New Writings in SF 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  “You liar!”

  “You simpleton!” The policeman leant over and grabbed his newspaper, smoothed it out angrily with his fists. “Here, this will show you! I’ll make you admit your stupidity, coming in here and playing your pointless jokes on me! An intellectual, I can see!”

  He ruffled through the paper. Moore caught a glimpse of its title The Alabama Star and stared up incredulously at the policeman. For the first time, he realized the man’s features were distinctly negroid, though his skin was white and his hair fair and straight. He emitted a groan of fright.

  “You a Negro?”

  “Course I am. And you look at this news item—fire in negro university. See that picture. See any negro there with black skin ? What’s got into you ?”

  “You may well ask, and I wish you’d stop grasping my shirt like that—it feels as if you have some chest hair with it, thanks. I’m not trying to play a joke on you. I must be in—well, I must be in some sort of an alternate universe or something. Hey, perhaps you are kidding me! Do you really mean people in Africa and India and so on have skins the same colour as us?”

  “How else could they be any other colour ? Ask yourself that!”

  “They were where I come from.”

  “Now, how could they be ? Just how could they be ?”

  “I don’t know! It’s a matter of history. Some races are white, some yellow, some brown, some black.”

  “Some idea! And you say this arrangement happened in history. When?”

  “I didn’t say that! It happened way back ... well, I don’t know when.”

  “I suppose your men originated from different coloured apes, huh?”

  “No, I think it all happened later than that... Stone Age, maybe.... Honestly, now you confront me with it, I must admit I don’t exactly know when the arrangement came about or how. It does sound a bit unlikely, doesn’t it ?”

  “Anyone who could dream up the idea of men all different colours—wow! You must be a real nut! I suppose like it’s allegorical, with the good people being white and the bad black?”

  “No, no, not at all—though I admit a few of the white saw it like that. Or did I invent it all, the whole colour question? Perhaps it’s all another facet of my guilt, an awful phantasm I have thrown up from the depths of my mind, where I did the murders. They can’t have any subjective reality, either. Wait! 1 remember! I’m nearly there! Fyodor Dostoevsky, I’m coming!”

  Hurriedly, he punched the policeman in the chest and braced himself for the reciprocal blow....

  * * * *

  He was tramping through the sand, ankle deep even in the main street of this shabby town. In the side streets, the sand climbed almost to the eaves of the shoddy wooden houses. Among the houses were buildings that he identified after a moment’s thought as mosques; they were no more than huts with wooden minarets added. There were Tartars here, moving slowly in their costumes of skin, some leading the two-humped camels of Bactria behind them through the street.

  The man with whiskers and a stoop was just ahead of him. Morovitch drew level and looked sideways. He recognized the beetling brow and the haunted eyes, set deep in their sockets.

  “Second Class Soldier of the Line Dostoevsky?” he asked.

  Dostoevsky stared back at him. “I’ve not seen you in Semiplatinsk before. Are you with the Seventh Siberian Battalion?”

  “The correct answer to that, operatively, is no. I—well, sir, if I could talk to you for a moment... the fact is ...”

  “It’s not a message from Marya Dmitrievna, is it?” Dostoevsky asked impatiently, his face pale.

  “No, no, nothing so banal. In fact, I have come from the future to speak to you. Please, cannot we go to your room?”

  Dostoevsky led the way in a sort of daze, shaking his head and muttering. He was still serving out his exile in Siberia, no longer as a convict but as a humble soldier in the army. His present home, to which he led Morovitch, was of the simplest, a poor room in one of the small wooden houses, containing little more than a bed, a table and one chair, and a round iron stove that could scarcely heat the flimsy room when the cruel winter came round again.

  Humbly, Dostoevsky offered the intruder the chair, sat down on the bed himself, and produced some tobacco so that he and the visitor might roll themselves cigarettes and smoke together.

  He passed a hand wearily over his face. “Where do you say you come from ? You’re not—not a Decembrist ?”

  “I am from what to you is the future, sir. In my age, my race recognizes you as one of the great novelists of the world, by virtue of your profound insight into the guilt always lingering in the human mind. You are one of the supreme artists of suffering.”

  “Alas, I can write no more! The old ability has gone!”

  “But even now you must be gathering together your notes on prison life for the book you will call The House of the Dead. Turgenev will say the bath-house scene is pure Dante. It will be read and remembered long after you are dead, and translated far beyond the bounds of your native Russia. And greater masterpieces of guilt and suffering will follow.”

  Dostoevsky hid his face in his hands. “No more! You will silence me forever if you speak thus, whether I believe it or not. You talk like the voices inside me, when another attack is coming upon me.”

  “I travelled back to you from the far future through a series of epileptic hosts. Others of my kind travel back through other illnesses—it is a matter of what we specialize in. I plan to travel slowly back through the generations to Julius Caesar, and beyond that ... but you are a very important landmark on my way, for you are integral to the whole philosophy of my race, honoured sir! Indeed, you might say you were one of the founders of our philosophy.”

