‘We’ll concentrate on the force field aspect,’ he said with as much assurance as he could manage. ‘The doors have to incorporate them, otherwise air would rush out into the vacuum, or spores drift through. And the force shield we’ll assume beat the locusts.’ It was a tall order. But they knew they existed, so they could be understood and duplicated. And then the project would be the paramount power on Earth, for what importance that now had. And suddenly Gordey realised he was making a bid for power. Wechsler, lying half eaten on his bed, realised that too, that much was obvious.
‘Well?’
With equally obvious reluctance, Wechsler slowly nodded his head.
* * * *
Korner enjoyed using the shears. There was an element of danger about it; one had to get fully suited and lug the apparatus out to near the end of the passage, beyond the door; and the shield embodied in the shears was crude compared to the one in the doors: it flashed blue and green and yellow fire like a vastly expensive firework, was energy expensive, and the apparatus was constantly under repair.
But for men in armour it provided a way across to the next cylinder. And back on Earth—a long way back now— the project could use the field to make nuclear weapons obsolete. If the cylinders let men have the time. That particular thought was on everyone’s mind. It was nearly two years now since the forward cylinder had first appeared in a Humber field; and there was a time limit to every test. Korner almost shivered as he thought about it. That was Gordey’s view, and it had diffused downwards.
A pebble tossed through the door tapped against his armour. That was the latest communication system through a thousand kiloparsecs—that was the astronomical section’s conservative estimate—and it meant the Deputy Director was coming through.
He worked the shears in a pyrotechnic display to clear the ground again. It was better not to use the shears with anyone in the way; that tended to build up a static charge on their suits.
As it happened, he didn’t need to use the shears again that day: Gordey crossed uneventfully.
* * * *
The Fifth Door
With Wechsler slowly being put back together again with grafts and cosmetic surgery on New Moon, Deputy Scientific Director Gordey ran the project: the titular head sat in an office in London and signed requisitions, or authorised someone else to authorise someone else to do the same. As he stripped off his suit, he vaguely wondered at the mechanism that kept here—without the intervention of mankind—at a sufficient heat, and with a proper partial pressure of oxygen. They didn’t even know how that was done yet, or where the doors got their power from. He pushed the thought out of his mind and looked about him.
The back-up team on door five was the largest for any of the doors; there was no forward team: for as far as they could tell, this door opened into the interior of a sun.
The door superintendent came over to him. Normanton, Gordey recalled: 47, astrophysicist, married, one daughter, 8, and his wife once held a party card. It was easy to train the memory into becoming a walking card index file. Politicians did it all the time. The one competence of the incompetent, he thought uncharitably: to know whom to tell to do what.
‘Nothing new?’
Normanton nodded. ‘Nothing at all, sir. It seems we’ve reached a dead end.’
Sir—the word echoed in Gordey’s mind: he was always careful for that respect: only the super competent could afford to dispense with it, and a philosopher, even a slightly mathematical one, was a long way from that in as technological an environment as this. Or was he simply an ordinary egoist ? The time was almost come when he could judge for himself.
A dead end, in the centre of a star. The idea made a delayed intrusion on his cheap introspection. There was no sense to it—a graduated test, with no final exam. Having come this far, was it time for the makers of the cylinders to step in ?
But he didn’t believe that: the makers only acted through their agents, the cylinders. It was an intuition without pretence of proof, but he shared it with almost the entire personnel of the project. There had to be a final test. But what? The ability to exist in the centre of a star? With perfect force shields, it was just conceivable; but to what end ? No, it had to be the way he had intuited. But he knew it didn’t have to be that way at all... Now was simply the time he had to take that chance which was the justification for his rank.
He had forgotten Normanton for a moment. He wondered what emotions had played in his eyes, for the superintendent was looking at him oddly.
‘I’ll see it,’ Gordey said, and Normanton superfluously led the way through the last of the identical chambers.
* * * *
The door was simply a solid white, of intense brightness, just viewable. Dramatically, it was a let down. But obviously the force screen was programmed so as not to let enough light out to blind: that was the pattern: on your side of any door, you were safe. But the tests had been quite convincing as to what lay on the other sides of doors; and all the indications were that on the other side of this, there was heat so intense that it could only be the centre of a star.
Now!
‘A dead end,’ Normanton reiterated.
‘I hope not,’ Gordey said, and flung himself through into the whiteness.
* * * *
zoon politikon
Sir Julian Wechsler fumbled with his shorn hands to unfasten his bow tie as he strode into the main room of his small though sufficiently luxurious London flat. He looked content with the world, as a man should who had just dined rather well with both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Technology, and had been offered, and had accepted, the Under Secretaryship of State at MinTech, with especial responsibility for the project. The fact that a life peerage to get him into Parliament went with the job was a pleasant little bonus.
