The First Science Fiction Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  “I just got here, this morning.… They didn’t tell us where to go, they just turned us off the ship. And it was so dark, and I was tired.… I didn’t know the City was so big. I’m looking for my son—not so big! We used to be fishermen back on the mainland. I did a little weaving.”

  “And your son ran off to the City and you ran off after him. Good luck in the New Land; welcome to the island of Opportunity. But just get up and move on.”

  “But my son.…”

  “There are more fishermen’s sons down here in the Devil’s Pot than you can shake a stick at—fishermen’s sons, farmers’ sons, blacksmiths’ sons, sons’ sons. And all of their mothers were weavers or water carriers, or chicken raisers. I must have talked to all of them at one time or another. I won’t even tell you to go down to the launch where they take the workers out to the aquariums and the hydroponic’s gardens. That’s what most of the young people do when they get here…if they can get a job. I won’t even tell you to go there, because there’re so many people that work there, you might miss him a dozen days running.”

  “But the war—I thought he might have joined.…”

  “Somewhere in this ridiculous mess,” interrupted Rara, her birthmark deepening in color, “I have misplaced a niece who was as close to me as any daughter or son ever was to any mother or father. All reports say that she’s dead. So you just be happy that you don’t know about yours. You be very happy, do you hear me!”

  The woman was standing up now. “You say the launches to the factory? Which way are they?”

  “I’m telling you not to go. They’re that way, down two streets, and to your left until you hit the docks. Don’t go.”

  “Thank you,” the woman was saying, already off down the street. “Thank you.” As she reached the middle of the block, someone rounded the corner a moment later, sprinting. He brushed past the woman and ran toward the door of the inn.

  “Tel,” whispered Rara. “Tel!”

  “Hi, Rara.” He stopped, panting.

  “Well, come in,” she said. “Come inside.” They stepped into the lobby of the inn. “Tel, do you know anything about what happened to Alter? I got a weird story from General Medical. And then you disappeared. My lord, I feel like a crazy fool opening this place. But if somehow she wanted to get to me, where would she go if I wasn’t here? And then, what am I to do anyway. I mean I have to eat, and—”

  “Rara,” he said, and he said it so that she stopped talking. “Look I know where Alter is. And she’s safe. As far as you know, you don’t know where she is, if she’s alive or dead. But you suspect she isn’t alive. I’ll be going to her, but you don’t know that either. I just came to check on some things.”

  “I’ve got all her things together right here. They gave me her clothes at the hospital, and put them all into a bundle in case we had to make a quick getaway. We had to do that once when we were working in a carnival where the manager suddenly took a liking to her and made himself a pest. She was twelve. He was a beast. Maybe you should take—”

  “The fewer things I take the better,” Tel said. Then he saw the bundle on the table by the door. On top was a leather thong to which a few chips of colored shell still clung. “Maybe this,” he said, picking it up. “What shape is Geryn’s room in?”

  “The place has been ransacked since they took him away,” she said. “Everybody and his brother has been picking at the place. What about Geryn, how is he?”

  “Dead,” Tel said. “What I really came about was to burn his plans for the kidnaping.”

  “Dead?” Rara asked. “Well, I’m not surprised. Oh, the plans! Why I burned those myself the minute I got back into his room. They were all over the table; why they didn’t take them all up right then, I’ll never—”

  “Did you burn every last scrap?”

  “And crumbled the ashes, and disposed of them one handful at a time over a period of three days by the docks. Every last scrap.”

  “Then I guess there’s nothing for me to do,” he said. “You may not see me or Alter for a long time. I’ll give her your love.”

  Rara bent down and kissed him on the cheek. “For Alter,” she said. Then she asked, “Tel?”

  “What?”

  “That woman you brushed by in the street when I saw you running up the block.…”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you ever see her before?”

  “I didn’t look at her very carefully. I’m not sure. Why?”

  “Never mind,” Rara said. “You just get on out of here before.… Well, just get.”

  “So long, Rara.” He got.

  * * * *

  Not so high as the towers of the Royal Palace of Toron, the green tile balcony outside Clea’s window caught the breeze like the hem of an emerald woman passing the sea. There was water beyond the other houses, deeper blue than the sky, and still. She leaned over the balcony railing. On the white marble table were her notebook, a book on matter transmission, and her slide rule.

  “Clea.”

  She whirled at the voice, her black hair leaping across her shoulder in the low sun.

  “Thanks for getting my message through.”

  “This is you,” she said slowly. “In person now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m not quite sure what to say,” she said, blinking. “Except I’m glad.”

  “I’ve got some bad news,” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Very bad news. It’ll hurt you.”

  She looked puzzled, her head going to the side.

  “Tomar’s dead.”

  The head straightened, the black eyebrows pulled together, and her lower lip tautened across her teeth until her jaw muscles quivered. She nodded once, quickly, and said, “Yes.” Then, as quickly, she looked down and up at him. Her eyes were closed. “That…that hurts so much.”

