The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Fine,” said Blair. “Let’s see how the cargo made out.”

  The three men returned to the grid, where they moored Wiley’s ship across from Dan’s, and then the four of them went on back inside the Station.

  Mendel was waiting for them inside the lock, brow furrowed with worry. He glanced back and forth from Blair to Ricks, then said to Blair, “How did it go?”

  “Fine.”

  “Just peachy,” said Ricks. “I get my merit badge, don’t I, Cargomaster?”

  Blair shook his head at Mendel, and went on toward the elevator without answering Ricks.

  He headed immediately for Section Five. Three crewmen were already at the bulkhead, which was still sealed shut. Blair looked at the pressure gauge, and saw that the dial was above the halfway mark and noticeably climbing. He talked with the crewmen a few minutes, discussing the strike and its repairing, and then at last the bulkhead door slid back into its recess, and they went on in. The crewmen went to work on the permanent repair of the inner hull, and Blair checked his cargo. A few of the food cartons had exploded when the section had gone to vacuum, but he gave them hardly a glance. He found the seven aluminum crates for QB. All had split open, releasing interior air, but their contents looked to be still in good condition. Blair grinned to himself with relief.

  QB was the maintenance base. As such, it had a permanent crew of eighty-four men. These men were on thirty-minute call at all times, and were fulfilling a two-year contract with General Transists. They spent every moment of those two years inside the QB satellite. Most of the time, they had little work to do, but the size of the crew was the statistical minimum required for any foreseeable accident to any part of the General Transits lifeline between the Earth and the Moon. When there was any sort of breakdown, such as this meteor strike on Station One, they went to work. The rest of the time, they were completely on their own. Their world, for two years, was a small metal ring nearly a quarter million miles from home. They couldn’t leave it, and they had little to do inside it.

  That was why the contents of the seven aluminum crates was so important. Four cartons of motion picture film and three cartons of microfilmed books. Six months of entertainment, of distraction. The only way the men of QB could keep from going stir-crazy in their two years of self-imposed imprisonment, the only way to last through the inactive days and weeks between the infrequent calls for their skills and labor.

  With no books, no motion pictures, no cheerful distractions for their minds, the men of QB would falter. Irritations would mount, squabbles would turn to hatreds, aggravations to bloody vendettas. Efficiency would collapse, morale disappear. Statistically, there would be within the first sixty days five suicides and eight murders.

  Entertainment. Tinsel. But, to the men of QB, as vital as food.

  Glenn Blair patted the aluminum crates, and grinned with relief.

  NOW that it was over, Harvey Ricks was terrified. Before he’d gone out, he’d been too full of the challenge he’d hurled at Blair; while he’d been outside, he’d been too busy. Now it was over, and he had time to realize the extent of the risks he’d taken, and he was terrified.

  He spent the next four hours in his cubicle, staring at the wall, vowing great resolutions of reform. From now on, he would mind his own business, accept his limitations.

  Then, after four hours, the barbell arrived from Station Three, and the transfer of cargo and passengers was made. There were five men coming back to Earth, there was stack after stack of cargo. The huge hold of the barbell was emptied, and then the shipment for the Moon—and the cargo for QB—was loaded aboard, and the three passengers for the Moon left Station One, carrying their one-suitcase-each to the new cubicle, where they would live another fifteen days of their lives. Ricks looked around at the new room, and already the retroactive terror was receding, already he was thinking of his exploit in self-congratulatory terms. He’d done well. He’d showed the Cargomaster that Harvey Ricks was a good man to have at your side, a man who can do the job right the first time.

  After a while, Blair knocked at the cubicle door and entered, smiling hesitantly, saying, “I didn’t get a chance to thank you, Ricks. You did a good job out there.”

  Ricks smiled, the old self-confident challenging smile. “Why, any time, Cargomaster.”

  Blair’s face tightened. “Well,” he said. “So I’ve thanked you.”

  “So you have, Cargomaster.”

  Blair left without another word.

  Ricks settled back on his bunk, arms behind his head, and smiled at the ceiling. He’d made it again. He’d sent the hunters away, and when the wolf had come he’d tromped it all on his own. He still hadn’t run across the wolf he couldn’t handle.

  But there was time. There was still plenty of time for Harvey Ricks to have his reckoning.

  Two years’ worth.

  WAITING FOR THE COIN TO DROP, by Dean Wesley Smith

  Nick stared at the sign on the antique gumball machine near the door in Donna Hayman’s living room and sighed.

  Wait for the Coin to Drop.

  If he waited for a coin to drop in that machine, he would never live long enough. Sometimes he really wished mechanical things would work here. Anything. But nothing mechanical did work, nothing electrical, nothing that required a moving part, even down to simple door hinges.

  Just to get into Donna’s apartment, he had had to use a sledgehammer and smash open the door. It took a crowbar to open a refrigerator, and that was after removing the screws on the hinges.

