A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  At least, they seemed practically unsinkable…

  Knife in hand, he flattened himself against the platform as the Straits roared just ahead. When the platform jolted and tilted up beneath him, he rammed the knife all the way into it and hung on. Cold water rushed suddenly over him, and Grandpa shuddered like a labouring engine. In the middle of it all, Cord had the horrified notion that the raft might release its unconscious human prisoners in its struggle with the Straits. But he underestimated Grandpa in that. Grandpa also hung on.

  Abruptly, it was over. They were riding a long swell, and there were three other rafts not far away. The Straits had swept them together, but they seemed to have no interest in one another’s company. As Cord stood up shakily and began to strip off his clothes, they were visibly drawing apart again. The platform of one of them was half-submerged; it must have lost too much of the air that held it afloat and, like a small ship, it was foundering.

  From this point, it was only a two-mile swim to the shore north of the Straits, and another mile inland from there to the Straits Head Station. He didn’t know about the current; but the distance didn’t seem too much, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave knife and gun behind. The bay creatures loved warmth and mud, they didn’t venture beyond the Straits. But Zlanti Deep bred its own killers, though they weren’t often observed so close to shore.

  Things were beginning to look rather hopeful.

  Thin, crying voices drifted overhead, like the voices of curious cats, as Cord knotted his clothes into a tight bundle, shoes inside. He looked up. There were four of them circling there; magnified sea-going swamp bugs, each carrying an unseen rider. Probably harmless scavengers – but the ten-foot wingspread was impressive. Uneasily, Cord remembered the venomously carnivorous rider he’d left lying beside the station.

  One of them dipped lazily and came sliding down towards him. It soared overhead and came back, to hover about the raft’s cone.

  The bug rider that directed the mindless flier hadn’t been interested in him at all! Grandpa was baiting it!

  Cord stared in fascination. The top of the cone was alive now with a softly wriggling mass of the scarlet, wormlike extrusions that had started sprouting before the raft left the bay. Presumably, they looked enticingly edible to the bug rider.

  The flier settled with an airy fluttering and touched the cone. Like a trap springing shut, the green vines flashed up and around it, crumpling the brittle wings, almost vanishing into the long, soft body!

  Barely a second later, Grandpa made another catch, this one from the sea itself. Cord had a fleeting glimpse of something like a small, rubbery seal that flung itself out of the water upon the edge of the raft, with a suggestion of desperate haste – and was flipped on instantly against the cone where the vines clamped it down beside the flier’s body.

  It wasn’t the enormous ease with which the unexpected kill was accomplished that left Cord standing there, completely shocked. It was the shattering of his hopes to swim ashore from here. Fifty yards away, the creature from which the rubbery thing had been fleeing showed briefly on the surface, as it turned away from the raft; and that glance was all he needed. The ivory-white body and gaping jaws were similar enough to those of the sharks of Earth to indicate the pursuer’s nature. The important difference was that wherever the White Hunters of the Zlanti Deep went, they went by the thousands.

  Stunned by that incredible piece of bad luck, still clutching his bundled clothes, Cord stared towards shore. Knowing what to look for, he could spot the tell-tale rollings of the surface now – the long, ivory gleams that flashed through the swells and vanished again. Shoals of smaller things burst into the air in sprays of glittering desperation, and fell back.

  He would have been snapped up like a drowning fly before he’d covered a twentieth of that distance!

  Grandpa was beginning to eat.

  Each of the dark slits down the sides of the cone was a mouth. So far only one of them was in operating condition, and the raft wasn’t able to open that one very wide as yet. The first morsel had been fed into it, however: the bug rider the vines had plucked out of the flier’s downy neck fur. It took Grandpa several minutes to work it out of sight, small as it was. But it was a start.

