New Writings in SF 19 - [Anthology] Read online

  Jeremiah looked up from his examination of the birds. ‘I didn’t think it mattered,’ he said softly. ‘It doesn’t always happen like that; only when it’s stormy outside, in the summer. I put it down to condensation. We know that the plant Down Below isn’t in good shape. I’d worked it out that the pressure inside Festive is a little lower than Outside and colder too. I thought it was humid air condensing.’ He looked at Jillie, pleading. ‘Like steam from a kettle,’ he mumbled.’

  ‘Balls,’ retorted David crudely. ‘You’re just covering up for yourself. That sort of excuse will get you nowhere.’

  ‘David-’

  ‘And you, too, Jillie. You believe what you want to, like all women. You ignore hard facts. Two people died, remember that. I might have died myself. I couldn’t breathe —I know that much. I ought to go for treatment myself; God knows what poison I’ve got inside my lungs.’

  ‘You needn’t bother, David,’ said Jillie firmly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no poison in your lungs. I’ve just got back from the Medicentre, remember? Those two people—they weren’t poisoned, they had weak hearts. They were asphyxiated and died from heart failure. The others all recovered with no ill-effects.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ David flushed angrily. ‘Are you trying to tell me I imagined that white filth that came in? I tell you I couldn’t breathe. I choked. You saw me.’

  ‘I saw you ... but you were choking because of what you saw—when you knew the window was gone your windpipe closed in a reflex spasm. The same thing happened to the others. It became mass hysteria in an instant. You’ve been so conditioned to the theory that the Atmosphere is poisonous that your mind accepts this as a fact and refuses to allow you to breathe it.’

  ‘Then what was the white stuff ? We both saw it again, just now.’

  Jillie smiled. ‘Condensation, just like Jeremiah said ...’

  David grunted. ‘I prefer to believe the evidence of my own eyes, thanks. I saw people die breathing that muck. I tell you, nothing can live Outside...’

  Jeremiah looked up; his eyes were bright.

  ‘Something can, David,’ he said. ‘Look!’

  David’s eyes widened as he stared from the fluttering object cupped in the old man’s hands to the row of motionless, switched-off birds on the tubular perch ...

  ‘They’re not really very good replicas, after all,’ observed Jeremiah shakily. ‘But they were good enough to fool this little fellow.’

  Uttering soft bubbling sounds the bird regarded them with bright, alert interest.

  * * * *

  ‘I don’t know ...’ muttered David. ‘For God’s sake, I just don’t know. Maybe you’re right. I don’t know ...’

  Jillie stared at him in futile anger. ‘What more proof do you want? Don’t you see? This is the sort of evidence we’ve been waiting for—this is the proof which you can take to the Council, and if they won’t listen or if they make any attempt to suppress it, we can blow the whole of Festive wide open by making it public ourselves, and showing people. And then we can live the way we were meant to live, in the Open Air, with no fear of radiation or any other sort of pollution, because if the Atmosphere will support birds, it’ll support us. Just imagine it, David! We could get away from this place, perhaps tomorrow, and people would see us, and follow. And if the Council and all the other yellow-bellies Down Below want to stay behind, that’s up to them. But they can’t deny the rest of the people a chance to live properly.’

  David stared at the bird, irresolute. ‘Suppose they can’t bring themselves to breathe, even after we’ve shown them the bird ? We’ve been in Festive a long time, Jillie.’

  Jeremiah was watching the two of them impatiently. His gaze wandered about the small room, taking in the stone walls, the pathetic skylight, the piles of rubble littering the floor, the cracked ceiling, the rough, ancient furniture. He heard the faint hiss from the air duct and the muffled footsteps and occasional chattering from the corridor. He sniffed and could smell the odour of Festive anew, although his nose had had a lifetime to get used to it. Suddenly, he realised that all this, the impressions of a lifetime, was perhaps not worth so very much ...

  He released the pigeon which fluttered across the room, alighted on the perch and examined curiously its immobile companions.

  Moving with surprising speed, Jeremiah snatched up a battered aluminium chair and flung it through the skylight.

  ‘Now, David!’ he shouted as shards of glass rained about him and the white clouds billowed in, ‘breathe, damn you, breathe!’

  David breathed.

  <>

  * * * *

  A MEMORY OF GOLDEN SUNSHINE

  Kenneth Bulmer

  There could be more than one way of travelling through Time—Race memory, for instance, which could be very useful in today’s turbulent world.

  * * * *

  ‘Time travel?’ said Harriet Milsom dubiously. ‘Do I believe in it?’ She pulled her elbow in over the door of the convertible and rubbed the slipstream-chilled skin reflectively. Her dark glasses regarded him slyly, two inky enigmas. ‘Should I believe, Harry?’ She knew exactly what she was doing. ‘Try to convince me.’

  ‘You’ll turn the Last Judgment into a joke, Harriet.’ Harry Hudson, as befitted a young man who considered himself a serious archaeologist, liked to concentrate humour and work into separate compartments. ‘I don’t mean actually travel in time-’ He jerked at the wheel and the convertible hissed around a clanging aluminium truck. The car swayed on soft springs throwing Harriet against the door.

