New Writings in SF 18 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  Suddenly he remembered something and craned forward. Forgetting the throbbing pain in his head, he thrust Clone aside and sat bolt upright, pointing a bony finger.

  ‘The door,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘What about the door?’

  ‘It’s open.’

  Coming in and seeing Floyd unconscious over the desk, Clone had most unprofessionally left the door ajar.

  ‘And that’s the last you’ll see of the fly.’

  Clone was a sound man, very logical and orderly-minded —except when he made absurd mistakes such as leaving doors open.

  It took Floyd a long time to explain about the fly. And about the missing micro-circuit. That called for a great deal of explaining.

  They took him seriously enough to search the whole of the security wing from top to bottom. But as Floyd expected, they found nothing. The building had been designed to keep out unwanted human intruders, but not to keep in flies. There were several unsealed crevices and ducts, and unplugged overflow pipes, through which a determined fly could make an escape.

  Floyd tried to get the Managing Director to see it that way. But when Iota came out with an exact replica of the missing circuit, Floyd wished he could slink away somewhere and hide.

  * * * *

  Floyd was still working at his old desk in Room 208. That in itself was something to be thankful for. He’d fully expected to be dismissed, or at least down-graded, after the last episode. But of course they didn’t allow him to work on secret projects any more. At first the work he was put to do was completely routine—the sort of thing any intelligent junior could have coped with. A week or two later he was given a concocted dummy project, designed to mislead Iota if ever they should get hold of it.

  Now Floyd was under orders to leave his window open all the time. He sat at his desk in a special protective suit, proof against horse-flies, wasps, hornets, and other forms of airborne menace. Close at hand on the table, was a protective helmet somewhat like those that beekeepers wear, but much tougher and sturdier. It was too ponderous for Floyd to wear all the time, but he had practised putting it on quickly. Clone had timed him with a stop-watch and they had got it down to under five seconds.

  So he sat at his desk day after day, chafing in the suit, with the protective helmet at the ready and pretended to work at the trivial tasks on which he was now employed.

  The window was triggered so that, the moment an insect flew through, it flipped shut. Just in case there was any malfunction, Floyd had a button under his thumb which could close the window independently of the automatic control.

  Concealed behind a screen, invisible from the window, sat Clone, wearing an even tougher protective suit. With grim devotion to duty, Clone insisted on wearing his helmet almost the whole time, though he had provided himself with a special air supply which made the suit a little more tolerable.

  Clone also had a button which could close the window, if Floyd should be attacked and incapacitated before he could get his helmet on.

  As the days went by and no fly appeared, relations between the two men became strained. Clone’s replies to Floyd’s conversational, bantering sallies became shorter and gruffer, through the swathes of his heavy helmet. In the end Clone pretended not to hear Floyd’s remarks and just sat there stolidly like a clumsily constructed mummy.

  What irritated Floyd was the growing sense that Clone had ceased to believe in the fly. He imagined Clone’s eyes through the visor, looking at him strangely, watching for the first sign of hallucinations or paranoid delusions. It was of course a triumph of credulity that Clone and the MD had accepted his story of the fly. There was some hard evidence, true: his loss of consciousness and the two red marks like hypodermic insertions on his arm. But these could easily have been faked, Floyd had to admit. So, at first, he felt a sense of gratitude that the security man had taken his story seriously.

  However as day followed day and nothing happened, Floyd sensed Clone’s belief wearing thin. It was being stretched to the limit, while they kept up the absurd pantomime of sitting there in the awkward suits. Had Clone some time-limit in his mind, when Floyd was to be finally discredited ? They could not sit there for ever.

  * * * *

  Floyd saw the fly first. But that was only to be expected, because Clone’s view was partly obstructed by his screen. Floyd’s finger jerked towards the button. The autocontrol flipped the window shut a fraction of a second before he made contact.

  A red warning light indicated to Clone what had happened, while Floyd struggled into his helmet.

  It had been agreed that they would pretend not to see the fly at first, so as to observe its behaviour when unmolested. So Floyd bent over his desk and went through the motions of working on the dummy project, as best he could in the clumsy hood.

  The fly patrolled back and forth behind Floyd’s head, sizing up the situation. Presently Floyd went over to the side of the room, on the pretext of checking a figure in a reference book. There was a whir of grey glinting wings as the fly swooped on the dummy micro-circuit and carried it away.

  Now Clone emerged from behind his screen, a ponderous white-suited figure, moving awkwardly like a badly synchronised automaton. He advanced towards the fly with a large butterfly net. Floyd too picked up a butterfly net from behind the screen and together they attempted to corner and capture the small invader.

  Their attempts were blundering and inaccurate, hampered as they were by stiff protective suits. The fly easily eluded their lunges and sailed over towards the window by which it had entered. It collided with the glass. Bounced off. Buzzed for a moment against the pane. Then, finding itself trapped, darted menacingly towards its assailants.

