New Writings in SF 18 - [Anthology] Read online

  The straight was very short, here, and he was coming into a bend. He braked, double-declutched, changed down, then accelerated. Oil on the track. The car slewed as he gripped the wheel and, for the brief instant that he was facing the wrong way, he saw a G.T. Ford, closely followed by a Ferrari, starting to take frantic evasive action. Then he was round again and gunning the engine to catch another Lotus. The Ferrari shot past on the inside, but the G.T. Ford ploughed into the embankment on the outside and burst into flames.

  He was lucky to be still alive. The oil patch had been real. The part of his mind unaffected by the drug realised that, and was afraid. Why had the oil been put on the track? Was someone trying to kill him? But that was absurd. People didn’t go around killing each other, these days. Aggressive traits were carefully filtered out, which was probably the reason why so few people took up the challenge of the Big Day. He fretted at the problem.

  Relentlessly he piled on the miles, passing the Lotus and the Ferrari in quick succession. This was what life was all about! Another G.T. Ford was just ahead of him, its driver skilfully following every curve and bend, giving Hanson no chance to take him. For five laps he hung grimly behind the Ford’s exhaust, his nostrils and throat clogged with the smell of fumes and burned rubber.

  Everything was so real—The pyre of the crashed G.T. Ford still burned every time he passed it. Feelings ... sounds ... smells....

  The image—if it was an image—of the Ford ahead of him began to fade. In its place there was a blur which gradually became a face of a young, handsome man.

  Where-? At the Old Film Society. The man who had been bitten in half by the shark! His hands continued to guide the car, to do all that was required.

  The man was smiling. Another face appeared at his left shoulder. That of a beautiful, long-haired girl. The one who had fallen down a mountain-side, on her Big Day, two years ago. He had seen the film at the Society.

  Who had taken those films and for what purpose ? When he thought about it, he recalled that there were quite a lot of such films at the Society, all recording; the deaths of people on the Big Day.

  The faces faded and the Ford was there again. His opportunity came. The Ford took a bend too sharply and the front off-side wheel went off the track. The driver wrenched his steering wheel, over-compensated, and Hanson’s Lotus thundered through the momentary gap, causing the Ford to brake hard.

  The car whined round the track, with only two laps to go. His mind was a vortex of confusion and terror. But reality, all three hundred and sixty-four days of it, was minutes away. He did not want to return to his stale existence. Did he have to ?

  The faces were there again, smiling, and the girl was holding out her hands to him. Like the woman on the moon-cold sands. Briefly, behind their heads, he glimpsed an ebony darkness scattered with still pin-points of light, then it was gone.

  His goggles were misting with sweat. The steering wheel shook like a live thing in his hands. The car was going faster, faster, and the brake didn’t respond. Fear constricted his breathing. Everything beyond the car was a blur of grey.

  The car slewed in the oil patch. His mind snapped like an over-taut elastic band. He was spinning, falling, falling.

  He saw the Lotus flipped on its back and slewing along the track like an overturned beetle. He saw himself lying prone, with people bending over him. The scene was shifting, indistinct.

  ‘You can waken up, now.’ There was faint pressure on his shoulder.

  He felt very calm and rested. He opened his eyes. The man and the girl were there, smiling. A second man, older, in white, seemed to be pleased with his reaction, and he, too, smiled.

  ‘I’ll leave you with him,’ the man in white said. ‘He’s going to be all right. He’ll be able to understand what you tell him. The sedative will ensure gradual return to total awareness.’ He smiled again at Mark and went out.

  ‘I’m Ronnie,’ the young man said, ‘and this is Helen.’

  ‘Both of you are dead,’ Mark said, without alarm. ‘I’ve seen the films of your deaths at the Society.’

  ‘You did see the films, Mark. But did you actually see me fall down the mountain? Did you actually see Ronnie bitten in half by the shark?’

  Mark glanced at the girl. His mind refused to get agitated. ‘No ... But, if you weren’t killed, what was the purpose of the films?’

  ‘As you can see, we’re very much alive!’ Ronnie said in parenthesis, squeezing Helen’s hand. ‘The purpose was to give an impression of death. Look.’

  He stepped aside and Mark could see a screen on a wall. Ronnie was swimming in green water. He wore a scuba suit and carried a harpoon gun. The scene mixed to a shot of a shark, cruising lazily. Then followed a sequence of Ronnie’s fear-filled eyes, the shark’s teeth, Ronnie trying to fire the harpoon, a flurry of bodies, man and shark, obscured by sand stirred up from the sea bed, then fade-out.

  ‘A dummy took my place, thank goodness, in that final shot, although I knew nothing about it at the time. I woke up, just like you, in a room, such as this, to see people whom I thought were dead.’

  ‘Now you’ll want to know why,’ Helen took up the story. ‘We are part of a group deeply concerned about the dominance of machines over our daily lives and what it is doing to people, collectively and as individuals. Everything is regulated. Imagination, initiative, curiosity, aggression: all have been ground out of the human character, leaving useless shells without drive or goal. Man has turned in on himself and is on a downward path to stagnation and eventual extinction.’

