New Writings in SF 4 - [Anthology] Read online

  There was a shortcut onto the mountain, missing Freshet. A rough road, barely more than a track. He took the car on that and held her flat out, squealing her into bends, breaking off into the rough, smashing her chrome chops on boulders. He was trying to break her up like he was busting up inside. When he got to High Eight the lines were live again. Somebody had authorized Donnell to put them back in. Or they’d put themselves back in. It didn’t make any difference to Rick. Didn’t make any difference to the folk who had got there before him either.

  All through the night they’d been coming, the poor folk, the first of the ragged armies...They were piled round the bars, the transformers were singing there shoulder deep. And there were black skeins round the walls like the bugs in the trap, and overhead in the wires like a crop of filthy fruit. There’d been a cordon of troopers round the hill. It was hard to tell, but it looked like the guards were mostly underneath.

  Rick started to laugh. A thin noise, wild and high. Laughing at the people, at High Eight, at what he’d seen there, at what he’d promised Jeff. He’d said he’d bring Stan. If he had to carry him. But he couldn’t carry him. He couldn’t move him, he’d have broken, he was too brittle....

  He went back down the mountain. He never knew how he reached the bottom. He had to run the last half mile. He’d busted the car, she was seized solid.

  There was a big line store about a mile from Number Seven, they’d set it up when they did all the work on the hill. Rick was lucky; when he reached it one of the Company trucks was standing outside. There was nobody around. He broke the door open, loaded what he wanted in the back of the wagon. When she wouldn’t take any more he started up and went for Freshet like a bat from Hell. He couldn’t think any more. He just wanted to see Judy had got away, he wanted her clear.

  He drove into trouble. A roadblock. It hadn’t been there when he’d come down. There were poles across the road, he could see the army moving about behind. He stopped the truck and a soldier came over. He had a carbine in his hands and looked like he’d been told he could use it. Rick yelled at him he was Saskeega maintenance, he’d got an urgent job. He shoved his pass under his nose and the man fetched his sergeant.

  Cameron felt he was going crazy. What he’d got wouldn’t keep and he knew it. The sergeant came across. He was scared. He had a big, pasty face and the fear was in his face, he smelled of fright. He wagged his thumb at the truck. “Down, bud...”

  Just along the road Hell started breaking loose, shots and screams. A column of people was coming along. Soldiers firing over their heads, trying to turn them. It wasn’t making any difference, they were walking like they didn’t hear.

  Rick jabbed the throttle and let the clutch go. He heard the smack as the shoulder of the truck shoved the sergeant’s face out of the way then he was through the block, bouncing and skidding on the timbers and poles and scattering men every which way. Something rattled behind him; blue sky opened up over the windshield, then he was clear. They never came after him. It looked as if they had their hands too full.

  Rick got to his place, Jeff’s car was still in the drive. He rammed the truck in alongside and got out. Something made him look across to the garage. The port was up, his wife’s old Pontiac was gone. He tried to tell himself, it’s O.K., they took the Pontiac instead, it’s O.K., but it wasn’t any good. He felt fear. It was like a hand round his heart squeezing it until it could get no smaller, no colder. He walked slowly into the house. He called, “Judy ... ?”

  Nothing. No answer. Water running somewhere and another noise. He followed it. Came from the lounge. He walked in. There was a hairdryer lying buzzing on the carpet, a cord up to the wallplug.

  Jeff was in the kitchen, of all the crazy places. Sitting over the sink with her head down. Cameron lifted her. Blood was all down the side of the sink, spattered, red and pink, a pink fan spreading to the plug. Her face was gouged, hair to chin. Like she’d been clawed by a mountain cat. She’d gone to the sink to try to stop the blood but she couldn’t, she was hurt too bad. He let go of her, wasn’t anything he could do. He stood there and knew he couldn’t go crazy, not just for a while.

  He knew what had happened, he could see it so clearly. Judy did what she said, she kept off all electric things, but she forgot the drier. She bathed and changed and then she started the drier and let High Eight talk, held the motor right up by her face so she could hear it clear. He should have remembered, he should have told her about the drier....

  Jeff tried to stop her. When she heard ... whatever it was you heard, she went out and got the Pontiac and Jeff tried to hold her and she beat and beat and tore her face apart...But it wasn’t Judy that had done that, it wasn’t his Judy, it was a Thing that already belonged to High Eight. . . . And that was where she went, she left Jeff on the ground and drove up the road, and God can you hear me, she drove to High Eight...

  He should have done what she said. He should have taken her away, she was always so scared of the lines, she knew one day she’d have to go to the lines.

  It had taken Stan and it had taken Judy, it had taken everything he had. It had to take him. It knew he hated it, it knew he could kill it. It was up there sulking, deep in the windings, it was full and lazy, but it knew it had to move because he was coming to kill.

  Rick tried to hold his mind on what he had to do. On his back he had a box of caps, the truck outside was loaded with blasting sticks. Linked charges on the tower heads each side of High Eight, blow the lines and pin it. Then flatten High Eight, burst its foul blue heart...But he wasn’t going to make it. He had the caps ready, he was checking them, but he knew he wasn’t going to make it. He didn’t want to make it because he’d have to go inside, he’d have to pick Judy off the wires....

