New Writings in SF 9 - [Anthology] Read online

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  New Writings in

  SF: 9

  Ed By John Carnell

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  Foreword by John Carnell

  Poseidon Project by John Rackham

  Folly To Be Wise by Douglas R. Mason

  Gifts Of The Gods by Arthur Sellings

  The Long Memory by William Spencer

  Guardian Angel by Gerald W. Page

  Second Genesis by Eric Frank Russell

  Defence Mechanism by Vincent King

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  FOREWORD

  by John Carnell

  While it was never intended to use individual volumes of New Writings In S-F to emphasize “themes” in science fiction—our primary intention is to .present a widely divergent selection of new and exciting stories in the genre —it is interesting to note that quite inadvertently this is happening. No. 6, for instance, had an underlying theme concerning mental powers; No. 8 was devoted mainly to space. This present volume deals largely with different aspects of over-population and the many facets such a problem is bound to have in the immediate future.

  This preoccupation with “things that might happen” has been part of the stock in trade of all good science-fiction writers and it is natural that they should see trends faster than most people—science fiction being largely a literature of prophecy, the writer has to be one jump ahead of current events all the time. Little wonder, then, that the world’s expanding birthrate, coupled with increasing mechanization and computerization, is taking up more time than the possibilities of Man landing on the Moon or Mars within the next decade.

  For instance, John Rackham in “Poseidon Project” visualizes that we shall soon have seriously to consider living under the sea and this means taking our environment with us and, as his experimental group discover, this also means taking along the human problems as well. On the other hand, William Spencer sees the overcrowded city of the future as an Orwellian ogre in “The Long Memory”, where everything is seen, heard and recorded. In lighter vein, Gerald Page only infers the background in “Guardian Angel” and proceeds to depict his action all in one room— Man versus Machine. Arthur Sellings, on the other hand, sets “Gifts Of The Gods” right here in the present day— but it is a present day hedged in with a far-reaching problem.

  To the far future is but a step in Vincent King’s novelette “Defence Mechanism”, probably one of the most colourful and imaginative stories we have yet published, where so many questions are asked and so many different answers come up that it is unwise to take anything for granted until the end of the story. Off the “theme” but just as exciting are the two character study stories—”Second Genesis” by Eric Frank Russell and “Folly To Be Wise” by Douglas R. Mason.

  In either category, good entertainment for an expanding population!

  John Carnell

  June 1966

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  POSEIDON PROJECT

  By John Rackham

  Working in a closed environment beneath the sea, a preselected group of human beings find that not all the perils facing them are outside their dome.

  * * * *

  One

  Almost to the day, it was six months after his wedding that Peter Sentry realized he was in love with his wife. The knowledge came out of the silent recesses of his mind as surprisingly delightful as finding a pearl in a plateful of dinner oysters. According to the gentle bleat of his alarm it was 0530, time to climb out and make ready for his day-watch in the power house. Other mornings he had tolerated this untimely summons from sleep, to grumble but submit, knowing it had to be done, but this special morning his irritation melted in the glow of his new find. He slid from bed carefully, adjusting the coverlet so that Belle would still be warm, shuffled to the meal-nook to switch on the preprogrammed breakfast, then moved into the bath cubby to endure the gasping semi-torture that would set him up for the rest of the day.

  As he smeared depilating cream, manipulated the toothbrush, squirmed at the impact of ice-cold needles of water, and then stood to let the hot dry blast finish him off, he revolved his new discovery in his mind like a man who knows he has found something valuable but is not quite sure what. That he knew the date was the least wonderful aspect, as everyone here in Poseidon counted the days. Here on the ocean bed eight hundred and eighty yards below the surface, every day passing was a day won and to be marked off the calendar. But that it had taken him six months to discover that he did, after all, love Belle, was a discovery as moving and significant as the astonishing fact that it was true. His next wonder was whether she felt the same ?

  Out of the shower and zipping up his thin cotton coveralls while he supervised the last moments of breakfast, he let his mind drift back to the start of it all. And even before the official start, which had been, symbolically, on the 1st of January, he had been a part of the preparations. The master design and all the planning had begun much farther back still, but he knew very little of that. Sentry had first come to the project by applying for and getting a job with the contractors who had undertaken to build and lay a floating island in mid-ocean half a mile across. All he knew at that time was that it was being done just for the hell of it, to see if it could be done. He had a degree in solid-state physics and was particularly interested in the currently exciting developments in fuel-cell power, but he was only twenty-five and vigorous minded enough to be attracted by the chance to take part in something new and challenging.