  Now, after almost a year of living in this apartment building, he had almost every apartment open so he could come and go with ease. Counting Donna’s, there were only six more apartments on the top floor left to open, six more hidden lives to explore, six more adventures to take before his research was finally finished and he could go home.

  He stopped inside the door and glanced around at Donna’s apartment. He could almost smell the uncut Canadian bacon and pepperoni pizza on the coffee table. He knew that wasn’t possible, since he needed special implants and a breathing device to even breathe or walk or see light through the air of this time period. Air molecules that didn’t move were as hard as steel. And since nothing moved, no smell could move to his nose either. Without the special implants, he would have died instantly on arriving in this moment in time.

  Outside the clean window, the city of New York spread out, the deep canyons of the buildings tightening down in the distance. No sound came from the city, since it too was frozen in this moment, this instant of time, as was everything else around him.

  He shook his head. It still smelled like pepperoni pizza in this apartment. He hadn’t had a bite of pizza for almost a year. It hadn’t occurred to him to bring any with him, or program it into his food replicator. No wonder he was imagining the smell. But he did remember to bring along his fine cigars and best whiskey. And after each day he allowed himself a few sips and a cigar, so life without pizza hadn’t been all bad.

  He had no idea if Donna Hayman was home at this very instant in time, but it sure looked like she was. He hoped she was. If nothing more than to give himself another beautiful woman to look at for his last few weeks in the building and in this time period. He knew, from his files that he had brought with him from the future, that Donna had been good looking at one point in her life.

  He doubted she would be as good as Betty in apartment 310, or Sandra in 241, or Kitty in 608, whom he had found in the shower, her head thrown back, her naked body frozen in a moment of showering, her almost perfect body covered in a silvered sheen of water.

  He had to admit, he had spent far, far too much time in that bathroom, staring at her, a woman long dead as far as he was concerned. Kitty would never realize that for a fraction of a fraction of an instant in time, she had had a visitor from the future staring at her in a very private moment.

  At first it made him feel a little perverted. But his job here was to study the people and he had decided there was nothing at
all wrong with admiring a perfect human form.

  After a time, he thought he had actually fallen in love with her. An impossible romance, since the only way a person from his time could travel back to another time was inside an instant, a fraction of a second too small to even measure, where nothing moved, and the laws of conservation of mass and energy wouldn’t allow anything to be changed from one instant to another.

  That fact, that reality, solved all time paradoxes.

  And that allowed for middle-aged writers like him, with far too much time on their hands, to go back in time for a year to study the people who lived in a crowded apartment building in New York and write a book about their long-dead lives of 2015.

  Granted, studying people in the past was nothing really new or original. But that wasn’t his focus. He had decided that for his book, he would put a special spin on the idea of ordinary people’s lives.

  He would study their secrets. He would learn their hidden desires, their fetishes, their affairs, and their faults.

  Every person, either in 2015 or 2259 had secrets. And a lot of people loved reading about other people’s secrets. His challenge to research his book called “The Secrets of Lexington Avenue” was to look into everyone’s lives in this building, and then through historical documents, if possible, learn how ten of these people fared with their secrets.

  So, for almost one year now, he had lived in a special time bubble set up in the lobby area. And every day he left that time bubble and broke open people’s doors and cabinets and everything else they kept secret and closed off and hidden from their neighbors.

  Of course, in the next fraction of an instant of real time for this building and these people, the universe would reset everything as if he had never been here, broken down a door, or even existed in this moment.

  It was impossible for him to do any real harm in this time.

  And to him, all these people were long dead, including Kitty in 608. And to Kitty and everyone else in this building, he was below notice.

  He had been surprised that living alone in a city of frozen, uncaring people had bothered him for the first few months. But eventually he got used to it.

  And now, after almost a year, he had come to like the people of this building, for the most part. He hadn’t expected that. He had expected them to just be statistics in his research. But by looking for their secrets, looking through their hidden lives, they had become more than frozen flesh and data. They had become human to him.

  And he had no doubt that was going to make his book a much stronger book.

  Of course, there were a half-dozen he had also come to hate when he discovered who they actually were. So far he had found two child molesters living in the building. Even though they would never notice, he had cut off their hands. It made him feel better, even though in the next instant of time, everything would reset and the monsters would continue on in their own time.

  But screw it, it made him feel better doing that.

  Even more surprising to him was that over a quarter of the people in the building had very few, if any, secrets. They simply lived their lives, many of them very sad and dull lives.

  Just as life treated them, he was sure he would go home and just forget them. They would live on as nothing more than a few notes in his research. He had come to realize that in many cases a person without secrets, without desires, without courage, was not worth studying.

  Or remembering, for that matter.

  However, a large number of people in the building lived interesting lives, had fascinating secrets, and often varied sex lives. He knew his readers would be interested in that, so for each person he tried to determine what their sexual desires and secrets were.

  There were twelve gay couples in the building and at least sixteen men and a dozen women who liked to look at pornography on their computers. Eight others were heavily into different aspects of bondage. Some had pornographic pictures in hidden boxes or in the back of drawers, often of themselves with some unknown partner.