  He waited a few moments, and then said, “Here, let me show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Come over to the table. Here.” He took a handful of copper centiunit pieces from his pocket, moved her books and slide rule over, and arranged the coins in a square, four by four, only with one corner missing. Now he took a smaller, silver deciunit and put it on the table about a foot from the missing corner. “Shoot it into the gap there,” he said.

  She put her forefinger on the silver disk, was still, and then snapped her finger. The silver circle shot across the foot of white marble, hit the corner, and two pieces of copper bounced away from the other side of the square. She looked at him, questioningly.

  “It’s a gambling game, called Randomax. It’s getting sort of popular in the army.”

  “Random for random numbers, max for matrix?”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Just guessing.”

  “Tomar wanted you to know about it. He said you might be interested in some of its aspects.”

  “Tomar?”

  “Just like I monitored your phone calls, I overheard him talking to another soldier about it before he—before the crash. He just thought you’d be interested.”

  “Oh,” she said. She moved the silver circle away from the others, put the dislocated copper coins back in the square again, and flipped the smaller coin once more. Two different coins jumped away. “Damn,” Clea said, softly.

  “Huh?” He looked up. Tears were running down her face.

  “Damn,” she said. “It hurts.” She blinked and looked up again. “What about you? You still haven’t told me all that’s happened to you. Wait a moment.” She reached for her notebook, took a pencil up, and made a note.

  “An idea?” he asked.

  “From the game,” she told him. “Something I hadn’t thought of before.”

  He smiled. “Does tha
t solve all your problems on—what were they—sub-trigonometric functions?”

  “Inverse sub-trigonometric functions,” she said. “No. It doesn’t go that simply. Did you stop your war?”

  “I tried,” he said. “It doesn’t go that simply.”

  “Are you free?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad. How did it come about?”

  “I used to be a very hardheaded, head-strong, sort of stupid kid, who was always doing things to get me into more trouble than it would get the people I did it to. That was about my only criterion for doing anything. Unfortunately I didn’t do it very well. So now, still head-strong, maybe not quite so stupid, I’ve at least picked up a little skill. I had to do something where the main point wasn’t whether it hurt me or not. They just had to be done. I had to go a long way, see a lot of things, and I guess it sort of widened my horizons, gave me some room to move around-some more freedom.”

  “Childhood and a prison mine doesn’t give you very much, does it?”

  “No.”

  “What about the war, Jon?”

  “Let’s put it this way. As far as what’s on the other side of the radiation barrier, which is pretty much out of commission now, there’s no need for a war. None whatsoever. If that gets seen and understood by the people who have to see and understand it, then fine. If not, well then, it isn’t that simple. Look, Clea, I just came by for a few minutes. I want to get out of the house before Dad sees me. Keep on talking to him. I’ll be disappearing for a while, so you’ll have to do it. Just don’t bother to tell him I’m alive.”

  “Jon.…”

  He smiled. “I mean I want to do it myself when I come back.”

  She looked down a moment, and when she looked up he was going back into the house. She started to say good-bye, but bit back the words.

  Instead, she sat down at the table; she opened the notebook; she cried a little bit. Then she started writing again.

  EXPEDITER, by Mack Reynolds

  The knock at the door came in the middle of the night, as Josip Pekic had always thought it would. He had been but four years of age when the knock had come that first time and the three large men had given his father a matter of only minutes to dress and accompany them. He could barely remember his father.

  The days of the police state were over, so they told you. The cult of the personality was a thing of the past. The long series of five-year plans and seven-year plans were over and all the goals had been achieved. The new constitution guaranteed personal liberties. No longer were you subject to police brutality at the merest whim. So they told you.

  But fears die hard, particularly when they are largely of the subconscious. And he had always, deep within, expected the knock.

  He was not mistaken. The rap came again, abrupt, impatient. Josip Pekic allowed himself but one chill of apprehension, then rolled from his bed, squared slightly stooped shoulders, and made his way to the door. He flicked on the light and opened up, even as the burly, empty faced zombie there was preparing to pound still again.

  There were two of them, not three as he had always dreamed. As three had come for his father, more than two decades before.

  His father had been a rightist deviationist, so the papers had said, a follower of one of whom Josip had never heard in any other context other than his father’s trial and later execution. But he had not cracked under whatever pressures had been exerted upon him, and of that his son was proud.

  He had not cracked, and in later years, when the cult of personality was a thing of the past, his name had been cleared and returned to the history books. And now it was an honor, rather than a disgrace, to be the son of Ljubo Pekic, who had posthumously been awarded the title Hero of the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.

  But though his father was now a hero, Josip still expected that knock. However, he was rather bewildered at the timing, having no idea of why he was to be under arrest.

  The first of the zombie twins said expressionlessly, “Comrade Josip Pekic?”

