kroth:  the slant

7: southward

I confess, it may have been a close thing. Until my next sleep period I managed to stay on target, resolved to do what I had resolved to do, but when I lost consciousness I lost my courage as well, and slipped into the most unhelpful dream: I had fallen on my face; I scrabbled and clutched at a damp grass slope as I tried in vain not to begin the last slide, the endless fall.
    I awoke; I forgot the nightmare. Reasonably determined to be a good brave boy and stick to my decision, I went off to work. But there, another backlash occurred.
    It happened during the tea-break. While I and the rest of the staff on my floor were gathering round to pick our brews from the trolley, all of a sudden I turned clammy and sick: cowardice had pounced on me, a confused wave of love and need for my little niche in Topland broke over me; no kind of argument, just an inner shrieking that pleaded, cling, cling to this tea-trolley domain, rather than go and fight for it.
    A single word bounced into my ear:
    “When?”
    It had come from one of the nurses' lips. A member of the admin staff replied: “As soon as I have cleared my desk.”
    “Any decade now, in other words,” scoffed one of his colleagues.
    Nobody laughed; and it was then that I understood that the clerk had stated his intention to enlist.
    I broke into the conversation and asked where I might find the recruitment office. Nobody laughed at me either; my voice was steady, and I hadn't had the visible shakes, so they probably thought I was being cool about it. The clerk sketched a map for me.
    The recruitment office was within walking distance, and I – glad that I had no desk that needed clearing; glad that my moral wobble was over – went off during my lunch break.
    The office was just an office. The receptionist at this doorway to doom simply took down my name, looked in a diary and gave me an appointment for the next day. Naturally. To be expected. I had no reasonable cause for dissatisfaction; yet, keen to start my training immediately, to march south as soon as possible and get it all over, I felt jittery with impatience.
    “You're crazy,” I said to myself. “No I'm not,” I retorted. “How long will my fit of courage last? I would be crazy if I didn't make full use of it before it fizzles out.” Exactly how soon that fizzle would occur – that was the vital question. No telling when I might suffer another attack like the one at the tea-trolley, involving some other symbol of civilized comfort. The answer, I told myself, depends upon which is the stronger, fear of what I am letting myself in for, or love of what I'll be fighting for; and since fear and love cannot be weighed, I cannot foresee the outcome, so I must commit, fast! I could not trust myself even one minute ahead.
    That evening, with these anxieties snaking around inside my skull, I took a gamble.  The notion that my fears were of the kind that multiplied in darkness, and that I could dispel them simply by shining the light of knowledge upon them, prompted me, after work, to head for the local library. I was determined to read up on the risky topics. For example: the international situation; the Gonomong; and what conditions might await me on the lower, steep-sloped latitudes of Kroth. “Face your fears and get over them” – that was the idea.
    Sound advice, no doubt; except that, in trying it, I almost scuppered my plans for good and all.
    In the reference section I sat down with a heavy, one-volume, abridged Encyclopaedia Universalis. Intending to let myself into it cautiously, as if an oblique approach could help you across a tightrope, I decided to begin not with “Gonomong” but with “Armed Forces”.
    “So, here we go: ARMED FORCES.... hmm.... stuff about organization, ranks, equipment.... see FORTIFICATIONS.... so turn to FORTIFICATIONS....” I riffled on through the top-right corners of the pages and came to “FORT-” and heaved the wodge of pages over and they whammed down to display a full-page illustration which smote my understanding with such impact that as I heaved the volume shut again I almost fell out of the chair. No good, no good, I gasped in futile rejection of the fortress of Neydio, latitude 60 degrees, slope 30 degrees. Leave it alone, leave it alone, I muttered as I stumbled out of the reference room. Down the stairs I lurched, through the swing door and out of the library.
    Perhaps if the picture had been described to me by someone else, instead of seen directly by my own eyes, terror would not have poked its bright eye over the parapet. I could then still have searched for knowledge by word of mouth; could have asked around, got chatting, joined a class to help myself adjust. But time was short and I wasn't taking any more chances. The only sure way for me to deal with the demon of fright was to close the frontier of knowledge, set up an Iron Curtain and post up “ignorance is bliss” along the barbed wire.
    So there you go, Duncan my lad, your fact-finding efforts have left you in a worse state than before.
    I stood sweating in the interview room at the recruitment office the next morning. A sharp-eyed man in his forties looked up from the papers that littered his desk. His was a kindly face, with that look of superior relaxation which is a sure sign of rank.
    “Sit down, Wemyss. I'm Major Dittenden. I want to know your reason for joining the armed forces at this particular time.”
    “To fight for Topland, sir.”
    “To fight for Topland.” He flicked at a document and then expressed himself with a mild Krothan expletive: “Kerunk, lad, according to these records you are oneirogeocentric, extremely so. Should you not confine yourself to some reserved occupation? Some task that you can carry out with honour to support the war effort from closer to home? As a soldier in the field I expect you'd be all right physically – it appears you passed the medical easily enough – but with your inevitable phobia about the Slope, you would be an encumbrance. You'd do us more harm than good. You must see that.”
    “I do, sir, but I also see that if things were as cut and dried as you say, you would be telling me, not asking me.”
    He smiled, “That's a little hit you've scored. Go on.”
    I have a trick, which sometimes works, when I need to say something effective. I de-focus my eyes. Then I can no longer see the person I am speaking to, and this helps me carry out a compensatory sharpening of inner focus, turning my ordinary verbal ability into something higher than average. I did this now, so that Major Dittenden's face became a blur to me as I replied:
    “Sir, I heard General Faraliew say something positive about ignorance. Whatever he may have meant, I can tell you for sure that I have made a bargain, by which I am able to suppress fear provided that I suppress knowledge too. I can be a simple soldier – with the emphasis on simple. Yes, I want to live in Topland – I need Topland – and that means I must fight in defence of my home. I cannot endure not to. Even if I could do useful work at home, the idea of staying safe while others protect me – no, sir, I couldn't do it.”
    Major Dittenden thought for perhaps three seconds, then pushed a paper towards me. “Sign here.” I signed; he countersigned. (Kerunk! thought I, my tactics sometimes work.) “Very well, soldier, you can report to barracks tomorrow afternoon,” he continued, “provided you spend up the kit-list: just remember, you're not on Earth now.” And that was that. Interview over. But what exactly – I wondered as I made my way out into the street – had he meant by his final sentence?  Not wanting to seem dopey, I hadn't asked him. Never mind. I had said the right things. I was in.
    I looked at the signed paper in my hand and saw that most of it, the kit-list part, was in the form of tear-off vouchers. So that was it. The idea evidently was that each recruit must equip himself, by going round the shops that sold the items for the kitbag. Fair enough. Just a looser way of doing things here; admin less centralised, less spoon-feeding than in the dream of Earth. Only –
    I stared at the most disquieting voucher.
    Weaponry: one pistol. Fight a war with pistols?
    You're not on Earth now, that's for sure.
    Oh, well, presumably the enemy, likewise, don't have anything more accurate or long-range than we do. There'd be no point in sending us south to be slaughtered, would there?

