New Writings in SF 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  New Writings in

  SF: 5

  Ed By John Carnell

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  Foreword by John Cornell

  Potential by Donald Malcolm

  The Liberators by Lee Harding

  Takeover Bid by John Baxter

  Acclimatization by David Stringer

  The Expanding Man by R. W. Mackelworth

  Treasure Hunt by Joseph Green

  Sunout by Eric C. Williams

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  FOREWORD

  John Carnell

  Recently, watching a television programme dealing with computerization and the wonderful robotic world now developing beneath our fingertips, I suddenly realized that today we are actually living in the science fiction age depicted by many authors only thirty years ago. In fact, so vast have been the strides of progress during the past fifty years that a man of 1915 if he could be transported forward in Time to 1965, would be completely bewildered by everything he saw, even terrified. This thought led me to think forward thirty-five years to the magic-sounding date of a.d. 2000 and to wonder what the world will look like then as the exponential curve of our technology gathers momentum—-and the picture comes out almost as frightening as that for the man of 1915! Adding factors like population explosion, the speed with which raw materials are being eaten up and the frantic search for new sources (already we are surveying the sea-beds), more and more buildings climbing higher into the sky, town planning, country planning, road and transport planning; demands for more food, water, power, light, cars, radios, television sets, washing machines; the increasing tide of waste; packaging, cans, bottles, broken gadgets—an endless cycle of everything rushing through the maw of production and destruction—in comparison with the world we are apparently rushing towards, the shadow of the H-bomb pales into an insignificant ghost! In a brief flash of Time’s scythe, the possible future in Thea von Harbou’s 1927 published novel Metropolis, or a very good analogy of it, is almost upon us.

  Some of these impressions must have been in the mind of Australian author Lee Harding when he was writing ‘The Liberators”, a beautifully developed study of a self-sufficient city in the far distant future, where computerization has been taken to its logical conclusion and the City roams the face of an Earth devoid of humanity, dreaming fantasies of the past as senility creeps into its memory banks.

  Still in the far future, American author Joseph Green presents a bizarre almost macabre adventure on a silicon-based world in ‘Treasure Hunt”, where the mating habits of an alien bird will provide a fascinating study for anyone interested in ornithology.

  Much closer to home are the stories by Donald Malcolm, David Stringer and Australian John Baxter—the latter I would commend for his theoretical development of Australia as the future larder of the world as well as his ideas on space flight. With the prospect of manned flights to the Moon by 1970 the plot of his “Takeover Bid” is particularly apt.

  Purposely placed last is Eric Williams’ novelette “Sun-out”, describing the thoughts and actions of a small group of astronomers who discover the Sun is about to die in a matter of days. It is a well-contrived story not of the magnitude of the disaster but of the human emotions involved and the fallibility of human nature. Basically, then, the stories in this fifth volume of New Writings in S-F are a great deal more realistic than they would have seemed a few decades ago.

  John Carnell

  May 1965

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  POTENTIAL

  Donald Malcolm

  A great deal of research has been done on the subject of dreams in recent years, but experts are still not too sure what does happen down in the subconscious when the conscious mind is at rest. Four-fifths of the brain mechanism is still a big mystery —within it there could be a latent power stronger than anything we know.

  * * * *

  One

  Dr. Edward Maxwell, Director of D.R.E.A.M., became conscious that he had been staring at the same passage in Hamlet for at least a minute: “To die; to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream ...” His mind was on his wife, Jill, a former assistant at the Dream Research Establishment. Their first baby was due any time. Why did they always seem to enter the battle-ground that was life in the early hours, he asked himself, absently noting that it was 1.46 a.m., when the slender thread of existence was at its thinnest. The sound of a soft but insistent buzzer impinged on his drifting thoughts as he sat in the control-room, which was lit only by the harsh light of the few close-circuit television screens in use.

  Had he been paying attention, he would have noticed that the electro-oculogram recording pen of research subject 177-6-65 had settled down after almost nine minutes of hectic activity. Maxwell thumbed Screen 177’s button and in the cubicle, an all but inaudible bell, keyed to the subject’s alpha rhythms so that only he would respond, rang.

  177 roused himself from the cot, looking like a monster out of a third-rate horror film. Electrodes were pasted to his scalp, the bony ridges of his eye sockets, his back and chest. Wires sprouted like spiky grass from his head.

  Behind the screens, a cardiotachometer and an electroencephalograph converted his heartbeats and brain rhythms into inked traces on calibrated rolls situated in transparent windows under the larger, close-circuit screens.

