by Bob Shaw
Cordner was too dazed to answer me, but Talmus nodded as he stared at the burns in horror.
“You’d better get back there fast, Clint,” I said gently. “And take Hardin with you. It looks to me as though you’re both out of the gunfighting business for some time.” Cordner nodded humbly and Hardin’s face went whiter than ever, but neither of them moved. I think they felt worse than if they’d been shot.
Afton Reynolds looked ill. “What happened? I … I don’t get it. Both those guns were all right half an hour ago. We tried them out.”
“That’s right,” Talmus chimed in angrily. “What made them burn up? Is this some kind of trick?”
“Your crazy plan made them burn,” I told Talmus. “There are two separate electronic elements in the electro-neuro safety catch—a sensing network which picks up and amplifies the currents in a man’s brain, and a computer which interprets the impulses and decides whether any particular situation justifies jamming the trigger action. I tried to explain this to my ex-boss but he fired me before he would listen.”
“I still don’t see it,” Talmus persisted. “Hardin had his gun out first and was aiming it at Clint. It was a clear case of self-defence as far as Clint was concerned.”
“No. Clint knew he had the slower draw and therefore Hardin’s gun wouldn’t fire at him.”
‘But what happened then? If Clint had the only gun which worked Hardin would have been defending himself even though he was faster in getting his out.”
“Ah!” I said happily. ‘But we’ve just shown that Clint’s gun wouldn’t work, even though he was slower, so Hardin couldn’t have been acting in self-defence either.”
Talmus pressed his hands to his temples. ‘But that means …’
“It means you can think around in circles for ever and you won’t get any nearer a solution. That’s what happens to the computers. It burns them out.”
Talmus wasn’t very bright, but he made a quicker recovery than the others. He shrugged. “I guess that’s it then. When the story gets out both of these boys will probably be laughed out of The Game, but Clint and I have had a pretty good run. The fifty thousand we collected on this shambles will be a big help, of course.” He looked at Reynolds significantly.
Afton Reynolds moaned and came forward with his arms held out pleadingly. Talmus pushed his face out of the way and started walking back to the farmhouse, then he got another idea.
“Just a minute. The guy who invented the electro-whatcha-macallit must have been a real genius. Couldn’t he have put in a sort of safety valve? I mean, the guns don’t have to burn up like that, do they?”
“No,” I agreed. “They don’t. My grandfather Vogt was and still is a genius—of sorts. He persuaded the government that anybody who was crazy enough to duel with dangerous weapons ought to be taught a lesson. A burnt child dreads the firearm, you might say.”
Afton Reynolds gave me a strange look and uttered one very short remark. Now, I’m the first to admit that my jokes occasionally fall short of perfection, but I saw no necessity for that sort of remark.
Reynolds left the Isher II News Service a week later and, frankly, it was a relief to see him go—a man who hasn’t a sense of humour will never get anywhere in this business.
Pilot Plant
1
Afterwards, Garnett found it difficult to decide which gave him the greater shock—the aircraft or the voice.
It had been a diamond-sharp morning in early Spring, with the green expanses of the airfield curving into the distance like the sunny cricket pitches of boyhood. From the comfort of his car Garnett watched the plane which had monopolised his life for five years go through an advanced phase of its flight development programme. The two-seat interceptor shimmered across the sky high up in the south then banked into a long, shallow dive aimed at the runway. As the machine approached, with the menacing silence of transonic speed, several hares which had been sitting on the turf shifted uneasily, displaying a kind of prescience, and began to run.
“Will pull out at approximately eight gravities.” The voice of chief test pilot Bill Makin, picked up by Garnett’s special car radio, sounded remote and somehow irrelevant.
The aircraft bit down into the denser air close to the ground and the invisible force fields that were its wings suddenly attained a ghostly visibility as air-borne moisture condensed into flickering grey streamers in the shock wave. At the far end of the runway the aircraft levelled out for a second then reared up into an impossible-looking climb.
If the wing generators were to fail about now, Garnett thought, indulging himself in a moment of melodrama, twenty tons of stainless steel and ceramic fuselage would land on top of my car. I would be killed.
“Something wrong here!” Makin’s voice had gone hard. “I’m losing my wings!”
The tattered rags of grey mist which had been flapping on the invisible wings, like a Valkyrie’s cloak, abruptly vanished. Garnett watched incredulously as the massive fuselage began to sink below its anticipated flight path then, suddenly very heavy, enter a definite and irrevocable dive. Ejector charges burst the centre section open and the precious cockpit hurled itself upwards, frantically breaking the suicide pact in which the rest of the plummeting airframe was now involved.
Garnett slammed the car’s starter button with the heel of his hand but the warm engine perversely missed its cue. He glanced over his shoulder. The fuselage was somersaulting down on him, so close that he saw the seriate rivets of its belly plates. The car’s engine whirred uselessly—and then he heard the voice.