  ‘We want to show you something,’ Ronnie said. ‘We can talk as we go.’

  Mark followed them into a long, brightly-lit corridor with many doors leading off it. He was now wearing a lightweight costume and soft shoes and he noticed that his companions, and most of the people they passed, wore a similar garment.

  Helen carried on with her story. ‘Certain people in high places decided that something must be done to salvage something of man’s crushed spirit. Against opposition from others who wanted to preserve the status quo, the Big Day was started.’

  They turned right into another corridor. Mark wondered if the place was underground, but refrained from asking at present.

  The Big Day had a much deeper purpose than the relief of frustration with society. The instigators wanted to find people with guts, courage, a sense of adventure, as well as the more obvious attributes of intelligence, and so on. When someone had proved himself, he was “removed”, as Ronnie puts it, from the rut, and brought here.’

  ‘What if someone objected?’

  ‘Occasionally, that happens,’ Ronnie answered, ‘but, after we’ve explained what we aim to do, they elect to stay.’

  They entered a room. In one corner a group of men and women were clustered around a blackboard, covered in abstruse mathematical symbols. A window ran the full length of the wall opposite the door.

  Mark found himself looking out at a huge cavern. People bustled about, on foot, or in small electric trucks, with an air of planned activity. He caught his breath when he saw the spaceships, one completed, the other evidently in the last stages of construction.

  ‘We’re not going to attempt to change society here,’ Ronnie said. ‘We’re going to make a new start, on one of the planets of Tau Ceti.’

  ‘Starships,’ Mark murmured, ‘not spaceships.’

  ‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘There’s still much work to be done, people to train, skills to learn. This is a kindergarten for a new race of men and women. Out there, among the stars, is the school. Will you join us ?’

  Mark smiled. Hand-in-hand, the three of them left the room.

  Down in the cavern, the starships awaited the Big Day.

  <>

  * * * *

  MAJOR OPERATION

  James White

  Herewith the final Sector General story in this series in which the patient awaiting surgery is over 50,000 miles in diameter. Previous stories in the series can be found in Ne
w Writings In S-F Nos. 7,12, 14, and 16.

  * * * *

  one

  On the whole weird and wonderful planet there were only thirty-seven patients requiring treatment, and they varied widely both in size and in their degree of physical distress. Naturally it was the patient in the greatest distress who was being treated first, even though it was also the largest—so large that at their scoutship’s sub-orbital velocity of six thousand plus miles per hour it took just over nine minutes to travel from one side of the patient to the other.

  ‘It’s a large problem,’ said Conway seriously, ‘and even altitude doesn’t make it look smaller. Neither does the shortage of skilled help.’

  Pathologist Murchison, who was sharing the tiny observation blister with him, sounded cool and a little on the defensive as she replied, ‘I have been studying all the Drambon material long before and since my arrival two months ago, but I agree that seeing it like this for the first time really does bring the problem home to one. As for the shortage of help, you must realise, Doctor, that you can’t strip the hospital of its staff and facilities for just one patient, even if it is the size of a sub-continent—there are thousands of smaller and more easily curable patients with equal demands on us. And if you are still suggesting that I, personally, took my time in getting here,’ she ended hotly, ‘I came just as soon as my chief decided that you really did need me, as a pathologist.’

  ‘I’ve been telling Thornnastor for six months that I needed a top pathologist here,’ said Conway gently. Murchison looked beautiful when she was angry, but even better when she was not. ‘I thought everybody in the hospital knew why I wanted you, which is one reason why we are sharing this cramped observation blister, looking at a view we have both seen many times on tape and arguing when we could be enjoying some unprofessional behaviour-’

  ‘Pilot here,’ said a tinny voice in the blister’s speaker. ‘We are losing height and circling back now and will land about five miles east of the terminator. The reaction of the eye plants to sunrise is worth seeing.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Conway. To Murchison he added, ‘I had not planned on looking out the window.’

  ‘I had,’ she said, punching him with one softly clenched fist on the jaw. ‘You I can see anytime.’

  Originally christened Meatball for obvious reasons, Drambo—which was the natives’ own name for their world—had to be seen to be believed. Even then it had been difficult for its discoverers, the crew of the cultural contact and survey vessel Descartes, to believe what they were seeing.

  Drambo’s oceans were a thick, living soup and its relatively small land masses were almost completely covered by vast, slow-moving carpets of animal life. In many areas there were outcroppings of rock and soil which supported vegetation, and other forms of plant life flourished in the oceans, on the sea bed or rooted itself to the organic ‘land’ surface. But the greater part of the planetary land surface was covered by layers of an animal-vegetable life composite which in some cases was nearly a mile thick.