  Clone, who had been leading the chase, was directly in its track. The insect clung to his right forearm and tried to sting him. But the protective material of the suit proved impervious to its barb. The security man stood quite still, his arm extended and Floyd was able to clap his butterfly net over the fly. But the diameter of the mouth of Floyd’s net was considerably greater than that of Clone’s admittedly bulky arm and the fly was able to escape again.

  It swung round Floyd’s back and tried to sting him between the shoulder blades. Again the protective suits proved their worth. Floyd shouted to the other man to clap the net over his back. But Clone, moving ponderously in the big suit, was not quick enough. The fly, baffled, made for the top of the cupboard where it had eluded Floyd before.

  * * * *

  Here it encountered a fine mesh closing in the cavity at the top of the cupboard. They had prepared the room by sealing every cranny and closing off the recesses with panels or wire mesh.

  There was nowhere to hide.

  The fly turned back from the mesh and circled the room.

  ‘Keep it on the move,’ Clone shouted, his voice muffled by the folds of his helmet.

  This was the plan they had worked out, in the event of the fly proving difficult to capture.

  They lunged at the insect repeatedly with the nets, not caring whether or not they caught it. So clumsy were their movements and so agile the fly, that it was hardly in danger of being ensnared. But what they were doing was to compel it to remain constantly airborne.

  The absurd battle between two men and a fly went on for what seemed like hours. Floyd’s arm was aching as though it was about to drop off and he was bathed in perspiration. He could barely raise his right arm. He gritted his teeth and managed to keep the butterfly net waving above his head, repeatedly dislodging the fly from resting-places which it tried to find on ceiling or walls.

  Ninety minutes after the chase began, the fly plummeted to the floor, its wings twitching uselessly. It dropped the dummy micro-circuit, managed to crawl a few feet, then stopped.

  Clone pushed back his helmet, his face red and steamy-looking. Floyd did the same. He saw the other man reverse his butterfly net and delicately nudge the fly with the end of the handle. The creature rolled over on its back, its legs pointing stiffly upwards, immobile.


  ‘Not shamming, I don’t think,’ said Clone, giving the fly another gentle nudge. There was no response.

  Floyd took a pair of tweezers off the desk, very carefully picked up the fly by one leg, and deposited it on a plastic dish.

  * * * *

  Floyd looked up from the microscope, his face showing incredulity.

  ‘Astonishing.’

  ‘You have a look. Clone.’

  The security man peered into the instrument.

  ‘So it is an artifact, as we thought.’

  ‘Yes, but look at the fantastic detail. It’s beyond belief. Removing the casing is going to be tricky without damaging the internal mechanism. But even from the outside you can see how incredibly small they are working.’

  Clone straightened up and gazed through the window towards the Iota factory in the distance, its bulk shimmering grey and featureless through the haze.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said slowly, ‘is why? If they can work this small they must be several years ahead of us in microminiaturisation.’

  ‘Ahead in some ways, yes.’ Floyd, out of loyalty to his firm, was grudging. ‘They have Murdoch, who is an acknowledged genius in the field. But he’s curiously unpredictable and something of a prima donna.’

  ‘Obviously, he can deliver the goods.’

  ‘When a project interests him, he can. He’ll push things ahead like wild fire. But he’s rather an unworldly person, with something of a contempt for consumer preferences and prejudices. The result is that their stuff doesn’t make money, but ours does. They are simply driven to industrial espionage and to copying our prototypes in order to keep a reasonable share of the market.’

  Clone nodded.

  Floyd took another look through the microscope and in spite of himself his face wrinkled into a smile of enthusiasm and appreciation. ‘But one has to admire the way they’ve gone about this.’

  He kept peering into the microscope as he spoke. ‘My guess is that the eyes operate as TV scanners. The device is steered remotely—possibly by an operator in the Iota factory itself. These long hairs are the radio antennae.’

  ‘The legs operate as a grab for carrying off specimens of micro-circuitry?’

  ‘Yes. But even without doing that. Iota can scan diagrams and drawings with the TV eyes and reproduce them electronically in permanent form at the other end.’

  The security man in Clone reasserted itself. ‘But this is diabolical. Nothing is going to be safe with devices like this around. The thing could get through a keyhole....’

  ‘We’ll work out a reply. There is a defence against any form of attack. And meanwhile. Iota have presented us here with a very pretty specimen of their advanced thinking.’

  * * * *

  Floyd inched the small joystick forward with thumb and finger. On the TV screen in front of him the ground rushed up in exploding perspective. The fly sailed into the picture, a blurred, dancing, dark-grey spot.

  With small movements of the stick, Floyd locked on to it. He followed its wild twistings and veerings unerringly.

  At each turn the horizon tilted crazily sideways, left or right, to near vertical. But the image of the fly, though it swung and wobbled, never left Floyd’s screen. Despite its speeding wingbeat, it grew steadily larger second by second.

