The Year Dot (The John Lymington SciFi/Horror Library #15)

By John Lymington

The Government decided that Christopher Jay was an enemy of the people. In fact, he was an enemy of the Government, and that meant he had to die.
So Jay became a casualty of the New Capital Punishment Act, and was duly executed on a series of trumped-up charges of treason.
But this was also the age of the Blind Scientist, the Transplanter, the Organ Switchers and the breeders of babies in bottles. And once Jay’s organs had been harvested, they found some very interesting places to resume life.
They also enabled Jay to fulfil his final wish—that if he was to die, then the entire planet was going to die with him.
This was the time of reckoning.
This was the Year Dot.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Nov 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215457658

John Lymington

John Richard Newton Chance was born in Streatham Hill, London, in 1911, the son of Dick Chance, a managing editor at the Amalgamated Press. He studied to become a civil engineer, and then took up quantity surveying, but gave it up at 21 to become a full-time writer. He wrote for his father's titles, including "Dane, the Dog Detective" for Illustrated Chips, and a number of stories for the Sexton Blake Library and The Thriller Library.He went on to write over 150 science fiction, mystery and children's books and numerous short stories under various names, including John Lymington, John Drummond, David C. Newton, Jonathan Chance and Desmond Reid. Including 20+ SF potboilers, adding that he "made a steady income by delivering thrillers to Robert Hale (the UK publisher) at a chapter a week".His novel Night of the Big Heat was adapted to television in 1960 and to film, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in 1967.

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The Government decided that Christopher Jay was an enemy of the people. In fact, he was an enemy of the Government, and that meant he had to die.

So Jay became a casualty of the New Capital Punishment Act, and was duly executed on a series of trumped-up charges of treason.

But this was also the age of the Blind Scientist, the Transplanter, the Organ Switchers and the breeders of babies in bottles. And once Jay’s organs had been harvested, they found some very interesting places to resume life.

They also enabled Jay to fulfil his final wish—that if he was to die, then the entire planet was going to die with him.

This was the time of reckoning.

This was the Year Dot.

THE YEAR DOT

By John Lymington

First published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1972

©1972, 2023 by John Newton Chance

First Electronic Edition: November 2023

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate

Series Editor: David Whitehead

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

This small satire is for my sons, The Reverend David, B.A., priest in the diocese of Canterbury; Cadet Richard, Royal Navy, at Dartmouth; Simon John, at school in Cornwall.

They all liked this idea but I hope they never see it happen.

John Newton Chance, sometimes John Lymington, Cornwall, December 1971

Book One

The Body of Christopher Jay

"Here lies the body of Christopher Jay

Who died maintaining his right of way.

He was right, dead right, as he sped along;

But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong."

Epitaph. U.S.A.

Item 504, File XVI, Rex v Jay, Treason.

Agency rewrite from SonVis monitor, recorded 1000-1105 hrs July 18th, in Prisoners’ Room, Tower of London.

JULY 18TH WAS fine and hot. Prisoners’ Room is stone with three deep cut windows barred with medieval grilles and one iron bound oak door. Furniture Jacobean, has one long table, six chairs, long case of reference books, Persian silk carpet on polished boards, plug for telephone by door but no instrument at this time.

At ten Christopher Jay was alone there. Thirty-five, heavily built, brown hair and beard, hazel eyes, wearing casual Harris tweed suit, white shirt, open collar, no tie allowed.

Lord Exton was shown in by a steward at 1001, who then retired and the door was locked from outside.

George, Lord Exton of Ironlands, said Jay. I’m glad you came.

Why did you want to see me?

How old are you?

Lord Exton seemed lost for a moment, then he said, Forty-two.

Too old.

For what?

For me. Do you remember Johnson said when a man’s to hang in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully. I haven’t got a fortnight, just five days and my concentration should be intense. It isn’t. Whenever I start to think something out, scenes from the past keep coming in. The drowning man’s life replaying before him. It is true, after all. He does see it again.

Lord Exton did not reply. Jay went to a window and looked out, then turned back and said, You had guts to come.

I just couldn’t think what on earth you wanted to say to me, and I still can’t. I came just in case there was anything—in a personal way—you would want me to do.

No.

Nothing of importance can be done. It’s finished, the case sealed. No appeals. I’m sorry. But I gave you the chance to go and escape all this. If you’d taken it, this could never have happened. You were determined to be crucified.