‘Hello, Wechsler.’
In the long silence that followed, Gordey looked Wechsler over. Most traces of the indecisive invalid he had seen in the hospital on New Moon had disappeared; Wechsler had left his chrysalis stage and become fully what he had always been in potential: a politician. But, they had their uses. In fact, they were indispensable.
Oddly, Gordey found himself thinking of those few moments when he had seemed to hang in the flame, wondering whether his gamble that the last door was a test of educated courage had been about to pay off. Wechsler would never have made that jump. But the tests were complex; as well as its technology, they also tested the range of a race.
And the doors had found the Culls wanting.
‘What do you want?’ Wechsler demanded abruptly.
‘There’s been some talk,’ Gordey began elliptically. ‘Talk about not taking a risk with the survival of the human race.’
Wechsler finally managed to divest himself of his bow tie, took a cigar from a box on the table and sat down in the armchair opposite the one Gordey occupied, beside the blazing but simulated fire.
‘Just talk,’ he said, as he lit up.
‘I think not,’ Gordey said, ‘otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’
‘I don’t believe the British Government’s involved.’
‘I know that,’ Gordey smiled. ‘That’s what I’m here to complain about.’
‘You mean-’
‘No. I want that kind of talk stopped. By your government. Incidentally, congratulations.’
Wechsler paused on the edge of thanking him. ‘We’re not a superpower, and even if we were, we couldn’t dictate to sovereign states.’
‘Britain had the first fruits of all the project inventions, and has the best force screens in the world, not to mention a fair lead in the New Industrial Revolution. But I won’t argue the point. I never expected the British Government to do my work for me. Just to pass on a message.’ He paused. ‘We finally have matter transmission.’
He watched Wechsler’s face, watched him come to full realisation of what that fact meant. The force screens all the nations had built in the last few months, crude though they were, had mad
e nuclear war virtually impossible. You can’t bomb through a force shield. But you can transmit through it. The project, with its lower case name, its nine thousand men, its several bases and now its vague affiliation to the UN, was the greatest power on Earth while it kept that secret.
‘And we intend to keep our secret,’ Gordey said. ‘The only technical people who could explain it are two doors away, so snooping will do you no good. And we’ve arranged things so that any attempt to take over the project, such as would have been necessary to erase the Culls, will fail. Fail disastrously.’
Wechsler had gone white faced with anger. But that was because he was a politician by instinct, and preferred to gloss over the crude wielding of power, disguising it with proper forms. This raw, it grated on him.
‘I’ll pass the message on,’ he said tightly, obviously aware that the message was actually the first assertion of suzerain power over all the nations of Earth that could be made to stick: the beginnings of world government.
Gordey had realised that was the logical consequence of his actions a long while since. It didn’t trouble him; it was inevitable, one way or another. But he also realised that the pill had to be sweetened.
‘I’m not making a bid for personal power,’ he said. ‘I’ve a story for you as well. One you’ve heard most of, but missed the end. You see, I also know the precise purpose of the cylinders.’
Stepping quite uninjured on the floor of a cylinder beyond the last, Gordey had felt suddenly elated. He was alive: he had been right. He walked the remaining yards into the open air, without fear. There was no other cylinder, just mountains—and in the far distance, an odd looking mountain hut. He turned about—and saw just mountain rock, no cylinder. Fear caught at his vitals, he couldn’t breathe, and then the irregular shadows of the rock sorted themselves out in his mind, and he saw that one of them was really quite regular, the end of the passage. He breathed again, and remembered the hut. This world was still inhabited; it was the end of the line.
But the Culls were not the makers. It had been a long, hard business, discovering the facts’ about them-
‘I know all this,’ Wechsler interrupted him impatiently, ‘I helped choose the team that analysed their radio transmissions. On the face of it, it’s true they don’t look like the makers, but-’
‘You’ve seen their technology!’
‘They’re several generations behind us, and at their rate of progress that could mean a couple of centuries. Their technology would have difficulty duplicating a computer, let alone the cylinders. And there’s no sign they’ve regressed. But-’
‘The same “but”, and it’s a large “but”, isn’t it? After seeing so many dead worlds, we can’t go on appearances; so wipe clean. And after we’ve done it, they have to be the makers, because otherwise it wouldn’t have been an act of justice, just murder. And if the makers are dead, the cylinders can no longer harm us. So we can forget them.
‘But then, in thirty or forty years, the cylinders will establish a new forward cylinder, on a new living world, and if the occupants of that world fail to get to us and wipe us out in their own well justified fear, the cylinders will leave them for later. And sooner or later, someone will get through, and...’
‘How can you be sure?’
