Space 1999 - Earthfall

by E. C. Tubb

  The deep voice again, feral in its purr, “Now how you aim to do that? I’m waiting, man. Just move in when you figure you’re ready.”

  “There’s two of us,” said Sam. “And I’ve got a knife. Now, make up your mind. Get to bed or get out.”

  “You telling me?”

  “That’s right, I’m goddamned telling you. Now . . .”

  A scuffle, a cry of pain, then a sussuration of noises which died as, warned by some instinct, Chan Anyang straightened from his position by the wall. A couple, walking arm in arm, stared at him as they passed. Their eyes were hostile.

  Anyang shrugged. Looks couldn’t hurt and he was accustomed to hostility. For a moment he considered taking action on what he had heard then decided against it. The sounds had come from the living quarters and he knew who had made them, but it would be bad policy to interfere. The men had argued, maybe one had been cut, if so Medical would report it if the injured man applied for treatment. Then would be soon enough to investigate. In the meantime it would be better to say nothing, do nothing, wait and watch and, of course, make his report.

  An incident, he thought, as he continued his patrol. A scrap of knowledge to add to the rest; the growing sense of isolation, the barely disguised hostility, the seething annoyance which was becoming manifest in small ways. Something familiar to him from the past, but new to the base itself. Before the accident there had been a coolness between Security and the rest of the personnel, but that was natural; discipline had been strict and few people liked those who openly carried arms even though the weapons were relatively harmless; electronic projectors which could stun and, if fire was maintained at high intensity, could even kill. The only feasible weapon to use in an environment so vulnerable to missiles. Yet they were a form of gun just the same.

  “It sets you apart,” Volochek had warned them. “Always remember that. A weapon gives a man power and makes him a member of a priviledged class. To abuse that power is to invite retaliation. To combat it requires force. Used to excess that force invites further retaliation and, before you know it, you’re in the middle of a riot. And,” he’d added dryly, “here’s something else for you to bear in mind. No matter how tough you think you are or how well armed you might be—the police are always in the minority.”

  A good man, thought Chan Anyang. A hard, tough, dedicated upholder of the law. And shrewd—he must always try to be as shrewd and, maybe, one day he would take his place in the other’s chair.

  A dream and one he enjoyed as he reached a corner and turned it—and fell as something smashed into the back of his skull.

  The calculation wasn’t coming out as it should and Rita Cantry rested her head on her hands as she fought the momentary irritation which threatened her self-possession. It would serve no purpose to smash her fist against the calculator or to rip up the precious graph-paper or even to smear the grease which held her computations. It would serve even less to beat her hands against her temples or to pound her feet against the floor. Such behavior would be worse than childish, it would be ridiculous. No thirty-two-year-old woman should even think of acting in such a manner, still less one who held degrees in psychology and had written a learned treatise on Cultural Behavior in Conditions of Industrial, Agricultural and Urban Stress.

  But, even so, she felt like tearing at her thick, auburn locks and screaming with the sheer need to find release.

  Instead she looked up and saw Helena Russell standing at her side.

  “Rita?”

  “No, Helena, there’s nothing wrong,” said Rita quickly, anticipating the question. “I’m just tired and frustrated and in a maze. I need a long holiday beside the sea with nothing to do but lie basking in the sun and nothing to worry about other than to decide what to wear and where to go to dine.”

  “And with whom?”

  “That too.” Rita frowned at the tablets Helena placed in her hand. “Dope? Are you trying to make an addict of me?”

  “Tranquillizers—you need them.”

  “As a part of my normal diet?”

  “As a crutch to lean on until you get the sense to realize that there are only so many hours in a day and they can’t be stretched.” Helena was serious. “What is it, Rita? Run up against the unpredictable? Found out that human beings aren’t nice, logical, well-ordered robots? Hit a snag or three?”