It said, “Get me out of this, Xoanon.”
Garnett had time for one instant of wonderment before he was swept away from the sunny spring morning in a bomb-burst of sound, pain and darkness.
2
The room was small but airy, and its chairs had the flawless convexities of furniture never used. Garnett’s bed was positioned where he could see, beyond the banked foliage of elm trees, the distant slopes of the Pennines.
Only very reluctantly, and over a period of weeks, had the drugs begun to release their grip on his brain. He was aware of his mind clearing from the bottom like a glass of aerated water, during which process there was a slow escalation of thought. At first he could little more than observe the rhythm of hospital routine, then he began to cope with his personal affairs and, a little later, to pick up the threads of his working life. For a while the realisation that he was owner and chief engineer of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company was less important than the fact that weeks of lying in bed had given him a permanent ache in, of all the unlikely places, his heels. But gradually the knowledge ceased to be a kind of distant landmark with which to orientate himself and there came a vague feeling that it might be pleasant to get back to work. It might be pleasant, and yet there was a disturbing element somewhere….
“If you won’t drink milk I’ll simply have to put you on a course of calcium tablets.” Janice Villiers shrugged as she spoke and let her eyes wander disinterestedly around the mushroom-coloured walls of his room. She was the dietician at the discreetly expensive clinic in which he had found himself, and Garnett had the impression she had got the job by mistake. She had lush black hair, a slight cast in one eye and a kind of forthright sexiness which struck a faintly jarring note amid the pervading professional blandness.
“I don’t need milk,” he said. “My bones are as good as you’ll get.”
“It isn’t bones I’m thinking about, it’s your nerves. You must be a pretty tough little fellow to have recovered as well as you did, but your system has taken a beating. Do you want a cigarette?”
She had been quick to notice his size, or lack of it, even though he was in bed. Garnett turned his head away angrily, ignoring the offered pack. Who the hell did she think she was, making personal comments to important patients? He saw his fine-featured jockey’s face frowning at him from a mirror and sought an unrevealing way to express his anger.
“Tell me,” he said tersely, ‘do
you smoke in the other patients’ rooms?”
Janice smiled and returned his stare. Her eyes were a strong, clear grey, but the slight in-turning of one of them gave her a ruefully conspiratorial look. She shook her head.
“Well, what makes you think you can get away with it in my room?” Garnett spoke coldly, but was astonished to discover that part of him was pleased with her answer.
Janice shrugged again and lit up her cigarette. “Were you afraid when you saw that plane dropping down on to your car?”
“Isn’t that an … unprofessional sort of a question?” He was working hard to elicit the normal respectful responses, but she seemed not to notice.
“Did you think you were going to die?” Her small oval face was intent.
Garnett shook his head uncertainly, remembering. Get me out of this, Xoanon. It had been a quiet, clear, perfectly normal voice—except for the fact that it had no apparent owner. He had read stories with the well-worn literary gimmick in which a man in a panic had heard screams, then realised they were coming from his own mouth, but this was rather different. He was not even the praying type, and had he been he knew of no deity by the name of Xoanon.
“Supposing you did die,” Janice persisted. “Did you ever think what you would most like to find on the other side?”
Garnett laughed incredulously. “For God’s sake! Have you been reading pamphlets on how to be an interesting conversationalist?” As on her previous visits, he finally gave up trying to establish anything other than the timeless man-woman relationship. “All right then, what would you like to find?”
“I would like,” she said, inhaling deeply and talking through the smoke with a kind of hard expertise which he found strangely annoying, ‘to waken up in a great hall with one of those vaulted green ceilings, but so big and high up that it was misty looking. And I would like to find myself in a chair facing a wise old man who was removing a kind of earphone set from my head. And I would like him to be saying, ‘Well, that was a sample of life on Sol III. If you would really like to study that planet there are a hundred thousand million of those lives to go through—or would you prefer to look at some of the other inhabited worlds of the universe?’ ;”
Garnett blinked. “That’s quite a concept—are you a writer?”
“No. I just worry about dying. I’m not cut out for it, I guess.” She smiled and brushed a speck of ash from the white linen of her uniform.
Garnett felt a pang of concern. He was fairly sure the girl was being flippant, but there was something in her face. Perhaps she really had a problem of some kind and had been speaking to him on a level of honesty which most people rarely reach. He failed to see how anyone with her stake in life could be obsessed with death, but somehow the subject kept cropping up in her conversation, and he had no idea of how to react. In the silence he became aware of barriers clanging into place between them and was amazed to discover how strongly he wanted to break through.
“Janice,” he said uneasily, using her name for the first time. “I’m getting out of this place in a few days, and … I wonder if you would have dinner with me some evening?”
She glanced up at him, apparently pleased but hesitating.
