Mutant

by James Corley

[IV]

  A stench like a combination of yeast and decaying fish permeated the southern end of the island as work progressed on the algae tanks. The nauseous miasma rose in the heat and hung in the still, humid atmosphere.

  "It won’t taste as bad as it smells,” Manji promised.

  “I hope not."

  “Do you think it’s wise to walk around in this temperature?" Manji asked, wiping sweat off his shining forehead.

  “I’m not spending the test of my life locked up in my room," Stoddard replied. "It’s all right for you. You’ve got something to do. I’m bored."

  “Why don’t you join our bridge club in the evenings?" Manji offered.

  “I hate bridge. I was never good at card games."

  “Learning the game would help you pass the time."

  “Don’t you have a pair of binoculars about somewhere?" Stoddard asked. “Can l borrow them?"

  “Certainly. Are you studying...?"

  “Bird watching,” Stoddard said. “It used to be my hobby once. I'm going to take it up again."

  “Be careful," Manji warned. “Don’t pass out like you did before. We might not find you next time."

  Stoddard shrugged. “I’ll wear my hat."

  Stoddard had always been a late riser, but he began to set his alarm-clock to wake himself before dawn. The early morning was cooler. The hours between six and nine were almost tolerable. There was time enough to walk two miles and back. The north end of the island had been untouched by the comings and goings of man over the years. The terrain was rocky and fell in low cliffs to the beaches and the vast green ocean. Stoddard knew there had once been a colony of sea birds here. He felt a mixture of revulsion and curiosity as he investigated the guano-spattered rocks to see what had happened to them.

  The homogeneous flocks of white feathered gulls had disappeared. In their place were individual birds which belonged to no known genus. The sports mostly kept to themselves, only infrequently could Stoddard find a pair close enough together in appearance to form a mating bond. Elsewhere piles of bloody feathers showed where fighting had broken out as it had become more difficult to identify between friend and foe, or where hunger for the altering food supply had caused an unnaturally savage reaction. Several birds had mutated into peacock coloured dandies. Others showed morphological differentiation. Tail feathers had developed into two foot long fans which stopped the bird from flying. Beaks had curved into parrot-like monstrosities, wings had atrophied until the bird resembled a miniature parody of an albino penguin. The tide mark was lined with other things. Things that had crawled out of the sea following some archetypal evolutionary impulse and found their adaptation unsuccessful.

  On the fourth morning of his coming to the rocks Stoddard saw something else. A figure lying on the beach in the distance. He raised his binoculars to study it. The figure lay face down, but from the curve of the buttocks it could only be a woman. Pamela Barnett. She was naked, her outstretched arms and legs tanned a deep mahogany, the rest of her body burnt a lurid red by the vicious ultraviolet. The knowledge that she must be dead washed through him accompanied by a physical sensation as if his viscera were draining from his body.

  She turned over. His mind lurched again as it was forced to accept her insanity. It was suicide for her to sunbathe now.

  He began to run along the cliff top to a point where he could descend to the beach, he wanted to warn her of the danger, the probability of heat stroke and heart failure, the certainty that in a year or two at most skin cancers would develop.

  He came to a sudden halt, binoculars banging against his chest. She knew the dangers as well as he did.

  The next morning she was on the beach again. Almost as if she had slept there, He stood at the same place on the cliff-top and watched through Manji's binoculars. The sight of her naked body aroused no sexual pleasure. The scene held only the kind of fascination he had felt as a child when he’d spied on the mysterious world of adults. There had been a secret hiding place behind the settee in the living room. He’d been five, maybe six. no older. He recognised the sensation now; he hadn’t then of course. It was the knowledge that their behaviour, however strange, was also contained in his own potential self but somehow held from his understanding by undiscovered rules.

  Stoddard had been kept awake most of the night thinking of the figure on the beach, pulling at the desperate problem she posed. He had decided against the theory that this was a macabre form of suicide. Her body had flared into a vivid redness but there was no blistering of the smooth, perfect skin. Obviously Pamela had been coming here for days. She had not abandoned herself to the Sun but had gradually accepted it, exposing herself at first only momentarily while building up tolerance to the rays.

  But did it imply a fall into insanity? Could she perhaps believe she lay sunbathing on some Mediterranean beach? Was she on holiday somewhere inside her skull? Had she forgotten the world was lurching under the impact of shattered genes? Did her mind pretend to itself that nothing had changed?

  He could have borne a realisation of her madness but something told him that the girl was as sane or saner than Stoddard himself. Her actions as she turned over were deliberate and calm, they showed none of the emphatic motility of the truly crazy. She was dressed modestly now in the fine, pale sand which clung to her sweating body. Once it seemed she looked straight at him but her eyes passed on. unseeing or uncaring that there was a watcher on the cliff-top.