                                                   *

Dr Rallod, just before I left his employ, said to me: “You're following your conscience, Duncan. You're not being pushed, remember that. If you should change your mind and choose to stay, no women are going to hand you any white feathers.”
    “I know that,” I said. “I know this is a good society.”
    “Better than Earth?” he smiled.
    “Yes!” I gave back.
    He lifted his brows at my defiant tone. “Well! A serious compliment! And I suppose it clinches the matter – but....”
    His hesitation gave me the opportunity to interrupt respectfully.
    “Please, no 'buts', Doctor. I realize I'm not trained, but....”
    He, likewise, interrupted:
    “That's just it, but but but! You won't ever get trained. There isn't time.”
    “Uh?” I didn't believe him. I could not have heard aright. Send untrained people to the front line? Was that the way things worked around here?
    I opened my mouth to protest – and then I remembered that it was my plan to keep things simple, which meant, as far as possible, keeping my mouth shut. Anyhow, since I liked this world so much, I ought to trust it, too. Despite its apparent absurdities, it had been good to me so far. Life on Kroth was worth while.
    I must just hope that I would live to enjoy it. I was seventeen; would I make eighteen? My thoughts focused on this, as I absent-mindedly thanked Dr Rallod and took my leave.
    ….Not that I would ever actually celebrate my eighteenth birthday here. Dream-words such as “year” and “decade” and “century” are still used, loosely remembered as they are from Earth, but there are no years officially measured on Kroth, only days. Hundreds of millions of numbered days of recorded history. For example, my Krothan birth certificate states that I was born on Day 935,305,651. The Change, or the Awakening from the Dream of Earth, occurred on 935,312,037, when I was 6,386 days old….
    Dates on Kroth look more like bank account numbers. Or – credit card numbers!
    I smiled at this whimsy. Young though I am for a credit card, my minimum payment is already due.

