“Oh, thank you, sir! And how about my sister? Can she come?”
“Oh, yes, most certainly,” I said. “Your sister can come. Any time she—”
I heard a startled shriek from the Mining men. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and I turned very slowly.
There stood a girl, a tall, skinny girl with eyes as big as saucers. She stared around like a sleepwalker and murmured, “Mars! Gol-lee!”
Then she turned to me and blushed.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I—I was listening in.”
PARADISE II
1955 UK revised version
The space station revolved around its planet, waiting. Properly speaking it was without intelligence, for intelligence was unnecessary. It had awareness, however, and certain tropisms, affinities, reactions.
It was resourceful. Its purpose was stamped into the very metal, impressed into the circuits and tubes. And perhaps the machine retained some of the emotions that had gone into its building—the wild hopes, the fears, the frenzied race against time.
But the hopes had been in vain, for the race was lost, and the great machine hung in space, incomplete and useless.
But it had awareness, and certain tropisms, affinities, reactions. It was resourceful. It knew what it needed. So it scanned space, waiting for its mission components.
The control board was covered with dials, switches and gauges, which were made of metal, plastics and quartz. Fleming, on the other hand, was flesh and blood and bone. It seemed impossible that any relationship could exist between them except the most perfunctory. Instead, Fleming, seemed to merge into the control board. His eyes scanned the dials with mechanical precision, his fingers became extensions of the switches. The metal seemed to become pliable under his hands, and amenable to his will. The quartz gauges gleamed red, and Fleming’s eyes shone red too, with a glow that didn’t seem entirely reflection.
Once the deceleration spiral had been entered, Howard settled himself comfortably in the galley. He estimated his fuel and food expenditures, plus depreciation on the ship. To the sum he added a safe third, and marked it down in a ledger. It would come in useful later, for his income tax.
They landed on the outskirts of a city, and waited for the local customs officials. No one came. They ran the standard atmosphere and micro-organism tests, and continued waiting. Still no one came. After half a day, Fleming undogged the hatch and they started toward the city.
The first skeletons, scattered across the bomb-torn concrete road, puzzled them; it seemed so untidy. What civilized people left skeletons in their roads. Why didn’t someone clean up?
The city was populated only by skeletons, thousands, millions, packed into crumbling theatres, fallen at the doorways of dusty stores, scattered across the bullet-ripped streets.
“Must have had a war on,” Fleming said brightly.
In the centre of the city they found a parade ground where rank upon rank of uniformed skeletons lay upon the grass. The reviewing stands were packed with skeleton officials, skeleton officers, skeleton wives and parents. And behind the stands were skeleton children, gathered to see the fun.
“A war, all right,” Fleming said, nodding his head with finality. “They lost.”
“Obviously,” Howard said. “But who won?”
“What?”
“Where are the victors?”
At that moment the space station passed overhead, casting a shadow across the silent ranks of skeletons. Both men glanced up uneasily.
“You think everyone’s dead?” Fleming asked hopefully.
“I think we should find out.”
They walked back to the ship. Fleming began to whistle out of sheer high spirits, and kicked a mound of pocked bones out of his way. “We’ve struck it rich,” he said, grinning at Howard.
“Not yet,” Howard said cautiously. “There may be survivors—” He caught Fleming’s look and smiled in spite of himself.
“It does look like a successful business trip.”
Their tour of the planet was brief. The blue-green world was a bomb-splattered tomb. On every continent, the towns contained their tens of thousands of bony inhabitants, each city its millions. The plains and mountains were scattered with skeletons, and there were skeletons in the lakes, and skeletons in the forests and jungles.
“What a mess!” Fleming said at last, as they hovered over the planet. “What do you suppose the population was here?”
“I’d estimate it at nine billion, give or take a billion,” Howard said. “What do you suppose happened?”
Howard smiled sagely. “There are three classic methods of genicide. The first is pollution of the atmosphere by poison gas. Allied to that is radio-active poisoning, mutated laboratory germs, created solely for the purpose of attacking whole populations. If they get out of hand, they can wipe out a planet.”
“Think that happened here?” Fleming asked, with lively interest.
“I believe so,” Howard said, wiping an apple on his arm and biting into it. “I’m no pathologist, but the marks on those bones—”
“Germs,” Fleming said. He coughed involuntarily. “You don’t suppose—”
“You’d be dead already, if they were still active. All this must have happened several hundred years ago, to judge by the weathering of the skeletons. The germs die for lack of a human host.”
Fleming nodded emphatically. “That’s made to order. Oh, it’s too bad about the people. Fortunes of war and all that. But this planet really is ours!” He peered out the port at the rich green fields below. “What’ll we call it, Howard?”
Howard looked at the fields, and at the wild, overgrown pastureland that bordered the concrete roads. “We might call it Paradise II,” he said. “This place ought to be a farmer’s heaven.”
“Paradise II! That’s pretty good,” Fleming said. “I suppose we’ll have to hire a gang to clear off those skeletons. Looks too weirdlike.”
Howard nodded. There were many details to be attended to. “We’ll do that after—”
The space station passed over them.
“The lights!” Howard cried suddenly.