  A fear had grown in him. A fear that the meaning of life was lost and that Pamela knew and accepted it. He was afraid that her acceptance would force him to acknowledge it too. At the beginning she had hated the Sun, hated what it was doing to the ova inside her. Now she had decided, he thought, that the world of mankind was finished. The world had rejected her kind as Master and now belonged again to the primeval god of fire. In Stoddard’s mind at least, Pamela Barnett had decided that the only way she could survive was by accepting the new order, by offering herself as sacrifice to the new-old god in the hope that the offering would bring salvation.

  The idea was as crazy as the others but somehow more irrationally human. Crazy only because reality had turned crazy.

  He let the idea sink away and pushed the fear under with it, replacing it with the daily conviction that contact would be re-established with the mainland. It might still happen. It was certain to.

  A week passed. It could possibly have been two weeks or a month. The heat was debilitating. Stoddard was tired. Each day merged into the next in his memory, the stench, the boredom, the hours spent watching Pamela Barnett. Things had ceased to mean anything. Imperceptibly Pamela reverted from burn redness through deep tan to the blackness of the first ancestor to emerge from Africa. At the end of the week or month Stoddard stopped visiting the cliff-top. The world shrank to his room and occasional, diffident visits to the algae tanks. He no longer made any pretence of being in control of the station.

  [V]

  And then years passed. And Stoddard and Manji and the others whom Stoddard never talked to were old men though not enough years had passed to make them old. But nothing changed. Manji still tended his tanks of stinking algae and Stoddard sometimes went to the north of the island to search the empty beaches through binoculars.

 

  It was late afternoon when Manji burst into the darkened bedroom.

  “The binoculars," he demanded excitedly.

  Stoddard was only half awake. “What?"

  “Get up. We’ve spotted a plane," Manji shouted.

  Stoddard followed as Manji snatched the binoculars and raced from the room as quickly as undernourished legs could take him.

  A small group of men stood on the beach staring into the western sky. The yellow globe of the Sun sent streamers of brilliance dazzling over the swell of the waves.

  One of the Indians pointed silently as the two men ran up.

  “It’s circling," Manji said. He brought the binoculars up to his eyes. A silver dot travelled slowly across the horizon
.

  Agonised, one of the men cried “It’s going past. It’s missing us."

  Manji brought the binoculars down. The expression of macabre glee he usually warded tragedy off with was missing. He handed them to Stoddard and began to walk slowly back towards the buildings.

  Stoddard looked through the glasses.

  The silver dot focussed into a globe, featureless, shining in the mirrored rays of the Sun, perfect in its roundness.

  Whatever had made and flew the globe had gone beyond human technology. Genes had mutated, it hardly mattered from what loins the genes had sprung, whether they had come from an anthropoid ape, a dog, or man himself. Stoddard realised the meaning of the flying machine. Man was obsolescent. The next step up the evolutionary ladder had been taken. When the machine had dissolved into the glare of the Sun he dropped the glasses into the sand and turned away.

  Along the beach, in the distance, he made out the naked figure of Pamela Barnett, her body as youthful and darkly golden as a heat mirage. She stood at the edge of the water and stared into the nova bright sky where the machine had disappeared. He realised then that something more than mere distance separated them.

  The woman was as alien as anything the disaster had created.

  Perhaps secretly she always had been.

  There was nothing left to hide now. And perhaps that was why she’d discarded her clothes. Or maybe she was just crazy. Adapted to a mad environment.

  “She’ll go blind if she looks at the Sun much longer," he thought.

  About the author

  BENEDICT’S PLANET

  Few people on Mars wanted to help. Six men were already lost, one was dead and another insane. Benedict’s newly discovered planet could make him a billionaire if he managed to get a sample of bohridium back to Earth. Bohridium which augmented the power of interstellar drives by orders of magnitude. But no one could explain events on the lost world that looked like a frozen earthquake. Were the nightmare Thight still in existence? Was Jonah Scull really the legendary saviour of the alien Youn? And were the mathematicians right when they predicted ships travelling in these phantom dimensions could slip outside of reality altogether?

  SUNDRINKER

  Corley mixes roaring adventure with bizarre satire as Earth Defence Forces fail to save human space from invasion by the malevolent Thight. In the face of calamity the squabbles between Earth, its colonies and the eccentric terrorists of S.P.A.D.E are forgotten. And Jonah Scull finds himself snatched from the court where he is charged with genocide and is told to save humanity.

  “Alarms screamed as hard radiation sleeted through the surviving Hellcats. Consoles blanked as external aerials burnt off superheated alloy skins. An impossibly long prominence exploded from the sun’s north pole, then the globe itself elongated as if the star was straining out after the fleeing ships to engulf them in a nuclear maw.”

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