Sauron Defeated (30 page)

'Telling a story,' answered Ramer glumly, staring at the fire.

'Yes,' said Dolbear. 'But don't try to do that in the nursery sense, or we'll have to roast you.' He got up and looked round at us all. His eyes looked very bright under bristling brows. He turned them sharply on Ramer. 'Come!' he said. 'Come clean!

Where's this place? And how did you get there?'

'I don't know where it is,' said Ramer quietly, still staring at the fire. 'But you're quite right. I went there. At least... well, I don't think our language fits the case. But there is such a world, and I saw it - once.' He sighed.

We looked at him for a long while. All of us - except Dolbear, I think - felt some alarm, and pity. And on the surface of our minds blank incredulity, of course. Yet it was not quite that: we did not feel the underlying emotion of incredulity. For apparently all of us, in some degree, had sensed something odd about that story, and now recognized that it differed from the norm like seeing does from imagining. I felt that it was like the difference between a bright glimpse of a distant landscape: threadlike waters really falling; wind ruffling the small green leaves and blowing up the feathers of birds on the branches, as that can be seen through a telescope: limited but clear and coloured; flattened and remote, but moving and real - between that and any picture. Not, it seemed to me, an effect to be explained simply by art. And yet - the explanation offered was nonsense outside the pages of a romance; or so I found that most of us felt at that moment.

We tried a few 'more questions, but Ramer would not say any more that night. He seemed disgruntled, or tired; though we had not scoffed. To relieve the tension, Frankley read us a short poem he had recently written. It was generous of him, for it was a good piece; but inevitably it fell rather flat. It is, however, pretty well-known now, as it appeared as the opening poem of his 1989 volume: Experiments in Pterodactylics.

We broke up soon after he had read it.

'Ramer,' I said at the door, 'we must hear some more about this, if you can bear it. Can't you come next week?'

'Well, I don't know,' he began.

'0 don't go off to New Erewhon again just yet!' cried Lowdham, a bit too jocularly. [I don't think so. A.A.L.] 'We want more News from Nowhere.'(17)

'I did not say it was Nowhere,' said Ramer gravely. 'Only that it was Somewhere. Well, yes, I'll come.'

I walked part of the way home with him. We did not talk. It was a starry night. He stopped several times and looked up at the sky. His face, pale in the night, had a curious expression, I thought: like a man in a strange country trying to get the points of the compass, and wondering which way his home lies.

In the Turl (18) we parted. I think what the Club really needs is not more stories - yet,' I said. 'They need, I specially want, some description of the method, if you could manage it.' Ramer said nothing. 'Well, good night!' I said. 'This has been one of the great Club evenings, indeed! Who'd have thought that in starting up that literary hare about the most credible way of opening a space-tale I'd blunder on the lair of a real winged dragon, a veritable way of travelling!'

'Then you do believe me?' said Ramer. 'I thought that all of you but Dolbear thought I was spoofing, or else going batty.

You in particular, Nick.'

'Certainly not spoof, Michael. As for battiness: well, in a sense, your claim is a batty one, even if genuine, isn't it? At least, it is, if I've any inkling of it. Though I've nothing to go on but impressions, and such hints as I've managed to get out of Rufus about your recent doings. He's the only one of us that has seen much of you for quite a time; but I rather fancy that even he does not know a great deal?'

Ramer laughed quietly. 'You're a hound, I mean a sleuth-hound, by nature, Nicholas. But I am not going to lay down any more trail tonight. Wait till next week! You can then have a look at my belfry and count all the bats. I'm tired.'

'Sleep well! ' I said.

'I do,' said Ramer. 'Very well indeed. Good night! '

MGR. NG. AAL. PF. WTJ. RD. JJ.

Night 61. Thursday, February 27th, 1987.(19)

A week later we were all together again, in Frankley's rooms this time; and even Cameron had come. As will be seen, he actually made a remark on this occasion, more than his stock

'Thanks for a very enterrtaining evening.' It was generally understood that Ramer was going to read a paper on Real Space-travel.

He was the last to arrive, and we were pleasantly surprised to see that he looked quite well, quite normal, and had not even the rather haggard look he used to have after writing a paper.

He spends a frightful lot of late hours on such things, and burns more paper than he keeps.

Arry Lowdham (20) tapped him all over and pretended to be disappointed by the result. 'No models!' he cried. 'No plans of cylinders, spheres, or anything! Not even a Skidbladnir for a pocket-handkerchief!'(21)

'Now, none of that Nordic stuff, please!' groaned Frankley, who regards knowledge of his own language at any period before the Battle of Bosworth as a misdemeanour, and Norse as a felony.(22)

'No, not even a paper,' said Ramer.

'Why not?' we all cried.

'Because I haven't written one.'

'Oh I say! ' we protested. 'Then you were spoofing all the time?' said Lowdham.

'No,' said Ramer. 'But I'm not going to read a paper. I didn't write one, because it would have been a great sweat; and I wasn't sure that you'ld really want to hear any more about it all.

But if you do, I'm ready to talk.'

'Come on!' we said. Frankley shoved him down into a chair, and gave him a tankard of beer, and a box of matches - for him to strike, hold over a dead pipe, and throw away, as usual.

'Well,' he said after a short silence. 'It begins some way back.

And the threads may seem a bit disconnected at first. The origins were literary, of course, like the discussion last week.

I've always wanted to try a space-travel story, and have never dared. It was one of my earliest ambitions, ever since Out of the Silent Planet appeared, when I was a small boy. That puts it back a bit.'

