New Writings in SF 19 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  And no one except me on the observatory had any formal access to this information, and I had felt that their speculations would have developed to it, and they hadn’t, and I didn’t know why.

  * * * *

  Later, when Clare had gone, I stood alone with Querrel by the main generators.

  The scene that had just taken place could have happened only on the observatory. Each of us knew the mental and physical strains being undergone by the others, as each of us was subjected to the same. That Clare had gone to another man did not surprise me ... it was only the shock of discovering it was Querrel. As far as he and Clare were concerned, I assumed that each of them must have known that their affaire could not have gone on for long before I discovered it. So there could be no genuine shame there. Nor could they have hoped to continue it if and when we left the observatory.

  We had said very little. Clare pulled away from Querrel, I tried to grab her but she evaded me. Querrel turned away and Clare said she was going up to our room.

  When she had gone, I lit a cigarette.

  ‘How long has this been going on ?’ I said, aware of the honour time had lent to the phrase.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Querrel said.

  ‘It does to me.’

  ‘Long enough. About seven weeks.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s all?’

  ‘Seven weeks. You know it was your fault, Winter. Clare really resents what you are doing to her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He didn’t reply, but sat down on the edge of one of the machine housings. Around us, the generators worked on smoothly.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘What did you mean?’

  He shrugged. ‘Clare will tell you. I can’t.’

  I said: ‘Who started it? You or Clare?’

  ‘She did. Though it comes back to you. She said it was a reaction against you.’

  ‘And you didn’t mind being used like that.’

  He didn’t reply. I wasn’t so blind as to be unaware that when a marriage is betrayed both parties are equally to blame. Though what Querrel meant by Clare’s resentment was lost on me. I had not to my knowledge done anything that would cause this reaction. Just then, Clare came back into the generator room with Andrew Jenson, the chief ecologist on board the observatory.

  He nodded briefly at Querrel, then looked at me. ‘Has Querrel told you?’

  ‘Told me what?’

  Querrel said: ‘No I haven’t. This hasn’t exactly been” a convenient moment.’

  In spite of my involvement, I registered the understatement. I said to Jenson: ‘Did you know about this ?’

  ‘I think we must be talking about something else.’

  I had wondered what connection Jenson had with the affaire between Querrel and my wife.

  Querrel got up from his perch on the edge of the housing, and went towards the door. ‘Excuse me for copping out of this,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough for one day.’

  I stared after him as he left us.

  * * * *

  It will have been noticed that during my descriptions of the work on the observatory there had been a certain amount of circumspectness as regards detail. There are reasons for this.

  It could be said, for instance, that in an environment where one’s whole existence is centred around some activity such as scientific study of an alien planet, then one’s behaviour should be very much coloured by what is going on. I have remained in this account remarkably free of the excitement of the staff over the various discoveries of minerals, bacteria and various higher life-forms.

  The main reason for my reluctance to go into detail is that there is a disparity between the activities of the staff and what I know to be their true function here.

  This is a necessarily cryptic state of affairs; not altogether without analogy to Tolneuve’s theories.

  But consider: the year is 2019, the planet we are supposed to be exploring cannot logically be within our solar system, mankind has not developed his technology to a point which would enable him to reach such a planet. A vacuum surrounds our observatory—unarguably there, as the air-leaks from our cabins continually testify—and yet outside there appears to be life. None of the staff has ever queried these things.

  * * * *

  Jenson went to the intercom and spoke for a few minutes to one or two other people. Taking advantage of the fact that we were alone, Clare and I exchanged a few words. At first she was sullen and unforthcoming. Then she let go, and spoke to me freely.

  She said that for several weeks she had been bored and depressed, anxious about me. That she had been unable to communicate with me. That I would not respond. She had suspected, for a time, that I had taken up with another woman, but discreet investigations had ruled this out to her own satisfaction. She said that she had been forced by the attitude of other scientists to separate herself from me in certain respects and that her personal attitude to me had changed in a parallel way. I asked her what she meant by this and she said that that was what Jenson was here for. She said that she and Querrel had started their affaire more or less as a consequence of this and that had I not acted in such a secretive way it would have never happened.

  ‘So you mean you think I’m holding something back?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I’m not. At least, not as far as you and I are concerned.’