  The writer rubbed the back of his neck in discomfort and shuffled his rough boots on the floor, unable to look straight at Morovitch. “You keep saying ‘our race’ and ‘our kind’, but what am I to understand by that? Are you not Morovitch?”

  “I have infested Morovitch. We are parasitic—I am merely distorting his life a little, as I have distorted the lives of those I infested on my way back to you. Ah, the emotions I have stirred! How you would relish them, Fyodor Mikhaylovich! I have been in all kinds of persons and in all kinds of worlds, even in those that lie close in the probability spectrum to Earth—to some where man never formed himself into nationalities, to one where he had never divided into races with different coloured skin, to one where he never managed to gain supremacy over his fellow animals! All, all those worlds, absolutely stuffed with suffering! If you could see them you might think you yourself had created them.”

  “Now you mock me! I can create nothing, unless I have created you. Forgive me if that sounds insulting, but I have a fever on me today, which induces me to doubt somewhat your reality. Perhaps you’re part of my fever.”

  “I’m real enough! My race—you see I use the term again, but I would find it difficult to define it to you. You see, there are more millions of years ahead than you could comprehend, and in those long periods man changes very radically. In my time, man is first dependent on a milk-meat animal he breeds—a sort of super-cow—and then entirely parasitic upon it. Over a millennia, he develops an astounding freedom and can travel parasitically back through the generations, enjoying the suffering of all, like a silverfish boring back through the pages of a large and musty volume: a silverfish who can read, sir, if you follow my image. You see—I let you into the secret!”

  Dostoevsky coughed and stubbed out his ragged cigarette. He sat uncomfortably on the narrow bed, crossing and recrossing his legs. “You know I cannot believe what you say ... Yet, tell me no secrets! I already know enough for one man; I’m burdened with knowledge about which I often ask myself, What good is it ? And if it is true, as you say, that I have understanding of some of the dark things in the human heart, that’s only because I have been forced— though often I myself was the forcer—to look into the dark things in my own heart. And I have tried to reach truth; y
ou are admitting, aren’t you, that you distort the lives you—well, if I say ‘infest’, it is your own word, isn’t it?”

  “We get more fun ... A couple of days ago, I caused a Belgian dentist to jilt his girl friend. Maybe he even murdered her! We live on the dark passions. The human race always had a morbid tendency that way, you know, so don’t think of us as too abnormal. Most literature is just gloating over the sorrows and sins of others—of which you are one of the supreme and most honoured exponents.”

  There were little flies that flipped down from the stained walls and landed persistently on the hands and faces of the two men. Dostoevsky had rolled himself another cigarette and drew heavily on it, looking less as if he enjoyed it than as if he supposed it might defeat the flies. He spoke ramblingly. “You have the case all wrong, sir. Forgive me if I criticize by remarking that your attitude seems very perverted and vile to me. I have never revelled in suffering, I hope ...” He shook his head. “Or perhaps I have, who knows? But you must leave me, for I feel remarkably ill of a sudden, and in any case, as I say, you are wrong.”

  Morovitch laughed. “How can millions of years of evolution be ‘wrong’ in any sense? Man is what he is, becomes what he is from what he was. Strong emotions are a permanent need.” He rose. Dostoevsky, out of politeness, rose too, so that for a moment they stood very close together, staring into each other’s eyes.

  “I shall come back to see you tomorrow,” Morovitch said. “And then I shall leave this ignorant tribesman and infest—well, sir, it will be the greatest connoisseur’s treat possible from our point of view—I shall infest you, and finally gain new insights into what suffering is like. It was so as to apply, as it were, the gilt to the gingerbread, that I called first, so that I may know you inside and out.”

  Dostoevsky began to laugh, but it broke at once, changing into a cough. “I see you are, as you claim, an illness.”

  “Tomorrow, I will be part of your illness. Goodbye, sir, and thank you for your courtesy and evident disbelief— until tomorrow!”

  He turned towards the door, on which the writer had hung a battered painting of a woman. As he did so, Dostoevsky bent quickly down and snatched up the poker from its resting place beside the stove. With a mighty swing, he brought it down across the man’s unprotected head, much as Raskolnikov would one day be described as bringing down the hatchet on the old lady’s head in Crime and Vunishment. With scarcely a groan, Morovitch sank to the floor, one arm sprawling out across the crumpled bed.

  Dostoevsky put the poker down. Then he began to tremble.

  <>

  * * * *

  IMAGE OF DESTRUCTION

  John Rankine

  Dag Fletcher of the Inter-Galactic Organization, who started “life” in the first volume of New Writings In S-F, runs into one of his toughest assignments as he takes the mixed crew of an Interstellar starship on a mysterious rescue mission.

  * * * *

  One

  Dag Fletcher broke total concentration and switched out the glowing presentation panel which was pushing data at him in a steady stream of stimuli. There was no doubt, the matters which found their way to his desk were those which other people had found difficult to deal with.

