New Writings in SF 22 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  ‘You are imprecise, Charles.’

  ‘And you are being stubborn. You know damn well what I mean. How long have we been travelling in this can ?’

  ‘A long time, Charles.’

  Too long, he thought. So long that time had become meaningless. Flung at a speed close to that of light, aimed at the distant stars, his metabolic clock slowed by the contraction effect. Back home it could have been ten thousand years. Within the ship it had been a lifetime.

  The thought bothered him and he fought it, aided by the drug, the comforting presence of the woman. Imperceptibly he slipped into reverie, hearing again the childish voices of the chosen, the deeper tones of his instructors. He was special. He was to be trained for a momentous task. His life was to be dedicated to the Great Expansion.

  He stirred and felt again the soothing injection.

  ‘Talk to me, Evane.’

  ‘About what, Charles?’

  ‘Pick a subject. Any subject. You are tall and blonde and beautiful. How do you feel locked up in that machine? Shall I let you out? Break into your prison and let you take a walk?’

  ‘You are being irrational, Charles.’

  ‘How so, Evane? You’ve been with me for how long? Fifty years ? More ? A long time in any case. We’ve spoken often and surely you must have changed a little from those early days. Listen, do you know why I destroyed the books and those other things ? I felt that you were watching me. Watching and despising me. Can you deny it?’

  ‘I have watched you, Charles, certainly.’

  ‘Watched and ordered, do this and do that and do it damn quick or else. At times you’ve been a bitch and I should hate you but I don’t. Hate you, I mean. I don’t hate you at all.’

  ‘Hate, Charles?’

  ‘An emotive feeling.’

  In his imagination she frowned and shook her head.

  ‘Don’t say it,’ he said quickly. ‘I don’t want to know what you can and cannot feel. Nothing with a voice like yours can be devoid of sensitivity.’

  ‘You are irrational, Charles. Perhaps you should sleep.’

  ‘No!’

  He snatched his arm from the orifice before the drug could be injected, cunning with much repetition for this was not the first time he had sat and conversed with the woman locked in her machine. And yet this time seemed different from those other occasions. Then he had permitted the oblivion she gave, sinking into darkness and a world of dreams in which, living, she had come to him, arms open, body yielding, sweeping him on a tide of consummation in which everything was wonderful and his life complete.

  ‘I don’t want to sleep,’ he said. ‘I want to talk. I want to know what all this is about. You are going to tell me.’

  ‘I do not understand, Charles.’

  ‘Data insufficient?’ He sneered at her expression..’Are you still trying to convince me that you’re just a machine ? Don’t you realise I know better? This whole thing is a farce. A play. It’s time it ended.’

  ‘I still do not understand.’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘You seem to be aberrated. A malfunction in your physical condition, perhaps. If you will replace your arm I will monitor your metabolism.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing. You’ll open the doors and let me out of here.’

  ‘That is impossible, Charles. You know that.’

  ‘Then return back home.’

  ‘That is equally impossible. You are distressed, Charles, your thinking illogical. But you are not alone.’

  Tiredly he opened his eyes and stared at the dials, the ranked telltales, the metal he had polished and the panels he had kept spotless. No, he was not alone. A million vessels over a span of years, each exactly like the one in which he rode, each loaded as this one was loaded, filled with manufactured spores, seeds, the life-elements common to the home world. Incipient life lying dormant in the hold, protected in a dozen different ways with skins of various plastic and natural membrane, in globules of ice and nutrient jelly, dehydrated, frozen, held in electronic stasis. Motes, dusts, moulds, near-invisible molecular chains. A cargo designed to perpetuate the race.

  And himself?

  ‘No!’ He writhed with inner turmoil. ‘No!’

  ‘Charles, you must relax. You have no need to fear. The ship is intact and you are unharmed. Everything is as it was.’

  The soft, soothing, mother-tone. The reassurance of a dedicated companion. He was not alone, she was with him, she would always be with him.

  But she lied as the others had lied as his whole life had been a lie. His whole empty, stupid, wasted life.

  ‘The truth,’ he said harshly. Tell me the truth.’

  ‘About what, Charles?’

  ‘About everything. Talk, damn you!’

  ‘The project was explained to you at the very beginning. The Great Expansion is the dream of the race of which you are a member. We are to seek out a suitable star, discover a planet within a certain range of determined factors and discharge our cargo according to programmed instructions. If successful the life-cycle of that world will be guided to emulate conditions approximating the home world. This means that, in future times, the race will find suitable planets on which to settle. By extrapolation it is possible that within a foreseeable future the members of your race will find habitable and, to some extent, familiar worlds scattered throughout the galaxy.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘There is no more, Charles.’

