New Writings in SF 9 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  “Oh no I’m not, dear man. You’ll play with me—or I’ll ruin you, your name, your domestic bliss and your professional integrity. Had you thought of that? You, in a position of trust and responsibility, a watcher-by-night, neglecting your duties for amorous dalliance—think how that would sound! Passion in the power-plant!”

  “Here ?” Sentry glanced round at the severe lines of the control room.

  “Why not? It will add spice. But not now!” She went back two tigerish steps. “There’s an art even to this and anticipation is nine-tenths of the delight. You will be on this watch again”—she narrowed her eyes in thought—”in seven days’ time. So there it is, darling. A date. Something to look forward to.”

  “Just a minute,” he growled, as she turned to go. “Apart from anything else, why me?”

  “Hah!” her eyes sparkled as she laughed at him. “Several reasons. In the early days when we were all so busy comforting each other, you didn’t indulge. I noticed that. You’re proud. And strong. The dominant type. And Belle obviously adores the very ground you walk on. That must mean something. I intend to find out what.”

  As he slumped before his control board there was a faint trace of her perfume, enough to assure him this thing had really happened and was no nightmare. But he felt anything but dominant, at that moment. He glanced automatically at his gauges without seeing them. He was caught, trapped as surely as a man in chains. What hurt more than anything was the obviousness of it. Belle had said it took two to make a man a satyr. So, with a relationship shattered, there had to be two bits, both Kingsleys. And, if Belle was also right about Bob Vance, there went two more. Where would it end ? And what was he going to do ? He glanced up at his board again, purely by reflex, and an odd eye caught him. He looked again, and sat up straight, staring at it. There, completely forgotten, was the round unwinking eye of the little portable TV camera. For a moment, Sentry was too stunned to grasp that he had been saved. Helen Kingsley had known, as everyone else did, that the power-plants were virtually the only places where cameras were not fitted, where all the precious readings were taken direct from pressure gauges and flow-meters and pyrometer points. And, this time, she had been wrong.

  He reached out and took down the little camera, handling it reverently. For the rest of that long watch he sat and thought, hard and carefully, to work out exactly what he had to do.

  * * * *

  Six

  The mid-month quiz came three days later. Timed for 1300 hours, it took place as usual in the main assembly room and again, as usual, the two Kingsleys held the chair between them, flanked on either side, on the rostrum, by the remaining ten of the sociology section, women one side, men the other. There was never any need to count heads or be formal. Kingsley went straight to the main matter.

  “I think we’re all agreed that the giant squid has given us our hardest shock since last session, so let’s deal with that first. Prime consideration must be present danger. Sentry?”

  “Solkov can tell you better. He’s East side.”

  “So far as we can tell,” Solkov stood to report, “nothing serious. A slight increase in seepage water. A slight loss in pressure in the inlet chambers. These we will seek out and deal with on the next routine overhaul.”

  “What about recurrence?” This from Yvette Briand, of Horticulture and Botany. Sentry stood for that one.

  “We are in process of fitting cables to each of the screens, permanently connected to battery power. Routine electrification should prevent any further incidents. It’s for the outside party to say how likely it is that we’ll get more squids.”

  Douglas Haig climbed to his feet. “I’d say another squid was unlikely. Cephalopods are my field. This is not their kind of locale, at all. That one, so far as I could tell from the remains, was injured before it reached us, I’d say in conflict with a predator, probably shark. Its behaviour was uncharacteristic, in that it should have lifted off when we approached. For the record, this is the biggest I’ve ever seen, although there are bigger specimens in the literature.”

  The biochemists had their turn, Alice Vance reporting that squid was considered a delicacy in some cultures but that this one was too old and tough to offer much scope. “However,” she said, “we found no toxins or contra-indications, so we passed it along to Diet and Culinary.”

  Emmeline Addy stood to report that they had tried all of a dozen ways to tenderize the flesh but without success. It was left to Elsie Haig, for Horticulture and Botany, to assure the gathering that the carcase would be rotted down and processed for humus and fertilizer. Kingsley took the floor again, an odd expression on his face.

  “I hope the meeting will permit me to make an apology, almost a confession. I’m afraid I rather lost my head in that crisis. I regret it. I can offer no excuse other than the feeble one that we seem to have progressed to the point where crises are no longer common. I imagine I had allowed myself to relax into over-confidence——”

  “This is quite unnecessary,” Alan Asquith interrupted from his right. “No one is criticizing you, Andrew. Forget it.”

  Sentry, keenly watching the faces on the platform, saw general agreement, with two exceptions. Paul Briand and Josip Isvolsky did not join in the chorus. They seemed aloof and watchful. He rose to his feet abruptly.

  “I wish to challenge the chair,” he said. All noises faded away until the room was thickly silent. Kingsley brought his head round very steadily.

  “Challenge the chair? What may that mean?” He tried a laugh that came more like a bark. “Were you suggesting there should have been a few words of commendation extended to you, Sentry ?”

  “Save it. I challenge the chair because I have a question or two to ask on matters you’re not competent to judge on.”

  “Questions?” Kingsley lost his superior manner at once. “What questions?”