  Once he almost lost it. That was when it buzzed against the sheer face of a building. Floyd flicked the joystick sideways, as warning signals rang in his head. But the hours spent flying the simulator paid off (he remembered Clone’s grin getting more and more sardonic as the ‘write-offs’ had piled up on the simulator scoreboard). He brushed a wing-tip and no more.

  Then there was no escape.

  Floyd followed the fly in its twisting, erratic dive to ground level. This one was doomed.

  Now Floyd felt an exultant surge of anticipation as the fly’s image loomed enormous on the screen. A moment later an electronic note sounded. Floyd pushed the lever marked ‘Capture’. He exhaled a sigh of satisfaction and switched to autopilot. Then, beaming round, he gave the thumbs-up sign to colleagues seated at similar control desks on either side of him. They were too busy with their own controls to take much notice.

  That was five already this morning.

  Multiply that by thirty and at this rate even Iota’s production line was being strained to breaking point.

  A hatch opened in the wall opposite and Floyd’s bird fluttered in and alighted on the top of the control desk. The wing action was good, but the wings did not fold when they stopped beating. And instead of two eyes, the creature had a single lens in the front of its head. Still, the overall effect was what counted. From a distance, a passer-by would have noticed nothing unusual.

  Floyd jiggled a lever and the beak opened. Out fell the fly, de-activated and safely encapsulated in a block of transparent quick-setting resin. It looked like one of Iota’s standard models, but nevertheless Floyd consigned it to the chute leading to the dissection laboratories. Just as well to be on the safe side.

  Now there was a welcome pause while Floyd’s bird got its fuel cell recharged. He stretched himself comfortably in the adjustable chair. Flight duration was only thirty minutes—though the boys in the back room were working on this. But half an hour was ample to make a ‘kill’. His record today was well up to average and it gave him a quiet satisfaction to know that he was the company’s top-scoring pilot. That helped to wipe the slate clean.

  Relaxing over a cup of instant coffee, Floyd took time to look round the windowless airconditioned control room. Seated in rows were some thirty other pilots, mostly concentrating on their TV panels, their faces tense with the absorption of the chase, or occasionally registering disgust as the quarry eluded them.

  Floyd switched his own TV to a general view of the scene outside the building.

  In the airspace between their territory and Iota’s perimeter, the air was alive with the dark shapes of birds. With the black scimitar wings of swifts, the yawning beak and fish tail, and the single eye bulging in their foreheads, the birds fluttered aloft and swept down in screaming dives. Wheeling and turning, they dominated the air, hunting Iota’s spy-flies out of the sky.

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  * * * *

  SOME DREAMS COME IN PACKAGES

  David Kyle

  The dream, in this instance, was to get to the stars— but a human being, at least in his present form, cannot live long enough to complete the journey...

  * * * *

  ‘... and it is henceforth prohibited to manufacture, assemble, or operate, or otherwise engage in experimentation with, such automatons and/or robots, as have been specifically defined in the preceding paragraphs, within the political limits of the Megalopolis of the Greater City of New York...

  Bye-Law K-9786, City Council,

  New York Megalopolis Charter,

  Adopted, July 1, 1988

  The rocketship was travelling westwards, drawing a thin, grey line of exhaust across the rich blue of the evening sky. When it began to descend. Dr. Don VanGeorge moved back towards the safety shelter at the northern edge of the roof, careful not to lose sight of the blonde head of the girl. She was down near the landing platform awaiting Robert’s arrival.

  Dr. Don VanGeorge was spying on the girl. He was a rational, intelligent, middle-aged man, who had convinced himself that he had to be a sneak and an eavesdropper for her own good. He knew he was right, but he despised himself anyway.

  As the ship lowered, whistling and humming and stirring up the inevitable city dirt even a half mile above the ground street, the girl moved indoors. At the corner of his barrier, VanGeorge watched the dark ship slip down across the background of the distant skyline. Off to his left was the Brotherhood Building, the windows of its tower now steadily creating tiers of light another three hundred feet above the Science Building where he stood. He looked out past the tower, towards the river, beyond the dark line of the distant shore where the horizon was deepening from yellow into orange. Farther off,
like a spear, was the silhouette of the Humanity Tower, its tip ablaze in the last rays of the hidden sun.

  There was a short sudden silence which was obliterated by the impact of the opening hatchway.

  The girl, Helen, Professor Haines’ daughter, had walked out alone, towards the unfolding stairway. VanGeorge moved closer, behind a service door, to peer through its narrow window. He saw Helen’s head lift and her tall body straighten and then he saw what she was seeing.

  On the top step a pair of shining black boots began their descent, slowly bringing into view legs, then torso. The cuffs of the man’s grey gabardine pantaloons were tucked into his boot tops, and his laboratory blouse, crisply fresh, was in turn tucked tightly into the broad belt which bound his narrow waist. Above the top of his unbuttoned high collar rode his head, erect on stiff neck. The flesh of his angular face was firm, his brown hair neatly brushed, and his eyes had the hot spark which turns stones into gems.