New Writings in SF 22 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  ‘What will happen to him?’ Lomax asked, wondering if there was still some way in which he could absolve Michael, from ignorance perhaps.

  ‘Nothing to him. We will want his signature on the record, of course. There might even be a reward. It depends on what we find out about you, sir.’ Gibbons was urbane, but there was nothing soft about his eyes. ‘We have reason to believe you may be an alien. I have a warrant..

  ‘But ... I don’t understand. You are arresting me ... rewarding my son?’

  ‘Your “son”,’ Gibbons said it with emphasis, ‘is as normal as I am. The brain-readings proved it. Now, sir ... if you’re ready...?’

  And then Lomax understood. And looked at his blonde, pretty, negative wife, her blue eyes as clear and placid as a china doll’s.

  ‘I always thought there was something funny about you,’ she said. And Lomax managed to smile.

  ‘You’ll never know just how funny, Milly. I hope Michael will forgive you. Some day. Shall we go, Mr. Gibbons?’

  <>

  * * * *

  THE RULES OF THE GAME

  Donald A. Wollheim

  A most eminent editor and publisher in the sf field here appears in the guise of author and this is particularly proper in this volume of New Writings, for Donald A. Wollheim was a close friend and business associate of John Cornell for very many years. Between them they introduced a considerable number of British authors to the US sf public. Here, Donald A. Wollheim is concerned to investigate the tune, played according to the laws of our science or someone else’s, that the Viper will call next.

  * * * *

  ‘So you were sent out here, actually all the way down here to hot Guyana, just to write a funny story about our Guyanese spaceship that has no engines!’ Dr. Desai laughed in his mild way, sipped another sip of that strong tea which the East Indians of his little country like to imbibe. ‘A curiosity story to fill some space on an idle Sunday in the great Northamerican newspapers.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, endeavoring another taste of the tea and wishing the doctor had a yen for a tall Rum Collins such as I had had a couple days ago in the only decent bar in Georgetown, ‘to tell you the truth, I was covering a whole series of stories in this area—the West Indies, Surinam, Northeastern Brazil, and so on. You I heard about in Georgetown while trying to do an article on your infernally confusing local politics. It seemed a good excuse to get away from the coast and into the backland mountains, especially with the storms that are coming in so frequently and the tides and all that.’

  The slight-bodied, brown-skinned Hindoo nodded and looked across his verandah. It was indeed pleasant where we were—high atop a plateau rising above the jungles that stretched between us and the coast of what had once been British Guiana. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said in that sibilant way characteristic of even the most educated of his race, ‘the storms and the unusual tides. Very odd for this part of the continent. They usually go north, those storms and hurricanes, to bash about among the wealthy people in Florida or the rebellious ones in Cuba. Things, you did notice, were different this year.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s so. Covered the big damage in Curasao last week. Got some nice shots and the home papers played it up. You have had an inordinate amount of shipping wrecked the last few days—I suppose as a result of the winds.’

  ‘Not quite, not quite,’ he said, then hastened to clarify, ‘I mean not just due to the winds. There have been seismic tremors beneath the waters, some slippage of the coastal shelf perhaps set off by the unusual tides.’ He sipped more tea, apparently meditating, then spoke up on a different tack.

  ‘You are in a strange profession. Other people’s troubles are your good news. You write them up and consider yourself happy.’

  I shook my head. It was comfortable here after the long sweaty hours riding through the narrow bumpy winding road of the stinking wilderness below, It was cool, it was vibrant, there was air that had the ozone the tropic jungle lacked. ‘Everybody says that of newspapermen, but really we are only curious creatures. I think we are just restless men who like to travel about and see the sights—and make someone else, such as our publishers, pay for it. Naturally we have to find excuses that will result in news stories. We are not just travel writers, you know.’

  ‘And you heard of this crackpot who built what they call a spaceship because some of our citizens in our quaint capital have tried to make a thing of it. The States has mighty spaceships. Great Russia has spaceships ... and, lo!, tiny persecuted Guyana now has one. True, it won’t fly, but what is that to our black men and our brown brothers who need to be diverted from their troubles.’ Dr. Desai finished his drink suddenly, set it down.

  ‘Yet you have been here resting after your trip and still you have not seen this fabled vessel, this anomaly of the astronauts, this soon-to-be-joke of the newspaper syndicates up north. Shall we talk about it, or shall I show it to you and talk while we do so ?’

  I pulled my feet up, got ready to rise seeing that the doctor was also about to do so. ‘Let’s do both,’ I said. ‘You show it to me, tell me what you wish, and I’ll ask any questions that come to mind.’

  We both got up. I noticed the wind was getting a bit gusty, the steady breeze had begun to shift and come in bits and spurts, and I now smelled a faint trace of oil in the breezes. I assumed it came from whatever plant the doctor had set up to build his device.

  We went down the steps of the verandah, walked along the path in front of the wide one-storeyed house and around to the back, brushing aside the tangle of bushes that, like all clearings, tried constantly to close in on the home and swallow it. But I was interested now for I saw that the house concealed a large excavation behind it, and nestling in that excavation was the locally famed Guyana spaceship.

