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Connoisseur's SF Page 13

by Tom Boardman


  The major came down the path fast. “Back to Washington, and hurry,” he said, “Got to get this, where it belongs before daylight or the space-time continuum will be broken and no telling what might happen then.”

  So we filled the tank and flew on back to Washington. I was tired and so was the flying machine, I guess, because now she just chugged along, heading for home and the stable.

  We landed near the trees again, and climbed out, stiff and tired. And after creaking and sighing a little, the flying machine just sat there on the ground, dead tired, too. There were a couple of musket-ball holes in her wings and some soot on her tail, but otherwise she looked just the same.

  “Look alive, boy!” the major said. “You go hunt for the horses, and I’ll get the machine back,” and he got behind the flying machine and began pushing it along over the grass.

  I found the horses grazing not far off, brought them back, and tethered them to the trees. When the major returned we started back, just as dawn was breaking.

  Well, I never did get my promotion. Or my wings either…

  It got hot, and pretty soon I fell asleep.

  After a while I heard the major call, “Boy! Boy!” and I woke up saying, “Yessir!” but he didn’t mean me. A paper boy was running over with a newspaper, and when the major paid for it, I drew alongside and we both looked at it, sitting there in our saddles near the outskirts of Washington, battle at cold harbor, it said, and underneath were a lot of smaller headlines one after the other. Disaster for Union Forces! Surprise Attack at Daybreak Fails! Repulsed in Eight Minutes! Knowledge of Rebel Positions Faulty! Confederate Losses Small, Ours Large! Grant Offers No Explanation; Inquiry Urged! There was a news story, too, but we didn’t read it. The major flung the paper to the gutter and touched his spurs to his horse, and I followed.

  By noon the next day we were back in our lines, but we didn’t look for the general. We didn’t feel any need to, because we felt sure he was looking for us. He never found us, though; possibly because I grew a beard, and the major shaved his off. And we never had told him our names.

  Well, Grant finally took Richmond—he was a great general—but he had to take it by siege.

  I only saw him one more time, and that was years later when he wasn’t a general any more, it was a New Year’s Day, and I was in Washington and saw a long line of people waiting to get into the White House, and knew it must be the public reception the Presidents used to hold every New Year’s, So I stood in line, and an hour later I reached the President. “Remember me, General?” I said.

  He stared at me, narrowing his eyes; then his face got red and his eyes flashed. But he took a deep breath remembering I was a voter, forced a smile, and nodded at a door behind him. “Wait in there,” he said.

  Soon afterward the reception ended, and the general sat facing me, behind his big desk, biting the end off a short cigar. “Well,” he said, without any preliminaries, “what went wrong?”

  So I told him; I’d figured it out long since, of course. I told him how the flying machine went crazy, looping till we could hardly see straight, so that we flew north again and mapped our own lines.

  “I found that out,” said the general, “immediately after ordering the attack.”

  Then I told him about the sentry who’d stole me the whisky, and how I thought he’d stolen it back again, when he hadn’t.

  The general nodded. “Poured that whisky into the machine, didn’t you? Mistook it for a jug of gasoline.”

  “Yessir,” I said.

  He nodded again. “Naturally the flying machine went crazy. That was my own private brand of whisky, the same whisky Lincoln spoke of so highly. That damned sentry of mine was stealing it all through the war.” He leaned back in his chair, puffing his cigar. “Well,” he said, “I guess it’s just as well you didn’t succeed; Lee thought so, too. We discussed it at Appomattox before the formal surrender, just the two of us chatting in the farmhouse. Never have told anyone what we talked about there, and everybody’s been wondering and guessing ever since. Well, we talked about air power, son, and Lee was opposed to it, and so was I, Wars are meant for the ground, boy, and if they ever take to the air they’ll start dropping bombshells, mark my words, and if they ever do that, there’ll be hell to pay. So Lee and I decided to keep our mouths shut about air power, and we have—you won’t find a word about it in my memoirs or his. Anyway, son, as Billy Sherman said, ‘War is hell, and there’s no sense starting people thinking up ways to make it worse.’ So I want you to keep quiet about Cold Harbor, Don’t say a word if you live to be a hundred.”

