A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “Maybe there isn’t a point, but I . . . I feel like we have to do something. We have to try. I don’t want us to end up another murder-suicide statistic.” He took her into his arms and held her close. “I love you, Beth.”

  She clung to him and whispered, “I love you, too.”

  They sat silently in the living room as the twilight deepened, and the world all around them hummed.

  What would normally have been a nine-hour ride to Little Sebago Lake took almost thirty-six hours because Dave wanted to stay off the interstates. The latest news reports indicated that truckers were chasing down and crushing unlucky drivers who pissed them off. Dave had seen the film Duel once, and that was enough for him.

  As they headed north, the sound became more discordant. Dave noticed a mechanical chunking quality that was getting more pronounced. The endless, irregular rhythm ground away at his nerves like fine sandpaper, but they finally made it to the cabin by the lake without incident.

  The camp was on the east side of the lake, small and shabby, but a welcome sight. The lake stretched out before them, a flat, blue expanse of water with the New Hampshire mountains off in the distance to the west. The sun was just setting, tipping the lake’s surface with sparkles of gold light and streaking the sky with slashes of red and purple.

  It was beautiful, and when Dave and Beth looked at each other, the good feelings drowned out the hum, if only for a moment. They embraced and kissed with passion.

  Then the day was over. The sun dropped behind the mountains, and the humming noise pressed back in on them. After unpacking the car, they ate a cold supper of baked beans out of the can. Beth set about making the bed upstairs and straightening up while Dave walked down to the lake’s edge.

  The night was still except for the hum. All the usual sounds—the birds and crickets and frogs—were silent. The lake looked like a large pane of smoky glass. Stars twinkled in the velvety sky above. Dave sat down on a weather-stripped tree trunk that had washed up onto shore and looked up at the sky. The noise seemed to be changing again. It now was a faint, squeaky sound that reminded him of fingernails raking down a chalkboard. At least it was the only sound. No blaring TVs . . . no pounding stereos.

  How long can this go on? he wondered. How long can anyone handle this before we go mad and exterminate ourselves?

  He heaved a sigh as he looked up at the sky. At first, he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing when he noticed a few black flakes drifting down onto the lake’s surface. They looked like soot from a bonfire. Like a child in a snowstorm, Dave reached up and tried to catch one of the falling flakes.

  Funny, he thought, I don’t smell smoke.

  He looked at his hand. The flake lay in the cup of his palm, but it wasn’t soft and crumbly like ash. It was hard and thin, with a dark, brittle surface. It crunched like fragile glass when he poked it with his index finger.

  Jesus Christ he thought. It looks like paint.

  Curious, he looked up again. By now the flakes were sifting down rapidly from the sky. As he watched, Dave became aware of a low, steady vibration beneath his feet. It felt like a mild electrical current. As he watched the sky, irregular yellow splotches appeared overhead as more and more black paint fell away, exposing a dull, cracked surface behind. After a time, silver and yellow flakes began to fall. Dave watched in amazement, his mouth dry, his mind numb.

  A crescent moon was rising in the east behind him. He turned to see if it, too, was peeling away from the sky like an old sticker on a refrigerator. The noise rose to a sudden, piercing squeal, and then the vibration rumbled the ground like a distant earthquake.

  “Beth!” he called out, watching as fragments of the moon broke off and drifted down from the sky. They fluttered and hissed as they rushed through the trees behind him, and then he saw something overhead that was impossible to believe. The peeling paint had exposed a vast complex of spinning gears and cogs with a network of circuits and switches that glowed as they overheated. The humming sound rose even higher until it was almost unbearable as more pieces of the night sky fell away, revealing the machinery behind it.

  At last, Dave knew—as impossible as it was—what was happening.

  “Beth!” he called out so his wife could hear him above the steadily rising rumble. “Come out here!

  You’ve got to see this! The sky is falling!”

