Universe 1 - [Anthology] Read online

  The strip of prints suddenly brightened just after that point at which he’d changed to a wide-angle lens, just after he’d -begun the final wrap-up. A ceiling light had been turned on in the kitchen.

  Tabbot stared at a naked woman seated at the table.

  She held both hands folded over her stomach, as though pressing in a role of flesh. Behind her the narrow door of the water closet stood ajar. The table was bare. Tabbot frowned at the woman, at the pose, and then rummaged through his notes for the retroactive exposure time: five minutes past six. The woman who made Christmas dolls was sitting at a bare table at five minutes past six in the morning, looking off to her left, and holding her hands over her stomach. Tabbot wondered if she were hungry—wondered if she waited on some imaginary maid to prepare and serve breakfast. Eggs, coffee, dry toast.

  He searched for a frame of the stove: There was a low gas flame beneath the coffee pot. No eggs frying. Well . . . they were probably three-minute eggs, and these frames had been exposed five or ten minutes apart.

  He looked again at the woman and apologized for the poor joke: she would be dead in forty minutes.

  The only other item of interest on the third strip was a thin ribbon of light under the shower curtain. Tabbot skipped backward along the strip seeking the two exposures angled into the shower stall, but found them dark and the stall empty. The wrong hour.

  Behind him the camera shut itself off and called for attention.

  Tabbot carried the instrument across the room to an advantageous position beside an arm of the chair and again angled toward the door. The timer was reset for a duplicate coverage of the scenes just completed, but he expected no more than a shadowy figure entering, firing, leaving—a murky figure in a darkened room. A new series was started with that one flash frame as the centerpiece.

  His attention went back to the woman at the table. She sat with her hands clasped over her stomach, looking off to her left. Looking at what?

  On impulse, Tabbot walked into the kitchen and sat down in her chair. Same position, same angle. Tabbot pressed his hands to his stomach and looked off to his left. Identical line of sight. He was looking at the shower stall.

  One print had given him a ribbon of light under the stained curtain—no, stained folding door. The barrier had leaked water.

  He said aloud: “Well, I’ll be damned!”

  The printed strips were stretched across the table to free his hands and then he examined his notebook item by item. Each of the prints had peered into the past at five minutes after six in the morning. Someone took a shower while the woman sat by the table.

  Back to the last few frames of the second strip taken from the second magazine: a figure—a dim and indistinct somebody of a figure—stood at the far corner of the coffee table looking at the closed door. Time: six-forty. Five minutes before the shot was fired.

  Did the woman simply stand there and wait a full five minutes for a knock on the door? Or did she open it only a moment after the exposure was made, let the man in, argue with him, and die five minutes later behind the chair? Five minutes was time enough for an argument, a heated exchange, a threat, a shot.

  Tabbot braced his hands on the table edge.

  What happened to the man in the shower? Was he still there—soaking himself for forty minutes—while the woman was gunned down? Or had he come out, dried himself, gulped down breakfast and quit the apartment minutes before the assailant arrived?

  Tabbot supplied answers: no, no, no, and maybe.

  He jumped up from the chair so quickly it fell over. The telephone was behind the stack of Western novels.

  The man answering his call may have been one of the wicker basket men.

  “County morgue.”

  “Sergeant Tabbot here, Photo Section. I’ve got preliminary prints on that woman in the apartment. She was seated at the breakfast table between six o’clock and six-fifteen. How does that square with the autopsy?”

  The voice said cheerfully: “Right on the button, Sergeant. The toast was still there, know what I mean?”

  Weakly: “I know what you mean. I’ll send over the prints.”

  “Hey, wait—wait, there’s more. She was just a little bit pregnant. Two months, maybe.”

  Tabbot swallowed. An unwanted image tried to form in his imagination: the autopsy table, a stroke or two of the blade, an inventory of the contents of the stomach— He thrust the image away and set down the telephone.

  Aloud, in dismay: “I thought the man in the shower ate breakfast! But he didn’t—he didn’t.” The inoperative phone gave him no answer.

  The camera stopped peering into the past

  * * * *

  Tabbot hauled the instrument into the kitchen and set up a new position behind the woman’s chair to take the table, stove, and shower stall. The angle would be right over her head. A series of exposures two minutes apart was programmed into the timer with the first frame calculated at six o’clock. The probe began. Tabbot reached around the camera and gathered up the printed strips from the table. The light was better at the window and he quit the kitchen for yet another inspection of the dismal preliminaries.

  The front door, the janitor and a second man in the doorway, the bright beauty of a frame with the detective sitting on the sofa, the darkened frames of the sofa pulled out to make a bed— Tabbot paused and peered. Were there one or twofigures sprawled in the bed? Next: the kitchen doorway, the overstuffed chair, the misplaced coffee table, the window with the closed drapes— All of that. On and on. Dark. But were there one ortwo people in the bed?

  And now consider this frame: a dim and indistinct somebody looking at the closed door. Was that somebody actually walking to the door, caught in mid-stride? Was that somebody the man from the shower?

