New Writings in SF 23 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘No. They must be together.’

  ‘I’d help you to the gate if I had time. I might as well let you have this.’ Lee put one of the guns on the ground. ‘I’ll be listening.’ Then he turned and began to climb down.

  When he reached the bottom he looked up. Eugene was leaning over the edge, the gun held in both hands. Lee heard the click as he pulled the trigger.

  He began to climb back up. Eugene frantically kept trying to fire the empty gun.

  ‘You shouldn’t have tried that,’ Lee told him. Then he killed him.

  * * * *

  It took much longer to find Chris and Alice, so many days that it seemed he had spent his whole life searching for them. He stayed away from the dome until there were no more old people he could steal food from, whom he could question. Then he returned. He did not even consider the possibility that the portal would ever be reopened. He went into every apartment, ignoring the survivors as though they did not exist. They were simply part of the landscape and there were fewer of them all the time.

  If they were outside, they could not remain there forever. He had found nothing to eat, and it would be the same for them. There was very little left even within the village, and Lee took all he could find. He promised to reward anyone who told him where Chris and Alice were hiding, and that was how he found them.

  An old woman told him the block, the floor, the apartment. It was one he had checked; he had checked them all. They must have moved in after he had been there. He could not understand why Chris had not tried to kill him. He had purposefully made himself conspicuous in the hope that he would show himself. And when he showed himself he could be killed.

  He broke into the apartment at first light. They were both in bed asleep. He had no hesitation this time. He could not risk giving Chris a chance. Lee yanked him out of bed and on to the floor, emptying his revolver into the man’s chest.

  Only then did Alice awake. She saw Lee. She saw Chris. And she began to cry, sobbing uncontrollably.

  Lee sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ he told her. ‘You’re safe. You’re with me now.’

  * * * *

  The world outside was safe and inhabitable, and it was up to him and Alice to inhabit it. The few hundred villagers left could be discounted, they would produce no offspring. In ten—Earth—years most would have been dead; here they would last even less.

  They were reasonably happy together. Alice never mentioned either Chris or Earth. They discovered hidden stocks of food in many apartments. Some of the villagers, before they died, began to cultivate native crops for food, and these they inherited. Lee even occasionally managed to trap an unwary specimen of a local species of rabbit, and later they had some success in breeding these in captivity. The summers were warm, the winters mild. Lee often thought of how they were like Adam and Eve, though he was careful never to mention this flight of fancy to Alice. The woman once said they had found themselves a private world at the end of the rainbow. The rainbow was the portal.

  After two years, when for all their efforts they still had no children, Alice admitted that she had accepted the bounty and been sterilised at puberty. In a way Lee was glad. It felt good to be the only man on the whole planet, on his planet. The only man and the last man. He and Alice would die here, of that he was certain. It was a much more pleasing prospect than the way he would have ended up if he had remained and grown old on Earth. The first, the last, the only. Lee and Alice all alone, at the end of the rainbow.

  They were all alone when, forty-nine of their world’s years after it had ceased to work, the portal began to operate again.

  They were questioned for a long time about what had happened. Lee gave his interrogators an edited version of the truth. He could not understand why he was not believed until one of them told him that so far as they were concerned the portal had been closed for a total time of an hour and a half. And in that hour and a half nobody had either gone in or come out.

  So far as the world knew, Lee and Alice were just two more old people. They were moved out and treated the same as any other unmarried seventy year olds. They never saw each other again, or even the world on which they had spent most of their lives. And the domed villages they were sent to were separated by more than mere distance, even though they were half a galaxy apart.

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  * * * *

  ACCOLADE

  Charles Grey

  On any new planet men and women will be concerned with their own fears and desires and here Charles Grey slaps down one more irritation in the way of the universe.

  * * * *

  Heaven waited at Journey’s End with each moment bringing unexpected gifts, a shower of novelties to titivate the senses so that they ran from one to the other, voices high in the limpid air, pale faces drawn with excitement as they tried to embrace the plethora of newness, running, examining, turning to look at fresh delights only to be intrigued by something even more wondrous in its implications.

  They were children running wild in a brand-new playground filled with entrancing toys and beneath their intoxication at the wealth of strange shapes and intoxicating colours was the greatest intoxication of all; the blood-surging thrill at once again having been given the precious gift of life.

  It had been too long, thought Tomlinson, standing in the shadow cast by the great bulk of the vessel, his grey eyes deeply sunken in the dark-ringed sockets of his wasted face. An eternity as they had lain in the artificial wombs doped, frozen, medically dead. A long, long time during which they had shaken hands with eternal darkness and gambled with what remained of their future while around them the ship had gulped interstellar dust and fed it to the ravening heart of the atomic engines from there to be spat in a thrusting tongue of flame. A thrust which had built up a velocity faster than that of light and where were you Einstein? Dreaming in your coffin a universe away? Did the great care if proven wrong ?