                                                   *

There were fewer men of military age in the streets than there had been the previous day; war-news had spread its influence like a suction pump through Savaluk. Drawing my cloak of ignorance about me, I averted my eyes from the placards and walked past them without buying any newspapers. “Since I'm headed for the real thing,” I figured, “what need is there to read about it as well?”
    The great blockish barracks building was magnificent in its heavy way, many-storied and fronted by columns. It stood well back from the street.  This allowed space for an enormous square, which was crowded with soldiers and vehicles. As I neared the ENTRY sign, several long jeeps carrying youngsters in sky-blue uniform, on their way out, rumbled past me on the other lane.
    I passed into the square and approached the building. Out of its front doors, like a lolling tongue, poked a queue of recruits. I unslung my kitbag and, carrying it by hand, joined the end of the queue. There were questions I was bursting to ask but the queue was shuffling forward, as fast as in an efficient post-office where all the counters are manned and none of the customers happen to want anything complicated; so there wasn't that stability which encourages conversation between strangers. Still, why not risk a word or two? I could tap the large youngster in front of me on his hulking shoulder and ask, for instance, Are we really going to fight a war with pistols? No, wait and you'll learn; so I told myself for the umpteenth time. On we shuffled, and the great doors drew closer, and I raised my eyes to the magnificent relief sculpture on the central frontage above them: it was an armoured man on horseback, three times life-size, with a wavy-lined cross blazoned on his shield. A phrase came into my head, that I must have heard somewhere: the Ripply Cross. A wavy line, in the iconography of Topland, was packed with connotations of heavenly peace, for the waves stood for the idyllic polar sea, Nistoom. And a cross composed of wavy lines combined this symbolism with the added quality of a Christian message. Love, peace, gentleness. On the other hand the man was in armour, astride a warhorse, and holding a long, strange, two-pronged lance. Curling above his shield were the words,
               NOTHINGE DID HE DREAD
and below it:
               BUT EUER WAS YDRAD
    Underneath the sculptured hoofs was inscribed:
    “General Necon Carredh, 935,120,419 – 935,147,904.”
    Others in the queue besides me were looking up at the impressive carving. The big lad in front of me said, “Uh – what does 'ydrad' mean?”
    The youngster in front of him said, “Goof – what do you think it means? Dreaded! Frightened! Means he weren't scared of nothing, others were scared of him.”
    “Why is it spelt all funny, like?”
    “I'm surprised you could tell! Fact is, no one knew how to spell in those days – bet you wish you lived then, eh, Archie?”
    We passed through the doors. In the lobby, a close-mouthed official checked through the stuff I had bought with the vouchers, measured me and issued me with the one thing the Army did give out directly – a uniform, which I donned while they stored away my old clothes. Again I asked no questions; all of us were being processed with breathtaking speed (except for Archie; they had taken one look at him, and led him away to be measured for a special-sized uniform). Then, ordered to follow my predecessors, I was out again, in the open air. A voice told me to hurry and I – bewildered with the thought, Is this it already? – stepped up to fill the last space on a crowded jeep, which immediately roared off, swerving through the exit from the square and onto the avenue.
    Including myself there were twenty men in blue, mostly young, in the back of the jeep as we rolled southwards. Pedestrians waved to us as we swept by, and we waved back, and then came the twinge, the moment of understanding, when there was no one left to wave to and no option but to take on board the fact that the streets of Savaluk were behind us and we had accelerated onto the Great Royal Road.
    But can this really be it, already?
    Better look intelligent; it might help.
    We were on a section of the GRR that I had never seen – the part I had slept through on the way up, long ago it seemed, in Fabrizio's van. We were part of a strung-out procession, with similar vehicles some couple of hundred yards ahead of us and behind us.
    Occasional hills varied the landscape, and where necessary the road curved around them, but for the most part this area of Topland was quite flat, allowing our stretch of road to run absolutely straight and our jeep to bullet along at motorway velocity, the wind roaring in our faces. I stole glances at faces and asked myself: was I the only one in the group who was flabbergasted at the speed with which this whole business had begun? Quite likely I was. The others, properly equipped with Krothan memories, must be more in tune with the unceremonious Krothan way of doing things. Nevertheless for them, as for me, it must be a solemn occasion. Some talked, but more were silent, and my own reticence did not seem unusual.
“Flat country” I call it, but of course nowhere on Kroth is it really flat, save at Nistoom, the actual pole. Already, therefore, we were descending the Slope, though, as yet, it was not detectable to the eye. I did sums in my head…. With roughly seventy miles to one degree of latitude, even at motorway speed it might be two or three hours before any gradient became noticeable.
    Hurriedly amassing reasons to look on the bright side, my brain churned out a flow of morale-boosting thoughts:
    I haven't chickened out, which is good. Some of the other lads look more worried than I am. Good, that means I am not the worst. On the other hand some look less worried than I am. Good, that means there's less to worry about than I think. Some look weedier and less fit than I do. Good, that means I am not the worst. Others look a lot tougher than I do. Good, they'll be stalwart when I have to fight beside them. Good, good, every way good.  And the pistols: the ridiculous, footling pistols: could it be that the warring nations of Kroth have hit upon a set of habits and conventions designed to minimise battle casualties? Something like the Plains Indians with their “counting coup”? And whatever the range, we shall have the advantage of gradient. We're fighting from the North; the enemy has to climb up from the South. We can charge down on them. So all of that is good.
    I did more sums in my head: we would make several hundred miles by nightfall.... and there would be a nightfall, for by that time we would have reached a point far enough south to enter the zone of day and night.... and wouldn't it be nice to experience sunset and sunrise again! So, again, good….
On the other hand –
    (Stop that, I commanded as I found myself looking morbidly ahead to see if I could begin to discern the Slope.)
    I had not yet spoken to any of my companions; I had, as the saying goes, retreated “into my shell”. But most of the others were quiet too, perhaps for the same reason. They were, after all, Toplanders, who maybe had never set foot outside their fortunate level country; who might have even less experience of the Slope than I. I at least came from Guthtin, fifteen degrees of latitude lower down. So in some ways I might be less “green” than they.  This was a point that had not occurred to me before.

