New Worlds #088v30 (1959 11)
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THE WAITING GROUNDS J. G. Ballard ALMOST OBSOLETE Donald Malcolm I LIKE YOU George Longdon ABERRATION Roy Robinson and J* A. Sones Features 14th Year of Publication No. 88 VOLUME 30 2/-
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m WORLDS PROFILES J. G. Ballard Hiddlesex A sure sign of the present health of science fiction is the continued emergence of writers well outside the mainstream tradition, more interested in experimenting with the imaginative and stylistic possibilities offered by the medium than in the conventional story set against an interplanetary or futuristic background. Among these writers is J. G. Ballard, who returns to New Worlds with ‘The Waiting Grounds’ in this month’s issue. “ What particularly interests me about science fiction, he says, “ is the opportunity it gives for experimenting with scientific or psycho-literary ideas which have little or no connection with the world of fiction, such as, say, coded sleep or the time zone. But just as psychologists arc now building models of anxiety neuroses and withdrawal states in the form of verbal diagrams — translating scientific hypothesis into literary construction — so I see a good science fiction story of a model of some psychic image, the truth of which gives the story its merit. Examples are The Incredible Shrinking Man , Limbo ’90, and Henry Kuttner’s Dream’s End. “In general stories with interplanetary backgrounds show too little originality, too much self-imitation. More important, the characters seem to lack any sense of cosmic awe — spanning the whole of space and time without a glimmer of responsibility.” Of his latest story, his first with an interplanetary setting, he says “ It’s just this sense of cosmic responsibility, the attempt to grasp the moral dimensions of the universe, that I’ve tried to describe in ‘ The Waiting Grounds.’ Seen as a psycho- literary model, perhaps it represents the old conundrum of the ant searching hopelessly for the end of the infinite pathway around the surface of a sphere. ‘ The Waiting Grounds ’ offers it a solution, implies that instead of crawling on and on it will find the pathway’s end if it just sits still.”
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NEW WORLDS ^-SCIENCE FICTION-^ NOVEMBER 1959 VOLUME 30 No. 88 MONTHLY CONTENTS Novelettes : Grapeliner James White 4 The Waiting Grounds J. G. bollard .. 41 Short Stories : Almost Obsolete Donald Malcolm . 70 1 Like You George Longdon . 84 Aberration Roy Robinson & J. A. Sones 97 Features : Editorial John Cornell 2 The Literary Line-Up . 83 Postmortem The Readers .. 127 Editor : JOHN CARNELL Cover painting by LEWIS TWO SHILLINGS Subscription Rates Great Britain and the Commonwealth 12 issues 28/- post free United States of America 12 issues $5.00 post free Published on the last Friday of each month by NOVA PUBLICATIONS LTD., Maclaren House, 131 Great Suffolk Street, London, S.E.I. Telephone : HOP 5712 Sole Distributors in Australia : Gordon & Gotch (Australia) Ltd. in New Zealand : Messrs. P. B. Fisher, 564 Colombo Street, Christchurch, N.Z. AH characters in these stories are purely fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is entirely coincidental. No responsibility is accepted for material submitted for publication but every care will be taken to avoid loss or damage. Return postage must be included with all MSS. Printed in England by The Rugby Advertiser Ltd., Albert Street, Rugby
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2 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Outward . . . It is not very often that this Editorial has an opportunity of tieing in with the news which breaks so frequently concerning interplanetary powered flight — time gaps in publishing being what they are. However, it does just work out this month that I can sneak in a few comments about Russia’s latest achievement with their round-the-Moon probe, although, unfortunately, at the time of writing (October 8th) no official details are forthcoming from the Russian scientists and what little news there is on the radio or in the daily press is com- pletely swamped by the General Election. It may well be that by the time you read this you will have seen the first pictures of the other side of our satellite, as that is one of many objectives listed for the flight. By an unhappy coincidence it was also the announced objectives by America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA were planning on launching an Atlas-Able probe from Cape Canaveral between October 6th and 10th with the idea of placing it in orbit round the Moon (this was the vehicle which they had previously planned to fire at Venus last June). Amongst the various scientific objectives listed by the Americans (and which the Russians have almost certainly obtained already) were information concerning lunar magnetic and gravitational fields, atmospheric details, configuration of the surface, radioactivity, and many other items required before a manned flight. It looks as though the Russians are easily maintaining their lead in the race into space, and while our article next month discusses the training of the selected Americans who will make a space jump sometime in the next two years you can be sure that somewhere in Russia similar training is going on to select the most suitable pilots for the Soviet’s first extra-terrestrial voyage. With, I think, one big difference. Whereas the Americans are approaching manned flight in cautionary stages, I think the Russians will make a grand play for a direct manned flight round the moon and back. When ? My guess — October 1960. Bearing in mind that the Russians have already stated that they will have a lunar base by 1965 and the fact that they have
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EDITORIAL 3 . . . Bound obviously perfected flight and control, I see no reason why this next step should not be achieved in the very near future, certainly long before the expected actual landing. And a probe with a man inside (providing that he has survived and is still sane) will be of more worth than a dozen mechanical aids and all the elaborate electronic equipment which is packed into the nose cone. Obviously, while flight and control will still be maintained from the launching base a pilot/passenger would be able to make necessary adjustments to the vehicle when approaching the moon, rounding it and starting on the journey back. Also for re-entry, which is still the stickiest problem facing the two major nations conducting experiments. Similarly he would be able to maintain continuous radio contact and send back visual details which at present are stored and telemetered at preset intervals. While the instruments are almost infallible (providing their power source is not cut off) the human eye and mind will assimilate a great deal more additional data which would otherwise be missed. Lunik Three (to give it its American nick-name) was almost certainly launched from the new Russian base about 1000 miles due east of Stalingrad and north-east of the Aral Sea, if reports concerning the site are correct. This base has been in operation less than a year and was responsible for launching Mechta (the sun probe) and probably the probe which landed on the moon in September. Previously the main base had been on the Volga River near Stalingrad but has been moved into a more sparsely inhabited area. While the Russians are readying themselves for manned flight round and to the Moon, you should also keep an eye out for probes being sent to Venus and Mars — both planets will be coming near to Earth within the next two to three years. But while the race into space is beginning to become really exciting let me point out an item which may well dampen our enthusiasm — both America and Russia are cutting back on the financial appropriations for their space research programmes. In this case the race will not necessarily be won by the fastest or the slowest — but to the one who can afford it ! John Cornell
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4 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION If you imagine that the ultimate method of interplanetary travel will be by the presentday orthodox spaceship design — better reserve judgment until you have read James White's latest contribution to the • science of astronautics.’ It is as revolutionary as Arthur C. Clarke’s dumb-bell shaped ship. GRAPEIINER by James White i Like a silver ghost the ferry rocket slid out of blackness and, briefly transiting the dazzling globe of the five thousand miles distant Earth, checked its motion relative to the assembled passenger units with a short, savage burst of decelleration. Watching from the open airlock of the Engine unit. Captain Woodhill signalled to the spacesuited figure of Sister Gallagher beside him and together they launched themselves towards the waiting ferry. Because they were both considerate types who understood and sympathised with the feelings of that rocket’s pilot at this moment, they opened their suit motors to full thrust and brought into play every ounce of skill in their possession in an effort to shorten, if only by seconds, the time taken for the trip across. A very few minutes later Woodhill hit the side of the ferry rocket with a gentle thump and jetted across to the already opened cargo hatch. Closely followed by Gallagher he entered and made a slow dive nosewards along the narrow well of the ship. A long row of collapsed passenger capsules,
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GRAPEL1NER 5 suspended like grey, lumpy cocoons in their specially braced and sprung containers, slid past until they came to the inner control-room lock. While they were negotiating this a series of tiny shocks felt through the soles of their boots, told of the arrival of an unloading crew. While unfastening Ms face-plate inside, Woodhill examined the control-room’s two occupants. Lying in one of the acceleration couches was a young man who must be Cummings, the new Steward. He was fully encased— except for the helmet — in the usual all-plastic spacesuit. His mouth was slack and Ms eyes dull and unfocussed, and altogether his degree of consciousness was very little better than that of the passengers being unloaded aft. WoodMll sighed. He understood the necessity for it, of course. The new Steward would have been thoroughly trained and tested by Earthside psychologists and was perfectly fitted for Ms life and duties in space. But repeated training flights into space were impossible for physical as well as economic reasons, so that a man called upon to leave Ms ship and dive across half a mile of nothing towards a living capsule wMch might be just barely visible in the distance, and do it on his very first time outside a sMp, had to be practically saturated with tranquilisers and other psychological cushioning to withstand the shock. But the new Steward was Gallagher’s problem. The other man in the control-room was also young, but conscious — far too conscious, perhaps, of the tMngs going on around and inside him. The ferry’s pilot looked pale and strained, and kept pulling himself backwards and forwards along the handrails and radiating anxiety and impatience from every line and feature in his face. Like a man, WoodMll thought wryly as he watched the other’s quick, nervous movements, who is trying to keep dry in a rainstorm by running between the drops. But there was no way to avoid the radiation which sleeted silent and unfelt through tMs all-metal ship. The business of moving about was only a pilot’s superstition. He might just as well sit down or stand still. “ ’Night, Lieutenant,” Woodhill said to the pilot when he had his face-plate open. “ TMs is the last batch, anytMng about them we ought to know ?”
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6 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ ’Night, sir,” said the other. He jerked his head in the direction of the passenger compartment and added, “ Girl in there had to have treble the usual dose. Bad case of nerves, apparently.” “ A claustrophobe ?” said Woodhill sharply. The pilot shook his head. “ They checked her medical and psych records and there’s nothing like that. She’s a biologist joining her husband on Mars. These over-intelligent types scare themselves silly over nothing, the doctor said. He had to give her extra sedation, though . . Sister Gallagher, who was bending over the new man, straightened up and asked for the passenger’s name and capsule number. She noted them in the pad strapped to her arm, then resumed chatting quietly and reassuringly to the Steward. Woodhill could feel a constant, irregular vibration in the hand which gripped the back of the pilot’s acceleration couch, a clear indication that the work of detaching the folded-up passenger capsules from their protective frames was well advanced. And in the direct vision port he could see a pattern of stars drifting slowly towards the edge, which meant that several of the passengers had already been thrown away from the ship and the reaction had caused a slight spin to be set up. Now that the conversation had dried up the pilot was beginning to look anxious again. “ How are they making out with the latest anti-gravity ship ?” Woodhill said suddenly. “ I get some of the technical publications, of course, but there must be a lot more literature on the subject available on Earth . . . ?” The Captain wanted to know what they were saying and thinking as well as what they were writing about the anti-gravity ships. He would also have liked full, detailed information on such things as the latest-model cars, fashion trends and current slang expressions — with their derivations — as well. But there was never enough time to pump the ferry-pilots as thoroughly as he would have liked, so he had to rely for his information on the few passengers on every trip who were not so overcome by awe of him that their vocal cords went into a state of temporary paralysis. Captain Woodhill had a horror of growing old, of slowly slipping into habits of thought and speech which would harden into an impenetrable, inflexible shell around his mind ; of
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GRAPELINER 7 becoming a sort of organic tape-recorder which reeled off sections of his life when the proper button was accidentally pushed, whether the pusher wanted to listen or not. He had a theory that if he could keep interested in things and continually- adjusting to new situations and experiences — keep exercising his mental equipment, in short, on everything in sight — then no matter what his body did his mind would not grow old. The Captain was pushing eighty now, he couldn’t afford to relax. But the pilot, his mind very obviously elsewhere, was not disposed to chat. Feeling both irritated and sympathetic at the same time, Woodhill fell silent. As far back as the days before the first manned satelite had been put up, the radiation Belt had been known. A layer of ionisation whose strongest concentration occurred between 30 degrees North and South Magnetic it extended — depending upon sunspot activity and other factors — at times outwards to a distance of six thousand miles. With a radiation level in the region of 50 Rontgens — and 15 R was considered the maximum safe daily dose allowable for atomic pile technicians and such — a ferry pilot naturally had to take his load through it fast. But getting through the radiation layer quickly enough to avoid a lethal dose was not the last of the pilot’s troubles. There were the cosmic rays. Direct cosmic radiation, except when encountered constantly over very long periods, was harmless. But the secondary radiation released when one of these fast, super-heavy particles struck the metal hull of a ship was a different matter. Yet the effects were unfelt and unseen to the person concerned . . . then. It was only when a pilot’s children and grandchildren were born that the effects became horribly apparent. So that it was not a selfish fear for his own safety which troubled the ferry-pilot, Woodhill knew. It was the thought of the terrible freak he would bring into the world should he exceed the safe time-limit which he was allowed to stay in orbit. The Captain suddenly took pity on him. With a gesture which took in the clock, the stars slipping past the viewport and the bumps and vibration being conducted through the control-room’s floor and bulkheads, he said, “ This is a very experienced unloading crew. Another few minutes should do it.”
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8 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Immediately the other’s face cleared. He began to talk so quickly that the words fell over each other. First he apologised for the fact that he might have seemed short and impolite to the Captain and Sister — not realising that ferry-pilots in orbit were always that way— and then went into a perfect babble of small-talk. “. . . And I almost forgot,” he continued as he reached Woodhill the box containing the special lightweight copies of the books the Captain had ordered, together with his last- minute instructions from the ground. “ The details are inside. You’re to watch for an alien spaceship again — supposed to be made of glass, this time ! It was Patterson on Ganymede who sent in the report. They’re replacing him as soon as possible, of course. “ That sort of thing happens so often — flying saucer sightings, alien spaceships and the Lord-alone-knows how many other wild imaginings.” He hesitated, then added awkwardly, “ I suppose it’s the loneliness which gets them.” “ Yes,” said Woodhill. The Captain was thinking that it had been tactful of the pilot to attribute Patterson’s insanity to loneliness and not to senile decay. Fie had known ex-Captain Patterson— ex- because an accident in the airlock had lost him his arm. But Patterson had elected to take over the one-man Jupiter Observatory on Ganymede, and had looked after the equipment there and played chess with anyone within radio distance for a great many years. Even Captains and ex-Captains wear out eventually, however, and the process nearly always started at the brain. A glass spaceship, Woodhill thought. Good old Patterson. Mad, of course, yet logical to the end. His brief reverie was interrupted by a message from the Steward-in-Charge of the unloading party reporting that they were taking out the last passenger now. Woodhill relayed the news briskly to the others and stood aside to allow Gallagher and the new man to preceed him through the lock. The pilot saluted, a courtesy which was optional in free fall conditions, with his eyes jerking sideways towards the clock. The Captain returned it gravely, closed his face-plate and left. He was only three hundred yards away when the Ferry’s motors flared at minimum thrust, pushing it clear of the passenger assembly preparatory to its piling on maximum
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GRAPELINER 9 decelleration for the return trip. He overtook and passed Gallagher and the new man on their way to one of the Steward’s Recreational globes, and a succession of passengers tumbling slowly through space, blissfully unaware of the apparent carelessness with which their precious persons were being tossed around. But they were on a divergent course to his own and soon he was alone, heading for the squat, awkward shape of the Engine unit. It resembled a cross between a space-going daddy long-legs and a horribly mutated wasp, the Captain thought. As well as the spidery framework which stretched out seventy feet from around the middle of its hull — which was designed to hold the towing cables free of the tail flare — it was painted in garish, zig-zag stripes of black, red and yellow to warn everyone that this structure was made of metal. This warning did not apply to the Captain, or Gallagher, or his two Engineers. Children and grandchildren, except for those already in existence, would never be a problem to them. When Woodhill entered the control-room and climbed out of his suit, Hutton, the Second Engineer, was at the large vision screen co-ordinating the efforts of the Stewards to prepare the passengers of the fourth ring for sleep. Hutton waited until the Captain was strapped into the couch beside him, then reported, “ The cone is in thrust position and hooked on, except for a couple of passengers from the last batch who are being attached to Ring Five now. Rings One to Three are under sedation too, of course, and the passengers in Four — the ones who have been up here the longest, that is — have been fed. “ Those that could eat,” he added, smirking. One of Hutton’s duties when he wasn’t acting as the vessel’s radioman or playing canasta with the First Engineer was to instruct the Stewards — especially new men — in their work and duties, and he had the irritating habit of telling the Captain things which Woodhill already knew or could see for himself. He was inclined to garrulity and repetition in his conversation, and altogether he was the sort of person that the Captain was deadly afraid of becoming himself. Woodhill said, “ How are we for time ?” “ Thrust in twenty-eight minutes,” Hutton replied. “ Will you talk to Ring Four now ?” The Captain nodded and pulled the PA microphone from its clip. Then he paused, looking out at his sprawling, name- less command.
