Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  OUT OF a small crowd a lean, stooped man was coming toward them, plodding with slow weariness as if he waded through mud; that was not pure figure-of-speech, George saw, for the man was wet as if he had just fallen into the lake. From the business socks inside his sandals a little puddle sloshed out at every step, and water plastered down his thinning hair and dripped from his translucent shorts and jacket. Simmons jumped to meet him, asking excited questions.

  “That fat fathering breeder!” was all Hall said at first, in a voice choked with anger, as he stood there trying to press the water out of his clothes. “That quintuplet-siring crowder!” Some of the onlookers gathered at a little distance smiled or giggled at the earnest vileness of the man’s speech, while one or two appeared sincerely shocked.

  Simmons was holding his wrist-radio ready. “If he shoved you in the water I can put in a call and charge assault and resisting arrest. That’ll get us some more manpower out here. Which way did he go?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t care to press those charges.” It seemed that a little strong language had served to discharge Hall’s anger. He put up a hand as if to ward off the detective’s glare and exclamations of disgust. “He didn’t hurt me. I don’t think he even intended to knock me in the water, just to get away.” Hall had taken off his jacket and now began to wave it like a distress signal, trying to dry it in the morning breeze. “I called out to him, when I saw that I had him cornered on a moored boat, I said just hand over the specimen and save yourself a lot of trouble. You and your wife and the whole world will be better off, I said. But then he came off the boat with this picnic cooler under his arm like a football. Just put down his head and charged, and he must weigh ninety kilos . . .”

  Hall had looked at Rita several times, but had offered her no recognition until now. “Well, Mrs. Rodney, I suppose you and your husband and brother here are getting yourselves a lawyer. From the way you sit there looking so serenely into space, I suppose too that you’ve heard about the report.”

  Rita, chin high, was studying the horizon. George asked: “Report?”

  “The new population forecast from the UN. The one we’ve all been afraid of. A real surprise. If the latest trends continue, world population is going to reach a peak of around ten billion in the next forty years and then start down, maybe even a rather sharp decline. Not that that will help the people who are going to go hungry in the next forty years, of course, but it’s going to make it a little harder to convict people like yourselves before a jury.” Mr. Hall was now standing nude and shivering slightly in the dawn, wringing out his shorts, his dripping codpiece slung over one shoulder.

  “World population’s going down?” said the detective, sounding rather dumb. He couldn’t seem to grasp it right away. George couldn’t either.

  Hall said: “Oh, we all knew it had to happen someday, one way or another. The only question was how and when. Still, when it does happen, we feel surprise.”

  Simmons was busy with his radio. George asked: “But what is it? The Homo Leagues? I know they’re growing fast.”

  “They were allowed for in previous forecasts. No, the thing that tipped the balance, that wasn’t foreseen, was all this religious celibacy. Half a dozen religions booming today, young people pulling themselves out of the reproductive pool by the tens of millions. People will think it will ease the population pressure right away, though of course it won’t. It was hard enough before to get convictions, with bleeding-heart lawyers and frozen fetuses to cloud the issue. Now this. But we’re going to try, sir, we’re going to try. I’ll see you in court, whether we manage to recover the specimen or not.”

  George, riding north along the Outer Drive in the back of the police car, going to some police station where they would have to let him see a lawyer before he said a sublimatin’ thing, held his sister’s hand and looked out over the lake. The waves were coming in stronger now with a freshening breeze, starting to crest into whitecaps near the shore. The fog had gone. Get through, Art, get through. Loyola School of Medicine, cryogenics lab, ask for Gwen or Larry. I’ve killed a man to save that kid, and you’d better not lose him now. I’d kill any other son of a bitch who tried to kill my nephew.

  He smiled a little for the new man born so strangely into the world, and at the same time he was very worried. The waves came in from the clear horizon, cresting into white. The crest of the wave has been reached. And now, to see which way the world slides down.

  1975

  DEEP SPACE

  One moment the Hudson was the solid world under the magnetic boots of his spacesuit, as he pounded in terror on the closed outer hatch of the airlock, and screamed a futile appeal into his helmet microphone. The next moment, hatch and ship were gone without fuss, as if they had never existed. Gone into that place or process that men called prime-space, and used without understanding. The ship’s jump out of normal space left his suited body turning alone among the stars.

  He had been working alone, standing out on the hull, adjusting the molecular pattern of an auxiliary field-pump. He had not spoken to anyone on radio for a minute or so. The warp-tool rested easily in the clawlike metal hands of his suit; a green light showed that the little ball-magnets in the tool were spinning and precessing properly. As far as he could tell, all systems were in great shape. Then—

  The waist-high bulge of the field-pump had receded with smooth suddenness into the hull. The man had known the probable meaning of that—that a jump was imminent—and in the nightmarish seconds left had made a shuffling lunge for the automatically closing hatch. Too late. He had tried to thrust the end of the warp-tool into the swiftly narrowing gap to jam it open, but he had been not quite in time. The closing hatch strained at the obstacle momentarily, then cracked the casing of the tool and shot it out, as a man might shoot a seed from between his fingers.