I wanted to see you because, in my—situation—one gets odd ideas, impressions. As I thought of my enemy it felt suddenly that I was only looking in a mirror. You’d probably understand this. Nobody else did. You know that once in a lifetime, perhaps, you are faced with a decision. To live, you know you must say Yes, but no power can stop that surge inside you that makes you say No. You feel you must throw yourself under the train as it comes in. You know you’ve got to walk back across the platform so you can’t reach the edge, but you stand there as it comes faster gets bigger and its roar in your ears dins out the voices you should listen to. Suddenly it’s something you want, must have—

Jay turned round from the window and looked at Lord Exton, then said, I’m sorry, and I’m very grateful. That’s what I wanted to say to you.

There is nothing to be grateful for, Jay. It was an idea, and it didn’t come off. I’m sorry you didn’t take it, but you didn’t, and that’s that.

It just occurred to me—is this room bugged?

It’s what we call SonVis monitored.

I’ve heard something about that. What is it? I won’t tell! Jay laughed then.

It replaces an ordinary electric light bulb. It looks like one and works like one, but inside there are two cells, one light sensitive and the other sound. The right kind of shade—see-through, you might foully say—is available in every possible design. It’s a commercial product but the Government are, for the time being, holding it close.

It’s radio?

No. Anyone can intercept that. This is transmitted back along the negative light supply wire and can be tapped and automatically translated anywhere along the line, inside or outside the premises. The shades are only transparent from the inside where the lamp is, like a backless mirror.

All that, to spy on one’s fellow men.

But didn’t you do the same, but with men and women instead of electronics? How did you get all the information you had about the Government and its affairs without paid spies?

Jay turned to the window again and said, It’s not the same. Yes, I had friends. Do they know—what’s happened?

The processes of the trial were secret for obvious reasons, but the outcome is not secret. Yes, they know. I’m sorry, but they do.

Don’t worry. I was alone before the trial began. They melted away when they smelt the way things were heading. I don’t blame them. They didn’t have to believe as I did.

Jay turned back and sat down at the table opposite Lord Exton.

They tried, Jay said. My little army of soldiers with pen and tongue, but one by one they were choked into silence. No editors would publish, no publishers buy, all broadcasting was blocked. It was an almost complete wall built around us. Except for young Payne and his Mum ... By the way, are they—all right? Clear?

They didn’t publish, did they? I don’t see that anything could touch them, so long, of course, as they behave now.

Do you know, I wished I had met her a long time ago.

Yes, said Lord Exton.

Were you at the trial?

I was out of the country.

"It was very impressive. All my dear, poor, suffering counsel had to work on was touching the hearts of the jury. He hadn’t a chance in hell, but he was so passionate it was pitiful to hear. I would have cried but I knew the sod didn’t believe a word of it.

"It was all like the trial in Alice. I felt sort of in a dream. I never really believed it was happening so that it would have a real ending. I thought it would screw up and up till the tension could be heard, and then phew! thank God that’s over. Even while they were thundering out their stage-struck speeches in that court I was thinking, ‘When I get the not guilty I’m going out to start it all over again, but bigger, better, and I’ll run and shout and play the piper until the crowds joined in behind me and it becomes a vast army winding over the hills into the glorious sunrise’ ... And then I came out of the dream and saw them putting the black cap on the old bastard’s head, and suddenly I wanted to explode and shout, ‘No, not me! Not me!’ And for a few minutes, while I listened to him, things felt hard and real, but since they’ve slipped off back into the dream again.

Except that I know they will slaughter me like a dumb bull.

You did your best to push us back into restoring that penalty.

"I realise now that’s what it read like, sounded like, looked like. But I always wrote for the lower I.Q. There’s more of that layer. You get a bigger reaction. What I said was that if you were going to bring back the death penalty you would have to think first whether it would be of any benefit to society whatever. That’s what I meant.

And some cruel, satirical swine thought it all up and said ‘Yes, but not that old bestial hanging. A new, hygienic, sensitive, kindly system of a shot in the arm and gentle, interminable sleep, and for the good of the society he has wronged, the healthy organs of the criminal shall be given to the sick, the weak, the suffering and otherwise dying.’ What a dream of perfection, Exton! Hogarth was born too soon.

It was a way of— Lord Exton began.

It’s a modernised, cynicised version of drawing and quartering, Jay interrupted. I told the lower I.Q. it should only come back if it proved a benefit and they suddenly got fed with the idea that made their little hearts bleed or their livers spleen up and they felt it was just the idea that should have been thought of before. What a tragedy the Mass is.