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10 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION n From outriggers on the Engine unit, four thick and immensely strong cables of woven plastic led out to Ring One, were anchored solidly to it at equal intervals around its circumference, then led on and were simularly connected to the four other rings. Number Two, which was three hundred feet across, was fifty feet wider than One, and Three was wider than Two and so on down the line. Under thrust and in its proper towing position the Engine unit formed the apex of a long, narrow cone along whose open centre the exhaust gases passed harmlessly. The rings themselves were comprised of several thicknesses of plastic tubing — the tough, flexible and springy tubing which, when the rings were dismantled at the termina- tion of thrust and the passengers were permanently awakened, would carry the air supply to the inflated passenger capsules. At the moment all the capsules, with the exception of those in Ring Four, were collapsed and drifted at the end of the short cables connecting them to their parent rings. Four towing cables, five gigantic but incredibly thin and springy plastic hoops and literally miles of rope scarcely thicker than a finger which held the capsules to the circumference of those hoops. It seemed to be a fantastically risky method of transporting nearly two hundred passengers across sixty million miles, Woodhill thought ; but he knew that this apparently fragile structure would hold under many times the maximum stress which its Engine unit could put upon it. The Captain cleared his throat, thumbed the mike switch and began to speak. “ Good Night, ladies and gentlemen, this is the Captain,” he said pleasantly. “ We shall begin to apply thrust in a short time, but before the Stewards come around with your sedatives there are some things I would like to tell you, even though most of you will have read up on them before deciding to make the trip. They are important things and bear repeating. “ First,” he continued, “ the acceleration. This will be maintained at one quarter-G for approximately eight days, with a break of four hours in every twenty-four for meals and so forth. This twenty-hour fast will do you no physical harm because you will be both asleep and resting in a gravity pull much lighter than normal, so that the fuel demands of your bodies will be correspondingly reduced. During the free-fall period of the voyage you will be amazed at how little you will eat.
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GRAPELINER 11 “ Second ; cosmic radiation.” Woodhill paused to give emphasis to the words which would follow, then went on, “ I can assure you, absolutely and inequivocably, that during the six weeks you will be en route you will have nothing to fear — then or at any later period in your lives. A matter of weeks is much too short a time for the natural radiation to cause mutational changes, and there will be none of the more dangerous secondary radiation present at all. Towing cables, ring structures and your living quarters with all that they contain are all-plastic fabrications. “ They can do wonderful things with plastics these days . . .” Woodhill continued with the many times repeated pep-talk with only part of his mind, the rest of his attention being concentrated on the gradually diminishing activity along the rings. One and Two were ready to go ; they looked like two slightly imperfect circles of mismatched beads which wavered gently with the tiny, conflicting motions given them by the vessel’s personnel. The grey, lumpy cocoons which were the collapsed and folded-up passenger capsules made up the greatest number of beads on the strings, but they were broken at intervals by the huge white pearls of the food and water storage globes. He could also see the Stewards-on-Watch for each ring, wearing their duration suits, hooked on and waiting. Ring Three would be ready in a few minutes, Five would be close behind. The Captain thought suddenly that he should cut the talk as short as possible. Twenty minutes wasn’t much time for Three and Five to be finished off and all the capsules in Four to be deflated. “. . . And you’ve had a chance to see how comfortable a twenty-foot living capsule can be. Everything is plastic, but tough. You can punch the transparent material of the bubble and it will simply give with you. It would take a knife, a very sharp knife, to put a hole in it. And all the fittings and the lock mechanisms are plastic, too, no matter how metallic they look. The only piece of metal in the whole construction,” Woodhill added with a small laugh, “ is the receiver which carries my voice. But don’t worry about that. It is miniaturised and the total weight of metal used is less than half an ounce, which is too little to count.
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12 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ One last request,” the Captain ended, “ co-operate with the Stewards who will shortly be coming to you. Probably some of you feel pretty miserable at the moment. Gravity sickness is bad at first, I know. But it leaves you very quickly, and then you realise why some of us prefer to live and die in space rather than on Earth. Good Night.” As Woodhill switched off Hutton snorted but made no other comment. The Captain gave him an irritated look. It was true that many Captains and Engineers preferred to live and die in space, and not just because their aged and enfeebled bodies could not withstand the three or fours G’s deceleration necessary to land them on Earth. There had been a time when he could have returned without it killing him, but he had chosen to stay. Only occasionally did he wonder if he had done the right thing. There was a sudden thump and a scuffling sound from the hull outside and shortly afterwards Sister Gallagher came in, her suit radiating cold all over the control-room for a few minutes. Unlike the others she retained her spacesuit when she strapped in and only opened her face-plate. If any of the passengers on Four objected to being put to sleep it would be Gallagher who would have to talk them round. She was very good at that. Woodhill hoped that there would be no need for her charm to be tested on this occasion ; if she had to go out to Ring Four again, the blast-off" would be delayed. “ We’ll have to treat our new Steward as a passenger for a while, I’m afraid,” she said, her eyes on the activity around Four. “At least until after acceleration. Pity, those men could use some help.” Gallagher possessed the severe, fragile beauty of an octo- genarian nun, Woodhill thought, as he looked across at her ; and a gentle, well-bred quavering voice which went with it. But that voice, which had terrorised, browbeaten and inspired the nursing staff of one of Earth’s largest teaching hospitals, could be geared to the production of butter and sulphuric acid with equal facility. At the moment it was in neutral. “ Probably the best thing,” Woodhill replied a little absently. “ If we can’t use him at least he won’t be getting in the way.” He was wondering at what age a hospital retired its Matron. Gallagher had been around for a long time, but would divulge her age to nobody. Hutton swore that she was a hundred at
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GRAPELINER 13 Least,- and Woodhill thought that that might not be too much of an exaggeration. He could, of course, find out from the Earthside authorities if he bothered to take the trouble. But a direct question like that involving the age of one of his crew might be taken as a hint that the person was becoming inefficient because of that age, and that was definitely not the case with Gallagher. One had to be careful of words and actions, however, for the authorities on Earth were very distrustful of the old men and women who made space-travel and interplanetary colonisation possible. There was so much expensive equipment involved, and the borderline between efficiency and the complete irresponsibility of second childhood was very narrow. The sight of the clock on Hutton’s panel put a sudden end to his musings. Seventeen minutes to go. “ Reactor Room,” he said briskly, “ report, please,” “ Ready to go when you are,” said the Chief Engineer in the bass growl he used for a voice. Carrington, who enjoyed being called ‘ Slim ’ because he very definitely wasn’t, spoke from the control cubicle of the reactor in the stern section. After a moment he added cajolingly, “ I could do with a sandwich . . Woodhill acknowledged the first sentence and ignored the second. In several places along the circumference of Ring Four the taut, shining globes that were the inflated living quarters were wrinkling, shrinking and collapsing in a fog of released air. Inside them the passengers — encased in spacesuits as an added protection and with a self-regulating air supply — and the solid plastic fittings were being bundled up together in the thin sheeting of the envelope. Gallagher drifted up from her couch and dived gently stem- wards. “ I can’t stand cruelty to animals,” she said as she was leaving, “ and his poor tape-worm must be starving . . “ Ham, please,” called Carrington. The Chief Engineer did not have an excessive appetite despite his bulk, the Captain knew, but at the moment he was alone and within a few yards of a nuclear reactor. Power piles were considered to be safe gadgets these days, but this one might be the oft-quoted exception. Woodhill knew that lots of people munched sweets, chewed gum or stuffed themselves with various edibles in the most unlikely places and at the oddest moments. In times of stress there was comfort in eating : to certain types of people a full stomach represented security,
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14 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION and that was what Carrington was hungering for at the moment. Twelve minutes to go. Each globe which was collapsed freed more men for work on the number remaining, and taking into account the assistance being given by stewards from the adjoining rings Three and Five, the Captain had about decided that blast-off would be on time. Not that a few minutes delay would matter greatly — that could be made up by an hour or so’s fractional increase in thrust. Only delays counted in the hours or days caused trouble. At minus four minutes he saw the last capsule go down and the gradual cessation of activity in the human gnat-swarm around Four. He said, “ Mr. Carrington, stand by.” The voices of the Chief Stewards began coming in : Ring Three reporting all secure and ready for thrust, closely followed by Two, One and Five. As expected Four was last, but still on time. “ Stand by all,” said Woodhill. “ Thrust in one minute.” As always the first thirty seconds dragged and the second galloped, then precisely on the zero second the pressure began. One quarter-G wasn’t much, but after weeks of complete weightlessness it felt uncomfortable and vaguely frightening. Woodhill forced the thudding of his heart, the constricted feeling in his chest and the other subjective impressions out of his mind and concentrated on the scene outside. So far nothing had pulled loose. All five rings showed a disquieting tendency to warp and buckle where they joined the towing cables, but this was expected and allowed for. The Captain regarded the imposing sight of an inter-planetary passenger vessel under power, and told himself sardonically that it resembled nothing so much as a space-going spider’s web hung with mummified flies . . . The wall-speaker clicked, emitted heavy breathing sounds and climaxed with a voice saying sheepishly, “ I fell off . . .” “ Cut !” said Woodhill sharply into the reactor room mike. Their acceleration dropped rapidly to nothing as Carrington shot in the pile’s damping rods, and the couch upholstery bounced Woodhill gently against his straps. He returned to the general circuit then and said impatiently, “ Who fell off, and where ?”
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GRAPELINER 15 “ Melville, sir,” replied the voice apologetically. “ From Three, sir. We were helping out at Four and when I got back there wasn’t much time so I just held on with my hands. That’s no trouble under a quarter-G. But when I decided to hook on properly and let go with one hand to do it, the other hand slipped — ” “ How long between the time you fell off and our cutting thrust ?” Woodhill interrupted. “ Uh, about five seconds, sir.” The Captain did some quick calculations and decided that Melville was dropping behind at a velocity of approximately thirty-five to forty feet per second. Woodhill relaxed ; it could have been much worse than that. “ Open your suit motor to full thrust,” the Captain directed. “ You should be able to check the fallaway and get back in about fifteen minutes. All right ?” “ I’m sorry, sir,” said Melville again, “ my fuel is gone and there wasn’t time to fit a replacement tank, either.” Hot, scathing words rose in Woodhill’s throat but got no further than the tip of his tongue. This was, after all, as much his own fault as that of the Steward. If he had not been so insistent on blasting off dead on time then people like Melville would not take risks to avoid the Captain’s displeasure. Woodhill cleared his throat angrily and said, “ Chief Steward on Five, come in please . . .” and began explaining the situation. “ I overheard everything, sir,” the Chief broke in. “ I take it you want me to snag him as he goes past ?” “ That’s it,” said Woodhill. “ And hook him on to your own section rather than returning him to Three — that way we’ll save a few minutes.” The Captain watched the tiny figure of Haines, the very experienced senior Steward of Ring Five, swoop down to meet the receding form of Melville, and trailing a line of fog from his compressed air motor. He saw the two men come together and, with the velocity of two bodies to check now, a sudden intensification of the motor’s vapour trail. They continued to recede, shrinking to a fuzzy point of light which was just barely visible. Then all at once, like a new comet swinging into the Solar System and dragging its tail behind it, they were coming back.
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16 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION in During the fallaway and return the Captain had been thinking of other things : chiefly of the springiness of his towing cables. When they had cut acceleration suddenly the tension of the cables would have thrown the engine unit and the rings towards one another. It was a slow, gentle process, of course, but already Woodhill felt that Ring One was crowding uncomfortably close behind him. And into a structure fabricated entirely of plastic — and because of this metal-free construction, guaranteed free of the mutant-producing secondary radiation — there was drifting a large, all-metal Engine unit. He couldn’t check the drift with a surge of power because Haines and Melville were almost certainly in line with the exhaust flare, and neither could he apply thrust at right angles without snarling the cables and probably pulling the whole tow inside out. Woodhill was becoming really anxious by the time Haines reported everything hooked on and secure. “ Nice work,” the Captain acknowledged, and as Haines signed off he turned to the reactor room mike. “ Take us away, Carrington. But gently, we don’t want to jerk anything else loose . . .!” There were no other mishaps, however. The Captain, as was customary, took the first watch while the others read, studied, gossiped or just moved about the ship getting used to the sensation of weight again. Watching them, Woodhill thought how fragile and feeble and awkward they looked even under a mere one-quarter G. Weight made a man look and feel his age. The first period of acceleration came to an end and again all weight disappeared. Stewards-on-watch hastily wakened the others who were not and the frantic scramble to waken, feed and put to sleep again their charges began, all within the allotted four hours. Food, water and reassurance moved continuously between the storage globes and the passenger capsules. Sometimes a passenger would be too much for a Steward to deal with and the Captain would be called in, and in turn he might have to send Gallagher. These troublesome passengers were usually the nervous, over-imaginative type who would later get a terrific kick out of the voyage, Woodhill knew. Then, after four hours of what seemed like utter chaos, everyone who should be asleep was asleep, the Watch were in position and the second period of acceleration began.
