New Writings in SF 4 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  He’d never had a row with Stan. He didn’t have one then, but it got mighty close. When things had calmed down a bit, the overseer said, “O.K., Rick, O.K. So we take first things first. What do we do?”

  Rick was still glaring at the hole. He said, “Block that road, Stan, east at Saskeega, west at the end of Indian Valley.”

  “It’s done.”

  “Relieving tackle on that downhill tower. Then get the traffic all through, get it clear. We can guy her then so she won’t fall, if she does we’ll have the line laying down right back to Saskeega. When we’ve secured her we go back down the hill and face the music. By then they’ll be playing a real pretty tune...”

  They got busy. Supporting the tower was a ticklish job, it was nearly night before they’d finished, and a storm was blowing up over the Black Horse. A queer fancy came into Rick’s mind, wedged itself there somehow so it wouldn’t be driven away. The next tower downhill was the one Jim Halloran had died on. He kept thinking he’d look up and see him still up there, riding the wires like a big, ragged crow as the stalk was winched upright. When everything was tied off, the vehicles convoyed back down. Rick couldn’t stop from looking in his mirror and seeing the red hood just behind and feeling glad he wasn’t the last in line. He was still pretty badly shaken up, he just felt like that. Glad he wasn’t the last in line...

  If he thought he’d had trouble over the suicides he soon found out that had been nothing. There was trouble and trouble and trouble. Saskeega was important, whatever happened there was important. Saskeega fed Sand Creek, and Sand Creek was part of the National Effort and that was very important. Nobody thought too much about sleep until the stage was rebuilt and the lines were in again. Stan and Rick were grilled by the FBI, they asked did they think the feeder had been sabotaged, they said the Hell yes, there didn’t seem to be anything else they could say. Yes, somebody blew that stage, somebody that wanted Sand Creek shut down. And that was all that was needed. The state troopers were turned out, and after that Rick complained bitterly he needed a countersigned pass to get from his house across to his own garage and back.

  A patrol crossed the Black Horse the night the stage blew, to check that the tower was O.K. and the tackles holding. The driver said later it was queer up there, the wind gusting so strong the tail of the car got nearly snatched off the road a couple of times. Nothing impossible in that; as Stan said, anything could happen on that mountain in a blow and most times it did. The other linesman acted strangely, wouldn’t talk on the hill, just sat making bug-eyes up at the wires in the dark. He killed himself the same night, ran his car in the garage. That made six...

  Rick found out something about himself. He was scared of the Black Horse.

  It was crazy, he knew that, he told himself it was crazy, but he couldn’t shake it off. The Black Horse was a hill. A lump of dirt stuck there in the way so they’d had to put the lines across it, give it a wire necklace. Rick told himself the lines were just lines, they carried supertension up from Saskeega to Indian Valley, across to Sand Creek. Just power lines, that was all. But some part of him insisted there was something else.

  He’d get up nights, go to the windows and watch the green lightning-flicker over the mountain, listen to the war-drums of the thunder. That was the line where people died. That was where they took hold of bus bars, scalded themselves into mummies. That was where they climbed towers, reached out and got a good firm grip on Death. That was where transformers exploded, and blew half the mountain out doing, it. That was the line to High Eight.

  He’d never felt like that, never had a thing in his mind that was crazy but that he couldn’t drive away. He tried to tell himself there was a Reason, there was always a Reason for everything, but that didn’t help because then he’d try and imagine what the Reason looked like. He’d see it stalking up there on its own two legs, he’d see it walking empty roads under the lightning flashes and glaring down at Saskeega, scurrying home to a little white building, nesting down before the dawn caught up with it. That was how he got to feel, about High Eight.

  They built the new stage. They costed it and ordered the parts and put them together, and tested and checked and corrected, until it was all fine. Then they started the feeder again and Rick hoped he’d get some peace.

  He did, for a couple of months. He got Judy to go away to her folks, she came back looking brown and well. They started going down to Stan’s place again, had a lot of fun. And the Indian Valley line stayed like it should, it was just a string of well-behaved towers humping away across a hill. Everything was O.K.

  Then Rick got a call that started it all again. This time for keeps.

  He was over in his office one afternoon. It was a nice day, the sun was shining and he was sitting up there with his feet on the desk and a cup of coffee in his hand. Then the phone rang. He picked it up. “Yeah, line maintenance, Cameron here...”

  A voice gabbled in his ear. “That you, Rick ? For Chrissake come up here, Rick, come up for Chrissake, we got a tower m-mm.”

  Cameron frowned. “What? Say again?” It sounded like the phone had said, “We got a tower melting.”

  It had.

  Rick didn’t know what to make of one of his boys gone crazy, raving on the line like that. He said, “Er ... Look Johnny, you on your own? Who you got with you, pal, who’s with you?”

  “Rick, for Chrissake...”

  “Take it easy, Johnny, you got Grabowski with you? You get him on the line, will you? and, Johnny, take it easy...”

  The phone swore. It said, “Damn it to Hell an’ gone, Rick, I ain’t shook my bolts, I’m at High Eight and the place is goin’ crazy again and there’s people all over, will you damn well come ... ?” The line went dead.