  ‘John!’ Cynthia came towards him, running, breasts loose beneath the thin fabric of her tunic. In her outstretched hand she held a thing of fuzz and brightness, a domed mound of slow pulsation. ‘See? It responds to the warmth of my flesh. Life, John! Life!’

  Her voice held the mother-hunger of her sex, the need to coddle and cherish, to suckle and to rear.

  Quietly he said, ‘You shouldn’t have touched it, Cynthia. It could be dangerous.’

  ‘This?’ She laughed, her voice like bells. ‘See how it changes colour as it moves? The way its coat bends as I speak? How could a thing so lovely hold danger?’

  He sighed as she held it out to him, conscious of his duty to look and comment and make decisions. But for how much longer? The journey was over; what need now of a captain ?

  ‘You are a biologist,’ he reminded flatly. ‘You know better than to go by appearances. Take it back to where you found it and touch nothing until you are certain it can do no harm.’

  ‘But, John. Really!’

  ‘Do it!’ His voice held the harshness of a schoolmaster reprimanding a child. Flushing, she obeyed the note of authority.

  Once again he looked at their new world, seeing nothing he had not seen before, the undulating plain covered with tall, branchless trees, the trunks scaled and tapering as they rose, curving gracefully at their summits, moving a little though there was no wind. Above the sky was an incredible blue blotched at the lower horizon by a mass of darkness like a range of distant mountains or an accumulation of sombre cloud. He felt an instinctive dread as he looked at it and yet it was a feeling without reason for it could be nothing more than a natural attribute of this world as was the sun and sky, the plain smooth and pocked with endless declivities filled with water, the trees and, around them, the colourful terrain.

  ‘We can live here, John.’ Paul came towards him, thin chest heaving beneath his open shirt, sweat dewing his hollow cheeks. He was thin, like them all, but good food would soon replace the tissue lost on the journey. ‘We
can cut down the trees and build houses and perhaps use the same material for food and fuel. We can plant crops and use fibre for clothing, seeds for oil, cellulose as a base for plastics. It will mean a lot of hard work but we can do it. A new world, John. Clean and fresh and ours to do with as we please.’

  Again the wild, illogical assumption that there would be no opposition and no danger. Like the others Paul was overreacting to his rebirth; now that the great hazard was over he assumed that all risk was now a thing of the past.

  Children, thought Tomlinson again. We need a death to startle them back into the adults they are. Some danger to manifest itself with screams and blood and broken bones. This world is too soft, too easy. The air, the gravitation, the temperature, all like that of Paradise. We should have landed among snow and ice and bitter winds. Or in a forest inhabited by savage creatures. Man needs the challenge of opposition in order to grow.

  Abruptly weary Paul sat at the base of a tree, his figure dwarfed by the vast bulk. A tree, Tomlinson noted, not in the shadow of the vessel, and he wondered if his remaining by his command was a subconscious desire to extend the duration of his authority. While they remained in and close to the vessel he would still be the captain, the father-figure, the voice of authority; but already he felt that the rank conferred by a world which must now be cosmic ash was a matter of habit rather than respect. He moved and sat beside the other man, abruptly conscious of his isolation.

  As if at a signal the others came to join them. They were tired, their initial euphoria yielding to a quiet excitement, scientific curiosity finally overcoming childish enthusiasm.

  It was a good sign, thought Tomlinson. They would rest for a while and then go into the ship for food and sleep and then, when he had them safely among familiar surroundings, he would subtly re-enforce his command.

  ‘We did it,’ said Jerry, lying supine, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun. ‘We did what they claimed could never be done.’

  ‘Did we?’ Robert sat beside Maria and held her hand as he joined the discussion. ‘Einstein said that nothing could travel at the speed of light—let alone faster.’

  ‘The word of one man.’ Cynthia sat with her hand on Frank’s shoulder, her head close to his cheek. Already they were pairing off, Tomlinson noted, and wondered which of the remaining women would be his. Peggy? Gay? Loma? All were young and nubile but one would select Jerry and another Paul and he would have to be content with what was left. And she? Would she be content with the oldest man of them all ? A captain without a command ?

  ‘The gospel according to Saint Einstein,’ said Gay. ‘Proved by mathematics and accepted by the faithful. You know, in, a manner of speaking, we are heretics.’

  ‘Living proof of the fallacy of a theory,’ said Paul. Others joined in.

  ‘A demonstration.’

  ‘A successful experiment.’

  ‘Pioneers smashing obsolete frontiers.’

  ‘The living,’ said Jerry, suddenly thoughtful. ‘Do you realise that, even if Einstein was only partly right, we are the only human beings alive in the entire universe?’

  ‘The time contraction theory?’ Maria shrugged. ‘As you approach the speed of light so time slows and, at the critical velocity, it stops. So a journey of several light years at light speed would mean that, on Earth, countless millenia would have passed in relation to those in the vessel.’ She shrugged again. ‘Once a theory is broken everything goes. We broke it; therefore all the rest is suspect.’