                                                        *

Approximately every half hour the jeep stopped for the sake of those of us who needed the loo. On the first such occasion, as we all clambered back on, I noted that the uniforms all appeared to be identical. Nobody wore extra stripes. We had no officers! Not even a lance-corporal was included among us. Yet the men seemed disciplined enough. Self-disciplined. That got me thinking: might I trust this lot? Trust them enough, for me to risk letting them know about my mental Earth-centredness? My lack of Krothan memories? I remembered the passage in Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions that vividly describes the “hazing” suffered by a recruit to the US Army during World War Two, ostensibly on account of his being a Jew, while in the same unit another recruit, likewise Jewish, is not bullied at all. As far as I could recall, the author gives no precise reason for the difference in treatment of the two men, but perhaps he was suggesting that Jewishness wasn't the main issue, it was more a case of one person giving out anxious vibes which aroused the bullying instinct in others, whereas another person didn't. In which case, all would depend on the manner in which I made my own admission of “differentness” – the “differentness” in my case being “Earthishness”. The best way would be to emit a kind of forthright vibe.  Abundant self-confidence plus zero sensitivity. That would be the style to adopt when taking the social plunge – which, sooner or later, I must do.
After about two and a half hours we passed a village sign which said:  “Merebbon: 88 degrees North”.
    “Still can't see the tilt in the ground,” I heard myself say to the soldier next to me.
    The lad – he looked a couple of years older than I – answered with a bit of a Mancunian accent (although so far as I know there is no Manchester on Kroth): “Two degrees down not quite enough. Three, and you'll see it.”
    “Is that a fact?”
    “So I'm told,” he shrugged.
    Seeing as my mouth appeared to have opened of its own accord to start this conversation, and since it seemed to be going all right, I had the confidence to continue: “It'll be almost a relief, you know, when the ground does start to tip. I've psyched myself up….”
    Oh brother, that's torn it. Shouldn't have admitted that I need to “psych myself up”. Fool to suggest that I have a problem with the Slope! Will anyone want to fight alongside a.... gradientophobe?
    “Yeah, me too,” came the reply. “Besides, I'm curious to see it. Must be one hell of a sight.”
    So – my mood swung to self-confidence again – I needn't have worried. This fellow had spent all his life in Topland, whereas my home village of Guthtin was way down at fifteen degrees of Slope, so (I made the point to myself again) I actually had the advantage of experience over him.  My ego began one of its waves of expansion. It got to the point where, in making friends, I was ready to take the kind of risk that can sometimes cut corners.
    “Have you ambitions,” I asked him, “to become an officer?”
    “Er – how did you guess?”
    “You're trying to grow an air-force-officer-style moustache,” I explained in cheeky mode, risking the use of humour to cut corners in making friends. Everyone remembered the dream of Earth; it was surely good enough ground, common and safe enough ground, for jokes.
    My remark set off some snorts from others sitting nearby. “Colonel Prabbs – sounds good enough, Bernie?” “This guy's got you sussed out, Bernie!”
    Bernie, the Mancunian, said loftily, “No he hasn't. He's got the 'air force' bit totally wrong.”
    “I should think so – seeing as there isn't one!”
    Bernie said, “It's the Navy I'm interested in.” He said it quite loudly, and I recognized his technique. Social chess, you might say. Occupy a key square to prevent your opponent doing so. For example, here he was defying them to make the obvious retort, “There's no Navy either!”, and because it was so obvious, they couldn't say it, else they'd exhibit a weakness in repartee.  Having won command of the centre squares he turned to me and went on:  “What inspires me, is that I'm dead keen on the Hornblower books.”
    “So am I,” I said delightedly. During the next few minutes a friendship was born, based on a shared admiration for those terrific yarns of the final war with France. In addition to the fun of discussing literature, I had further opportunity to gauge my own relation to the vast majority who did not share my Earth-centred mental world. The differences between us, but also the limits of those differences, became clearer. Bernie, like the others, like almost everybody, remembered Earth as a faded illusion, an intermittent memory, subordinate to the real life he was living, rather than the full and vivid dream-set which I possessed; yet with regard to literature inside that dream we were on equal terms. Neither of us, after all, had ever sailed in the Royal Navy in Nelson's time. (In fact I've never been on a real sailing ship.)  It is only the magical skill of C S Forrester that can bring Hornblower's era alive for any of us; so in that topic I have no advantage over the people of Kroth.
    A chance moment came when others had fallen silent and I could tell they were listening to Prabbs and me. Never would there be a better moment, thought I, to “let the cat out of the bag”. With the help of literature – which is a dream in any case – I could make my confession harmless.
    So I said: “The world of the seven seas is home to me.”
    He's an oneiro, the whispers went round.
    “Well, not home exactly,” I amended in haste, “because Kroth is what's real, and what's real has to be home. But Earth is what I remember, more than here. Earth is what I'm – er – centred on.”
    Silence stretched for a few ticks.
    “Well, kid,” one companion growled, shrugging his gorilla-sized shoulders, “you're an oneiro, but we're all shonks round here.”
    Not knowing what a shonk was, I didn't immediately reply. I was, moreover, becoming aware that no reply was needed just then: for the whispers and the comments were none of them hostile. They were just curious. I had got away with it.
    “Speak for yourself, Jake,” said another soldier; “I'm no shonk. I've spent a good part of my life as far down as fifty-five. That's a Slope of thirty-five.”
    This drew immediate fire. “Be quiet, Terry, we know you can do arithmetic.” “Yeah, Terry, we all know you're the globe-trotting type.”
    The driest response came from Jake: “I on the other hand am just a humble TV repairman.” He sounded the opposite of humble as he said this – Krothan machinery being so prone to breakdown, repairmen are the elite of the workforce.
    I interposed: “A shonk, I take it, is a Toplander.”
    “More or less,” agreed Bernie Prabbs. “Or, more loosely, if you live on the Slope you can slap the label onto anyone who lives further north. That’s to say: anyone who inhabits an easier gradient than you is, as far as you’re concerned, a shonk. So we Toplanders are the only ones who haven't got anyone to use the word against – 'cause nobody lives to the north of us; we're the real, literal, ultimate shonks – flatties, softies – the lucky so-and-so's who live on easy-peasy level ground.”
    “And how serious an insult is it - shonk?”
    The men looked at each other uncertainly. The much-travelled Terry offered an opinion, “Mild to moderately abusive, I'd say. Sort of on a par with gringo, maybe.”
    I confessed, “No matter how far south I lived on Kroth I'd be a shonk in memory, since my memory remains anchored on Earth, and, well, as you know, all over Earth there are – there were – slopes but no Slope with a capital S. As you all know,” I repeated, “as well as I do.”
    “Yes, it doesn't do to underestimate us,” said Terry dryly. “Our Earth memories, though no doubt fainter than yours, are equally informative as to details.”
    “So, shonk one way, shonk the other, what does it matter?” I continued to muse. “I've been slow on the uptake.”
    “How do you mean?” asked Terry.
    “Oh, just that, for hours I'd been shy of opening my mouth just because I reckoned no one would believe I could – er – cope on the Slope as well as you lot.”
    “Hey, man, Cope on the Slope!” cried Jake. “Let's make a march out of it. Cope-on-the-Slope, ratta-ta-tum….”
    I had “broken the ice”; I had admitted to my drawbacks and had suffered no social repercussions. As a bonus, in doing all this I had helped to enliven the group as a whole. No longer did I scan the horizon ahead with quite the same fearful attention as before, and in my elation I must have overlooked the first dread evidence of visible tilt. When I did notice it, I was amazed at my own lack of fear. Careful! Remember, this is just the start. The steepness accelerates as you go down. As I wobbled on the ridge between overconfidence and terror, I was, fortunately, jolted out of these musings.
    “Looks like we're about to hit town,” said Terry. “About time.”
    The jeep ahead of us swerved to the right, leaving the Great Royal Road, and we followed, onto a side-road that led us under a sign saying “WELCOME TO GHEEN” before widening abruptly. We debouched onto an asphalt arc that looked likely to form the wide rim of an enormous circle; along this rim we rolled past hundreds of parked jeeps, motorcycles, staff cars and supply vans, till our driver pulled to a stop in a section with space available. I guessed that the entire circle must be big enough to hold an army, and perhaps was holding one, in a scattered sort of way. Inward, the hub was a pedestrian zone with stalls, cafes, throngs of customers; and beyond that, beyond the circle altogether, rose some three-storied buildings with inn-signs upon their roofs, visible from afar: “The Tilt”, “The Blue Yonder”, “The Sagging Horizon”, “The Slippery Slope”. Very funny, I grimaced as I rose from my seat. On my original way North, I had probably stopped at this place, but I had slept through the experience. Like it or not, now was the time to catch up on what I had missed.
    The others were pouring out of the jeep while the driver said, “Three hours liberty! Three hours, remember!” – just before he himself jumped off.  He turned to me. “Come on, lad. Make the most of it.”

