New Writings in SF 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  Driscoll was in the blister now. Forcing his hands to find and operate familiar instruments now entirely invisible because of the strength of the hallucination.

  “Lamp on,” Driscoll said. “It’ll take a few minutes to warm. I’m sitting right in front of it. Make it easy on yourself. Go outside and wait.”

  “I’m staying,” Brevis said. Unable to orientate himself with respect to the now unseeable blister layout, he sat down on the floor. At rest, the impressions overwhelmed him. The Tau images, suffering no attenuation through the limiting filters of the body, assumed an exquisite fidelity and “edge” which he found both intolerable and irresistible at the same instant.

  There was no way now to shut out the startling excitations, nor any way to keep his personality contained. The Tau-psychic interaction continued through to fusion point, and its effect was one of mental dispersion, as though his consciousness was being distributed homogeneously into the surrounding phenomena. His mind and the Tau-space imagery momentarily seemed fused into one.

  It was later that something left of himself tired of being alone and infinite, and tripped his attention to Driscoll’s disembodied voice rambling in the midst of chaos. Only one phrase was sufficiently articulate to be understood—but that was sufficient to shock his mind back into narrower awareness.

  “Brevis . . . stop fighting me. Is that what you want . . . infinity?”

  In that instant of revelation Brevis forced his mind to withdraw from the fantastic rapport, and forced his muscles to carry him to his knees. As he did so a new form of image forced itself into his head—great sliding bands of alternate light and darkness, slipping, twisting, moving always downwards. Then he knew that his eyes had come within the range of the krypton lamp. This was the moire fringe effect, though what was visual and what was hallucinatory he was unable to decide.

  But he was conscious that Driscoll was somehow forcing the bands downwards across the field of view, seeking a smaller pattern, a smaller differential between their time and the real time of the universe. The flickering bands cascaded to a blur of grey, then slowed as Driscoll paused for a closer examination of phase, angle and magnitude.

  Brevis relaxed, and in doing so he lost the image of the moire fringe. The turbulent Tau image crowded over him again, slipping away on all sides in a torrential series of changing modes and characters breathlessly unlike anything he had previously experienced in Tau. Unable to regain his vision of the fringe, he attempted to remain a passive observer as the drunken kaleidoscope of subjective impression veered down an ever-narrowing funnel of restricted effect.

  The thought formed hazily in his head at first, and then with a clear and rising panic, that Driscoll had lost control. The descent seemed too far and too fast, and they were gaining an impetus which it appeared impossible to halt. From the infinitely large, Driscoll’s own introspection was threatening to drive them into the infinitely small, and they stood the risk of becoming voyagers in some untenable sub-nuclear domain.

  Brevis attempted to extend his mind into correlation with the now fleeting image. But the relative velocity between the phenomenon and the speed of his own thought processes defied the contact and threw him back with a headful of sparks. And his panic grew to a certainty as the velocity of the descent increased still further as judged by the transience of the parade of imagery.

  Once again he attempted to enter the battle, and this time his mind caught and held, but with a mental wrench that almost stripped him of consciousness. Then he was back again, fighting to re-form the patterns of Tau image with which he had become acquainted through exposure to more normal states of Tau.

  Then suddenly stasis, quietude, rest; a synchronous locking. He caught at the image and held it, and the whole scene stabilized in the rose-pink panorama of the Tau Gamma mode illusion. It seemed they had arrived.

  It took him many minutes to collect his senses and to take stock of the situation. The intensity of the Gamma image was low, and the krypton lamp, now itself visible, provided sufficient illumination to draw out other real details against the pink hallucination. Stumbling to his feet Brevis located the switch for the blister’s internal lighting. Immediately the normal details of the room became apparent and the pinkness shrank back to a mere ghost of an illusion.

  Driscoll had slipped from the chair in front of the lamp and was now prostrate on the floor. Relying now on his eyes, Brevis sought a path through the disordered screens and dragged Driscoll out to the corridor. A swift examination suggested he was not dead but merely in a state of shock. Despite the urgency which the treatment of Driscoll seemed to merit, Brevis felt impelled to visit both Porter and Grus on his way to collect his emergency case. Both were still sleeping, but stirring and shortly due to wake.

  It was only when he reached his cabin that his experience in the blister caught up with him. As he opened the door a brief confrontation of his own face in the mirror filled him with confused amazement. In attempting to correlate the death-white idiotic features which he saw with those of his normal image, the wonder and the horror caught up with him. He had a vague impression of falling as delayed shock drove the resistance from his body and tipped him into a pit of unconsciousness.

  When he finally awoke, Porter was standing at his side.

  “How do you feel now, Eric?”

  “Weak,” said Brevis.

  Porter nodded. “It certainly took it out of you. But you’ll be pleased to know that whatever you did was successful.”

  “You mean we’ve made it?” Brevis sat up. “We got back into congruence?”