  VISITNG THE MILLIONAIRE

  George Anthony

  In the end, it got a bit tedious, queuing to see the millionaire. As befitted our colour, marshals waved us through the outer gates into the court of preliminary investigation; but here we waited for some hours with perhaps a thousand others until, eventually, there were checks on the authenticity of our displays; and then more serious enquiries into records. In eight of our group a deficiency was revealed. Our number fell to twelve.

  After that it was the whole day progressing along an upward-spiralling ramp, rehearsing answers to hypothetical questions, eyeing each other until we reached the first level platform and presented ourselves.

  “You have been informed,” said the evaluator, “that only one qualifies here. I decide who.”

  Tests continued throughout the night; but I experienced no difficulty in producing correct responses. As the sun rose, the other eleven of my group were on the downward ramp, while I rejoined the slow onward climb.

  It was not easy to avoid contact with those around me, who—also sole survivors of their groups—attempted to find out in disingenuous conversation what level of competition they now faced. I feigned an auditory defect and gave short, bizarre, answers. I was soon left to myself.

  The second level was reached, once again, some time towards evening. Here the questioning was more indeterminate, designed to pick up motivational anomalies, signs of ambivalence.

  But my preparations were adequate. The reasons for wishing to observe the millionaire were seen to reflect an inherent temporal sense, developed to a keen historical perspective. My experience would have novelty.

  And so I rose to the third and final level. The thousands which had presented themselves at the outer gate had been winnowed down to some twenty—the maximum permitted at any one time—being those most likely to pass on something of value. It was possible, indeed, that we might be the last. The existence of the millionaire was after all a statistical improbability, and one which grew steadily more improbable as the years passed.

  We passed through various final security screens; but, again, my preparations proved faultless. A chain of locks took us up a gentle pressure gradient and into a hall where the millionaire’s chamber hung suspended in an intricate maze of conduits. We began the last stage of the journey: a spiral ramp leading to the viewing platform. I made myself ready.

  Looking down at the millionaire in its envelope of support machinery, I found it difficult to believe that such a misshapen, pallid being was of any cosmic significance. Yet its race had at one time dominated our space, not through force, but through the irresistible spread of its freely-shared technologies and cultures.

  And now, here was the last of them. The natural ageing of the species had at some point deprived it of fertility; but its biology had been engineered to give each individual effective immortality.

  Yet, in the end, they could not defeat the grindstone of time. Accident, conflict, the wear-and-tear of existence had whittled the numbers down: from trillions to billions, and then to millions; from millions to thousands, hundreds, tens; and at last to one, who, according to the records, was over a million years old. The millionaire.

  My moment had come. Reciting the codes, I focused energies on the being below, and watched as the radiance flowed from its body, turning the liquids in the surrounding tubes to vapour, the metals and synthetics to liquid. Attendants reached out for me; but it was over. The light below ended as suddenly as it had come, leaving only black dust.

  So died the last of the human beings. A thousand civilisations, smothered in infancy by human benevolence, had been avenged
.

  THE TREASURE

  Michael Davis

  Jake heard the scream from the direction of the shoreline. He ripped his way through the dense undergrowth, but when he got there, she was gone. He followed the drag trail into the teal colored trees. Just inside the dense underbrush, he came to an opening, and there she was, the life being sucked from her small body. She reached for him, pleaded for relief. He struggled to help her, but he couldn’t move. His feet were entangled in the roots of the forest; the vines rose up and anchored him to the ground. She called his name again and again, begged him to save her, but he could only watch as she was slowly devoured. He looked toward the sky; cried out for a reprieve, but there was no one to help.

  Clang.

  Jake opened his eyes. His self-made alarm worked this time. He pulled down the clear plastic container hanging over his head and shook it back and forth. The motion aggravated the two-inch long glowworms stored inside the container. The insects hissed as their bodies emitted a bright glow, equivalent to roughly a 40-watt bulb.