  Fifty people in the building played musical instruments and another dozen were travel freaks, people who seemed to live to do nothing but leave town and see the world beyond the confines of New York City.

  Six were working on novels and from what he could tell, none of them were any good. And three were working on plays, none of which were ever produced that he could discover.

  Almost half of the people in the building were having money trouble of one sort or another.

  He had no doubt he would have trouble focusing on just ten people in this building for his book.

  Maybe Donna would end up being one of those top ten most interesting. He could call her the “pizza woman” since that pizza really seemed to have invaded his imagination.

  Nothing could smell or feel hot or cold in this instant of time. And if not for his specially contained living bubble that sucked energy from his own time period and allowed him to live in his real time, he wouldn’t even be able to shower or eat.

  He had once tried a bite of a steak in one of the first apartments he had broken into. It had tasted like sawdust and his special implants had warned him away from such action by instantly causing him to throw it all back up all over the plate of the apartment occupant.

  Nick ignored the imagined smell of the pizza and forced himself to really look at the apartment around him. He needed to find out just how human Donna Hayman of apartment 719 really was, and what her secrets were.

  Just as he was doing now, living in the past, Donna clearly also had lived in the past in her life. Every detail screamed out another era long before 2015. From the old gumball machine with its strange sign telling someone to wait for the coin to drop to a huge mural on one wall with the pictures of Gone with the Wind stars taken at the opening of the famous picture in Atlanta.

  The furniture was of the 1940s, overstuffed and comfortable-looking. A Shirley Temple doll sat on one chair and a game of Monopoly with metal pieces and wood houses covered an end table, looking like it was half-played.

  The room looked lived in, with the pizza on the coffee table and Coke in an old bottle beside it. His stomach rumbled as he got nearer the pizza. He was going to have to call the day early and head back to his time bubble to get some dinner.

  “You want a piece?” a woman asked from behind him.

  He spun, his heart threatening to explode out of his chest. It had been almost a year since he had heard another person’s voice, even though he had talked to the frozen residents all the time.

  Facing him was a woman with a very nasty-looking knife held casually in her hand like she was used to using one in all different ways, including cutting pizza.

  Not possible.

  She was moving and breathing and blinking and doing everything a live person would do.

  Not possible. He was inside an instant of time, a random instant. No one else could be here at this moment.

  His mind just wouldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then finally he caught his breath and realized that the live person he was staring at wasn’t Donna Hayman, the resident of this apartment.

  “How?” he asked, which was just about all he could manage to get out.

  He lowered his hand slowly and let it hover over his emergency recall button covered with a protective cap on his belt. He had thought about hitting that button that would send him back to his normal time a great deal during those first lonely days, but after three months, he had sworn to himself he wouldn’t give up on this idea or this book.

  The woman smiled at him and her face seemed even more attractive in a classical model way, except for the fact that the smile didn’t reach her green eyes. She had on a knit yellow sweater and shorts that allowed her beautiful, thin legs to stand out. She was barefoot and her long, blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

  Damn, she was the best-looking woman in the building.

  He was dreaming. This wasn’t real. It simply couldn’t be real.

  “Don’t bother to hit
your recall button,” she said, her voice low and husky. “You’re inside my bubble now and it won’t work.”

  He shook his head. His mind was reeling. This could not be happening. It was against all the laws of physics that he understood, and he had spent some time studying them before he was allowed to take this research trip. And this was really, really against the laws of time travel.

  “You sort of stunned me,” she said, again smiling at him, “when you started banging on my door with that ax.”

  He watched as she twisted the knife in her hands. Crap, he had left the ax out in the hallway.

  She went on. “Clearly, you’re from some point in the future. What year is it where you came from?”

  “2259.” His voice sounded high and he swallowed the dryness.

  “What month and day is it for you now?”

  He had to think for a moment and do a little calculation, since he hadn’t thought of what day it was back in the future, in his real time, for a while. “August twenty-first.”

  That time he managed to keep his voice normal and level, even though he was having an impossible conversation with a woman twisting a knife in her hands.

  She nodded. “Two more years and twelve days. That’s what I figured.”

  “Until what?”

  “Until I get out of this jail,” she said, waving the knife around at the apartment. “I’ve been here for six years, 353 days. Nine-year sentence in this instant in time, living in this stupid apartment that a woman by the name of Donna created.”

  Suddenly Nick understood exactly what had happened. He had broken into a prison cell.

  After time travel had been discovered and the realization that nothing could be affected in the past, society had started dumping criminals into the past, letting them live in contained time bubbles in an instant in time, isolated, unable to hurt anything or anyone until their sentence was up.

  It was fantastically cheaper than prisons. He had read studies on it. No guards, self-replicating food, and no need to even bother with keeping track of the prisoners. Their locations and instants of times in the past were always kept a secret, thus they would be impossible to find.