  “Yessir,” I said, and I never have. But I’m way past a hundred now, son, and if the general wanted me to keep quiet after that he’d have said so. Now, take those hands out of the air, boy! Wait’ll the world’s first pilot gets through talking!

  J. G. Ballard

  Build-up

  Noon talk on Millionth Street:

  “Sorry, these are the West millions. You want 9775335d East.”

  “Dollar five a cubic foot? Sell!”

  “Take a westbound express to 495th Avenue, cross over to a Redline elevator and go up a thousand levels to Plaza Terminal. Carry on south from there and you’ll find it between 568th Avenue and 422nd Street.”

  “There’s a cave-in down at ken county! Fifty blocks by twenty by thirty levels.”

  “Listen to this—‘pyros stage mass break-out! fire police cordon bay county!’ ”

  “It’s a beautiful counter. Detects up to .005 per cent monoxide. Cost me $300.”

  “Have you seen those new intercity sleepers? Takes only ten minutes to up 3,000 levels!”

  “Ninety cents a foot? Buy!”

  “You say the idea came to you in a dream?” the voice jabbed out. “You’re sure no one else gave it to you.”

  “No,” M. said flatly. A couple of feet away from him a spot-lamp threw a cone of dirty yellow light into his face. He dropped his eyes from the glare and waited as the sergeant paced over to his desk, tapped his fingers on the edge and swung round on him again.

  “You talked it over with your friends?”

  “Only the first theory,” M. explained quietly. “About the possibility of Sight.”

  “But you told me the other theory was more important. Why keep it quiet from them?”

  M. hesitated. Outside somewhere a trolley shunted and clanged along the elevated. “I was afraid they wouldn’t understand what I meant.”

  The sergeant laughed sourly. “You mean they would have thought you really were crazy?”

  M. shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Its seat was only six inches off the floor and his thighs and lumbar muscles felt like slabs of inflamed rubber. After three hours of cross-questioning logic had faded and he groped helplessly. “The concept was a little abstract. There weren’t any words for it.”

  The sergeant snorted. “I’m glad to hear you say it.” He sat down on the desk, watched M. for a moment and then went over to him.

  “Now look,” he said confidentially. “It’s getting late. Do you still think both theories are reasonable?”

  ML looked up. “Aren’t they?”

  The sergeant turned angrily to the man watching in the shadows by the window.

  “We’re wasting our time,” he snapped. “I’ll hand him over to Psycho. You’ve seen enough, haven’t you, Doc?”

  The surgeon stared thoughtfully at his hands. He was a tall heavy-shouldered man, built like a wrestler, with thick coarsely-lined features.

  He ambled forward, knocking back one of the chairs with his knee.

  “There’s something I want to check,” he said curtly “Leave me alone with him for half an hour.”

  The sergeant shrugged, “All right,” he said, going over to the door. “But be careful with him.”

  When the sergeant had gone the surgeon sat down behind the desk and stared vacantly out of the window, listening to the dull hum of air through the huge ninety-foot ventilator shaft which rose out of
the street below the station. A few roof lights were still burning and 200 yards away a single policeman slowly patrolled the iron catwalk running above the street, his boots ringing across the darkness.

  M. sat on the stool, elbows between his knees, trying to edge a little life back into his legs.

  Eventually the surgeon glanced down at the charge sheet.

  Name: Franz M.

  Age: 20.

  Occupation: Student.

  Address: 3599719 West 783rd Str., Level 549-7705-45 KNI (Local).

  Charge: Vagrancy.

  “Tell me about this dream,” he said slowly, idly hexing a steel rule between his hands as he looked across at M.

  “I think you’ve heard everything, sir,” M. said.

  “In detail.”

  M. shifted uneasily. “There wasn’t much to it, and what I do remember isn’t too clear now.”

  The surgeon yawned, M. waited and then started to recite what he’d already repeated twenty times.

