New Writings in SF 5 - [Anthology] Read online

“Well, no,” he said uneasily. “That’s the odd thing. No matter how basic the trauma is, we could have detected it. We tested Chart for all expected troubles. The isolation, the silence, the recirculated air—none of them could possibly have affected him. His mind was incapable of reacting to any of them in this particular way. If you like, he was immune to neurosis. There are things he could have reacted to, of course, but none of them occurred during the flight. We’ve got a complete brain-wave record of the whole period. Nothing happened to him in the bubble.”

  “If it’s not mental, then how about physical? Some new virus...”

  “No, that’s impossible too. The field would keep out everything that might conceivably have affected him. He was completely insulated. Anyway, the infection effects would have registered in the brain pattern.”

  So it wasn’t physical and it wasn’t mental—or at least not physical or mental in the sense that we were used to. We were at a dead end. There was only one thing to do— test. We began next day.

  It isn’t hard to set up a force field. It needs a few thousand watts of power and something to perch your projector on, otherwise you find a quantity of floor included in the field. Once the field is formed it’s impervious to anything from gamma rays to a punch from a human fist. Nothing hitting the field can penetrate it, not even subatomic particles. This is what makes it particularly good for space flight. The radiation hazard ceases to exist. For tests, we had set up the usual projector complex, a framework rather like an old-fashioned automobile chassis, on top of a shaft. In the centre, directly over the shaft, was the projector, in front of it the pilot’s seat and console, and behind the air-recirculating equipment. The only new feature was a two-way T.V. link, the cable of which ran down the support shaft. Ordinarily the shaft was retracted by the pilot before launching, allowing the field to complete itself, but in this case we needed some type of observing mechanism. The seal was tight. But for the link the test pilot was just as Chart had been.

  After the field had been turned on and the link tested there was nothing to do but wait. For the first few days I spent most of my time in the control bay watching the image of Tevis, the test pilot, on the monitor screen, but soon the strain began to tell and I forced myself away from the project. Cal Talura felt the same way, and so we spent a few days on the surface hunting small game and generally puttering about in the desert. On one of these trips, hunting farther south than I had ever been before, I was surprised to see the brown surface of the Nullabor give way without warning to an area of dead black that stretched as far as I could see. It was a huge and static shadow mantling the brown earth, a great ink blot on creation. Col saw my surprise.

  “Woomera.” he explained, pointing to the south.

  I looked through the binoculars and saw the distant glint of metal. Another Common Europe rocket, no doubt, on its way to Station I or perhaps farther out.

  “What’s all this, then?” I asked, indicating the blackness.

  Col’s face betrayed his resentment.

  “Security,” he explained. “They cleared the whole area for fifty miles around and sprayed it with a metallic solution. It gives Woomera a sort of radar mirror, a neutral surface that shows up anything that moves on it. Their scopes can pick up anything that walks out on to that area. And there’s no cover. They ground up the rocks and cleared every bit of vegetation.”

  “Well, it’s their land,” I said, swinging the copter around to avoid the area.

  Col’s reaction was unexpected. “Why? We were here first, weren’t we?”

  Whether he meant Australians in general or his own people in particular I didn’t know, though I suspected the latter.

  “There’s the treaty ...”

  Col consigned the treaty and the men who had made it to eternal damnation in a few Arunta phrases and I let the matter drop, making, however, a mental note to keep an eye on Col’s oversensitive nationalism. In our business it didn’t pay to be careless of politics.

  * * * *

  The whole question of Woomera came to a head some days later. Early in the morning Col stormed into my office and dropped a pea-sized object on to the desk. I squinted at it, a tiny pearl of intertwined wires around a central red crystal.

  “Where was this planted?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t, luckily. We’d just finished a fresh wall sealer job in the main lounge when one of the boys hit the wrong button and knocked off a patch. This was in the wet plastic.”

  “Why did the main lounge need a new plas job?”

  Col scowled. “I’m way ahead of you. The old wall was discoloured by fumes, the fumes came from a coffee machine that was slightly miswired, a man named Bronski did the wiring...”

  “And he went A.W.O.L. some weeks ago. These boys are experts.”

  I looked at the tiny bug again. Naturally there were no markings but the thing had E.L.D.O. written all over it. We had, I thought, effectively prevented the Russians and the Chinese from penetrating Crosswind, but there was something particularly irksome about being spied on by our own allies.

  Col voiced my conclusion. “Woomera?” he asked.

  I was about to say “Where else?” when the desk plate lit up.

  “A Colonel Thompson to see you.”

  “Thompson?”

  “From Woomera.”

  Col and I exchanged glances.

  “Tell him to wait,” I said, “and give me the latest Woomera staff list.”