                                                      *

I got down stiffly and followed. The pedestrian hub, positioned like a magnified island amid a traffic roundabout, drew me and many other recruits who might otherwise have put too sudden a strain on the facilities of the inns beyond. I stepped onto the “island” alongside a notice which said:

                Gheen – 87 degrees 30 minutes North
                         Where the Slope Begins!

True enough, I reckoned: this is the region where you start to see the Slope. But not on this precise spot; right here you can actually forget it because the vehicle park is banked up level, and the stalls and the bustle and commotion would in any case mask a tilt of only two and a half degrees, and so fear’s creep is here concealed, though I shall have to confront it before long.
    I pushed on among the stalls, benches, tables. Girls in white and yellow uniform were emerging from a pavilion carrying trays and handing them to anyone who wanted one; the smell of sausages wafted in my direction, nicely associated with the welcoming, decorous sight of the girls; I wondered what they were being paid to look so happy. No – that was a rubbish thought.  An Earth thought.
    “Thanks – er – Zory,” I said, glimpsing her name badge.
    “Not Zory – Zorrie,” she simpered.
    I set down my tray at the end of a table. “Zorry?” I said, cupping my ear; she almost doubled up at this witticism, and skipped off, leaving me with a plate of sausages and spring onions, a hunk of bread and a mug of beer, and a deep gratitude towards Life, Fate and the Army's catering department as I munched away. I paid no attention to the strangers at the other end of my table, nor did I try very hard to locate Bernie and the rest as I gazed around; I would see enough of them shortly.
    Then when I had just about finished I did spot one of them: Jake, the ex-TV-repair-man. He was wearing the look of someone who has been given a job to do as he exchanged a few words with the diners on the next table; then as he lumbered over to my table I saw he was wearing a badge with letters on it.
    “Hi, Jake – what does CC stand for? Chief Commander?”
    “Complaints Commission,” he shrugged. “Any gripes so far?”
    “Certainly not. This stuff's good,” I replied, tapping the plate with my fork.
    “Courtesy of the War Office.”
    “Well,” I remarked, “if they're equally good at other aspects of the campaign, the enemy had better watch out….”
    Jake merely nodded and said, “Anyhow, if you want to see the gry pee, he's over that way.” He pointed, added, “See you,” and left me for another table, where I saw him lean over and exchange a few words….
    I wondered, uneasily: whoever heard of a nice army? A comfortable army, good at serving food, but providing no training. A clever army, scouting the opinions of its soldiers, to invite grumbling as a safety valve…. But what was the use of that if, militarily, we were a bunch of amateurs heading south to get slaughtered….  My jitters needed to be laid to rest; I jumped up and strode in the direction Jake had indicated, to locate the gry pee, the person to gripe to, the Complaints Commissioner, whose very existence abetted my suspicion that this army was far too soft to be at all convincing as a fighting force. Dare I point this out? Probably not.  Not only did I lack confidence in the Service, I had no confidence in my own thought-processes either.  My assumptions about military life, coloured by having read Starship Troopers, were highly dubious…. Yet common sense did insist that some toughening ought to be involved.  I was soft, and to save my own life I wanted to be made hard.  Still, this was only the first day.  Ah, but already I had sensed an atmosphere of flimsy credibility...
    On the far side of the pedestrian zone, a small audience – ten or so – was scattered around some semi-circles of mostly empty seats. I joined this gathering, a few other recruits drifting in with me. We all sat facing towards an officer, an upright sixtyish man, who was standing on a sort of podium at the central position, with what looked like four henchmen seated beside him on low three-legged stools.
    “C'maaaan, roll up there!” roared the gry pee in the style of a desperate stall-holder. “Don't be shy! Let's have some serious complaint now.”
    A trooper in the audience stood up and said, “Sir, I reckon I have one.”
    “Good; spit it out! And you, jury, wake up, listen and record!” the gry pee added for the benefit of the four beside him, who had been hunched with their elbows on their knees, staring boredly at the ground. They reached for their clip-boards.
    The trooper then proceeded at tedious length to voice his complaint. It concerned the lack of guidelines in the packing of equipment into vans. We listened to him make the point that not enough thought was being put into the order in which the items were packed. Serious delays at the other end would occur if the stuff could not be taken out again in practical sequence when the van had reached its destination…. It seemed a conscientious complaint, most likely self-interested insofar as the trooper foresaw his own involvement in the unpacking process and didn't want to get blamed when things went wrong, but none the less valid for that.
    The gry pee said, “Jury! Is this a gripe worth listening to?”
    The four glanced at each other, exchanged a few whispers and then bestirred themselves to nod. Their foreman said, “We'd give it a Cee-plus, sir.”
    “So! I am therefore obliged,” the gry pee addressed us, “to provide an answer. And my answer is this: Doubtless the way the vans are packed is wasteful, but, in war, if you eliminate one waste, you create another, so that in this particular case, for instance, in order to spend less time at the unpacking end you would have to spend more time on organization at the packing end. So what the hell. We'll look into it, but don't expect too much. Jury! Have I answered? Yes? Thank you. Next!
    I told myself that this was the moment, if only I could bring myself to stand up and voice my own gripe, but the trouble was, having heard his style, my mind raced ahead to guess what his answer would be: yes, we could train you, but that would take time and resources, and so what you gain on the swings you'd lose on the roundabouts, as the enemy would be doing things during that time, employing his own resources…
    No one else volunteered anything either.
    “Next!” roared the gry pee, peremptorily refusing to accept our silence. “Next!” His voice grated like a stalling engine, his disappointment coming through to me as real. A crazy spirit of helpfulness overcame me, as though I had nothing better to do than oil the wheels of this set-up. I rose to say my piece after all.
    “Sir,” I began, “most of us – I mean, sir, is it wise to send raw recruits like me southwards into battle with no training? I realize,” I snatched at the clever thought that I might pre-empt the argument, “that if we start training, it might give the enemy ideas in the same direction, and he might get trained too, which you could say might lead to something as bad as an arms race – a skills race. But….”
    Silence enfolded the scene. The gry pee was grinning at me.
    “But, what?” he said. “Is the thought popping into your head, that maybe you have answered your own question?”
    “Yessir, I s'pose so,” I mumbled.
    A loud laugh tipped the gry pee's head back and then he swung towards the “jury”.
    “An acceptable gripe nevertheless, wouldn't you agree? Keeps our show on the road, eh?”
    “Yeah,” they responsed to this heavy prompting. “Bee-minus,” added the foreman.
    He turned back to me and now his grin was gone.
    “Your name,” he demanded.
    “Wemyss, sir.”
    “Private Wemyss, you have a fidgety brain.”
    “Yessir.”
    “Don't overdo it, and you may go far. And now to respond to your question – because your own answer doesn't quite fit the bill:
    “A lot of people say we don't train our recruits, but this is true only if you are referring to pre-combat training. If you survive, you'll certainly get trained on the job. It has to be this way; do you see why it has to be this way, Wemyss?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Come on, think. ALL OF YOU, THINK.” He scowled round the rows of seats. “Let me make a comparison that ought to be familiar to everybody, since this point is likely to come up again and again, as we all remember what Earth was like. Cast your minds back to that old dream. Remember that Earth's universe is mostly a realm of weightless Space. Try to imagine the training problem there, if a space war was in the offing, you were going to have to fight weightless and yet your training had to be confined to the ground! You couldn't do it. There'd be no way of duplicating that Space environment. You could try underwater, but it wouldn't really be the same sort of thing because you'd be surrounded by the pressure and the inertia of the water instead of the true emptiness of Space. Now then. Our problem is not that we're going to have to fight weightless; on the contrary, our Space presents us with the terrifying alternative, since weight pervades this universe; but our case is similar insofar as we're going to face a thing for which we are not and cannot be prepared; a thing that cannot be imitated beforehand. What would you expect us to do? Build, in the flat terrain of Topland, mock-ups of the Slope? Use mere hill-slopes to fake a tilt in the very world? Actually it's been tried, and practice has shown that the so-called 'experience' gained is never any real good. It's never sufficiently convincing. Nothing prepares you for fighting on the Slope, except fighting on the Slope.”