  “As near as we can tell. When Sigmund and I came round we found we were in a simple Gamma mode. We took the chance and dropped the ship out of Tau into real space. There we found everything according to the catalogue. We’ve been taking spectroscope and radio-telescope fixes on the identifiable primaries and radio-sources, and we’ve even managed to establish our position.”

  “How did Pat make out?”

  “Fine. He recovered a lot quicker than you. He’s back in the blister right now doing triangulation fixes for Sigmund, and feeling rather chipper about the whole thing. He estimates we can make the return trip without losing congruence as long as we don’t tie our time constant to a fixed point of reference.”

  “With that I agree,” said Brevis. “Our dimensional dilemma was a simple example of Tau-psychic interaction. The radio-pulses controlled our instruments and our clocks. From these we took our consciousness of time. It wasn’t a condition of time appropriate to the separate universe we had become at that velocity, but we fondly imagined that time, at least, was real.

  “It was our acceptance of that measured time which fixed it as a time constant as far as Tau-space was concerned. All the other physical dimensions then had to adapt in order to maintain the right mass-time relationship. I think for that we can steal Diepenstrom’s term of an imagination trap—because that’s precisely what it was. Next trip just let the time constant, and thus our time consciousness, drift with the ship. By the way, how far did we travel?”

  “When you feel up to it, Eric, come down to Control and see the scanners. It’s rather an impressive sight. The Milky Way, seen from completely beyond its boundaries, is a rather frightening and a rather nostalgic thing to see.”

  <>

  * * * *

  APPLE

  John Baxter

  Scientists consider that Man’s size is between the macrocosm and the microcosm. John Baxter takes an apple and an insect out of context with their normal size to produce a horribly fascinating story of what might happen if the balance of Nature is disturbed.

  * * * *

  The apple was red, smooth, coldly perfect. One patch, almost obscured by the shadow it cast in the soft light, was green, a blemish that served only to show up the flawless purity of the remaining colour. It lay on its side, letting light spill into the recesses of its hollow, from which the stalk jutted inconclusively, terminating in a small leaf, greenly tran
sparent.

  Low down, near the ground, a crater had been gouged out, exposing the white flesh. The hollow was an irregular one and already the air had turned most of the higher points to a rusty brown. Much of the rest was creamy with incipient decay.

  A town lay just under this crater, half its three hundred houses in morning sunlight, the others obscured by the dark terminator of the apple’s vast shadow.

  To Billings, standing three miles away, it looked as if the apple itself were getting ready to snap up the rabble of houses over which it hovered, but when he looked up at the mass of the fruit looming solid and red in the strengthening light, its colour accentuated by the climbing sun, the sensation passed. It was as solid and immovable as the others. Faced finally with the thing he had travelled fifty miles to find, he dropped the long case of tools, hitched up his leather apron and reflectively massaged away some of the aches that had plagued him this last half day of hill climbing.

  The valley before him, Billings thought, looked like a mouth, the apple lying on a broad and smooth tongue of brown earth surrounded on three sides by a gap-toothed mountain range that grinned obscenely at him. His climb had brought him out of the throat, a narrow gully of dry earth rippled with erosion scars like a tumbled cloth. Standing now at the root of the tongue, he luxuriously scratched away a recalcitrant colony of itches on his neck, picked up once again the clanking bag of tools and moved reluctantly on.

  Going down the slope was work almost as hard as his earlier climb. The ground was metal-hard, bleached by the rain to a sterile and jagged mass from which grains of mica and quartz glinted back the yellow sunlight. All atomic grounds had the same look; riven, like scraps of another world. No man, and especially not one of his trade, had to have one pointed out to him. The dead earth and the weird giant fruits it spawned were indication enough; just two of the jokes war had played on the human race. Like the Moths.

  Head down, his eyes on the fissured ground, Billings tramped the long road to the town, thinking only of sitting down, loosening his tight apron and belt, discussing his fee with the town Boss. Mild pleasures, but the only one most Moth Killers knew. Staining the air he could smell the rotting juice of the apple, sweet and diseased, matching the bilious glow of the sun. He ignored the stink and soon it faded from his sensations.

  He placed the Boss as soon as he saw him, then forgot his existence. He was young, ugly, tough—his town was the same. A ragged puddle of gimcrack shacks latticed with crooked muddy streets, its weak hold on reality was accentuated by the bulk of the apple looming above it, needing only a touch to roll down on it like a red moon, crushing the miners and their houses into the earth. But nobody cared. Women stood gossiping at their doors while children paddled around in the mudholes. There was an endless traffic of handcarts along the street carrying sawn slabs of apple flesh to the presses or returning empty to pick up a fresh load. As the two men, Boss and Moth Killer, went by, the people bent their heads and said nothing.

  Close to the mine, traffic was thicker and more hurried, the miners’ movements more antlike than ever. The apple loomed over them, cutting off the light, and in the mire of mud and juice that surrounded the entrance to the mine, the men moved like naked spectres, shiny with the apple’s blood.

