A Treasury of Great Science Fiction 1

by Anthony Boucher (ed)

  Petra had not seen it happen. She was looking all around, with a bewildered expression.

  “What’s that?” she asked. “What’s that queer noise?”

  The Zealand woman came in, calm, confidence-inspiring.

  “Don’t be frightened. We’re coming. It’s all right. Stay just where you are.”

  I could hear the noise now. A strange drumming sound, gradually swelling. One could not place it; it seemed to be filling everywhere, emanating from nowhere.

  More men were coming out of the woods into the clearing, most of them on horseback. Many of them I recognized, men I had known all my life, all joined together now to hunt us down.

  Suddenly one of the horsemen shouted and pointed upward.

  I looked up, too. The sky was no longer clear. Something like a bank of mist, but shot with quick iridescent flashes, hung over us. Above it, as if through a veil, I could make out one of the strange, fish-shaped craft that I had dreamt of in my childhood, hanging in the sky. The mist made it indistinct in detail, but what I could see of it was just as I remembered: a white, glistening body with something half-invisible whizzing around above it. It was growing bigger and louder as it dropped toward us.

  As I looked down again I saw a few glistening threads, like cobwebs, drifting past the mouth of the cave. Then more and more of them, giving sudden gleams as they twisted in the air and caught the light.

  The shooting fell off. All over the clearing the invaders lowered their bows and guns and stared upward. They goggled incredulously, then those on the left jumped to their feet with shouts of alarm, and turned to run. Over on the right the horses pranced with fright, whinnied, and began to bolt in all directions. In a few seconds the whole place was in chaos. Fleeing men caromed into one another, panic-stricken horses trampled through the flimsy shacks, and tripped on the guy-ropes of tents flinging their riders headlong.

  I sought for Michael.

  “Here!” I told him. “This way. Come along over here.”

  “Coming,” he told me.

  I spotted him then, just getting to his feet beside a fallen horse that was kicking out violently. He looked up toward our cave, found us, and waved a hand. He turned to glance up at the machine in the sky. It was still sinking gently down, perhaps a couple of hundred feet above us now. Underneath it the queer mist eddied in a great swirl,

  “Coming,” repeated Michael.

  He turned toward us and started. Then he paused and picked at something on his arm. His hand stayed there.

  “Queer,” he told us. “Like a cobweb, but sticky. I can’t get my hand——” His thought suddenly became panicky. “It’s stuck. I can’t move it!”

  The Zealand woman came in, coolly advising’

  “Don’t struggle. You’ll exhaust yourself. Lie down if you can. Keep calm. Don’t move. Just wait. Keep your back on the ground so that it can’t get around you.”

  I saw Michael obey the instruction, though his thoughts were by no means confident. Suddenly, I realized that all over the clearing men were clawing at themselves, trying to get the stuff off, but where their hands touched it they stuck. They were struggling with it like Dies in treacle, and all the time more strands were floating down on them. Most of them fought with it for a few seconds and then tried to run for shelter of the trees. They’d take about three steps before their feet stuck together, and they pitched on to the ground. The threads already lying there trapped them further. More threads fell lightly down on them as they struggled and thrashed about until presently they could struggle no more. The horses were no better off. X saw one back into a small bush. When it moved forward it tore the bush out by the roots. The bush swung round and touched the other bind leg. The legs became inseparable. The horse fell over and lay kicking—for a while.

  A descending strand wafted across the back of my own hand. I told Rosalind and Petra to get back into the cave. I looked at the strand, not daring to touch it with my other hand. I turned the hand over slowly and carefully and tried to scrape the stuff off on the rock. I was not careful enough. The movement brought the strand, and other strands, looping slowly coward me, and my hand was glued to the rock.

  “Here they are,” Petra cried, in words and thoughts together.