  ‘It was always that,’ said Lorna. ‘Nothing can travel faster than light because the faster you go the greater your mass becomes until, at light-speed, you would have infinite mass and therefore need infinite force to move it. But what about light itself?’

  ‘An exception,’ commented Frank. ‘The one which confirms the rule. Light has zero mass when at rest and so could be made to fit the theory.’

  ‘Some theory,’ said Frank. ‘What about the expanding universe? Distant galaxies recede from us with fantastic velocities. The further we went out the faster they receded until they reached a point where they must have passed light speed. When they did they vanished. Are you going to claim that a galaxy has zero mass?’

  ‘You don’t have to convince me,’ said Frank. ‘You’re preaching to the converted.’

  ‘Time,’ said Peggy. She had been thinking about what Jerry had said and the concept that they could be the only people alive had disturbed her. ‘How long did it take?’

  ‘The journey?’ Jerry smiled and moved a little closer. ‘Who knows? And by what standards? Ship time? Earth time ? Biological time ? Everything is relative. A day to us is a lifetime to a mayfly. A two-foot wall over which we can step is an insurmountable mountain to a worm.’ He reached out and took Peggy by the hand. ‘Enough of discussion. Shall we explore a little?’

  ‘No,’ said Tomlinson quickly, and added, for fear they should think him jealous, ‘I think it would be best for us all to return to the ship for food and rest. We don’t want to overdo things.’

  ‘Hint taken,’ said Jerry and rose, Peggy at his side. ‘But you’re right, Captain. We’re all a little bushed, and maybe it would be wise to do as you say.’

  Tomlinson could not rest. He rose early and prowled about the vessel as if he were an automaton devoid of free will. The ship was computer-operated, men had no real place in it aside from being passengers and now that it had landed, its work done, the entire mass of cunning fabrication had lost its original purpose and become nothing more than a protective envelope.

  However, some instruments had been designed for manual operation and with them he scanned the heavens, brooding over his observations of the sun, his study of the sombre mass of darkness now swollen so as to cover a quarter of the sky. There was something disturbing about it, the hint of a shape impossibly familiar and it worried him. The sun too was unusual, being both impossibly vast and impossibly distant and, as far as he could discover, seeming to be immutable in the sky.

  ‘John?’ It was Lorna rubbing sleep from her eyes. Her hair was dishevelled and her tunic creased but she was warm and human and he responded to her presence. ‘I woke,’ she said, ‘and heard sounds. I wondered who could have caused them.’

  Who or what, he thought, but made no comment.

  ‘You look worried, John. Is anything wrong?’

  ‘The sun,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t moved. We landed hours ago, a full day at least, and the sun is still in exactly the same position. And there is this.’ He gestured towards the screens which showed the rising shape of darkness. ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘That bank of cloud?’ She leaned forward a little, frowning. ‘No, it isn’t a cloud. It’s-’ the frown deepened. ‘I don’t know quite what it is but it seems, somehow, sinister.’ Her laugh was strained, metallic. ‘Stupid, isn’t it? There’s nothing on this world which could possibly hurt us.’

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’

  She turned at the sharpness of his voice, her eyes searching his face. ‘I suppose I can’t, really. It’s just a feeling I have. It’s so warm, so snug and nice outside that the possibility of danger seems inconceivable. And the ship—would it have woken us and released us if there was harm waiting outside?’

  She was a child demanding reassurance and yet the demand was justified. The vessel had been programmed to find a safe environment and that is just what it seemed to have done. And yet a machine, like those it carried, could be limited by sensory restrictions. Who could be certain that, during the years of travel, something had not gone wrong?

  ‘John ?’ She caught his arm. ‘Don’t look so gloomy. We’ve a new life to begin and sadness is one of the things we should have left behind. Let’s go outside.’

  So it was to be Lorna, he thought as she led the way to the port. Not Peggy or Gay but Lorna, not as beautiful as the others, a little older, not so vivacious, but she would do well enough. It was a comfort that at least one problem had been solved.

  He felt better outsid
e, away from the enclosing metal, the machine made by men who could now be only less than dust. The sun still shone warmly from its unchanged position in the sky and a slight breeze stirred the tips of the branchless trees. Like spines, he thought idly as he stared at them and was reminded of something though he couldn’t tell what.

  He breathed deeply, feeling the lifting of his depression, the unreasonable, illogical dread he had felt while in the vessel. Men were not made to live in a coffin of dead matter fabricated into unnatural shapes. Men were intended to stand with their feet on the soil, the sun warm on shoulders and back, the sound of the wind in their ears. On this world life would be natural and it was a good world, a soft and easy place which they could all enjoy.

  He turned and saw the ugly bulk of the ship and the seared place around it where the landing jets had torn and charred the ground. How long? he wondered. They had landed and time would have passed as the ship cooled, more as it woke the passengers, still more as they explored and talked and later slept.