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GRAPELINER 17 Sister Gallagher was looking thinner and more tired, the Captain noted : like a nun who has been on a long and rigorous fast. He stood her watch with the excuse that he had some bookwork to do anyway. The end of the second and succeeding periods of thrust differed only in minor details. The small, routine crises were solved by Stewards on the spot without the Captain being asked or even informed about them. But at the conclusion of the eighth period of acceleration the vessel had built up to the velocity required to take them to Mars in the scheduled time of forty-three days. For the next four weeks, until deceleration of the same force and duration was applied to brake them into an orbit around Mars, weightless conditions would prevail. Some passengers would like that and some would not —at first. “ Good Night, ladies and gentlemen, this is the Captain . . .” The whole aspect of the vessel had changed. All the passenger capsules were inflated now, together with the four outsize globes which would be used as Steward’s living and recreational quarters and the big, cigar-shaped envelope to house the air purification and recirculation machinery. All were still firmly anchored to their rings, but the layers of thin piping which formed the towing-ring structure were now practically invisible, hidden like the string inside a rope of outsize pearls. Very soon there would be another change, one for which the more nervous types of passenger should be prepared. “. . . In a few minutes time you will see members of the crew dismantling the rings to which your living capsules have been attached,” said Captain Woodhill after a pause timed to gain him the maximum attention from his listeners, “ and if you look out at this ring structure you will see that it is composed of several thicknesses of piping clamped together and overlapped for strength. Until deceleration begins four weeks from now this piping will have another purpose, that of bringing you air from the re-purification plant. “ There is, of course,” he went on, “ a tanked air supply in each of the capsules. But the air we will pipe to you will be much fresher and more pleasant than the tanked stuff, and as well it will allow us to gradually reduce the pressure inside your living quarters so that in the event of a meteor puncture the pressure-drop will be less sudden and you will have lots of time to get into a suit ...”
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18 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Woodhill wanted to stress the rule about always sleeping inside a spacesuit at that point. It was very easy to fall asleep in weightless conditions, and a man or woman waking to the ghastly realisation that his or her air was rushing away into space was almost certainly a goner — their brains might react quick enough but not their sleep-drugged and half-conscious bodies. It was a strict rule, therefore, that everyone slept inside a spacesuit with only the faceplate open. But he decided to wait a little while : the passengers were too newly awakened to be tired just yet, and it was bad policy to start scaring them with the meteor-puncture bogey so soon. “. . . Inside your quarters,” the Captain continued pleasantly, “ you will find thin plastic sheeting in various shapes and colours. These can be used to divide up your globes into compartments, for purposes of privacy or for cutting out unwanted light when you want to sleep. The Stewards will advise you on how to use these, but when you get the hang of them I expect everyone will have their own ideas for interior decoration. “ That is all for the moment,” Woodhill ended, “ I hope you all settle down quickly and comfortably, and that you have an enjoyable trip. Good Night.” While he had been speaking the breakdown of Ring One had already begun. The thick, double piping it contained was disconnected, straightened and reconnected into a long, thin stem which was manoeuvured carefully into the centre of the hollow cone formed by the four remaining rings. Three men towing the air-plant container arrived and attached the big cigar shape to the end of the stem nearest the Captain, then more men flew out along it to fit couplings at six-yard intervals. The other rings were beginning to break by now and thinner sections of double piping were being brought to the main stem and coupled up. Couplings and piping both were numbered and colour-coded for quick assembly, and soon the stem had sprouted a small forest of subsidiary air pipes, so much so that it resembled a denuded pine tree. Stewards of the technical section moved along the stem and branches checking the joins and laying communications cable. During all this activity the passenger globes had been left to drift at the end of long safety lines which were connected now to one of the main towing cables. As the rings to which they had been attached dissolved from around them they began to break their circular formation. One or two of them floated right
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GRAPELINER 19 away from the main group and the Steward-on-Watch had to go out to calm the agitated passengers concerned by pointing reassuringly to the safety line. When they refused to be thus reassured he got behind them and, using his compressed air motor, gave their globes a gentle push back in the direction of the main group. “ Carrington, Hutton,” said the Captain suddenly. “ Get the Weed out and throw it across to them, they’re about ready for it now.” The Weed was a specialised strain of Martian plant life which could synthesise a truly amazing quantity of oxygen from a roughly equal amount of carbon dioxide. It grew fast and flourished so long as the C02 kept coming, but tended to die of self-strangulation in its own oxygen if the supply diminished. Woodhill watched the two engineers climb into suits and take a container of frozen Weed into the airlock for tossing out. The men working around the stem would snag it as it drifted past. The four Steward’s globes had been attached to the stem, with the food and water storage tanks beside them for handi- ness in serving meals. One by one the passenger globes were brought in and attached to the pipes which sprouted from the main air artery, and gradually the vessel took on the form so beloved by the travel poster illustrators. Captain Woodhill had watched this metamorphosis take place many times. First the overloaded spider-web which was the towing cone, then the transition period when the inflated capsules hung like five straggly ropes of pearls, and then this. It was beautiful and it possessed a random symmetry that was indescribable, the Captain thought as he looked out at his command which now hung like a bunch of silvery grapes against the stars. Things went smoothly for several watches after that. The passengers settled down nicely, and some of them began asking the Stewards for instruction in short-range suit navigation so that they could visit nodding acquaintances — nodding and waving and sticking the tongue out were about the only methods of communication between the globes at the beginning of a voyage— a few yards away, which was a very promising sign indeed. Then a small spot of trouble developed. At least, Woodhill thought it small. Gallagher had other ideas.
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20 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION . I told her how it was affecting the other passenger^ around her,” the Sister expostulated, after giving the facts qf the case in a slightly quieter tone. “ And the Stewards, too. That new man is useless for anything every time he comes within fifty feet of her globe. I told her how many married men we have aboard, and explained that when she attracts more than her fair share of Steward attention it means that the other passengers get less, which creates bad feeling and eventually ruins a trip for everyone.” Gallagher took a deep breath, then plunged ahead. “ She said she understood all that and she didn’t want to cause trouble, but that where she came from there was very little sun. It’s glorious out here, she says, and she’s sun- starved. I told her she could sunbathe all she wanted but to use the screens inside her globe. She said she would, but didn’t. “ She’s nothing but a hussy ! A shameless exhibitionist who — ” The Captain held a hand up to quell the tirade, then said, “ Most of the men and Stewards are mature people, so that I doubt if there would be any trouble. But there’s still a very small chance that . . .” He paused thoughtfully, then shook his head. “ I suppose we might as well crack down at the beginning. Do you want me to talk to her ?” Sister Gallagher shook her head. “ She would only say ‘yes’ to everything and carry on as before . . .” “ Well, then ?” “ What is our position at the moment, sir ?” said Gallagher, apparently going off at a tangent. Woodhill looked at her sharply. “ The present position of Mars makes it necessary for us to approach the Sun almost to within the orbit of Venus before curving outwards again. Our nearest approach will be in eighteen hours — which reminds me. I’ll have to issue warnings about over-exposure to the increased ultra-violet . . .” He stopped, coughed, then added, “ I won’t have it, Sister. There would be the danger of a serious heat-stroke.” “ No, sir,” Gallagher said firmly. “ I promise I won’t let it go that far. One of the Stewards will fix her receiver for me so she won’t hear your exposure warning, that’s all. You won’t even know about it, officially.” Woodhill sighed. “ All right,” he agreed, “ but tell me how it goes.”
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GRAPELINER 21 Shortly afterwards the Captain began the long job of making the rounds of his ship, and while inspecting the enormous mass of technical equipment and examining the Stewards in their fitness to perform their duties he managed to work in visits to passengers. His aim in this was to encourage as many of them as possible to leave their capsules and learn the rudiments of spacesuit manoeuvring so that travel around and visiting within the ship would be possible for them. The interior of a twenty-foot sphere — even one that was a semi-transparent bubble hanging in interplanetary space — could become very boring to the inhabitant, especially when the weight allowance gave them only two pounds of reading material. The Captain would glide up to the passenger sphere, radio for permission to enter, then wriggle through the tiny airlock. Once inside he would exchange the greeting which had become traditional in a media where there was no day — the passenger a little awkwardly and himself with the ease of long usage. He would chat for a while before leaving, but the passenger would have very little to say on that first encounter with him. He could see the reason for that in their eyes, in the looks which were a nice mixture of awe and pure inquisitiveness. Awe at this frail, incredibly wasted and old-looking man who had not set foot on a planet or breathed other than repurified air for several decades, who would die helplessly of a ruptured heart and burst arteries within minutes of being exposed to an Earth-normal gravity, yet whose wasted muscles possessed a degree of control and co-ordination in weightless conditions which had to be seen to be believed. And there was, too, the fact that in the absence of gravity the human body lived longer, much longer. The curiosity, of course, was regarding the reason which had brought or driven him to space in the first place. In the past he had sometimes satisfied their curiosity, telling them of the car accident which had killed his wife and youngest son. And how the other two married children had blamed him for it and made his life a misery. But the passenger concerned invariably thought that the Captain was looking for sympathy, which he wasn’t, and Woodhill had stopped letting his silvery locks down in this fashion. Sometimes he would look out at his command, at the weird complex of globes and plumbing and human life which was in his charge, and muse wryly. And they accused me of being too old to handle a car . . !
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22 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION His tour of inspection was nearly completed when the Captain began to notice a new word appearing in the light- hearted, slangy conversation of his Stewards. Curious, he asked Sister about it. “ What or who is Minnehaha ?” “ Minnehaha, Laughing Water . . began Gallagher, then : “ Oh, hang it, I forget how it goes now. It’s a poem called “ Hiawatha,” about Indians . . .” Suddenly it clicked. Woodhill said, “ You mean our one- woman girly show ?” Gallagher nodded. “ She’ll stay decently covered up from now on if I know anything. I’m attending her regularly to spread that anti-UV goo on her. It’s very good stuff even if I do slap it on a bit ungently.” She chuckled softly and added, “ A lovely tomato colour, she is.” In reply the Captain made a non-committal sound designed to give the impression that while he was grateful that the problem was disposed of he did not altogether approve of the manner of its solution. Gallagher left, not seeming to worry too much whether the Captain approved of her methods or not. IV The half-way point in the trip arrived and passed, marked by gatherings of the passengers and Stewards not on duty in the four big spheres used by the crew as living quarters. The interiors of the globes resembled a badly overcrowded goldfish bowl, the Captain thought, but the strangeness of being able to meet and talk to a whole lot of people at once — something the passengers had been unable to do since leaving Earth- more than compensated them for any discomfort they suffered from the frequent kicks and collisions. A game of follow-the- leader around and through the ship, performed by the passengers who had been taking instruction in space-suit handling, rounded off the occasion. This was an hilarious success from the spectators’ point of view, but what the Steward-instructors thought of the debacle was not mentioned aloud — especially to those passengers who had got themselves inextricably tangled up in the rigging. So that the ‘ Bunch of Gripes ’ as Gallagher called them would be under constant supervision by the officer on watch in the control room, the engine unit had been rotated so that its
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GRAPELINER 23 bows pointed back towards the assemblage. Rearview TV could have been used instead and without moving the ship, but this was subject to interference from the Sun and was not dependable. Hurtling silently tail-first now, and still connected loosely to the rest of the ship by the four towing cables, the engine unit maintained a constant radar sweep astern. And got a blip where no blip had a right to be. “. . . It seems to be a small, dense body,” Hutton, who was on watch, reported, “ and not another bunch of grapes. But the course and speed rule out its being a meteor or small asteroid with an eccentric orbit. If I hadn’t heard that the last one had dropped into the South Atlantic I’d say somebody was testing an anti-gravity ship ...” Looking at the trace which was drifting slowly across the screen, Woodhill was inclined to agree with Hutton. Those anti-G ships, mankillers though they were, could be built much more cheaply than the reaction-propelled type, so that it was quite possible that another had been constructed since the last failure. And if it was ’way out here then it had been the most successful yet. The thought made him vaguely uneasy. On Earth most people believed that the anti-G vessels would replace the ships currently in use inside the next twenty years or so. Requiring very little metal in their construction they could be designed to avoid the secondary radiation hazard, and they could accomplish in a few days the same trip which it was taking Woodhill’s ship six weeks to do. They would simply reverse the gravitic attraction of the home planet and fall rapidly away from Earth, at a constantly increasing velocity, until they began to fall towards the planet which was their destination. But antigravity was a cranky business at the moment, and its ships were just as prone to fall down as up. When people wanted to travel safely in space they used grapes, the Captain told himself smugly ; grapes got you there. “ Is it in telescopic range ?” Woodhill asked suddenly. He had never seen one of the new ships. Hutton’s face twisted itself into the pained, slightly harrassed expression he registered when a simple question demanded a complicated answer. He said, “ We’re overhauling it fast, but its lateral velocity with respect to us is so great that it will be out of sight to starboard by the time we draw level. I’d say its nearest point of approach will be in about twelve
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24 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION minutes time, but you’ll have to have very good eyes to see details.” “ We’ll try anyway,” said Woodhill. He had the keenest pair of eyes on the ship. While Hutton aligned the telescope with the radar bearing the Captain tried to raise the other ship on the radio. He was still trying when there was a surprised grunt from the engineer. He hurried back to the telescope. There was no atmospheric or other forms of distortion in space so that very high magnification could be used. Looking at the tiny, glittering image centred in the instrument’s field the Captain thought that a blind man could see this thing, whatever it was. He looked several times, moving his eyes to the side several times to rest them, then moved acoss to the intercom. “ Carrington, come up here a minute.” His hands had begun to shake. The First Engineer arrived and stared for several minutes through the eye-piece. Hutton had another look, then Carrington again. Woodhill said, “ Well ?” “ Th-the radar indicates a small body, about half the mass of the engine unit here,” Hutton stammered. “ It’s very bright, I ... I don’t know . . .” “ Carrington ?” The engineer hesitated, then said briskly, “ Course and velocity are wrong for a 'body in a natural orbit around the Sun. I seem to see a fine fuzz around the image that could be towing booms or radio antennae, but my eyes weren’t good enough to resolve it and it might have been my mind playing tricks with my vision because I know that it can’t be a natural body. “ The albedo is very high. It must be a nearly perfect reflector, like ice or glass . . .” The Captain lost track of what Carrington was saying after that. He was wondering what it would be like to lose his command, to be banished to some lonely observation satellite where he would die or go mad talking to himself. But a job like that might be too much to hope for. It required an old man with an alert brain — old because those observation posts were full of metal equipment and the secondary radiation did not bother the aged. More likely he would be sent to that dome he had heard about on the Moon with the other ‘retired’
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GRAPELINER 25 Captains and Engineers whose minds had begun to go or who had seen things. He was thinking about Patterson. It would be so easy to side-step the whole problem, too. Just make a brief entry in the log regarding the sighting of a peculiar object and leave it at that. Carrington and Hutton would back him up to that extent, he knew, and the authorities could not query something which had been sighted both on radar and by telescope by three seperate people. But the Captain’s eyes were very good ; he had seen much more than the two engineers and he considered it his duty to report it. And if certain people drew the wrong conclusions from his report . . . Well, he had always liked Patterson and they would be company for each other on the Moon. “ Hutton !” he said abruptly. “ Leave the telescope and return to your panel, you’re supposed to be on watch anyway. I want you to send this . . .” He began to write quickly on a message pad, crumpled the first two attempts and tossed them away as being improperly worded, then handed Hutton the third. “ Get that off at once and repeat until acknowledged.” The Second Engineer began to scan the message. He looked suddenly frightened. “ But . . . but I didn’t see anything like this ! There was just a bright spot in the telescope and a blip on the ... I didn’t see anything . . . !” You stupid , frightened old man ! thought Woodhill furiously, momentarily forgetting that he was both old and frightened himself. Aloud he said. “ You will not, either of you, be required to lend verbal support to my hallucinations, if that is what they prove to be. Now get the message off.” Hutton flushed at the anger in the Captain’s voice and Carrington, who had been reading over the Second’s shoulder, gave Woodhill a long, thoughtful look. Finally he said, “ If it should be what you think it is . . .” Without completing the sentence Carrington kicked his hulking body back in the direction of the reactor room. Because of its intense brightness the object remained visible for several minutes longer than expected, but eventually it was gone and the Captain returned to watching it on the radar screen. Behind him the Second Engineer was repeating the
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26 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION message as ordered, but in tones which disassociated himself from the contents. Woodhill had tried to make the message sound as concise, serious and sane as possible. But he could not help remembering that the copy of Patterson’s report from Ganymede had sounded that way, too, and they were replacing Patterson. Now that it was gone from view Woodhill found himself wondering what exactly it was that he had seen. It had not been anything positive, he knew ; he was sure only that the object resembled none of the current types of space-vessel, either, in use or of the experimental anti-G type. Which left only one other possibility. And if the thing was of extra- terrestrial origin and a product of intelligence then people should be told about it, even if it was only a derelict falling endlessly through space whose course happened to intersect the Solar System . . . A sudden, violent pattern of interference swept across the radar screen, halting the Captain’s thoughts dead in their tracks. As he watched, the interference died but did not disappear entirely ; the blip kept swelling and shrinking and wobbling all over the screen. He stepped up the sweep rate in an effort to increase definition, but without effect. Woodhill began to suspect that the object itself might be producing the interference, and if that was the case . . . The Captain returned quickly to the telescope, and was not too surprised to find that the object was back in sight. He reached for the public address mike. “ Good Night, ladies and gentlemen, this is the Captain,” he said, and began lying plausibly. “ During every voyage we try to spring a little surprise item which usually takes the form of an emergency drill, and this is it. Whether you are awake, asleep or whatever, I want every one of you into spacesuits within the next ten minutes. When this is done you must stay inside your globes and await further instructions . . .” Despite his efforts to retain a pleasant, half-joking tone his voice became suddenly harsh as he went on, “ This applies also to all Stewards and Chief Stewards, who will immediately go to the assistance of the passengers in their charge who may not be able to manage their suits alone. You have ten minutes, move !” To the suddenly bewildered Hutton he snapped, “ That applies to us, too. Tell Carrington.”