                                                   *

The physical task of transporting an army over two thousand miles southwards to the front line involved much wear and tear on Krothan machinery. Frequently a vehicle would break down and its complement of soldiers would be distributed among others; room for this had been allowed for, as none of the jeeps had started out full. We actually looked forward to breakdowns as a relief from hours and hours of monotonous riding and the inevitable stiffness and soreness. But for me, the mental business of enduring that journey was not much like any kind of ride at all.
    Rather, it resembled crossing a dangerous torrent on foot. The “stepping stones” are the bright, optimistic moments. The gaps between them are the fears. To get across those gaps, you use the firmness and the lightness of heart which one good episode gives you, to jump you to the next. Jump a good jump and you don't fall in.
    The tilt in the world had got to about five degrees when I heard the first engine switch off. One of the staff cars in our convoy, which happened to be running close to us, now ran silently, using the gradient alone, no longer needing to use fuel. It wasn't long before the driver of our jeep (a heavier vehicle, creating more friction with the road surface) was able to switch off likewise. The cessation of our motor, the awful sense of resigning all control, the surrender to the pull of gravity – that queasy moment might really have got to me if I had allowed it to conspire with something else, with the slight but increasingly ominous sag in the forward horizon.
    Fortunately (and not a moment too soon) relief came. From here on downwards, the builders of the road had ensured that no straight stretch should last more than a couple of miles. So now, instead of hurtling directly South, we zig-zagged down.  Let this be a lesson, I told myself, to trust the authorities; I might have guessed that they would not be so stupid as to allow us to get carried away by a lethal slide into continuous acceleration on an endless “free-fall” Slope.
    That relief was my next “stepping stone”.
    During the following lunch-break we found, as we ambled back from the inn, that our jeep was gone. It had been driven back north. What? No more transportation? None of us could explain it.
    “There's Murena. Ask him,” suggested Bernie.
    An officer was standing ten yards off, at a part of the depot where some other jeeps had been parked; those vehicles, like ours, were gone, and in their stead were some cheap and flimsy-looking metal carts, into some of which soldiers were already climbing. The officer, swarthy and imperturbable, supervised the embarkation with occasional languid gestures. When he noticed us he pointed to the cart assigned to us.
    “Captain Murena, sir,” said Terry Croale, “are we really supposed to ride in that thing?”
    “Yep. Downhill all the way.” His mouth quirked as he spoke those words, as happens when someone quotes a cliché. And that was the whole extent of the help we got from Murena. We got the message: If I'm not worried, you ought not to be worried either.
    Well, the cart's brakes should work…. and the zig-zag road must in any case prevent uncontrolled increase in speed…. and if the authorities weren't worried…. it all seemed right in theory….  
    We got on, and our driver (a sergeant Paxton) released the brake. The cart began to roll. Downhill all the way. No motor. One-way. We're being poured down… My thoughts backed off, like a dog with hackles raised.  Really, you must take it easy, Duncan old ego, I whispered; hang on, boy, hang on; no use snarling at the laws of nature. And really, it isn't so bad; only a few degrees as yet.
    The fact that this army depot – Ullend was its name – was situated amid rich farming country, helped. It is hard to feel spooked when rolling past orderly hedgerows and fields dotted with cows. It all looked, from a certain angle, so familiar! However, this restful, reassuring effect had its strict limits. Though the place would have looked English in a photograph, in reality the overall Slope, slight though it was, wiped out almost all the spiritual similarity.
    At the stops for food and rest, Murena could be seen walking from cart to cart, supervising our acclimatisation. He wasn't much help, in my opinion. I can't speak for the others, but my fears could not be quietened by a sardonically amused phrase intended to belittle the creep towards geographical terror. It was all right for him – he'd been down to Neydio, sixty degrees, several times before.  He paraded his unconcern with a breezy “Downhill all the way!” or “It's a slippery slope – get used to it, men, it's here to stay!” I froze when I heard such phrases.  He delighted in needling us. In some ways he reminded me of my cynical Uncle Vic, except that with Vic the needling was a device to provoke argument; whereas with Captain Murena, our superior officer, there was no answering back.  We just had to sit and take the mockery.  Not the way to banish the threat of the ultimate vertigo while rolling down the tilting world.
    I say all this, and yet – was he wrong? He gave us no guidelines at all, no rules, no tips; he ripped away our expectations of help and advice, and kicked each of us into our own individual void.  So at least we knew where we were with him – namely, nowhere. Private Wemyss must fight his private battle. And what happens if he doesn't know how?