  Cord didn’t feel quite sane any more. He sat there, clutching his bundle of clothes and only vaguely aware of the fact that he was shivering steadily under the cold spray that touched him now and then, while he followed Grandpa’s activities attentively. He decided it would be at least some hours before one of that black set of mouths grew flexible and vigorous enough to dispose of a human being. Under the circumstances, it couldn’t make much difference to the other human beings here; but the moment Grandpa reached for the first of them would also be the moment he finally blew the raft to pieces. The White Hunters were cleaner eaters, at any rate; and that was about the extent to which he could still control what was going to happen.

  Meanwhile, there was the very faint chance that the weather station’s helicopter might spot them.

  Meanwhile also, in a weary and horrified fascination, he kept debating the mystery of what could have produced such a nightmarish change in the rafts. He could guess where they were going by now; there were scattered strings of them stretching back to the Straits or roughly parallel to their own course, and the direction was that of the plankton-swarming pool of the Zlanti Basin, a thousand miles to the north. Given time, even mobile lily pads like the rafts had been could make that trip for the benefit of their seedlings. But nothing in their structure explained the sudden change into alert and capable carnivores.

  He watched the rubbery little seal-thing being hauled up to a mouth. The vines broke its neck; and the mouth took it in up to the shoulders and then went on working patiently at what was still a trifle too large a bite. Meanwhile, there were more thin cat-cries overhead; and a few minutes later, two more sea-bugs were trapped almost simultaneously and added to the larder. Grandpa dropped the dead sea-thing and fed himself another bug rider. The second rider left its mount with a sudden hop, sank its teeth viciously into one of the vines that caught it again, and was promptly battered to death against the platform.

  Cord felt a resurge of unreasoning hatred against Grandpa. Killing a bug was about equal to cutting a branch from a tree; they had almost no life-awareness. But the rider had aroused his partisanship because of its appearance of intelligent action – and it was in fact closer to the human scale in that feature than to the monstrous life form that had, mechanically, but quite successfully, trapped both it and the human beings. Then his thoughts drifted again; and he found himself speculating vaguely on the curious symbiosis in which the nerve systems of two creatures as dissimilar as the bugs and their riders could be linked so closely that they functioned as one organism.

  Suddenly an expression of vast and stunned surprise appeared on his face.

  Why – now he knew!

  Cord stood up hurriedly, shaking with excitement, the whole plan complete in his mind. And a dozen long vines snaked instantly in the direction of his sudden motion and groped for him, taut and stretching. They couldn’t reach him, but their savagely alert reaction froze Cord briefly where he was. The platform was shuddering under his feet, as if in irritation at his inaccessibility; but it couldn’t be tilted up suddenly here to throw him within the grasp of the vines, as it could around the edges.

  Still, it was a warning! Cord sidled gingerly around the cone till he had gained the position he wanted, which was on the forward half of the raft. And then he waited. Waited long minutes, quite motionless, until his heart stopped pounding and the irregular angry shivering of the surface of the raft-thing died away, and the last vine tendril had stopped its blind groping. It might help a lot if, for a second or two after he next started moving, Grandpa wasn’t too aware of his exact whereabouts!

  He looked back once to check how far they had gone by now beyond the Straits Head Station. It couldn’t, he decided, be even an hour behind them. Which was close
enough, by the most pessimistic count – if everything else worked out all right! He didn’t try to think out in detail what that ‘everything else’ could include, because there were factors that simply couldn’t be calculated in advance. And he had an uneasy feeling that speculating too vividly about them might make him almost incapable of carrying out his plan.

  At last, moving carefully, Cord took the knife in his left hand but left the gun holstered. He raised the tightly knotted bundle of clothes slowly over his head, balanced in his right hand. With a long, smooth motion he tossed the bundle back across the cone, almost to the opposite edge of the platform.

  It hit with a soggy thump. Almost immediately, the whole far edge of the raft buckled and flapped up to toss the strange object to the reaching vines.

  Simultaneously, Cord was racing forward. For a moment, his attempt to divert Grandpa’s attention seemed completely successful – then he was pitched to his knees as the platform came up.