  I looked up to see the gleaming white fish-shape settling into the middle of the clearing. Its descent swirled the floating filaments in a cloud about it and thrust a waft of air outward. I saw some of the strands in front of the cave-mouth hesitate, undulate and then come drifting inward. Involuntarily I closed my eyes. There was a light gossamer touch on my face. When I tried to open my eyes again I found I could not.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It needs a lot of resolution to lie perfectly still while yon feel more and more sticky strands falling with. a feathery, tickling touch across your face and hands; and still more when you begin to feel those which landed first press on your skin like fine cords and tug gently at it.

  I caught Michael wondering with some alarm if this was not a trick, and whether he might not have been better off if he had tried to run. Before I could reply the Zealand woman came in reassuring us again, telling us to keep calm and have patience. Rosalind emphasized that to Petra.

  “Has it got you, too?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “The wind from the machine blew it right into the cave—Petra, darling, you heard what she said. “You must try to keep still.”

  The throbbing and the whirring that had dominated everything grew less as the machine slowed down. Presently it stopped. The succeeding silence was shocking. There were a few half-muffled calls and smothered sounds, but little more. I understood the reasons for that. Strands had fallen across my own mouth. I could not have opened it to call out if I wanted to.

  The waiting seemed interminable. My skin crawled under the touch of the stuff, and the pull of it was becoming painful.

  The Zealand woman inquired: “Michael? Keep counting to guide me to you.”

  Michael started counting, in figure-shapes. They were steady until the one and the two of his twelve wavered and dissolved into a pattern of relief and thankfulness. In the silence that had now fallen I could hear him say in words, “They’re in that cave there, that one.”

  There was a creak from the ladder, a gritting of its poles against the ledge, and presently a slight hissing noise. A dampness fell on my face and hands, and the skin began to lose its puckered feeling. I tried to open my eyes again; they resisted, but gave slowly. There was a sticky feeling about the lids as I raised them.

  Close in front of me, standing on the upper rungs of the ladder and leaning inward, was a figure entirely hidden in a shiny white suit. There were still filaments leisurely adrift in the air, but when they fell on the headpiece or shoulders of the white suit they did not stick. They slithered off and wafted gently on their downward way. I could see nothing of the suit’s wearer but a pair of eyes looking at me through small, transparent windows. In a white gloved hand was a metal bottle, with a fine spray hissing from it.

  “Turn over,” came the woman’s thought

  I turned, and she played the spray up and down the front of my clothes. Then she climbed the last two or three rungs, stepped over me where I lay, and made her way toward Rosalind and Petra at the back of the cave, spraying as she went.

  Michael’s head and shoulders appeared above the sill. He, too, was bedewed with spray, and the few vagrant strands that settled on him lay glistening for a moment before they dissolved. I sat up and looked past him.

  The white machine rested in the middle of the clearing. The device on top of it had ceased to revolve, and now that it was observable, seemed to be a sort of conical spiral, built up in a number of spaced sections from some almost transparent material There were glazed windows in the side of the fish-shaped body, and a door stood open.

  The clearing itself looked as if a fantastic number of spiders had spun there with all their might and main. The place was festooned with threads, appearing more white than
glossy now; it took a moment or two of feeling something was wrong with them before one perceived that they failed to move in the breeze as webs would. And not only they, but everything, was motionless, petrified.

  The forms of a number of men, and horses, too, were scattered among the shacks. They were as unmoving as the rest.

  A sudden sharp cracking came from the right. I looked over there, just in time to see a young tree break off a foot from the ground, and fall, Then another movement caught the corner of my eye—a bush slowly leaning over. Its roots came out of the ground as I watched. Another bush moved. A shack crumpled in on itself and collapsed, and another. It was uncanny and alarming.

  Back in the cave there was a sigh of relief from Rosalind. I got up and went to her, with Michael following. Petra announced in a subdued, somewhat expostulatory tone, “That was very horrid.”