'Yes, 1938,' said Cameron,(23) whose memory is like that. I doubt if he has ever read the book. The memoirs of minor modern diplomats are more in his line. The remark was his sole contribution.

'I never did write one,' said Ramer, 'because I was always bothered by the machinery, in a literary sense: the way of getting there. I didn't necessarily object to machines; but I never met and couldn't think of any credible vehicle for the purpose. I really agree very much with Nicholas on that point.'

'Well, you tried a pretty ordinary machine on us in that tale,'

said Frankley.

'And seemed pretty disgruntled with me for objecting to it,'

said Guildford.

'I was not really disgruntled,' said Ramer. 'A bit put out, perhaps, as one is when one's disguise is pierced too quickly.

Actually I was interested in the way you all felt the discord: no more than I did myself. But I felt that I had to tell that story to somebody, to communicate it. I wanted to get it out. And yet, and yet now I'm rather sorry. Anyway, I put it in that quickly-made cheap frame, because I didn't want to discuss the way I came by it - at least not yet. But Ruthless Rufus with his

'Yes, he has!' said Dolbear. 'So get on with your confession!'

Ramer paused and considered. 'Well, thinking about methods of getting across Space, I was later rather attracted by what you may call the telepathic notion - merely as a literary device, to begin with. I expect I got the idea from that old book you lent me, Jeremy: Last Men in London, or some name like that.(24) I thought it worked pretty well, though it was too vague about the how. If I remember rightly, the Neptunians could lie in a trance and let their minds travel. Very good, but how does the mind travel through Space or Time, while the body is static?

And there was another weakness, as far as I was concerned: the method seemed to need rational creatures with minds at the other end. But I did not myself particularly want to see - or I should say at that stage, perhaps, write about - what Lewis called hnau.(25) I wanted to see things and places on a grand scale. That was one thread.

'Another thread was dreams. And that had a literary origin, too, partly. Because Rufus and I have long been interested in dreams, especially in their story-and-scene-making, and in their relation to waking fiction. But as far as I could judge such things, it did seem to me that a pretty good case had been made out for the view that in dream a mind can, and sometimes does, move in Time: I mean, can observe a time other than that occupied by the sleeping body during the dream.'

'But of course it can, and without sleeping,' said Frankley. 'If we were confined to the present, we couldn't think at all, even if we could perceive or feel.'

'But I mean moving not by memory, or by calculation, or by invention, as the waking mind can be said to move; but as a perceiver of the external, of something new that is not yet in the mind. For if you can see, in other times than the time of dreaming, what you never saw in waking life, so that it is not in your memory - seeing the future, for instance, would be a clear case, and it cannot reasonably be doubted that that occurs -

then obviously there is a possibility of real first-hand seeing of what is "not there", not where your body is.'

'Not even your eyes?' said Frankley.

'Ah,' said Ramer, 'that is of course a point. I shall come to that later. It is probably a case of "translation"; but leave it for a bit. I was thinking of dreaming chiefly, though I don't suppose the possibility is really limited to that state. Only, if you live in a never-ending racket of sense-impressions, other more distant noises have to be very loud to be heard. And this movement, or transference of observation: it is clearly not limited to Other Time; it can occur in Other Space, or in both. A dreamer is not confined to the events of Other Time occurring in his bedroom.'

'But wouldn't you expect to be limited to the places where you yourself have been, or will be, in Other Time?' asked Guildford.

'That's not the general human tradition about visions,' said Ramer. 'Nor is it borne out by authenticated modern instances.

And it is not my experience, as you will see. But naturally I thought about that point. I think, actually, that it is clear that the mind can be in two places at one time: two or more; once you have made it more than one, the figure is, perhaps, not very important. For I suppose, as far as the mind goes, you can't get nearer to saying where it is than to say where its attention is.

And that, of course, may be decided by various causes, internal and external.

'You can get a sort of literary parallel. I think it is a pertinent one, actually; for I don't think literary invention, or fancy, is mixed up in all this by accident. When you are writing a story, for instance, you can (if you're a vivid visualizer, as I am, and are clearly visualizing a scene) see two places at once. You can see (say) a field with a tree and sheep sheltering from the sun under it, and be looking round your room. You are really seeing both scenes, because you can recollect details later. Details of the waking scene not attended to, because you were abstracted: there's no doubt of that. I should as certainly add: details of the inner scene, blurred because you were to some extent distracted.

'As far as my own visualizing goes, I've always been impressed by how often it seems independent of my will or planning mind (at the moment). Often there is no trace of composing a scene or building it up. It comes before the mind's eye, as we say, in a way that is very similar to opening closed eyes on a complete waking view.* (26) I find it difficult, usually quite impossible, to alter these pictures to suit myself, that is my waking purpose. As a rule I find it better, and in the end more right, to alter the story I'm trying to tell to suit the pictures. If the two really belong together - they don't always, of course.

But in any case, on such occasions you are really seeing double, or simultaneously. You tend to associate the two views, inner and outer, though the juxtaposition of them may be, usually is, their only connexion. I still associate a view of a study I no longer possess and a pile of blue-and-yellow-covered exam-scripts (long burnt, I hope) with the opening scene of a book I wrote years ago: a great morain high up in the barren mountains.'

'I know', said Jeremy, 'the foot of the Glacier in The Stone-eaters.'(27)

'I think a connexion could be made out between those two scenes,' said Frankley.

'It's very difficult to find any two things that the story-making faculty cannot connect,' said Ramer. 'But in this case the story-scene came into my head, as it is called, long before the examination reality. The two are connected only because I was re-visualizing, revisiting, the Glacier-foot very strongly that day.'