New Writings in SF 6 - [Anthology]

by Ed By John Carnell

  He laughed and heard the sword tinkle at his feet. He reached towards her and laughed again as a dagger flashed in her hand. Contemptuously he knocked it aside and clamped his hands on warm, struggling flesh. His blood thrilled with the lust for conquest.

  He opened his eyes and stared at the satin finish of the ceiling.

  He swore and rose and swore again as his forehead hit the edge of the cap. A hell of a time for the thing to break down. His instinct was to hit out and he slammed his hand against the warm metal, furious at the disturbance of his favourite dream. A tell-tale lit with a cold, green glow and he arrested the movement of his hand poised for a second blow. Grumbling, he thrust his head into the field of the cap. The spool must be broken or the selector at fault, but he could fix neither. Malchus would have to do that.

  * * * *

  The engineer sat cross-legged before the quiescent bulk of the power unit. The side-edges of his naked feet rested on the metal of the floor, the tips of his supporting fingers touched itto either side. His eyes were closed, but he was not asleep.

  He sensed the vibration of the metal, the path of incandescent particles within the pile, extrapolating from observable data to the logical conclusion. There was a tiny hesitancy from one of the turbines. It was almost nothing but the slight imbalance would hinder the path of the bases, deflecting them a trifle to one side. There would be excessive erosion on a certain spot and a rise in temperature. The extra heat would affect the bore of a pipe and create a minor bottleneck. Pressure would tend to build.

  Eventually a repair and adjustment would have to be made.

  But not now. Not for a long time yet. They would have time to finish this tour before things reached the point where to ignore the trouble would be to court disaster. Then he would oversee the work and guide the rebuilding.

  The corners of his mouth lifted in a smile.

  To build!

  Feldman could never appreciate the beauty of the thought. But the navigator was not an engineer.

  * * * *

  Feldman was the man who sent the ship lunging at invisible targets, who checked the radiation of suns and the atmosphere of planets, who lived by the lines of a spectroscope and the immutable laws of science. He worshipped the cold beauty of an equation. He was writing a book.

  It was a work of love, a hobby, and would be published, if at all, under a pseudonym. He would not risk the sneers of his contemporaries. He wrote:

  The greatest foreseeable problem of heterosexual crews, the strains and frustrations of, thwarted sexual desire, have apparently been overcome by use of the dream-cap in which paradoxical dreams are encouraged with the consequent release of physical strain by the superimposition of erotic and exotic stimuli. A choice of dream-sequences is provided by varied tapes and, it is to be assumed, the synthetic world so provided compensates for the boredom of space flight and the lack of congenial company. By congenial I mean female and not incompatable types. Choice of crew-members is carefully governed both from the view-point of dual-attributes and...

  He was wandering. He lifted the pen and sucked thoughtfully at the tip. The book was to be about the sexual tensions and problems in space, but, for some reason, he constantly veered from the subject. Now, for example, he was about to laud the Pentarch for their wisdom in crew-selection when, of course, it wasn’t really wisdom at all but plain common sense. He really must stick to the point.

  And yet—?

  Was it really wise to write the book at all? A man in his position couldn’t be too careful, and if the book were published and a whisper of the true identity of the author should leak out—?

  He frowned and moved his hand to the release. A pressure and the surface was blank. Almost at once he regretted the total erasure - he should have printed it at least if only to make corrections. He could always destroy the thing before they landed. But perhaps if he tried a different approach?

  The pen touched the surface and left a scrawl of thin lines. Hastily he jabbed the erase button again. He was sweating. He hadn’t really meant to write that at all.

  * * * *

  Intalgo took a smear of pigment on the tip of his thumb and wiped it beneath the staring eyes. He brushed a thin line at the corners of the mouth and touched the contour of a lip. Leaning back he looked at the result.

  He frowned his disappointment. He had tried to portray resignation, acceptance, fortitude, the whole overlaid with a patina of pain. Instead he had added a new emotion. Now the face held hate.

  He reached towards the erase then halted the movement of his hand. Was he so wrong? Wouldn’t a man so tormented have cause to hate his tormentors? He had tried to picture an ideal and so had tried to achieve the impossible. Art could not deny reality.

  Irritably he rose and paced the control room, wondering at his sombre thoughts. Death, torment, the ultimate in pain - why did his hands insist on creating such things? And why did that face hold a haunting tinge of familiarity?

  Musing, he stared at his creation while around him the control room hummed its satisfaction. The hum gave the answer. The control room was too empty - something was missing. Something which, subconsciously, he had tried to replace.

  The Pentarch had flung the ship like a challenging hand towards the stars. But now that hand was maimed.

  The captain was dead.