  The plate cleared and a string of names began to move across it.

  European Launcher/Development Organization

  Head. General Sir Gordon Glenwright.

  Deputy. General Sir Stuart Millar.

  Thompson’s name appeared half-way through the first twenty names.

  Colonel Sanchez Thompson, 2/ic Security.

  “A minor V.I.P.,” Col said. “What does he want?”

  “There’s one way to find out.” I told the secretary to let him in.

  It cannot be said too often that appearances are deceptive. This is especially true in intelligence work. The public image of the spy is a very complete and detailed one, so much so that one is almost obliged to pattern real spies along the complete opposite of the popular idea. Sanchez Thompson seemed almost to go too far. He was so obviously not a spy that he could hardly have been anything else. He stuttered. He bit his fingernails. He dressed without style or taste. I had never thought that the mass-produced British army officer’s uniform could look badly cut, but on him it seemed almost scarecrowish. However, his eyes missed nothing, and when he had something important to say he never stuttered. I wasted no time with amenities. Almost before he had sat down I pushed the bug across the desk towards him.

  “Yours, I think.”

  He picked it up unsmilingly and held it as I had earlier between thumb and forefinger.

  “A beautiful piece of work,” he said.

  “And very useful.”

  “They fill in the gaps—the sort of thing we can’t get in ... other ways.”

  “Meaning spies?” Col snapped. I was surprised at his tone. Apparently his emotions ran closer to the surface than I had guessed.

  Thompson pursed his lips and glanced at me. I said nothing. He looked back to Col.

  “Meaning spies.” he agreed.

  Col’s palm slammed down on the desk-top.

  “Well, you damned little peeping tom. What business is it of yours what we do here? Why don’t you keep your nose out of our business and get back where you came from. We don’t want you.”

  Thompson wilted under the tirade. He was a diplomat. Verbal slanging wasn’t in his line.

  “We have an agreement...” he said weakly.

  “An agreement thirty-five years old! An agreement that you’ve abused ever since you got it. Just like the Americans up north. You’re nothing but...”

  I held up my, hand. “Col...”

  “Interfering little ...”

  “Col!”

  He lapsed into sullen silence
.

  “You’re probably interested in the tests we’re running. Colonel,” I said. “Would you care to see the set-up?”

  Col seemed hardly to believe his ears. We left him sitting in the office, motionless. I suppose he thought I was selling him and the whole project down the river, but the pattern wasn’t hard to see. There was little about Crosswind that E.L.D.O. didn’t know. Thompson’s casual visit proved that. I wondered what errand he had come on.

  “I suppose you have something to tell me,” I said as we moved towards the test area.

  He reached into his pocket and handed me a sheet of paper. I glanced through it. It was a legal opinion signed by one of the most eminent international jurists; even I knew his name, though the law was a closed book to me. Briefly it suggested that, should the situation ever come to a head, it seemed likely that E.L.D.O. could take over Crosswind under its agreement with the Australian government, as any experimental work in connection with spaceflight in this country should be done under E.L.D.O. auspices.

  “Experimental work,” I said. “But what if we can make this thing work? You would be shut out then, wouldn’t you?”

  “Indeed we would, Mr. Fraser—if it worked.”

  So it seemed that, unless I was very lucky, I would be working for Common Europe before very long, taking my orders from Paris. And Washington, of course. Col had been right there. The difference in greed between the Europeans and the Americans was tiny. Both had approached the situation in the same way back in the fifties. With E.L.D.O., the European consortium set up in 1960 to try and break the American domination of space research, it had been “Let us use your outback for test firings and we’ll give you prestige.” With the U.S., it had been “Give us an area to build a military base and we’ll give you protection.” In the troubled days of the mid-century Australia had desperately wanted prestige and protection, but more, it had wanted the feeling of “belonging”, of being a “power”. The politicians had handed out land by the thousand square miles to the Americans at Northwest Cape and given the Europeans almost complete control of Woomera. A few decades later they saw their mistake, but it was too late to back out then.

  I passed Thompson through the guard, and we walked together towards the huge globe that filled the bay. Caught and thrown back by the perfect reflective power of the field, our images, bent and elongated, looked back at us like wry caricatures.

  “It’s a fascinating thing,” Thompson said. “I look forward to working on it.”

  I ignored the remark and walked over to where a group of technicians were clustered around the T.V. monitor. Tevis, the test pilot, was talking, reeling off a string of figures to one of the controllers. He looked drawn but healthy. There was no sign of any ill effects, nor of the symptoms Chart had exhibited. I checked my watch. He had been in the field seven hours longer than Chart.

  “How is he?” I asked the doctor.

  “Seems perfectly well. The brain-wave pattern is normal.”