  “Oh no,” Sentry retorted. “Not for you.”

  “Do you expect me to vacate the chair?”

  “And the room. And Mrs. Kingsley as well, please.” Sentry put down his hand to push away Belle’s anxious clutch on his sleeve, but kept his eyes hard on the platform crew. Aileen and Alan Asquith spoke almost in concert.

  “This is ridiculous!” they said, and then hushed. The rest remained quiet until Helen Kingsley rose, pale and furious.

  “Come, Andrew,” she snapped. “You’ll recall us, of course, when Mr. Sentry has done making a fool of himself !” Her husband’s snarl was audible in the hush as he leaped up and marched from the platform. Asquith stood watching them go, then turned a blistering eye on Sentry. With his neatly clipped moustache and aristocratic air, he could appear commanding. He did now.

  “I suppose you’d want to appoint a new chairman? Yourself, perhaps ?”

  “Not you, anyway. I haven’t cancelled one bias just to make room for another. I’ll be happy to accept either Paul Briand or Josip Isvolsky.”

  After fifteen silent seconds for thought, Briand sighed. “Very well, Mr. Sentry. What is this momentous matter?”

  “A general question, first. You people up there are responsible for keeping an eye on our mental health. We all have to take a personal stability test once every two weeks. We do. Who tests you ?” Asquith snorted, but Briand was calm.

  “We test each other, of course. Very discreetly. Was that your big question?”

  “Just a preliminary. Tell me now, who last ran a test on Kingsley?”

  “Hah!” Asquith grunted. “And then you’ll demand to know the results of that test, eh ? No no, Sentry. That data is confidential, as you know.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep on screaming before you’re hurt,” Sentry snapped. “I only asked—which one of you last ran a test on Kingsley ?” Asquith sat, shrugged a sneering glance at Briand, then at Isvolsky. Then David Repington frowned at Larry Kiggel. They frowned at each other. The tension grew as the enquiring looks crossed the platform to the distaff side. Aileen Asquith shrugged, glanced to Olivia Cadorna. Hilda Ryan and Ruth
Nivelle exchanged glances. Irene Ibbot put a hand to her mouth. Sentry was guessing ahead of them all now. “While you’re at it,” he suggested, “who last ran a test on Helen Kingsley?”

  From the floor someone called out. “They’ve tested each other, perhaps ?”

  “No!” Isvolsky scowled. “That is not good practice.”

  Sentry sagged. His hopeful scheme had come unstuck. “That’s it,” he shook his head. “I withdraw the question. You’d better call back those two.”

  “A moment,” Briand put up a stern finger. “It is not so easily dismissed. There are implications------”

  Before he could complete the sentence the lights winked out. A fraction of a second later the floor shook just a thought ahead of a distant booming explosion. Sentry didn’t remember beginning to run. He was out of the room and into the open before his slower reasoning processes had worked out how he knew, instantly, that it was Power-East. The sound, the direction of impact, the pattern of light failure and flickering recovery, he analysed it as he ran, reaching the plant entrance well ahead of anybody else. Inside, the motor-room was silent. Up the corkscrew ladder he went, to find the control-room vacant, all instruments zeroed except the cross-over monitors, which were up to attention. The visiphone bleated. He slapped it alive. Eben Addy’s face looked out, tensely alert.

  “What the hell was that, Pete?”

  “Dunno. Just got here. Who’s on?”

  “Percy West. Ain’t he there?”

  “Not in sight. Leave this link open, I’ll go look and call you back.” The stink of fried insulation caught Sentry’s nostrils. He tracked it, let it lead him up and around another ladder, up to the switch-house. With the scorched insulation came the sweet reek of hot oil. Percy West lay sprawled on the tile floor, feebly trying to wriggle to the door. The walls were dripping with oil. Of the several rows of heavy-duty switches, one line was a wreck, their box-casings burst open like so many bombs. Sentry went down on his knees.

  “Take it easy, Percy. What happened?” His touch told him that West was badly burned, at least.

  “I’m all right, Pete. Just flash!” Tiny flakes of scorched skin broke and fell from West’s face as he tried to grin. “Switch-house temperatures began dropping about an hour ago.”

  “Dropping? Getting cooler?”

  “Right. Figured it out afterwards, too late. Came up to see why. Must have made a spark of some kind.”

  “Free hydrogen! From the fuel-store lines.”

  “Right. We must have loosened the seals when we blew the squid. But we don’t have hydrogen monitors. Silly, isn’t it?”

  There came a clatter from below and Sentry raised his voice. Twenty delicate minutes later West was out and on the cool grass outside where the medical team could make hasty and temporary attempts to ease him. As a rule. Men’s Medical handled male accidents, but Sally West was head of the women’s section, and no power on earth or under the sea would have kept her from Percy’s side at that moment. Sentry noted that even while he was busy making arrangements for repair and replacement of the damaged switch-gear. There was a lot to be done, most of it hard and heavy labour, and he was thoroughly weary by the time he was able to leave it and get home. He was angry, too. As he said to Belle,

  “It’s high time we turned this whole business over to automation. The computer would have diagnosed free hydrogen in a flash, as soon as those falling temperatures snowed. The heat-exchange factor is well known. Percy, of course, still had his head full of the giant squid business and I don’t blame him. It is the human factor that is going to wreck us unless we do something about it.”