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GRAPELINER 27 Five minutes later, encased in his suit but helmetless, Woodhill returned to the telescope. The object seemed to have gone. He searched carefully, sweeping the instrument back and forth in infinitesmal arcs so as to be certain of not missing it. The radar image was still too unsteady to give him a helpful bearing, and he had to break off several times to answer Chief Stewards wanting to know what was going on. He told them what he thought was going on and sent them to check again on the safety of their passengers, then returned to the ’scope. Suddenly he saw it pop into the field of view, appearing so big and close because of the high magnification that it made him gasp. He turned quickly and took the couch beside Hutton. “ Rear vision screens, quickly !” Hutton gave a startled yelp as the alien spaceship flickered onto his screen. It was close, Woodhill thought fearfully, less then a mile away and looking as though it was bent on ramming them up the exhaust pipe. Head on like this it was hard to see details, but the hull seemed to be a semi-transparent glass-like substance from which grew a fine, sparse fuzz of thin spikes, and at more infrequent intervals around the hull tripods of thicker piping surmounted by what looked like bowl reflectors. While his hands shook and the cold sweat began to trickle down his back a cooler, more objective part of Wood- hill’s mind noted that the alien’s vessel seemed to be non- metallic, which could mean that they feared radiation as much as the humans did, and that those reflectors looked remarkably like pictures he had seen of the gravity repulsion bowls used on anti-G ships ... A harsh babble erupted from the speaker grill as everyone in the ship apparently started talking at once. The Captain yelled, “ Quiet ! I can see it, we can all see it ! Stop tying up this channel telling us about it, and keep it clear for orders from myself. Understood ? No incoming messages unless there’s a grave emergency — •” “ It’s going to hit !” shouted Hutton in terror. “ No !” said Woodhill sharply. “ Read the time and distance graduations on your screen. It’ll be close but it won’t hit us—” “ Look . . !”
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28 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Two of the six reflector bowls which encircled the waist of the alien ship had begun to glow red, and to centre themselves on the engine unit. Woodhill felt a shudder run through the whole ship and saw a blur of motion beside him as Hutton’s hand darted towards the emergency thrust button. “ Wait !” he called, but too late. It took all of three seconds to contact Carrington and countermand Hutton’s signal, and by that time the engine unit was moving at nearly fifty feet per second, straight towards the centre of the passenger globes . . . “ Did you see that ?” cried Hutton excitedly. “ I nearly got him with our tail flare ! That shook him, I bet — ” “ Shut up !” said Woodhill, then on the crew circuit : “ Attention ! We have been obliged to apply thrust for three seconds to avoid collision with the alien . . .” He shot a withering glance at Hutton. “. . . and we are falling back on the passenger assembly. We can’t apply thrust at right angles to avoid you because there isn’t time for the gyros to swing the ship. So listen carefully, here is what you must do . . .” The air-plant installation was to be disconnected from, the main stem, also the food and water storage globes and the big crew spheres, and were to be held only by their long safety lines. Every available Steward was to go along the stem disconnecting the rigid air-supply piping which held the passenger globes to it, and push them out to the limits of their safety lines also. There would be a lot of air lost but that could not be helped, and at the earliest opportunity the air purifying installation must be stuffed with enough passengers to keep it from dying from lack of C02. If the engine unit couldn’t take evasive action then the globes would have to disperse to avoid it .. . A strangled sound from Hutton made the Captain look round quickly. The alien vessel had drawn level with them and was pulling slowly ahead, four of its bowl reflectors glowing red and swinging about in apparently aimless fashion. Maybe that three-second dose of radiation from their tail flare had done some damage, the Captain thought. He was surprised how small the alien ship looked, too, and how fragile the projecting tripods seemed. At this close range he could see that the spikes covering its hull had their points capped by a tiny ball. He had to force himself to drag his attention away and back to his passenger globes.
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GRAPELINER 29 V It was a fantastic, awe-inspiring sight. The globes were opening out, bursting away from what would have been the point of collision and trailing the severed air-lines behind them . Because of safety valves inside the spheres they remained inflated, but the residual air in the lines together with that in the disconnected main stem burst out as an irregular, sparkling mist which sent ghostly pseudopods spurting out to the hurrying globes and beyond. The effect was of some weird and monstrous flower opening up to engulf them. The Captain knew that it did not represent a threat, but the aliens had no such comforting knowledge. He saw the glittering, transparent ship making frantic efforts to sheer off. But the passenger globes were still spreading out ; they had not reached the limits of their safety lines yet. The reflector bowls around the ship glowed red and whipped from side to side, and a sudden, violent wind seemed to shake the cluster of globes directly ahead of it. Yet even with the passenger spheres still spreading out Woodhill thought that it might have avoided collision, if it had not been for the towing cables. The increased slack on the towing cables caused by the engine unit falling back on its tow had sent them snaking and coiling all over the place, and those cables were of metallic hardness and strength. The alien ship blundered suddenly into one which tore off three of the tripod and bowl assemblies together with half a dozen of the shorter spikes. From the stumps a thick, whitish fluid bubbled and hardened and the ship spun slowly end over end. It blundered into a passenger globe, ripping the thin plastic wall to shreds with its spikes. Air spurted out, hazing the details, but the Captain saw the ruptured sphere held to the alien’s hull momentarily before drifting off. Another collision and another globe burst in a shining cloud of air, but this one was dragged behind the ship by its safety line which had become entangled in one of the tripods. Still spinning the alien blundered into another globe’s safety line, then another and another until it was inextricably tangled up in them. Reflector bowls, the only two left in operable condition, apparently, whipped about furiously for several seconds then became still. The ship came to a halt,
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30 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION with four inflated globes and the one collapsed and tragic remnant which it had destroyed trailing from it by their safety lines. “ Gyros,” said the Captain urgently. “ And thrust. Three and a half seconds at one-quarter G. Get us back here !” But it took many agonisingly slow minutes for the engine unit’s gyros to make the ship swap ends, and more for its carefully timed period of thrust to bring it back into the vicinity of the globes. Woodhill’s quick thinking in ordering the globes to scatter had kept them from colliding or being contaminated with the engine unit’s still radio-active tail, but something which was much worse had happened as a result of it. Listening to the babble over the general and Steward’s circuits he felt sick. This was too much for an old man to handle, he told himself wretchedly. His control of the present situation was nil, his effectiveness a zero quantity. The globes had spread out to the limits of their inter- connected safety lines, been jerked to a halt and were already beginning to drift slowly together again. Sense and purpose had replaced the panic in the orders being shouted over the suit radios, and the Stewards began to operate as the highly trained and co-ordinated body that they were. Certain jobs just had to be done, and the fact that an alien spaceship was in their midst capable of negating all their efforts in a matter of seconds was not allowed to make any difference. If there was to be any safety at all it lay in flight, but before there could be any movement at all the towing rings had to be reformed. The only wild conversation in evidence now, the Captain noted, was that which referred to the passengers whose globes were entangled with the alien ship and bobbed within a few yards of it. The people inside those globes were visibly alive but definitely not safe— there was movement, too, from the ruptured globe, proving that its occupant had got into his suit in time and had survived the collision— and he would have to be evacuated at once before the alien decided to do some- thing else. “. . . Go to that globe nearest to the alien ship’s stern first,” a voice, which the Captain recognised as belonging to Chief Steward Haines, was urging, “ and bring the passenger out. Talk him into it if you can, slug him if necessary, but work fast. And be careful of that ship ...”
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GRAPELINER 31 “ I will,” came the reply in a voice thick with rage. “ But if I had my way I’d go into that ship and tear every murdering, lousy alien apart.” Woodhill saw a tiny figure in a spacesuit dart towards the alien ship and approach to within fifty yards. Then it happened. A thin, white line, perhaps ten feet long, detached itself from the alien ship and shot like an arrow towards the Stewards. It hit, and splashed. There was a panicky cry from the speaker grill ; “ They’ve hit me with something ! I . . I can’t move . . !t “ Thompson ! Melville !” Haines voice rapped out. “ Go after him. And take evasive action. Plenty of it, unless you want whatever that was to happen to you ...” Two more figures moved, ducking and weaving madly, towards the alien — and were speared by arrows of white which splashed against their suits and froze. Other men followed and met the same fate despite their ducking, feinting and wild acrobatics. The alien seemed to know exactly what they were going to do and how exactly they intended to dodge before they did it : reaction preceded action rather than following it. Seeing with what calm deliberation and lack of fuss the men were hit, and remembering back to the time when the panicky Hutton had reached for the emergency thrust button, and the alien ship had used the time-lag between the activation of the control and the seconds-later commencement of thrust to duck away from their tail flare, Woodhill came to a very frightening conclusion. The aliens had telepathy. When the eighth man had been hit the Captain decided that it was high time he resumed his responsibilities. “ Haines ! The Captain here. Call off all attempts to rescue those passengers, at least for the present. And those men who have copped it — wait until they drift well past the alien before picking them up, and tell the men bringing them in to make a wide circle around that ship. I’d say that the range of that white stuff is from fifty to seventy yards, so tell them to act accordingly. And where is Sister Gallagher ?” “ Yes, sir,” said Haines, sounding relieved at being able to shift the load, and : “ I think Sister is in SG2.” At the back of his mind the Captain had been very worried over the safety of Gallagher. It was a relief for him to know that she was in one of the steward’s globes. He said, “ Very
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32 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION well, take the casualties there. And tell Sister I’d like a report on them as quickly as possible.” The Captain went to the direct vision port and focussed a pair of binoculers on the alien ship. He examined the shining, glass-like structure closely, trying to draw some solid, accurate conclusions for the basis of future actions. He was trying to look and think ahead— and succeeding. In the process he was frightening himself half to death. He was running out of time, fast. “Gallagher here,” said the ’speaker grill suddenly. “I’ve looked at those men, sir. The white substance was shot at them from those short spikes around the alien hull— they shoot out a jet of it which spreads and hardens on contact, the men say. The outside of their suits is covered with a thin, hard shell which makes it impossible to remove them. The stuff is so hard that nothing we have here will make a mark on it, though I’ve no doubt the heavy cutting tools in the machine shop ...” She left the sentence dangling. That was out, the Captain thought grimly, except as a last extremity. Bringing a young man into the repair shop of the all-metal engine unit, to undergo perhaps several hours of secondary radiation while he was being cut free . . . But Gallagher was speaking again. “ With an impenetrable shell covering most of the joins in their suits we’ll have our work cut out for us simply keeping the men supplied with air — and even that, I might add, would be impossible if we go to towing stations. And naturally, we can’t get food or water to them, so there isn’t much time to come up with the answer.” You don’t know the half of it, thought Woodhill. The alien ship was small, and through its transparent hull he could see two dark, blurred figures whose size and mass was at least that of a human, so that Woodhill estimated their food requirement to be roughly similar as regards volume. Which meant, considering the small storage space available within it, that the vessel was simply a scout for some larger ship. Scout- ships could be expected to carry radios, which in turn meant that the mother ship must now be rushing to the aid of its distressed and beleagured daughter. When it arrived it could be expected to be in a hurry and mad and prone to jump to wrong conclusions.
