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New Writings in
SF: 29
Ed By Kenneth Bulmer
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Kenneth Buhner
Double Summer Time by Cherry Wilder
The Z Factor by Ernest Hill
A Space for Reflection by Brian W. Aldiss
Random Sample by E. C. Tubb
Sentenced to a Scheherazadean Death by David H. Walters
Between the Tides by Donald Malcolm
Young Tom by Dan Morgan
In the Coma Condition by Charles Partington
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FOREWORD
Kenneth Bulmer
Science fiction asks much from its readers and in return gives the Universe. One aspect of sf often used in its praise and, perhaps, more often as a club to belabour the whole of sf is its newness. If an aspect can be used as a club, sf has taken more than its fair share of punishment. One school of thought, still applying the somewhat out-of-date slogan of ‘idea as hero’, stoutly resists this punishment, pointing with large contempt at the comparative barrenness of the contemporary novel. The truth is that the contemporary science fiction novel successfully melds the best of old and new, and the sf short story, a form always pioneering, does the same thing.
The facts are that the imaginative, supernormal, fantasy story began with the first glimmerings of consciousness in the human brain that went beyond the immediate needs of food and sex. A story need not have an entirely new and original idea - they are almost as rare as waterfalls on Mars - but if it is handled in a new and original way it will surely find fresh responses and open up fresh areas of experience. When new ideas do come along they light up the whole field of sf and enrich us all.
The word ‘new’ in the title of New Writings in SF must be taken in one sense to indicate that the stories are not reprints, as are the stories in almost all the current anthologies. Most of the material in New Writings is sf especially written for the collection. The word ‘new’ also does not mean that every writer appearing in our pages is a new writer. Readers will know that a balance is struck between the brand new practitioners and the authors who have achieved some fame in the field. The interesting fact remains that New Writings in SF does publish a very high proportion of high class fiction from brand new writers, and very many of them continue on to carve out successful writing careers for themselves. In this valuable task New Writings is the undisputed leader.
I ought to make the point here, most strongly, that writers submitting material for consideration should enclose a suitably-sized envelope with correct return postage.
It would be useful to me if, when you write your next letter of comment to New Writings, you indicate in which order you read through the book. Do you just start on page one and read straight through? Do you check the contents page and then turn to a favourite author? And then how do you continue? Or what method, if any, do you adopt when reading New Writings? We do not run a readers’ column; but all letters are most gratefully received and help to build up our picture of the reader response, which, I am pleased to say, continued to be highly commendatory.
‘A Space for Reflection’ is not one of Brian W. Aldiss’s trios of Enigmas. Laying aside the compilation of the Enigmatic Companion for a space, Brian Aldiss presents us with a story packed with philosophies that will arouse intense reactions and with points of view devastating in their apparent simplicity, enriching in their complexities.
Cherry Wilder, an Australian lady of great charm and presence, has been scoring notable successes of late, and with ‘Double Summer Time’ she takes us on a strange journey through the motives of human beings, themselves the victims of twists in time.
Donald Malcolm takes a long look at alien mores and customs under terminal strains, and E. C. Tubb presents a puzzle tale in which brawn has no advantage over brain.
With ‘The Z Factor’ Ernest Hill presents something of a puzzle, too, only this time the puzzle is the tone of the piece as the author swings our attention away from the expected direction to reveal fresh dimensions of man’s uniqueness -or is it merely that this pseudo-uniqueness is encompassed within the wheel of entropy?
Charles Partington is building up in a particular style very much of the late nineteen-seventies and I am sure readers will look forward with interest to finding out what Mr. Partington is going to do with the various strands he has been revealing to us in his recent work.
Absent from New Writings in SF since volume 20, where he appeared with ‘Canary’, Dan Morgan presents in deadpan style his blackly ironic look at one human reaction to population control.
Appearing in print for the very first time, David H. Walters gives us a double-barrelled reminder of the old saying: ‘By the Word shall ye Live.’ The trouble here is the weakness of the human throat and vocal chords.
All these stories are brand new and all in their own way and to a variety of degrees contribute to the totality that is science fiction.
Kenneth Bulmer
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DOUBLE SUMMER TIME
Cherry Wilder
Here is a dazzling new story from the author of ‘The Ark of James Carlyle’ and ‘The Phobos Transcripts’ which calls upon many different spheres of interest, approaches to reality, and relationships of human with human, human with robot and human with vegetable. With extra-terrestrial intelligences able to interfere with the flow of Time it was just as well for Charles Curthoys that he remembered the date of his birthday. The story contains the interesting notion that a person would have special qualifications by reason of once having been a tree. And Cherry Wilder’s notion of the favourite beverage of the robot is a masterstroke ...