  Whatever the doctor had in mind—and that I was dealing with a mystical crackpot I had known from the start, for what else would you expect from an isolated wealthy Hindoo in a year like this—the thing was certainly not designed like the Saturns and the Atlases and the ICBMs and all that. It made our various Mercury and Apollo capsules look like tiny toolsheds. This thing was a globe, a darned big one when you got close to it, all metallic and shining, set with a number of small closely impacted bulls’ eyes windows, ringed with bands of enforced metal, and without the slightest sign of rocket engines or fueling tanks or any other visible means of propulsion.

  I looked at it, standing on the edge of the excavation, with a slight puzzlement. Somewhere I had seen something like it before. There were two or three servants around, carrying things into the pit and up a narrow ladder to an open circular portal in the equatorial band of the metal globe. Loading it, apparently, with the doctor’s personal belongings—one chap had a pile of books, which must have been scooped up from the doc’s library.

  ‘You look almost as if you were getting ready to take off,’ I said, pointing to the book-laden carrier. ‘But everyone says the thing has no engines... and I see none, at that.’

  Dr. Desai stood there, his hands folded in front of him, and beamed at his creation. ‘I think we may be taking off very soon now,’ he murmured softly. ‘And as for the engines, the power will be supplied from elsewhere.’

  Yippee, I thought, here comes the mysticism. The word elsewhere, like the words beyond, destiny, and divine will, are the keys to this. Another Ufologist, I bet, but with a twist that will help get me a story. Then it hit me. The resemblance of the globe, that is.

  ‘Hey!’ I said. That looks like the kind of globular spaceship the science-fiction magazines used to have back in the days when anti-gravity was the big thing. Have you invented an anti-gravity engine, then?”

  ‘No, no,’ said Dr. Desai. ‘That would be impossible right now. Maybe tomorrow it will be possible, but while the whole Earth sits at the bottom of a vast gravity well, nobody can experiment with counter-gravity measurements. But the rules may change. The rules may change.’ He paused, looked at me. ‘I will give you your big story because nobody will pr
int it anyway. The rules are about to change ... and that is what this Guyana spaceship is for. To take advantage of that change. You see, you have all looked it from the wrong angle. Think of this not as a spaceship—a thing to be propelled by itself against the forces of nature, but more as a lifeboat, a Noah’s Ark, I think you would call it in your Biblical tales.’

  I looked at him. There was a sharp blast of wind again and the scent of petroleum was stronger on it. ‘There must be a reduction plant nearby, doctor?’ I asked. ‘Or are your men really fueling it anyway. I smell something a lot like rocket or aeroplane fuel.’

  The little brown man smiled enigmatically. ‘What you smell is coming from elsewhere; there are no oil plants near here. As for the secret fueling, I do not deceive you. Come, I show you the inside; you will find no fuel tanks.’

  We walked down to the bottom of the excavation— there was an incline—and walked over to the hanging ladder. The looming body of the globe was as big as a five storey house and remarkably well constructed. One could see evidence of the amateurs who had been enlisted to build it, for the rivetting and the caulking were not the slick stuff one saw at Cape Kennedy, but had the appearance of the loving polish put on by cabinet makers. Watertight, I had no doubt at all. Probably spacetight, too.

  We climbed the ladder and went into that big enclosed globe and I was impressed. It was a well equipped complete home indeed. It had floors and the equatorial and upper floors were designed to be fine dwelling quarters, with rooms for work and rooms for leisure, upstairs bedrooms, and so on. The lower half was storage, just storage, and fully loaded too. Loaded with cases of food and canned goods, with generators to keep up the airconditioning and heating and lighting, and supply power for the storage of deep-frozen foods, and all that.

  But of engines for propulsion and tanks for liquid hydrogen, I saw nothing. There was a jeep, neatly crated, and other crates which held, the doctor said, a small airplane, bicycles, a boat ... These, he said, had all been adapted to electric or steam drive—he did not want to stock any petrol aboard.

  The thing was built like a spaceship otherwise. Insulated walls, self-regenerating water cycling equipment, and it was evident that the doctor must have spent most of his fortune on constructing this thing in the last few years. I looked at the rugs on the living room floor and the desks in the laboratories, and I looked at the easy chairs rivetted to the floor by the little impregnable windows, and I heard the soft talking and occasional laughter of what undoubtedly were the doctor’s wife and children and maybe concubines upstairs—though he did not offer to take me upstairs.

  ‘You seem to have already moved out of your house,’ I said finally. ‘You give the appearance of getting ready to take off,’ I added, sitting myself down in a chair and fixing the doctor with my eye. ‘But how and where ? With all due respect. Doctor Desai,’ I said, suddenly, taking my journalistic chance to get down to the nitty-gritty, ‘none of this makes sense to me.’

