New Writings in SF 5 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  “Gone? I thought he was still in the tank.”

  “He was, but he broke out and rigged up a booby trap with the fluid and some of the wiring. When the guards came in they got a shock that knocked them unconscious.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “Two hours maybe.”

  Still half asleep I struggled into my clothes and stumbled along the corridors to the main garage. All the doors of the big hangar were open and the damp chill of the desert night made the air freezing. Breathing it was like inhaling icy water. Streams of vapour puffed from the nostrils and every conversation was marked by the white fog. Col had already organized search parties and the bay was full of the sound of motors as the two-man cars revved up and climbed the ramps into the starless night. I could see their searchlights patching the desert all around. I watched as Col sent out the last parties.

  “Want to go?” he asked.

  I shook my head. With my meagre knowledge of the desert there was little I could do.

  “Well, one of the crews is short a man,” Col said. “I was thinking...”

  “You go,” I said. “I wouldn’t be much use to you.”

  A minute later the last ship slid up the ramp and left me alone in the hangar.

  Someone had spread an ordnance map on the floor. I walked over and looked down at it. It was incomprehensible to me, but that was probably my drowsiness. I wondered where Chart was; where a man could go in the desert. What could he hope to find among the rocks and sand? There were no towns, no oases, no wells. Most of the map mirrored this aridity. It was brown, plain and unrelieved—except, I noticed, for a web of thin black lines that covered it like the work of an industrious spider. Out of curiosity I checked the key—odd to think that if the map had faced the other way I wouldn’t have bothered— and saw that they were magnetic field lines graphed during the last I.G.Y. by a team of trivia-minded Belgians. The lines wandered in delicate curves over the desert, almost always singly but sometimes running parallel and occasionally congregating into huge knots marking areas of particular magnetic density. There were two knots like that in our vicinity. On one of them somebody had scrawled an X in blue pencil. It came to me I had seen this map before. The X marked the spot where Chart had been found the first time.

  And if that knot of lines coincided with the place he had run to the first time...

  Outside it was still dark, but a false dawn lighted the east with a pale glow. Luckily there were still cars available. I climbed into one and set out to the west, my shadow racing before me like a long finger.

  It took me less than half an hour to reach the place I had marked on the map; the second knot of magnetic lines, almost identical with the one on which Chart had been found last time. The sun was well up by the time I killed the power and settled quietly on to the top of a low hill that seemed almost a marker. I got out. There was no movement, no sound, and for the first time it occurred to me to wonder if my hunch was wrong. The fear was shortlived. Walking to the top of the rise I looked down its far side to see a single car standing abandoned. I looked out beyond it to the plain. About a quarter of a mile away a figure was moving slowly and deliberately in the slanting dawn light. I could see his shadow, gaunt and elongated as was mine, rippling on the rocks. I set out after him.

  It took only a few minutes to reach Chart. He was not walking away from me or from the car. He seemed not to be aware of where he was going. Rather his path followed the lines of force I had seen on the map. For a while he walked slowly in a straight line. Then he stopped, turned, walked back, then turned again. I drew close, but he took no notice of me. Soon I was beside him, but still he said nothing, merely walking purposefully towards the rising sun. He was naked from the tank, his skin unnaturally pink and shining. All the lines were smoothed out. He was wet, new-born, a creature with whom I had no common ground. I looked into his eyes and saw that they had ceased to have any life. They were lenses, objects for seeing. Any life in Peter Chart had retreated deep inside him into the dim red centres of his being. His life was governed by his need and his hunger.

  Hunger. This was the thing we had never even considered. All our calculations had been based on an overdose, an encroachment of some kind, either of some new germ or an unknown stimulus. In a way, we had outsmarted ourselves—we had never looked for the thing that was not there, the omission that should have been obvious. The force field was proof against radiation. In fact, that was one of its big advantages. It reflected every kind of radiation—light, heat, gamma, even types not yet discovered. A man inside a force field was cut off from all this. For the first time in his life, for the first time in the life of his entire species, he was insulated.