  A path had been made across the mud with slabs of pressed-out apple flesh, like porous brown wood. The Boss went first, Billings following. As they walked across the narrow track, men looked up at them, then stepped uncomplainingly off until they had passed. Billings watched the men’s legs sinking to the knees in the brown bog but felt no sympathy for them. He had been used to such things when he was a miner.

  Now that he was more, it was his right to have privileges. He had worked for them.

  The path’s end was well inside the cavity. It yawned like a vast and jagged pit above them. By the light of the oil lamps wedged into the walls, Billings could see the galleried mine rising three hundred feet above him, its face dotted with men. Their echoing voices peopled the dark air with ghostly curses and prayers, underscored and occasionally blotted out altogether by the trickling splash of juice from the cuts they made. An endless drizzle of the sticky sweet liquid fell to the floor of the mine, making their leather clothing glossy and stiff. Drops of the juice trickled off their aprons and fell into the swamp that surrounded them. The air was thick with the smell of decay.

  Billings dropped his tool case, unlaced the opening and took out the contents item by item, laying them out in a neat row on the ground. His two blades, something like the billhooks used by the miners, were differently weighted so that the flat, almost square blade at the end of the four-foot handle could bite deeper and stay in longer, its curved talon hanging on to flesh and carapace even when its wielder was unable to strike again. After this there were leather gauntlets and greaves, barbed pitons, a fat coil of rope and spiked boots. It had been some months since Billings had used the boots and greaves, but they had stayed supple inside the bag. He pulled them on, laced them carefully and picked up the rest of the equipment.

  “The entrance is up top,” the Boss said.

  Billings looked up. There was less activity in the darkness, and he knew why. Word had spread that he was a Killer. He could feel them watching him, hoping—as he had hoped when he was a miner—to see some slip, a fault in his skill. He visualised how it must look to the men hanging in their harness up against the top faces in the dark, their bodies tacky with juice, hands welded to their knives by a congealing glaze of the stuff. In their eyes, used to darkness and yellow light, he would seem a dim and distorted figure, hardly more than an upturned face against the brown of the muddy floor.

  He moved quickly and without warning the Boss, so that the man jumped visibly when Billings took his knife from his quiver and, with one neat wrist movement, sliced a horizontal gash in the main face. The flesh was brown, rotten, almost dried out, but another cut showed white. He cut again, severing the overhang so that the firm foothold was exposed from above and shelved beneath by the larger mass of rotted flesh. His right leg came up and the foot wedged deep into the notch while his arm swung again higher up, cutting a further foothold. His gauntleted left hand grabbed at the rough and crumbling surface of the main face, steadying his body for the movements of his blade.

  The climb was dangerous, depending on a continued ascent for safety. His hand would steady him for only a few seconds before the rotten flesh collapsed under his touch, and the cleated soles of his boots would hold in a cut for only a moment before sliding out. There was no time for him to see where he was going nor concern himself with the face above him. He had estimated where the ledge was that he must arrive at, and also the best route to approach it. Now he had to depend on his inborn skill. Spidering upwards, his hands grasped, his blade swung, his feet bit and pistoned him up the cliff. His mind was blank—until, after a long moment of doubt, his blade cut air, his fingers grabbed a firm new-sliced edge, and he hauled himself up on to the main upper terrace. As he stood panting on the edge, he heard the miners around and above him muttering, sensed their admiration and was content.

  The Boss took another minute to reach the terrace along the roped gallery that zigzagged up the main face. Billings waited without comment, cleaning his blade and scraping the accumulated pulp from between the spikes of his boots. When the Boss arrived he recognised resentment in the man’s stiff face but said nothing.

  “Further up,” the Boss said shortly.

  They moved along the terrace until it petered out in a dark hollow so small that they had to stoop. A miner brought down a lamp and the Boss took it, holding the light up. In the glow Billings saw the beginning of a tunnel, the ragged edges of transparent, slightly green material that lined it, and smelled the dry and musty scent he had expected.

  “It’s an old one,” he said. “Three days maybe.”

  He pulled at the tattered edge of the tunnel lining and shredded a piece of it in his fingers.

  “Maybe four. It’s dried out a lot.”
r />   “How far in will...?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  The boss held the lamp further towards the tunnel, letting fingers of light probe the darkness. There was nothing to be seen but the smooth-sided circular hole plunging into the heart.

  “How long will it take?”

  Billings hefted his knives on to his back and took the lamp.

  “As long as it takes,” he said shortly and walked down into the darkness.

  The Boss looked after him for a moment, then turned to stare at the silent miners hanging in their harness across the face of the crater. Their burning eyes were brighter than the lamps by which they worked. He moved quickly down the gallery without saying anything.

  * * * *

  Inside the tunnel it was warm and dark. Billings trimmed the lamp and moved slowly forward, listening. Air moved softly around him, light glinted on the walls.

  He remembered his father who had died in a tunnel very like this.