  ‘Like hell there isn’t. What about me?’

  ‘You are the safety factor. It is remotely possible that something could go wrong with the ship or the life-support or maintenance mechanisms. If so you are able to effect repairs.’

  ‘With what? My bare hands?’

  ‘No, Charles, with the tools which I will make available in case of need.’

  ‘And the knowledge of how to use them?’

  ‘That has been implanted in your subconscious mind, Charles. The knowledge will be released by any state of real emergency.’

  It sounded logical and he wondered why he should be impressed, what else would a machine be but logical ? And yet the thing had been programmed and set to respond in a certain way to certain stimuli. It could be lying or, correction, telling the truth as it knew it which needn’t be the truth at all.

  And yet, if that wasn’t the truth, what was?

  Why had he been incorporated into the vessel ?

  Restlessly he rose from the chair and walked the ten feet towards the rear bulkhead, the ten feet towards the chair, the ten feet back again. Around him the vessel operated with its usual, quiet efficiency and he stared at the walls, the ceiling, the panel with its ranked instruments. Window-dressing, he thought, suddenly. Something to occupy his attention and to maintain the illusion that he was important to the functioning of the ship. Why hadn’t he realised before that he was totally unnecessary with the vessel operated as it was by computer control? An expensive piece of inessential cargo.

  And yet the Builders would never have wasted so much unless there had been a reason.

  He said, harshly, ‘Evane, why am I here?’

  ‘I told you, Charles.’

  ‘You lied. Now tell me the truth.’ Incredibly she did not answer and, staring at his hands, seeing the thick veins, the blotches, the signs of age, he said, ‘What happens when I die?’

  ‘When you cease to function, Charles, we will have reached terminal distance from the home world. I shall then reverse direction and commence to search for a suitable world to receive our cargo.’

  For a moment it made no sense—and then the truth came crashing in, numbing, killing with its sudden destruction of his pride and ego.

  ‘A clock,’ he said blankly. ‘You mean that I’m nothing more than a damned clock.’

  A metabolic timepiece: for in the contraction caused by near-light speeds how else to determine duration? The seeded world must be within reach and that measurement must be determined by the life-span of a man. His life-span or
his awareness of the truth, the variable was important.

  And the rest ?

  ‘I am sorry, Charles,’ said the machine and this time there could be no doubt as to the note of regret. ‘I am really sorry.’

  And then the electronic device implanted in his brain froze him to instant immobility, the gases came to chill him into stasis, the walls opened and displayed the instruments which would take him and sunder his-flesh into fragments, preserving the essential RNA and DNA molecular chains all to be added to the final seeding.

  But there was no pain. No pain at all. In that, at least, the Builders had been kind.

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  * * * *

  RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Arthur Clarke was one of John Carnell’s oldest friends and as an author feels a particular debt to him because, among many other things, John Carnell first published ‘The Sentinel’, the short story that was the germ of 2001, A Space Odyssey. Naturally, Arthur Clarke was anxious to appear in this special volume of New Writings. But he tells me he has nothing unprinted, for The Wind from the Sun brings all his stories into book form, so it is with very great pleasure we are able to present herewith the introduction to his novel Rendezvous with Rama, published by Gollancz. This short introduction indicates that the Clarkian magic and breadth of vision continue unabated...

  * * * *

  Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On 30 June, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and two thousand miles—a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. Again, on 12 February, 1947, yet another Russian city had a still narrower escape; the second great meteorite of the Twentieth Century detonated only two hundred miles from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivalling that of the newly-invented uranium bomb.

  In those days, there was nothing that men could do to protect themselves against the last random shots in the cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of the Moon. The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the Twenty First Century, there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice. The human race had spread from Pole to Pole. And so, inevitably...

  At 09.46 G.M.T. on the morning of September 11, in the exceptionally beautiful summer of the year 2077, most of the inhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball appear in the eastern sky. Within seconds it was brighter than the sun, and as it moved across the heavens—at first in utter silence—it left behind it a churning column of dust and smoke.

  Somewhere above Austria it began to disintegrate, producing a series of concussions so violent that more than a million people had their hearing permanently damaged. They were the lucky ones.

  Moving at thirty miles a second, a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy, destroying in a few flaming moments the labour of centuries. The cities of Padua and Verona were wiped from the face of the earth; and the last glories of Venice sank forever beneath the sea, as the waters of the Adriatic came thundering landwards after the hammer-blow from space.