  Since the first cell formed in the ocean man has had a flood of atomic particles flowing through him every second of his existence. Suddenly, for one man, it stops. How could we know what effect it had? Chart had collapsed completely, reduced from an intelligent man to a mindless addict of a drug he didn’t recognize by a need he never knew he had. He came back to earth with only one thought in his mind—to find the thing his journey had deprived him of. The place where radiation caught in the earth’s gravitational field spouted up again into space provided the greatest concentration near where he landed, so he went there. Nothing could be allowed to stand in his way. He had only one thought—to feed.

  “I don’t see how the test failed then,” Col said. “Tevis was perfectly all right when we took him out.”

  I had wondered about that too, until I remembered the T.V. link. “There was some leakage along the metal stand, of course, but the T.V. camera must have given him enough direct radiation to live on. But we’d better keep him under observation.”

  Col and I faced each other over the desk. We were both thinking the same thing.

  “Can we lick it?” Col asked.

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Are you going to try?”

  I thought about it for a moment, then I reached for the phone.

  “Get me Woomera. Colonel Thompson.”

  A few seconds later Thompson’s face came on to the screen. He wasn’t trying to hide his self-satisfaction.

  “Mr. Fraser! As a matter of fact I was just leaving to come over.”

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I’m rejecting the orders you gave yesterday. All my guards have been ordered to shoot on sight anybody approaching the perimeter. Good morning.”

  I cut the connection, though not too quickly to miss the very satisfying expression of complete amazement on Thompson’s face.

  Col’s expression was almost as dazed.

  “Can we pull it off?” he asked.

  “We can try. It’ll take them a few hours to find out that I’m not joking and a bit longer to see whether I’m insane or not. After that they’ll have to go through channels and I think I can guarantee that will take a long time.”

  Outside, the sun was up. For the first time since I had come to the desert, I realized that here was the real Australia. The sand, the rock, the sun—this was the country to which I owed my loyalty, just as it was to Col Talura’s ideas that I owed my allegiance, not to the old myths on which I had been brought up. There was no unpleasantness in the country or the ideas that I had not put there. Given time, I thought it would not be hard to learn a devotion to both. The least I could do was to try.

  <>

  * * * *

  ACCLIMATIZATION

  David Stringer

  As a direct contrast to the preceding story, David Stringer suggests that not only will man conquer space, but in less than a hundred years he will be reaching for the outer planets. The major problem, he infers, will be with man himself and not the mechanics of space flight.

  * * * *

  They called it the high-G blues and there were a lot of gags about it, some funny, others not so funny, but when you got it that wasn’t a joke. The feeling of bird-panic in your skull, as if your brain had come loose and was swilling about pulsing and flutte
ring, that was bad. And the sickness, the nausea, the drag in the pit of your stomach where you forced lead-heavy feet and legs to move. Too much, he told himself, too damn much happens far too quick when they flip you back to Terra.

  He stood under a sky of gentian blue, a fierce sky. Round him was the roar and bustle of Mainport, Earth. It seemed momentarily that the noise was focusing itself on him; he heard with a crystal clarity the booming of traffic on the distant turnpikes, the lighter clatter of the base Pedivators, the thin high whistle of escaping lox from the fuelling floats way out on the midfield launch pads. Somewhere over there loudspeakers were bellowing, clearing an Athene tourist ferry through the last few minutes of her countdown.

  He turned slowly, feet seeming locked to the ground. Mainport had grown a lot in the two years he’d been away. In front of him the new admin building rose storey on storey, a shimmering card-stack against the blue, and there were new transit sheds and autoparks reaching into the distance. Behind him the service ferries perched on their tails like a forest of silver steeples; beyond them again, four, five miles away, was the long shape of the Athene. He imagined rather than saw the white tubes of the umbilicals thrust into her hull, the scurrying of trucks and minicars between her fins. The floodlights top of the launch tower would be twinkling down through the spectrum, timing the blast off, the ground crews scurrying clumsily like divers dressed in asbestos armour. The fuel floats were mating the ferry, fertilizing her with coldness; the frost was forming in thick white swaths under her inlet vents and there were patches of it round the tankers’ wheels where decompressing lox snatched the temperature from the air. The floats made their own seasons, travelled in hoar-patches of winter.

