New Writings in SF 4 - [Anthology] Read online

  Rick got a cigarette out of his windcheater pocket and fumbled it alight. He was angry with himself; he was acting and thinking like a kid fresh from High School. What he was going to do was ride on up and check the place; and if there was nobody around he was going to phone back to Saskeega and somebody was going to get taken apart. That was all there was to it.

  There were folk there. There was a patrol car, he saw the roof-flasher from a couple of miles down the road. Somebody was waving a lamp. He stopped the car and got out. The wind was evil; it felt like a solid, animate thing. He leaned into the gusts, tacked across to High Eight.

  It was quieter inside, the wind was muted and the housings were silent because the lines were out. A couple of the night maintenance staff from Saskeega were there, and two cops. They were standing in a group looking at the bus bars. One of the engineers was saying “Gee, look at that! Gee, look at that!” He was talking softly, like somebody at a pretty firework display. “Gee, look at that...!”

  The Thing squatted with its back turned to Rick, showing him the top of its bald head. Its hands were on the bus bars, but he wasn’t holding the contacts any more. Its arms were burned off at the wrists. The stumps sticking out from the body were dried and twisted. The man must have dived in head first, got hold of the bars one in each hand. God alone knew how...Then they’d got hold of him and the arcing hadn’t stopped till his arms were burned apart. All round for yards across the concrete floor were the black scars where the sparks had drummed and hissed.

  The wind howled outside. The man said, “Gee, look at that...!”

  Rick turned round on him, managed to talk somehow. “Turn it off, will you? Just turn it off...

  The engineer looked at him and shook his head. “Gee, Rick,” he said. “Just look at that...!”

  The overseer walked the length of the building to the phone. He rang through to Saskeega, got the duty engineer in West Power Block. He said harshly, “Donnell, what in Hell you playing at down there?”

  There was a lot of static on the line. It was hissing and crackling like it was trying to talk as well, a gibberish of embryonic words. Rick could hardly hear his own voice. He said, “What in Hell you playing at?” Suddenly he couldn’t stop himself yelling. He felt he wanted to take somebody and pound their face in because of what had happened. But there was no one to blame...

  Donnell sounded half crazy. “Rick, I don’t know what happened, I don’t know how in Hell it happened. Trips shoulda pulled the line, they stayed in. Trips didn’t work, I don’t know what in Hell happened...”

  Cameron swore. “What are you using for eyes down there, what about your line volts? What you doing down there, what you using for eyes ...?”

  A great guffaw of static. Then, “I pulled the line soon as the volts jumped, Rick, I don’t know what in Hell happened...”

  “Soon as Hell you did. Guy’s hands fried off up here, Donnell, while you were sitting waiting for your meters to kick. You took his hands off his body, God damn it, you took ‘em right off his body...”

  “Rick, I don’t know how in Hell—”

  The overseer slammed the phone down and got out. The whole place smelled like somebody had been cooking meat with no salt, and he knew within two minutes he was going to be sick as a dog.

  They had to wait while photographs were taken. You always had to have pictures of a thing like that, Rick reflected bitterly, just in case you ever managed to forget it. Then they started clearing the lines. Rick would have called Stan but it would have done no good; he’d gone off to a big convention the afternoon before, he wasn’t expected back for a couple of days.

  Power was restored about six in the morning, and Rick Cameron drove back down to Saskeega and into a hornets’ nest; the feeder had been out most of the night, they’d had to pull juice from half across the country to keep Sand Creek alive. He called Stan long-distance from his office. He still felt pretty shaken up. He had to try three hotels before he reached his boss, when he came on the line he already knew what had happened. Stan flew back the same morning, he was in Saskeega in about six hours. They went down together to see Sheriff Stanton.

  They’d taken all the precautions they could; the lock on the door had been fixed, but the second victim hadn’t got in that way. There were a couple of windows in the transformer house, they were fairly small and they had heavy bars across, but it looked like the suicide had pulled the bars out with his bare hands and the glass and frame as well. There was no sign of anything he could have used as a lever and there was blood on the sill and on the floor inside, a trail of it to the bus bars. It looked as if he’d torn his hands to pieces smashing the window. Stanton said maybe more would be known after the autopsy, but it looked plain enough; the guy had been crazy, like the hobo. He shook his head. He said he’d known the dead man, he was a farmer from down in Indian Valley. He said, “Beats me how a little guy like that could have busted that window apart. He must have been deranged, crazy as Hell ... but that don’t help us none, what you boys goin’ to do about this ?”

  The Saskeega men looked at each other a little blankly. Then Stan said, “Don’t seem to be much we can do, Andy. Like you said, suicides happen. If a guy goes crazy we can’t read his mind. We didn’t kill those folk.”

  Stanton grunted. “Your juice did. Look fellers, I seen things like this before. Take my word. Not on the lines, that’s something new, but I’m telling you if there’s a suicide, say a drowning, and the word goes round, you’ve got a dozen more. Seems the idea gets in peoples’ minds, triggers half the potential nut cases in the county. Now I’ve seen this and I don’t want no more bodies coming down off that mountain, what’re you going to do?”

