New Writings in SF 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Then you never actually kept an assignation with Sentry?” David Repington asked. Kingsley looked murderous. Helen lifted her chin sharply.

  “I am prepared to carry out professional obligations, but I don’t think anyone would expect me to go that far.”

  “Well!” Kingsley growled, deep in his throat. “And this is the man who dares to accuse me—me! My God!”

  “May we now hear Mr. Sentry?” Hilda Ryan’s voice was coldly calm, and Paul Briand nodded.

  “Exactly. We must have it out.”

  “I’d rather not listen to his lurid imaginings,” Kingsley shouted. “There are limits, you know!”

  “You’d better stay,” Sentry told him. “You won’t hear anything lurid, not from me.” He turned to face Ruth Nivelle. “Three days ago your husband Georges brought me a job to do. The following day I gave it back to him and asked him to hang on to it for a while. Did he say anything to you about it?”

  She thought a moment, then nodded. “Yes, I remember. Georges gave the—it to me to put away for him. In my desk file. It is still there.”

  “That’s fine. Just to prove there’s been no chance to fake or tamper.” Sentry swung back to the co-chairman again. “The thing we were talking about was a camera. Georges had busted, it. I had just repaired it. And it was on my control panel, watching and listening to you, Mrs. Kingsley, three nights ago when you came to call on me. It saw everything, heard everything------”

  He halted as he saw her stagger and then go down in a dead faint. Her husband stared down, frozen for the moment, the veins standing out on his neck, then he spun, snarling, and threw himself bodily across the table. Sentry was caught completely flat-footed by surprise and the sheer animal ferocity of the attack. He had one hideous close-up of a grinning maniacal face, then the hard floor met the back of his head and he saw stars, felt a cracking pain and then darkness.

  * * * *

  Seven

  Consciousness crept back to him through the sound of groans and a fog of pain. He realized that it was he himself who was groaning, stopped it and opened his eyes very cautiously, wincing at the bright lights of the sanatorium. A face came to look down at him. Luigi Cadorna smiled.

  “Be still, now. It is only a bump on the head and some bruises, not severe. My Olivia told me all about it.”

  “What happened?”

  “As you might expect. Kingsley is unsafe. Also his wife. Both are under sedation right now. In a little while, three or four days perhaps, we begin to shut down the project and return to the surface. A pity.”

  “What for? Why are we quitting?” Sentry tried to sit up, and another face came to frown at him. Stephen Wilby.

  “Lie still, man. You’ve had a hell of a crack. Looks as if Kingsley tried to shove your skull right through the floor.”

  “Never mind that. Steve, why are we deciding to quit. Who made that decision, anyway?”

  “I dunno. The sociology boys I guess. They’re in charge. Now you take it easy. Belle’s outside, waiting to see you.”

  Her approach was characteristically calm and casual. “I always said you had a hard head. Now everybody knows.”

  “It doesn’t feel all that hard right now,” he admitted, and she put a sympathetic hand on his arm.

  “Peter, whatever did you do? Half the sociology section are nursing cuts and bruises, Kingsley’s in a strait-jacket and there’s talk about us closing the place down. You look as if you’d been trampled. What’s been going on?”

  “All I did was challenge an axiom,” he sighed. “Tinkle, would you ask Paul Briand to come and see me as soon as he can, before anybody takes any big decisions, please ?”

  Briand came late that evening, just as Sentry had heard good news about Percy West, that his colleague was suffering only from lesser burns and shock and would be fit in a day or two. But Briand looked grim.

  “You showed us our weakness, Sentry,” he admitted. “In time, I hope.”

  “What’s this talk about shutting the project down ?”

  “But what else?” the Frenchman shrugged. “We are in a new kind of danger, now that we know the testing machinery is not reliable. Anything else we could cope with, but the human factor was always the big riddle. And we have been wrong somewhere, that much is now obvious.”

  “I have a theory about that, Paul. No, wait, I haven’t done so badly up to now, have I ? This time you can check me out beforehand. A prediction. But I want a little data first. Tell me, what actually happens to our test records, afterwards?”

  “They are stored, filed, in the computer. What else would you?”

  “All right. Now, let’s say you have just put me through the battery and you have all the results down there. What, exactly, do you do next?”

  Briand frowned. “Do you expect me to give you a lesson in test evaluation in six short words? I look, I think, I judge. There are thirty-eight variables. I look for abnormalities, from my experience!”

  “I’m an engineer-type,” Sentry said. “In my job one looks for anything out of line, anything that changes without some good reason. You?”

  “But, of course. Sentry, this is elementary.”

  “It certainly is. Look, I want you to do something for me. Get hold of Hans Goring. Or Sophia Menin, from Biochemistry. Either of those, or anyone else who knows how to set up a computer programme and set up a routine on the machine that will retrieve and inspect all the personality test-data for each and every one of us, compare them over elapsed time, and isolate any significant changes. Know what I mean?”