  The fear had a galvanic effect, it bounced Rick out of his chair and out of the office. He jeeped across to Main Block and burst in on Stan. He said breathlessly, “High Eight again, Stan, something wrong with a tower. Can you come?” The Controller didn’t waste time answering, just grabbed his hat and ran after him.

  There was an accident truck outside, they jumped in and Stan set the siren blaring. He drove for the gates scattering people right and left. Rick yelled at him. “There’ll be Hell for this, the old man’ll give us Hell, using a siren without a main alarm...”

  He shouted back. “If it’s a phoney we give out we got a short on the button. If it’s the real thing, best we keep it to ourselves. What the Hell they say’s the matter?”

  “Say we got a tower melting.”

  “What?”

  Rick bawled, “Melting...” Stan didn’t ask anything else, just put his foot down and kept it there. They bounced through the gate and screeched onto the main road.

  There was plenty wrong.

  They passed Number Seven, everything still looked O.K. The truck swung round the last bend but one and there was High Eight, above and tiny in the distance. Rick said “Jesus Christ...” He couldn’t help it.

  Strain towers are extra-heavy stalks put in to take the pull where the cables change direction. Last one before Indian Valley was just below High Eight, and like the linesman had said it was melting. There wasn’t any doubt it was melting. Metal was dropping off the arms, running like solder under a torch, splashing down onto the rock in gobs a foot across. While Rick stared the whole thing sagged, shoved a spar towards the mountain like a man thrusting his knee out, bracing himself for a big yawn. Beyond the tower was a trouble wagon, and a little figure in Saskeega blue was running like Hell down the mountain. In front of him were the people.

  The road was full. There were a couple of hundred of them, maybe more. They were formed in a ragged column, moving up the middle of the carriageway towards High Eight. All sorts of people. There was a garageman still in his soiled whites, a girl in a blowy dress. . . . And in front of them the tower was bending into crazy shapes and over their heads the wires were waltzing from side to side.

  Rick slammed the siren in again and the truck came down behind them howling
and bellowing. Stan was leaning out of the cab yelling at the top of his voice. “Get out from under the wires..... Get back, get off the road, get out from under the wires...”

  For all the notice they took the wagon might not have been there. Stan left it nearly too late to stop. At the last instant he trod on the anchors and wrenched the wheel round and the truck screeched and broadsided onto the rough. It dragged a plume of dust behind it forty, fifty yards, then it smashed its pan across a rock and the ride was over. Rick banged his head on the screen, fell back and heard the cables part. Something slapped on the road behind the truck’s tail, the Saskeega men curled up instinctively away from the cab sides, there was the rush and whimper of the arcing then the cutoffs killed the line. Stan got out; Rick followed him cautiously, feeling himself to see he was still in one piece. The Sand Creek feeder was out again...

  Boris Grabowski reached the truck. His face was as near white as it could get and his eyes looked as if they were bolting out of his head. He said, “Boss, I’m going bloody crazy.”

  Rick said heavily, “You and me both, Boris, you and me both.” He looked up towards the strain tower. She was mostly all gone; there was a stump about six or eight feet tall, and the struts of that were twisted and blackened. What was left of the head had been dragged ninety, a hundred feet downhill, and all the road was a jumble of wires. The people were standing about in the middle of the mess. The cables had come down right among them, but they were still all on their feet, God alone knew how. The Saskeega men tried to talk to them, but it was no use. They started pushing them clear of the cables. It was hard work. The strangers stared straight ahead, walked when they were being shoved, stopped still as soon as they were left alone. “What we need,” said Rick furiously, “is a bloody sheepdog.”

  He sent Boris down to phone for roadblocks and ambulances and lifting gear to clear the carriageway. Then he walked on up to High Eight with Stan. They got another shock. The people they’d seen had been only the second wave, the first crowd of zombies had got there before the lines parted. There were red smears on the door where they’d torn the locks apart. They were the folk Johnny had tried to tell about on the phone.

  Rick went inside. Johnny was very dead. It looked like he’d tried to hold the folk back from the bus bars. He hadn’t had a chance, they’d picked him up bodily and shoved him onto the contacts...Six had managed to die, a dozen more were hanging round the gear looking stupid, fumbling at the bars like something ought to have happened but hadn’t. Rick hauled one of them up and shoved him away. He came right back and the overseer shoved him off again. He came back again and Rick hit him, he couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t feel it. He rolled across the floor, got up slobbering blood and started feeling for the contacts again. Rick let him be. It was like giving a kid a toy to keep it quiet....

  The only one of the victims that showed any sign of being human was a girl. She sat just outside the door and she was crying. Stan put his jacket round her shoulders. He said, “God knows what’s with the others, but this looks like plain shock.” He started talking to her. He found out her name was Allison Foster, she’d lived with her aunt a few miles out of Freshet. She said they’d heard the music. That was all. They’d heard the music. They’d got the car out and driven up, following whatever was calling them. They’d had a blowout on the trail, had to walk the rest of the way. She told Stan, the music had stopped now. It had gone away. Then she starting in crying again.