  Rick said carefully, “You think maybe the old guy heard about the hobo?”

  “Don’t see how. Lived on his own, got a little place way out of town, hardly ever saw any folks. I’ll check on it, but I don’t see how in Hell he could have known.”

  Stan said, “Well, we can’t write it off as just bad luck. What say we put a guard on that place a few nights, Rick, till things quiet down?”

  Rick thought of the blackness up there, the wind talking in the wires all the night through. The warning lights that Judy reckoned said come on. ... He said, “Two men, Stan, and better arm ‘em. Makes ‘em feel better.”

  Stan looked at the overseer sharply, but nothing more was said. He brought the thing up again that night though, while Rick was driving him home. “Two lots of double time just to watch one bloody little transformer stage, see no more crazy bastards turn themselves into rare steak...The old man’s going to nail my ears to the wall for this, Rick. They want a guard, I say put on a guard, fine, put a guard on the place. But why the Hell two?”

  Rick narrowed his eyes and squinted at a bend. “You like to do it, Stan, you do it on your own?”

  He said, “I’d do it if I had to, and you damn well know it, what’n Hell you getting at?” He sounded surly. Rick glanced at him quickly. That wasn’t like Stan...

  They posted the guards and that took care of things at High Eight for a time. But High Eight wasn’t the real worry. What Rick wanted to know, what Stan wanted to know, what it seemed everybody in Saskeega wanted to know was why those trips hadn’t worked. On all high-tension lines there is gear designed to kill the circuit in an emergency, if, for instance, a tower blows down or gets struck by lightning. If the lines stayed in they’d burn up everything, fry anybody within yards as well. That’s what the trips are for, in the event of a major short they pull the plug after three or four seconds at the outside. But the suicide had been on the bars a lot longer than that and the lines didn’t cut at all till Donnell shut down by hand.

  That was another mystery, of course. How could Donnell and the whole night staff have missed seeing things were wrong? Donnell swore he took action as soon as the voltage went crazy and he was a good engineer, Stan knew that. “But the Hell, Rick,” he said worriedly. “He didn’t pull those lines till there was nearly nothin
g left of the guy, he didn’t pull till the voltage had steadied again. He could have had the whole feeder burn out under his nose. Under all their noses...”

  The Controller questioned everybody, but he could get no leads. There just didn’t seem to be a reason for any of it. The trip gear was checked a dozen times, there wasn’t a thing out of place. That line just had to pull. And yet it didn’t.

  They had to leave things like that. Nobody liked it, but there wasn’t anything to be done. The guards were kept on High Eight a couple of weeks, but nothing else happened. Rick put another set of bars on the window, had the door double-locked and hoped the line had settled down for good. But it had not. The day after the guards were removed Saskeega lost three men.

  Two of them were killed in a chopper that crashed into the cliff right below High Eight. Nobody could explain it; a farmer who saw it happen said the machine just turned and flew straight at the rock. The Company ran half a dozen helicopters, they were good for patrolling lines in awkward country. Stan grounded the rest as soon as he heard; that didn’t make Rick’s job any easier. He tried to make the best of it. He was sanguine enough to realize there was nothing else his boss could have done.

  The other death was on the Indian Valley feeder as well. The man’s name was Halloran, Rick had known him very well. He was half Irish, hadn’t seemed to have a nerve in his body. He was boss of one of the maintenance gangs, he’d been with Saskeega for years.

  He took a truck out that day, nobody saw him go. Nobody missed him either. About five in the afternoon a patrol came through from Indian Valley on a routine job, saw something they never would have believed. One of the men told Rick later, they drove down and stopped and got out of the car and stood staring, and they still could hardly believe. Parked beside one of the towers was the trouble wagon; and up above it, way up in the sky, Jim Halloran was crouched over an insulator stack, blue fire in his hands and the pain of the Pit in his eyes...

  Rick began to lose staff. They sloped off in ones and twos, found other jobs where they wouldn’t have to keep looking over their shoulders wondering who was going next. Halloran’s death hit them harder than anything else that had happened. Old farmers can go crazy, bums can get tired of life, but Halloran was a guy they’d worked with, got drunk with. He wouldn’t have killed himself, that was what they muttered. Something dragged him up to that tower, he didn’t take his own life, and whatever the something was, if it could kill a guy like Halloran it could do anything.

  Rick knew the rumours were going round, but there wasn’t a thing he could do. He’d got his hands full as it was; there was a lot of routine work on the lines, repair jobs were always coming up; kids out for kicks shooting up the insulators, all sorts of things like that. The choppers were still being taken apart to find out what made them fly into rock walls, he’d had to split the remnants of half a dozen gangs and make up new bosses, and there was trouble there. Always friction when a thing like that has to be done. He was working most hours God gave, his wife was headed for a nervous breakdown on account of all the trouble, he’d just about had enough. Then he heard about Stallion Jim.