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GRAPELINER 33 So that taking up towing formation — and in the process sacrificing the lives of the men frozen inside their spacesuits — and haring out of here at their snail-like quarter-G would be useless as a method of escaping a ship whose scouts had the gravity drive. Whatever was going to happen would occur within a few hours, or perhaps minutes, from now, and the answer would have to be ready then. It had to be the right answer, too. Anything else and at very least the passengers and crew of his command would die, and at most he might involve Earth in an interstellar war which would be the end of his race. He had to be very, very careful. Wrong thinking now could cause . . . His mind became a churning mass of horrible effects which could arise from simple, innocent causes. Woodhill forced them into the background and spoke harshly : “ Haines, we’ve got to attack that alien ship ! I want every Steward and as many passengers as will volunteer. Start getting things organised right away. I’ve something in the engine unit here which should help, but more about that later.” “ Yes, sir !” said Haines, angrily enthusiastic. Other comments came through the general and crew circuits and were merged into a low, animal sound of rage and approval. Woodhill was glad the attack had popular support : it was imperative for the men to be in this frame of mind if his plan was to succeed — for the time being, that was. “ I’ll call you back,” said the Captain, and broke contact. VI The plan he had in mind was a desperate gamble, its success depending on the correctness of dozens of assumptions he had made from watching the alien ship and the recent activity around it, and if any single one of them proved wrong then his plan was a failure. Take the telepathy, for instance. If the aliens could and were reading his mind at the moment then he might just as well give up. But he was staking everything on the hope that the background noise from a large number of strange minds was confusing the aliens, that and the fact that there were strong indications that the alien telepathy was limited in range. Because the white stuff sent against the men could have been used effectively over much greater distances than fifty yards, but it had not been used beyond that range. Which could
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34 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION mean that it was only within that distance that the aliens could begin reading human minds well enough to know how they were going to duck. And the white stuff itself. Close examination through the binoculars had shown that there was a small nozzle mounted on a universal pivot fitted to the end of every ‘ spike.’ The white substance hardened quickly and became transparent. Was it too much to suppose that the free-swinging nozzle arrangement was a meteor protection device, that its purpose was to replace and seal off any portion of the ship’s hull which might be damaged. The fact that the aliens had turned them outwards and used them as a weapon only proved that the humans did not hold a monopoly on adaptiveness. But the most promising and hopeful fact of all was that nowhere on the whole surface of the alien hull or among the mechanisms visible inside it was there a trace of an airlock. However, there was no use going over all this in his mind again, the Captain told himself firmly. It was time to act. “ Carrington, listen in on this, then come to the control- room, please,” he said into the intercom. Then over the Steward’s circuit ; “ Come in Haines. Now listen carefully. In a few minutes time I’ll be throwing you some stuff in three-foot containers. These are plastic, so there is no radiation hazard, but they have to be handled gently. Contents are a new type of acid which is being carried in the engine unit because of the danger of it getting loose in the cargo sphere. To use them you’ll have to build up speed and direction with your suit motors towards the alien — dive-bomb them, in other words. Make sure that the nozzle end hits first, it’s very fragile and should break on contact. We’ll work out the plan of attack later, but I want that ship clobbered . . .” He could hear the excited, angry voices making a harsh rasp as they merged. Woodhill knew he was suppling a need, a magic wand which would open up the alien ship. They were too worked up to ask questions — such as what if the acid did not penetrate, or how come such a powerful acid was being stored in a plastic container . . . “. . .And Haines, please ask Sister Gallagher to come to the engine unit immediately.” When Carrington arrived he said, “ I want you and Hutton here to throw those containers in D compartment across to SG2. But I want them painted first. Spray them a nice orange colour, or some other bright, dangerous-looking shade. The
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GRAPELINER 35 vacuum will have them dry before they arrive. I don’t want anyone to know that they are empty air tanks . . The two engineers began moving the containers to the airlock, taking turns at rotating them under the sprayer. As they were finishing, Gallagher came in. “ Sister,” he said briskly, “ I want to observe the coming operation from close range and need a covering party — an unarmed covering party. You’ve been with Haines and seen the passengers who have volunteered for the attack. I want the names of five or six of them who are the most nervous, impressionable and over-imaginative. You’ve met them all during the voyage and should know — ” “ But that’s stupid ! Why not take Haines and a couple of the senior Stewards . . ?” She broke off, then ended shrilly, “ Oh, all right, all right ! You needn’t look at me like that. If that’s the way you want to do it I can give you the names. But I can’t . . Sister was badly frazzled, the Captain thought. Yet if he told her everything, he knew that she would feel much worse. Woodhill finished noting down the names and said, “ I’m leaving now. You three stay here and on no account mention anything I have said recently to the crew or passengers, or anything you may deduce from what I have said. Don’t even talk about it among yourselves. If possible don’t even think about it. You don’t know who might be listening . . .” The Captain knew that he left them firmly convinced that he had well and truly flipped his lid, but he was hoping that the habit of discipline would persist long enough for his plan to be carried through. Under the Captain’s direction the Stewards and volunteer passengers formed a wide globe around the alien and began to close in gingerly. Most of them carried the brightly painted cylinders which supposedly contained acid, and although they were now all within one hundred yards of the ship and all presumably thinking hard about the purpose of the cylinders, none of the white goo had been sent against them. This proved fairly conclusively, Woodhill thought, that the aliens’ telepathic range was decidedly limited. He began to move towards the gap in the englobing force which had been left for the passage of himself and his covering party.
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36 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Because the party was there to give him mental rather than physical coverage, Woodhill kept up a low, nervous flow of conversation, doing his best to scare the six men around him silly. In order to control the attack the Captain would have to be close to the alien ship, and a mind which was radiating the plan of attack as strongly as he would have to do would stand out like a beacon to the beings inside the ship. And if they read his mind before he wanted them to, especially with this mob of humans swarming around their vessel they would almost certainly jump to the wrong conclusions again. It was quite possible that his plan might just as well have been accomplished by his coming alone and unarmed to the alien ship. But the chances were that the aliens were so jumpy that they would simply have plastered him with their sealing compound, and that would have been that. On the whole this way was probably better. The Captain could not shield his thoughts, but he could provide for himself an obscuring cover of frightened, confused and strongly radiating minds which would swamp out the quieter, more stable signals coming from himself. That was another assumption he hoped was correct. If it was, however, it meant that his own safety and degree of concealment was in direct proportion to the amount of funk he could induce in his covering party. That was why he talked constantly in a nervous, jerky voice about the aliens, wondering aloud what they were like, what they would do if they got .to a passenger and similar disquieting subjects. He interpersed this scarifying monologue with orders to the attackers. “ Haines,” he said sharply, “ send in a few men twenty or thirty yards, and tell them to be ready to duck out again quick. And listen, on no account are they to release their acid bombs — ” “ But that’s . . .!” Haines choked back words that would have been sheerest mutiny, breathed hard into his suit mike, then protested, “ Shouldn’t we consider the element of surprise and hit them first time with everything . . .?” “ Do it my way,” Woodhill rasped. To the men beside him he said, “. . . And it must be pretty terrible inside those frozen-over suits. Imagine being able to see and hear your friends but never able to touch them. That’s if you’re lucky and your face-plate can be opened for food and drink. But suppose it wasn’t and a dollop of that stuff landed on your air
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GRAPELINER 37 tank supply line. They wouldn’t be able to change the tank and after a bit when the air ran out . . Three figures trailing lines of fog from their compressed air motors darted towards the ship, and suddenly all hell broke loose. Woodhill knew what had happened — had been expecting it, as a matter of fact. With the entry of the men into telepathic range the aliens knew — or thought they knew — -what the brightly painted cylinders were for. Thin lines of white speared out from practically every projector in the ship, not only towards the three men but aimed at every man in the vicinity who carried one of them. Two of the men headed towards the ship were hit and spun away, in awkward, frozen postures, to be picked up by passengers hovering outside the englobing force. The men surrounding the ship were still outside telepathic range, of course, so that their minds were not being read while they took frantic evasive action. They were able — just barely — to avoid being hit. Almost without noticing it he found that he was within the fifty yard limit and drifting closer, yet none of the projectors had been directed at any of his party. Unarmed and radiating fear at a high and sustained rate as they were doing, the aliens disregarded them and concentrated on the targets which they knew were dangerous — the men carrying the ‘ Acid 5 tanks. The rate of fire from the ship began to slacken off. Obviously the aliens were conserving their store of the sealing compound. Woodhill did not want that. “ Haines,” he called quickly. “ Send in some more men, from several directions at once. Just have them duck into range and out again, I want to draw their fire . . The reaction this time was not nearly so spectacular, and there were no casualties. “ Everybody move in,” Woodhill ordered, “ but slowly ! Get ready to use the acid tanks, but not until I give the word. Keep harrying them . . . !” Like an enraged porcupine flinging off its quills the alien ship sprayed the englobing force with the silent white jets : it was a panic reaction. One of the Captain’s covering party was hit and spun away in a stiff, unnatural posture, and the others scattered leaving Woodhill alone. Then suddenly it stopped. The attackers continued to close in, moving the bright orange cylinders into position as they came, and still there was no response. Woodhill, who had been trying to
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38 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION calculate just how much of the sealing compound a scoutship could afford to carry, began to feel hope. Haines had realised what had happened, too. The Chief Steward’s voice came blasting out of the phones urging, “Attack, attack now ! They’re out of ammo, go in and plaster them . . .!” “ Attention !” roared the Captain suddenly. “ You will do no such thing ! Move in close, but do not use the tanks — there’s nothing in them, anyway. Now listen to me . . .” Speaking quickly because the men were in no mood for a long, closely-reasoned sermon, the Captain recounted the series of incidents — accidents, he put in, was a better word — which had occurred since first contact with the alien ship, but from the viewpoint of both sides. The alien had come in too fast and too close, causing the engine unit to apply thrust rather than risk collision. The unit’s tail flare spewing out in their faces must have given the aliens quite a fright, too. Then when the engine unit drifting back had caused the passenger cluster to scatter, opening and swelling outwards in a fog of escaping air to ten times its original size, the aliens must have thought that some terrible space-dwelling monster was getting ready to swallow them up. The damage done among the passenger globes had been inflicted during their desperate efforts to escape, and the reason they had all been shaken up so badly when the red-glowing reflectors were pointed .their way was because these were the ship’s means of propulsion — a repulsion beam or some similar means of gravity control — and they had just happened to be in the way. He explained what the white stuff was and the panic which must have led the aliens to using their meteor protection as a weapon. Then he had to tell them about the aliens’ telepathy, which made it necessary for him to dupe his passengers and crew into thinking he intended to destroy the alien while all the time he merely wanted it rendered helpless so that he could get close enough to talk. “. . . The mother ship will be arriving any time,” Woodhill continued, “ and we must straighten out this misunderstanding before it gets here. That is the only course open to us. Escape is impossible and the only help that can be given to those men frozen into their suits must obviously come from the aliens themselves. Remember that there are no airlocks on the alien
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GRAPELINER 39 ship — apparently they seal themselves in and dissolve their way out, so they are bound to have the solvent for that white stuff. “ Now I want you all to move back to your quarters, and stay there until I’m finished here. But first, a few of you tow away the passenger spheres that are entangled with the ship.” The Captain hesitated, then waited until a party of Stewards hurried to do his bidding. Until that moment he had been unsure whether or not the anger he had aroused had gone beyond his control. “ I’ve explained how the proximity of so many minds using, to them, alien thought processes confuses the beings in the alien ship,” he said in conclusion. “ Had this not been so, my plan of attack would not have worked. But now everyone but myself must be out of range. They must have only one mind to read ; mine. There must be no more confusion, no more misunderstandings . . .” But when he landed on the alien’s hull a few seconds later and saw the two beings — they were just enough like humans to seem horrible — looking through the transparency at him, the Captain began to have doubts. The beings showed no signs of agitation as they watched him out of large, soft eyes, which meant that they must have read his mind and now knew that the humans were not and never had been a threat to them. It also meant that the aliens might ignore him, coldly certain that the Captain and the rest of the humans would be eliminated as soon as the mother ship arrived. Maybe the aliens were the type who held a grudge. Angrily, the Captain pushed these negative thoughts out of his mind. To the beings in the ship he was an alien, with alien thought processes which — in spite of the possession of telepathy on one side — would require ‘ keying-in ’ with some common denominator. Woodhill brought out the tube of cargo marking paint he had with him and prepared to illustrate Pythagoras’ Theorum. But he was forestalled by one of the aliens who came close to him and began drawing on the inside surface of the hull. When the being had finished there was a simple, graphic picture of a solar system containing five planets, the third and fourth of which were ringed. Then the alien raised an arm which was jointed in the wrong places and pointed. Woodhill
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40 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION judged the direction as being towards Bootes. He sighed and began to feel easier, about everything. When a stranger tells you where he lives it is a sign of trust, an indication that he wants to make friends. Woodhill was confident now that he would be able to make his needs understood and that there would be no bloodshed when the mother ship arrived. He knew it with a certainty that made him wonder if the telepathy was — just a little— a two-way process. But all this was only the beginning : the Captain foresaw the meeting of two races and the problems which could arise, problems which he would have to solve. Because he would be hailed as the expert on these matters simply because he had made the first contact. Woodhill had always longed to keep a flexible mind, to keep abreast of events and seek new experiences, and now he was getting his wish with a vengeance. His mind protested so violently at the load it would be asked to bear that he thought it must go mad. But that was only on the surface. Underneath, the Captain was a very happy man. James White. <Sy November 7th
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 41 Not for a long time have readers seen a story quite like this one. Those with extensive collections or good memories will remember the impact H.P. Lovecraft made in the middle 30 ’s with his a ll-too-few science fiction stories, particularly “ At The Mountains Of Madness.’’ Undoubtedly author Ballard has a touch of that same genius which eventually made Lovecraft great. WAITING GROUNDS by J. G. Ballard Whether Henry Tallis, my predecessor at Murak Radio Observatory, knew about the Waiting Grounds I can’t say. On the whole it seems obvious he must have done, and that the three weeks he spent handing the station over to me — a job which could easily have been done in three days — were merely to give him sufficient time to decide whether or not to tell me about them. Certainly he never did, and the implied judgment against me is one I haven’t yet faced up to. I remember that on the first evening after my arrival at Murak he asked me a question I’ve been puzzling over ever since. We were up on the lounge deck of the observatory, looking out at the sand-reefs and fossil cones of the volcano jungle glowing in the false dusk, the great 250-foot steel bowl of the telescope humming faintly in the air above us. “ Tell me, Quaine,” Tallis suddenly asked, “ where would you like to be when the world ends ?” “ I haven’t really thought about it,” I admitted. “ Is there any urgency ?”
