New Writings in SF 4 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  Blick was suitably impressed. The multiple passions which had driven him ultimately to this far and obscure corner of the universe still left him with a restless dissatisfaction, which the motion of the drift did something to relieve. He smiled wryly at some introspective pattern of reflection. Curiously, a passion for anonymity and loneliness were not the factors which had led him to become anonymous and alone in this most lonely and anonymous of places. This was an irony of life he could never explain, even to himself.

  The fact that he was at this outpost at all was, he knew, entirely his own doing. He had pioneered the technique of ion-exchange concentrate “mining” on Hebron V, and could by now, had he chosen, have occupied a safe and high administrative position in the company. But by a combination of obstinacy, assumed eccentricity and a carefully pre-calculated lack of responsibility, he had excused and manoeuvred himself out of the desk work and the salary and returned to this outpost laboratory and his thoughts. Metaphorically, the Company had shrugged its shoulders and calculated that he was the only loser, and since Blick always returned good value for money spent, he was left to have his way.

  Glancing at the multiple hands of his wrist chronometer he turned, for perhaps the hundredth time, to scan the railway line which crossed the ocean on the incredibly fragile-seeming chain of floats and supporting girders. On Hebron V the railway meant so much more than transport; it meant power, communication and life itself. Without the usually punctual daily train not only was his work hampered to the point of uselessness, but he and the occupants of the other stations were left in an intolerably dangerous situation. Currently, the train was fourteen hours overdue, and the multiplex communication line had ceased to function.

  He smiled again his wry, habitual smile and turned his attention back to the rafts of the station chained in loose association, from the broad backs of which rose his precious tanks and pumps and the tall resin columns of the ion-exchange installation. Methodically, almost absent-mindedly, he checked the gauges and adjusted the flow rates one by one. The pump on plant eighty-seven was labouring badly, so he made a note to clear the filters, and closed the unit down. This done, he returned to the laboratory and began to run analyses on the various concentrates entering the tanks.

  The analysis results were moderately good, with platinum-group metals from the deep pickup particularly high, but the yield from the resin beds selective to the heavier trans-uranic elements was disappointing, and scarcely justified his request to the Company for the recent “drift” of the station two kilometres south of its original position. The “top-stream” water was again the frequent mixed mineral stew, and he noted to limit his intake of this solely for the production of the process water he needed to keep the other columns in operation. Only from the “midi” stream was the output high with his staple product—copper. The midi pumps were bringing up a good quality liquor, mainly sulphate radical and organo-complex, and by using sulphuric acid to regenerate the ion-exchange resins he was producing almost completely pure copper sulphate for transfer to the storage tanks. Out here on the Rim, where copper had nine hundred times the value of gold on Terra, this was a useful achievement, so he plotted his influent depths and went out again to sound the height of the midi current.

  It was then, as he was crossing the broad raft decking, that he perceived the next hint of trouble. So used were his ears to the whine and throb of his pumps that he could almost tell their individual performances by their contributions to the total melange of sound. Had his ears not been so critical he could have missed entirely the almost imperceptible break in their rhythm. In fact, so short was the period before recovery that the circuit-breakers did not have time to react before the current was restored and held them firm.

  Scowling, he forgot his intended mission and turned back to the power room, where the current from the cable, which picked up from the railway line, was divided and the power suitably transformed to provide the complex needs of the station. Nothing appeared amiss; the meters exhibited no more than the usual slight hunting, and all the breakers and isolators were cool and firm. This led him to assume that the fault had lain with the supply and not with his own installation, and he raised one eyebrow at the implication.

  The electricity supply was fed into the conductors, which also served as the railway lines and the multiplex communication feeder, at Station Sixteen, about a hundred and fifty kilometres north down the precarious chain of floats which was their only link with Lamedah. Since the supply itself was an MHD-oscillating atomic-plasma reactor, and therefore not itself likely to be subject to random variations in output, the fault probably lay either with the associated equipment at Station Sixteen or, more possibly and more potentially disastrous, with the railway line itself.

  Blick had never had any illusions about the seriousness of a major catastrophe affecting the functioning of the line. Economics alone had dictated that three parallel bars of steel-clad gold should span the two hundred kilometres from the Base on Lamedah to Station Sixty, carrying power, transportation and communication simultaneously along the chain of PTCFE floats which was the sole and dubious umbilical cord feeding the sixty stations of the line. Max Colindale, the general manager of Transgalactic Mining and Minerals, had a whole file of Blick’s comments on the arrangement, and the heading on the file, had he seen it, would have caused Blick’s immediate resignation.