“Lights?” Fleming stared at the receding sphere.
“When we came in. Remember? Those flashing lights?”
“Right,” Fleming said. “Do you suppose someone is holed up in the station?”
“We’ll find out right now,” Howard said grimly. He took a determined bite of his apple as Fleming turned the ship.
When they reached the space station the first thing they saw was the other ship, clinging to the station’s polished metal as a spider clings to its web. It was small, a third the size of their ship, and one of its hatches was ajar.
The two men, suited and helmeted, paused in front of the hatch. Fleming seized the hatch in his gloved hands, and pulled it completely open. Cautiously they aimed their flashlights inside, looked, and jerked abruptly back. Then Howard motioned impatiently, and Fleming started in.
There was the body of a man inside, half out of the pilot’s chair, frozen forever in that unstable position. His face was fleshed enough to show his death agony, but the skin had been eaten bone deep in spots by some disease.
Piled high in the rear of the ship were dozens of wooden cases. Fleming broke one open and flashed his light inside.
“Food,” Howard said.
“Must have tried to hide in the space station,” Fleming said.
“Looks that way. He never made it.” They left the ship quickly, a little disgusted. Skeletons were acceptable; they were self-contained entities in themselves. But this corpse was too eloquently dead.
“So who turned on the lights?” Fleming asked, on the surface of the station.
“Perhaps they were on automatic relay,” Howard said doubtfully.
“There couldn’t be any survivors.”
They walked across the surface of the station, and found the entrance.
“Shall we?” asked Fleming.
&nbs
p; “Why bother?” Howard said quickly. “The race is dead. We might as well go back and file our claim.”
“If there’s even one survivor in there,” Fleming reminded him, “the planets’ his by law.”
Howard nodded unwillingly. It would be too bad to make the long, expensive trip back to Earth, return with their surveying teams, and find someone cosily keeping house in the space station. It would be different if survivors were hiding on the planet. Legally, they would still have a valid claim. But a man in the space station, which they had neglected to examine—
“I suppose we must,” Howard said, and opened the hatch.
Within, they were in total darkness. Howard turned his flashlight on Fleming. In its yellow glow, Fleming’s face was completely shadowless, stylized like a primitive mask. Howard blinked, a little frightened at what he saw, for at that moment, Fleming’s face was completely depersonalized.
“Air’s breathable,” Fleming said, and immediately regained his personality.
Howard pushed back his helmet and turned up the light. The sheer mass of the walls seemed to crush in on him. He groped in his pocket, found a radish, and popped it in his mouth for morale.
They started forward.
For half an hour they walked along a narrow, winding corridor, their flashlights pushing the darkness ahead of them. The metal floor, which had seemed so stable, began to creak and groan from hidden stresses, setting Howard’s nerves on edge. Fleming seemed unaffected.
“This place must have been a bombing station,” he remarked after a while.
“I suppose so.”
“Simply tons of metal here,” Fleming said conversationally, tapping one of the walls. “I suppose we’ll have to sell it for junk, unless we can salvage some of the machinery.”
“The price of scrap metal—” Howard began. But at that instant a section of floor opened, directly under Fleming’s feet. Fleming plunged out of sight so quickly that he didn’t have a chance to scream, and the section of floor slammed back into place.
Howard staggered back, as though physically struck. His flashlight seemed to blaze maniacally for a moment, then fade. Howard stood perfectly still, his hands raised, his mind caught in the timelessness of shocks.
The shock wave receded slowly, leaving Howard with a dull, pounding headache. “—is not particularly good just now,” he said insanely, finishing his sentence, wishing that nothing had happened.
He stepped close to the section of floor and called, “Fleming.”
There was no answer. A shudder passed over his body. He shouted, “Fleming!” at the top of his lungs, leaning over the sealed floor. He straightened up, his head pounding painfully, took a deep breath turned and trotted back to the entrance. He did not allow himself to think.
The entrance, however, was sealed, and its fused edges were still hot. Howard examined it with every appearance of interest. He touched it, tapped it, kicked it. Then he became aware of the darkness pressing against him. He whirled, perspiration pouring down his face.
“Who’s there?” he shouted down the corridor. “Fleming! Can you hear me?”
There was no answer.
He shouted, “Who did this? Why did you flash the station lights? What did you do to Fleming?” He listened for a moment, then went on, sobbing for breath. “Unseal the entrance! I’ll go, and I won’t tell anyone!”
He waited, shining his light down the corridor, wondering what lay behind the darkness. Finally he screamed, “Why don’t you open a trapdoor under me?”
He lay back against the wall, panting. No trapdoor opened. Perhaps, he thought, no trapdoor will. The thought gave him a moment’s courage. Sternly he told himself that there had to be another way out. He walked back up the corridor.
An hour later he was still walking, his flashlight stabbing ahead, and darkness creeping at his back. He had himself under control now, and his headache had subsided to a dull ache. He had begun to reason again.
The lights could have been on automatic circuit. Perhaps the trapdoor had been automatic, too. As for the self-sealing entrance—that could be a precaution in time of war, to make sure that no enemy agent could sneak in.