  “Or seven,” agreed Rita Cantry. She swallowed the tablets and took a sip of the water Helena handed to her in a fragile cup. Finishing the water she prevented herself crushing and discarding the container. Nothing was disposable now, not even those items designed to be just that. “It’s a mess,” she admitted. “I’ve plotted trends which aren’t working out. The work-pattern, well, it’s not according to prediction and the stress index is way out. It’s becoming a matter of picking your own premises and arriving at any conclusion you please. It—damn it, it scares me.”

  “Yes,” said Helena, quietly. “It does.”

  She stepped away from the desk to stand limned against the transparent partition separating the larger compartment beyond from the offices in which they stood. A tall and beautiful woman, Rita thought, then recognized more than just the outward appearance. The doctor had worked for hours trying to snatch the dying back from final disintegration. She had fought with what weapons she possessed against the hurt and pain and suffering of those lying in the wards and in the intensive care unit. She had watched men and women die and had delved into their flesh to discover what had killed them.

  And still she had retained consideration enough to ease the inner turmoil of a young and healthy woman who had almost yielded to a childish tantrum.

  Rita Cantry said, “Thank you, Helena.”

  “For what?”

  “For—well, never mind.” For being kind and understanding and, above all, of being tolerant. But how to say that in words which wouldn’t embarrass?

  Rising she joined the doctor at the partition, staring through it to where Mathias stood surrounded by a small crowd. His shoulders were bowed a little, his face stamped with the weariness which, suddenly she realized, Helena shared. A thing beyond normal fatigue, something born of desperation, of the knowledge of human limitations and human frailty.

  Soldiers in an endless battle in which any victory could only be a temporary respite from inevitable defeat.

  Then he looked up and saw her and smiled, the fatigue falling from him like a discarded cloak, one hand lifting in salute before he turned to where Nurse Liam Kikkido wheeled a covered stretcher towards him.

  The lesson, his voluntary chore, had begun.

  He waited a moment, conscious of the dramatic value of the hesitation, silence gathering, broken only by the soft click of instruments as the nurse wheeled a trolley into position beside the covered stretcher. From it Mathias took a pair of heavy gloves, not the delicate things used during surgery, but the tougher ones intended for those performing autopsies. Donning them he looked at his pupils.

  One said, “Should we take notes, Doctor?”

  “No. Paper is valuable and a recorder will serve. You have one? Please use a throat-mike or whisper if you lack one. But notes will be unnecessary—we are moving into the field of practice.”

  The hint won them as he knew it would. As the promise of moving from the theoretical to the actual had always won the interest of students since teaching began. To do instead of to watch. To feel instead of being told. To become, even if only in part, a practitioner of the desired profession.

  And he was suddenly conscious of his responsibility.

  To watch, to teach, to guide. To pass on painfully gained knowledge and skills, to encourage and to condemn when condemn he must. To select, to cull, to act as a god. And that was fair enough because he, like a true god, would be imparting the secrets of life and death. And he must not be a jealous god because the base needed those able to treat fevers and knit bones, to mend, to heal, to comfort, and to aid. Doctors and nurses and those able to give first-aid. Never again the spectacle
of babies whimpering in their agony while ignorant mothers paid precious food-buying money to a painted savage who did no more than rattle a gourd.

  No more old wives tales and the pain and hurt and confusion they had wrought.

  No more superstitious nonsense with its harvest of agony.

  No more blind and destructive beliefs in magical remedies.

  These people now standing before him would know!

  “Nurse—if you please!”

  Stepping forward Liam Kikkido removed the sheet from the body lying on the stretcher.

  It was that of an Asian male.

  A real body, the man had died in the intensive care unit after days of dedicated attention. Another victim of the forces which had torn the Moon from Earth to send it God knew where. He had been bled and frozen after his kidneys and corneas had been carefully removed and stored for later, possible use. Later his bone-marrow would go the same way, his liver, pancreas, spleen—anything which could be salvaged and was not essential to the instruction. Conservation extended even to the dead.