My God, and you the very one that played on it for your own purpose, years and years of feeding it, twisting it, needling, getting into it, listening to the drivel and then feeding back your version with the poison in—

They’ve got their own back, Jay interrupted again. I played on stupidity and cupidity and I—didn’t see the twist at the end. But then, when you believe in something as strongly as I did you don’t see where you’re going, you only see where you want to go. I remember Gloria Payne said that. ‘If you keep your sights high, you’ll trip over the kerb.’ That’s what I did, and got run over by a bus. Still, it’s done now. And as I say, I’d do it again.

If you started again from Square One, Lord Exton said, you’d have to do it all again or else be someone different altogether. But if at this moment it was all washed out, and you were freed, you wouldn’t do it again.

You don’t understand, Exton. I believe. I still believe. That belief is the only spiritual strength I have, but it is my whole strength. When I appealed to the hoi polloi I did it to try and get physical strength to back me, and in that I know now I was wrong. But one learns. When my father was very old and dying he said to me, ‘There’s one consolation; I know now what it was all about’. I know that too, now, Exton. And I know that whatever miracle could happen, I’d do the same again. They would never hold me still. And if I can send messages from beyond the Great Incinerator, I’ll bloody well do it yet!

You did quite a lot.

"No, there isn’t the medium. That’s the trouble. There’s the language barrier, censorship—and Government suppression. That’s the same everywhere, here, Russia, China, the States, just the same suppression, slightly differently applied. But if you could rouse the people, you’d have the same result in each place; a kickback against the artificial authorities which rule these states. But you haven’t the language, you see. The translator loses. A word doesn’t transmit quite the same force with a different sound. Or something. Sometimes I think the only way the rule of the privileged and powerful could be overturned is by an army of disciplined idiots to do it. These babies they’re trying to make in bottles. A foul, filthy idea that is, my friend, and a true mirror of man’s twisted egoism, but if we could have these creatures and just tell them what to do, like machines, they’d do it.

But this is going far beyond my time, Exton. I’ve tried in my own time, and been beaten. So, to quote a phrase, that’s that. Goodbye.

Extract from Lord Exton’s Diary, unpublished, dated midnight July 18th.

I SAW JAY today. I am very sad. The magic has gone out of him. He isn’t even arguing; just scattering words around. He isn’t frightened. It’s worse; he is depressed.

I can’t do anything, but I made a formal request to see the Secret File of events leading up to the trial beginning with May 11th when Payne agreed to publish Jay’s Devastated Prostitute. Unfortunately I have to go into the Iron Rooms to read it. It’s probably chained up anyhow.

I don’t see it can help him, but I have to know because of the Paynes.

Note. The librarian says the extracts from evidence are not chronological but arranged for the development of the case against Jay. Details of people concerned are fairly full to help in any future prosecution.

Rewrite from monitoring 1900 hrs July 22nd, Prisoners’ Room, Tower of London.

JAMES BENDENHAM, M.D., made a routine call on Jay.

I’m still fit? said Jay.

Very.

I suppose one has to be to participate in the Top-and-Transplant Act.

There’s always something we can use.

It shows the measure of modern superstition that they never use the brain. In their hearts they believe the soul is somewhere in that.

I don’t know where. All animals have one. It’s a motor, really. It operates the rest.

Supposing I were to die in the night? Wouldn’t that upset everything?

It’s highly unlikely so I don’t consider an upset.

Are you a religious man?

No. I’m a Scot. I believe in Scotland. That’s why I left. I spoilt it.

I wondered because one of the arguments in favour of this Act was a religious one. I never got that angle. After all, I never read that we were advised to give away the other cheek, or lung, or kidney, for the benefit of the sick, suffering and the meek. What did meek mean in the days of the translation? They shall inherit the earth. The only earth the meek get is six feet of it shovelled in on top. When do I go?

In half an hour. They fly you down to Pagebridge. Wonderful place that, you know. The largest spare part store in the world.

Well, it got a head start with this Act pushing the able bodies into it.

It takes accidents and so forth, not just... It’s of great value to the sick.

Built as a War Experimental Station, then changed to a Germ Warfare Centre and now a spare part museum, it’s certainly got a horror record.

You are too sensitive.

I’m in a position to deserve it.

You’re a strange man. Have you no fear at all?

I’m solid with it. That’s why I talk all the time. It blocks off thinking. What’s the routine, do you know?

"You fly