A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Coherent conversation came later, when Alan, Suzanne, and a small group went into the ship for a conference. Joy drained from the faces of all the colonists except Suzanne, as Alan told them.

  “I don’t have a replacement satellite.”

  “What did you have in mind when you left, Commander?” the Governor asked.

  “Getting here,” Alan said, looking at Suzanne. “I’m afraid I didn’t think much beyond that.”

  “How did you get here? We heard that you’d been lost.”

  “I was testing a new drive that was supposed to reach light speed. I don’t know what happened, but I got from just outside the Sol system to just outside the Alpha Centauri A system in a matter of hours. Now, as for the satellite, I can return to Earth, pick up a new one, and have it back here in no time.”

  “It may have been a matter of hours for you, Commander, but not for Nine. It was summer solstice here when you started, and now it’s nearly spring. Assuming that you could duplicate your feat, you wouldn’t get back here for a year and a half. Our experts give us less than two months.”

  The conversation went on, but it had all been said. The ships available could take a small percentage of the colonists back to Earth, but only a very small percentage.

  Alan and Suzanne spent the night making love, talking, and thinking. Alan drifted off into a troubled sleep, and woke with a dream-inspired idea. Suzanne woke to Alan’s voice.

  “That’s right, Governor. Your science and technology staff, here on the ship, as soon as possible.”

  It took less than half an hour.

  “Okay, here’s my plan. If it won’t work, I want to know why. If it will work, I want to know how. Now, the new drive that got me here does only one thing. It converts mass into energy. It will draw that mass from any matter it’s in contact with. On the ship, the energy is fed into the drive, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be fed into Nine’s power grid.”

  “You’re overlooking a basic problem,” a voice said. “The mass you had to work with in flight was not the resting mass of your ship, but the mass due to its great acceleration. Your ship is at rest relative to Nine, and its mass is so small as to be useless.”

  There was a hum of conversation, but no one spoke up with a solution. The hum was dying down into despair as Alan broke in. “What is one gravity on this planet, compared with Earth?”

  “One point three nine.”

  “That’s it, then. The mass converter will operate at any acceleration, or gravity, greater than one Earth. If we disconnect it from the ship’s drive and remove it, it can draw on Nine’s mass.”

  There was chaos, as objections were thrown into the air like confetti. “It the mass of the planet is negated, it will fly apart!”

  “There’s no way to anchor such a device against the acceleration it will develop!”

  “Once started, the process will build until . .

  “One at a time!” Alan shouted over the din. “Now. The mass of Nine will not be negated. This will have to be calculated before we do anything, but Nine’s mass is so great that we can supply all the energy we want using a percentage so small that it’s practically nonexistent. E = mc2. A very, very small amount of mass translates into a very, very large amount of energy. Second. The device will be producing energy, not acceleration, so there is no need to anchor it any more than a normal generator. Now, as to a runaway reaction, I have to make a confession. The last order I gave the computer before blacking out was to increase acceleration slowly. I should have put some limit on that command, or at least a deadman cutoff. It may have shut the drive

  down because it was approaching its pre-programmed target, or for some other reason, but that doesn’t matter here. We’ll take it in small, self-limiting stages, so there won’t be any heart attacks. Now, are there any other objections?”

  There were, but they were minor compared to the first ones. Having dealt with why it wouldn’t work, they got on to how it would work. Then, from theory to construction, and on the day of the spring equinox it was as ready as it ever would be.

  “How sure are you,” Suzanne whispered in Alan’s ear, “that this monster isn’t going to blow us up?”

  “Now, what kind of an experiment would it be if we already knew the results?” Alan threw the switch.

  There was a low hum, increasing in frequency as he slowly increased the power. Seconds dragged out like hours. Finally, Engineering dome reported all needles in the green. There was a fearful, expectant silence, followed by cheering, dancing, and general pandemonium.

