New Writings in SF 5 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  “My imagination, friend. It’s always plagued me and that’s why I drank, if you want to know. I was a sensitive child with complexes.”

  Smith picked up his gloves and put them on very slowly. He knew what he had to do. Someone from the other side had visited this planet. He had actually given aid and comfort to an inhabitant and had set in motion a chain of events which might reveal the truth before it was permitted. If this man on the bench talked and the planet believed him, all was lost. Materialism might sweep across the universe like a rotten plague propelled onwards by a primitive race who would have no idea of what they were wrecking.

  He had to kill Algie.

  Algie suddenly felt very uneasy. He sensed danger. All his life he had dodged bombs, from the sky and under the ground, and he had an instinct for them. When a bomb dropped, Algie could be seen running for the open. He ran so fast the army never caught him to court-martial him for running.

  Smith knew the sacrifice he had to make. The law was clear. If he took Algie’s life he had to do it with his own. He must expand the cells of his body until they tore from their fellows and blew Algie and the bench into pieces of nameless plasma. All because one man, and from the other side at that, had broken the eternal rule and interfered with a primitive race. Why?

  “Easy, mister. He wanted to meet me.”

  Smith sought the slovenly folds which supported Algie’s eyes. A happy thought was dawning in his mind. Could it be that the planet was near its spiritual breakthrough? It was impossible! They were in a post-atomic period, a positive step backwards even from the brief, high point of their renaissance and that was virtually nothing. Yet, Algie had just read his mind.

  “Puzzles you, doesn’t it? Perhaps you haven’t met a crew like us before. You see, when one of our people gets funny ideas about reading minds and so on, they lock them up.”

  “They do what?” The stranger felt lost and very nearly confused for the first time in his life. He had heard of culture shock, but now it was on him it had him by the ears.

  “Lock them up or put them in a pulpit.”

  “You mean every one of them is different?”

  “In some ways. Each one comes in with a different ability or an indifferent ability like mine. Most of it’s wasted. Some of it never shows. If it’s strange, then they don’t like it at all.”

  “I see.” Smith did see. He understood why the other man had tried an experiment. It was an effort to find out how this strange race worked. Perhaps he had thought each individual would have to be dealt with and brought to his salvation one by one. A novel idea.

  But had he been right ?

  Obviously not. He had realized it at the end, too. With certain proof, out of Algie’s own mind, he had only one course. He would have had to kill himself and Algie as he, Smith, would have to kill Algie. Hold on! If the other man had tried to rectify his interference and had exploded himself, how was it the thin man was still alive ?

  “Did he explode, Algie?”

  The thin man nodded.

  “Where were you?”

  “Over the other side of the park and running. He set fire to the trees and I got the blame, but I didn’t mind. Not after what he did for me.”

  Smith saw the point once again. He would have to fling his arms round Algie and hold on tight. It was almost sickening, but Earth must not become a political shuffle-board or spread its contaminating breath of barbarity round the universe. Algie knew too much, and though he had the rudiment of the gift he had no real idea of how to use it.

  Algie slipped his arms out of the sleeves of his jacket and made his body as much into a tube as he could. Nothing like all the training of an old busker family to help in a pinch. Wasn’t his father a houdini and a hard case to boot. Just as his mother had read minds and picked pockets.

  Smith wrapped his arms round the rigid body.

  Thoughts whipped through the far distances from place to place and were relayed back with comment. They were pleased with him but puzzled. “High survival factor here,” one said and another added, “They could break loose without us. A genuinely new culture.”

  But Smith had to stop the rot. They had to have time to think it out. He had to blow his body to pieces and face a wait of a century or so for a new one to take its place, wandering perhaps in the empty space in penance, in the meantime. He expanded with all his concentration. It had to be quick.

  Algie stood behind the great oak at the other end of the park. He saw the damage done to the flower-beds and the trees scorched and stripped of their leaves. Even as he spotted the police, with the usual pair of white-coated male nurses, he didn’t mind. They would blame him. Just as he had a job lined up with the old bank mob, too, and it wasn’t the kind of job he had indicated to the gullible Smith—rather an over-the-back-wall-and-blow-the-safe-quickly gambit. The mob would be very disappointed!

  Still, when he was back inside he would give old Doc Klenk something to think about. He thought he had worked a quick cure, but now he would insist on a new course of pills, big pills, he bet, fit for cart horses. Never mind, he had learned a lot.

  He shambled back towards the white-coated nurses and the police, apprehensive of a sharp crack behind the ear, until he saw neither of the nurses was one of the sadist squad. His back straightened and he thought tenderly of Smith. Poor con-man, but a perfect gent. He wondered how they had managed that expanding gimmick.

  Voices drifted in.

  “Clever monkeys ... one day they may be all over us ... clever monkeys with imaginations ... and souls to find. Wait ... wait until we know ... genuinely new culture.”

  Algie did a little skip. His mind filled the park and played and soared with the leaves, scattering the dustbin lids around the public convenience jumbled in with leaping police hats and doing a crazy dance.