  If tremor there was in his voice, it was negligible. He was the son of Ljubo Pekic. He said, “That is correct. Uh…to what do I owe this intrusion upon my privacy?” That last in the way of bravado.

  The other ignored the question. “Get dressed and come with us, Comrade,” he said flatly.

  At least they still called him comrade. That was some indication, he hoped, that the charges might not be too serious.

  He chose his dark suit. Older than the brown one, but in it he felt he presented a more self-possessed demeanor. He could use the quality. Five foot seven, slightly underweight and with an air of unhappy self-deprecation, Josip Pekic’s personality didn’t exactly dominate in a group. He chose a conservative tie and a white shirt, although he knew that currently some frowned upon white shirts as a bourgeois affectation. It was all the thing, these days, to look proletarian, whatever that meant.

  The zombies stood, watching him emptily as he dressed. He wondered what they would have said had he asked them to wait in the hallway until he was finished. Probably nothing. They hadn’t bothered to answer when he asked what the charge against him was.

  He put his basic papers, his identity card, his student cards, his work record and all the rest in an inner pocket, and faced them. “I am ready,” he said as evenly as he could make it come.

  They turned and led the way down to the street and to the black limousine there. And in it was the third one, sitting in the front seat, as empty of face as the other two. He hadn’t bothered to turn off the vehicle’s cushion jets and allow it to settle to the street. He had known how very quickly his colleagues would reappear with their prisoner.

  Josip Pekic sat in the back between the two, wondering just where he was being taken, and, above all, why. For the life of him he couldn’t think of what the charge might be. True enough, he read the usual number of proscribed books, but no more than was common among other intellectuals, among the students and the country’s avant garde, if such you could call it. He had attended the usual parties and informal debates in the coffee shops where the more courageous attacked this facet or that of the People’s Dictatorship. But he belonged to no active organizations which opposed the State, nor did his tendencies attract him in that direction. Politics were not his interest.

  At this time of the night, there was little traffic on the streets of Zagurest, and few parked vehicles. Most of those which had been rented for the day had been returned to the car-pool garages. It was the one advantage Josip could think of that Zagurest had over the cities of the West which he had seen. The streets were not cluttered with vehicles. Few people owned a car outright. If you required one, you had the local car pool deliver it, and you kept it so long as you needed transportation.

  He had expected to head for the Kalemegdan Prison where political prisoners were traditionally taken, but instead, they slid off to the right at Partisan Square, and up the Boulevard of the November Revolution. Josip Pekic, in surprise, opened his mouth to say something to the security policeman next to him, but then closed it again and his lips paled. He knew where they were going, now. Whatever the charge against him, it was not minor.

  A short kilometer from the park, the government buildings began. The Skupstina, the old Parliament left over from the days when Transbalkania was a backward, feudo-capitalistic power of third class. The National Bank, the new buildings of the Borba and the Politica. And finally, set back a hundred feet from the boulevard, the sullen, squat Ministry of Internal Affairs.

  It had been built in the old days, when the Russians had still dominated the country, and in slavish imitation of the architectural horror known as Stalin Gothic. Meant to be above all efficient and imposing and winding up simply—grim.

  Yes. Josip Pekic knew where they were going now.

  * * * *

  The limousine
slid smoothly on its cushion of air, up the curved driveway, past the massive iron statue of the worker struggling against the forces of reaction, a rifle in one hand, a wrench in the other and stopped before, at last, the well-guarded doorway.

  Without speaking, the two police who had come to his room opened the car door and climbed out. One made a motion with his head, and Josip followed. The limousine slid away immediately.

  Between them, he mounted the marble stairs. It occurred to him that this was the route his father must have taken, two decades before.

  He had never been in the building of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, before. Few Transbalkanians had, other than those who were employed in the MVD, or who came under the Ministry’s scrutiny.

  Doors opened before them, closed behind them. Somewhat to Josip Pekic’s surprise the place was copiously adorned with a surplus of metal and marble statues, paintings and tapestries. It had similarities to one of Zagurest’s heavy museums.

  Through doors and down halls and through larger rooms, finally to a smaller one in which sat alone at a desk a lean, competent and assured type who jittered over a heavy sheaf of papers with an electro-marking computer pen. He was nattily and immaculately dressed and smoked his cigarette in one of the small pipelike holders once made de rigueur through the Balkans by Marshal Tito.

  The three of them came to a halt before his desk and, at long last, expression came to the faces of the zombies. Respect, with possibly an edge of perturbation. Here, obviously, was authority.

  He at the desk finished a paper, tore it from the sheaf, pushed it into the maw of the desk chute from whence it would be transported to the auto-punch for preparation for recording. He looked up in busy impatience.

  Then, to Josip Pekic’s astonishment, the other came to his feet quickly, smoothly and with a grin on his face. Josip hadn’t considered the possibility of being grinned at in the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

  “Aleksander Kardelj,” he said in self-introduction, sticking out a lean hand to be shaken. “You’re Pekic, eh? We’ve been waiting for you.”