  He had two or three seconds after that to yell, and pound at the closed hatch with his suit’s metal hands. If they heard him, inside, it was evidently by then too late to stop the impending jump. The ship vanished right from under his boots.

  He was alone in deep space, many light-years from any sun. His body was turning slowly, as a result of his last movement against the ship.

  Drilled-in training stayed with him. Without having to think about it he slid an arm in from its spacesuit sleeve and switched his radio to emergency position; the coded distress signal was already hurling itself away from him at light-speed in all directions. Within about a second, he had done all that he could do for himself.

  He fell.

  Like all spacemen, he was used to the occasional absence of gravity. Working outside, away from a starship’s artificial gravity, did not bother him; the magnetic boots gave a standing man an adequate sense of up and down. But now he only fell. It was a sensation that had become bearable to him, through training and practice, but hardly more than bearable.

  The weightless falling sensation combined with the shock of what had happened to nudge him toward panic. But he fought it off, telling himself he had a chance, a good chance. It would take only a minute to figure the chances out.

  The Hudson would come back for him, of course. If the crew did not already know that he had been left outside, someone was bound to notice within minutes that he was missing. It was incredible that the ship had jumped with him outside; some against-all-odds coincidence of mechanical malfunction and human error had victimized him.

  The precise nature of that coincidence made no difference to him now. Neither did the distance of the Hudson’s jump. Whether it had gone only a trillion kilometers or so, or several light-years, within twenty minutes or half an hour they would have started back for him.

  On the return jump they would aim for their previous position—but how close could they come to it? He had a pretty good idea of the answer. If the Hudson popped back within a billion kilometers of him, it would be a very good shot.

  All right, then. Figure forty-five minutes or an hour, and they would be back in normal
space in his general area, searching. By then he would be waiting at the center of a sphere of radio distress signal that was approaching a couple of billion kilometers in diameter, and increasing that diameter by something like thirty-six million kilometers a minute. Not a small thing at all for them to search for. Stated in those terms, the facts were comforting.

  Yet well he knew the vastness in which his billions of cubic kilometers of signal were—nothing.

  He fought down fear, and loneliness, and falling sickness, holding to the idea that he was going to be rescued, concentrating on it as a certainty. He had plenty of air in his tanks.

  Only—it was almost as if they had left him outside deliberately.

  Forget that. That way lay panic and madness. Now it helped to look at the calmness of the stars. He was turning only slowly, and they held an ordered march across his faceplate of invisible glass. He was near the edge of Earth’s galaxy, and the stars and glowing gas of it made an uneven line of rounded, snowy cliffs that rested on nothing. Away from the galactic plane, which was marked with dark streaks and masses of obscuring dust, the starclouds thinned out rapidly into looser agglomerations, globular clusters, scattered dustings and dots.

  His body turned steadily in the multicolored ghost-light of all the distant suns. Blackness came into view—the Night that held the galaxy like a dust-speck, as the galaxy held him. Here and there were a few frontier galactic stars, and out beyond the pinhead ghosts of light, showing where other island universes had been—long ago. Then, turning, he once more faced the starclouds of galactic center.

  Now he was calmer. He studied the dials on the little panel set in front of his chest inside the suit. They glowed soft green. The clock informed him that about five minutes had passed since the ship jumped, and the air gauge said that he had nearly six hours of life left in his tanks. A radio dial indicated that his transmitter was still putting out strongly.

  Even five hours of air should be more than enough. The Hudson should be back in this area within an hour, and should have picked up his signal in another hour at worst. Then they would rush closer to him at nearly the speed of light, perhaps put out a boat, and pick him up. Say four hours for the whole thing. No need to worry about air. Unless something went wrong.

  Calculations finished, he went back to watching the turning, steady-shining stars. The galaxy went round and round.

  The Hudson seemed a little unreal to him now, as if it were something he had not seen for years. He thought of how the crew would be laughing in relief when they came to pick him up.

  We had to come back, Sharp would say. You still owe me money, remember? Everyone would have a joke, except the captain, and whoever had caused the accident. Maybe it was no one’s fault, just the damn drive. Sometimes the damn drive could do tricky things. He wondered if even the scientists really fully understood it yet.

  Time was a slow thing, where he was now. But his little clock was a great help. It was not impressed by deep space, or falling, or anything else. Inexorably if slowly it consumed the minutes that separated him from safety.

  His turning began to bother him. Now it seemed to make the weightless falling worse, so he unhooked the flexible exhaust hose and jetted away most of his spin with air from his suit. Plenty of air. To stop the spinning took only a very little.

  Time crept by. He felt patient, alert, almost comfortable. He stretched his legs and arms, and the metal claw-hands moved against the stars, blotting out distant clusters and nebulas. Someday well win, he thought. Someday we’ll boss the whole works, all that out there. Because we’ll take the inanimate stuff a bit at a time, like this clock, like the suit I wear, and make it serve us, make it fight on the side of life.

  The man looked without awe at what he could see of infinity, and knew that he was ignorant and weak, but that he was not at that moment a bit afraid. He wanted to say it aloud, interrupt his coded distress signal, put his statement on a spreading record: I am not afraid.