  Tabbot dropped the strips and sprinted for the kitchen.

  The camera hadn’t finished its programmed series but Tabbot yanked it from position and dragged it over the kitchen floor. The tripod left marks. The table was pushed aside. He stopped the timer and jerked aside the folding door to thrust the lens into the shower stall. Angle at the tiny wash basin and the mirror hanging above it; hope for sufficient reflected light from the white tiles. Strap on a fresh magazine. Work feverishly with the side rule. Check and check again the notes to be certain of times. Set the timer and start the camera. Stand back and wait.

  The Lieutenant had been wrong.

  The woman who made Christmas dolls did not walk to the door and admit a man at about six-forty in the morning; she didn’t go to the door at all. She died behind the chair, as she was walking toward the window to pull the drapes. Her assailant had stayed the night, had slept with her in the unfolded bed until sometime shortly before six o’clock. They got up and one of them used the toilet, one of them put away the bed.He stepped into the shower whileshe sat down at the table. In that interval she held her belly, and later had breakfast. An argument started—or perhaps was carried over from the night before—and when the man emerged into a nowdarkened kitchen he dressed and made to leave without eating.

  The argument continued into the living room; the woman went to the window to admit the morning sun while the professional gunman hesitated between the coffee table and the door. He half turned, fired, and made his escape.

  “There’s a little hole in the spine...“

  Tabbot thought the Lieutenant was very wrong. In less than an hour he would have the prints to prove him wrong.

  To save a few minutes’ time he carried the exposed magazine down to the truck and fed the film into the developing tank. It was a nuisance to bother with the keeper each time he went in and out, and he violated regulations by leaving it inert. A police cruiser went by as he climbed down from the truck but he got nothing more than a vacant nod from the man riding alongside the driver. Tabbot’s knee began to hurt as he climbed the steps to the third floor for what seemed the hundredth time that day.

  The camera had completed the scene and stopped.

  Tabbot made ready to
leave.

  He carried his equipment outside into the corridor and shot three exposures of the apartment door. The process of packing everything back into the bulky case took longer than the unpacking. The tripod stubbornly refused to telescope properly and fit into the case. And the citizens’ privacy law stubbornly refused to let him shoot the corridor: no crime there.

  A final look at the unoccupied apartment: he could see through into the kitchen and his imagination could see the woman seated at the table, holding her stomach. When he craned his neck to peer around the door he could see the window limned in bright sunshine. Tabbot decided to leave the drapes open. If someone else were killed here today or tomorrow he wanted the drapes open.

  He closed the apartment door and thrust his I.D. card into the keeper’s slot to activate it. There was no rewarding stir of machinery, no theatrical buzzing of high-frequency pulsing but his guts began growling when the red bullseye glowed. He went down the stairs carefully because his knee warned against a fast pace. The camera case banged his other leg.

  Tabbot removed the reel of film from the developing tanks and started it through the printer. The second magazine was fed into the developer. He closed the back door of the truck, went around to the driver’s door and fished for the ignition key in his trouser pocket. It wasn’t there. He’d left the key hanging in the ignition, another violation of the law. Tabbot got up in the cab and started the motor, briefly thankful the men in the police cruiser hadn’t spotted the key—they would have given him a citation and counted him as guilty as any other citizen.

  The lab truck moved out into traffic.

  The printing of the two reels of nylon film was completed in the parking lot alongside the precinct house. He parked in a visitor’s slot. Not knowing who might be watching from a window, Tabbot removed the key from the ignition and pocketed it before going around to the back to finish the morning’s work.

  The strip results from the first magazine were professionally insulting: dark and dismal prints he didn’t really want to show anyone. There were two fine frames of gun flash, and two others of the dim and indistinct somebody making for the door. About the only satisfaction Tabbot could find in these last two was the dark coloring: a man dressed in dark clothing, moving through a darkened room. The naked woman would have been revealed as a pale whitish figure.

  Tabbot scanned the prints on the second strip with a keen and professional eye. The white tile lining the shower stall had reflected light in a most satisfying manner: he thought it one of the best jobs of backlighting he’d ever photographed. He watched the woman’s overnight visitor shower, shave, brush his teeth and comb his hair. At one point—perhaps in the middle of that heated argument—he had nicked himself on the neck just above his Adam’s apple. It had done nothing to improve the fellow’s mood.

  One exposure made outside the apartment door—the very last frame—was both rewarding and disappointing: the indistinct somebody was shown leaving the scene but he was bent over, head down, looking at his own feet. Tabbot supposed the man was too shy to be photographed coming out of a woman’s room. He would be indignant when he learned that a camera had watched him in the little mirror above the wash basin. Indignant, and rather furious at this newest invasion of privacy.

  Tabbot carried the prints into the precinct house. Another sergeant was on duty behind the desk, a man who recognized him by his uniform if not by face or name.

  “Who do you want?”