  ‘You could see that truck a mile off!’ she protested in ruffled anger, shrugging her yellow and white dress straight. ‘I should never have let you drive.’

  ‘You can take over again after Andy’s.’

  Sunlight razored off the truck’s corrugated aluminium sides like ranked serrated blades.

  ‘If we get to Andy’s.’

  The restaurant lay ten miles short of the secondary turnoff leading to the bay and the beach and the twisted neck of water half-throttled by an overgrown island the locals called Leaf Island and Leaf Cove. That word Leaf sounded musically in Hudson’s ears. Already sea tang in the air braced his shoulders back as his nostrils widened.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ Harriet was saying in her brisk scalpel-fashion. ‘Professor Saintsbury has some respect for my brain power, admittedly in a field outside his own, even if none of us has the slightest respect for your driving capabilities.’

  He glanced obliquely at her, seeing the dark hair flaunting in the slipstream, the sunglasses, the lithe abandoned pose of the yellow and white dress—she was all a figure from the seventies and because of that the power of the brain behind the slightly petulant face should come as no surprise. Harriet Milsom and organic biochemistry had been soul-mates from grade one.

  Hudson wrenched the wheel again, hearing the tyres squirm, feeling himself squirm. Harriet had damn flaying ways. ‘I meant what I said. It would be sort of time travelling—if your synthesis holds up.’ The road ahead, leaping at him, white and demanding and insatiably there, represented life and urgencies of living. Leaf Cove and the dig, the coolness of the trenches, the yellowed whiteness of bone, the dirt-encrusted artifacts that yielded to patient brushing a breathless wonder of time-past in time-present—these were the realities of life to Harry Hudson. ‘A sort of time-travelling,’ he said, again. ‘But only that. Only that.’

  ‘Don’t do yourself an injury, Harry.’

  So she could understand, then! As the red convertible squealed around a bend Hudson felt once more the tremor of sexual fear he had immediately experienced on seeing Miss Harriet Milsom for the first time. Her tentacles probed deeply.

  The restaurant showed ahead, streamlined, neon-lit, blaring, ringed by abandoned refuse awaiting a problematical collection, music drowned. Hudson pulled into the lot and stopped the car. He hauled on the handbrake click by click, feeling a sensuous tremor of r
eprieve. ‘Andy’s,’ he said. He took off his dark glasses, waved them vaguely, put them back on, climbed out of the car. Harriet had reached the door by the time he caught her; wiping his forehead, he was too late to act the gentleman.

  They sat in a booth with Cokes and for the moment were content just to let the fizzy tickle moisten the dust-lining of their throats.

  ‘What did you mean,’ she said at last, ‘if my synthesis holds up?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, Harriet.’ He shifted uncomfortably. ‘You know what I mean. No one knows if this scheme will work. It’s only my idea-’

  ‘And my chemistry.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. Oh, hell, Harriet—you know what I mean!’

  ‘All I know is you want me to synthesise a system for RNA production under controls as directed-’

  ‘By using ordinary drugs—like Alert Phase Seven Eight— you can produce extra large amounts of RNA in a person’s brain and this, we know, strengthens the memory-’

  ‘You’re picking it up very well, Harry.’

  He finished his Coke in a huff. His sports shirt clung to him and his slacks felt hot and sticky around his legs, clinging. ‘Care for another?’

  ‘Yes-’ she began and then paused. Hudson screwed his head around. In this hot weather black leather and crash helmets added a heightened flush to the faces of the motor-bicycle riders. They crowded in, taking off their helmets like space capsule riders, stamping their narrow legs, flexing corded muscles, talking loudly, blowing, the centre of a permanently carried about stage.

  Hudson turned back to Harriet and saw she was rising.

  ‘Time we were pushing on,’ she said tartly. ‘Professor Saintsbury will have everything set up by now.’

  ‘Yes.’ He spoke the word normally; but he felt it as a mumble.

  The black leather skid kids lined up at the counter.

  Their decision as to refreshment, taciturn, voluble, incoherent, bellicose, resulted in agreement of a kind. The argument, Hudson thought, the distaste in him stiffening his face, must have started over something else. Whatever started it was of no importance. One black leather back hit the floor; a boot struck. Someone yelled. A man at the nearest booth said something—Hudson did not know what —and a youth with a casual slap rapped him back into his seat.

  ‘Drag him, man, he ain’t worth a punch.’

  The massive Red Indian heads—all feathers and swastikas and wampum—painted in lurid colours on the black leather backs flicked around to the counter as gilt and brass trimmed fronts showed, leering faces above losing their sullenness in the promise of action.

  Hudson felt that the word punch did not mean a blow; more likely a puncture and that an in-word for something else. The man cowered back on the seat. He had tried to rise and leave; but a hand on his shoulder had forced him back.

  ‘Now, listen here-’ he began. The bluster drowned like a kitten in a bath tub.

  The boy who had been kicked on the floor struggled to his feet, glad that now other game had been flushed he could rejoin the wolf pack.

  Harriet said: ‘Where’s the counter-hand? We can’t just stand here and do nothing.’

