New Writings in SF 23 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  In this case they were big enough.

  He rose to his feet. ‘Nothing lasts forever. The times will change again. And that creature will have to watch out for himself.’

  Courdon merely stared at his desk as Julian strode from the room.

  * * * *

  In the evening Julian’s airplat took him to the South tiers of the London Conurbation. He parked in a garage five hundred feet above ground level and entered the adjoining apartments.

  The people gathered there were all either close friends or sufficiently in sympathy with Julian’s private philosophy to be trusted. They formed a tightly knit in-group jarringly at odds with the normal standards of the time. And they all, to one degree or another, wanted to live for ever.

  They listened to his account of the meeting with Courdon with an air of cynical acceptance. They knew it already.

  ‘Decadent and cowardly,’ said David Aul. ‘Still, that’s life.’

  Julian gulped wine from a huge goblet. ‘We’ll take it into our own hands.’

  ‘Mon Dieu, that’s going a bit far, isn’t it?’ said another voice.

  ‘We’ve already discussed it.’

  ‘Yes, but were we serious?’

  ‘Of course we were serious, you damn fool!’ Julian’s eyes flashed angrily at the speaker. It was Andre, a vague, unpredictable Frenchman. ‘Do you think I waste my time on daydreams?’

  Andre shrugged.

  ‘Anybody who has no stomach for it, walk out of here right now,’ Julian demanded. ‘If you want to squeal on us, go ahead and do it. We’ll simply deny everything and that will be that.’ And then we’ll do it anyway a few years later, Julian thought to himself.

  He didn’t wait for answers but snatched up a bottle of wine and retreated to the corner of the room where he flung himself on a couch and continued to drink swiftly and heavily.

  Ursula Gail detached herself from the group and smiled down at him with clear hazel eyes.

  ‘So you’re really going to do it?’ she said, speaking with a slight German accent.

  ‘Naturally.’ Seizing her wrist, he pulled her down on the couch with him.

  ‘But what about the risk? Somebody might betray us. What about me? Suppose I do?’

  ‘If you do I’ll kill you.’

  She chuckled softly, leaning close and nuzzling his cheek. ‘That’s what I like about you, Julian. You’re so wicked. I don’t think there’s one good impulse in you.’

  ‘What is good perishes; evil endures.’ He shook his head, momentarily confused. What had made him say that? He was already slightly drunk.

  She noticed his unsteady movements as he scanned the room for another bottle. ‘Aren’t you drinking too much ? I thought you were operating early tomorrow morning.’

  ‘What difference does it make ? These days all the instruments are electronically controlled. I often operate dead drunk. Never lost a patient yet.’

  The drink and the music that came from a small player were making him feel warm and mellow. He had a pleasant feeling of anticipation, of a decision made and of having burned his boats behind him. The others were almost certain to back him. What was there to lose? Liberty? Life? They would be lost anyway, in a few decades. Against that was balanced the possibility of life eternal.

  The final plans were already vaguely foreshadowed in his mind. It could not be done for a few years yet. The present time was too soon, and besides there was much preparation to be completed. A ship would be best, he told himself. A yacht fitted with everything they needed and in which they could sail the oceans while completing the work, safe from detection.

  Afterwards came the question of whether the alien’s method of immortality could be adapted to a human being. They all knew that the probability of that was rather low. But then, who but a desperado ever commits himself to a philosophy of action, not to say of crime ? Julian’s mouth twisted sardonically as he contemplated the thought.

  A short while later he took Ursula into an adjoining bedroom. Breathing lightly in the darkness, she suddenly spoke.

  ‘What would you give up for immortality, Julian ? Would you give up this?’

  ‘I would give up everything,’ he said. She asked no further questions. They both lay staring up at the darkened ceiling, imagining a future without end.

  * * * *

  Four

  Five years passed before Julian deemed the time was ripe.

  Neverdie had settled quite well into human society. He was only occasionally mentioned in the mass media now and lived the life of a near-recluse in a large house whose interior had been restyled in the Georgian mode—a fashion the alien seemed to prefer to all others. His needs were financed out of the returns from his books. Julian had studied them all assiduously, especially the lengthy Alde-baranian Social Organisation, but had learned nothing useful. He was not interested in how an extinct species formed ‘hedonistic rank-order’, as was apparently the case. Neverdie had also written a number of competent but off-beat science fiction novels with some interesting details, but nothing touching on biochemistry.

  On the evening of the 18th July, 2109, Julian and his comrades struck. An airplat glinted in and out of light and shade in the approaches to the Northern suburbs and entered the habitat jungle.

  Julian was flying, with four others in the seats behind him. The airplat drifted through the three-dimensional maze, surrounded on all sides by lavishly decorated walls, windows, doors and ceilings and the gardens that hung profusely from almost every roof. After a short while they arrived at Neverdie’s dwelling.