  She turned away. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Jenson put down the intercom handset for the last time and came back to us. His face bore an expression, the like of which I had rarely seen on the observatory. One commonly sees a kind of blankness in the faces, but Jenson’s showed purpose, intent.

  ‘You’ve got one of your transor-conjunctions tonight, haven’t you?’

  ‘At eleven thirty, real-time.’

  ‘OK. As soon as that’s finished, we’re leaving the observatory. Are you coming with us?’

  I gaped at him. What he had just said amounted almost to treason against his own identity. It was impossible for him, or any other members of the staff, to conceive independently of the notion of leaving the observatory. Every member of the staff had been fully conditioned against such a concept.

  Clare said: ‘This is what I meant. We’ve been planning to get out for several weeks. The others told me not to talk to you about it.’

  ‘But that’s impossible.’

  ‘To get out ?’ Jenson smiled at me as if I were to be patronised. ‘We intend to use the abort mode. Nothing could be simpler.’

  Whatever may or may not be outside the observatory— whether you accept the official rationale of the observatory or, like me, you are aware of the true state of affairs—there is certainly a great deal of hard vacuum. Either the vacuum of elocated space, or the other and more common kind. No human being could hope to exist outside without full portable life-supports. Jenson knew this; everyone knew it.

  ‘You’re insane,’ I said. ‘You’re incapable of assessing the true state of affairs.’ I meant this emotionally and literally. He was acting in a deranged way and by definition, by the way he and all the others behaved in the sense of group response, he was insane. ‘You don’t know what’s outside.’

  Clare said: ‘We do, Dan. We’ve known for some time.’

  ‘The planet’s uninhabitable,’ I said. ‘The life-forms you’ve been observing are incompatible with the hydrocarbon cycle. Even if you could get through the elocation field, you’d never survive.’

  I was sticking to the official line. Jenson and Clare glanced at each other. Even as I spoke, I realised that none of this was their intention.

  * * * *

  This is relevant:

  The moon orbits the Earth at a distance of roughly a quarter-million miles. As it completes one orbit, so its own period of revolution ends. Result—we see only one face. However, the orbital path of the moon is elliptical and thus its speed in orbit varies depending on its distance from Earth. Result—an observer on Earth sees the face of the moon moving v
ery slightly from side to side as if it were shaking its head. It is therefore possible to see fractionally more of the moon’s surface than that on the side facing Earth. This movement is known as libration. On the northeast edge of the moon’s near side, as viewed from the Earth, is a crater named Joliot-Curie. For just over 28 days of every lunar month the crater is invisible from Earth. But for a few hours every month an observer inside the crater would see the Earth creep into sight over the horizon.

  On the floor of the crater, operating in a narrow strip of land from which the Earth can be seen at this time, is the observatory.

  * * * *

  I glanced at my wrist-watch. I said: ‘What has the next transor-conjunction to do with this?’

  ‘Some of the others want to have a look at the whole communication as it arrives. This is a genuine transor, isn’t it?’

  ‘As opposed to ...?’

  ‘Those times when you close your office to get up to God only knows what. We know that there’s only one transor every four weeks, Winter. And that the observatory is run from Earth on a real-time basis of four-weekly cycles.’

  ‘How do you know that ?’

  ‘We’re not entirely subject to the controllers’ whims,’ said Clare. ‘We have some access to what’s going on.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ I said. It had been comforting to be the only person on the observatory with the knowledge of what was really going on. Now it looked as if the others had somehow found out.

  ‘Look, Winter,’ said Jenson. ‘Will you accept that we do know what the real situation is ? You don’t run the observatory, you know.’

  ‘But I do have control of information,’ I said.

  Jenson gestured impatiently. ‘You had,’ he corrected. ‘It’s been common knowledge for some time that the mission’s purpose has had to be changed. We know about the troubles on Earth.’

  I thought about that for a moment.

  ‘Why do you want to get out of the observatory just at this moment?’

  Jenson shrugged. ‘This is the time,’ he said. ‘We’re tired of being cooped up in here. Now we know exactly what’s going on, we especially resent being here for no good reason. Some of us have members of our families on Earth ... with the trouble brewing up, not unnaturally we want to be with them. Also, there is a strong current of feeling that if a war does break out on Earth, we may well be stranded inside here. It’s apparent that the experiment as it was has come to an end.’