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One
Security found the Professor in his laboratory preparing to examine a fragment of rock. Curthoys, the senior research assistant, showed in the two officers with a certain amount of restrained commentary. Hewbry Hall was old; it had grown by accretion over several hundred years. The conservatory had been added during the nineteenth century, the plumbing refurbished during the twentieth, the laboratory ... Curthoys flung open the door ... was quite modern.
Brewster, the ranking NSO man, was impressed; the amount of computer installation alone testified to a large transatlantic bequest. He cocked an eye at Adamson, his colleague, who was bound to appreciate a technological display.
‘Expecting us,’ murmured Adamson.
There was a camera, of the sort still associated with bank robbers, and a recording device in plain view; Curthoys followed Brewster’s glance and gave a thin smile.
A husky young man in lab whites prowled on the periphery. That would be the junior research assistant: Ed Grey from Caltec. Far away on his dais the Old Man looked up from his work with a ferocious grin; he was at the top of his form.
‘Good morning!’ he barked. ‘I wonder what you could possibly want with me?’
Brewster sighed; he had tangled with the Old Man before.
‘Professor Latham ...?’
‘I admit it!’ cried the Professor. ‘I am the man. Sidney Erasmus Latham... got that? And you are my Big Brothers.’
Brewster flashed his identity plate stoically and approached the dais.
‘Wait!’ The Professor held up his hand. ‘I want a further witness to this interview... she takes stenographic shorthand.’
He bent towards his intercom and Ed Grey stepped eagerly towards the glass doors. The security men followed him and Curthoys ambled across: all four men stared out into the garden.
A girl sat under the trees reading a bo
ok. The place was overgrown, tumbling with vines and starry clumps of border plants, but ages ago it had been a formal garden. The girl sat reading in chequered shade; leaf shadows moved across her bare arms and the pages of her book.
‘Verity!’ said the Professor. ‘Come in please.’
The girl put aside her book and walked towards the laboratory, brushing aside the curtains of green leaves.
Brewster was captivated by the scene. Verity Latham, the daughter. He had studied her file of course ... militant ecologist: a greenfreak. Degree in antiquities of some sort ... English Literature? Classics? First Class Honours obtained while serving six months in prison, then she recuperated in the Kenyan Reserve ... she still had the tan. Her long light-brown hair was bleached by the fierce sun. She had been interrogated once or twice about the Old Man’s security problems but she wasn’t co-operative. Blood was thicker than water. What did she think about a father who rigged his intercom to an oak tree?
Ed Grey slid open the glass doors and Verity came in. She took down a white jacket from the peg and slipped it over her sleeveless green tunic. Transformed herself into a stenographer then settled down with her notebook.
‘Professor Latham,’ said Brewster. ‘We have reason to believe you were in the Oakdene area this morning.’
The Professor gripped the grubby lapels of his old-fashioned lab coat and moved forward on the dais.
‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ he said nastily.
Brewster glanced cautiously at Adamson who blinked once and began to read his report.
‘Twenty minutes after impact, while the police from Chipping Dene were attempting to cordon off the area, Professor Latham was seen by members of the public and by police officers. He was approaching the verge of the crater and collecting specimens----’
‘Brilliant!’ the Professor pounced. ‘A splendid absence of names, times, bona fides. I can picture the scene only too clearly. The ancient trees, the early morning mist... five or six coppers and their lumbering, petrol driven paddy-wagon. The crater, yawning like the pit of hell, and a white-coated figure flitting about among the trees before the dumbstruck peasantry. Perhaps it was the Minister for National Security in a fright wig!’
The Professor ran a hand over his shock of white hair; he and his two assistants laughed aloud.
Adamson put in impassively:
‘You were there, sir. I observed you myself.’
‘And your observations are not to be questioned?’ snapped the Professor.
‘No, Sidney,’ said Verity Latham, half amused. ‘You can’t question his observations.’
Brewster was surprised; she had been sitting beside an open window, taking her shorthand industriously with an occasional glance into the garden. He was surprised that she had been the one to recognize Adamson.
‘What is it Verity?’ said the Professor irritably. ‘Are we going too fast for your wretched grammalogues?’
Verity sighed, looked at the two security officers apologetically and blew Adamson’s cover.
‘That chap is infallible,’ she said. ‘He saw you. He can’t volunteer incorrect information.’
No-one spoke; the hum of the generators filled the room. Curthoys juggled silently with a flask, his eyes fixed on Adamson.
* * * *
The Professor said quietly:
‘Good heavens ...’
‘Yes,’ said Verity. ‘He’s one of the NSO robots.’
Brewster flinched from a blow that never fell. The usual reaction was fear and outrage but Latham was plainly delighted. Brimming with scientific curiosity he came down from his perch, shook Adamson warmly by the hand and introduced his assistants and his daughter.