  He was within eight feet of the edge. As it slapped down again, he drew himself desperately forward.

  An instant later, he was knifing down through cold, clear water, just ahead of the raft, then twisting and coming up again.

  The raft was passing over him. Clouds of tiny sea creatures scattered through its dark jungle of feeding roots. Cord jerked back from a broad, wavering streak of glassy greenness, which was a stinger, and felt a burning jolt on his side, which meant he’d been touched lightly by another. He bumped on blindly through the slimy black tangles of hair roots that covered the bottom of the raft; then green half-light passed over him, and he burst up into the central bubble under the cone.

  Half-light and foul, hot air. Water slapped around him, dragging him away again – nothing to hang on to here! Then above him, to his right, moulded against the interior curve of the cone as if it had grown there from the start, the froglike, man-sized shape of the Yellowhead.

  The raft rider!

  Cord reached up, caught Grandpa’s symbiotic partner and guide by a flabby hind-leg, pulled himself half out of the water and struck twice with the knife, fast, while the pale-green eyes were still opening.

  He’d thought the Yellowhead might need a second or so to detach itself from its host, as the bug riders usually did, before it tried to defend itself. This one merely turned its head; the mouth slashed down and clamped on Cord’s left arm above the elbow. His right hand sank the knife through one staring eye, and the Yellowhead jerked away, pulling the knife from his grasp.

  Sliding down, he wrapped both hands around the slimy leg and hauled with all his weight. For a moment more, the Yellowhead hung on. Then the countless neural extensions that connected it now with the raft came free in a succession of sucking, tearing sounds; and Cord and the Yellowhead splashed into the water together.

  Black tangle of roots again – and two more electric burns suddenly across his back and legs! Strangling, Cord let go. Below him, for a moment, a body was turning over and over with oddly human motions; then a solid wall of water thrust him up and aside, as something big and white struck the turning body and went on.

  Cord broke the surface twelve feet behind the raft. And that would have been that, if Grandpa hadn’t already been slowing down.

  After two tries, he floundered back up on the platform and lay there gasping and coughing awhile. There were no indications that his presence was resented now. A few lax vine-tips twitched uneasily, as if trying to remember previous functions, when he came limping up presently to make sure his three companions were still breathing; but Cord never noticed that.

  They were still breathing; and he knew better than to waste time trying to help them himself. He took Grayan’s heat-gun from its holster. Grandpa had come to a full stop.

  Cord hadn’t had time to become completely sane again, or he might have worried now whether Grandpa, violently sundered from his controlling partner, was still capable of motion on his own. Instead, he determined the approximate direction of the Straits Head Station, selected a corresponding spot on the platform and gave Grandpa a light tap of heat.

  Nothing happened immediately. Cord sighed patiently and stepped up the heat a little.

  Grandpa shuddered gently. Cord stood up.

  Slowly and hesitatingly at first, then with steadfast – though now again brainless – purpose, Grandpa began paddling back towards the Straits Head Station.

  Nightfall

  ISAAC ASIMOV

  If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God! – EMERSON

  Aton 77, director of Saro University, thrust out a belligerent lower lip and glared at the young newspaperman in fury.

  Theremon 762 took that fury in his stride. In his earlier days, when his now widely syndicated column was only a mad idea in a cub reporter’s mind, he had specialized in ‘impossible’ interviews. It had cost him bruises, black eyes, and broken bones; but it had given him an ample supply of coolness and self-confidence.

  Aton 77 found his voice, and though it trembled with restrained emotion, the careful, somewhat pedantic, phraseology, for which the famous astronomer was noted, did not abandon him.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘you display an infernal gall in coming to me with that impudent proposition of yours.’

  The husky telephotographer of the Observatory, Beenay 25, thrust a tongue’s tip across dry lips and interposed nervously, ‘Now, sir, after all –’

  The director turned to him and lifted a white eyebrow. ‘Do not interfere, Beenay. I credit you with good intentions in bringing this man here; but I will tolerate no insubordination now.’