  “I was suspended in the air above a hat stretch of open ground, something like the floor of an enormous arena. My arms were out at my sides, and I was looking down, floating.”

  “Hold on,” the surgeon interrupted. “Are you sure you weren’t swimming?”

  “No,” M. said. “I’m certain I wasn’t. All around me there was free space. That was the most important part about it. There were no walls. Nothing but emptiness. That’s all I remember.”

  The surgeon ran his finger along the edge of the rule.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, the dream gave me the idea of building a flying machine. One of my friends helped me construct it.”

  The surgeon nodded. Almost absently he picked up the charge sheet, crushed it with a single motion of his hand and flicked it into the waste basket.

  “Don’t be crazy, Franz!” Gregson remonstrated. They took their places in the chemistry cafeteria queue. “It’s against the laws of hydrodynamics. Where would you get your buoyancy?”

  “Suppose you had a rigid fabric vane,” Franz explained as they shuffled past the hatchways. “Say ten feet across, like one of those composition wall sections, with hand-grips on the ventral surface. And then you jump down from the gallery at the Coliseum Stadium. What would happen?”

  “You’d make a hole in the floor. Why?”

  “No, seriously.”

  “If it was large enough and held together you’d swoop down like a paper dart.”

  “Glide,” Franz said “Right.” Thirty levels above them one of the intercity expresses roared over, rattling the tables and cutlery in the cafeteria. Franz waited until they reached a table and sat forward, his food forgotten.

  “And say you attached a propulsive unit, such as a battery-driven ventilator fan, or one of those rockets they use on the Sleepers. With enough thrust to overcome your weight. What then?”

  Gregson shrugged “If you could control the thing, you’d, you’d…” He frowned at Franz. “What’s the word? You’re always using it.”

  “Fly.”

  “Basically, Matteson, the machine is simple,” Sanger, the physics lector, commented as they entered the Science Library.

  “An elementary application of the Venturi Principle, But what’s the point of it? A trapeze would serve its purpose equally well, and be far less dangerous. In the first place consider the enormous clearances it would require, I hardly think the traffic authorities will look upon it with any favour.”

  “I know it wouldn’t be practical here,” Franz admitted. “But in a large open area it should be.”

  “Allowed. I suggest you immediately negotiate with the Arena Garden on Level 347-23,” the lector said whimsically.

  “I’m sure they’ll be glad to hear about your scheme.”

  Franz smiled politely. “That wouldn’t be large enough. I was really thinking of an area of totally free space. In three dimensions, as it were.”

  Sanger looked at Franz curiously, “Free space? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Space Is a dollar a cubic foot.” He scratched his nose. “Have you begun to construct this machine yet?”

  “No,” Franz said.

  “In that event I should try to forget all about it. Remember, Matteson, the task of science is to consolidate existing knowledge, to systematize and reinterpret the discoveries of the past, not to chase wild dreams into the future.”

  He nodded and disappeared among the dusty shelves.

  Gregson was waiting on the steps.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Let’s try it out this afternoon,” Franz said. “We’ll cut Text 5 Pharmacology. I know those Fleming readings backwards. I’ll ask Dr McGhee for a couple of passes.”

  They left the library and walked down the narrow, dimly-lit alley which ran behind the huge new Civil Engineering laboratories. Over 75 per cent of the student enrolment was in the architectural and engineering faculties, a meagre 2 per cent in pure sciences. Consequently the physics and chemistry libraries were housed in the oldest quarter of the University, in two virtually condemned galvanized hutments which once contained the now closed Philosophy School.

  At the end of the alley they entered the university plaza and started to climb the iron stairway leading to the next level a hundred feet above. Half-way up a white-helmeted F.P. checked them cursorily with his detector and waved them past.

  “What did Sanger think?” Gregson asked as they stepped up into 637th Street and walked across to the Suburban Elevator station.

