New Writings in SF 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  The general immobility struck a freak resonance in Fletcher’s mind which threw up the story of the girl in the shop who was asked, “Do you keep stationery?” and had to confess, “Well, I wriggle a bit.” This unseasonable gloss brought a small loss of concentration and he drew back a fraction of a second late as a round Sabazian head in the circle immediately below looked up to see if they still had a roof.

  There was a shouted warning and every head turned up like a circus audience seen from the apex of the big top. From far below, a staccato patter of orders, and a guard sent a single shot screaming up with its flat percussive crack echoing still as Dag reached the hollow column.

  He heaved himself out on to the platform as light filled the tube from below and far down, he saw movement filling it from side to side. As he pushed back the trap, hammer blows jarred it against his hands as the upcoming guard ran through a clip. Then he was taking time off to do a neatly designed piece of undercutting with the vibrator through which he could ram a wedge.

  Reaching the ladder in two strides, he went up in a rhythmic swing; glad it was short; feeling the gravity drag as though he had suddenly aged.

  At the top, he believed for a moment that he had made a mistake and the car was on the other side. But even as he pushed himself to a jog trot round the rotunda to find out, he knew it was no good.

  Certainly, it had gone. As he confirmed that it was so, a number of things happened at once. The force field was very much stronger, it built intolerably into a pounding, destructive rhythm, which isolated every cell in his ten-billion-unit computer brain and broke the conscious bonds which made him man. A last impression was that all the lights in Jasra had dimmed down to pin points of cherry red. He crumpled forward with arms outstretched on to the black basalt tiling.

  Arne Richardsen had made a command decision which ensured his future as executive material, but which gave him no immediate pleasure. The car’s low power system was swamped in the intense field. He could not raise Three-Four and it took him two seconds to know positively that he never would.

  He could stay where he was and go on trying until time ran out and be in the clear responsibility-wise. He could even go back to Fletcher and tell him how it was. Or he could take the initiative, leave his commander, take the signal himself in a forked stick like any traditional messenger-man.

  At full thrust, the small silver car moved like a flung dart and was docking below Three-Four’s entry port in under a minute.

  Banister cracked into a concentrated fury of action. Alarm bleeps sounded through the ship. Forty seconds after Richardsen’s arrival, with crew sealed up in their clutter of survival gear, he was leaving his front door as the last man out, and joined and strung-out line ploughing heavily through the lichen towards Interstellar X.

  They were twenty metres from Three-four when the perimeter lights cut out and the big-city glow in the sky above Jasra dimmed down.

  Materialized in three-dimensional solidarity beside Three-Four and sidling slowly towards her was a shining replica of the ship herself. Seemingly as substantial as the original. Correct in every minute detail with a nimbus of blue luminosity like St. Malo’s fire.

  They stood in the sea of lichen, feeling the intolerable tension even through the bulk of their protective gear. Heads turned back looking up. Like a procession of statues in a field.

  The slowly moving image touched its target. Moved on as circles intersect, overlap and finally coincide. There was only one ship. Interstellar Three-Four glowed brilliantly, faded, and was gone, leaving incredibly only its vacant lot. Gone as completely as if it had flamed on to complete its scheduled mission towards another planetfall.

  * * * *

  Five

  Susan Brault, back in the nest, saw the lights go down from the open roof where she had stood since the departure of the working party. Emotionally involved in the well-being of her commander, she instinctively felt that something was badly wrong and like Richardsen had a dilemma to rebut.

  Categorically told to stay where she was, there should have been only one outcome. But a conclusion arrived at on a deeper level than the conscious mind moved her to action. She jammed a chair where it would hold the sliding door, slung the carbine across her shoulders like a partisan, wound a length of line round her narrow waist and swung out on to the other party wall.

  She reasoned that going the same way as the others would be asking for double luck and in the event her choice was not unreasonable. The patio was empty and there were no lights, dimmed or otherwise, from the three rooms which opened on to it.

  A new vista of the city from this quadrant allowed a limited view of the port itself. She saw the end-game of Three-Four’s eclipse. The ship glowed as if flood-lit and then dissolved in darkness. Interstellar X remained comfortingly in silhouette against its backdrop of stars and rising ground light.

  It puzzled her but did not drown out her concern for Fletcher. This thing she had about him had started when she had first joined a crew from training wing. He had briefed the first mission, going out of his way to make it easy for her. After his incredible career he still had a fresh mind and could see the way ahead as if he stood exactly where she was standing.

  As she had learned more of what he had achieved, the dangers he had passed, her interest had grown. Now to be on the same crew was an unexpected bonus. But, except that he treated her with the attention any man would give to an above-averagely attractive girl, there was no move on his side to push the boat along. Obviously he had no special thought for her.

  In this analysis, she was way out. Dag Fletcher was not insensitive to the flattering attention he was getting; but in all modesty rated it as a by-product of his position in the corporation and the reputation he had. Hardly a personal issue at all. He deliberately kept his mind from the individual angle, because he knew he could very easily want more than she would be prepared to give.