  He looked down at the floor and observed a two-foot long brown slug easing across the trip wire of his alarm. He removed the knife from the sleeve attached to his belt, tossed it at the four-inch diameter creature, and skewered the slimy thing to the ground.

  Jake sat on the edge of the handmade cot and stared through the tent opening at his new world. He shook his head to force out the terrible images that hounded his dreams. The nightmares came less frequently now, but the memory was always there, leaching at his soul. For that one mistake, when he lowered his guard for an instant, he would be haunted for the remainder of his days.

  Jake reached for his knife and picked up one of the many hostile creatures he had learned to live with during the past eleven months. He smirked at the slug and declared, “Not this time. You already sucked off my little toe, you bastard. It’s my turn to eat you.” He tied a string around the extruded orifice at the front of the slug and hung his evening meal from the tent post to prevent the other little crawly things from stealing his dinner.

  He walked outside and peered up at the three moons that cast a blue tinge across the landscape. “Might as well stay up. Not enough time before they start coming again.” He stretched his six foot frame and ran a hand through his sandy colored hair and took a moment to enjoy the view of the sparkling turquoise shoreline eighty yards below his fortress. Forty-foot luminescent eels undulated in the surf, as the males jockeyed for access to a mate. A large six-legged pig-like creature routed in the sand for shellfish deposited by the tide.

  “Watch it. You’re getting too close.” The animal had carelessly strayed next to a two foot diameter borrow. “Too late.” In an instant, the maroon-red sea leech shot out and latched its four-inch fangs into the side of its victim. The struggle for life subsided when the leech tranquilized its prey by injecting a pint of poison. Once the meal was enveloped, the leech retracted back into its hiding place beneath the sand.

  “Guess I’ll replenish my stock.” Jake walked back to the tent and gathered an arm full of items from his arsenal. He walked along the rim of the plateau that defined his battlefront and distributed weapons at strategic locations where they tended to crawl up the ridge once the assault began. Jake shook his head at the contrast between the sophisticated armaments destroyed in the crash and his current defenses. His crude primitive weapons were simple: several crossbows he fabricated from the wreckage and spears fashioned from saplings, and large stones. Not much for a technology driven man, but enough to survive the last four months against the only weapon his adversaries possessed, their own bodies.

  Satisfied that his stash would last through the upcoming battle, he walked back to the tent and examined the electronic components laid out on the table. “Maybe this time I fixed it.” Jake spent the next few minutes reassembling his mission recorder. Then he picked up the wireless microphone, crossed his fingers, and stated, “Testing, testing, one, two, three.”

  He flipped the playback switch, “Please work, you son of a bitch.”

  “Testing, testing, one, two, three.”

  “Finally! After all these months, I can start recording this fouled up mission.”

  Jake pulled back the flap of the tent and looked toward the horizon, “Fifteen minutes until sunrise. I’ll record as much as I can before they come.”

  He shook the container of glowworms a few times, sat it on the table and began. “This is Major Hamilton, commander of the Specter Three deep probe mission. It’s been eleven months since we arrived on this planet. In terms of where we are, I have no idea. Two years into the mission, something happened to the auto-nav system. We were all suspended, and by the time I refreshed, the command software had vectored us on a glide path to land on Aurora, or at least that’s what I call this place. From our approach, the planet appeared to be roughly 90% water, with five or six large landmasses, each about half the size of Australia. A massive electro-magnetic pulse destroyed the mission flight data, so we could never figure how we got here instead of our original destination, Omega Four. The EM pulse toasted all our celestial instrumentation. I think we came too damn close to an uncharted gravity well. Life support lasted long enough to start the refresh cycle, but it screwed up on Captain Jones’ suspension pod. By the time I recovered, his body had collapsed into a gelatinous form.”