  This vast, organic carpet was subdivided into strata which crawled and slipped and fought their way through each other to gain access to necessary top-surface vegetation or subsurface minerals, or simply to choke off and cannibalise each other. During the course of this slow, gargantuan struggle these living strata heaved themselves into hills and valleys, altering the shapes of lakes and coastlines and changing the topography of their world from month to month.

  Evidence of two distinct and separate forms of intelligent life on the planet was furnished almost at once. During the first and very fleeting contact with the planetary surface, when the ground had seemingly done its best to swallow the ship in one gulp, Descartes had been penetrated by a small, completely unspecialised and thought-controlled tool far in advance of anything known to the Galactic Federation’s technology. And later in orbit the ship had been present during the first manned space flight by a member of a Drambon species who knew nothing at all about the tool or its makers.

  Recently they had made contact with other species living inside the strata creatures, but the level of intelligence had been too low for an interchange of concepts to take place— they had been about half as bright as an Earth dog.

  Somewhere in or under those vast strata creatures there was a highly intelligent race whose land was sick and dying all around them—at least, that had been Conway’s theory up to now.

  Murchison pointed suddenly and said, ‘Someone is drawing a yellow triangle on your patient.’

  Conway laughed. ‘I forgot, you haven’t been involved with our communications problems so far. Most of the surface vegetation is light-sensitive and, some of us thought, may act as the creature’s eyes. We produce geometrical and other figures by directing a narrow, intense beam of light from orbit into a dark or twilight area and moving it about quickly. The effect is something like that of drawing with a high-persistency spot on a vision screen. So far there has been no detectable reaction. It is possible/ Conway added, ‘that the strata creature itself is intelligent.’

  ‘But you got a reaction once?’

  ‘Yes,’ Conway replied, ‘when we stood on the surface while our ship did tight figure-of-eight turns above us. A couple of tools turned up, you’ve seen the report. Probably the creature can’t react even if it wanted to, because eyes are sensory receptors and not transmitters. After all, we can’t send messages with our eyes.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Murchison.

  They landed shortly afterwards. Murchison and Conway stepped carefully on to the springy ground, crushing several of the vegetable eyes with every few yards of progress. The fact that the patient had countless millions of other eyes did not make them feel any better about the damage inflicted by their feet.

  When they were about fifty yards from the ship, Murchison said suddenly, ‘If these plants are eyes, and it is a natural assumption since they are sensitive to light, why should it have so many in an area where danger threatens so seldom? Peripheral vision to co-ordinate the activity of its feeding mouths would be much more useful.’

  Conway nodded. He knelt carefully among the plants and Murchison followed suit. Their long shadows were filled with the yellow of tightly-closed leaves. He indicated their tracks from the entry lock of the ship, which were also bright yellow, and moved his arms about so as to partly obscure some of the plants from the light. Leaves partially in shade or suffering even minor damage reacted exactly as those completely cut off from the light. They rolled up tight to display their yellow undersides.

  ‘The roots are thin and go on for ever,’ he said, excavating gently with his fingers to show a whitish root which narrowed to the diameter of thin string before disappearing from sight. ‘Even with mining equipment or during exploratories with diggers we haven’t been able to find the other end of one. Have you learned anything new from the internals?’

  He covered the exposed root with soil, but kept the palms of both hands pressed lightly against the ground.

  Watching him, Murchison said, ‘Not very much. Light and darkness, as well as causing the leaves to open out or roll up tight, cause electro-chemical changes in the sap, which is so heavily loaded with mineral salts that it forms a very good conductor. Electrical pulses produced by these changes could travel very quickly from the plant to the other end of the root. Er, what are you doing, Doctor, taking its pulse?’

  Conway shook his head without speaking, and she went on, ‘The eye plants are evenly distributed over the patient’s top-surface, including those areas containing dense growths of the air renewal and waste elimination types, so that a shadow or light stimulus received anywhere on its surface is transmitted quickly—almost instantaneously, in fact—to the central nervous system via this mineral-rich sap. But the thing which bothers me is what possible reason could the creature have for evolving an eye-ball several hundred miles across?’

  ‘Close your eyes,’ said Conway, smiling. ‘I’m going to touch you. As accurately as you can, try to
tell me where.’

  ‘You’ve been too long in the company of men and e-ts. Doctor,’ Murchison began, then she broke off, looking thoughtful, and did as she was told.

  Conway began by touching her lightly on the face, then he rested three fingers on top of her shoulder and went on from there.

  ‘Left cheek about an inch from the left side of my mouth,’ she said. ‘Now you’ve rested your hand on my shoulder. You seem to be rubbing an X on to my left biceps. Now you have a thumb and two, maybe three fingers at the back of my neck just on the hairline...Are you enjoying this, Doctor? I am.’

  Conway laughed. ‘I might if it wasn’t for the thought of Lieutenant Harrison watching us and steaming up the pilot’s canopy with his hot little breath. But seriously, you see what I’m getting at, that the eye plants have nothing to do with the creature’s vision but are analogous to pressure, pain, or temperature sensitive nerve endings?’