  Maxwell activated a tape-recorder and the twenty-year-old Gerry McLean began to dictate his dream. The Director decided to listen. McLean was spending his first night in the research establishment and had dreamed once already that night, in a fragmentary way, at 11.21. While there had been nothing obviously unusual about the dream, intuition born of experience told him that volatile undercurrents surged in the subject’s mind. It could be nothing more than frustrated sexual urges:- or it could be something important. He sensed a familiar dryness on the roof of his mouth. He leaned his square, blue chin on the backs of clasped, hirsute hands as the tousle-haired young man began hesitantly:

  “Clouds ... or maybe swirling mists. Pale pink and yellow, with patches of grey. They didn’t seem to fill the whole area of the dream, only the centre, leaving the edges murky. Lots of sharp, bright sparks are darting about at random, some rushing into the dark portions, but most of them seem to be pouring out of the pink and yellow mass.” He paused and passed his hand across his brow in a curiously odd gesture. ‘There’s a pattern forming, now. The sparks are beginning to line up into definite shapes. I can’t understand them. They mean nothing to me. Some of the shapes are moving slowly, others are still, but pulsing, like small frightened mice. Now and again, some of the still ones, usually in a group, move to another place in the pattern, then stop. Wait! There’s someone there!” Maxwell jerked himself to full awareness. “I can see only the back of a head—no, the top. Dark hair, big, protruding ears ... It’s gone, now. Some words... ‘...where firing commences...’ and ‘...shift and it must be emphasized that it occurs...’ and ‘tends to be lowered until it fires for ...’ That was the end of the dream.”

  Maxwell, nonplussed, lounged back with his hands behind his head as McLean lay down and went back to sleep. There were only two subjects at the establishment that night and, as the other one had dreamed shortly before, there would be no more activity for at least an hour. That would give him time to think. The body of the dream itself—the mists and the sparks—wasn’t all that unusual; but those infuriatingly unfinished sentences were something else again. What could they mean?

  He activated the tape-recorder again so that it would play back through a microphone in the control-room and not disturb the sleeper, although from the looks
of him, that was unlikely. Already, his body, twitching and jerking, was sunk deep in the well of sleep. When the general movement of the limbs ceased, it would be a sign that the subject had a dream coming on.

  Maxwell listened again to the strange, incomplete sentences and noted that two references were made to variations of the word “fire”. Was that significant, he wondered? Finding a clean page on his pad, he began to put his thoughts on paper.

  Fire fires

  Boss fires (ha ha)

  gun fires (and weapons in general)

  neuron fires

  enthusiasm/imagination is fired

  A motley list, he considered. There was a hiatus in his thinking and he wished, briefly, that he hadn’t been quite so precipitate in giving up smoking. He’d even set his face against the subterfuge of “planting” a packet in a convenient place for emergencies such as this. However, he was off the habit and that was that. He’d take up chewing nails, or something similar.

  He sat tapping the pencil on the list. It was too soon to start jumping to clever conclusions that would probably be all wrong anyway. In any case, the words might not necessarily be connected with the other aspects of the dream, or even with the dream itself. Many people had dreams which were always a hotch-potch, showing no discernible pattern or form. Even the weird logic applicable to dreams was missing.

  He let his mind drift off the immediate problem and fell to thinking about the work being done on the fascinating questions posed by dreams and dreaming. The initial research programme had started at the University of Chicago in 1953. Now, in 1979, there were nineteen centres throughout the world, all attached to universities or hospitals. Maxwell’s centre in London was the third largest. The official designation was Dream Research Establishment, but some wag had added the letters “a.m.” because most of the work took place in the wee small hours of the morning. The tag had stuck, and the men in the research group were known to the regular nurses as the Dream Boys.

  Many of the popular fallacies attributed to dreams had been shown the door. Almost without exception, everyone dreams, every night. People who claim that they don’t dream have simply failed to recollect their dreams, which occupy about twenty per cent of their sleeping time. Their dreams may have been subconsciously suppressed.

  Dreaming was as natural as breathing, and the latest research revealed that a person deprived of sleep, and therefore of the opportunity to dream, soon suffered a decline in both physical and mental health. Day-dreaming, some authorities considered, was one of nature’s ways of making up such a deficiency. And it had also been shown that dream actions took the same time to perform as they did in waking hours.

  The sequence and times of occurrence and duration of dreams had been thoroughly investigated and reduced to a line on a graph. Dreaming occurs several times in a night, but only at one particular stage of sleep. The times of dreaming were matched against a master graph, kept current with data from all nineteen centres, to derive more information on the mystery of dreaming and why people dream.

  When a person drifts into sleep, his first dream is fragmentary, transitory and disconnected, as if takes on a moving film were blocked off at random.

  The plunge into the deepest sleep is sudden, like stepping over a precipice. This period lasts about thirty minutes. The sleeper then approaches the lightest phase of sleep, reaching it just over an hour after falling asleep. On the average, the sleeper remains in this stage for nine minutes and has his first organized dream during this time. A sleep not quite as deep as the first thirty-minute period again claims the person. Dream passages of nineteen, twenty-four and twenty-eight minutes occur at intervals until the final dream which lasts until awakening.