  It hit him, on the dot.

  High Eight calling....

  He reeled, hand to his head. It was like all the sound there ever was. Like music but not like music. Like the wind in trees. Like voices. Like Mom and Pop. Lovely and lovely and ugghh...

  Ugghh....

  Like Judy....

  It didn’t take him all at once. It tried, but it couldn’t. It had to rack up and down, and slide, move and slide, look for him, pinpoint...

  He was moving again, draggingly. The caps in his hand, blasting sticks in the truck, and the wind in the trees soughing, Judy calling and not to let go of the caps don’t ever forget ... and up ahead on the hill, movement. A shifting and crawling. A motion that was no motion. Molecules that were not molecules forming and dissolving, bubbling, frothing...

  And for the first time, fear...

  <>

  * * * *

  STAR LIGHT

  Isaac Asimov

  Herewith a little-known vignette from popular scientist-author Isaac Asimov, whose short stories and novels are among the best in the genre. Renowned for his theories on robotics, his novel concerning the robot detective R. Daneel Olivaw in The Caves Of Steel was dramatized on BBC TV 2 during 1963.

  * * * *

  Arthur Trent heard them quite clearly. The tense, angry words shot out of his receiver.

  “Trent! You can’t get away. We will intersect your orbit in two hours and if you try to resist we will blow you out of space.”

  Trent smiled and said nothing. He had no weapons and no need to fight. In far less than two hours the ship would make its Jump through hyperspace and they would never find him. He would have with him nearly a kilogram of Krillium, enough for the construction of the brain-paths of thousands of robots and worth some ten million credits on any world in the Galaxy—and no questions asked.

  Old Brennmeyer had planned the whole thing. He had planned it for thirty years and more. It had been his life’s work.

  “It’s the getaway, young man,” he had said. “That’s why I need you. You can lift a ship off the ground and out into space. I can’t.”

  “Getting it into space is no good, Mr. Brennmeyer,” Trent said. “We’ll be caught in half a day.”

  “Not,” sai
d Brennmeyer, craftily, “if we make the Jump; not if we flash through and end up light-years away.”

  “It would take half a day to plot the Jump and even if we could take the time, the police would alert all stellar systems.”

  “No, Trent, no.” The old man’s hand fell on his, clutching it in trembling excitement. “Not all stellar systems; only the dozen in our neighbourhood. The Galaxy is big and the colonists of the last fifty thousand years have lost touch with each other.”

  He talked avidly, painting the picture. The Galaxy now was like the surface of man’s original planet (Earth, they had called it) in prehistoric times. Man had been scattered over all the continents, but each group had known only the area immediately surrounding itself.

  “If we make the Jump at random,” Brennmeyer said, “we would be anywhere, even fifty thousand light-years away, and there would be no more chance of finding us than a pebble in a meteor swarm.”

  Trent shook his head. “And we don’t find ourselves, either. We wouldn’t have the foggiest way of getting to an inhabited planet.”

  Brennmeyer’s quick-moving eyes inspected the surroundings. No one was near him, but his voice sank to a whisper anyway. “I’ve spent thirty years collecting data on every habitable planet in the Galaxy. I’ve searched all the old records. I’ve travelled thousand of light-years, farther than any space-pilot, And the location of every habitable planet is now in the memory store of the best computer in the world.”

  Trent lifted his eyebrows politely.

  Brennmeyer said, “I design computers and I have the best. I’ve also plotted the exact location of every luminous star in the Galaxy, every star of spectral class of F, B, A and O, and put that into the memory store. Once we’ve made the Jump the computer will scan the heavens spectroscopically and compare the results with the map of the Galaxy it contains. Once it finds the proper match, and sooner or later it will, the ship is located in space and it is then automatically guided through a second Jump to the neighbourhood of the nearest inhabited planet.”

  “Sounds too complicated.”

  “It can’t miss. All these years I’ve worked on it and it can’t miss. I’ll have ten years left yet to be a millionaire. But you’re young; you’ll be a millionaire much longer.”

  “When you Jump at random, you can end inside a star.”

  “Not one chance in a hundred trillion, Trent. We might also land so far from any luminous star that the computer can’t find anything to match up against its programme. We might find we’ve jumped only a light-year or two and the police are still on our trail. The chances of that are smaller still. If you want to worry, worry that you might die of a heart attack at the moment of take-off. The chances for that are much higher.”

  “You might, Mr. Brennmeyer. You’re older.”

  The old man shrugged. “I don’t count. The computer will do everything automatically.”

  Trent nodded and remembered that. One midnight, when the ship was ready and Brennmeyer arrived with the Krillium in a briefcase (he had no difficulty for he was a greatly trusted man) Trent took the briefcase with one hand while his other moved quickly and surely.

  A knife was still the best, just as quick as a molecular depolarizer, just as fatal, and much more quiet. Trent left the knife there with the body, complete with fingerprints. What was the difference ? They wouldn’t get him.