  I thought about it for a moment. Then I said, “Right— turn it off.”

  There was a descending whine as the generators cut out. The field shimmered and then faded slowly into invisibility. From the top of the shaft Tevis looked down, blinking in the bright light of the bay.

  There was nothing else to be done at the test site so we caught the walkway that led back to the office. On the way I asked the inevitable question.

  “How much time do we have?”

  Thompson shrugged. “It’s not up to me, Mr. Fraser. If I could take your acceptance back with me...”

  “No chance. I’ll have to take this up with my superiors in Sydney and Canberra.”

  “There won’t be any need,” Thompson said. “We’ve already arranged that. You should get confirmation in a few hours.”

  My first impulse was to hit him and wipe that self-satisfied look from his face but the urge passed. There was nothing to be gained from violence.

  “Well,” I said, “it seems you’ve thought of everything. What are your orders ... sir.”

  The E.L.D.O. man looked embarrassed for the second time that day.

  “You’re taking the wrong attitude, Mr. Fraser. There’s nothing personal in this. We’ve both been in this game for a long time. It’s a business, nothing more. Can we afford to have feelings?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for a discussion of ethics, or for that matter any sort of discussion.

  “What about tomorrow?” I said.

  “If you like,” Thompson said. “And I hope you can look at things a little clearer then.”

  When I got back to the office Col was still there. My surprise must have been obvious because he smiled.

  “I gather you expected me to be gone.” he said.

  I sat down heavily. “Well, you must admit it was a fair assumption.”

  “You don’t give me credit for much intelligence, do you? Would you have run away?”

  “No, but...” I stopped.

  Col jumped on my words.

  “But you’re not an abo ? I thought that was it!”

  Coming so close on the conversation with Thompson his remark took me off guard. I tried to retrieve the situation.

  “Next you’ll tell me I’m prejudiced. You know me better than that, Col.”

  “Aren’t you prejudiced, Bill?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “It’s not as ridiculous as you think,” Col said. “Why did you pick me for this job? Not because of my qualifications —there were plenty of white men with the same degrees. Not because I needed it—there’s no shortage of work these days. No—you chose me because I’m black—an aboriginal —an abo. You give it away every time you look at me.”

  Abruptly I turned my chair to face the window and, for some reason that even now I find hard to fathom, hit the button to clear it for the first time in years. The afternoon sunlight streamed in off the desert, blindingly clear. But it was not only the sun that made my face burn.

  “Why bring all this up now?” I said.

  “It has to be discussed some time.”

  I thought about it for a moment. Then I said, “I don’t deny the fact that you weren’t white influenced me, but it wasn’t a matter of prejudice.”

  “Don’t fool yourself, Bill. It was. You were being charitable. Pity is just as much prejudice as hate, you know. You’re always talking about the old days when Australia was a country to be patronized. Don’t you see you’re patronizing me?”

  Just then, I wanted nothing more than to have that conversation end as quickly as possible.

  “Well, you won’t have to put up with it much longer,” I said. “Crosswind is finished. Tomorrow E.L.D.O. moves in.”

  Col was surprisingly calm.

  “I gathered that,” he said.

  “It had to come. We were lucky to get away with it this long.”

  “Did it have to come?” Col said. “Or do you mean you’re glad it came?”

  I heard the door close, but I didn’t turn around. I was still there, looking out over the desert, when night began to close in.

  * * * *

  For the next few hours I went through the motions of cleaning up the office. The whole thing had seemed very easy when Thompson and I had discussed it—just a simple matter of transferring power from one person to another. But Col had disturbed me. Part of his outburst had been sheer bad temper, no doubt, but that still left a considerable residue of fact. He was right about a number of things. My hiring him for the job had been partly influenced by the fact that he was an aboriginal. At the time I had rationalized it as an interest in his particular attitude to the work, but it was becoming clear that there was more to it than that. I was seeing my motives become more and more obvious as the evasions covering them were drained away. It was less than edifying.

  As for giving up Crosswind, I had to admit that the takeover by E.L.D.O. had seemed to lift a weight from my shoulders. For the past two years I had worked hard on the project, and worked well too, I thought.
There had been little time to think about the imponderables such as loyalty. Did I care about the project? Or was it just the interest in a job to be done? I decided to sleep on it. No doubt I would have woken in the morning with the whole thing carefully rationalized in my mind and the depths of character Col had revealed all covered up again, but things were destined to be different.

  About 3 a.m. I woke to the supremely irritating screech of the bonephone I always wore when on call. The tiny alarm wedged against my mastoid bone jabbed me awake in a second. I ripped the thing off and groped for the communicator switch. It was Col.

  “Chart’s gone again.” he said. “Out into the desert.”