  Six hundred thousand people died, and the total damage was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to history, to science—to the whole human race, for the rest of time—was beyond all computation. It was as if a great war had been fought and lost in a single morning; and few could draw much pleasure from the- fact that, as the dust of destruction slowly settled, for months the whole world witnessed the most splendid dawns and sunsets since Krakatoa.

  After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a determination and a unity that no earlier age could hive shown. Such a disaster, it was realised, might not occur again for a thousand years—but it might occur tomorrow. And the next time, the consequences could be even worse.

  Very well; there would be no next time.

  A hundred years earlier, a much poorer world, with far feebler resources, had squandered its wealth attempting to destroy weapons suicidally directed by mankind against itself. The effort had never been successful, but thg, skills acquired then had not been forgotten. Now they could be used for a far more worthy purpose, on an infinitely vaster stage. No meteorite large enough to cause catastrophe would ever again be allowed to breach the defences of Earth.

  So began Project SPACEGARD. Fifty years later—and in a way that none of its designers could ever have anticipated —it justified its existence.

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  * * * *

  SPACEBIRD

  James White

  Besides being the recipient of the new Europa Award presented at the first European sf congress at Trieste in 1972 for his novel All Judgement Fled, James White has a tender loving care for all his stories, not least the well known Sector General series. Previous stories may be found in New Writings Nos. 7, 12, 14, 16 and 18. For such a series to be successful the qualities of compassion and understanding of an alien viewpoint are prerequisites. These qualities James White possesses to the full...

  * * * *

  One

  The Monitor Corps scoutship Torrance was engaged on a mission which was both highly important and deadly dull. Like the other units of its flotilla it had been assigned a relatively tiny volume of space in Sector Nine—one of the many three-dimensional blanks which still appeared in the Federation’s charts—to fill in the types and positions of the stars which it contained and the numbers of planets circling them.

  Because a ten-man scoutship did not have the facilities for handling a first contact situation, they were forbidden to land or even make a close approach to these planets. They would identify the technologically advanced worlds, if any, by analysing the radio frequency and other forms of radiation emanating from them. As Major Madden, the vessel’s captain, had told them at the start of the mission, they were simply going to count lights in the sky and that was all.

  Naturally, Fate could not resist a temptation like that...

  ‘Radar, sir,’ said a voice from the controlroom ‘speaker. ‘We have a blip on the close-approach screen. Distance six miles, closing slowly, non-collision course.’

  ‘Lock on the telescope,’ said the Captain, ‘and let’s see it.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Repeater screen Two.’

  On Corps scoutships discipline was strict only when circumstances warranted it, and normally those circumstances did not arise during a mapping mission. As a result the noises coming from the ‘speaker resembled a debate rather than a series of station reports.

  ‘It looks like a ... a bird, sir, with its wings spread.’

  ‘A plucked bird.’

  ‘Has anyone calculated the chances against materialising this close to an object in interstellar space?’

  ‘I think it’s an asteroid, or molten material which congealed by accident into that shape.’

  ‘Two lightyears from the nearest sun ?’

  ‘Quiet, please,’ said the Captain. ‘Lock on an analyser and report.’

  There was a short pause, then: ‘Estimated size, roughly one-third that of this ship. It’s non-reflective, non-metallic, non-mineral and-’

  ‘You’re doing a fine job of telling me what it isn’t,’ said the Captain drily.

  ‘It is organic, sir, and ...’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And alive.’

  For a few seconds the controlroom ‘speaker and the Captain held their breath, then Madden said firmly, ‘Power Room, manoeuvring thrust in five minutes. Astrogation, match courses and close to five hundred yards. Ordnance, stand by. Surgeon-Lieutenant Brenner will prepare for EVA.’

  The debate was over.

  During the ensuing four hours Lieutenant Brenner examined the creature, initially at a safe distance and later as closely as his suit would allow. He was sure that the anlyser had been a little too optimistic over what was most likely a not quite frigid corpse. Certainly the thing was no threat because it could not move even if it had wanted to. The covering of what looked like large, flat barnacles and the rock-hard cement which held
them together saw to that.

  Later, when he was ending his report to the Captain, he said, ‘To sum up, sir, it is suffering from a pretty weird skin condition which got out of control and caused it to be dumped—certainly it didn’t fly out here. This implies a race with space-travel who are subject to a disease which scares them so badly that they dump the sufferers into space while they are still alive.

  ‘As you know,’ he continued, ‘I don’t have the qualifications to treat e-t diseases, and the being is too large to fit into our hold. But we could enlarge our hyperspace envelope and tow it to Sector General.