  Deep in space now, with the police-cruisers in pursuit, he felt the gathering tension that always preceded a Jump. No physiologist could explain it, but every space-wise pilot knew what it felt like.

  There was a momentary inside-out feeling as his ship and himself for one moment of non-space and non-time, became non-matter and non-energy, then reassembled itself instantaneously in another part of the Galaxy.

  Trent smiled. He was still alive. No star was too close and there were thousands that were close enough. The sky was alive with stars and the pattern was so different that he knew the Jump had gone far. Some of those stars had to be spectral class F and better. The computer would have a nice, rich pattern to match against its memory. It shouldn’t take long.

  He leaned back in comfort and watched the bright pattern of starlight move as the ship rotated slowly. A bright star came into view, a really bright one. It didn’t seem more than a couple of light-years away and his pilot’s sense told him it was a hot one; good and hot. The computer would use that as its base and match the pattern centred about it. Once again, he thought: It shouldn’t take long.

  But it did. The minutes passed. Then an hour. And still the computer clicked busily and its lights flashed.

  Trent frowned. Why didn’t it find the pattern? The pattern had to be there. Brennmeyer had showed him his long years of work. He couldn’t have left out a star or recorded it in the wrong place.

  Surely stars were born and died and moved through space while in being, but these changes were slow, slow. In a million years, the patterns that Brennmeyer had recorded couldn’t-

  A sudden panic clutched at Trent. No! It couldn’t be. The chances for it were even smaller than Jumping into a star’s interior.

  He waited for the bright star to come into view again, and, with trembling hands, brought it into telescopic focus. He put in all the magnification he could, and around the bright speck of light was the tell-tale fog of turbulent gases caught, as it were, in mid-flight.

  It was a nova!

  From dim obscurity, the star had raised itself to bright luminosity—perhaps only a month ago. It had graduated from a spectral class low enough to be ignored by the computer, to one that would be most certainly taken into account.

  But the nova that existed in space didn’t exist in the computer’s memory store because Brennmeyer had not put it there. It had not existed when Brennmeyer was collecting his data—at least not as a luminous star.

  “Don’t count on it,” shrieked Trent. “Ignore it.”

  But he was shouting at automatic machinery that would match the nova-centred pattern against the Galactic pattern and find it nowhere and continue, nevertheless, to match and match and match for as long as its energy supply held out.

  The air supply would run out much sooner. Trent’s life would ebb away much sooner.

  Helplessly, Trent slumped in his chair, watching the mocking pattern of star light and beginning the long and agonized wait for death.

  —If he had only kept the knife.

  <>

  * * * *

  HUNGER OVER SWEET WATERS

  Colin Kapp

  Colin Kapp, a young British scientist and fast becoming one of our most popular s-f writers, presents a story which should delight all those who demand more science in their fiction. In short, how to build a boat without wood, metal or tools—providing that you live on a planet where the sea water is suitable for ion-exchange.

  * * * *

  Even the transcendental scarlet did not obtrude, so exquisitely did the colours harmonize with and complement each other, the subtleties of tone quieting the gaudiness with soft and mellowing hues to produce the nearest thing to visual perfection that Blick had ever experienced. Certainly he had never before seen the rock faces so beautifully adorned.

  This was partly the effect of the season, and partly the effect of a new current stirring through the rocks, whose movement seemed to excite an increase in the speed of the life-cycle of the magnificent flora, initiating a kind of avid thirsting to contribute the finest consummative blossoms to the orgy of summer on Hebron V. And for uncounted hectares, infinite and beautiful, the garden of sweet waters continued to the far horizon.

  The apparent solidity of the panorama was almost entirely illusory. The rocks of highly foamed siliceous slag had a density of only point seven six against a density of one point three for the mineral broth on which they floated. Apart from the random and still ill-understood currents, the normal drift was slow, caused by planetary rotation and the drag of the solitary satellite, and was of the order of a mere kilometre per hour in this latitud
e. However solid and static the scene might appear at any one instant, the continuing migration of any salient points which might occur on the landscape soon dispelled any illusions of permanency. Only the floating process stations and the flexible railway which ran on a line of floats for nearly two hundred kilometres to the Base on Lamedah, the planet’s only significant land-mass, were chain-anchored to the deep bedrock of the core.

  On this day, however, the usual northerly movement of surface water was being reinforced by a more rapid current, and the scenic drift was probably approaching three kilometres an hour, an almost unknown occurrence. The effect was mesmeric, since, lacking a stable visual reference point, the station itself appeared to be in motion, ploughing through the gardens of infinitely coloured delight as a ship passes through the sea, the rocks turning and dividing about the utilitarian rafts and reforming to an apparently solid terrain on having passed the obstacle. The delicious and delicately gaudy flora which abounded on the oceanic floating garden was equally adaptable and divisible, being mainly soft and pithy, with trailers having no great tensile strength. Only a few of the trailing roots and membranes fouled the rafts in passing, and even these were eventually swept aside by the attrition of the rocky drift.