  ‘No-’ said Hudson. He licked his lips. ‘No—we can’t do nothing-’

  Harriet pulled her dark glasses down her nose and stared at him. ‘Well-?’

  There were, he felt resentfully, all manner of correct things he could say and would be perfectly justified in saying, at length and at some heat; but nothing he could say now would retrieve this choicely disastrous situation. Nothing further need be said; certainly nothing need be done. Everything necessary had been catastrophically lined up, and dumped on his head with the unerring aim of all objects deposited from great heights.

  The counter-hand re-emerged from the kitchens and said: ‘I’ve called the cops. You’d better beat it.’

  One Red Indian essayed a smashing spree in the direction of a display case, but the counter hand slapped a sap down with a juicy thud and the motor-cycle riders took the hint. Noisily they left, their engines outside revving up like amused and uncaring raspberries, good humoured and deadly. Hudson swallowed.

  ‘Shall we go now, Harry?’ asked Harriet. The tone of voice thrust the misericorde in the last half inch.

  Useless to pretend that nothing had happened ...

  Useless to blind himself to what had been self-evident from the day he’d met Harriet Milsom. She strode like a young lioness from the restaurant, standing with her body flaunting its yellow and white dress on the steps, watching the motor cyclists, listening—as Hudson, too, listened—to their whistles and calls of appreciation. With ear-shattering roars the bikes took off, spitting dust.

  ‘Pity,’ said Harriet, leading the way to her red convertible. ‘They’re not going our way. And here comes the fuzz. If we weren’t in a hurry I’d-’

  ‘Professor Saintsbury-’ began Hudson.

  ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, Harry! I know!’

  He could have got his face smashed in and his ribs fractured, of course—he could have. No doubt, he thought with a mean-streak unusual to him, she’d have liked that.

  At Leaf Cove waited the trenches, the artifacts, the realities of life for Harry Hudson. That, at least, Harriet could not change.

  At Leaf Cove they scrambled straight from Harriet’s car down the steep track with its overhanging vegetation slashed back to the beach. Nine hundred years ago the place must have looked very different from this. Then there would have been wooden huts, the postholes of which were creating such a bitter argument now, mangy dogs, the smoke of wood fires, skins framed out to dry, the dragon ships pulled up on their false keels, out of the water and out of the element where they became foaming steeds of the ocean. Perhaps over there on that flat expanse a few youngsters would play with fierce ardour and wooden swords and shields the deadly games of their fathers. A hunting party might be returning, wild men of the Northland bringing their own reckless savagery to a land already well-provided with its own barbarism. The talk would be of the hunt and of the skraelings, and the prospects for the winter, and of the new expeditions from Greenland, and the awe-inspiring possibility that the Bishop of Greenland, himself, might visit this far-flung diocese.

  Professor Saintsbury welcomed them in with a curse.

  ‘If you two have been goofing off indulging yourselves-’

  Hudson, before Harriet could frame the thunderous rebuke flashing shrilly in her face, said: ‘We got here as fast as we could. Professor. I drove some of the way.’

  ‘Oh. Well, come on, I’m indulging you, Harry, with all this nonsense. I don’t have too much time to waste.’

  Professor Saintsbury had once played in the forward line and his shoulders attested to that. His dark hair and stub-bled chin, the driving personal magnetism of the male animal and his agate eyes had combined, in a way incomprehensible to Hudson, to place him in the chair of archaeology at the University. Hudson would have agreed that Saintsbury had, at one time, been rather a good archaeologist; but now ... Hudson jumped when the professor called.

  ‘Come right away, professor...’

  They walked between piles of dirt and detritus, sieves, shovels, picks, brushes, gangplanks, all the necessary impediments of a thoroughly conducted dig. Hudson called across to Alice Leathworthy, taking photographs, and she nodded back absently, engrossed with shadows and highlights. At the mouth of a trench they paused.

  ‘I thought this one, Harry.’ Saintsbury sounded brisk and no-nonsense. ‘If the runes were right and they did penetrate inland then it’s likely only the men made that expedition. This one is a man. Big fellow.’

  The Viking settlement had been raided and smashed by Indians, nearly a thousand years ago, and this man over whose grave they now stood had been buried by his companions presumably when they had returned from the interior. Where had they gone? Saintsbury and Hudson wanted to know. They wanted to know all there was to know about the North Men of North America. Hudson wanted to know because he was an archaeolo
gist and the concept had fired him passionately. Saintsbury wanted to know—sometimes Hudson wondered just why the athletic, woman hunting, popular professor wanted to know apart from the obvious reasons.

  Working with absorbed care they removed two of the exposed and parted vertebrae. ‘We’ve done everything we need to on this one, Harry, and by being late you’ve held us up.’ Saintsbury did not intend to let that little matter drop. Plainly, to Hudson, the professor experienced jealousy over Harriet. Hudson, prying loose part of the backbone of a Viking dead nine hundred years, wished there was reason for that jealousy.

  There had been no question in Hudson’s mind of querying Saintsbury’s choice of specimen. They carried their spoils up to the administration area and laid them carefully on a table in the lab tent. ‘This won’t take long,’ said Harriet firmly.