Gordey shrugged. ‘I can’t prove anything, but I tell you it’s so, and I was right once before.’
‘You were,’ Wechsler admitted grudgingly.
‘And I’ve already told you what the cylinders are.’
‘A doomsday weapon, cutting a swathe of fear through the galaxy, setting young races at each other’s throats...’
Smiling bitterly, Gordey cut him short. ‘That’s rather too grand.’ He paused, then: ‘In fact, it’s a graded mousetrap.’
* * * *
Wechsler seemed to crumple back into his chair, as if a sorcerer’s needle had been stuck through the heart of his doll.
‘It all fits, even to the fastidious detail of letting the various species of mice do the actual killing.’ Gordey stopped talking. He could see Wechsler was convinced. There was much more to say, how they could contact the Culls, and use the still primitive matter transmitter to make the leap out into space to contact other races ... a federation of mice. The metaphor ought to be ridiculous, but it wasn’t.
Or was it ? Intelligent mice might avoid a trap, but they don’t get down to understanding it, and turning it on its makers.
He wondered briefly about the makers. What kind of race was it that needed so desperately to be alone? Fear of the stranger was a fault; perhaps it could be exploited as such.
Man was a political animal, zoon politikon, and that was his strength, to build upon. A Federation of Not Quite Mice. He almost laughed; he was getting very good at humourless laughing. He would have to remember to play down the mouse metaphor soon: it was strictly shock tactics. Then he remembered he had a question to ask.
‘You’ll pass the message on?’
For a second time in his life, Wechsler nodded in a particular way.
<
* * * *
SPORTING ON APTERYX
Charles Partington
Charles Partington, handsome star of a number of famous amateur sf films, has already seen publication in the Arkham House collections of macabre tales, but this is his first appearance with an sf story. New Writings is constantly promoting new writing talent and in this story of the people of the windy plateau of Apteryx Charles Partington sets up an. analogue of a reality we ignore at our peril.
* * * *
Night filled the pre-dawn world with secret places, strange regions where gleaming eyes stared from concealing shadows. Rustlings and furtive movements disturbed the undergrowth and the air vibrated with expectancy.
Minona, moving hesitantly through the hushed fields, stopped and listened every so often to the sound of distant voices, her face taut with growing desperation. Somewhere ahead of her, in the forbidden forest of winds, Mrogre forced his ruined body through trees and tangled bracken, his spoor a dragging trail of blood and angry tears. Between them lay the villagers, shouting, embittered men who drove that which they found hateful before them.
Mrogre was the hunted. Soon, despite his fear, exhaustion would grip his tortured frame. Then he would drop uncaring. Then he would die.
Before Minona lay the forest, a shunned and unknown place where the winds began. Already soft breezes trembled her hair. Behind her the slow gentle bowl of the plateau dipped down towards the village. Ahead, pale moonlight filtered through gnarled fingers of oak and elm. She paused, wondering if she possessed the determination to plunge into that whispering darkness.
Again faint cries of agony drifted towards her on the strengthening night wind. She sobbed, trying desperately to hold back the tears as the harsh teachings of Taltos came echoing into her mind. Minona was only a girl, and the laws of the plateau were without emotion, immutable, hideously unfair. Suddenly she ran blindly into the forest, disregarding the dangers, hoping only to see him once more before he died.
The trees closed about her, shutting off the stars and the lights from the village. With each step the wind grew, moaning in the shadow-held trees. Minona’s heart was full of fear and uncertainty. Everyone on the plateau had been instructed from childhood that the forest was evil. It was the place where the winds began. And even worse—beyond the forest lay the edge, the inconceivable end of the world. Minona knew that it was towards this that Mrogre fled.
Sobbing with pity and fear, Minona rushed breathlessly through the darkness, fending off low overhanging branches, her bare feet, accustomed to the open meadows, lacerated and bruised on the rough intertwining roots. The wind howled among the trees, gathering strength, buffeting her slim body with increasing force until it took all her strength to make headway. Instinctively she knew that she was now very near the edge and the old ancestral fears reared unbidden in her confused mind.
Suddenly the forest ended, terminating in a dark expanse of mos
s-covered stones, across which the wind rushed in demoniacal fury. So strong was that screaming unrelenting wind that Minona was completely unable to make headway against it. Tears of frustration were added to those already streaking her bemused face. She had never imagined the wind could be so strong.
Then far away, on some unimaginable horizon, shadowed peaks burst into liquid fire as the sun rose beyond them, flooding the plateau with light. Half-blinded by tears and the sudden brightness, Minona made out the blurred shapes of men from the village, and beyond, crouching helplessly on the very edge of the world, Mrogre the hunted, staring down into the unknown.
New Writings in SF 23 - [Anthology] Page 10