  By the time Alpha Centauri A had set, every light in Town was on, and Spring Equinox was declared an annual holiday. Almost as an afterthought, the tachyon transmitter was turned back on, and reoriented for Earth. The first message was sent by the hero of the day, Alan Stitch.

  “A. Stitch in time, saves Nine.”

  THE LAST ONE LEFT

  Bill Pronzini

  The alien leans toward Cavender and folds two of its six tentacles on the desk blotter. Bright green eyes on slender stalks regard him gravely. “Now then,” it says, “what did you say is disturbing you? It would be best to get right to the point. Of course,” it adds in gentle tones, “if you’d prefer not to discuss it at the present moment that would be all right too. Ultimately you must be the judge, the controller, the captain, as it were, of your life.”

  Cavender smiles. He winks at the alien; it pretends not to notice. He is used to this kind of thing by now and is not even surprised that Doctor Fount has been replaced. His own wife, his secretary, half of his office staff in the last week; surely his psychiatrist was inevitable. He sees Fount twice a week, was somewhat surprised the replacement had not been accomplished on Tuesday.

  When the aliens first appeared, just one week ago, they had started at the fringes: marginal people, beggars, cleaning ladies, token sellers, busboys and the like. The next day it had been the children and white-collar workers. Last night it had been Eunice and three-quarters of the opera company. And now it was his shrink. Ah well. He had never got along with Fount anyway.

  It doesn’t really matter, he thinks. What does matter is finding out why they have moved in and from where they’ve come. And why nobody but him seems to have been aware of the replacements when they started; no pandemonium on the streets, no newspaper articles, routine applause at the City Opera last night. Is he the only one who can see them?

  Once he has the answers to these questions Cavender is sure he will be able to find a way to banish or destroy the aliens. He will have to save the world—that occurred to him during the sextet, just before all six of the singers sprouted tentacles. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the fate of Mankind is in his hands. Which is not unusual. He has been cleaning up weaker people’s messes all of his life, it seems.

  “All of my life,” he says, and realizes that he has spoken most of this aloud. An old trait, this talking to himself, which has increased markedly in the past couple of days, what with the pressures and losing Eunice and all. Who could blame a man for becoming a little less stable under these circumstances?

  The alien, who has been listening to him with polite attention, says, “This is very interesting, Albert. Why do you think this is so? Why does the fate of Mankind, that is to say, rest exclusively upon you?”

  Like Fount, the alien replacement is humoring him. It must have read the files, listened to the tapes. No matter; Cavender loves to be humored. Why pay a hundred dollars for forty-five minutes if not for that? He has always enjoyed psychotherapy, although now of course he can hardly continue.

  “Because,” he says, “I seem to be the only one aware of the invasion. Your invasion, I mean, through which one by one you’ve usurped almost all the population of New York. I wonder if it’s this way in the midwest, to say nothing of the Eastern bloc?”

  The alien regards him sadly. “How long have you felt this way?”

  “Oh come on,” Cavender says, “I’ve been in this shrinking game for four
years and I know all the tricks better than you. You don’t have to deal with me as if this is reactive depression with paranoid focus.”

  “Come again?”

  “Never mind,” Cavender says. He pauses. “What I want to find out,” he says, “is why you’re doing this. I mean, what’s your primary motivation? Simple conquest of an inferior race? Or what? And what happens to all the good folks you’ve replaced? Are they simply being eliminated or are they transferred to your home planet, whatever strange place that must be, and put to work in mines or labor communes?”

  The alien holds a pencil between two of its tentacles and assumes an expression of professional concern. It seems to be waiting with interest for him to continue.

  “Labor communes would be my guess,” Cavender says. “Let’s see. You needed to take over a new world because living conditions on your planet are becoming intolerable. Pollution, overpopulation, that sort of thing.”

  “Mmm,” the alien says noncommittally.

  “But you don’t want to just abandon your home because there are plenty of natural resources left. None of your people want to stay there and work in the communes, so that’s where we come in. Where the ones you’ve replaced come in, rather. How about that? Am I on the right track?”

