New Writings in SF 5 - [Anthology] Read online

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  TAKEOVER BID

  John Baxter

  There may be many unknown factors involved in preventing Man from surviving in space, despite all today’s knowledge of space medicine. Australian author John Baxter suggests one such possibility the medics may have overlooked and incidentally paints a fascinating mind picture of his native country in the near future.

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  To set out on a journey at evening is an experience that has always pleased me. There is a sense of stealing a march on your fellows, of having broken the tyranny of the clock and struck out on your own. So when it became evident on that cold winter’s afternoon that I would have to go to Crosswind headquarters I bitched a little—it was expected —but inwardly I rather looked forward to the rush trip. Even with priority it wasn’t possible to get a seat on any westbound jet and I knew I would have to drive the two thousand miles, but as I eased the car out of the office tube and into the main traffic flow I felt more at ease than I had all week.

  Lying back as the autopilot threaded me through the river of cars I had time to look around for the first time that day. There was a sunset over the city, one of those huge violet and orange affairs that one gets in Australia when the air is cold and clear. They’re a good crowd-pleaser and the weather-control boys turn them on regularly, but I’ve never liked them. They have the look of scars and wounds, and their colours are livid rather than vivid. It’s hardly the sort of thing one mentions in family therapy, but I’ve always looked on sunsets as a kind of omen, a forecast of trouble to come. In this case my instincts were right.

  It took an hour to get out of the city proper and into the mountains, so night had fallen by the time I hit the main highway and set out to chase the sun. Behind me the city of Greater Sydney sprawled in a net of lights across the dark encroachment of the harbour. Along the foreshores, among the canyons of the city streets, out in the suburbs that covered the whole coastal plain people were getting ready to eat, turning on their 3V sets, settling down for a quiet evening, while I scurried off into the interior on a task that would affect every one of them in some way or other. Seven million people in Sydney, another twenty-eight million in the rest of Australia, and unwittingly I held the fate of them all in my hands.

  Now that I was locked on to the highway I began, as usual, to feel bored. Outside the dome the luminescent ribbon of roadway unwound at a steady two hundred miles per hour. A few cars flicked by going in the opposite direction and, looking back, I could see others following me at varying distances. Beyond the limits of the road there were probably houses, certainly farms, but if there were people anywhere around me I was unaware of them. The clear bubble of the car isolated me completely. There was not even any real contact with the road. The air cushion kept the car suspended a few inches above the surface and the connection between the magnetized strip on which I was locked and the steering apparatus was electric and invisible.

  Forced in on myself I became more acutely aware of my sensations. Comfort, certainly; the car was custom built. Warmth; the heater was perfect. But hunger—this was one problem that the car would not solve for me. 1 poked around in the various recesses, but except for a few scraps of chocolate already turning white with age there seemed to be nothing in the car that was even remotely edible. I picked up the phone and punched the office number. Seconds later the pert face of the night receptionist floated on to the screen.

  “Civil Aviation. Can I help you?” She looked closer. “Oh, Mr. Fraser.”

  “Has Miss Freeman left yet?”

  “I’m not sure. Wait, I’ll try your office.”

  There was a blip and the screen cleared to show Ilona Freeman’s face. She smiled.

  “Hi, Bill. What did you forget?”

  “Food?”

  “Try your case.”

  I opened my satchel. Inside, along with the papers, were three thin plastic packs.

  “Remind me to raise your salary,” I said.

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Anything come in since I left?”

  “Only that he’s continuing to improve. He hasn’t woken yet—or he hadn’t at seven anyway.”

  “Right. See you Thursday.’

  I cut off, took out one of the plastic packs and tore off the sealer strip. Steam and savoury odours puffed out. I folded the sides down and they locked into the shape of a shallow dish. Chicken Cacciatore with new potatoes and green peas. One of the others would hold lemon gelati; Ilona knew my tastes well enough. But I was puzzled by the third. I looked inside. Packed into the small space was the oddest assortment of fruits I had ever seen—or not seen; most of them were completely unknown to me. Long purple things like peas, something that might have been a banana if it hadn’t been pastel pink, berries in green, blue, white and magenta. The pack, like all the others, was marked “Export Only”. Apparently the Assistant Director of Civil Aviation had made the unofficial V.I.P. list. Australia’s export trade in food was its biggest money-spinner and the bureau guarded it jealously. It gave me an obscure satisfaction to know that the food I was despatching was to stay in the country rather than be sold to some well-to-do gourmand in Italy or France.