  “A machine!” Briand made a face. “No machine can do the work of the human mind, my friend.”

  “That’s the axiom I wanted to challenge. Will you do it? There’ll be no danger of revealing confidential material. You’re the only one who will see the final figures. And one thing more. Let me have a piece of paper and a stylus.” Briand got out a notebook, tore out a page. Sentry scribbled on it, folded it and gave it back. “There, you keep that until after you get the machine results and then look. Here’s my prediction. Most—almost all—the records will show no significant change. Some will, however. Those I’ve written down there. If I am right------”

  “You have the Kingsleys here, of course.”

  “No. You’re not thinking. Their records are fake, remember? No. If I’ve picked them right, then I’ve proved my point. And the project need not be thrown out as a loss. It will take only an hour or so to prove it.”

  Briand got up. “Very well,” he sighed, “if it will preserve this wonderful experiment, I will try anything.”

  * * * *

  Sentry slept well that night, but it was more sedation than satisfaction. His gamble seemed to be on more and more tenuous grounds the more he looked at it. He was awake and anxious long before there was any need, next morning. His answer came in the shape of all ten of the sociology section presenting themselves at the medical centre to talk to him. Stephen Wilby, under protest, allowed them the use of the Medical conference room. Briand took the floor.

  “It is obvious,” he said, “that Mr. Sentry knows something we do not.” He described the suggested computer analysis and its results. “My friends, all night I have puzzled over this, but without the ‘aha!’ of understanding. The machine results show that all of us have remained reasonably stable and adjusted, over the period, except four. The four which Mr. Sentry wrote down here. I will name them, within this confidence of professionals. They are Robert and Alice Vance, and Luis and Maria Sanchez!” There was immediate if controlled uproar and incredulous voices. Briand waited for quiet.

  “Now, Mr. Sentry, you will please tell us how you knew?”

  “Gladly,” Sentry nodded, “but you’ll have to let me do it my way and lead up to it by stages, because you’re not going to like this. We’re all scientists together. You’ll agree, I think, that in the past half-century whenever we’ve applied the scientific method to our problems we’ve succeeded pretty well and whenever we haven’t, we’ve
pretty well failed. Now this was and is a scientific problem, this project. And one of the main props of the scientific method has always been to minimize the possibility of human error. In my field it is fairly simple. I rely on instruments all the time. I take decisions, yes, but on the best possible evidence, provided for me by a non-involved machine of some kind.”

  “We deal with people,” Asquith interrupted. “Not machines!”

  “Agreed. There’s a difference. Emotions, feelings, inspiration and intuition and so on, all come into it. Precious abilities that no machine has. But deadly, if and when they fly directly in the face of fact. You have to have hard facts first. People make mistakes when they think they are better than the facts. That’s how I was able to predict those four. Paul, may I ask you a personal question? Are you in love with your wife, Yvette?”

  Briand grunted. “Another trick ? If so, it fails. I am sorry to disappoint you, Sentry, but the answer is yes, I am in love with Yvette.”

  “No disappointment, Paul. I was gambling on that. Look, when this project was being put together, the really hard part was selecting sixty people who would be fit for it, have the necessary combinations of skills and abilities, and be compatible with each other at the same time. We, all of us, were analysed right down to the last toenail and idiosyncracy. And the computer shuffled us and selected those who would stand the best chance of rubbing along together, both as a community, and as life-partners. For the sake of a very important and exciting project, we co-operated, made a go of it. But we were selected for compatibility only. Nobody said anything about love, or emotional involvement, or even affection, because we have no objective measurements for such things.”

  “On the whole,” Hilda Ryan murmured, “we have done very well. What are you getting at, Peter ?”

  “Let me be poetic a moment. I suggest to you that love is not the seed that is planted, but the flower that blooms afterwards—if, and only if, that seed was well planted and allowed to grow in good soil. In other words, given compatibility and willingness to begin with, love follows. As it has done with us. All of us, except the four people mentioned and the Kingsleys. Because, don’t you see, they were already married before they applied for the project, before the computer could analyse them for pair-compatibility. Their names were entered in as ‘married’, which, to the machine, means ‘compatible’. So the machine accepted that as a datum given and went on from there. And they were the only ones to fail. The rest of us are all right!”

  Six months later, when the Second Poseidon Group had gone down, and the pioneering First Group reached the surface after a tedious week of careful depressurization, there was a swarm of avid newspapermen there to welcome them to the light of day and the unfamiliar feelings and sounds of the retrieval vessel. Sentry became the focal point for one little group. With his arm around Belle, he smilingly disclaimed any claim to genius or brilliance.

  “Just a hunch, at first,” he declared, “based on a thing I once read by Bernard Shaw. Two people under the powerful influence of biological urges and sentimental emotions are in the worst possible condition to make sensible decisions which may affect the rest of their lives. Or something like that. It’s true, anyway. We were lucky. We made the rational decisions first and fell in love afterwards. We made it work.”