  Jake took a drink of water from his canteen. It felt good to talk to someone, or at least to feel like he was talking to another human. “The gravity well must have slung us into a new trajectory. It was probably a black hole that exceeded its mass consumption capacity and emitted a powerful EM pulse. Fortunately, we were off on one of the field’s side lobes, otherwise we would have been fried to a cinder. With the sensors burned out, the landing radar was useless. I deployed the emergency deceleration chutes, but it wasn’t enough. The ship skidded through thick undergrowth before hitting the rock ledge. It took out the entire right side, including Lieutenant Carol Manson’s suspension pod. I went back to see if she survived, but there was nothing. Just pieces of her body scattered among the wreckage. I gathered what I could and buried the remains of Carol and Captain Jones up here on top of the plateau, so I can watch over them. Make sure nothing disturbs them.”

  He looked out at the crosses casting shadows in the bright moonlight. “Mary Thompson, the life sciences specialist, survived the crash. After we established a safe haven on the nearest plateau in the tropical forest, Mary began to investigate the multitude of life forms on the planet.”

  Jake smiled. “Tell Harry Myers, I finally figured out why mission planning was so imperative about splitting the genders on each flight. I first thought it was some political statement, but now I understand the logic of their decision. The first five months weren’t that bad. It was tough to figure out how to survive in this ecosystem, but at least we weren’t alone. We had each other.”

  He removed his mother’s medallion from his pocket and rubbed the smooth surface in the amber light of the glowworms. The heirloom was the only thing he kept. When she died, there was no one to leave behind, no reason not to join the deep probe mission group. Jake remembered when he gave Mary the memento as a gift for her birthday, three months after they crashed. It was the first time Mary kissed him.

  He picked up the microphone and continued. “When that thing took Mary, it was like I was thrown into some dark abyss. I walked around with no purpose for a long time. I never imagined it was possible to be this lonely, especially at night. The nights are unbearable. I still haven’t adapted to all the noises, the gut wrenching screams as some prey loses its life.”

  Jake glanced at the closest cross of the three in the makeshift graveyard. “Mary and I really got close in those five months we struggled to survive. We never clicked back on earth, but here, we really bonded. We talked about how lucky we were to end up together, even if it was all the way out here. We even discussed starting a family.”

  He gazed out at the pink clouds reflecting sunlight from below t
he mountain, “I tried to save her, but by the time I got there, the eight foot segmented centipede had injected too much digestive fluid. It took two days before she finally died. I had to watch her slowly dissolve, listen to her suffer. I’ll never forget it, never. I considered stopping her pain, bringing it to an end, but I just couldn’t do it. God forgive me, but I lacked the courage.”

  A dim light blanketed the horizon as the sun neared the ridgeline. The looming dawn brought the first series of clicks and low resonant snorts. “I don’t have much time before they start again. Mary learned that the dominant species on this planet is a four-legged mammal that resembles a large green cat-like creature. She named the species ‘the Clickers’, because of their constant chatter of alternating clicks and snorts. They’re basically peaceful, thriving on the fruits and berries that grow abundantly in the forest. Their faces are humanoid in form, with oval eyes, and small noses, like those on a tiny puppy. Their four-inch long elfin ears provide exceptional warning against approaching predators. They also appear to be a matriarchal-based species. The females determine what each cluster of Clickers does, and when.” He grinned, “Much like with human women.”

  Jake ate a large pear shaped fruit and then continued. “The males average about one hundred and seventy pounds and move around on all four extremities. The females are roughly thirty pounds lighter and spend most of their time in trees, but they walk upright as bipeds, just like us. This arboreal behavior has evolved a four-foot tail for balance, and a fourteen inch tapered tongue to help reach fruit on the smaller upper limbs.”

  The first of Aurora’s two suns peeked above the mountain, and the chatter below in the forest stopped. “Crap. I’ve got to go. They’ll be coming up the ridge for me. I’ll explain more later.”

  He turned off the recorder and ran toward his observation post at the edge of the plateau. It was still too dark to see them climbing up the hill, but he knew they were coming; they always did. No matter how many he killed, they still came. For a six-day period every two months, his existence had diminished into a constant battle with an alien life form that he had come to understand too late.