  He left his padded chair and roamed impatiently round the broad, oval penthouse room, reflecting that it would not be long before he fitted a matching padded wall to beat his head on.

  High up in the Northern Hemisphere Space Corporation Headquarter Block, he could see the intricate complex spreading out round him, at once familiar and yet, on occasions, totally strange. The recurring, central pivotal theme of his professional life, and yet only one place among many, one reality among an infinity of possibilities.

  This was a dangerous mental tack to sail and he recognized its perils. The new chairman label on his penthouse door might come to hang like an albatross round his neck; but no one could cut it free. It was his own choice and he was stuck with it.

  Out left, on the distant perimeter, he could see the towering spires of the slender ships he directed on their incredible inter-stellar missions. For a year now, since Spencer’s death, he had been top man in the Corporation, and now he knew what pressures had gone to sour his late chief’s temper and put the lines on his craggy face. Reluctantly, he was brought round to an admiration of the diplomatic skill which Spencer had deployed. It was in this committee management field where he knew himself to be least successful.

  No detail of logistics escaped the fine net of his attention, no problem that might face his commanders on their far-flung enterprises could find a gap in his practical experience. To the space crews, he was a kind of superman. Every fantastic mile of every mission, they had tangible evidence of his absolute paternal care. It was true to say that they would accept any direction he gave as if it had come down from a mountain, graven on a stone tablet.

  The Executive Committee, with its political links and its allegiance outside the service was another matter. Also the many thousands of ground staff were less inclined to bow to the throne. They could only follow the curt, military-style memos which he used as an instrument of government and think of him as the autocratic god in the ivory tower.

  Moreover, in the years as chief trouble-shooter for Chairman Spencer, he had weeded out a number of misfits from active service in the fleets. No one likes to be found inadequate, particularly if he knows he is; even when being grounded carried a technical promotion and extra pay. Colleagues knew the score and a certain bitterness remained to rankle and grow.

  Dotted about the huge complex, they formed a potential lobby against the new chairman. Not particularly active, he was a dangerous man to cross; but lying like grains of sand in the delicate machinery of control. Fletcher was not unaware of it. But he reckoned it as one of the inescapable byproducts of command. One of the things which were attached to that “Chairman” label. And yet he also knew that Spencer had always managed these affairs with the minimum of personal enmity.

  Back at his elaborate console desk, he stubbed a piano-key on the local-environment-block. A double wall of glass rolled silently away and he walked out on to his roof-garden into warm mid-morning sunlight.

  Now he could hear the ships and the world was alive round him. That would be Interstellar Three-Four, dead on schedule, building to that crescendo of effort which would lift her off. He could not control an involuntary tightening of his nerves. Less than a minute now for them before they burst out of this constricting shell and into their independent world. Their own small planet, held together by their own expertise against every hostile force in the book.

  Acting on impulse, he strode back inside and flicked in the over-riding priority line to the blockhouse. His face came up life-size on the master screen and he said, “Controller, put me through to Three-Four.”

  Then he was looking into the control cabin of the vibrating ship, with the sweep hand on her commander’s console eating into the red quadrant. He came up as an inset, top left on the main scanner, lean face lined and tanned, short cropped, fair hair with its narrow iron-grey streak, legacy of a searing mission, eyes grey-green, snapping with eagerness.

  He said, “Neal, good trip. I’d like to join you.”

  Commander Neal Banister, one of the senior captains of the service had time to say, “Thank you, Chairman. You’re welcome. Any time.” Then he exercised the prerogative of principal executive of a moving ship and cut Fletcher out of the picture.

  It was what Dag himself would have done and he could not fault it. But it was as if a door had been slammed in his face. Grounded, by God! Out of the mainstream of action which made the service what it was. He could imagine the feeling in that ship. A well-integrated crew, confident of their expertise as the most highly trained technocrats their planet had ever produced.

  Fletcher set himself to work with an anesthetizing dedication. Spencer had once said to him, “I work a five point plan, Fletcher. Long ago I found that it works out. Do one thing at a time. Know the probl
em. Learn to listen. Learn to ask questions. Learn to tell sense from nonsense.”

  It seemed a long time ago; though it was not so long as that, in the time measured by chronometers. A collection of truisms; but he had come to appreciate that therein lay all the mystique of management.

  He worked steadily on a two-hour stint to subdue his impatient flesh and beat the robot to its knees with a repetitive flash coming up all pending business clear.

  It was not until a week later, at the same vulnerable morning hour, that he was moved again to regret his deskbound lot and this time the stimulus-surge tripped a oneway relay in his computer mind which could only take him along a path of action.

  Banister came up on the confidential scrambled link which brought his voice directly to the penthouse, breaking through all routine circuits and sending up an alarm bleep on the immense chart which localized the last plot of his ship.

  His voice, shorn and parcelled by a hundred relays, but unmistakable in timbre, said, ‘There’s a thing come up, Dag, you should know. Final briefing brought up a detour on this trip. Sabazius. It carried your personal authorization so I let it go. Is that right?”