  As I tucked into dinner the amusing side of the situation made me smile. Australia selling food to Europe? In the fifties the idea of Australia exporting anything but the most basic raw materials—wool, wheat, steel—would have been ridiculous. Nobody had bargained for the immense expansion that would follow the opening up of Australia to Asian immigrants and the impetus this would give to the development of the inland desert. Up to 1970 settlement was in most cases confined to a narrow strip of coastline seldom more than one hundred miles wide. Now, in 1994, there were market gardens in the far west where once a farmer had been lucky to graze two sheep to the acre, and they were well on the way to planting wheat where Lake Eyre had once turned a white mirror of dried salt to the sun.

  The increased productivity had had its effect on the national character too. For decades Australia had lived on its muscles, trying to make up for its economic deficiencies by victories on other fronts. Australian sportsmen, artists and writers were world-famous. It was fashionable in Europe and America to admire Australia, to fly in and spend a few weeks on air-conditioned safari into the desert, but like all fashions this was shallow. Beneath the veneer was a contempt. Australia had the status of a football scholar, a nation that had nothing but brute strength and native cunning to pit against the wealth and sophistication of its older fellows. So, when it suddenly fell heir to wealth its first impulse was to strive with other countries for the goals that mattered; the cure for cancer, longevity, space. And so it had happened that in 1993 an Australian scientist had stumbled on the force field and, almost by accident, given mankind the stars.

  Or at least so it had seemed at first. Out in the desert, somewhere north of Capricorn, a research station had been set up and the first cautious experiments made. A generator encapsulated itself in a force field that made an enclosure better, stronger than the finest natural materials in existence. Such a bubble, stressed in a certain way, tended to disappear. After a few experiments radio telescopes on the U.S. space station reported that there were odd objects receding from the earth at incredible speeds. More bubbles were sent out and tracked. Apparently such a field, being a perfect reflector, supplied nothing for the forces of space to hold on to. Like an orange seed squeezed between thumb and finger it stored up the energy applied to it and then suddenly skidded out from between the two opposing forces at a speed that was dangerously close to that of light

  After three months they managed to find a way to make the acceleration gradual and to track and retrieve the force field bubbles. One was brought back. A rat was sent out and retrieved, then a chimpanzee. All survived ground tests. Then they sent a man. On June 7, 1994, Colonel Peter Chart, R.A.A.F., had set off along the track taken by other bubbles. And had returned. Or at least his body had. His mind seemed someho
w to have been lost among the empty reaches of space. He had been taken from the bubble completely catatonic and had remained that way for three weeks. Then, on July 2—yesterday—he had quietly risen from his bed, killed a guard and run off into the desert. Nobody knew why, nobody knew how—but it was my responsibility as leader of the project to find out.

  I would have worried about it all night, but the almost imperceptible hum of the motor lulled me into a doze. Occasionally I would wake when a car went by on the other lane, but by the time I had turned my head it was nothing but a glow disappearing in the distance behind me. Once—it must have been around 3 a.m., I suppose—I woke again and watched rather muzzily as a string of automatic ore-carriers roared past, their huge hoppers piled with chunks of rock torn from the mines of the Pilbara, farther north. The rust stains on those jagged nuggets were like dried blood—another omen, if I had cared to consider it such.

  When I woke the sun was well up and my destination close. All around from horizon to horizon there was only desert. Sand, rocks and stunted spinifex. It was a desolate place, but that was why we had chosen it. A particular rock formation flashed past, reminding me to switch to manual control. A few minutes later I slowed down and turned off the highway where a sign saying maxwell downs experimental cattle breeding station pointed up a rough track. The surface was loose and as I switched the air cushion to maximum lift a cloud of red dust rose in the air. Nobody could be unaware that I was coming.

  I nosed along the track as fast as the surface allowed until it petered out at an old artesian well some ten miles from the highway. The mill turned desultorily in the hot breeze and a wheezing old pump brought up from the underground lakes a trickle of water as brackish and un-drinkable as blood. There was no sound save the clanking of the pump and the splash of water. I waited. A few moments later the old concrete slab on which the pump-house had once rested tilted slowly and opened a dark cavern in the earth. I guided the car down the ramp and into the headquarters of Operation Crosswind.

  All the project H.Q. was underground, though a few offices, my own included, had windows on to the desert, an executive amenity that we seldom used. At the bottom of the shaft I got out of the car and as the garager trundled it off looked up at the square of blue-white sky above. The heat was intense and enervating. My skin prickled and contracted under its dryness, and I was glad when the walkway carried me down into the air-conditioned part of the project.

  Col Talura was waiting for me at the other end. Col— for Colemara. His grandfather had fought with Nemarluk in the Kimberleys and smeared his body with the kidney fat of many white men. Col was a fully initiated member of the Arunta. I had seen his scars. He was also one of the first aborigines to hold a Ph.D. and a B.Sc. Perhaps this contrast was the reason I had chosen him as my right-hand man. His combination of sophistication and allegiance to the old tribal ways made him a person worth studying. It interested me to see how he would react to this, his first crisis. However, there was no time for character analysis at the moment.