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42 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ Urgency?” Tallis smiled at me thinly, Ms eyes amiable but assessing me shrewdly. “ Wait until you’ve been here a little longer.” He had almost finished Ms last tour at the observatory and I assumed he was referring to the desolation around us which he, after fifteen years, was leaving thanklessly to my entire care. Later, of course, I realized how wrong I was, just as I misjudged the whole of Tallis’s closed, complex personality. He was a lean, ascetic-looking man of about fifty, withheld and moody, as I discovered the moment I debarked from the freighter flying me in to Muralc — instead of greeting me at the ramp he sat in the half-track a hundred yards away at the edge of the port, watching silently through dark glasses as I heaved my suitcases across the burning, lava-tMck sunlight, legs weary after the massive deceleration, stumbling in the unfamiliar gravity. The gesture seemed characteristic. Tallis’s manner was aloof and sardonic ; everytMng he said had the same deliberately ambiguous overtones, that air of private mystery recluses and extreme introjects assume as a defence. Not that Tallis was in any way pathological — no one could spend fifteen years, even with six-monthly leaves, virtually alone on a remote planetary clinker like Murak without developing a few curious man- nerisms. In fact, as I all too soon realized, what was really remarkable about Tallis was the degree to wMch he had preserved his samty, not surrendered it. He listened keenly to the latest news from Earth. “ The first pilotless launcMngs to Proxima Centauri are scheduled for 2250 . . . the U.N. Assembly at Lake Success have just declared themselves a sovereign state . . . Y-R Day celebrations are to be discontinued— you must have heard it all on the radiocasts.” “ I haven’t got a radio here,” Tallis said. “ Apart from the one up there, and that’s tuned to the big spiral networks in Andromeda. On Murak we listen only to the important news.” I nearly retorted that by the time it reached Murak the news, however important, would be a million years old, but on that first evening I was preoccupied with adjusting myself to an unfamiliar planetary environment — notably a denser atmo- sphere, slightly Mgher (1.2 E) gravity, vicious temperature
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 43 swings from -30° to + 160° — and programming new ro urines to fit myself into Murak’s 18-hour day. Above all, there was the prospect of two years of near- absolute isolation. Ten miles from Murak Reef, the planet’s only settlement, the observatory was sited among the first hills marking the northern edge of the inert volcano jungle which spread southwards to Murak’s equator. It consisted of the giant telescope and a straggling nexus of twenty or thirty asbestos domes which housed the automatic data processing and tracking units, generator and refrigerating plant, and a miscellany of replacement and vehicle stores, workshops and ancillary equipment. The observatory was self-sufficient as regards electric power and water. On the nearby slopes farms of solar batteries had been planted out in quarter-mile strips, the thousands of cells winking in the sunlight like a field of diamonds, sucking power from the sun to drive the generator dynamos. On another slope, its huge mouth permanently locked into the rock face, a mobile water synthesiser slowly bored its way through the desert crust, mining out oxygen and hydrogen combined into the surface minerals. “ You’ll have plenty of spare time on your hands,” the Deputy Director of the Astrographic Institute on Ceres had warned me when I initialled the contract. “ There’s a certain amount of routine maintenance, checking the power feeds to the reflector traverses and the processing units, but otherwise you won’t need to touch the telescope. A big digital does the heavy thinking, tapes all the data down in 2000-hour schedules. You fly the cans out with you when you go on leave.” “ So apart from shovelling the sand off the doorstep there’s virtually nothing for me to do ?” I’d commented. “ That’s what you’re being paid for. Probably not as much as you deserve. Two years will seem a long time, even with three leave intervals. But don’t worry about going crazy. Y ou aren’t alone on Murak. You’ll just be bored. £2000 worth, to be exact. However, you say you have a thesis to write. And you never know, you may like it there. Tallis, the observer you’re talcing over from, went out in ’03 for two years like yourself, and stayed fifteen. He’ll show you the ropes. Pleasant fellow, by all accounts, a little whimsical, probably try to pull your leg.”
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44 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Tallis drove me down to the settlement the first morning to collect my heavy vacuum baggage that had travelled space- hold. “ Murak Reef,” he pointed out as the old ’95 Chrysler half- track churned through the thick luminous ash silted over the metal road. We crossed a system of ancient lava lakes, flat grey discs half a mile wide, their hard crusts blistered and pocked by the countless meteor showers that had driven into Murak during the past million years. In the distance a group of long flat-roofed sheds and three high ore elevators separated themselves from the landscape. “ I suppose they warned you. One supplies depot, a radio terminal and the minerals concession. Latest reliable estimates put the total population at seven.” I stared out at the surrounding desert floor, cracked and tiered by the heat swings into what looked like huge plates of rusted iron, and at the massed cones of the volcano jungle yellowing in the sand haze. It was 4 o’clock local time — early morning — but the temperature was already over 80°. We drove with windows shuttered, sun curtain down, refrigerating unit pumping noisily. “ Must be fun on Saturday night,” I commented. “ Isn’t there anything else ?” “ Just the thermal storms, and a mean noon temperature of 160°.” “ In the shade ?” Tallis laughed. “ Shade ? You must have a sense of humour. There isn’t any shade on Murak. Don’t ever forget it. Half an hour before noon the temperature starts to go up two degrees a minute. If you’re caught out in it you’ll be putting a match to your own pyre.” Murak reef was a dust hole. In the sheds backing onto the depot the huge ore crushers and conveyors of the extraction plants clanked and slammed. Tallis introduced me to the agent, a morose old man called Pickford, and to two young engineers taking the wraps off a new grader. No one made any attempt at small talk. We nodded briefly, loaded my luggage onto the half-track and left. “ A taciturn bunch,” I said. “ What are they mining ?” “ Tantalum, Columbium, the Rare Earths. A heart- breaking job, the concentrations are barely workable. They’re tempted to Murak by fabulous commission rates, but they’re lucky if they can even fill their norms.”
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 45 “ You can’t be sorry you’re leaving. What made you stay here fifteen years ?” “ It would take me fifteen years to tell you,” Tallis rejoined. “ I like the empty hills and the dead lakes.” I murmured some comment, and aware that I wasn’t satisfied he suddenly scooped a handful of grey sand off the seat, held it up and let it sift away through his fingers. “ Prime archezoic loam. Pure bedrock. Spit on it and anything might happen. Perhaps you’ll understand me if I say I’ve been waiting for it to rain.” “ Will it ?” Tallis nodded. “ In about two million years, so someone who came here told me.” He said it with complete seriousness. During the next few days, as we checked the stores and equipment inventories and ran over the installation together, I began to wonder if Tallis had lost his sense of time. Most men left to themselves for an indefinite period develop some occupational interest : chess or an insoluble dream-game or merely a compulsive wood-whittling. But Tallis, as far as I could see, did nothing. The cabin, a three-storey drum built round a central refrigerating column, was spartan and comfort- less. Tallis’s only recreation seemed to be staring out at the volcano jungle. This was an almost obsessive activity — all evening and most of the afternoon he would sit up on the lounge deck, gazing out at the hundreds of extinct cones visible from the observatory, their colours running the spectrum from red to violet as the day swung round into night. The first indication of what Tallis was watching for came about a week before he was due to leave. He had crated up his few possessions and we were clearing out one of the small storage domes near the telescope. In the darkness at the back, draped across a pile of old fans, track links and beer coolers, were two pedal-powered refrigerator suits, enormous unwieldy sacks equipped with chest pylons and hand-operated cycle gears. “ Do you ever have to use these ?” I asked Tallis, glumly visualising what a generator failure could mean. He shook his head. “ They were left behind by a survey team which did some work out in the volcanos. There’s an entire camp lying around in these sheds, in case you ever feel like a weekend on safari.”
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46 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Tallis was by the door. I moved my flashlight away and was about to switch it off when something flickered up at me from the floor. I stepped over the debris, searched about and found a small circular aluminium chest, about two feet across by a foot deep. Mounted on the back was a battery pack, thermostat and temperature selector. It was a typical relic of an expensively mounted expedition, probably a cocktail cabinet or hat box. Embossed in heavy gold lettering on the lid were the initials ‘ C.F.N.’ Tallis came over from the door. “ What’s this ?” he asked sharply, adding his flash to mine. I would have left the case where it lay, but there was some- thing in Tallis’s voice, a distinct inflection of annoyance, that made me pick it up and shoulder past into the sunlight. I cleaned off the dust, Tallis at my shoulder. Keying open the vacuum seals I sprung back the lid. Inside was a small tape recorder, spool racks and a telescopic boom mike that cantilevered three feet up into the air, hovering a few inches from my mouth. It was a magnifixent piece of equipment, a single-order job hand-made by a specialist, worth at least £500 apart from the case. “ Beautifully tooled,” I remarked to Tallis. I tipped the platform and watched it spring gently. “ The air bath is still intact.” I ran my fingers over the range indicator and the selective six-channel reading head. It was even fitted with a sonic trip, a useful device which could be set to trigger at anything from a fly’s foot-fall to a walking crane’s. The trip had been set ; I wondered what might have strayed across it when I saw that someone had anticipated me. The tape between the spools had been ripped out, so roughly that one spool had been torn off its bearings. The rack was empty, and the two frayed tabs hooked to the spool axles were the only pieces of tape left. “ Somebody was in a hurry,” I said aloud. I depressed the lid and polished the initials with my finger tips. “ This must have belonged to one of the members of the survey. C.F.N. Do you want to send it on to him ?” Tallis watched me pensively. “ No. I’m afraid the two members of the team died here. Just over a year ago.” He told me about the incident. Two Cambridge geologists had negotiated through the Institute for Tallis’s help in
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 47 establishing a camp ten miles out in the volcano jungle, where they intended to work for a year, analyzing the planet’s core materials. The cost of bringing a vehicle to Murak was prohibitive, so Tallis had transported all the equipment to the camp site and set it up for them. “ I arranged to visit them once a month with power packs, water and supplies. The first time everything seemed all right. They were both over sixty, but standing up well to the heat. The camp and laboratory were running smoothly, and they had a small transmitter they could have used in an emergency. “ I saw them three times altogether. On my fourth visit they had vanished. I estimated that they’d been missing for about a week. Nothing was wrong. The transmitter was working, and there was plenty of water and power. I assumed they’d gone out collecting samples, lost themselves and died quickly in the first noon high.” “ You never found the bodies ?” “ No. I searched for them, but in the volcano jungle the contours of the valley floors shift from hour to hour. I notified the Institute and two months later an inspector flew in from Ceres and drove out to the site with me. He certified the deaths, told me to dismantle the camp and store it here. There were a few personal things, but I’ve heard nothing from any friends or relatives.” “ Tragic,” I commented. I closed the tape recorder and carried it into the shed. We walked back to the cabin. It was an hour to noon, and the parabolic sun bumper over the roof was a bowl of liquid fire. I said to Tallis : “ What on earth were they hoping to catch in the volcano jungle ? The sonic trip was set.” “ Was it ?” Tallis shrugged. “ What are you suggesting ?” “ Nothing. It’s just curious. I’m surprised there wasn’t more of an investigation.” “ Why ? To start with, the fare from Ceres is £800, over £3000 from Earth. They were working privately. Why should anyone waste time and money doubting the obvious ?” I wanted to press Tallis for detail, but his last remark seemed to close the episode. We ate a silent lunch, then went out on a tour of the solar farms, replacing burnt-out thermocouples. I was left with a vanished tape, two deaths, and a silent teasing suspicion that linked them neatly together.
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48 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Over the next days I began to watch Tallis more closely, waiting for another clue to the enigma growing around him. I did learn one thing that astonished me. I had asked him about his plans for the future ; these were indefinite — he said something vague about a holiday, nothing he anticipated with any eagerness, and sounded as if he had given no thought whatever to his retirement. Over the last few days, as his departure time drew closer, the entire focus of his mind became fixed upon the volcano jungle ; from dawn until late into the night he sat quietly in his chair, staring out at the ghostless panorama of disintegrating cones, adrift in some private time sea. “ When are you coming back ?” I asked with an attempt at playfulness, curious why he was leaving Murak at all. He took the question seriously. “ I’m afraid I won’t be. Fifteen years is long enough, just about the limit of time one can spend continuously in a single place. After that one gets institutionalised—” “ Continuously ?” I broke in. “ You’ve had your leaves ?” “ No, I didn’t bother. I was busy here.” “ Fifteen years !” I shouted. “ Good God, why ? In this of all places ! And what do you mean, ‘busy?’ You’re just sitting here, waiting for nothing. What are you supposed to be watching for, anyway ?” Tallis smiled evasively, started to say something and then thought better of it. The questions pressed round him. What was he waiting for ? Were the geologists still alive ? Was he expecting them to return, or make some signal ? As I watched him pace about the cabin on his last morning I was convinced there was something he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell me. Almost melodramatically he watched out over the desert, delaying his departure until the thirty-minute take-off siren hooted from the port. As we climbed into the half-track I fully expected the glowing spectres of the two geologists to come looming out of the volcano jungle, uttering cries of murder and revenge. He shook my hand carefully before he went aboard. “ You’ve got my address all right ? You’re quite sure ?” For some reason, which confused my cruder suspicions, he had made a special point of ensuring that both I and the Institute would be able to contact him. “ Don’t worry,” I said. “ I’ll let you know if it rains.”
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 49 He looked at me sombrely. “ Don’t wait too long.” His eyes strayed past my head towards the southern horizon, through the sand-haze to the endless sea of cones. He added : “ Two million years is a long time.” 1 took his arm as we walked to the ramp. “ Tallis,” I asked quietly, “ what are you watching for ? There’s something, isn’t there ?” He pulled away from me, collected himself. “ What ?” he said shortly, looking at his wrist-watch. “ You’ve been trying to tell me all week,” I insisted. “ Come on, man.” He shook his head abruptly, muttered something about the heat and stepped quickly through the lock. I started to shout after him : “ Those two geologists are out there . . . !” but the five-minute siren shattered the air and by the time it stopped Tallis had disappeared down thp com- panionway and crew-men were shackling on the launching gantry and sealing the cargo and passenger locks. I stood at the edge of the port as the ship cleared its take-off check, annoyed with myself for waiting until the last impos- sible moment to press Tallis for an explanation. Half an hour later he was gone. Over the next few days Tallis began to slide slowly into the back of my mind. I gradually settled into the observatory, picked out new routines to keep time continuously on the move. Mayer, the metallurgist down at the mine, came over to the cabin most evenings to play chess and forget his pitifully low extraction rates. He was a big, muscular fellow of thirty- five who loathed Murak’s climate, geology and bad company, a little crude but the sort of tonic I needed after an overdose of Tallis. Mayer had met Tallis only once, and had never heard about the deaths of the two geologists. “ Damned fools, what were they looking for ? Nothing to do with geology, Murak hasn’t got one.” Pickford the old agent down at the depot, was the only person on Murak who remembered the two men, but time had garbled his memories. “ Salesmen, they were,” he told me, blowing into his pipe. “ Tallis did the heavy work for them. Should never have come here, trying to sell all those books.” “ Books ?”