  Although lights shone already from most of the surrounding windows, Neverdie’s house was in darkness. Julian parked the airplat on the flat, bare roof, close to the roof door. He got out, stepped to the door and tested it. The door was unlocked.

  He had previously had the house cased for alarms in the guise of a magazine interview. Apparently, there was none, which to Julian’s mind was an extraordinary oversight. He beckoned to the others. They padded after him and the group descended into the dim interior.

  Julian paused briefly to enjoy the elegance of the rooms. Neverdie certainly had good taste. But for the strangeness of the furniture, which was built to serve his form and not the human, this could have been the home of a cultured, educated Englishman.

  They found the alien in the downstairs drawing room, apparently asleep. Julian knew that he would sometimes sleep for a week without waking. He drew a small cylinder from his pocket, releasing from it an invisible gas. To the humans in the room it did nothing; in the Aldebaranian, however, it induced a deep unconsciousness. Neverdie would not wake now.

  Julian had learned that trick in the course of his previous medical attendance on Neverdie. They lifted the body on to a stretcher; it was surprisingly light.

  Back at the roof door Julian glanced quickly around. He did not think they were observed. Impatiently he waved the team on. In seconds their cargo was safely aboard the airplat.

  Nosing out of the habitat region, they flashed into the open air again, and went planing Southwards.

  * * * *

  At almost the same time Courdon received a call.

  Five years ago, sensitive to Julian’s purposefulness, he had taken precautions. Neverdie’s dwelling was bugged.

  After all this time the surveillance service was slow to respond to the announcement that uninvited persons were present in the apartments. Following a procedure already laid down, their first move was to contact the administrator.

  In his own home, Courdon took the news with astonishment and, at first, disbelief.

  ‘Can you give me a picture of them?’

  The surveillance operator spoke calmly. ‘They have already left the house. We are tracking them in an airplat, flying towards Greenwich. We can pick them up at any time you like.’

  ‘No, not yet. If they have the nerve to kidnap Neverdie then this is a planned conspiracy. Let’s wait to see where they lead us.’

  The kidnap party disappea
red into the ascending tiers on the South side of the city. Police plats, nosing like fish in an undersea coral bed, cruised after them at a calculated distance.

  In the interlocking complexity they soon lost their quarry, but were not worried. In the next few minutes they would find it again, probably at its destination.

  And so they did. But in those few minutes they were already too late. They found the airplat, as well as the house where it was parked, deserted. Their reaction was to search the neighbouring buildings and to think in terms of a switch to another airplat. It did not occur to them until some time later to think of an ocean-boat mingling with the river traffic beneath their feet and heading rapidly into the open sea.

  Watching from his home, Courdon cursed.

  * * * *

  In the Mediterranean, aboard the piano yacht Rudi Deutschke, Julian faced a vacillating situation.

  In short, his colleagues had got cold feet.

  ‘C’est dangereuse, mon ami,’ Andre said glumly. ‘By now they will be looking for him. What if they should guess he is at sea?’

  ‘How would they guess, you fool?’ Julian retorted. “They might think of it as a remote possibility, that’s all. And as for a sea search—well, have you any idea just how many ships are on the oceans at any one time? Damn near a million, I should think.’

  ‘Just the same,’ David Aul put in carefully, ‘we won’t be safe until that creature below decks is washed over the side, or what will be left of him. How long is all this going to take?’

  ‘It will take months at the very least, so stop panicking. And you’re never going to be safe, get that through your head. And for God’s sake try to work up a little backbone !’

  I’ll ditch this lot as soon as it’s convenient, he told himself. When it comes to it they’re nothing but a bunch of nuts who get jittery the moment their fantasies start to turn into reality. Except Ursula, no sense in wasting her. She’s got more guts than the rest of them put together. Funny thing about some of these women.

  Actually the research to be done on Neverdie was only the first stage. Then would come the problem of learning how to apply the knowledge gained. That would almost certainly take years.

  His plan was to pass through the Suez Canal and into the Indian Ocean, where West-European influence was slight and the chances of their being apprehended correspondingly reduced. Once they were finished with Neverdie he would switch to the land for the longer stages of the work. India was a delightfully corrupt place and he knew where he could be kept indefinitely from view of the law, with full research facilities, until this programme was complete.

  When he felt he was sufficiently rested Julian began.

  Taking with him David Aul, who was a trained biochemist, he descended to the space amidships that had been equipped to fulfil all the functions he thought would be necessary.

  There was enough here to take the alien apart muscle by muscle, nerve by nerve and molecule by molecule.