    Oh, go ahead, think your unreasonable thoughts; war is not a reasonable thing; you haven't even found out anything about the enemy, nor are you in any hurry to do so; you have your reasons to be unreasonable, to relax and swim in the ocean of events; let those who are paid to know it all, sort it all out. And talking of oceans, here’s an idea: why not pretend that the blue sky down there is not air but sea? Say: “One blue is like another.” Say: “If the worst comes to the worst and you fall off the world and into the infinite sea of ether, what does it matter whether you freeze, starve or asphyxiate first? Dead is dead! It doesn't take forever! And the end result will be the same as if you had fallen into an Earth-type ocean.”
    But this kind of attempted trick, of trying to belittle my own fears, did not really work much more effectively than the belittling of them by Murena. Or at any rate, the benefit didn't last long. Worse terrors exist than those which simply threaten to do. The worst threats are the threats to show. Otherwise no one would ever be scared of entering a haunted house. No use trying to avoid that kind of fear by saying dismissively, “dead is dead”.
    A better idea was to get into a routine whereby I turned my head in accordance with the zig-zagging of the cart. Along a south-west stretch, turn to look north-east; along a south-east stretch, turn north-west. In this way I would keep my eyes averted from the South, as much as I could without making too great an exhibition of my cowardice. Many of my poor fellow-wimps, I covertly saw, were doing the same. Trying our best not to make it too obvious, trying to do it more with eye-movement than with head-movement, we could, however, look directly South sometimes, because in the game of hide-and-seek with Fear you can sometimes peek out at it, just as a mouse can emerge from its hole when the cat is not looking. And in my case, when Fear did cotton on to my presumption, and swerve to pounce, I did not merely have the option of turning my head away from the South; I could also, as an alternative, do my old trick of defocusing my eyes. Then the blue-haunted downward gulf became a blur which might have been simply a view over sea, rather than the outrageous cosmic tilt which it really was. I could do this, because the Slope was still relatively mild. Even so, I could not do it for long, because of the strain on the muscles around my cornea.
    Hour by hour the Slope increased, as it must do, while every feature in the landscape, every growth or construction, maintained a vertical stance increasingly at odds with the ground. Trees, bushes, houses, pylons, even the long grass in the meadows shouted, look, the world really is tipping, it's not just a cockeyed view of your own, it's the real business, keeling over; we'll balance ourselves upright as long as we can but it's getting harder and harder and there'll come a time when we and you must topple!
    The stupid part of me came to the rescue: You're all right at the moment because you've been over this stretch before, when you went along it in the other direction, going up. Admittedly you were of course facing north on your way north, so you were spared the view south, but still, you were going over this very ground. You stood the strain then; you can stand it now, and in fact for a while yet, all the way down to the latitude of Guthtin, your home village with its Slope of fifteen degrees, you have proved that you can stand it.
    Sometimes you have to go for the stupid fix, like when you borrow more money to pay your debts: a temporary fix at the cost of making the underlying problem worse in the long run. Just what would I say to myself when I passed Guthtin? No answer, eh? Sometimes, you have to be stupid.  You've no choice but to lurch onto a dead-end stepping stone, to buy time.
Is that not reasonable?  But on the other hand, in what condition were we going to be by the time we had to fight? Fighting was bad enough on Earth – here one would be fighting the weirdness of the battlefield as well as the battle.
    Yet, scary though it was, we were taking it all far too lightly; we weren't doing nearly enough to get worked up about it.  Here was the lack-of-training gripe again. This time it gave a clue to the next stepping stone: if we couldn't be trained, how about some equivalent of a war dance? Perhaps I could try this idea out on Jake. Get him to snap out of his sullen acquiescence as the cart rolled us down the GRR towards our doom. I could suggest, tactfully, that the Henry-the-Fifth-before-Agincourt style of exhortation might have some point to it; with the hope that, in getting our blood up to fight, combat readiness might blank out vertigo.
    I spoke: “Hey, we're a quiet lot, aren't we?”
    “Yeah,” said Jake, brooding beside me.
    “Yeah,” I echoed loudly. “The tone is somewhat lacking in rage, hate, berserk fury, et cetera!”
    “What must I do? Get rabies?”
    “I don't fancy frothing at the mouth much myself, but aren't we going to need something in that line? Assuming, that is, that there is something ahead of us to rage about. And if not, why fight at all?”
    “I dunno,” said Jake.
    Terry heard that; he laughed loud. “What a reaction! 'I dunno'. Don't bother with him, Dunc; you'd do better having another session with the gry pee. Mind you, I don't suppose he can do much else than tell you that it's early days yet….”
    “Don't you think he's much good, then? The gry pee, I mean.”
    “You didn't recognize him? Jon Tsorego – the famous conductor? That's who he is in civilian life. Not bad practice, perhaps, for dealing with gripes. I'd say he's good.”
    “I must try to find him at the next stop.”
    It didn't work out that way – I lurched onto a different “stepping stone” instead. For the next stop turned out to be somewhere important in my life, none other than my Krothan birthplace.
    The village of Guthtin.