  * * * *

  Intalgo had loved that lonely man. Beneath the cold exterior he had sensed a warm personality and an imagination almost equal to his own. No artist, the captain, but a trained manipulator of men. But he had once likened the stars to camp fires burning in the fields of eternity and Intalgo could forgive many things to a man who had held thoughts of such poetic slant.

  But he found it hard to forgive the manner of his death.

  Such a man should not have died in such a fashion. For him was the noble ending, the song of trumpets, the heroic passing. Not a sharp edge drawn across a naked throat in the silence of his lonely watch. Often the artist wondered what had driven him to take his life. Had he, too, been crucified on the cross of duty and inclination?

  Was that his face which looked back from the painted sheet?

  Intalgo stared at it with sharpened interest, but it was not the captain. It was not anyone he knew and yet...

  He sat, musing, looking at the painted face, remembering the dead.

  They had often talked during the long, silent hours between the stars. They had talked of death and of life and the purpose of existence. They had talked of what they did and why they did it.

  And the captain had shown his fear.

  ‘Out here,’ he’d said, ‘we’re irritating intruders, rats scuttling among the granary of the stars. What may we find? Other, older races, perhaps? Strange ways and strange customs and mysteries which we lack the mental equipment to solve. And yet we go on. We have no choice but to go on.’

  Then he would laugh without humour and his eyes would grow bleak.

  ‘One day we will find something beyond us and, when we do, God help our ignorance.’

  He had not waited for that day to come.

  * * * *

  They landed on a planet which drowsed beneath the ruddy glare of a dying sun. The ship was an alien harshness on a rolling plain of yellow dust. An enigmatic cube thrust its squat ebony finger towards the sky. It was the only sign of life the world possessed and it was old. Old beyond their limited imagination.

  But they landed to stamp the seal of the Pentarch on a new acquisition of Man.

  ‘We must be armed,’ said Delray.

  ‘No need - the entire planet is dead,’ said Feldman.

  ‘I must get into that building,’ said Malchus.

  Intalgo said nothing - a recorder should not speak. But in the log he wrote:

  Inertia caused normal landing precautions to be taken, but from habit, not from a sense of responsibility. Neither is willing to take the orders of another - each claiming that he has equal right. I am watching the corrosive effects of Democracy and, while it
is fascinating in its unexpected nuances of individualism, it can lead only to chaos. These journeys last too long.

  Too long - and yet it was as easy to continue as to return and the Pentarch was stern when it came to dealing with failure. More than stern when it dealt with disobedience. Intalgo sighed and closed the log and went to breathe the alien air.

  The place had a timeless, dreamlike quality as if a segment of creation had been frozen so that there could be no change, no alteration, no newness or passing away. The air was heavy, stagnant, flattering the echoes of their conversation. Like ants the three others wended their way to the titanic bulk of the mysterious building. They walked with arrogance but without harmony. They were individuals, not a team.

  Intalgo sighed again. Now the challenging hand was more than maimed - it was clawing itself apart.

  * * * *

  Malchus found it first. It was almost buried in the yellow dust and he kicked it free then squatted, looking at it.

  It was the part of a machine.

  It was tooled and finished in a way he had never seen before but, now that he saw it, the reason was obvious. It glinted and shone with the rainbow pattern of refracted light and the scored surface was designed to eliminate friction. The eddy currents generated when the machine was in operation would keep the surfaces an atom apart.

  It was - it must be - the central bearing of an engine which was - it could only be - the drive unit of a...

  He blinked and settled himself more comfortably and concentrated his attention.

  A pipe would run from there and meet a shaft which had to run from there and the junction would have to be - there! Then that hollow must hold a swivel-drive leading to ...

  He sat immersed in the joys of construction.

  Feldman found it next.

  He snorted at the engineer then stooped as he saw what rested on the sand. Squatting, he looked at it.

  It was crystallized truth.

  It was a model so intricate and yet so plain that it was as easy to read as a book. There was the basic structure of the atom and there were the logical extensions of the formulae propounded by Einstein and there - if he looked very close -were the equations of the three-body problem and those surely must appertain to time itself so that...

  Feldman sighed with intellectual satisfaction and settled himself for his greater concentration.

  Delray found it next.

  He came shouting over to the others and glared at what rested between them.

  It was naked satiation.

  It was the euphoria of combat, the thrill of physical violence, the tease of mental struggle. It was his own deep, dark heritage of type and it opened before him like a flower within whose petals was to be found all he had ever sought. He sank into it and into an eternal enervating dream.

  Intalgo found it the last of all.

  He stood murmuring into the recorder, his eyes fastened on the three, distant shapes, frozen in a fresco of bone and flesh and pulsating blood. Around him the air hung like many folds of scented silk.