  They both stared at Neverdie as he lay strapped to the operating table. Surrounding him were the electronic pantos that would do all the cutting and manipulating—Julian didn’t trust this job to manual dexterity, and besides he would be working at the cellular and molecular levels. One half of the working area was devoted to biochemical analysis and the mapping of the nervous system. If they found that they needed any extra equipment, Julian was confident that they could get it in India.

  ‘What if it’s something that we can’t find out?’ Aul commented.

  ‘I don’t think it will be. I’m more than half certain that Neverdie’s immortality isn’t natural to his species. That just wouldn’t make sense, would it? Any biological organism has to die, otherwise the ecology it lives in couldn’t work. I think he acquired everlasting life by artificial means and if that’s the case then we should be able to find out how.’

  Julian flicked a switch and brought the hum of power to the workroom. ‘To begin with, let’s see if our friend has had a change of heart that would make all our work unnecessary.’

  Using a dropper, he administered a few cc’s of a pungent-smelling liquid to an organ just beneath Neverdie’s carapace. The alien, who was strapped upside down to reveal a mass of appendages, opened milky translucent eyes and stirred feebly.

  The eyes swivelled and focused on Julian. “You are making a mistake...’ the voice diaphragm said weakly.

  ‘It’s you who has made the mistake,’ Julian said. ‘You know what we want: give it and we’ll spare you.’

  ‘No... I cannot.’

  Julian paused. ‘I would like to put a few questions to you,’ he said finally. ‘Are you willing to answer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Firstly, is the secret of immortality something I could find? I mean, is it an analysable property of your body?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could it be applied to myself?’

  ‘Yes, more easily than you think.’

  Julian’s excitement mounted. ‘Well what is it ? If you’ll tell me this much, why won’t you tell me the whole thing?’

  Neverdie squirmed. ‘I beg you, do not seek immortality. Forget your lust, leave me in peace...’

  ‘I’ve got to!’ Julian exclaimed in sudden inspiration. ‘It concerns some specific substance, or something, that your body contains, doesn’t it? To have it myself I’d have to take it away from you, wouldn’t I?’

  Suddenly Neverdie became still, as if in despair. ‘Your guess is close. But you must abandon your intentions. You do not understand. This is your last chance to leave well alone.’

  ‘I understand that you’re trying to save your own skin. Unfortunately in this universe any item in short supply goes to the strongest party.’ He glanced at Aul. ‘Don’t say anything of this to the others. We have to get in all the facts before revealing anything that might cause trouble.’

  Aul nodded, his face clouded.

  ‘Then let’s get to work. Good night, Neverdie. The curtain is falling.’

  From a nearby nozzle he released more of the gas that to the alien was an instant general anaesthetic. Neverdie’s appendages twitched once. Then he was still again.

  * * * *

  They were sailing past the Gulf of Akaba when Courdon finally caught up with them.

  Since losing track of the quarry in London, he had frantically been trying to identify and search all vessels that had travelled down the Thames in the following two days. The number ran into thousands. There was nothing to connect the Rudi Deutschke to Julian Ferrg, and it was with great difficulty that he managed to persuade an Israeli coastal patrol to make what was strictly speaking an illegal search.

  At the time Julian’s investigations had only reached a rudimentary stage concerned with biochemical analysis using tissue samples sliced from the alien’s inert body. Neverdie was very lucky: no real damage had been done.

  So engrossed were Julian and David in their work that they failed to hear the whistle of the patrol craft as it flew overhead. Julian merely looked up with a frown of annoyance as he heard shouting from the deck above, especially the shrill voice of Ursula.

  ‘Get up there and tell them to stop their damned row, David,’ he ordered angrily. ‘I’ll have no arguments on this junket.’

  Aul moved to obey. But at that moment the door flew open and the bereted coastguards stood framed there. For long moments they stood, staring at the scene, their tanned faces turning pale.

  ‘What do you want?’ Julian shouted in an enraged voice. ‘Get out of here, damn you! Can’t you see we’re busy?’

  The guards unshouldered their arms. The game was up.

  * * * *

  At his trial Julian fell back on the perennial refuge of the scoundrel: patriotism.

  He had done it all, not for himself, but for humanity. ‘Even when governments are soft,’ he said, ‘there are some who believe that mankind must advance by whatever means possible. My work, had it been allowed to continue, would have brought incalculable benefits to this planet
.’

  The audacity of his statements probably did serve to soften his sentence, as had been his intention. His companions were given ten years apiece in a corrective institution. Julian, as the ringleader, was sentenced to fifteen years.

  * * * *

  Five

  On his release, fifteen years later, Julian was forced to make a drastic reappraisal of his position. He was no longer a young man in his early thirties: he was forty-eight. Although he had kept himself fit during his imprisonment and was still lean and active, the sands were running out.