  Giving her attention to the job in hand, Susan found that she had been trying unsuccessfully to get through the transparent screens for longer than she could afford. She ran back to the parapet, sure now that Fletcher needed help.

  From this penthouse roof, there was a treble storey drop of twenty metres to the next projecting patio. Doubled, the line would take her half-way. Thinking herself into an optimistic set, she went over the top and down in a lithe, handover-hand drop.

  Smooth surfaces against her face made every effort to contradict her mood. When she reached the end of the line, the case for optimism needed a new advocate.

  Two metres left, a recess went back to a window. She tried to remember what the windows were like and could only visualize long complete plates without support features. Right, there was nothing. Except that at extreme reach there was a wider slot than usual between the basalt block strata.

  Arms aching with strain, she unslung the carbine and explored the gap with its short muzzle. It went back about four centimetres. She wedged it in, clip and butt turning up. Hanging from it, one handed, she cleared the rope, fed it over the barrel in a convenient cooling fin and then carried on.

  At the bottom, she stood erect against the wall, taking deep breaths in a darkness which concealed the totally pleasing effect this dynamism gave to a trim and proportionate figure. Stepping back she considered the possibility of pulling the carbine free and catching it as it fell. Then she recognized that there were too many imponderables. Instead, she ran lightly to the next balustrade and saw that this one concealed only a normal one-storey drop.

  Susan Brault was in top physical shape in a service which took high ratings as a norm. She went over to full-arm stretch and dropped, turning as she fell to come out of the movement in a relaxed forward roll. She found she was at walkway level, and moved off at an easy jog-trot towards the great central tower which had been Dag’s objective.

  The walkways were empty, as though the people of Jasra knew better than to be out and about and she had to fight down a rising sense of panic and nightmare dread at her lone
liness in this alien place.

  Light was fully restored when she neared her objective and she had easy vision of a green-painted ambulance tender sidling in to dock at the level immediately below. Doors slid open in the entrance porch and a low trolley was wheeled out by a uniformed female Sabazian. There was no doubt who was lying on it and he appeared to be dead.

  Somewhere, at the back of her mind, had been the thought that once she joined up with Fletcher and Richardsen, whatever complications remained, her personal troubles would be over. Now the full insecurity of her situation dawned starkly on her. In any case, if Dag was dead she was facing a bleak moment of truth at every level.

  She checked a suttee instinct and held back. No guard followed the trolley out. The attendant ran it up a short ramp into the open back of the tender and pulled down its overswung door to a clip-fastener. Then she went round to join the pilot.

  Susan dropped down and had joined the corpse as the tender began to edge out of the bay. She found herself in a low-ceilinged oblong box with two berths, one above the other, with Fletcher in the bottom one. The forward bulkhead was solid to within half a metre of the roof and closed by a transparent screen for the rest of the way. Pilot and nurse appeared, head view, looking to the front. She lay flat on the floor, out of vision for any casual look round and took hold of his trailing hand.

  In spite of the warm night it was unseasonably cold. Testing for a pulse, she could not be sure, but believed it might still be faintly a going concern. Watching the window, she moved inch by inch until she was sharing his berth. Then she methodically went into a high-powered revival drill which would have resurrected a candidate from the valley of tombs.

  She zipped down his blue overall suit and peeled it off. Flat powerful torso with a white scar from left shoulder to right hip like a tattooed bandolier. Then she wriggled out of her jersey top and held him tightly, warming him with her tautly vital body in a total statement of form from knees to lips which breathed into his cold ones.

  It was a method to revive a far-gone exposure case and was as unfair to rigor mortis as it could get. Dag Fletcher had opened his eyes to some unexpected scenes but this one went into the file as top choice. He saw wide brown eyes centimetres from his own, dark brows flaring obliquely; a cowl of dark scented hair brushing his face, warm arms and the softly-firm pneumatic pressure of bare breasts against his chest.

  To say, “Where am I?” would have been unforgivable. He said as though her presence there was the most obvious and necessary thing, “Your eyes are nearly all pupil and the iris is like a dark gold ring. A very beautiful effect, Susan.” and took her in a grip which was convincing proof that he had rejoined the ranks of erotic man.

  She put a hand over his mouth and struggled clear, a feat requiring as much strength as anything yet in her busy evening. By the time she had grabbed her charcoal-grey top, he was back on frequency and similarly ready to postpone personal interest to the public good.

  He said, “They thought I was dead. Sabazian biological structure is pretty rugged. They would not detect respiration or pulse. You did a good job, Susan, and no man ever revived a better way. Next time I get hold of you, however, it will not be in the line of duty. So you’d better be on your guard.”

  She said, “Why, Commander, whatever do you mean?” But her eyes gave away the honest statement that she was all interest in the arrival of that day.