  Standing at the head of the stretcher Mathias studied those gathered around. Some were nurses eager to gain fresh knowledge and rise in the world of medicine. Some, he knew, would soon be entrusted with the simpler medical tasks connected with healing and surgery; an extension of their present ability to inject, stitch, dress wounds, treat burns and superficial injuries. Others, using scarce leisure time, wanted to gain at least a smattering of new skills.

  The latter were the most stunned. They had, he guessed, expected a plastic fabrication, the phantom of old-time obstretics, now brought up to date with removable sections, each muscle, nerve and sinew, each vein and artery and organ tinted and delinated with various colors.

  One day, perhaps, they would make one, but for now it was important they learn the texture of flesh, the unexpected resistance of skin to the knife, the feel of once-living tissue in their hands. No fabrication could emulate that as no artificial construct could show the subtle variation to be found from one body to another.

  “Your attention, please.” Mathias picked up the heavy scalpel from the tray and stood with it poised in his hand. “Before I begin there is one very important fact I want you all to observe. The man lying here is an Asian, but he could well have been a Negro, a Caucasian, an Oriental or a Mongolian. He could have had any color skin and any kind of hair. He could have belonged to any of the races you watching me represent or to a multitude of sub-cultures such as the Aborigines or the Eskimo. The point I wish to make is this.”

  With a sudden, deft stroke Mathias opened the body from groin to trachea.

  “No matter what the color of the skin. No matter how we look outside, inside,” he pointed with the tip of the scalpel, “we are all exactly the same.”

  From where she stood watching through the transparency Helena said, “Do you believe that, Rita?”

  “That we are all alike inside?”

  “Yes.”

  For a moment she thought about it, watching Mathias at work, his deftness, the reflection of light from his dark skin, the white flash as the nurse skilfully wiped sweat from his brow, feeling a sudden jealousy at her closeness, her attention. Helena watched her, eyes checking, studying until Rita shook her head.

  “No?”

  “No. Oh, I’m not talking in a medical sense and I guess that to a doctor all hearts, lungs, kidneys, bone and blood are the same. But it’s more than that. No matter the color of the skin people are different. Skin-color merely accentuates those differences.”

  “And provides them?”

  “Sometimes. If black is bad then be careful of black. Red for danger, green for safety, white for purity—we are conditioned to color from birth. How to disregard it? Frankly I don’t think we can. It’s there, before our very eyes and unless we can dye everyone blue then we have to live with it. But that doesn’t mean we have to hate or fear it.” Lifting a hand Rita Cantry touched the tip of a finger against the glass, the nail occluding Mathias’s head. “It’s crazy, when you think about it. We go to the beach and sit around cultivating a deep tan and yet profess to regard those who are born with one as different.”

  “They are.”

  “They aren’t! It’s just—” Rita broke off, shaking her head. “I guess I walked into that one, didn’t I? There should be some way to clear up this conflict of what we mean by ‘different.’ No two people are the same yet we are all human. That makes us the same, but take one man and compare him to another and there’s a difference. Well, I guess I can’t have it both ways.”

  “You’re in love with Bob Mathias,” said Helena, bluntly, “And he’s in love with you. What other way do you want it?”

  “Bob? In love with me?”

  “Are you blind or don’t you want to believe the evidence of your own eyes.” Helena shook her head in mock reproof. “I’m a doctor, girl, not an introduction agency. And, for a psychologist, you certainly betray a strange ignorance of others as well as the facts. My guess is that each time you tried to work out your calculations you became confused because, subconsciously, you were trying to slant your findings to form a favourable conclusion. Life isn’t like that. Real life is full of loose ends, pain, unhappiness, terror and potential threat. Well?”

  “Those and more,” admitted Rita Cantry. “I told you it scared me and you said the same. You know?”

  “I can guess.”