He announced cheerfully:
‘Of course I was at the site! As you well know Mr...er Brewster isn’t it? ... I’ve been at every site for the past twelve months. The helicopter has done yeoman service.’
‘I’m sorry to intrude on you like this, Professor,’ said Brewster, ‘but your clearance...’
‘I know, I know, I’m B-minus these days.’
The Professor was observing Adamson wistfully like a boy outside a toyshop window.
‘I think that Mr. Adamson can testify if he checks his memory banks that I carried no extra-terrestrial material from the site.’
Adamson nodded; he no longer made the pretence of reading from a notebook.
‘Samples of plant life and rocks, a dead blackbird and two squirrels, lying twenty metres from the lip of the crater.’
‘Squirrels? Red squirrels?’ Verity demanded.
‘Grey squirrels,’ said the Professor. ‘Grey... bring out the grey squirrels.’
‘That’s still pretty bad!’ grumbled Verity as Ed Grey nipped up to the dais and produced a carrying cage. ‘If these damned meteorites are killing squirrels...’
‘Hush, child!’ said Curthoys. ‘The squirrels are not dead.’
The Professor led the security men to the dais.
‘Of course these objects kill animal life. I found a dead weasel at one site and at another the remains of a sheep-dog. On the other hand a surprising number of animals in the area of a drop suffer no ill effects. I have had reports of some sheep that were unharmed and I found a pair of rabbits... what... three months ago.’
‘What do you do with these animals?’ asked Brewster. He could hardly believe his good fortune. The Old Man had cracked, had become tractable all of a sudden; Adamson had done the trick.
‘Yes, Sidney?’ asked Verity. ‘What do you do with them?’
‘I test them for radiation of course!’ snapped the Professor. ‘What d’ye think I do with them? Vivisect them? Get off your hobby-horse, Verity!’
Ed Grey was lowering the carrying cage into a long demonstration chamber at one end of the Professor’s work bench. He adjusted the lighting in the chamber, then pressed a lever so that the carrying cage opened and lay flat. The two grey squirrels were ready for observation; they lay on the tanbark lightly curled in sleep, fluffy tails billowing over their noses.
‘Sleeping?’ asked Adamson, whose inbuilt curiosity was equal to the Professor’s.
‘Coming out of shock,’ said Latham. ‘That’s all it is. No trace of radiation. Both animals sound and healthy so far as we can judge.’
‘You’ve examined them?’ asked Verity.
‘Very cursorily, I’m afraid,’ said the Professor. ‘Barely had a moment to run the geiger over the wee beggars. We’ll be more thorough. Do it yourself if you’re so concerned, my dear. Get Grey to run a few tests.’
He turned back to Adamson and Brewster.
‘We’re not equipped for livestock,’ he said. ‘At the moment we’re working with metals. And talking of metals the so-called ‘casing’ found at site five, near Hastings, is in my opinion no more than a fragment of igneous rock!’
‘Have you found any evidence...’ Brewster began.
‘To support this popular theory of an “alien probe”?’ chortled the Professor. ‘None ... none ... Unless you count the regular distribution of these meteors.’
‘Your “grid pattern”,’ said Adamson.
‘Exactly.’ The Professor jerked his head at Curthoys. ‘We’ll have coffee in the projection room. I have film that illustrates the grid pattern.’
Verity continued to observe the two squirrels; they stirred in their sleep, fur rippling, and twitched their feet a little. One opened its eyes and brushed its front paws sleepily over its ears. Brewster looked back as the Professor shepherded them through the heavy drapes into the projection room and saw the two young people, heads together, peering into the demonstration chamber. Ed Grey’s work certainly had its compensations.
‘Fourteen sites ... but scarcely any fragments...’ there came the penetrating obbligato of the Professor’s voice. ‘They burn up ... they are consumed away ... like all meteorites ...’ He gave a familiar bark of laughter.
‘Need a pretty hard organism to survive such an entry.’
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*
Two
Charles Curthoys got into the habit of visiting the conservatory every morning after breakfast with nuts for the squirrels. It was a sad place, with the elegant glass domes overhead and the floor a tangle of rusty piping. Central heating had saved the palms and the hardy tree-fern. Now Verity had set up her cages and was embarked on some sort of program with the squirrels. Curthoys was surprised that she persevered; the squirrels were healthy and attractive but in no way remarkable. He wondered if she might be trying to impress her father with a show of scientific zeal. The Professor was ambivalent: he told Verity he was pleased to see her keeping out of mischief, but he alarmed the housekeeper, Mrs. Furness, by suggesting that a squirrel had grown two heads. More to the point he refused to let Ed Grey assist with the program. They were approaching a critical stage in their work with the alloys and the new transformer.
New Writings in SF 29 - [Anthology] Page 1