  * * * *

  ‘They have not moved for hours and are obviously unaware of any form of physical discomfort. The thing is divided between them, but it must be some kind of snare. The builders of this monolith must have devized means to protect it from intruders such as ourselves. In a short while I will go across to them and try to restore their senses and recall their responsibility.’

  He hesitated, then switched off the instrument.

  There was really nothing more he could say.

  Say, but not think. The dead words of the dead captain came to him as he walked across the plain of yellow dust to where his companions sat in frozen concentration.

  Rats scurrying among the granary of the stars.

  Rats!

  The Pentarch would not be amused, but he knew now why he had depicted Man as being suspended from a cross. Man with his own face. Man, tormented in his eternal search for . ..

  He saw what the others had found.

  It was pure art.

  It was the thing he had sought all his life and it held so great a joy that he felt tears sting his eyes and overwhelming emotion fill his heart.

  Sitting he stared at it.

  Man lives by his search for Heaven. This thing was Heaven -for all of them.

  They could never leave it.

  <>

  * * * *

  ATROPHY

  by Ernest Hill

  Take automation to its logical conclusion and what kind of work is there left for mankind to do—except press a few buttons? But what happens to the worker when the machines go wrong?

  * * * *

  There was a tweet in the upper register and the blues were blurred. Either the blues were blurred or his eyes were still clouded with an opaque residue of sleep. Or the angle. The Tilt. His hand slipped languidly from under the fibre-glass coverlet, pressed, and the set-right register moved forward a notch. Two notches. Better. Some Tilt. The feet should be slightly higher than the head, the body at an angle of five degrees to the horizontal. The angle of relaxation. Certainly the blues were now bluer but the tweet was still pronounced. Either actually an electronic distortion or subjectively, a jangle discordant with a brain rhythm surge. The programme was a bore anyway. Or was it? He had hardly noticed the programme. Only the tweet and the register. All programmes were a bore if it came to that. Why watch? No reason at all. He activated his alpha rhythm and the set switched itself into a dead thing of ten foot screen and chromium suspended from the ceiling.

  A doze. Thank God it was Wednesday. Every Monday morning you think Wednesday will never come. But it does. It does. Today. Eleven o’clock. A doze and a twiddle of the alpha rhythm around the tea-maker relay. Tea. A bath. Another nap. Perhaps a stimulator and a walk round the park. Tea and a tranquillizer and the evening programme. A retina and receptivity stimulator.

  “Elvin!”

  Perhaps something more active. A game of gin rummy with anyone gin-rummy minded enough to play. A space cruise in the activated planetarium. Lay back and let the stars slip by. Later perhaps a night-club in an atmosphere of nudity and mild narcotics. An erotic film, lips a-quiver and bared navel nerve-ends on the sensor pads.

  “Elvin!”

  No. Eroticism was a bore. Stimulation. Stimulation. Stimulation. No one ever did anything very much. Electronically—not actually. A bore. It was all there in the sensor pads. Why carry it farther? One always thought one would. Why? Why go through the emotional upset and possible degradation of a first-hand affair that never approached the poignancy of the sensors? Much better a taste-bud stimulant and a bottle or two of anything at all. No need for expense or the fatigue of selection.

  Although...? The red fluid. It would be fun one day to

  try a sip or two of the pale red stuff with unactivated taste-buds. A real experiment. What would it taste like ? Vinegar, probably with a dash of meths. Who cared? Taste was subjective like first degree sex in the safety of the secondhand. Like alcoholism.

  “Elvin!”

  Taste-buds. Yes. Tea. A taste-bud stimulant and a cup of tea. Relax. Activate the alpha rhythm. Two-beat-one. The tea-twiddler. Might as well be water, of course. But it was tea—or something like it. Did one really save effort with the alpha rhythm twiddle ? The effort of activation almost equalled the effort of knob-depression. Oh, well! The makers knew best!

  “Elvin!”

  Oh, God! She’s there. Standing by the bed, arms akimbo and tired eyes contemptuous. Why doesn’t she go away? Or sleep? Or twiddle her brain rhythm round the dishwasher. Or activate the waste-incinerator. Or something.

  “Get up!” she said.

  “Why?” he asked. “For goodness sake, why? It’s Wednesday. I’ve had a hard week. Leave me alone.”

  She threw back the fibre-glass. Switched off the temperature regular with a flick of scarcely conscious brain rhythm surge. Two-beat-two.

  “You’ll atrophy,” she said. “That’s why!”

&n
bsp; Of course he wouldn’t atrophy. He had been thinking consciously and logically of all sorts of things. What to do. When to do it. You don’t think consciously and logically if you atrophy. You slip into a sort of dreamy torpor and the State knocks on the door in a white coat. Rather pleasant to be taken away by the State. No need to plan the day. To think. To dream.