, not to say obstreperous two-year-old, decided that this would be an opportune moment for him to send the salt-pot flying into father’s cornflakes. Rudolf stood up rather wearily, smiled thinly at Mabel, and said:
“I think I’d better be going, dear.”
“Bye-bye,” returned Mabel absently, clearing up the mess the children were so busily making, putting Matthew back on his chair, Mark back on his, picking Luke up out of the jam, and rescuing John from the overturned milk. Rudolf struggled into his almost threadbare overcoat, and reached for his hat; Mabel was far too busy with the children to see him off—not that it mattered very much, he thought; not that anything mattered very much. He got as far as the door before he realised that he had forgotten his glasses. He came back indoors and looked for them desperately everywhere. He finally located them on top of the bookcase, put them on and blinked owlishly for a moment as his eyes adjusted themselves to the strong lenses. The effort of looking for the glasses had raised some dust on top of the book-case. The dust on top of the book-case had upset his asthma. He began coughing and wheezing as he made his way to the door again.
“Good-bye, dear,” he called between coughs.
“Good-bye,” echoed Mabel absently as she coped with the children and the remains of the breakfast things. As Rudolf’s feet contacted the pavement his chilblains began to play up worse than ever. The speed with which he had tried to eat his small dish of soggy cornflakes had triggered off his indigestion, and a violent hiccoughing attack accompanied the throbbing twitch in his feet. It seemed, he reflected, that it never ‘rained but it poured’ as the old adage had been wont to relate. He took stock of himself as he walked the short distance to the station.
His eyesight was bad, he suffered from asthma, at the moment he had indigestion and chilblains; he longed to hurry but he daren’t because the doctor had told him that his heart was not strong; suddenly he became aware of yet another pain which was going on in interesting rhythm with his footsteps.
“Toothache!” he muttered the word out loud. Somewhere there must be an abscessed molar, because every time his foot touched the pavement there was a tingling pain in the right side of his lower jaw.
A black-jacketed youth, with a skull and crossbones between his shoulder blades and an enormous black crash helmet, roared past at a steady 85, the fact that it was a built-up area apparently making no difference to the gentleman on the enormous 1,000 c.c. bike. The noise of the bike set Rudolf Mallory’s nerves twitching almost uncontrollably:
“These young hooligans——” he thought to himself, then stopped and smiled. “How old are you, Mallory?” whispered a voice inside his mind, “you’re talking about ‘young hooligans’ and you’re scarcely thirty. You’re like an old man. Your hair is beginning to go, your teeth are practically useless; you suffer from chronic indigestion, bad sight, a weak heart and chilblains.”
Feeling very sorry for himself, Mallory reached the station, showed his season ticket and boarded the eight fifteen. He couldn’t afford to buy a paper as some of the other men did, but he stole swift, sly, surreptitious glances at the backs of the papers belonging to the wealthier residents in his carriage. He knew that many of them came from fashionable bungalows, some semi-detached, others fully detached, from different parts of the town. He knew that most of them earned at least in the region of thirty to forty pounds a week—many of them a great deal more. He looked at the papers they were reading. Most of them had the ‘Financial Times’ and were studying it avidly, others were reading the ‘Telegraph’ or the ‘Mail’. Several copies of the ‘Times’ made their presence felt. Mallory sighed almost inaudibly. He wished he had the kind of problems that bothered the men who read the ‘Financial Times’. It would be nice to have had enough money to live on, let alone some to spare to invest. … Mallory sighed again; it was his own fault, he supposed. He had two arms, two legs, a body and a brain, in the same way that they did. If they had used theirs more efficiently than he had used his, well then, the fault must be his and his alone. He started thinking about the rest of the interesting things that made up his life. He had an enormous crop of unpaid bills that didn’t look as if they ever would get paid. They owed money to the milkman, the grocer and the butcher. The house badly needed repairing, the children all needed new clothes, the push chair was worn out and must be renewed. They needed coal and they couldn’t afford any. The problem of finding shillings for the electricity meter—not to mention the gas meter—was a constant nightmare. Rudolf longed for an occasional drink and an occasional smoke and never had either. Mabel needed some new clothes, he needed a new overcoat … the list was endless.
In that dark grey morning, looking through a grimy window into a dark grey world, a dark grey thought began to be born at the back of Rudolf Mallory’s dark grey mind. He could see no hope of an improvement. Jobs were by no means plentiful and he was by no means efficient. Every now and then he had to have a day off sick with either his asthma or his heart, and every time he did that the unpleasant Mr. Claude Mongle, who employed him, gave dark hints about unhealthy men not really being worth their salary. If it hadn’t been for Mabel, the mortgage on the house, the four kids and the heap of bills Rudolf Mallory would have told Claude Mongle just exactly where to go, but he was a wage slave, and wage slaves do exactly as they are told in silence, when they are sufficiently debt emburdened. …
The train reached his station in the city; he got out with a herd of happier, more efficient men and shuffled on chilblained feet, still hiccoughing, still not daring to go as fast as he wanted to because of his heart, wheezing a little from his asthma, in the direction of Mongle’s establishment. It was ten minutes to nine by the time he had got his coat off and opened his ledger.
At nine o’clock precisely Claude Mongle, hawk-like and rather inhuman, looked interestedly over Mallory’s shoulder. Rudolf was writing as rapidly as his chilled fingers would allow; he had no gloves; he could not afford gloves; he had lost the only pair he had ever had and had never been able to afford to replace them. Mongle bid him a rather acidulous ‘Good morning’ and went on to inspect somebody else.
No prospects at all, thought Rudolf, absolutely none. The only prospect was getting the sack, or getting old and getting a pension, which would be considerably less than the eight quid a week he got from Mongle! Life suddenly seemed to stretch out before him like a great drab panorama. He realised as he thought about it that it was very definitely not what he wanted! The dark grey thought came up into his mind again. Why not end it all? He thought of Mabel and the children. Despite her nagging and her lack of understanding, he still loved Mabel; and the kids, noisy, obstreperous as they were—he still loved them. What would happen to them? Probably they would be better off on National assistance. Certainly they couldn’t be any worse off. He shrugged his shoulders and sighed we. . .
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