He knew that his reasoning wasn’t too sound, but it was the best he could do. The entire situation was inexplicable. That corpse in the spaceship, the beautiful dead planet—there was a relationship, somewhere. If only he could discover where.
“Howard,” a voice said.
Howard jumped back convulsively, as though he had touched a high-tension wire. Immediately his headache resumed.
“It’s me,” the voice said, “Fleming.”
Howard flashed his light wildly in all directions, “Where? Where are you?”
“About two hundred feet down, as well as I can judge,” Fleming said, his voice floating harshly down the corridor. “The audio hookup isn’t very good, but it’s the best I can do.”
Howard sat down in the corridor, because his legs refused to hold him up. He was relieved, however. There was something sane about Fleming being two hundred feet down, something very human and understandable about an imperfect audio hookup.
“Can you get up? How can I help you?”
“You can’t,” Fleming said, and there was a crackle of static which Howard thought was a chuckle. “I don’t seem to have much body left.”
“But where is your body?” Howard insisted seriously.
“Gone, smashed in the fall. There’s just enough left of me to hook into circuit.”
“I see,” said Howard, feeling strangely light-headed. “You’re now just a brain, a pure intelligence.”
“Oh, there’s a little more to me than that,” Fleming said. “As much as the machine needs.”
Howard started to giggle nervously, for he had an image of Fleming’s grey brain swimming in a pool of crystal water. He stopped himself, and said, “The machine? What machine?”
“The space station. I imagine it’s the most intricate machine ever built. It flashed the lights and opened the door.”
“But why?”
“I expect to find out,” Fleming said. “I’m a part of it now. Or perhaps it’s a part of me. Anyhow, it needed me, because it’s not really intelligent. I supply that.”
“You? But the machine couldn’t know you were coming!”
“I don’t mean me, specifically. The man outside, in the ship, he was probably the real operator. But I’ll do. We’ll finish the builder’s plans.”
Howard calmed himself with an effort. He couldn’t think any more right now. His only concern was to get out of the station, back to his ship. To do this, he had Fleming to work with; but a new, unpredictable Fleming. He sounded human enough—but Was he?
“Fleming,” Howard said tentatively.
“Yes, old man?”
That was encouraging. “Can you get me out of here?”
“I think so,” Fleming’s voice said. “I’ll try.”
“I’ll come back with neuro-surgeons,” Howard assured him. “You’ll be all right.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Fleming said. “I’m all right now.”
Howard lost count of the hours he walked. One narrow corridor followed another, and dissolved into still more corridors. He grew tired, and his legs began to stiffen. As he walked, he ate. There were sandwiches in his knapsack, and he munched on them mechanically, for strength.
“Fleming,” he called finally, stopping to rest.
After a long pause he heard a barely recognizable sound, like metal grating against metal.
“How much longer?”
“Not much longer,” the grating, metallic voice said. “Tired?”
“Yes.”
“What is all this? Is it a bomb station?”
“No. I do not know the purpose of the machine yet. I am still not entirely integrated.”
“But it does have a purpose?”
“Yes.” The metallic voice grated so loud that Howard winced. “I possess a beautifully functional interlocking apparatus
. In temperature control alone I am capable of a range of hundreds of degrees in a micro-second, to say nothing of my chemical mixing stores, power sources, and all the rest. And, of course, my purpose.”
Howard didn’t like the answer. It sounded as though Fleming were identifying with the machine, merging his personality with that of the space station. He forced himself to ask, “Why don’t you know what it’s for yet?”
“A vital component is missing,” Fleming said, after a pause. “An indispensable matrix. Besides, I do not have full control yet.” More engines began to throb into life, and the walls vibrated with the sound. Howard could feel the floor tremble under him. The station seemed to be waking up, stretching, gathering its wits. He felt as though he were in the stomach of some giant sea monster.
Howard walked for several more hours, and he left behind him a trail of apple cores, orange peels, fatty bits of meat, an empty canteen and a piece of waxed paper. He was eating constantly now, compulsively, and his hunger was dull and constant. While he ate he felt safe, for eating belonged with the space ship, and Earth.
A section of wall slid back suddenly. Howard moved away from it.
“Go in,” a voice, which he tentatively identified as Fleming’s, said.
“Why? What is it?” He turned his flashlight into the hole, and saw a continuous moving strip of floor disappearing into the darkness.
“You are tired,” the voice like Fleming’s said. “This way is faster.”
Howard wanted to run, but there was no place to go. He had to trust Fleming, or brave the darkness on either side of his flashlight.
“Go in.”
Obediently Howard climbed in, and sat down on the moving track. Ahead, all he could see was darkness. He lay back.
“Do you know what the station is for yet?” he asked the darkness.
“Soon,” a voice answered. “We will not fail them.”
Howard didn’t dare ask who it was Fleming wouldn’t fail. He closed his eyes and let the darkness close around him.
The ride continued for a long time. Howard’s flashlight was clamped under his arm, and its beam went straight up, reflecting against the polished metal ceiling. He munched automatically on a piece of biscuit, not tasting it, hardly aware that it was in his mouth.
Various Fiction Page 100