  The Controller looked up and shook his head, and they heard the sirens going way off towards Saskeega...

  The mountain was cordoned. The road was closed to traffic from Freshet right to Indian Valley. It seemed every research lab in the country had a team up there scraping about. They even sent some people over from Cape Kennedy. What the spaceboys wanted with bits of the busted stalk, Rick couldn’t figure. Stan said sardonically that maybe they thought the Company had little green men.

  Just about everything got analysed, the tower struts, the insulators, the rock face, bits of the cables. If there were ever any reports Stan and Rick didn’t get to see them. They were no wiser than they had been the day the thing happened. All they knew was one bright morning that tower melted. It couldn’t have happened, but it did.

  They re-rigged the feeder. A piece was blasted out of the rock, the new cables were brought inside the line of the old so the eggheads could keep their playground. Power was restored two days after the accident. The troops stayed put; Black Horse Pass was stiff with guards.

  Within a week the people who’d been saved were all dead, and that started a national scare on its own. There was talk of putting the whole of Saskeega County under quarantine. That would have been done, but nobody could find out why the victims died. Wasn’t anything physical, they just seemed to fade away. Nobody could do a thing. Rick heard the day the power went back on they had to strap them down to stop them walking to the Black Horse and doing the same thing all over. The girl Stan had talked to didn’t seem too bad, they didn’t watch her like they watched the others. They let her ram her fingers in a light socket. Somehow she kept them there till her heart stopped....

  Rick moved over to Stan’s place for a time because he didn’t like the idea of Judy being on her own any more. When she was with Jeff she wasn’t too bad. About ten days after the trouble he got back from Saskeega one evening and Stan asked him to go down to the workshop. He’d got something he wanted to show him.

  He’d got a nice little place rigged up at the bottom of the lot, a shed with a couple of lathes and a milling machine. The thing he wanted to talk about was standing in the middle of the floor. Rick stared at it. “What’n Hell is it, Stan?”

  He said, “Take a look. Guess at its operation.”

  Rick looked. The device was about four feet tall, a square box set on thin, dural legs. Most of the housing was taken up with circuitry. Rick was no electronics man but he knew an oscillator pack when he saw one. There was a metal cone speaker mounted above it on a horizontal baffle, and on top of that a thing that looked like the element of an electric fire. Over that again was a fine wire-mesh frame.

  Cameron shrugged. “Lower part’s obvious. Rest looks like it’d be good for warming the house. What’s it supposed to do?”

  Stan said, “It’s a bugtrap.”

  Rick was fogged. “What does it trap?”

  “It’s set for ‘skeeters at the moment. Give me a hand with it, I’ll show you.” They lifted the machine outside and Stan plugged in a wander lead from the shop distributor board. He pointed at a line of potentiometers on the chassis. He said, “You get a sort of list comes with it, you set these things up for your homing frequencies. Composite note.”

  Rick had read something about that somewhere; how the females of certain insects emit a note to attract the males, or the other way round. He wasn’t too sure about that, but the principle was obvious. He said, “You mean the pack generates the call frequency, the ‘skeeters fly in...”

  “And land on the hotplate over the sound source. Quick and easy. And it works, it works fine.” Stan switched the thing on. There was no audible sound; the side panels just got a sort of velvety feel, that was all. The elements started to glow orange-red; within seconds something dropped down onto the gauze, wriggled and vanished. Then another and another. Soon a stream of insects were flying down to incinerate themselves. Stan switched off. He said, “That’s enough for a demonstration. I don’t even care for killing ‘skeeters at the moment, I’m beginning to know what they feel like.”

  It took a few moments for the implication to sink in. When it did, Rick felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. He said, “Stan, if you’re suggesting what I think.... It’s crazy. And it’s too bloody horrible for words....”

  Stan shrugged. “I didn’t suggest a thing. I showed you an insect trap, you made your own comparisons.” He picked up a gauze frame. “I left the thing running last night. This was the result.” Rick took it from him. It was like he’d expected. The thing w
as coated with insects, black drifts and skeins of them, He chucked it down and Stan walked away.

  Rick followed him. Somehow, although a thing that had been in his mind for a long time had been verbalized, he still felt he had to argue. He felt mad at Stan for saying something he was so scared might be true. He said, “Stan, if you expect me to go along with a crazy thing like that—”

  The other man swung round on him. “Christ, Rick, can’t you play this quiet...?” He said, “Look, I don’t believe.” He spread his hands. “I can’t believe. But I’ve followed this thing through and there’s only one answer satisfies my logic. I can’t believe that answer. But I also know, I know, Rick, that what you saw that machine do, is a model of what’s going on at High Eight. This I swear before God and His angels.” He ducked back into the workshop.

  Rick stepped after him helplessly. Stan opened a cupboard. There was a bottle of Scotch and a couple of glasses. He got the whisky down and poured a couple of slugs. Rick picked his drink up, and the glass chattered suddenly against his teeth. He set it down and looked at it. “Now I know I’m going crazy.”