  One of the alien’s eyestalks flicks aside. Nothing else changes in its expression and it doesn’t speak, but Cavender thinks: Aha! On target, all right.

  “Now the next question is,” he says, “why am I exempt? Why haven’t I been replaced and why is it I can see you for what you are and nobody else suspected a thing?”

  “Perhaps you’d care to venture another guess there, Albert,” the alien says.

  Cavender nods, considers, and has what he takes to be another insight. “Maybe you aliens are only able to replace people who don’t need shrinks,” he says. “The unimaginative masses, the normal ones. Normal ones,” he says again, because he likes the sound of the phrase. “Does that make any sense?”

  “What do you think, Albert? It’s you on whom all of this must focus, after all. Are you pleased with your insights?”

  “Stop patronizing me,” Cavender says. “I’m one of the last ones left and you know it. Maybe I’m even the last one by now, who knows?” He pauses, suddenly at a loss. “I’m quite disturbed by all of this,” he adds after a while.

  “I’m sure you are, Albert,” the alien says in a sympathetic way. “Of course you realize I have no answers. The only answers must come from you, as I have explained in the past.”

  The alien’s color has shifted, Cavender notices. It is the most delicate of orange now, its tentacles a pastoral and bucolic blue, as blue as an inverted bowl of sky against the earth-colored speckles of the upper and lower extremities. His perspective lurches; he feels a moment of confusion. Another moment of confusion?

  “I think I’m going to leave,” he says.

  “That is your decision. You don’t have to talk, though: we can just sit here if you like.”

  There is a beauty to the tentacles; they have the symmetry and the fine detail of the backs of old violins. “No,” Cavender says, “I want to leave. You’ll bill me, I guess. Do aliens send out bills?”

  “Of course I’ll bill you, Albert,” the alien says kindly. “But why don’t you lie down on the couch and rest for a time? You still have twenty minutes left and you want to get full value for your money, don’t you?”

  “You have no mercy,” Cavender says. “I’m not bitter about that but it’s the truth. No mercy at all.”

  “Why do you say that? Why do you think I have no mercy?”

  “Because you don’t. You could make it easier for me by admitting the truth, but you just won’t do it.”

  “What truth, Albert?”

  “Oh all right,” Cavender says irritably and stands. The beauty of the tentacles is beginning to unnerve him. “An invasion is an invasion. You people are obviously superior to us in every way and your mass hypnosis and transferral program is almost a hundred percent effective. You hold all the advantages. For now,” he adds in a cryptic tone. “For now.”

  “We’ll continue this next Tuesday,” the alien says. “Unless you’d care to change your mind and stay on for the rest of your session—”

  Cavender shakes his head, turns, and leaves the office. He notes as he walks through the reception area that in the interim Fount’s secretary has also become an alien—a small, delicate, five tentacled creature in fetching magenta with multicolored eye-stalks. It is all slipping away very quickly; he should have known that they would make a second sweep of all clerical personnel. He sighs and goes through the outer door, waits in the corridor by the elevator.

  Three aliens emerge wobbling from the periodontist’s office adjacent and stand by him, complaining to each other about excessive bleeding and the perils of anesthesia. Aliens, it would seem, have the same dental problems as humans. He must keep that in mind, Cavender thinks; it might be a flaw in their armament. Perhaps it can be worked with, used against them as a means of saving the world. If there is any world left to save, that is. If he is not already the last human left.

  The elevator comes and takes them all silently to the lobby, where they part. Cavender walks toward the entrance at a brisk pace, and then he—

  —rolls through the flickering doors. Comes into a burning and omnipresent sunlight. Conditions here are not nearly so good as advertised, he thinks; there is too much sunlight and too much air. At the very least they could have denextified the amorlets for the Crossing, piped through a little inductivity. But then, Headquarters gives grattl about the amenities. All they care about is ranking and rendling, ninking and bocck, and little compassion for the furnerraghts as always.

  Waving his tentacles meditatively, denextifying as best he can unsupported, Szzlvey Trg establishes rolicular modal control and warkles toward Cavender’s hutch.