  * * * *

  With the ‘plex gone, the only remaining communication device was a sound-powered circuit to Station Sixty, which had originally been installed by the construction team for the purpose of comparing drift velocities. Station Sixty, at the end of the chain, some five and a half kilometres distant, was now used only as an ecological field laboratory under the control of Martha Sorenson, the planetary biologist. For purely personal and emotional reasons Blick’s hands were trembling very slightly as he dragged the instrument from the rear of the desk. It had been a long time since he had used it last. After a brief moment of hesitation he cranked the instrument and then sat back with the handset, and was relieved to hear the click signifying contact established.

  “Martha?”

  “Who else did you expect?” Five words only, but the inflections of the voice carried even over the restricted frequency range of the instrument. Association did the rest.

  “Blick,” said Blick unnecessarily, knowing as he said it that the circuit did not and could not possibly communicate with any other two people.

  Understanding, she allowed him the seconds necessary to recover from his slight confusion, so he continued: “Look, there’s something wrong with the line between here and Base. The train is seventeen hours overdue and I can’t raise Base or anybody on the ‘plex system.”

  “I know,” said Martha. “I tried to send in my reports on the telefax, but the system’s completely dead. The power’s erratic, too. What do you think’s gone wrong, Blick?”

  “The power’s fed into the line at Station Sixteen, but the ‘plex continues through to Base. That suggests trouble at or near Sixteen on the Base side. If I remember rightly there’s a submarine valley across there somewhere.”

  “Yes, the Anapolis deeps. I did a bio-survey in that area last year. There’s a lot of high-velocity current layers in that area. Perhaps one of them surfaced.”

  “Perhaps. That could be nasty if the line’s been broken completely. There’s no construction team left onworld, and Base-maintenance aren’t equipped to handle anything that big.”

  “You think this might be big?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid it might. A swamped float should only take a few hours to replace, but seventeen hours needs some explaining. If it is a big break it could take weeks to repair, and if it needs supplies or help from offworld it could take a month before they can get to us out here. How’re you fixed for food?”

  “About three days, if I eat the tins I’ve been avoiding.”

  “Roughly the same here. Look, if the situation doesn’t change before nightfall I suggest
we place ourselves on an emergency footing. The sooner we do that the longer we will be able to last out if we have to.”

  “That makes sense,” said Martha, “but surely they could reach us somehow before then? They’ve plenty of boats at base.”

  “Only lightweight stuff, and no use for working against the rock-drift at this time of year. The best they have available is capable of not much above five kilometres per hour against the drift, and we’re two hundred kilometres south of Base. In their region, the prevailing current is about seven kilometres per hour just now and moving north-north-west, so they couldn’t reach us if they tried. And if a high-velocity streamer has broken surface across the Anapolis deeps we must assume it’s westerly bound, and that makes the situation completely hopeless.”

  “You’re right, of course,” said Martha. “I’d never stopped to think just how precarious our situation was out here.”

  “I did,” said Blick. “I had a row with Max Colindale over it, and nearly got my contract cancelled for my pains. It seems I was up against something called statistical probability, which proved to his satisfaction that my chances of dying of starvation out here were far slighter than my chances of dying anywhere else in the galaxy from all forms of fatality combined. Therefore, what did I have to complain about? He was doing me a favour, no less.”

  Martha began laughing. “Poor old Blick! I can just imagine your reaction when he told you that. I never could really understand why you came out here in the first place.”

  “Can’t you, Martha ?” Blick’s voice was quickly sad.

  She stopped laughing suddenly. “Yes. I do know, Blick. But it was a stupid thing to do. We both know there can never be anything more between us—not while you have a wife and family who love you as dearly as yours do. I’ve been too much hurt by the same sort of situation myself, remember? You can’t ask me to be instrumental in bringing that sort of hurt to you or them. You’re too damn nice, the whole bunch of you.”

  “That’s my trouble in life,” said Blick, “being too damn nice and getting involved with people who are too damn nice. It’s a positive fault. It’s the uncharitable, the inconsiderate and the conscienceless figurative bastards of this life who get all the breaks.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Martha seriously. “You don’t know how many times I’ve had that argument with myself. There’ve been times when just one more hurt dealt out by life could have made me quash my scruples and come to you, regardless of the consequences.”

  “Thank you for that crumb, anyway,” said Blick. “I’ll call you again before nightfall unless anything happens before.”

  He broke the connection and leaned back, thankful for the first time that the sound-powered phone did not have the video circuits provided by the ‘plex. He did not want anyone, especially Martha, to see him in his present mood.

  * * * *

  The power held out until mid-afternoon. The impending failure was heralded by two staccato interruptions, which dropped out all of the small automatic circuit-breakers on Blick’s installations before picking up again. Blick did not bother to restart the stalled equipment, but merely went round and closed the valves isolating the columns from the water, regenerant and concentrate tanks. There was no point in producing further concentrates to meet a delivery schedule for which no transport was likely to be available.