  We shook hands sketchily.

  “Sorry I couldn’t meet you,” he said. “I just got back from the hospital this minute.”

  “How is he?”

  “Damned if I know. Physically he’s in poor shape but no danger. Mentally ... well, the doctor can tell you better than I can. Want to go to the hospital?”

  We stepped on to another walkway. Col took a folio of papers from under his arm.

  “You’d better look through these,” he said. “They’re the search team’s reports.”

  I leafed through the papers. Maps marked with search patterns and in one spot a triumphal cross marking where Chart had been found. It was a good twenty miles from the base, I noticed. Records of radio messages, various reports —and a few photographs. The first showed a plain littered with wind-smoothed rocks. “Gibber country” the natives call it.

  “This where they found him?” I asked.

  Col nodded. “Bad country,” he said. “Almost impossible to search.”

  I went through the other photographs. A shot of a car, abandoned. Only a service jeep; nothing but a power unit, a seat and a hemispherical dome. The dome was folded back. I looked at the next photograph. It was a shock.

  “My God!”

  Col didn’t turn. He knew what I was looking at.

  “A mess, isn’t he? Third degree burns, exposure, thirst— nasty.”

  “He’s naked.”

  “That’s how we found him. It’s not unusual. People lost in the desert often get delirious and throw off their clothes. I don’t know how he survived. It hasn’t been below a hundred degrees over here for weeks.”

  The walkway ended at the door of the hospital. The doctor was waiting there to meet us.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “A mess. But he should pull through.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “If you like. But he can’t talk. We’ve got him in a skin tank.”

  We walked down a corridor and he led us into the room where Chart was. The whole chamber was bathed in blue luminescence. On the walls, ripples of light flowed endlessly in the blueness. The room contained only the tank, a long coffin-like plastic cylinder connected to quietly humming machinery. In it a man floated. This was neither the Peter Chart I had known six months ago nor the seared animal of the photograph, but another composite half-formed creature. The skin over his whole body was soft and pink like that of a child. Every line and wrinkle had been smoothed out. Above the mask the man’s eyes were closed in sleep.

  I turned to the doctor. There was no real need to whisper, but I had the feeling that to talk loudly in here would somehow disturb the delicate balance in which Chart was held.

  “Are you taking brain readings?” I asked.

  He moved to a small machine connected to the side of the tank near Chart’s head. A wire connected it to two electrodes taped to his forehead. The doctor cranked the recorder on the side and a slip of paper slid up from the interior of the machine. He handed it to me.

  “This is the complete record since he came in.”

  I examined the graph on the sheet. Something about it was odd but I wasn’t sure what. Then I realized. There was an unnatural evenness about the pattern. Catatonics have an especially complicated brain pattern. Physically they are motionless but subconsciously their brains remain active, endlessly considering the problem that has forced them to shut down their bodies in protest. Yet Chart’s mind was just as inactive as his body. There was nothing on the graph but the mumble of a brain carrying on natural functions. Only in one place was there a variation. The graph suddenly leaped almost off the scale and for a quarter of an inch or so moved crazily about before settling down again. This must have been the period of Chart’s escape, flight and recapture. I didn’t mention it until we were outside in the corridor again.

  Then I said, “How did it happen?”

  The doctor scratched his ear nervously.

  “It’s my fault,” he said, “though I must say I think anybody would have done the same thing in the circumstances. After he’d been in a coma for a few days and all the usual tests had been made, we left him under minimum security; a nurse to see to the feeding and such, and a guard just in case something happened. On the night he escaped the girl went out as usual about 2 a.m. to refill the nutrient bottle. Chart hadn’t changed at all during the day. As you can see from the graph he was completely unconscious right up to then. Yet suddenly he leapt out of coma into instant life, strangled the guard with his bare hands, sneaked out of the hospital and stole a car. Medically, it’s impossible—but he did it.”

  “Is there any possible explanation that might cover the situation?” Col asked. “It doesn’t matter how far-fetched it is, just so long as it fits.”

  The doctor looked more confused.

  “I wish it was that easy. As far as I can see, we’ve tried everything that might logically have caused this particular situation, and none of them fit. Human beings aren’t as c
omplex as you might think. Of course, you sometimes get bizarre symptoms for fairly simple diseases, but as a rule the cause and effect are fairly easy to link up. But this ... I mean, the symptoms and the possible causes aren’t even of the same order!”

  I chewed this over.

  “So what it amounts to,” I said, “is that Chart is suffering from some unknown mental aberration presumably caused by his experiences on the flight.”