  Clare had moved across to me. Now she laid a hand on my arm. The touch of her felt vaguely alien, yet also reassuring.

  ‘We must get out of here, Dan,’ she said. ‘For both of us.’

  I tried to give her a cold look; the memory of what I had found her doing with Querrel still a disconcerting thought in the back of my mind.

  ‘You say you know what’s happening. I don’t believe you do.’

  Jenson said: ‘It isn’t just me. Everyone on board knows. There’s no point in arguing about it.’

  ‘I’m not arguing.’

  ‘OK. But for God’s sake let’s forget the official line about surveying an alien planet.’

  By the manner in which Jenson was talking, I knew that he wasn’t trying to extract information from me ... though at another time this might have been an acceptable motive within the terms of the experiment. Rather, it was as if we were both living with a falsehood, both knew it and both should abandon it.

  I said: ‘All right. We’re not on an alien planet. What do you think the observatory is?’

  ‘We don’t think,’ said Clare. ‘We know.’

  Jenson nodded to her. ‘We know that what we are expected to believe is a series of implanted reactions to preprogrammed stimuli. That the scientific reports we give to you to relay to Earth are in fact viewed in the sense of how well we have reacted rather than what our reaction has actually been. We also know that a large number of our assumptions about the observatory are artificial and were conditioned into us before we came here.’

  I said: ‘I’ll concede you that so far.’

  ‘What we don’t know, on the other hand, is the exact purpose of the experiment, though there have been several speculations that we are a kind of control-group. In the same way that we have been told that this mission is simulated on Earth by computers, so we are ourselves a kind of simulation for some other expedition ... perhaps one even on another planet. Or an expedition which is intended to go to another planet.’

  I had no idea how they had reached this knowledge, but what Jenson was saying was almost exactly so.

  ‘There is also some other kind of experiment going on, but of this we have no knowledge at all. We think, though, that it is connected with you, and accounts for your presence here.’

  I said: ‘How have you found this out ?’

  ‘By common deduction.’

  ‘There’s just one more thing,’ I said. ‘You are proposing to leave the observatory. Do you know what’s outside?’

  Clare glanced up at Jenson, and he laughed.

  ‘Office-blocks, motels, smog, grass ... I don’t know, anything you like.’

  ‘If you try to get outside the observatory you’ll die,’ I said. ‘There’s literally nothing outside. No air ... certainly no grass or smog.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’re on the moon,’ I said. ‘Earth’s moon. You’ve been right in everything you’ve said so far ... but you’re wrong about this. The observatory is on the moon.’

  They exchanged glances again. ‘I don’t believe it,’ Clare said. ‘We’ve never left Earth. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘I can prove it,’ I said.

  I turned to an equipment bay behind me and took a steel lever from its rack. I held it in my hand before them, then let go. It floated gently to the floor ... one-sixth gee, lunar gravity.

  ‘What does that prove?’ Jenson said. ‘You’ve dropped a lever. So what?’

  ‘So we’re in the lunar field of gravity.’

  Jenson picked up the lever, dropped it again. ‘Does this look to you as if it’s falling slowly?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘What about you, Clare?’

  She said with a slight frown? ‘It looks perfectly normal to me.’

  I put my hands on Jenson’s shoulders, pushed backwards. He moved away lightly, recovered easily.

  ‘On Earth,’ I said, ‘you would have fallen heavily.’

  ‘On the moon,’ Jenson replied, ‘you couldn’t have pushed so hard.’

  We picked up the lever and dropped it again and again to the floor. Each time it fell smoothly and gently to the floor, bouncing two or three times with light ringing noises. And yet they maintained that it fell as if under normal gravity.

  Who, I began to wonder, was imagining what ?

  * * * *

  Before the escalation of the troubles on Earth, an expedition had been planned. I don’t know where it was intended to go, nor how it was supposed it would be transported there. The members of the expedition would live and work in a mobile laboratory, carrying out various facets of ecological research. .

  The Joliot-Curie observatory was a practice run—deliberately placed in a relatively inaccessible area of the moon, deliberately rigged to mislead the occupants into believing they were working in the field.

  So conditioned were they that no one until this moment had ever questioned the mission, or speculated as to its purpose. What they saw of the unnamed planet was prerecorded films, prepared slides, pre-taped responses on the EEGs. What was observed at the observatory was the observer.