  It seemed one of the gangers was a halfbred Indian. Whatever the truth of his tale, he reckoned years back his people had owned most of Saskeega County. He said that Indian Valley had been their chief hunting ground, which explained its name, and that the Black Horse was sacred land, the home of the tribal gods. Stallion Jim was the boss spirit or totem, and there was a legend that one day he would return and drive the white-eyes back into the east. There would be portents when that happened, thunder and lightning on the peak, and people would be killed by fire from the sky. It all fitted in very nicely, and it was just about what was needed to start a general rout.

  Rick decided this was one thing he could knock over the head. He had the Indian—Joey, they called him—in his office, and had the mother, father and grand-daddy of all rows. He told him one more word out of him about phantom horses or curses or fire from above and there’d be more fire than he knew what to do with right down on earth, and he’d personally kick him to the other side of Saskeega. Joey didn’t answer much; but even while his boss was bawling him out his eyes were flicking to the window of the office. The lines were visible from that window, threading away towards the hills, and the Black Horse was lowering in the distance...

  The Indian saved Rick his trouble. He lit out the same day, they never saw him again.

  But the damage had been done. Saskeega lost more men than ever till Rick was practically working with skeleton crews. He didn’t have a day off for a month; then he got sick and tired. He told Judy to pack a lunch, they’d be getting out for a time. He’d seen as much of the Company as he wanted, if the whole shebang fell apart while he was away it was just too Goddam bad.

  They drove round the long way to Indian Valley. It had always been one of Judy’s favourite spots. It was a hot day. Rick pulled the car off the road under a group of trees. They sat and talked and ate the meal; then he leaned back and smoked a cigarette, and looked through the leaves to where he could see the Black Horse framed in the distance. The top of the mountain seemed to move as he stared at it, crawling forward against the clouds and not getting anywhere. Rick started to doze; he was feeling at peace with the world.

  There was the most fearsome noise he’d ever heard. It wasn’t like thunder, wasn’t like anything he could think of. It filled the air, it was deep and hollow at the same time, a series of concussions that hit him like punches under the heart. There was nothing to see, just the mountain and the sailing clouds. He sat with the cigarette in his fingers and his mouth open. The row lasted maybe ten seconds, maybe twenty. When it finished Judy started to whimper. She said, “Stallion Jim. . . She ducked, like the sight of the mountain was burning her. It was the first time Rick knew she’d heard the story.

  He shoved her in the car and started up. He had no idea what he was going to do, he just knew he was going to get away from that place but fast. The noise had shaken him up badly, more badly than he was prepared to admit either then or later. He heard himself saying over and over, “Was a storm, honey, it was thunder, that’s all...” But he didn’t even believe that himself. The din hadn’t sounded like any thunder he’d ever heard. It had sounded just like it should; like the beat of huge, horrid hooves round the mountain...

  They got home, the phone was raising Hell. Would Rick Cameron go up to the Black Horse right away, Station Seven had exploded.

  He didn’t waste time explaining that transformer stages don’t explode, he just put Judy back in the motor and drove down to Stan’s place. Jeff was at home; he thanked God for that at least. She looked pretty white herself; Rick said things were under control, could she look after Judy while he went up the hill. He felt better after that; he knew his wife would be O.K. He drove for the Black Horse.

  He didn’t make good time. Traffic was stalled on the mountain, somebody said a tower was down across the road. Rick would have got through faster with a trouble wagon, but he’d only got his private car and no identification. In the end he gave up arguing. He drove through on the wrong lane and the Hell with everybody. He got up to Number Seven, the tower wasn’t down, but she was leaning out across the road like she’d come any minute. The sky was full of cables. Rick left the car and walked.

  It looked like half Saskeega had got there in front of him. Stan was there and Sheriff Stanton, they said old man Perkins had been up but he’d cleared off again. That suited Rick fine. He went and had a look at what was left of the stage. There wasn’t much; a few bits of metal scattered around, some lumps of concrete, pieces of the insulator stacks. Where the transformers had stood was a hole. A crater. It was twelve, maybe fifteen feet deep and thirty feet across. It had an obscene look about it, it was black inside like the earth had been burned, and it threw rays and arms out across the road like a filthy star. Rick walked to the edge of it with Stan, stood looking down. He didn’t know what to think. He said quietly. “How do you read th
is, mister?”

  His boss shook his head. “Only one answer. Somebody blew it. We been sabotaged but good...”

  The linesman stared at him, grinning without humour. “No. Oh, no ... somebody blew it? You mean, they blew this thing up ? You just see that hole, Stan, you know what it’d take to dig that out? You worked out what size charge you’d put in to make a hole like that?”

  Stan looked angry. “So they didn’t know what they were doing. They used a big charge.”

  Rick nodded. “Yeah, they did. They used a big charge. And that row I heard was the charge going off. Yeah.”

  He walked round the lip of the crater. Stan followed up. He said, “So it blew on its own. How’s that, Rick, it just sort of blew up. Just like so.”

  Rick could feel the sweat starting out on his face. It was like he was going crazy. He said, “Transformer stages do not explode. I am a working stiff, I am not too bright in the head, I just know this, transformer stages do not spontaneously ... explode.”