  Her eyes dwelt reprovingly and curiously on the white-suited figure. The woman made a few final, all-encompassing passes with her spray, then pulled off her gloves and lifted back her hood. She regarded us. We frankly stared at her.

  Her eyes were large, with irises more brown than green, and fringed with long, deep-gold lashes. Her nose was straight, but her nostrils curved with the perfection of a sculpture, Her mouth was perhaps a little wide; the chin beneath k was rounded, but not soft. Her hair was just a little darker than Rosalind’s, and, astonishingly in a woman, it was short. Cut off nearly level with her jaw.

  But more than anything it was the lightness of her face that made us stare. It was not pallor; it was simply fairness, like new cream, and with cheeks that might have been dusted with pink petals. There was scarcely a line in its smoothness, it seemed all new and perfect, as if neither wind nor rain had ever touched her. It was hard to believe that any real, living person could look like that, so untouched, so unflawed.

  For she was no girl in a first tender blossoming, unmistakably she was a woman—thirty, perhaps; one could not tell. She was sure of herself, with a serenity of confidence which made Rosalind’s self-reliance seem almost bravado.

  She took us in and then fixed her attention upon Petra, She smiled at her, with just a glimpse of perfect, white teeth. There was an immensely complex pattern which compounded pleasure, satisfaction, achievement, relief, approval, and most surprisingly to me a touch of something very like awe. The mtermixture was subtle far beyond Petra’s grasp, but enough of it reached her to give her an unwonted wideeyed seriousness for some seconds as she looked up into the woman’s eyes, as if she knew in some way, without understanding how or why, that this was one of the cardinal moments in her life.

  Then, after a few moments, her expression relaxed. She smiled and chuckled. Evidently something was passing between them, but it was of a quality, or on a level, that did not reach me at all. I caught Rosalind’s eye, but she simply shook her head, and watched.

  The Zealand woman bent down and picked Petra up. They looked closely into one another’s faces. Petra raised her hand and tentatively touched the woman’s face, as if to assure herself that it was real. The Zealand woman laughed, kissed her, and put her down again. She shook her head slowly, as if she were not quite believing.

  “It was worthwhile,” she said, in words, but words so curiously pronounced that I scarcely understood them at first. “Yes. Certainly, it was worthwhile!”

  She slipped into thought-forms, much easier to follow than her words.

  “It was not simple to get permission to come. Such an immense distance, more than twice as far as any of us has been before. So costly to send the ship. They could scarcely believe it would be worth it. But it will be . . . She looked at Petra again, wonderingly. “At her age, and untrained—yet she can throw a thought halfway round the world!” She shook her head once more, as if still unable to believe it entirely. Then she turned to me.

  “She has still a great deal to learn, but we will give her the best teachers, and then, one day, she will be teaching them.” She sat down on Sophie’s bed of twigs and skins. Against the thrown-back white hood, her beautiful head looked as though it were framed by a halo. She studied each of us thoughtfully in turn, and seemed satisfied. She nodded.

  “With one another’s help, you have managed to get quite a long way, too; but you’ll find that there is a lot more we can teach you.” She took hold of Petra’s hand. “Well, as you’ve no possessions to collect, and there’s nothing to delay us, we might as well start now.”

  “For Waknuk?” Michael asked.

  It was as much a statement as a question, and she checked herself in the act of rising, to look at him inquiringly,

  ‘There is still Deborah,” he explained.

  The Zealand woman considered.

  “I’m not sure—Wait a minute,” she told him.

  She was suddenly in communication with someone on board the machine outside, at a speed and on a level where I could make almost nothing of it. Presently she shook her head, regretfully.

  “I was afraid of that,” she said. “I am sorry, but we cannot include her.”

  “It wouldn’t take long. It isn’t far, not for your flying-machine,” Michael insisted.

  Again she shook her head.