  One newsman turned to Belle, and asked her amid a lightning-storm of flash-bulbs. “Do you feel that it will go on working, Mrs. Sentry?”

  Belle smiled. “I’m ready to spend the rest of my life working at it,” she declared, with confidence.

  <>

  * * * *

  FOLLY TO BE WISE

  by Douglas R. Mason

  The enquiring female mind is often enough to drive a man to the edge of frustration—but that is when he usually makes his most interesting discoveries.

  * * * *

  Light was faint in the east. A pallid bar, which came briefly and was drowned out. An uneasy pallor lost as the black tide flowed again. Etiolated echo of the infinity of dawns which had blazed and gone.

  No human consciousness made its heartbeats the measure of the time it took to turn. There was no time. Only a slow separation. But light grew, gathered in the countless million lenses of an inert atmosphere. A notional eye would have seen a small grey planet troubled and tortured by rebirth.

  The seas had not entirely died. Tiny, rod-like organisms stirred in their depths, felt the warmth of the light and exploded into productive life. The spiral screw began to turn once more which in the term of years measured by an atomic clock would throw up a conscious mind.

  Dragged by its heavier neighbour into the long orbit round the new sun, a satellite moon took its share of light. On the parent planet, life complicated itself. Cells burgeoned, divided, became specific in function. Life crawled ashore again from the ancient seas. Forests rose and sank. The planet’s raddled skin expanded in the new heat, threw up new mountains, ran its oceans to new shores.

  Out of the dialectic came man. Conscious of a new now and carrying his ancestry in a sealed bag in his head, an unsuspected handicap.

  * * * *

  An immense plain of yellow-ochre sand streaked with white patches of granulated marble was brilliantly lit from a huge fire-wheel of sun, almost vertically overhead. Zara only recognized that the reflection made her eyes ache and that the heat was beating down on her polished, cobalt-blue skin with a tangible depressive weight.

  She called out, “Kaalba, Kaalba,” in a deep, throaty voice, which was projected by the sounding board of sheer cliff at her back and rolled, echoing, over the flat beach.

  Far off, at the indeterminate edge of the sea, a diminished figure, shimmering in the heat haze, turned and waved both arms in acknowledgement and then bent again to continue whatever he was doing.

  Zara’s large, expressive eyes narrowed with impatience and the first real irritability she had shown since they left the clan. In substance, without the form of words, she was thinking, “The fool, he must know that I meant him to stop and come to meet me. I know he’s there, and he knows I know he’s there. So why wave ? It is to assert that whatever he is doing is more important to him than I am.”

  Standing still for this analysis, in the stupefying heat, she felt it flow along the curves of her body like heavy syrup. Except for a narrow, plaited thong of yellow snakeskin, circling low on her hips and anchoring a minimal loop of red cloth, it had an uninterrupted, switchback run.

  They had reached this open plain and its boundary of sea after twenty days’ journeying through the forest. Usually, two people on their proving time stayed near the clan. A day’s distance away, just out of range of the farthest-roaming hunter or food-gatherer. But Kaalba had decided that they would be different. With a hundred days to fill, he said they should go out in a straight line until they had counted fifty days or found some great marvel—whichever was the sooner.

  Still, she could hardly complain about that. It was his quality of being different which had made her agree to be his partner. She could have had any of the young men of their age group. Or, indeed, any of the unpaired elders. No other woman in the clan had received more formal requests. No one had such luminously black hair, such velvet skin, round breasts and long slender legs. Almost as tall as Kaalba, she walked with a queen’s grace and as a bonus was skilled in all the work which a woman should do.

  Trudging sulkily forward towards him, she told herself that she must have been mesmerized by words and by his quick, eager voice. Why had she come ? He was not really good-looking, even. Just persuasive. Getting his way by a gift of the gab.

  For days they had walked together, not a handsbreadth ahead or behind the other. Hand in hand, through the endless forest. At night, Kaalba had made a booth of saplings, working with neat economical strokes of his obsidian axe. She had gathered bracken and moss for their bed.

  Food almost fell into their outstretched hands, curious fruits, edible fungi, the tender tips of certain bushes. It was her special contribution t
o know what was good and what was not. There was precedent of a whole clan being wiped out by injudicious sampling.

  That was something, too. She stopped again to think about it. There was the river fish which was good to eat if you took off its skin and removed the roe, ovaries and liver. Leave any one of these items by careless preparation and you handed your guest a certain and painful death. That was a mystery. However did anyone find out that it was good to eat since the first person to try would surely be killed? Somebody like Kaalba no doubt. He would find a way round it. She would ask him.

  He was thigh deep in clear water, axe raised and then chopping down at a grey mass which was in a churning turmoil. As she said, “Kaalba,” the duel ended, and a grey hemisphere floated up to the surface.