  The Spacer grinned. There was a hitch, some irregularity in the thousand-item checklist. He heard a command rumble across the pads. “Abort... abort..The old jargon of the nineteen-sixties, still in use over a century later. But there was a rightness to the word; the launch of a rocket was an organic event, it was a straining, a building of pressures. There was a culmination, a final thrusting, a furious naked outbursting through Earth’s skin of air. It was an orgasm, and a birth. Old times, a man was born just once in life. But the Spacers, like the rockets, were born over and again, into the icy Otherworld between the planets ...

  A medic was touching his elbow. He laughed at her and shook his head, tried to step out briskly across the apron to the waiting Port Conveyor. He felt now that he was a giant, yards high, swinging his ponderous, ungainly legs and arms. The air seemed to thicken in front of him so he had to butt at it with his chest, the Conveyor was half a mile away. High-G blues; what was that line from the song, the one he’d heard tinkled on guitars and banjos out in deep space, on the Moon and the service feeders? “There’s nothing half so bad as that swim across the pad...” With Acclimatization the feelings would pass, but until then he was big as a god, with all a god’s clumsiness moving among men.

  He eased himself into the Conveyor, heard the door sigh shut, let his shoulders sink into the silvery Atmocushioning of the seat. The little vehicle, jewel-yellow, extruded jointed buglike antennae from its front fender, picked up the rails of the control grid buried in the Aureocrete and swooped away towards the distant complexes of buildings. Two minutes now, maybe three, for the Spacer to adjust, get hold of a few tearaway fantasies, worry out just what in Hell he was going to say to this girl Reb.

  Problems, God he had problems. Everything shifting too fast... He touched the blank dash in front of him and it rendered up a ready-lit Sobranie. He put the gold-tipped black cylinder between his lips and shut his eyes, saw Reb in the white suède of full-dress uniform, Earth spinning up blind and bright from a void. G-shift had scrambled his brains; only hours before, or so it seemed, he’d exchanged the brooding calm and desolation of a met cabin at the foot of the Lunar Alps for the noise and bustle of Selena, Moon’s biggest colony. From Selena to a yawing orbit-feeder, then a Thunderbird, now this. From choice he would have waited out his leave on the Moon, yarning with the incoming Deepspacers in a dozen low-grade bars, living with his parents in their three-cubicle suite in the tourist wing of the Terran Hotel. His folks had gone Moonside a year before, looked like staying. There was elbow-room in Selena, jobs for the asking; Earth was getting crowded out again. But Spaceregs were strict; first duty period was followed by Terran re-acclimatization, and the rule was never relaxed. He blew smoke moodily and shrugged. Being sent Earthside was standard practice. So why the helpless feeling that he was a pawn, a chunk of flesh and blood being shoved from square to square like a counter in the ancient game of chess ?

  He yawned. Maybe he was just overtired. The trip back to merry middle Earth had been a cattle-run. A two-year Louie couldn’t expect much red carpet to be rolled for him between planets, but the Routing Branch could surely have done better than that. Piled into a modified Mark Nine Thunderbird towing a thousand-ton cargo drogue. Two days on acceleration, three more of straining to halt the burden, rendezvous with blazing Vulcan up there miles above Terra ... He grinned sourly; Earthside you still heard people talk about the “weightlessness” of space. It was just too easy to forget inertia. The Mark Nine had yanked away by the hour, a flea trying to turn a whale; the drogue, once moving, wanted to plummet down at the Pacific, burst over Earth in a firestorm of glowing ore fragments. Accidents like that had happened, and they would happen again. Hitting the home plate was like trying to roll a ballbearing through a maze of magnets. They’d made it after a lot of sweating; during deceleration a course computer had gone on the blink and that had been fun, real crazy fun. The bag of rock was still up there somewhere, floating in the blue, tethered alongside the orbiting foundry where the deepspace boats were made. In the early days they’d prefabricated the ships on Terra, ferried the pieces up to assembly orbits with fleets of rockets; but Moon’s incredibly rich ores, her acres of nearly unoxidized iron, had combined with her low escape velocity to make the elephantine drogue technique more economical. On Vulcan, in the total vacuum of space, solar mirrors raised furies of cheap heat for the smelting. The satellite would be busy tonight; from this latitude it was invisible, but its glare would be lighting the tropics.