  But of course it would sound foolish when they heard it on the Hudson.

  The minutes were eaten up and eaten up and eventually three hours had passed. It came to him that he was the only real being in the universe, that he had always been alone, that his ideas of other beings and worlds were only self-deception. He had heard this fallacious fantasy discussed somewhere, and knew there was a name for it He felt so good and confident now that he could let his mind play with such nonsense and not be bothered a bit. The falling was still a bother but he kept it under control. Things could be a lot worse.

  He waited calmly. Soon they would come.

  At last he thought he saw a tiny spherical silhouette against the clusters of one galactic arm. Slowly he turned; tensely he waited for another glimpse. There . . . yes . . . something! He turned again. Yes!

  In a few brief minutes it came closer, until there was no longer room for doubt. The multi-million galactic suns made a gleaming spot on the featureless hull. The field-pumps were apparently still retracted, in jump position. That was unusual, but it meant little to the man—he scarcely noticed it, in his intense relief. He hadn’t realized how worried he’d been, until the worry was gone.

  He slid an arm in from its suit arm and pulled his helmet microphone into position. He couldn’t keep from grinning and laughing; it was hard to speak plainly.

  “Hey, about time!” he called. “I was getting lonesome.”

  He listened for a reply—but of course his receiver had been on all the time, in the short pauses between transmitted pulses. Why hadn’t they already spoken to him? Something wrong with the radio? Not likely. And he could hear background noise without any trouble.

  The Hudson seemed to be very close, only a few hundred meters away, the apparent size of a golf ball at a few meters’ distance. It seemed to be moving past him.

  “Hey!” he shouted, blasting his own ears inside the helmet. “Come on!”

  He waited and watched and listened. Couldn’t they hear him? Had they all gone crazy? The ship was moving past him. He rotated away from the slow-moving, distant shape and lost it. He couldn’t find it again. Something was badly wrong. He couldn’t understand.

  He shouted and shouted into his microphone, not knowing what he said. Had it been only a hallucination? Were they all dead on board? They couldn’t be; they had come back and found him. In his slow turn he spotted the object again, once more between him and the bright bulk of the galaxy. He must be orbiting around it somehow.

  With a shaky claw-hand he took the strong lamp from his helmet, turned it on and aimed it. At that distance the sharply focused beam spread out enough to illuminate the whole sphere brightly. No boat appeared, no hatch opened, nothing disturbed the smooth featureless metal. It seemed that he was orbiting the ship slowly—why should that be?�but he lost it again due to his own turning motion.

  It came to him that what he saw was not the Hudson at all, but a ship of unknown aliens, who had stumbled upon a nothing out here in the middle of nowhere, and were circling around it suspiciously.

  “Take me in!” he screamed. “I don’t care who you are!” It was hard to think; if only the eternal falling would stop, just for a minute . . .

  He unlimbered the exhaust hose again and jetted air to build a spin, searching all space with his light as he twirled. It must be the Hudson, and the boys were just having a joke, and he didn’t mind really, because the joke would soon be over and they would let him in . . .

  . . . almost as if they had jumped deliberately . . .

  He saw it again, saw with nightmare horror that it was farther away.

  “Take me in!” he screamed. “Help meeee!” He chased the ship with the hose pointing behind him, jetting away good air. He was clumsy with the hose, making himself spin first one way and then another, but somehow he got closer.

  . . . And inside the good thick hull there would be life and warmth and closeness and no-falling. What difference if it was a joke or they were all dead or alien monsters or whatever if he could reach the
ship and make them let him in . . .

  Suddenly it was in the full glare of his light, quite close, rushing at him with what seemed terrific speed. In blind panic he moved his hose and shot out of the sphere’s path, and lost it and looked for it again.

  . . . falling, falling, hideous falling that never stopped . . .

  He thought he saw it, far away, and tried to chase it and lost it again. His air rushed swiftly away into vacuum. Where now? Quick, quick! over there . . . or was that a star . . .?

  The little room off the Hudson’s boat bay was still cold with the chill of the suit that had been brought in minutes before. The body had been removed but the bulky suit still lay open on the deck, snowy with what moisture it could condense out of ship’s atmosphere. A man straightened up from the group around it, took a few steps to where the captain stood, and said into the silence:

  “No sign of any hole. I guess he bled out every sniff through the exhaust tube.” The speaker looked down at the deck, up and around. “Why?”

  “I mean to find that out,” was all the captain said. It had not been his fault, but he had just lost one of his crew.

  Someone said: “He must have cracked up, shouting all that stuff about let-me-in, when we were still half an hour out.”

  “What’s that?” the captain asked sharply. He had moved closer to the suit and was pointing at one of its feet, where encrusted frost was already beginning to melt away again. The suit expert reached cautiously for a little object that seemed fixed to the sole of one of the suit’s magnetic boots. He brushed frost from the object and held it up.

  “Anybody know what it is?”

  “Oh!” said someone, at whom everyone turned to look. “I think it’s one of those ball magnets. We carry them as replacements in Supply. You know, the ones in the warp-tools?”

  The cold magnet rested in a man’s hand. It was bright, spherical, featureless, about the size of a golf ball.