“I’ll still be on sticks,” he said quickly, feeling gauche, ‘but my hair’s growing back again where they put the plate in my skull. I won’t always have this tonsure, you know.”
Janice smiled whitely, stood up and stubbed out her cigarette. “Thank you,” she said. “It sounds nice. Let’s discuss it later.” She went out, closing the door gently.
Garnett slumped back feeling both elated and aghast. He also had a suspicion she had left at that moment simply because her illicit cigarette was finished and if it had burned out sooner she would have gone that much earlier. What, he wondered, had made him do it? And what did he think he would be able to do for her? The latest pile of blue-covered, spiral-bound reports from the works occupied his attention for some time, and then Nurse McFee came to re-make his bed. She was a motherly woman, with bright red forearms and a faintly Scots accent.
“I was speaking to the dietician,” he said casually, ‘and I …’
“Oh, she’s begun visiting you, has she?” Nurse McFee grunted fiercely as she pulled back the bed clothes. “I wondered when she would get round to you.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you must be getting better.” Nurse McFee pounded his pillows into submissive fluffiness and refused to speak again. When she had gone Garnett settled down for his afternoon doze, acknowledging sleepily that he would probably be better off if he stopped the Janice Villiers thing right then and there. He slid peacefully into unconsciousness, and sometime during the drowsy afternoon his brain, which had hesitated so long, took the final decisive step out from under the canopy of the drugs.
He awoke in a panic.
A glance at the clock showed him it was several minutes before four. He pulled the televu off the bedside table on to his lap and punched out the works number. There was a delay, during which the little screen remained blank, then the face of the operator appeared, glowing in the grey depths like a submerged pearl.
“Mr. Garnett!” The tiny face assumed perfect miniature lineaments of surprise.
“Hello, Connie,” Garnett said brusquely. “Put me through to Mr. Dermott.” He waited impatiently while the connection was being made. Ian Dermott was his general manager and had been with the organisation since its early days back in the Sixties, handling the administrative and commercial side. He was directly and solely responsible to Garnett because the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company was a rarity in its field in that it was privately owned. When Clifford Pryce, inventor of the generated wing, had died in 1978 he had willed the company to Garnett, along with a complicated system of legal safeguards designed to prevent him from bringing in public money by the issue of even a single debenture. Not that there had been any likelihood of fresh capital being required—the Pryce-Garnett T.6 orbital interceptor had been on the boards of the Coventry design offices then and it was an obvious winner right from the start.
The T.6’s main engine was a hydrogen-burning jet with an advanced type of ion-augmented thrust, but the aircraft’s big selling point was the Pryce generated wing—the invisible, steel-hard force field which could fan out ten metres for low-speed flight and progressively reduce in size as speed increased. At Mach 8 the wing generators; were switched off altogether, allowing the hurtling, white-hot fuselage to sustain itself by body lift alone without the impending drag of even a vestigial wing. During the research and development stages there had been delays due to the fantastic precision called for by Pryce’s design for the wing electronics. In the end the bugs had been ironed out and, as a private venture financed by profits from military orders, the company was now developing a larger generated wing system capable of supporting a civil airliner.
Which was why Garnett was in a panic.
“Hello, Tony.” Dermott’s face appeared in the screen. “What’s all this then? Why aren’t you catching up on your sleep? You’ll need it when you get back you know.”
“Hello, Ian. Sorry to interrupt you, but this is important and I want you to issue the initial paperwork right away.”
Dermott adjusted his glasses, looking puzzled. “Of course, Tony. What is it?”
“I’m cancelling the twenty-metre wing project.”
Dermott lowered his head for a few seconds, apparently staring at his hands, then he looked up coldly. “I’m sorry, Tony. You can’t do that.”
The words shocked Garnett. He had expected the other man perhaps to show surprise or resentment, but not step so completely out of line, and out of character. “I’m doing it,” he said. “In fact, I’ve done it. From the moment I informed you I was cancelling, the project was dead.”
“Tony, are you sure you’re feeling all right? You just can’t do this, you know.”
Garnett took a deep breath. “Issue an immediate stop-work order to the design, production, t
est, purchasing and planning staff concerned.”
“For God’s sake, Tony! Why? Just tell me why.”
‘Because it will lose money. We won’t be able to sell it. Do you want a better reason? So far we’ve sunk the best part of a million pounds into that wing—money that I’ll have to write off against research and development costs of the T.6 wing.”
‘But we were in full agreement that the big wing is just what civil aviation is waiting for.”
“It is,” Garnett agreed grimly, ‘but not with our reliability figures. Our own Air Registration Board and the American F.A.A. have always regarded a fatal accident rate of one in every hundred million flights as being a reasonable objective, although in practice they treat one in ten million flights as an acceptable figure. In more convenient terms, this is an accident rate of 1 u215? 10{super
u8722?7}. It has taken us four years to achieve .92 u215? 10{super