  The ‘plex system remained dead. Blick briefly considered breaking the equipment open and recovering components sufficient to build a small morse transmitter. Having considered thus far he realized that it was not a transmitter he needed but a receiver. Base would already be acutely aware of the position of the stations along the chain, and it was information from Base that was needed, not the reverse. Certainly, he had neither the knowledge nor the facilities to build a receiver capable of rendering intelligible the complex compressed-information transmissions of the Base deep-space transmitter, even if ionospheric scatter were to deflect sufficient of it to make the transmission available in this region.

  The final failure of the power rendered even these speculations sterile. This time there was no instantaneous break in the current, but a slow tail-off both in potential and frequency which Blick recognized as the result of the damping of the MHD reactor until the oscillations ceased and the plasma was extinguished. This particular mode of shutdown suggested an emergency measure to ensure the safety of the reactor rather than a calculated engineering shutdown.

  Looking northward down the chain he could see nothing of interest save for the perspective convergence of the railway lines, which being curved by a more than usually western component in the drift, cheated him of his habitual thoughts of the spacing of the rails approaching the infinitely small but never quite attaining it. Shorn of the noise of the pumps the station was enfolded by a vast silence, and the blank, orange-tinted sky seemed to move oppressively lower. He became aware for the first time of the slight bump and drag of the rocky foam along the edges of the rafts and the skitter of small fauna on the rocks hurriedly avoiding the upset which was caused to their own small and insubstantial worlds.

  Returning to the cabin, he was about to crank-up the sound-powered phone to Station Sixty when the instrument rang under his fingers, giving him a shock which he experienced as more physical than psychological.

  “What are we going to do, Blick?”

  “Currently, there’s not much we can do except wait. Now the power’s gone I think we can safely assume there’s a major break in the line and that it’s going to take a long time to repair. Perhaps the Base engineers can handle it, but I doubt if they can even get across without a cushion-craft of sorts, and that’ll have to come from outworld somewhere. I rather fancy it’ll mean a heavy engineering crew being brought in from Delta Five.”

  “But that may take a month!” Martha tried to adjust to the situation. Blick did nothing to soften the edges of the blow.

  “Yes,” he said. “Just that. Perhaps they can get emergency supplies through to us, perhaps not. It’ll depend on whether they can cross whatever gap there is, whether they have a locomotive on this side of the break and whether they themselves can restart the generator for power to drive it here. Given so many unknowns and a complete lack of information our only course is to immediately prepare for the worst.”

  “Then what do you suggest?” asked Martha.

  “First,” said Blick, “that we move you down here and pool such foodstuffs as we have available. We’ll work out some sort of rationing system which will give us a chance of surviving for a maximum period.”

  “Whoa!” said Martha, laughing. “Whose welfare are we interested in? I don’t really see how mine is going to be improved by moving into your cabin, and I can diet here as well as anywhere. Apart from the social prospects, give me one good reason why I should be any better off at your station than at mine ?”

  “In a word,” said Blick, “water. Your supply is limited to your tank, and that was due to be refilled by the train that didn’t arrive. I’d guess that only gives you a maximum of two day’s supply in hand unless you give up such luxuries as washing, in which case you can last out for about a week. Here I can use my resin columns to produce as much pure water from the sea as we’re ever likely to require. Stay there if you like, but remember where to come if you get thirsty.”

  “I might even do that if you can twist your crazy columns into producing gin, but if you think I’m going to walk five kilometres just for a drink of water, you don’t know Martha Sorenson.”

  “How much water have you got, Martha?”

  She was silent for a moment. “None, and you damn well know it, Blick.”

  “Uh! I’ll come and give you a hand with your supplies. Shall I come tonight or in the morning?”

  “Best make it the morning, Blick. I’ve something I must sort out before I leave.”

  “Such as?”

  “Me,” said Martha, putting down the phone.

  * * * *

  The only way to reach Station Six
ty was to walk the distance over the awkward railway decking. When he arrived, Martha had already packed and was awaiting him. Sensibly, she had limited the load to the very minimum of personal effects plus all the food which was available, though of the latter there was appallingly little. Their reunion was sincere if undemonstrative, and inhibited by a reserve which neither of them would have cared to explain.

  Although they had spoken briefly over the ‘plex system they had not seen each other for eight months, and Blick felt a slight stab of pain on noticing that time had touched the first traces of tiredness and hardness to a face he could remember as nothing but youthful and vital. He realized these things only by comparison with memory, and when he looked again he could find nothing but a slightly enhanced maturity, and the intensity which was the essential Martha was undimmed. Nevertheless, something inside him shed a small, bitter tear of regret.