  All the establishments were at present participating in research initiated at the University of Tokyo. A group of students whose examination results had been consistently poor had been divided into two sections. One section had been allowed the normal quota of sleep and their results had not shown any significant increase for the better. The second section had been allocated more sleeping, and therefore more dreaming, time. Their results had shown an amazing upward trend, the corollary being that additional dreaming increased the potential for their work. This hypothesis was now being subjected to a rigorous investigation.

  Maxwell’s part in the experiment didn’t, properly speaking, begin until the following night, when twenty volunteers would take up residence for two weeks, including week-ends. This would yield an average of seventy dreams per subject, and an approximate total of one thousand four hundred dreams. The total for all the establishments would be in the region of twenty-six thousand dreams. Application of exhaustive analytical techniques would produce data proving or disproving Tokyo’s claims.

  He glanced again at the list he’d written down, then went into the small adjoining kitchen to brew himself a cup of tea. He boiled up some water, gave a tea-bag the fateful drop into the cup, poured in the water and let it infuse. He decided to have it without milk and added an extra spoonful of sugar to his usual two. He was about to sip this nectar when the buzzer summoned him. He almost dropped his cup in surprise. Taking his drink with him, he returned to the control-room. Screen 177! Routine took over and Maxwell awakened McLean and set the tape-recorder going. Only then did he have time to check his watch: 2.27. But that couldn’t be! Two dreams within forty-one minutes. He remonstrated with himself for not paying more attention to the screens. That way he would have been at least partially prepared. The tea forgotten, he settled to listen to what the boy had to say.

  If McLean realized that his sleep period between the dreams had been abnormally short, he gave no sign of it.

  “There are no clouds, now, only a uniform blue-grey background that seems to extend everywhere. There are no random sparks, either. All are in some pattern or other. There’s much more activity ... looks purposeful, as if a stimulus were being applied ... or—or supplied.”

  Maxwell was really puzzled and not a little apprehensive, now. McLean’s language was too concise and information-loaded to be true. He’d have to talk to the boy and find out more about him. There was much more to this than was apparent, and Maxwell was beginning to feel worried.

  “The pattern moves ... it’s as if the mechanical action of a typewriter were being translated into terms of light... I see the head again; the hair is wavy and parted on the left. I also see something else, but I can’t make out any details. It’s like—well—a roll of white paper. It seems to be running in the background, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. When the sparks stop moving, the paper does also. There’s something else not actually depicted in the dream: a long, rounded mass with thin extrusions at various plarces.” That’s you! Maxwell knew with certainty. His forehead was covered in sweat. “And there are more words. ‘...lengths 1,2,3... n-I, n, n...’ and ‘...practice, a language such as English is highly redundant so that its information content is less than a ...’ and ‘...gaps do not occur so that we can consider average conditions in the store...’ There’s also a bit that looks as if it might be a chapter heading or something similar; ‘...level in the store’. There’s a lot of mathematics on the roll of paper—” A loud intake of breath was followed by an exclamatory, “Of course, I see—” Abruptly McLean stopped speaking, an ecstatic expression in his eyes. He lay down and resumed his sleep.

  * * * *

  Two

  It took Maxwell some time to regain control of his breathing. He’d been holding it in. With great noisy gulps, he drank the tea, although it was practically cold. The physical activity seemed to calm him.

  Once again, he played back the partial sentences, Seeking what might possibly be key words. Two phrases struck him. “Conditions in the store” and “level in the store”. He wrote them down and underlined them as he wondered about their meaning. What kind of store was meant? And what connection, if any, was there with the previous lot of words?

  He gave his attention back to the screens and the electro-oculogram record.
It was practically going crazy. A quick scrutiny of McLean revealed that his body was perfectly still and relaxed. Occasionally, his eyeballs flickered, although the comparative inaction suggested that not much dream activity was taking place. There was nothing physically exhausting going on, of that much he could be certain. There was, rather, an implication of almost manic concentration.

  Maxwell tapped his large white teeth with the pencil. McLean shouldn’t be dreaming at all. He’d just finished dreaming. That made three dreams in under an hour, something unheard of in all the years of dream research.

  He waited until the subject’s limbs began to show signs of movement again, then tried to waken him. But he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—be roused.

  Maxwell ran out of the control-room and down to the cubicle. McLean looked peaceful. Maxwell checked his pulse and made a couple of other tests. Everything was normal. McLean simply couldn’t be wakened from his deep slumber.

  Pensively, Maxwell returned to the control-room and resumed his seat. 165 started to dream again and Maxwell was thankful for the return to routine. Keeping an eye on Screen 177, he decided to listen in on 165. The dream was fairly predictable, except for a phrase that almost eluded the Director. “...synthetic language made up of letters of the English...” the old man said, apparently unaware of the incongruous statement.