  He’d had two years of it, two years of hard work and hazard, and he had enjoyed every minute of it. Looking back now he could pinpoint precisely the moment he had realized there was something more to “Island” than was being let out for public consumption. The tug-fleet had assembled an enormous concourse of steel cylinders, each twenty-five feet long, hexagonal in section and hollow. These, bolted and hinged together at their edges, had made a vast heaving carpet of buoyancy to support a floor of synthetic rubber a yard thick. And then, over the rubber, struggling men had contrived to lay one more surface, of laminated and rubberized concrete of a carefully calculated flexibility. They had then bonded the whole area with a perimeter wall. It had all made sense, except for one item. Every one of those buoyancy cylinders had a tap-outlet at the top, and it was curious that great care was taken to keep those tap-outlets clear and free when the carpet was laid. He had wondered why, and he had an engineer’s mind.

  A tap-fitting could mean only one of two things. Either you wanted to pump something in, or out. And whichever it was, once you did that you lost your buoyancy. You had to. And, as “Island” had only six or seven feet of freeboard by the time the perimeter wall was up, and the intention was to put in place a complex of “dwelling units”, the whole thing would sink!

  Sentry collected the breakfast on a tray, grinning at his own struggles to believe the incredible, so long ago. At that moment the notion of sixty selected people deliberately choosing to live for a year on the sea-bed, half a mile below the surface, never occurred to him, and if it had he would have hooted at it. Yet here he was, doing it. He went into the bedroom, swung a spidery table into place, laid the tray on it and shook Belle.

  “Come on!” he said, without ceremony. “It’s just on six. You want any of this, or shall I put it in the oven ?”

  The humped coverlet stirred, gave a long sigh and ten finger-tips appeared, pushing it back to reveal a tousled mass of blonde, almost silvery hair, and two enormous blue eyes. They were the biggest and bluest eyes he had ever seen, and on those alone, Belle was beautiful. The rest of her was non-spectacular, was comfortably ho
mely.

  “I never heard the alarm,” she mumbled, sitting all the way up and stretching luxuriously.

  “Remember me?” he scorned. “I live here. You’ve been lying there just waiting for me to bring this in. You don’t fool me, Tinkle.”

  “It’s not fair!” She finger-combed her hair from her face and grinned as she reached for her cup. “I’ve no secrets any more.”

  The idea that anyone so transparently honest and candid could ever have secrets at all was ludicrous enough to make him chuckle, but as he perched on the bedside to take up his own cup his mirth died away.

  “Perhaps you do still have one. I know I have. Something I discovered only a few minutes ago.”

  “Conundrums at this hour? What have you discovered?”

  “That I am in love with you, Tinkle.” He said it quite seriously. “The buzzer woke me, and there it was in my mind. Utterly obvious. And wonderful.”

  She gazed at him over the rim of her cup, then moved it enough to say, “Now what am I supposed to do? You’ll be off to work in twenty minutes!”

  “Just forget you’re a biologist for a moment. You might tell me whether some similar sort of conclusion had reached your mind or not ? That’s what really matters, isn’t it?”

  “Right.” She nodded. “You always do know, exactly, what it is that matters. The important things. I noticed that about you a long time ago, and I’ve been in love with you for a long time. Doesn’t it sound odd ? But I didn’t tell you, because it wouldn’t have been right.”

  “That’s true. You’d never try to influence me. That’s your way. But I had to tell you, because that’s my way.”

  “I’m so glad you did. Can you remember just what it was that made it go click in your mind?”

  Sentry harried a small heap of pressure-cooked sea-greens and pondered the point. “Something like this. Six months gone. Six months to go. And then all over bar the studies, the appraisal of data, the reports, the tedious abstracts. But this, this life down here—all over and finished. All of us free to go our separate ways and pick up normal life again. You know? And it hit me then. I didn’t want it. I just couldn’t imagine the future without you as part of it. And then I knew.”

  “That’s a good way,” she murmured, spearing a last piece of white fishmeat with her fork. “With me it was a long time ago, and sudden. The first big black-out, remember?”

  Sentry remembered very well. That had been the colony’s first major fright, and a combination of circumstances engineered by malicious coincidence. With a pressure of millions of tons per square foot to keep at bay, steady power and throbbing machinery were absolutely essential, and potential defects were chased and corrected rigorously. One ring-main was out of service for a periodical inspection, the other perfectly capable of carrying full load and a bit over. But—just as Sophia Menin, in Biochemistry, moved the switch to activate the big centrifuge, so, at that precise moment, the marine biology team under Luis Sanchez had rapped the button to start opening the armoured outside door to Sea-Lock Two, so that they could get back in from an expedition across the sea-bed. “B” ring-main could have accepted one surge, but not both. Protective trips went into action automatically. Instant blackout, a kind of silent death.

  Sentry had just been leaving Power-West, was barely out of the entrance when the “night” fell. Running like a madman, he had managed to get back in and up to the control-room just in time to stop his relief, Charlie Snow, from throwing in the big breakers by hand.

  “Charlie! For God’s sake—no!” He could recall Snow’s face now, and how it had gone sick-white in the feeble glow of emergency battery-power.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, “I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted the power back.”