  “He’s no use at all,” Franz said. “He didn’t even begin to understand what I was talking about.”

  Gregson laughed ruefully. “I don’t know whether I do.”

  Franz took a ticket from the automat and mounted the Down platform. An elevator dropped slowly towards him, its bell jangling.

  “Wait until this afternoon,” he called back. “You’re really going to see something.”

  The floor manager at the Coliseum initialled the two passes.

  “Students, eh? All right.” He jerked a thumb at the long package Franz and Gregson were carrying. “What have you got there?”

  “It’s a device for measuring air velocities,” Franz told him.

  The manager grunted and released the stile.

  Out in the centre of the empty arena Franz undid the package and they assembled the model. It had a broad fan-like wing of wire and paper, a narrow strutted fusilage and a high curving tail.

  Franz picked it up and launched it into the air. The model glided for twenty feet and then slithered to a stop across the sawdust.

  “Seems to be stable,” Franz said. “We’ll tow it first.”

  He pulled a reel of twine from his pocket and tied one end to the nose.

  As they ran forward the model lifted gracefully into the air and followed them round the stadium, ten feet off the floor.

  “Let’s try the rockets now,” Franz said.

  He adjusted the wing and tail settings and fitted three firework display rockets into a wire bracket mounted above the wing.

  The stadium was four hundred feet in diameter and had a roof two hundred and fifty high. They carried the model over to one side and Franz lit the tapers.

  There was a burst of flame and the model accelerated off across the floor, two feet in the air, a bright trail of coloured smoke spitting out behind it. Its wings rocked gently from side to side. Suddenly the tail burst into flames. The model lifted steeply and looped up towards the roof, stalled just before it hit one of the pilot lights and dived down into the sawdust.

  They ran across to it and stamped out the glowing cinders. “Franz!” Gregson shouted, “It’s incredible! It actually works.”

  Franz kicked the shattered fuselage.

  “Of course it works,” he said impatiently, walking away. “But as Sanger said, what’s the point of it?”

  “The point? It flies! Isn’t that enough?”

  “No. I want one big enough to hold me.”

  “Franz, slow down. Be reasonable. Wh
ere could you fly it?”

  “I don’t know,” Franz said fiercely. “But there must be somewhere. Somewhere!”

  The floor manager and two assistants, carrying fire extinguishers, ran across the stadium to them.

  “Did you hide that match?” Franz asked quickly, “They’ll lynch us if they think we’re pyros.”

  Three afternoons later Franz took the elevator up 150 levels to 677-98, where the Precinct Estate Office had its bureau.

  “There’s a big development between 493 and 534 in the next sector,” one of the clerks told him, “I don’t know whether that’s any good to you. Sixty blocks by twenty by fifteen levels.”

  “Nothing bigger?” Franz queried.

  The clerk looked up. “Bigger? No. What are you looking for? A slight case of agoraphobia?”

  Franz straightened the maps spread across the counter.

  “I wanted to find an area of more or less continuous development. Two or three hundred blocks long.”

  The clerk shook his head and went back to his ledger. “Didn’t you go to Engineering School?” he asked scornfully, “The City won’t take it. One hundred blocks is the maximum.”

  Franz thanked him and left.

  A south-bound express took him to the development in two hours. He left the car at the detour point and walked the 300 yards to the end of the level.

  The street, a seedy but busy thoroughfare of garment shops and small business premises running through the huge ten mile thick BIR Industrial Cube, ended abruptly in a tangle of ripped girders and concrete. A steel rail had been erected along the edge and Franz looked down over it into the cavity, three miles long, a mile wide and 1,200 feet deep, which thousands of engineers and demolition workers were tearing out of the matrix of the City.

  Eight hundred feet below him unending lines of trucks and railcars carried away the rubble and debris, and clouds of dust swirled up into the arc-lights blazing down from the roof.

  As he watched a chain of explosions ripped along the wall on his left and the whole face suddenly slipped and fell slowly towards the floor, revealing a perfect cross-section through fifteen levels of the City.

 

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