  The doctor was not offended. He held up a finger for a moment’s pause, went across the room, and I heard him make his way to the open portal. I could see through the little window near me that the sky was clouding up, that the trees were showing agitated signs of increasingly strong gusts of wind, and the servants were no longer in sight. I heard a whoosh and a clonk somewhere and realised the doctor must have shut the surface door against the winds. I smelled that same petroleum odour on the draught that preceded his closing it.

  He came inside, looking a little perturbed, his eyes gleaming. Ah ah, I thought to myself, the old kook touch is coming now. But he settled down into a chair, nodded. ‘It does not indeed make sense to you,’ he said. ‘It cannot because it does not make sense at all in the old rules of science. But that is because you have a fixed view of those rules. You have not applied to the universe the rules which you Occidentals so naturally apply to the things of mankind. You are not seeing straight. Like all the Western world, with one wonderful exception, you have a mental dichotomy.’

  ‘And that exception is?’ I asked, leaning forward, waiting for the hook.

  Dr. Desai smiled. ‘When I say it, you will say in your head crackpot and feel that you are right. But I will say it anyway—the word is Velikovsky.’

  Yugh! He was right. I had the word. But I had no choice. I’d sit it out.

  ‘So let us say Velikovsky, and say that your Western scientists reject his studies because what he says happened thousands of years ago are nonsense according to the laws of science today. Let me hasten to say, the scientists are right. They could not have happened according to the laws of science those great men studied.

  ‘But, you see,’ he waved a finger at me, ‘what had all that to do with poor Velikovsky? Velikovsky was a student of the Bible, a student of archaeology, of ancient lore and of the stories handed down by people who claimed to be eyewitnesses to world-shaking wonders. He did not invent any laws. He merely recorded, noted the contradictions with modern viewpoints, and worked out logically the only explanations for the curious events that all our ancestors swore by. To account for the Flood, for the things seen in the heavens, for the craters of the Moon and Mars, and the deposits of oil on Earth, for the appearance of flaming swords in the sky, and the sun standing still in the sky, for the disappearance of lands and the strangeness of the Evening Star, he simply put all the observations of our very human ancestors together and said it must have been this way.

  ‘That the way he said it had to be, made no sense at all with the laws of mathematics, of astronomy, or reaction and action, of gravity, was not his business. It was irrelevant. Either all of humanity was lying five thousand years ago—or they were not.’

  ‘And if they were not, why then it was the laws of science that were—no, no, don’t outguess me—not wrong, but different, in those days.’ Dr. Desai leaned back, nodding.

  Outside, the sky was darkening and a storm was coming up.

  ‘The laws of science do not change,’ I said; me, with my college education and my passing grade in college math.

  ‘Why not?’ said Dr. Desai. ‘You forget some of the very axioms on which all science is founded. One of which is that everything stated as a law is an approximation taken from observed evidence. Another real law of science is that everything does change, everything is in a constant state of motion, everything is always in flux, things evolve, life alters constantly, molecules are always moving, nothing, absolutely nothing is stable. And that being so, then the laws of science must be constantly shifting themselves to adapt to the ever-altering realities of nature.’

  I was about to argue, but the doctor glanced out the window, held up a hand, shook his head. ‘Let me continue my thoughts now. Time is moving too rapidly outside.

  ‘I said also that you Occidentals always knew that rules are made for changing. It is the first law of your political game. Your politics are always played on the grounds that whoever owns the board can change the rules to prevent losing the game. We in Guyana can testify to that a hundred different ways. You know our history.’

  And I did know their history. Here was a country, ruled and owned by Britain and heavily infiltrated by US capital, whose population was about fifty per cent East Indian, about forty per cent Negro, and the rest white and mixed native stock. It had divided politically along purely racial lines, and the party that consistently got the majority was naturally the East Indian one. But that party had been led and directed by anti-imperialists, Marxists, Communists or what have you. And Britain was not going to let this country become independent under that type of political thinking. Britain, at that time, was the owner of the political game board. So the British changed the electoral rules, kept changing them, and the East Indian Leftists kept winning, until finally the British figured out a set of a rules and system of score-keeping that guaranteed that the minority party must win—and only after it did win, did the British and the Americans turn the game board over to a ‘free’ Guyana. Simple politics, and yet, in the context of the docto
r’s remark, something perhaps strangely frightening.

  Whoever owns the board can change the rules.

  It happens every day in politics. If our party runs the city, we gerrymander the districts, we make special restrictions on who can vote and who can’t, we count the ballots ourselves—but we always change the rules as long as we can to keep the game our property. It’s played all the time everywhere. Let the official constitution start to hurt the people who own the plantations and suddenly there is a military putsch—which somehow is always on the side of the land and property owners. It’s the history of Latin America and Africa—and the rest of the continents too if you look carefully.

  That’s the way human society has always functioned. It is a natural law of human society.

  So, Dr. Desai’s argument went on, if it is a natural law of the way we humans do things—and we humans are living molecules respondent to chemistry and physics and the movements of the planets in the heavens—then it would appear that this law also applies to all the universe.