  “I am sorry,” she said again. “Of course we would if we could, but it is a technical matter. You see, the journey was longer than we expected. There were some dreadful parts that we dare not cross, even at great height: we had to go far around them. Also, because of what was happening here, we had to come faster than we had intended.” She paused, seeming to wonder whether she was attempting an explanation beyond the understanding of such primitives as we. “The machine,” she told us, “uses fuel. The more weight it has to carry, and the faster it travels, the more of this fuel it uses, and now we have only just enough of it left to get us back, if we go carefully, If we were to go to Waknuk and make another landing and take-off there, and try to carry four of you, as well as Petra, we should use up all our fuel before we could reach home. That would mean that we should fall into the sea, and drown. Three of you from here we can just manage with safety; four and the extra landing, we can’t.”

  There was a pause while we appreciated the situation. She had made it clear enough, and she sat back, a motionless figure in her gleaming white suit, her knees drawn up and her hands clasped around them, waiting sympathetically and patiently for us to accept the facts.

  In the pause one became aware of the uncanniness of the silence all about us. There was not a sound to be heard now. Not a movement. Even the leaves on the trees were unable to rustle. A sudden shock of realization brought a question from Rosalind:

  “They’re not—they’re not all—dead? I didn’t understand. I thought—”

  “Yes,” the Zealand woman told her, simply. “They’re all dead. The plastic threads contract as they dry. A man who struggles and entangles himself soon becomes unconscious. It is more merciful than your arrows and spears.”

  Rosalind shivered. Perhaps I did, too. There was an unnerving quality about it—something quite different from the fatal issue of a man-to-man fight, or from the casualty roll of an ordinary battle. We were puzzled, too, by the Zealand woman, for there was no callousness in her mind, nor any great concern, either—just a slight distaste, as if for an unavoidable, but unexceptional, necessity. She perceived our confusion, and shook her head reprovingly.

  “It is not pleasant to kill any creature,” she agreed, “but to pretend that one can live without doing so is self-deception. There has to be meat in the dish, there have to be vegetables forbidden to flower, seeds forbidden to germinate; even the cycles of microbes must be sacrificed for us to continue our cycles. It is neither shameful nor shocking that it should be so. It is simply a part of the great revolving wheel of natural economy. And just as we have to keep ourselves alive in these ways, so, too, we have to preserve our species against others that wish to destroy it, or else fail in our trust.

  “The unhappy Fringes people were condemned through no act of their own to a life of s
qualor and misery—there could be no future for them. As for those who condemned them—well, that, too, is the way of it. There have been lords of life before, you know. Did you ever hear of the great lizards? When the time came for them to be superseded they had to pass away.

  “Sometime there will come a day when we ourselves shall have to give place to a new thing. Very certainly we shall struggle against the inevitable just as these remnants of the Old People do. We shall try with all our strength to grind it back into the earth from which it is emerging, for treachery to one’s own species must always seem a crime. We shall force it to prove itself, and when it does, we shall go; as, by the same process, these are going.

  “In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction.

  “If the process shocks you, it is because you have not been able to stand off and, knowing what you are, see what a difference in kind must mean. Your minds are confused by your ties and your upbringing, you are still half-thinking of them as the same kind as yourselves. That is why you are shocked. And that is why they have you at a disadvantage, for they are not confused. They are alert, corporately aware of danger to their species. They can see quite well that if it is to survive they have not only to preserve it from deterioration, but they must protect it from the even more serious threat of the superior variant

  “For ours is a superior variant, and we are only just beginning. We are able to think-together and understand one another as they never could; we are beginning to understand how to assemble and apply the composite team-mind to a problem, and where may that not take us one day? We are not shut away into individual cages from which we can reach out only with inadequate words. Understanding one another, we do not need laws which treat living forms as though they were as indistinguishable as bricks; we could never commit the enormity of imagining that we could mint ourselves into equality and identity, like stamped coins; we do not mechanistically attempt to hammer ourselves into geometrical patterns of society, or policy; we are not dogmatists teaching God how he should have ordered the world.