  Algie, the real expanding man.

  <>

  * * * *

  TREASURE HUNT

  Joseph Green

  A sentient object on one planet could well be an inanimate one of immense value on another, given the right catalyst. Mr. Green’s concept in the following story is startling as well as unusual, and presupposes a conflict between carbon-based life and a silicon-based one.

  * * * *

  The wall slid upwards and he went charging down the ramp, wheels driving hard against the steel. Fear drove him, fear gave him strength, fear pushed him across the open space and into the sheltering growth, out of sight of the alien tower of steel that stood so strong and looked so strange in this fragile fairyland of flower and light.

  The fear began to fade. He rolled on a moment more before stopping, impelled by its memory. His unorganized flight had carried him to the edge of a silvery-surfaced pool. He glanced at his reflection in the heavy liquid, then closed his eyes. He felt a sense of shock and a sense of complete rightness, and suddenly he became very confused. He wanted to scream, but instead told himself, I am Soames Chacedony! I am Soames Chacedony, Soames Chacedony! He stopped. There was memory, harsh and hurting, but memory, an implanted voice that said, There will be an initial period of confusion. Find a hiding-place and wait it out. Don’t struggle, just wait. You will understand.

  The voice was too strong to resist. He looked around, one wheel moving slightly when his neck would twist no farther, the wheel swinging him half around. There was a thick patch of vegetation a few yards behind him. He glanced again at the water, seeing the plump, rounded armless body, heavy tapering tail, snake-length of neck topped by a blunt and broad-nosed dragon’s head, the open mouth showing pointed tongue and diamond glitter of teeth in wide, wicked jaws. He looked at the two wheels of bone that supplied his locomotion as he moved away, at the massive bones which protruded from both sides of the muscular abdomen to serve as their axles, the clever arrangement of great thews powering extended bones with rounded ends that swung in small constant circles, fitting into the deep hollows between the wheel’s twelve spokes on half the cycle. He looked like an oversized seahorse
mounted on a crossing shaft with rollers on its ends.

  He watched the bones revolve and the wheels move as he headed for the refuge of the sheltering growths, felt his tail curl in or out, sensitive to every slight shift of balance, heard the faint whispering sound of the grease his body automatically supplied easing friction in the bone sockets. He moved into the bushes, and waited.

  I am Dr. Soames Chacedony! I am Professor Soames Chacedony! Chacedony! Chacedony! Chacedony! He repeated this earnestly, sincerely, because he believed it, because it was truth. He wanted to add that he was an Earthman, that he walked on two legs, that he had hands, feet, a face. He wanted to say all this aloud, but his throat could not utter human speech and it would obviously have been a lie anyway.

  He closed his eyes. The darkness was comforting; this world was too bright, too real, and the voice of memory spoke more easily when it was hidden.

  What am I doing here ? he asked himself. I am dead, he added before he could answer.

  You are a mental pattern, a matrix of electrical forces taken from one mind and forcibly imposed on another. We are not cerebrotechs and cannot explain the process. It is a temporary imposition; in a few hours the sleeping mind of your host will reassert itself and you will fade into nothingness. Your true brain is unconscious but tied to your present mind by very strong bonds. If one dies it affects the other.

  Why was this done? he asked himself, and waited for the answer to appear from his own subconscious.

  We are on a treasure hunt. We are after the fresh-laid egg of the firebird, the most beautiful object in the galaxy, and this is the only way one may be obtained. You were chosen to share this effort with us because our computer selected you as the philosopher most likely to succeed.

  Selected me ? Why me ? I am dead! Memory came back with a rush, and he was dead, legally, and buried as well, and they had fished up his body, a clear violation of the euthanasia law, and withdrawn the dream serum he had injected into his bloodstream with much ceremony the day before, and revived him, and offered him a share of the fabulous wealth they earnestly felt was almost within their grasp. He could even remember the overly dramatic farewell speech he had made to some of his followers and students as he sat in the coffin holding the hypo, the conscious but silent comparison of himself to a Greek who had said farewell between swallows of hemlock three thousand years ago. He, too, was dying for a cause, though the drug he was voluntarily taking would extend life for many days before his body finally wasted into death. He would lie in his simple coffin in its assigned place on the bed of the Mediterranean, and live a thousand years of dreams during each day his body died. He was a healthy and vigorous man of eighty, with another sixty years of slow degeneracy ahead if he chose to take them, but he would end his life by this faster-in-reality but longer-by-dreams route to dramatize the movement he headed.

  He was the leader of the dedicated band of men and women who claimed that the tortuous rejuvenation operation giving near immortality should be available to all who desired it. The government’s official position was that it was impossible for everyone to undergo treatment, that it must be reserved for those persons so valuable to the war they could not be spared, or those who could afford the million credits needed for private treatment. A deceptive statement which ignored the alternatives. Radium was plentiful now, and more surgeons could be trained. The government was simply unwilling to accept the perfectly fair terms the Rekriksah had offered because it would mean returning some of the star systems Earth had stolen from them.