  What was left of the Thunderbird had kicked off Earth-side after ditching the drogue and the rest of the trip had gone smooth as honey, but it had still been a bloody cattle-run. Too much time to think...

  The Conveyor slowed, beeped faintly to itself with what sounded like annoyance and slid into the geometrically perfect line of traffic edging under the flaring portico of the Admin stack. The Spacer swung down the vanity mirror from above the windshield, ran a hand through his cropped blond hair. Against his will, he started wondering what his planetary tour would be. Privately, he fancied Mars. He’d heard some good stories about the Red Planet. Facilities and conditions were improving now with over a dozen domes operating; the scenery was spectacular, G just low enough to be pleasant and the equatorial temperature bearable in the daytime at least. Venus wasn’t much of a deal, nothing but a perpetual red-hot dust storm, and Mercury was worse; Hell’s back kitchen they called it, with reason and feeling. One hemisphere hotter than a blast furnace, sporting lakes of molten tin, the other frozen at ultimate zero, atmosphere plastered to the rocks like icing on an unholy cake. They had established three domes in the libration belt, but development was next to impossible; human-kind was showing the flag down there by the sun, but that was about all. No, it would probably be Mars. Or perhaps farther out, one of the moons of Jupiter maybe; that was a long haul, it would mean ten years snapped off his life, but his back pay would be building all the time, he’d come back to Terra rich and it wouldn’t be too bad ... Whatever he was offered, he would only have one choice; he could back down, but there would be no second chance. The Service had made its own astringent rules years ago; if you wanted Deepspace you took what was given. If you refused, nobody blamed you. At least, not to your face.

  He put the mirror back out of sight, shrugged off a momentary chill
ing thought. There was no reason why he shouldn’t go stay with the Le Cheminants, he’d been pretty friendly with Reb right through space school, he’d got no family on Terra now, wasn’t a reason why he shouldn’t spend his leave with her folks. He reminded himself wryly he might be a second-rate Louie out on Selena, but at home he was one of the élite, a Spacer of two years standing. He’d made the grade; he was Gerry Kaufman, V.I.P., from here on in. The kids would mob him for his autograph; the Deepspace blue was like a magnet to them, they couldn’t resist it. He should know; hadn’t been too long since he was a star-eyed nipper himself, dreaming planets and Hoffman Approaches before he dreamed anything else at all...

  How long had Reb been Earthside now, nine months, a year? She’d worked the standard Ranger first tour, six months on GX then the post-satellite course back at space school. Couldn’t have done much else with a father like that. The Le Cheminants were one of the old Spacer families, third-generation aristocrats with a name to keep up. Reb’s grandfather had been in the first Venus crew, her father was famous for the opening-up of Mars’ uranium fields. Gerry wondered if Reb had got her planetary posting yet. Or if she’d maybe opted out. He wondered how the satellite tour had changed her. Not if but how. Space changed everybody, one way or another. Some it spewed back gibbering wrecks. The medics couldn’t tell, finally, what would happen to a human mind off Earth. They could examine and select, weed out the incipient unbalances, the budding schizophrenics and manic depressives, the glory-hunters and the kids with delusions of grandeur, they could iron out your personality, tidy your repressions and phobias; they could paper the walls with encephalographs, turn your mind into the sort of stable computer that can live with the nearly unthinkable. They could send you out into space a whole creature, but space alone ever knew what would come back ...