  Fletcher had a moment to reflect that he was more fortunate than any human-type being had a right to be and had to modify it as the Sabazian nurse belatedly turned round to see how the cadaver was taking the ride. She was all surprise to see that his eyes were open and he was zipping up his curious overall suit. The driver responded to her thump on his massive shoulder and took a look for himself, then he dropped the car in a lichen-covered space between rows of squat circular houses and slid back the screen which separated the quick from the dead.

  His simple task was to deliver the body to the converter on the moor outside Jasra where corpses were collected and re-structured into useful community products like soap, fertilizer and book-binding materials. Not much profit could be expected from the slender Earthman, but it would be a gesture towards covering expenses for the trouble he had caused. Certainly, there was nothing in the convenant about Resurrection.

  The Sabazian leaned through, head and shoulders, having thoughtfully picked a heavy jacking lever from its clip beside his seat.

  Rank and file members of the organization were not in the genius class and he brought his flail down with a carry-through which embedded it in a mash of broken springs and torn fabric. Fletcher, timing it to the last split second, rolled clear and grabbed the grey arm in an old-fashioned lock which threatened to break it off.

  The bar fell to the deck and was caught by Susan Brault who appeared like a comely genie and, without prompting, took a two-handed swipe through the open slot, which lifted Dag’s hair with the wind of its passing and caught the driver on the side of his neck. His grey turnip head lolled sideways in a very terminal way. Soap and fertilizer shares were looking up.

  The nurse, primarily a member of a semi-military organization, was bringing a carbine round to bear when Susan’s bludgeon on a second sweep drove it soggily against her ballooning chest and Dag had pulled it free before she could regain the initiative.

  He handed it to his Brunhilde. “Cover her, I’ll pull out the driver.”

  They left the man, a barely noticeable grey mound in the amethyst-blue lichen and Dag went on another kilometre before they dumped Florence Nightingale knee-deep in the heather. Then with Susan beside him, he turned back in a wide sweep for Jasra, now a bowl of brilliant light.

  The hospital tender was clumsy in use, with switch-gear which had been superseded a century ago on Space Corporation craft. Dag made two false moves which took them within a metre of collision before he got the hang of it and beat it up to a fair speed just above walkway level. Susan rode shot-gun with the carbine across her knees.

  She said, “Where are you taking me?” in the tone which pleasingly suggested that anywhere at all was all right by her.

  Dag Fletcher took time off to give her a long look. Whatever the outcome, which was very shaky indeed, he felt a surge of personal optimism in the life situation. It was all starting again for him and he realized what he had cut himself off from in the last year or two of concentrated work schedules.

  So far, the initiative had been all on her side. So he went down in a flamboyant dive and when the tender ploughed to a stop took a full minute by his time disc in spite of time’s special value just then, to show her beyond reasonable doubt that the ball was in his court and she was a marked woman.

  Then he was giving total concentration to the moves ahead. He said, “Can you raise Interstellar X on this heap’s primitive intercom ? They might have news of Arne.”

  She took under thirty seconds to tell him it was no go and he followed the same reasoning path as Richardsen had done and turned for the space port. Three-Four had certainly gone.

  * * * *

  Six

  Ten metres from the reception port of his own ship, grabs snaked out and held the tender in line with a static disintegrator. Banister’s voice, on a beamed hailer, penetrated the very fabric, using the clipped lingua franca of the Galaxy and in a tone which would have made any language sound nasty. It said, in essence, that he wanted one good reason for allowing the car to stay in recognizable molecular shape and he wanted it damned quick.

  Dag said, “Fletcher here and Executive Lieutenant Brault,” and the grabs retracted and pulled them up to the front door.

  Banister said, “Richardsen swore he’d seen you dead when he went back. He got away with a line of notches in the car. Hablum is in the open. He must believe he has a cast-iron case.”

  Fletcher said, “Interstellar Three-Four will cost Sabazius two hundred million and I’ll collect it myself. Where’s Richardsen now?”

  “Still out with the car. He went back to p
ick up Lieutenant Brault from your five-star hotel. Thank you, in passing, for the call. You could have been twelve crew down as well.”

  “Everything has its good side. We can put Interstellar X on a war footing. Sort it out, Neal, and take over in command. Bring in your co-pilot on the same basis. That will leave me free to run the I.G.O. political angle. No criticism of Paula Underwood, she’s a good navigator, but this is now a different mission. She can double with your number three. All your people in the executive slots except Ray. He must stay number one Power.”

  “I’ve worked with him before. I’d agree that.”

  “Then we have spare people to put on the armament. Susan Brault with me on the diplomatic chore ranked as Staff Lieutenant. Crew briefing as soon as you can make it and in any event in fifteen minutes.”

  It took all of that, with Interstellar X like a disturbed hive. Among Banister’s crew,’ Fletcher found an ex-I.G.O. gunner who had done his compulsory service in a corvette with similar armament. Carter by name, a tow-haired, phlegmatic type, who heaved himself into the corvette’s fire-control centre above the hydroponic tanks in the cone without asking a single question. He strapped himself into his gimbal-mounted couch, plugged himself in, ran through the controls and called up on the net. “Guns to Commander. All systems Go. Just tell me where and when.”