                                                   *

A camp had been set up on the outskirts and the usual three hours' liberty was accorded us, long enough for me to walk into the village and re-visit the scenes that had met my eyes when I first awoke from the Earth-dream and found myself in the real world. I went into grumpy old Mrs Nott's corner shop and bought a carton of juice and a sandwich. She actually managed to grunt “hello” when she saw me. Then I walked past the house inhabited by sprightly old Miss Tyler and rejoiced to see her in the garden, busily planting a shrub. She straightened.
    “Duncan! In uniform! How grand to see you!”
    “I'm glad to see you, Miss Tyler; good thing they let us off here.”
    “How soon have you got to get back?”
    “Oh, in a couple of hours.”
    “Well, you go and enjoy yourself! But wait – just tell me – how is it? Are you all right? You look fine, but, you know….”
    “I know. It's confusing.”
    “Well, I'm sure you'll do fine. You go and confuse them.” And lifting her trowel, she pointed dramatically south, a jabbing gesture of future triumph. “'Bye now.”
    I went down the street to my empty home, sat and had my snack, and then went next door and knocked. Would she be there? I heard movement; footsteps approached across the hall; my mind built structures, framed conversations; but the steps sounded feeble, a bit blundering. By the time the door was fumbled open I was ready for disappointment. Sure enough, before me stooped the wan and tottering Mrs Swinton, instead of the tall, bland loveliness of her daughter. “You want Elaine. She's not here,” and my disappointment deepened. But then the mother added: “She's enlisted as a nurse. She's gone to join your army now,” and while I stood astonished, my quaint hope must have flashed in my face, for her manner became welcoming and she invited me in for tea. I looked at my watch and said yes, I could manage some tea. So I came in and sat down, my head whirling with vague plans, and presently I had the sense to take this opportunity to ask Mrs Swinton if she could tell me anything, from her own experience, about the lands to the south of Guthtin.
    “Not a lot,” she said. “You could ask around the village, but none of us travel much in the north-south direction. To save fuel, we do our commuting and holidaying mostly east-west. North-south's a bit impractical. After all, we slope fifteen degrees around here. Run down, plod up, as the saying goes.” She vaguely added, “Elaine once went on a school trip down to eighteen degrees. Some biology thing. Come to think of it, I could show you her geography book….”
    “No, no books,” I replied hastily, remembering the shock I had received from the encyclopaedia in Savaluk, “I much prefer to hear things spoken.  The human touch…. Hey, I'd better be off now. Thank you, Mrs Swinton,” and I put my cup and saucer down. “I much appreciate the tea.” And little did she know how true that was. As the porcelain clinked on the tray I took care to hoard it in the medicine-cupboard of my imagination, where my memory keeps its doses of normality.

                                                   *

That snippet of information about Elaine's school trip gave me some extra “breathing-space”, some hours' extension to the bearable Slope: I could now say to myself not only “it must be all right as far as fifteen degrees, for I was born in Guthtin”, but also “it must be all right for another three degrees down, as far as eighteen degrees, if school trips go there”.
    Not that I was really in much of a comfort zone even while still in Guthtin. I might, for a minute or two, tolerate the sight of the blue void gaping at me over the slumped Southern 'horizon', but then would come an attack of understanding in which I would not only realize but really realize what I was seeing, and that was no good at all. However, I had myself under sufficient control, so far. The task before me, as ever, was to maintain this control. One consolation: the all-demanding struggle against cosmic fear left little time for worry about the prospect of getting shot at, maimed or killed. Those nightmares were standard issue; I could have got them on Earth.
    For some hours, both before and after Guthtin, the Road's zigzags got gradually wider and shorter, and the corner embankments more extreme, and thinking ahead I realized that we must eventually descend to a latitude where the gradient would have steepened so far as to make such a highway impractical. That would constitute the point at which the resources and expense needed to build the Road were too great for it to continue. Also, perhaps at about the same gradient, the vehicles' brakes would no longer endure the necessary strain.
    I wondered if that was where we would find the border between our culture and that of the Gonomong. I suddenly pictured some situation like a frontier of the Roman Empire, the end of a road marking a boundary where civilization ended and barbarian peril began. I thought of asking Terry Croale whether this guess was good. It would be a risk to ask, because he might give me more information than I wanted; a conversation, once started, can be impossible to steer…. It would be a pity to spoil my record of not knowing, which had supported me up till now. I glanced at Terry's worldly-wise expression.
    He caught my eye.
    “Figuring it all out, Dunc?”
    “Do I look it?” I countered.
    “You looked as though you were about to ask something.”
    An interruption came as our cart lurched around the next bend.
    “I was just wondering,” I said as my stomach settled, “where's the next stop. I'm getting tired of this everlasting swivelling Road.”
    “Not everlasting,” he said gently. “The next stop is Dorington Dradett.”
    To judge by his tone, the significance of the name was supposed to be self-evident. I must have looked blank. Terry's manners were impeccable; he could easily have showed up my ignorance but instead he left me to work out the obvious from the chatter which followed.
    “Never been there,” said one voice.
    “It's meant to be good,” said another.
    “All right if you like skiing,” said a third.
    Skiing! I might have guessed.

>>  8: Grass-Skiing Plunge