  It was true that as long as the interplanetary war went on mankind’s resources must remain tied up in arms, but they could end the fighting tomorrow if they would, freeing technology to work for the needs of the individual. Sol Central had the attitude that had characterized governments since the days of his Greek mentor, the willingness to work for the future of the race regardless of what it cost the members living in the present. That attitude had to be changed.

  Background knowledge faded as the specific answer which had been implanted in his subconscious appeared. All four of us have made the attempt, and failed. We think we know why. When you meet the firebird you will find that the instincts of the chariot-horse body you possess, plus the normal fear of death, will make it difficult for you to submit to her. We found it impossible. It is our hope, which the computer bears out, that a trained philosopher who is honestly willing to accept death, who has only to overcome the natural reaction of the chariot-horse, can force himself to submit to capture.

  With this information came a picture of the two Earthmen waiting in the tall steel ship, two young men with muscular bodies and hands trained to gun or tool, two men who were daring and loved adventure, and loved life more than most because they had many times seen it in deadly peril. In them the desire to live was strong.

  But there was another man sitting vacant-eyed in the ship, and a body buried somewhere under the glittering mica and sand of the landing field. This world had killed one man by brute physical violence. In sorrow and deep regret they had told him about those two men, their companions through many a voyage rough and strange; especially they had spoken of Silversohn, the cerebrotech who had managed to restore the ancient and alien identity transfer machine when they found it on a remote dead planet in their last far wandering. He had restored it, and used it after his three companions had failed, to become the second casualty when a hungry carnivore caught him far from the ship and killed and ate his borrowed body. They had obtained this much by putting him under deep hypno, but his mind was gone. Now Silversohn puttered about with the transfer machine, still capable of repairing it despite his idiocy, keeping it going in order that Soames Chacedony might try where all others had failed.

  But your logic is faulty, he had cried to them when he awakened in deep space. I do not wish to live. Why, then, should I endure this agonizing and unpleasant experience of which you speak, when death is so much more preferable?

  They had smiled, their handsome faces masks of mocking cynicism, and his memory supplied the answer they had given then: You chose death because it was inevitable anyway, professor. You were already past the best years, could only go downhill without the rejuvenation treatment. With your share of the egg credit you can buy the long life. All four of us had the first treatment, and we are far older than you. It is time for the second one, which will prevent ageing for another hundred years. We think you will choose to live, even though others die, once there is a real choice.

  And betray the cause for which I martyred myself? he had asked in anger, and then thought about it and realized he would have to try for the egg. They had raised doubts he could never forget if he did not face the temptation and resist it.

  Thus he stood under the weird trees, in a body grotesque and strange, in search of the egg of beauty and life, in order that he might reject that life and prove himself true to his beliefs.

  He opened his eyes.

  For the first time he saw his surroundings with conscious perception. Till now he had accepted, a chariot-horse seeing its own strange land with its own bright eyes, uncaring.

  He saw a world of light. A viciously bright sun with only a tinge of aged red burned close at hand. There were no true shadows. He was in a vari-formed forest of translucent trees, some lean and spare and bending like vertical whips, others more nearly in the standard plant form, a central trunk supporting smaller branches which supported twigs, with round patterned plates attached to the twigs like oversized leaves. On some trees the plates had. combined into a single canopy, like a protective tent. The one universal characteristic of all visible vegetation was its semi-transparency. The flat plate structures passed reddish sunlight almost without hindrance, turning the area beneath a soft shade of violet. The thicker twigs contained a trace of resistance near their centres, while the branches held enough light to be a darker shade of red. The massive central supports had cores that were almost opaque, but this was because the entering light diffused there, spreading up and
down the body rather than passing through. The very soil on which he rolled glittered in the light, a composition of polished silicon and sparkling mica. Human eyes would have been blinded, lost in the assault of brilliance.

  Another fragment of memory returned. This was one of those rare planets where the life-chain had formed on a silicon rather than a carbon base, a world so completely alien human senses were virtually useless, human consciousness unable to function competently in its forests of crystal growths. The atmosphere his borrowed body breathed was a mixture of nitrogen oxides, hydrogen sulphide, sulphurdioxide and ammonia, with not a trace of oxygen in free form. The pool in which he had admired his reflection had been of liquid mercury. The temperature was high enough to vaporize water in seconds.

  He looked at his body again, and realized with amazement that while he was not actually transparent his flesh did admit sunlight easily. His outer cell layers received energy directly from the sun, and synthesized compounds which circled through the remaining tissues. When he moved he gave off light, and now he realized this was true of every plant and animal on this sphere. His borrowed eyes knew and allowed for this. He was a humble vegetarian, with teeth of diamond and stomach of hydrofluoric acid, and there were growths of prisms, seed carriers of crystal bells, fruits of gemmed translucency which were his food. There were other animals like himself, and many like his firebird mate ... which was carnivorous.