  “All right. But let’s do it right. Lighting circuits first. You get on the visiphone and warn all the labs and everybody else—operate their ‘off’ switches on anything using heavy power. Go on!”

  Within half an hour everything was back to normal, lights, circulators, temperature-coils, atmosphere-plant and then the heavy stuff, section by section, and no harm done apart from frayed nerves. But Sentry had spent a further valuable hour hammering home the lesson to be learned and circulating it to all departments. “In the event of another major power failure, switch off all major current-consuming plant immediately.”

  “That was a lulu!” he grinned. “If Charley had thrown that switch, and fed all that load straight on to the generators—well, we wouldn’t be here right now to talk about it. We were all pretty much on edge in those days. It couldn’t happen now.”

  “That’s not the point, Peter. I was as scared as anyone, at first. But I knew you should have been on your way home. You didn’t come. The power came back, all normal, and still you didn’t come. Then I realized I was still afraid, but not for myself, for the dome, for anything else except you. You mattered more than anything else in the world. That’s when I knew.”

  “But that was four months ago. You’ve known all that time? Belle, am I slow?”

  “Not really,” she smiled. “You’re a man. It’s different for you.”

  “Whatever that may mean,” he scoffed. “All the same though, it does make a difference.”

  “What kind of difference?”

  Sentry got to his feet hastily. “Oh no,” he said, “you’re not getting me involved in a philosophical discussion. I haven’t that kind of mind. Let’s just say I consider it a bonus, and myself the most fortunate of men.” He put out his wrist to see the time and gasped. “Fortunate or not, Charley will have blood in his eye if I don’t get going!” He stood a moment in awkwardness then stooped to kiss her, very gently. “ ‘Bye now. See you tonight.”

  For a long while after he had gone, Belle Sentry sat quite still in her bed, dreaming and feeling supremely and foolishly happy. For six nerve-taut months she and Peter had lived together as man and wife, had grown to know and respect each other, with many shared surprises and delights, but that was the first time he had ever kissed her goodbye just like that. Then she too caught sight of the clock and made haste to rise and dress and attend to her household chores before leaving to carry on with her own work in Biology.

  * * * *

  Two

  It was 0630 as Sentry cleared the cluster of buildings that made up the dome centre and set away to walk to Power-West, out at the rim. He was in good time and didn’t hurry himself. At his back was the orderly array of dwelling units, conference and recreation rooms, stores and supplies, all set around the central column that was the emergency-escape tube and decompression-chambers. It was a pile that towered like a temple, reaching to the blue-grey “sky” up there, that layered bubble of acryllic resins and rubbers and foamed concrete that was the edge of this little world. It glowed now with the diffuse blue of “night”. He knew that in an hour and a half from now there would be a mass exodus from the centre as the colonists tackled the problems of yet one more day under pressure, and the light would change to brightness. He had little eye for it this morning, or for the disciplined flower-beds and vegetable plots that hugged the path, all grown on synthetic soils and humus won from the sea out there. Ahead of him and all round the rim were the workshops, the laboratories, the busy places where the colonists toiled with all the wit and resource they could bring to keep this isolated world a going proposition.

  He could remember how the true extent of the project had unfolded itself to him stage by stage. Because he had felt certain “they” were going to sink the “Island” and couldn’t imagine why, and was tantalized by that, he had Volunteered to stay on for the “building programme”. Among various unspecified prefabricated sections coming in by freight he had seen the unmistakable contours of what had to be a power-generating plant. And then another. And of advanced design, too. He had applied at once to the site-superintendent.

  “Those power-plants,” he said, “are they for show, or use?”

  McTaggart had told him, “Just as soon as ever we can get them opera
ting, we will. Make our own juice. Why? You looking for a better job, mister ?”

  “If there’s one going, yes. I’ve a degree in that stuff. Want to try me out?” He hadn’t cared whether McTaggart was getting a power-engineer cheaper that way than by hiring one from shore. That didn’t matter. What did matter was that he now had a job he could get his teeth into, plus the assurance that he would stay with the project until the end, whatever that was. And so he had been on hand at the unfolding of the next stage. Looking about him now, at the warm dry quiet, it was hard to recall what it had been like when open to the winds, the lash and whip of sea-spray and the continuously unsteady rippling motion of the great waves. He would never have called it a place to live, not by choice.

  “To live? Here?”

  “Yes, Mr. Sentry. People will live here.” It was his first meeting with Dr. Andrew Kingsley, who headed the little group of serious-faced men who had come to inspect progress on the vast heaving disk. Kingsley, leonine and quietly assured, had gone on. “Imagine this entirely enclosed. Assume sixty people, their needs and an extensive provision of workshops and equipment for research, all within this circle. Assume, as we are doing, a load of about fifty megawatts overall. Now, in your opinion, if you were asked to depend on this power-plant as installed, would you? If it was your life at stake?”