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50 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ Cases full. Bibles, if I recall.” “ Text-books,” I suggested. “ Did you see them ?” “ Sure I did,” he said, puttering to himself. “ Guinea moroccos.” He jerked his head sharply. “ You won’t sell them here, I told them.” It sounded exactly like a dry piece of academic humour. I could see Tallis and the two scientists pulling Pickford’s leg, passing off their reference library as a set of commercial samples. I suppose the whole episode would eventually have faded, but Tallis’s charts kept my interest going. There were about twenty of them, half million aerials of the volcano jungle within a fifteen-mile radius of the observatory. One of them was marked with what I assumed to be the camp site of the geologists and alternative routes to and from the observatory. The camp was just over ten miles away, across terrain that was rough but not over-difficult for a tracked car. I still suspected I was getting myself wound up over nothing. A meaningless approach arrow on the charts, the faintest suggestion of a cryptic ‘ X,’ and I should have been off like a rocket after a geldspar mine or two mysterious graves. I was almost sure that Tallis had not been responsible, either by negligence or design, for the deaths of the two men, but that still left a number of unanswered questions. The next clear day I checked over the half-track, strapped a flare pistol into my knee holster and set off, warning Pickford to listen out for a May Day call on the Chrysler’s transmitter. It was just after dawn when I gunned the half-track out of the observatory compound and headed up the slope between two battery farms, following the route mapped out on the charts. Behind me the telescope swung slowly on its bogies, tirelessly sweeping its great steel ear through the Cepheid talk. The temperature was in the low seventies, comfortably cool for Murak, the sky a fresh cerise, broken by lanes of indigo that threw vivid violet lights on the drifts of grey ash on the higher slopes of the volcano jungle. The observatory soon fell behind, obscured by the exhaust dust. I passed the water synthesiser, safely pointed at ten thousand tons of silicon hydrate, and within twenty minutes reached the nearest cone, a white broad-backed giant two- hundred feet high, and drove round it into the first vally. Fifty feet across at their summits, the volcanos jostled together like a
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 51 herd of enormous elephants, separated by narrow dust-filled valleys, sometimes no more than a hundred yards apart, here and there giving way to the fiat mile-long deck of a fossil lava lake. Wherever possible the route took advantage of these, and I soon picked up the tracks left by the Chrysler on its trips a year earlier. I reached the site in three hours. What was left of the camp stood on a beach overlooking one of the lakes, a dismal collection of fuel cylinders, empty cold stores and water tanks sinking under the tides of dust washed up by the low thermal winds. On the far side of the lake the violet-capped cones of the volcanos ranged southwards. Behind, a crescent of sharp cliffs cut off half the sky. I walked round the site, looking for some trace of the two geologists. A battered tin field desk lay on its side, green paint blistered and scratched. I turned it over and pulled out its drawers finding nothing except a charred notebook and a. telephone, the receiver melted solidly into its cradle. Tallis had done his job too well. The temperature was over 100° by the time I climbed back into the half-track and a couple of miles ahead I had to stop as the cooling unit was draining power from the spark plugs and stalling the engine. The outside temperature was 1 30°, the sky a roaring shield, reflected in the slopes around me so that they seemed to stream with molten wax. I sealed all the shutters and changed into neutral, even then having to race the ancient engine to provide enough current for the cooler. I sat there for over an hour in the dim gloom of the dashboard, ears deadened by the engine roar, right foot cramping, cursing Tallis and the two geologists. That evening I unfurled some crisp new vellum, flexed my slide rule and determined to start work on my thesis. One afternoon two or three months later, as we turned the board between chess games, Mayer remarked : “ I saw Pickford this morning. He told me he had some samples to show you.” “ T.Y. tapes ?” “ Bibles, I thought he said.” I looked in on Pickford the next time I was down at the settlement. He was hovering about in the shadows behind the counter, white suit dirty and unpressed.
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52 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION He puffed smoke at me, “ Those salesman,” he explained, “ You were enquiring about. I told you they were selling Bibles.” I nodded. “Well?” “ I kept some.” I put out my cigarette. “ Can I see them ?” He gestured me round the counter with his pipe. “ In the back.” I followed him between the shelves, loaded with fans, radios and T.V.-scopes, all outdated models imported years earlier to satisfy the boom planet Murak had never become. “ There it is,” Pickford said. Standing against the back wall of the depot was a three-by-three wooden crate, taped with metal bands. Pickford ferretted about for a wrench. “Thought you might like to buy some.” “ How long has it been here ?” “ About a year. Tallis forgot to collect it. Only found it last week.” Doubtful, I thought : more likely he was simply waiting for Tallis to be safely out of the way. I watched while he pried off the lid. Inside was a tough brown wrapping paper. Pickford broke the seals and folded the sides back carefully, revealing a layer of black morocco-bound volumes. I pulled out one of them and held the heavily ribbed spine up to the light. It was a Bible, as Pickford had promised. Below it were a dozen others. “ You’re right,” I said. ' Pickford pulled up a radiogram and sat down, watching me. I looked at the Bible again. It was in mint condition, the King James Authorised Version. The marbling inside the end-boards was unmarked. A publisher’s ticket slipped out onto the floor, and I realized that the copy had hardly come from a private library. The bindings varied slightly. The next volume I pulled out was a copy of the Vulgate. “ How many crates did they have altogether ?” I asked Pickford. “ Bibles ? Fourteen, fifteen with this one. They ordered them all after they got here. This was the last one.” He pulled out another volume and handed it to me. “ Good condition, eh?” It was a Koran.
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 53 I started lifting the volumes out and got Pickford to help me sort them on the shelves. When we counted them up there Were ninety in all : thirty-five Holy Bibles (twenty-four Authorised Versions and eleven Vulgates) fifteen copies of the Koran, five of the Talmud, ten of the Bhagavat Gita and twenty-five of the Upanishads. I took one of each and gave Pickford a £10 note. “ Any time you want some more,” he called after me. “ Maybe I can arrange a discount.” He was chuckling to himself, highly pleased with the deal, one up on the salesmen. When Meyer called round that evening he noticed the six volumes on my desk. “ Pickford’s samples,” I explained. I told him how I had found the crate at the depot and that it had been ordered by the geologists after their arrival. “ According to Pickford they ordered a total of fifteen crates. All Bibles.” “ He’s senile.” “ No. His memory is good. There were certainly other crates because this one was sealed and he knew it contained Bibles.” “ Damned funny. Maybe they were salesmen.” “ Whatever they were they certainly weren’t geologists. Why did Tallis say they were ? Anyway, why didn’t he ever mention that they had ordered all these Bibles ?” “ Perhaps he’d forgotten ?” “ Fifteen crates ? Fifteen crates of Bibles ? Heavens above, what did they do with them ?” Mayer shrugged. He went over to the window. “ Do you want me to radio Ceres ?” “ Not yet. It still doesn’t add up to anything.” “ There might be a reward. Probably a big one. God, I could go home !” “ Relax. First we’ve got to find out what these so-called geologists were doing here, why they ordered this fantastic supply of Bibles. One thing : whatever it was, I swear Tallis knew about it. Originally I thought they might have discovered a geldspar mine and been double-crossed by Tallis— that sonic trip was suspicious. Or else that they’d deliberately faked their own deaths so that they could spend a couple of years working the mine, using Tallis as their supply source. But all these Bibles mean we must start thinking in completely different categories.”
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54 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Round the clock for three days, with only short breaks for sleep hunched in the Chrysler’s driving seat, I systematically swept the volcano jungle, winding slowly through the labyrinth of valleys, climbing to the crest of every cone, carefully checking every exposed quartz vein, every rift or gulley that might hide what I was convinced was waiting for me. Mayer deputised at the observatory, driving over every afternoon. He helped me recondition an old diesel generator in one of the storage domes and we lashed it on to the back of the half-track to power the cabin heater needed for the -30° nights and the three big spot lights fixed on the roof, providing a 360° traverse. I made two trips with a full cargo of fuel out to the camp site, dumped them there and made it my base. Across the thick glue-like sand of the volcano jungle, we calculated, a man of sixty could walk at a maximum of one mile an hour, and spend at most two hours in 70° or above sunlight. That meant that whatever there was to find would be within twelve square miles of the camp site, three square miles if we included a return journey. I searched the volcanos as exactingly as I could, marking each cone and the adjacent valleys on the charts as I covered them, at a steady five miles an hour, the great engine of the Chrysler roaring ceaselessly, from noon, when the valleys filled with fire and seemed to run with lava again, round to midnight, when the huge cones became enormous mountains of bone, sombre graveyards presided over by the fantastic colonnades and hanging, galleries of the sand reefs, suspended from the lake rims like inverted cathedrals. I forced the Chrysler on, swinging the bumpers to uproot any suspicious crag or boulder that might hide a mine shaft, ramming through huge drifts of fine white sand that rose in soft clouds around the half-track like the dust of powdered silk. I found nothing. The reefs and valleys were deserted, the volcano slopes untracked, craters empty, their shallow floors littered with meteor debris, rock sulphur and cosmic dust. I decided to give up just before dawn on the fourth morning, after waking from a couple of hours of cramped and restless sleep. “ I’m coming in now,” I reported to Mayer over the trans- mitter. “ There’s nothing out here. I’ll collect what fuel there is left from the site and see you for breakfast.”
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 55 Dawn had just come up as I reached the site. I loaded the' fuel cans back onto the half-track, switched off the spot lights and took what I knew would be my last look round. I sat down at the field desk and watched the sun arcing upwards through the cones across the lake. Scooping a handful of ash off the desk, I scrutinised it sadly for geldspar. “ Prime archezoic loam,” I said, repeating Tallis’s words aloud to the dead lake. I was about to spit on it, more in anger than in hope, when some of the tumblers in my mind started to click. About five miles from the far edge of the lake, silhouetted against the sunrise over the volcanos, was a long 100-foot high escarpment of hard slate-blue rock that lifted out of the desert bed and ran for about two miles in a low clean sweep across- the horizon, disappearing among the cones in the south-west.. Its outlines were sharp and well-defined, suggesting that its materials pre-dated the planet’s volcanic period. The escarp- ment sat squarely across the desert, gaunt and rigid, and looked! as if it had been there since Murak’s beginning, while the soft ashy cones and grey hillocks around it had known only the. planet’s end. It was no more than an uninformed guess, but suddenly I would have bet my entire two years’ salary that the rocks of the escarpment were archezoic. It was about three miles outside; the area I had been combing, just visible from the observatory,. The vision of a geldspar mine returned sharply ! The lake took me nearly half-way there. I raced the Chrysler across it at forty, wasted thirty minutes picking a route through an elaborate sand reef, and then entered a long steeply walled valley which led directly towards the escarpment. A mile away I saw that the escarpment was not, as it first seemed, a narrow continuous ridge, but a circular horizontal table. A curious feature was the almost perfect flatness of the table top, as if it had been deliberately levelled by a giant sword.. Its slides were unusually symmetrical; they sloped at exactly the same angle, about 35°, and formed a single cliff unbroken by fissures or crevices. I reached the table in an hour, parked the half-track at its; foot and looked up at the great rounded flank of dull blue rock; sloping away from me, rising like an island out of the grey sea of the desert floor.
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56 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION I changed down into bottom gear and floored the accelerator. Steering the Chrysler obliquely across the slope to minimise the angle of ascent, I roared slowly up the side, tracks skating and racing, swinging the half-track around like a frantic pendulum. Scaling the crest, I levelled off and looked out over a plateau about two miles in diameter, bare except for a light blue carpet of cosmic dust. In the centre of the plateau, at least a mile across, was an enormous metallic lake, heat ripples spiralling upwards from its dark smooth surface. I edged the half-track forward, head out of the side window, watching carefully, holding down the speed that picked up too easily. There were no meteorites or rock fragments lying about ; presumably the lake surface cooled and set at night, to melt and extend itself as the temperature rose the next day. Although the roof seemed hard as steel I stopped about 300 yards from the edge, cut the engine and climbed up onto the cabin. The shift of perspective was slight but sufficient. The lake vanished, and I realized I was looking down at a shallow basin, about half a mile wide, scooped out of the roof. I swung back into the cab and slammed in the accelerator. The basin, like the table top, was a perfect circle, sloping smoothly to the floor about one hundred feet below its rim, in imitation of a volcanic crater. 1 braked the half-track at the edge and jumped out. Four hundred yards away, in the basin’s centre, five gigantic rectangular slabs of stone reared up from a vast pentagonal base. This, then, was the secret Tallis had kept from me. The basin was empty, the air warmer, strangely silent after three days of the Chrysler’s engine roaring inside my head. I lowered myself over the edge and began to walk down the slope towards the great monument in the centre of the basin. For the first time since my arrival on Murak I was unable to see the desert and the brilliant colours of the volcano jungle. I had strayed into a pale blue world, as pure and exact as a geometric equation, composed of the curving floor, the pentagonal base and the five stone rectangles towering up into the sky like the temple of some abstract religion. It took me nearly three minutes to reach the monument. Behind me, on the sky-line, the half-track’s engine steamed
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 57 faintly. I went up to the base stone, which was a yard thick and must have weighed over a thousand tons, and placed my palms on its surface. It was still cool, the thin blue grain closely packed. Like the megaliths standing on it, the pentagon was unornamented and geometrically perfect. I heaved myself up and approached the nearest megalith. The shadows around me were enormous parallelograms, their angles shrinking as the sun blazed up into the sky. I walked slowly round into the centre of the group, dimly aware that neither Tallis nor the two geologists could have carved the megaliths and raised them onto the pentagon, when I saw that the entire inner surface of the nearest megalith was covered by row upon row of finely chiselled hieroglyphs. Swinging round, I ran my hands across its surface. Large patches had crumbled away, leaving a faint indecipherable tracery, but most of the surface was intact, packed solidly with pictographic symbols and intricate cuneiform glyphics that ran down it in narrow columns. I stepped over to the next megalith. Here again, the inner- face was covered with tens of thousands of minute carved symbols, the rows separated by finely cut dividing rules that fell the full fifty-foot height of the megalith. There were at least a dozen languages, all in alphabets I had never seen before, strings of meaningless ciphers among which I could pick out odd cross-hatched symbols that seemed to be numerals, and peculiar serpentine forms that might have represented human figures in stylised poses. Suddenly my eye caught : CYR*RK YII A*PHA LEP**IS *D 1317 Below was another, damaged but legible. AMEN*TEK LC*V *LPHA LE*ORIS AD 13** There were blanks among the letters, where time had flaked away minute grains of the stone. My eyes raced down the column. There were a score more entries : PONT*AR*H *CV ALPH* L*PORIS A* *318 MYR*K LV* A**HA LEPORI* AD 13*9 KYR** XII ALPH* LEP*RIS AD 1*19
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58 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION The list of names, all from Alpha Leporis, continued down the column. I followed it to the base, where the names ended three inches from the bottom, then moved along the surface, across rows of hieroglyphs, and picked up the list three or four columns later. M*MARYK XX*V A* PH A LEPORI* AD 1389 CYRARK IX ALPHA *EPORIS AD 1390 I went over to the megalith on my left and began to examine the inscriptions carefully. Here the entries read : MINYS-259 DELI* ARGUS AD 1874 TYLNYS-413 DELTA ARGUS *D 1874 There were fewer blanks ; to the right of the face the entries were more recent, the lettering sharper. In all there were five distinct languages, four of them, including Earth’s, translations of the first entry running down the left-hand margin of each column. The third and fourth megaliths recorded entries from Gamma Grus and Beta Trianguli. They followed the same pattern, their surfaces divided into eighteen-inch wide columns, each of which contained five rows of entries, the four hiero- glyphic languages followed by Earth’s, recording the same minimal data in the same terse formula : Name — Place — Date. I had looked at four of the megaliths. The fifth stood with its back to the sun, its inner face hidden. I walked over to it, crossing the oblique panels of shadow withdrawing to their sources, curious as to what fabulous catalogue of names I should find. The fifth megalith was blank. My eyes raced across its huge unbroken surface, marked only by the quarter-inch deep grooves of the dividing rules some thoughtful master mason from the stars had chiselled to tabulate the entries from Earth that had never come. I returned to the other megaliths and for half an hour read at random, arms outstretched involuntarily across the great inscription panels, finger tips tracing the convulutions of the