  SCORCHED SUPPER ON NEW NIGER

  Suzy McKee Charnas

  Bob W. Netchkay wanted my ship and I was damned if I was going to let him have it.

  It was the last of the Steinway space fleet that my sister Nita and I had inherited from our aunt Juno. Aunt Juno had been a great tough lady of the old days and one hell of an administrator, far better alone than us two Steinway sisters together. I was young when she died, but smart enough to know that I was a hell of a pilot; so I hired an administrator to run the line for Nita and me.

  Bob Netchkay administrated himself a large chunk of our income, made a bunch of deliberately bad deals, and secretly bought up all my outstanding notes after a disastrous trading season. I threw him out, but he walked away with six of my ships. I lost nine more on my own. Then my sister Nita married the bastard and took away with her all the remaining ships but one, my ship, the Sealyham Egg beater.

  And I’d mortgaged that to raise money for a high risk, high profit cargo in hopes of making a killing. But there were delays on Droslo, repairs to be made at Coyote Station, and the upshot was that Bob had gotten his hands on my mortgage. Now he was exercising his rights under it to call it early, while I was still racing for the one nearby dealer not trade-treatied to my competitors. His message was waiting for me when I woke that morning someplace between Rico and the Touchgate system.

  Ripotee had checked in the message for me. He sat on the

  console chewing imaginary burrs out from between his paw pads. No comment from him. He was probably in one of those moods in which he seemed to feel that the best way to preserve his catlike air of mystery was keeping his mouth shut and acting felinely aloof.

  I read my message, smacked the console, and bounced around the cabin yelling and hugging my hand. Then I said, “This is short range, from ‘The Steinway Legal Department,’ which means that creep Rily in Cabin D of our flagship—I mean the Netchkay pirate ship. They’re close enough to intercept me before I can reach my buyer on Touchgate Center. Bob will get my ship and my cargo and find a way to keep both.”

  Ripotee yawned delicately, curling his pink tong
ue.

  I wiped the console and cut every signal, in or out, that might help Bob to home in on me again. Then I set an automatic jig course to complicate his life. Fast evasive tactics would cost me heavily in fuel but still leave me enough to get to Red Joy Power Station, an outpost on Touchgate Six that was closer to me than my original buyer. Red Joy is an arm of Eastern Glory, the China combine that is one of the great long-hauling companies. I could make Red Joy before Bob caught me, dump my cargo with the Chinese for the best price they would give me, and nip out again.

  The Chinese run an admirable line, knowing how to live well on little in these times of depression. They’re arrogant in a falsely humble way, lack daring and imagination as Aunt Juno taught me to define those terms, and think very little of anything not Chinese. But they are honest and I could count on them to give me fair value for my cargo.

  On the other hand, though the Stein way ships are shorthaulers, they are the only short haulers that can travel among star systems without having to hitch costly rides with long haulers like the Chinese. We are in competition, of a sort. The Chinese don’t like competition on principle; so they don’t much like Steinways.

  Ripotee was observing the course readouts glowing on the wall. “Red Joy.” he remarked, “used to be the trademark of underwear marketed in China in the days of Great Mao.”

  “At worst they would impound my ship,” I said, “but they’d still pay me for what’s in it.”

  Ripotee coughed. “About our cargo,” he said. His tail thumped the top of the console. “I was mouse hunting this morning in the hold.” I kept mice on the Eggbeater to eat up my crumbs and to keep Ripotee fit and amused. “All that pod is souring into oatmeal.”

  I sat there and spattered my instruments with tears.

  Pod is one of the few really valuable alien trade items to have been found in the known universe. It integrates with any living system it’s properly introduced to and realigns that system into a new balance that almost always turns out to be beneficial. People are willing to pay a lot for a pod treatment. But if pod gets contaminated with organic matter it integrates on its own and turns into “oatmeal,” a sort of self-digested sludge which quickly becomes inert and very smelly and hard to clean up.