  Another “human factor” awaited him the next morning. At 0830 hours he had a visiphone call from Paul Briand, informing him that he was to attend a special committee meeting of the entire sociology section, in camera. Belle made no secret of her distress.

  “Andrew is after your blood, Peter. He’s going to build a cross and nail you to it. He’s the type.”

  “Don’t worry, Tinkle. I don’t break all that easily. This might be the way to achieve what I was after, anyway.”

  The twelve were gathered in their own interview room, where the long table made a “U”-shaped area for Sentry to stand. He felt as if on trial. Kingsley put on the look of a headmaster about to admonish a brilliant but difficult pupil, an air of amused tolerance thinly layered over severity.

  “Well now,” he began, “this is an extraordinary situation, isn’t it? Are we to have an explosion?”

  “Perhaps. Tell me, do you know what was said, yesterday, after you left the quiz?”

  “I can guess the general drift. The purpose of this meeting is that you will now make your accusations against me in my presence. Fair?”

  “That’s fine. Only I didn’t make any accusations. I’m surprised your colleagues didn’t tell you that!”

  “We don’t gossip,” Asquith growled. “You have the floor. Get on!”

  “All right. Here’s that question again. When did you last take a personal stability test, Kingsley ?”

  “Stick to your last, cobbler,” Kingsley smiled. “You’re making a fool of yourself. I have a test every other week, just like anyone else.”

  “No no,” Briand murmured, and there was instant hush. “That is not true, Andrew. Not true.”

  “Are you calling me a liar, Paul?” Kingsley’s indignation was well done. “You should check the records before making a statement like that, you know.”

  “But I did. I checked very carefully, for ten times. Twenty weeks. And always the same—exactly the same— results. Similar, perhaps I could say possible. But exactly the same ? Never.”

  “I agree,” Isvolsky murmured. “It seems Paul had the same idea as myself, and found the same results. Ten duplicate records, and all signed by Helen Kingsley. Furthermore------”

  “Damn it, those records are confidential!”

  “Rubbish!” Isvolsky brushed the objection aside with a precise gesture. “I am as professional as yourself. I disclose no secrets. I say, furthermore, that Helen Kingsley’s records show precisely the same pattern. It is now mid-July. Since twenty weeks back, neither one of you has taken a test, simply handed in copies. Comment, please.”

  Kingsley went red in the face, tried to laugh. “Good God!” he burst out. “Anyone would think it was a crime! I am, after all, the Director. I have a thousand things to attend to. Does it matter that I chose to code in ‘same as last time’ results, instead of going through the rigmarole and wasting someone else’s time ? Surely no one questions my stability?”

  “I do,” Sentry stated flatly. “You can call that an accusation, if you like. We can start with the fact that you and Mrs. Kingsley have been conspiring between you to dodge the tests for the past twenty weeks.”

  “Just a minute,” Asquith protested. “That’s a bit too strong. Conspiring? Come now, Sentry!”

  “Husbands and wives aren’t supposed to check each other anyway, you’ve said so yourselves. So what else is it?”

  Helen Kingsley came to her feet, shivering with rage. Sentry watched her the way he would watch a strain-gauge climbing to danger point.

  “Be careful,” she warned. “I wouldn’t push this thing too far, in your circumstances.” She let it hang there and he kept his bleak gaze on her until he thought the moment was ripe.

  “A threat?” he murmured. “Is that how you propose to demonstrate how sane and stable you are, before these witnesses?”

  She went white. Her laugh came shrill and unsteady. “You fool, to try psychological tricks on me. As Andrew said, stick to your last. Try your filthy accusations on me and I’ll see that you regret it, you conceited clown!”

  “Now look here,” Kingsley slapped the table, “first you accuse me of psychosis. Then you snap at Asquith. Now you’re picking on Helen. Can’t you see you are demonstrating the very imbalance you’re accusing others of? Persecution tendency. Possibly slight megalomania. Wouldn’t you say, Briand?”

  He
len Ryan broke in before Briand could speak. “My husband works in Mr. Sentry’s area of operations. And I was the last one to run a test on him. I submit that he shows every sign of stability and control. I reject Dr. Kingsley’s implications. Peter, I would like to hear the substance of your evidence as it relates to------”

  “Let me tell it first,” Helen came up to her feet again, eyes blazing, “and then let him lie, if he dares!”

  “Then there is substance to it?”

  “Only this. That man is riddled with erotic fantasies, hatched in the long solitude of the night watches. Heaven only knows how many other women he has made the target of his urges, that remains to be seen. I do know that when he approached me and suggested—no, insisted—that I should visit him in the night, told me of his perverted imaginings and assumed that I would enjoy taking part in their fulfilment, I was shocked and disgusted. However, as part of my professional obligation, I was prepared to humour him up to a point. Frankly, I had not arrived at any hard decision. I think I would have sought advice from one of you, given the chance.”