  Of course, a trained psychiatrist versed in space medicine she would be fully aware of the results of prolonged stress, and Rita wondered why she hadn’t remembered it before. A fragment of jealousy, perhaps, the desire to remain top in her own, chosen field. A small, childish reaction and one to be ashamed of. As she had been ashamed of her previous emotional state, the desire to throw a tantrum.

  Helena had cured that with the tranquillizers and now she had shown how her own, personal stress could be alleviated. A word, that’s all it would take. A smile and the touch of a hand and, later, the pressure of lips and the culmination of desire. Why had she waited so long?

  Why hadn’t Bob spoken?

  And then, with a sudden flash of insight, she answered the question. Why should he have done? Why should she have expected the initial move to come from him? Why, when he was so busy, had she hoped for so much? Hoped for and subconsciously demanded it. As, even at this moment, others were hoping for and subconsciously demanding other things; acknowledgment of their individual existence, their importance, their permission to arrange their lives, the need to know, to express themselves, to participate.

  A hell-broth of emotions, seething beneath the surface of apparent calm, working like fermenting yeast in a sealed bottle, building up pressure until, at last, the bottle would break.

  Her calculations should have told her just when that would be, but the operating sample was too small, the trends too concentrated. She had gained her fame by dealing with the thousands employed in factories, the millions influenced by agricultural shifts. To predict the actions of a few hundred men and women of assorted skills and various motivations, of racial and national loyalties, of individual idiosyncrasies was beyond her. She had failed.

  “No,” said Helena, when she confessed it. “You haven’t failed. You merely looked for wider patterns that exist on the Moon. It is if I automatically suspected an epidemic of virulent flu when a man sneezed instead of checking that he hadn’t sniffed a little irritating dust. The simple answer is often the correct one. Now, if you based your extrapolations on—” She broke off as her commlock hummed. “Excuse me.”

  Rita turned away as she spoke into the instrument, looking again at Mathias, noting the curl of his hair, the way it lay on the nape of his neck, anticipating the joy of feeling it against her flesh as she ran her fingers through the gleaming curls. Anticipating, too, the talk they would share, the plans they would make. Together they would face what lay ahead. With each to strengthen the other there was nothing they couldn’t accomplish, no danger they couldn’t survive, no hards
hip they wouldn’t be able to endure.

  If he loved her as she loved him. If—please, God, make it so! If . . .

  Then he turned as if conscious of her stare and met her eyes and smiled, the smile fading to be replaced by a sudden, raw hunger, an aching need which eliminated all doubt and left in its place a warm and comforting security.

  “Helena! He—” Rita turned, the words dying as she saw the doctor, the commlock in her hand, the expression on her face. “What is it?”

  “Trouble. I’m needed.” And then, as if forced to explain, added, “A man has been found dead.”

  C H A P T E R

  Nine

  He looked very small as he lay in the corridor, very young, his slight body seeming to be that of a boy, even the hand outstretched before him bearing an almost girlish delicacy. His head was turned, one cheek resting on the plastic floor, the eyes open and a little startled as if death had come with total unexpectedness. He could have been awake and remaining silent aside from the blood staining the whites of the eyeballs, the crimson which had seeped.

  “Chan Anyang,” said Vladimir Volochek. “A good man.” He added, bleakly, “But apparently not good enough.”

  Helena made no comment as she looked at the body.

  “He was on regular patrol,” continued the Head of Security. “He should have booked into Post Thirteen at 21.37. When he didn’t I sent two men to cover his route.”

  “Two?” Helena stared at the man. “You suspected something like this might happen?”

  “It’s always a possibility.”

  “And you accepted the risk?”

  “No, Doctor, he did.” Volochek gestured towards the dead man. “But I accept the responsibility.”

  Which meant exactly what? To whom would he have to answer? What penalty would he have to pay? Then Helena saw his face and recognized the anger lurking beneath the broad, peasant-like mask. If nothing else his punishment would be self-administered—failure to Vladimir Volochek was something which came hard and, even if his man had failed, still he took it as a personal lack. As he would take revenge with the same, personal involvement.