  Theremon decided it was time to take a part. ‘Director Aton, if you’ll let me finish what I started saying I think –’

  ‘I don’t believe, young man,’ retorted Aton, ‘that anything you could say now would count much as compared with your daily columns of these last two months. You have led a vast newspaper campaign against the efforts of myself and my colleagues to organize the world against the menace which it is now too late to avert. You may leave,’ he snapped over his shoulder. He stared moodily out at the skyline where Gamma, the brightest of the planet’s six suns, was setting. It had already faded and yellowed into the horizon’s mists, and Aton knew he would never see it again as a sane man.

  He whirled. ‘No, wait, come here!’ He gestured peremptorily. ‘I’ll give you your story.’

  The newsman had made no motion to leave, and now he approached the old man slowly. Aton gestured outward. ‘Of the six suns, only Beta is left in the sky. Do you see it?’

  The question was rather unnecessary. Beta was almost at zenith; its ruddy light flooding the landscape to an unusual orange as the brilliant rays of setting Gamma died. Beta was at aphelion. It was small; smaller than Theremon had ever seen it before, and for the moment it was undisputed ruler of Lagash’s sky.

  Lagash’s own sun, Alpha, the one about which it revolved, was at the antipodes; as were the two distant companion pairs. The red dwarf Beta – Alpha’s immediate companion – was alone, grimly alone.

  Aton’s upturned face flushed redly in the sunlight. ‘In just under four hours,’ he said, ‘civilization, as we know it, comes to an end. It will do so because, as you see, Beta is the only sun in the sky.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Print that! There’ll be no one to read it.’

  ‘But if it turns out that four hours pass – and another four – and nothing happens?’ asked Theremon softly.

  ‘Don’t let that worry you. Enough will happen.’

  ‘Granted! And still – if nothing happens?’

  For a second time, Beenay 25 spoke, ‘Sir, I think you ought to listen to him.’

  Theremon said, ‘Put it to a vote, Director Aton.’

  There was a stir among the remaining five members of the Observatory staff, who until now had maintained an attitude of wary neutrality.

  ‘That,’ stated Aton flatly, ‘is not necessary.’ He drew
out his pocket watch. ‘Since your good friend, Beenay, insists so urgently, I will give you five minutes. Talk away.’

  *

  ‘Good! Now, just what difference would it make if you allowed me to take down an eyewitness account of what’s to come? If your prediction comes true, my presence won’t hurt; for in that case my column would never be written. On the other hand, if nothing comes of it, you will just have to expect ridicule or worse. It would be wise to leave that ridicule to friendly hands.’

  Aton snorted. ‘Do you mean yours when you speak of friendly hands?’

  ‘Certainly!’ Theremon sat down and crossed his legs. ‘My columns may have been a little rough at times, but I gave you people the benefit of the doubt every time. After all, this is not the century to preach “the end of the world is at hand” to Lagash. You have to understand that people don’t believe the “Book of Revelation” any more, and it annoys them to have scientists turn about face and tell us the Cultists are right after all –’

  ‘No such thing, young man,’ interrupted Aton. ‘While a great deal of our data has been supplied us by the Cult, our results contain none of the Cult’s mysticism. Facts are facts, and the Cult’s so-called “mythology” has certain facts behind it. We’ve exposed them and ripped away their mystery. I assure you that the Cult hates us now worse than you do.’

  ‘I don’t hate you. I’m just trying to tell you that the public is in an ugly humour. They’re angry.’

  Aton twisted his mouth in derision. ‘Let them be angry.’

  ‘Yes, but what about tomorrow?’

  ‘There’ll be no tomorrow!’

  ‘But if there is. Say that there is – just to see what happens. That anger might take shape into something serious. The sparks will fly, sir.’

  The director regarded the columnist sternly. ‘And just what were you proposing to do to help the situation?’