  Tabbot said: “The Lieutenant. What’s-his-name?”

  The desk man jerked a thumb behind him. “In the squad room.”

  Tabbot walked around the desk and found his way to the squad room at the end of the building. It was a large room with desks, and four or five men working or loafing behind the desks. Most of them seemed to be loafing. All of them looked up at the photographer.

  “Over here, Sergeant. Did you finish the job?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tabbot turned and made his way to the Lieutenant’s desk. He spread out the first strip of dark prints.

  “Well, you don’t seem too happy about it.”

  “No, sir.”

  The second strip was placed beside the first.

  “They’re all dark except those down at the bottom. It was brighter in the shower stall. That’s you in the shower, Lieutenant. The backlighting gave me the only decent prints in the lot.”

  <>

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Gerard F. Conway is another product of the Clarion science fiction workshops; in fact the story below was written last year for discussion there. It’s a powerful story about a different kind of interstellar ship, and a very personal type of space disaster. . . . At Clarion, evidently they don’t do just writing exercises. You’ll see more of Conway’s writing in his first novel, THE MIDNIGHT DANCERS, an Ace Science Fiction Special to be published July 1971. And, of course, there’ll certainly be much, much more after that: the man is a story-teller.

  MINDSHIP

  Gerard F. Conway

  We were three weeks out from Centauri when our Cork blew.

  He was a thin man, almost gaunt, with lines and hints of age wrinkling the paperweight thinness of his skin; for that, he was a young man, and it showed in the way he carried himself—easily, sliding along with that forward shove affected by those still new in space, the kind of lopsided tumble that bumps you off walls, cracks your head against low hatches, gives you a hundred bruises and cuts on your first trip out. Like a fly in water, spinning about, flapping gauze wings; he moved like that. Occasionally, he smiled; when it came, it rested for only a moment as though unsure, waiting to be blown away. If I were to pick a word, a single word for him, it would be Young.

  Like all Corks, he was a Sensitive. You could see it in his hands, the way they fluttered over his lap when he sat in the lounge, the way they touched and lighted on the arms of his chair, rested on his knees, moved on to trap themselves under his elbows; his fingers were long, tapered, sallow candles lit from an inside source, always pale and drained, pinkish at the tips where the nails used to be. When he spoke, his hands jumped and dove, winding tapestries in the coffee-stained air of the lounge where we slouched about, chatting and listening to carefully worn tales; when he spoke, his voice was quiet, unobtrusive, gentle. When he spoke, he looked down, watching his hands. Sometimes he stared at them as though they were apart from him, flesh-tinted birds nestling in his lap. I know that look.

  Three weeks out on our third run, he blew. We were lucky to get back to port. Lucky for us. His luck ran out when he shipped aboard theCharter.

  You can’t think of yourself objectively; at least, it’s that way with me. I can’t judge; it’s too easy to relax the more temperate aspects of the personality, and take hell out on yourself. Too easy. We all tend to mark ourselves as martyrs.

  * * * *

  I was captaining theCharter when we touched down on Endrim; half the crew had been blown away by the last twist into the Back Region: the former Captain was one of the first to go down, of course, and since I was First, I took up and carried through and brought us down and kept us Out. All the right things, all the smart things. We still lost half our crew.

  By the time we reached Endrim, we were a limping mass of crippled mindship. Even the Engineer was on the verge of being blown; somewhere back in the second foray our Cork—this one was an old man way past his third ‘juve, a crumpled shell of gray and pink who’d somehow managed to stick it through six runs with only minor adjustments; the contrast between him and the Cork we latched onto at Endrim was blowing—cracked up and began fingering pod controls in his bay section; somehow he punched a liferaft node and ejected himself suitless into the Big None. Never found him, though at that point we were rather busy to be looking for a half-senile Sensitive. Maybe we should have sent out a pod; after he blew, everything seemed to crumble at the edges, eating in towards the middle like acid rust on a sheet of cheap tin. That’s when the Engineer started complaini
ng about stresses along the lateral lines; that’s when half the crew snapped and went screaming into liquid madness.

  A Cork is quite a useful thing on a mindship; without one, crews have a tendency to dissolve in their own madness.

  When we touched Endrim, I made finding a new Cork Priority One.

  In a port, any port, whether it’s on the dark side of the main spiral or the light, you’ll find three types of districts: your pleasure centers, where the less discriminating congregate; your livers—local residents only, it says here; and your communes. It’s the last place you look for when you’re searching out a Sensitive.

  That’s where I found the new Cork.

  * * * *

  I was with the Cook. He pushed through the screen ahead of me, twisting around to hold the strands back and let me through; I ducked under the low hang, came out into a scent of sweet smoke tainted by an under-odor of dust, and the dry, sometimes choking flavor of packed earth. It was dark, graying towards corners where candles and oil-lamps made futile, halfhearted efforts to relieve the black. I blinked against the sting spotting my eyes, glanced in at the unmoving shapes outlined in the dim glow.