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 59 hieroglyphs, seeking among the thousands of signatures some clue to the identity and purpose of the four stellar races. COPTIC LEAGUE MLV BETA TRIANGULI *D 1723 ISARI* LEAGUE* VII BETA *RIANGULI AD 1724 MAR-5-GO GAMMA GRUS AD 1959 VEN-7-GO GAMMA GRUS AD 1960 TETRARK XII ALPHA LEPORIS AD 2095 Dynasties recurred again and again, Cyrark’s, Minys-’s, -Go’s, separated by twenty- or thirty-year intervals that appeared to be generations. Before AD 1200 all entries were illegible. This represented something over half the total. The surfaces of the megaliths were almost completely covered, and initially I assumed that the first entries had been made roughly 2200 years earlier, shortly after the birth of Christ. However the frequency of the entries increased algebraically : in the 15th century there were one or two a year, by the 20th century there were five or six, and by the present year the number varied from twenty entries from Delta Argus to over thirty-five from Alpha Leporis. The last of these, at the extreme bottom right corner of the megalith, was : CYRARK CCCXXIV ALPHA LEPORIS AD 2218 The letters were freshly incised, perhaps no more than a day old, even a few hours. Below, a free space of two feet reached to the floor. Breaking off my scrutiny, I jumped down from the base stone and carefully searched the surrounding basin, sweeping the light dust carpet for vehicle or foot marks, the remains of implements or scaffolding. But the basin was empty, the dust untouched except for the single file of prints leading down from the half-track. I was sweating uncomfortably, and the thermo-alarm strapped to my wrist rang, warning me that the air temperature was 85°, ninety minutes to noon. I re-set it to 100°, took a last look round the five megaliths, and then made my way back to the half-track. Heat waves raced and glimmered round the rim of the basin, and the sky was a dark inflamed red, mottled by the thermal
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60 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION pressure fields massing overhead like storm clouds. I jogged along at a half run, in a hurry to contact Mayer. Without his confirmation the authorities on Ceres would treat my report as the fantasy of a sand-happy lunatic. In addition, I wanted him to bring his camera ; we could develop the reels within half an hour and radio a dozen stills as indisputable proof. More important, I wanted someone to share the discovery, provide me with at least some cover in numbers. The frequency of entries on the megaliths, and the virtual absence of any further space — unless the reverse sides were used, which seemed unlikely — suggested a climax was soon to be reached, probably the climax for which Tallis had been waiting. Hundreds of entries had been made during his fifteen years on Murak ; watching all day from the observatory he must have seen every landing. As I swung into the half-track the emergency light on the transceiver above the windscreen was pulsing insistently. I switched to audio and Mayer’s voice snapped into my ear. “ Quaine ? Is that you ? Where the hell are you, man ? I nearly put out a May Day for you !” He was at the camp site. Calling in from the observatory when I failed to arrive, he assumed I had broken down and abandoned the half-track, and had come out searching for me. I picked him up at the camp site half an hour later, retro- versed the tracks in a squealing circle of dust and kicked off again at full throttle. Mayer pressed me all the way back but I told him nothing, driving the Chrysler hard across the lake, paralleling the two previous sets of tracks and throwing up a huge cloud of dust 1 50 feet into the air. It was now over 95°, and the ash hills in the valley at the end of the lake were beginning to look angry and boiled. Eager to get Mayer down into the basin, and with my mind spinning like a disintegrating flywheel, it was only as the half- track roared up the table slope that I felt a first chilling pang of fear. Through the windscreen I hesitantly scanned the tilting sky. Soon after reaching the basin we would have to shut down for an hour, two of us crammed together in the fume-filled cabin, deafened by the engine, sitting targets with the periscope blinded by the glare. The centre of the plateau was a pulsing blur, as the air trapped in the basin throbbed upwards into the sun. I drove straight towards it, Mayer stiffening in his seat. A hundred
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 61 yards from the basin’s edge the air suddenly cleared and we could see the tops of the megaliths. Mayer leapt up and swung out of the door onto the running board as I cut the engine and slammed the half-track to a halt by the rim. We jumped down, grabbing flare pistols and shouting to each other, slid into the basin and sprinted through the boiling air to the megaliths looming up in the centre. I half-expected to find a reception party waiting for us, but the megaliths were deserted. I reached the pentagon fifty yards ahead of Mayer, climbed up and waited for him, gulping in the molten sunlight. I helped him up and led him over to one of the megaliths, picked a column and began to read out the entries. Then I took him round the others, recapitulating everything I had discovered, pointing out the blank tablet reserved for Earth. Mayer listened, broke away and wandered off, staring up dully at the megaliths. “ Quaine, you’ve really found something,” he muttered softly. “ Crazy, must be some sort of temple.” I followed him round, wiping the sweat off my face and shielding my eyes from the glare reflected off the great slabs. “ Look at them, Mayer ! They’ve been coming here for ten thousand years ! Do you know what this means ?” Mayer tentatively reached out and touched one of the megaliths. “ ‘Argive League xxv . . . Beta Tri-’ ” he read out. “ There are others then. God Almightly. What do you think they look like ?” “ What does it matter ? Listen. They must have levelled this plateau themselves, scooped out the basin and cut these tablets from the living rock. Can you even imagine the tools they used ?” We crouched in the narrow rectangle of shadow in the lee of the sunward megalith. The temperature climbed, forty-five minutes to noon, 105°. “ What is all this, though ?” Mayer asked. “ Their burial ground ?” “ Unlikely. Why leave a tablet for Earth ? If they’ve been able to learn our language they’d know the gesture was point- less. Anyway, elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence, and there’s something here that suggests the exact opposite. I’m convinced they expect that some time in the future we’ll take an active part in whatever is celebrated here.”
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62 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ Maybe, but what ? Think in new categories, remember ?” Mayer squinted up at the megaliths. “ This could be anything from an ethnological bill of lading to the guest list at an all-time cosmic house party.” He noticed something, frowned, then suddenly wrenched away from me. He leapt to his feet, pressed his hands against the surface of the slab behind us and ran his eyes carefully over the grain. “ What’s worrying you ?” I asked. “ Shut up !” he snapped. He scratched his thumbnail at the surface, trying to dislodge a few grains. “ What are you talking about, Quaine, these slabs aren’t made of stone !” He slipped out his jack knife, sprung the blade and stabbed viciously at the megalith, slashing a two-foot long groove across the inscriptions. I stood up and tried to restrain him but he shouldered me away and ran his finger down the groove, collecting a few fragments. He turned on me angrily. “ Do you know what this is ? Tantalum oxide ! Pure ninety-nine per cent paygold. No wonder our extraction rates are fantastically small. I couldn’t understand it, but these people — •” he jerked his thumb furiously at the megaliths “ — have damn well milked the planet dry to build these crazy things !” It was 115°. The air was beginning to turn yellow and we were breathing in short exhausted pants. “ Let’s get back to the truck,” I temporised. Mayer was losing control, carried away by his rage. With his big burly shoulders hunched in anger, staring up blindly at the five great megaliths, face contorted by the heat, he looked like an insane sub-man pinned in the time trophy of a galactic super-hunter. He was ranting away as we stumbled through the dust towards the half-track. “ What do you want to do ?” I shouted. “ Cut them down and put them through your ore crushers ?” Mayer stopped, the blue dust swirling about his legs. The air was humming as the basin floor expanded in the heat. The half-track was only fifty yards away, its refrigerated cabin a cool haven. Mayer was watching me, nodding slowly. “ It could be done. Ten tons of Hy-Dyne planted round those slabs would crack them into small enough pieces for a tractor to handle. We could store them out at the observatory, then sneak them later into my refining tanks.”
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 63 I walked on, shaking my head with a thin grin. The heat was hitting Mayer, welling up all the irrational bitterness of a year’s frustration. “ It’s an idea. Why don’t you get in touch with Gamma Grus ? Maybe they’ll give you the lease.” “ I’m serious, Quaine,” Mayer called after me. “ In a couple of years we’d be rich men.” “ You’re crazy !” I shouted back at him. “ The sun’s boiling your brains.” I began to scale the slope up to the rim. The next hour in the cabin was going to be difficult, cooped up with a maniac eager to tear the stars apart. The butt of the flare pistol swinging on my knee caught my eye ; a poor weapon, though, against Mayer’s physique. I had climbed almost up to the rim when I heard his feet thudding through the dust. I started to turn round just as he was on me, swinging a tremendous blow that struck me on the back of the head. I fell, watched him close in and then stood up, my skull exploding, and grappled with him. We stumbled over each other for a moment, the walls of the basin diving around us like a switchback, and then he knocked my hands away and smashed a heavy right cross into my face. I fell on my back, stunned by the pain ; the blow seemed to have loosened my jaw and damaged all the bones on the left side of my face. I managed to sit up and saw Mayer running past. He reached one hand to the rim, pulled himself up and lurched over to the half-track. I dragged the flare pistol out its holster, snapped back the bolt and trained it at Mayer. He was thirty yards away, turning the near-side door handle. I held the butt with both hands and fired as he opened the door. He looked round at the sharp detonation and watched the silver shell soar swiftly through the air towards him, ready to duck. The shell missed him by three feet and exploded against the cabin roof. There was a brilliant flash of light that resolved itself a fraction of a second later into a fireball of incandescent magnesium vapour ten feet in diameter. This slowly faded to reveal the entire driving cabin, bonnet and forward side-panels of the half-track burning strongly with a loud, heavy crackling. Out of this maelstrom suddenly plunged the figure of Mayer, moving with violent speed, blackened arms across his face. He tripped over the rim, catapulted down into the dust and rolled
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64 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION for about twenty yards before he finally lay still, a shapeless bundle of smoking rags. I looked numbly at my wristwatch. It was ten minutes to noon. The temperature was 1 30°. I pulled myself to my feet and trudged slowly up the slope towards the half-track, head thudding like a volcano, uncertain whether I would be strong enough to lift myself out of the basin. When I was ten feet from the rim I could see that the wind- screen of the half-track had melted and was dripping like treacle onto the dashboard. I dropped the flare pistol and turned round. It was five minutes to noon. Around me, on all sides, enormous sheets of fire were cascading slowly from the sky, passing straight through the floor of the basin, and then rising again in an inverted torrent. The megaliths were no longer visible, screened by curtains of brilliant light, but I groped forward, following the slope, searching for what shade would still be among them. Twenty yards further on I saw that the sun was directly overhead. It expanded until the disc was as wide as the basin, and then lowered itself to about ten feet above my head, a thousand rivers of fire streaming across its surface in all directions. There was a terrifying roaring and barking noise, overlayed by a dull, massive pounding as all the volcanos in the vulcano jungle began to erupt again. I walked on, in a dream, shuffling slowly, eyes closed to shut out the furnace around me. Then I discovered that I was sitting on the floor of the basin, which started to spin, setting up a high-pitched screaming. A strange vision swept like a flame through my mind. For aeons I plunged, spiralling weightlessly through a thousand whirling vortexes, swirled and buffeted down chasmic eddies, splayed out across the disintegrating matrix of the continuum, a dreamless ghost in flight from the cosmic Now. Then a million motes of light prickled the darkness above me, illuminating enormous curving causeways of time and space veering out past the stars to the rim of the galaxy. My dimensions shrank to a metaphysical extension of astral zero, I was propelled upwards to the stars. A isles of light broke and splintered around me, I passed Aldebaran, soared over Betelgeuse and Vega, zoomed past Antares, finally halted a hundred light years above the crown of Canopus.
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 65 Epochs drifted. Time massed on gigantic fronts, colliding like crippled universes. Abruptly, the infinite worlds of tomorrow unfolded before me — ten thousand years, a hundred thousand, unnumbered millenia raced past me in a blur of light, an iridescent cataract of stars and nebulae, interlaced by flashing trajectories of flight and exploration, I entered deep time. Deep Time : J ,000,000 mega-years. I saw the Milky Way, a wheeling carousel of fire, and Earth’s remote descendants, countless races inhabiting every stellar system in the galaxy. The dark intervals between the stars were a continuously flickering field of light, a gigantic phosphorescent ocean, filled with the vibrating pulses of electromagnetic communication pathways. To cross the enormous voids between the stars they have progressively slowed their physiological time, first ten, then a hundred-fold, so accelerating stellar and galactic time. Space has become alive with transient swarms of comets and meteors, the constellations have begun to dislocate and shift, the slow majestic rotation of the universe itself is at last visible. Deep Time : 10,000,000 mega-years. Now they have left the Milky Way, which has started to fragment and dissolve. To reach the island galaxies they have further slowed their time schemes by a factor of 10,000, and can thus communicate with each other across vast inter-galactic distances in a subjective period of only a few years. Continuously expanding into deep space, they have extended their physiological dependence upon electronic memory banks which store the atomic and molecular patterns within their bodies, transmit them outwards at the speed of light, and later re-assemble them. Deep Time : 100,000,000 mega-years. They have spread now to all the neighbouring galaxies, swallowing thousands of nebulae. Their time schemes have decelerated a million-fold, they have become the only permanent forms in an ever- changing world. In a single instant of their lives a star emerges and dies, a sub-universe is born, a score of planetary life- systems evolve and vanish. Around them the universe sparkles and flickers with myriad points of light, as untold numbers of constellations appear and fade.
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66 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Now, too, they have finally shed their organic forms and are composed of radiating electromagnetic fields, the primary energy substratum of the universe, complex networks of multiple dimensions, alive with the constant tremor of the sentient messages they carry, bearing the life-ways of the race. To power these fields, they have harnessed entire galaxies riding the wave-fronts of the stellar explosions out towards the terminal helixes of the universe. Deep Time : 1,000,000,000, mega-years. They are beginning to dictate the form and dimensions of the universe. To girdle the distances which circumscribe the cosmos they have reduced their time period to 0.00000001 of its previous phase. The great galaxies and spiral nebulae which once seemed to live for eternity are now of such brief duration that they are no longer visible. The universe is now almost filled by the great vibrating mantle of ideation, a vast shimmering harp which has completely translated itself into pure wave form, independent of any generating source. As the universe pulses slowly, its own energy vortices flexing and dilating, so the force-fields of the ideation mantle flex and dilate in sympathy, growing like an embryo within the womb of the cosmos, a child which will soon fill and consume its parent. Deep Time : 10,000,000,000 mega-years. The ideation-field has now swallowed the cosmos, substituted its own dynamic, its own spatial and temporal dimensions. All primary time and energy fields have been engulfed. Seeking the final extension of itself within its own bounds the mantle has reduced its time period to an almost infinitessimal 0.00000000 . . . n of its previous interval. Time has virtually ceased to exist, the ideation-field is nearly stationary, infinitely slow eddies of sentience undulating outward across its mantles. Ultimately it achieves the final predicates of time and space, eternity and infinity, and slows to absolute zero. Then with a cataclysmic eruption it disintegrates, no longer able to contain itself. Its vast energy patterns begin to collapse, the whole system twists and thrashes in its mortal agony, thrusting outwards huge cataracts of fragmenting energy. In parallel, time emerges.
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 67 Out of this debris the first proto-galactic fields are formed, coalesing to give the galaxies and nebulae, the stars encircled by their planetary bodies. Among these, from the elemental seas, based on the carbon atom, energe the first living forms. So the cycle rehews itself . . . The stars swam, their patterns shifting through a dozen constellations, novas flooded the darkness like blinding arcs, revealing the familiar profiles of the Milky Way, the constella- tions Orion, Coma Berenices, Cygnus. Lowering my eyes from the storm-tossed sky I saw the five megaliths. I was back on Murak. Around me the basin was filled with a great concourse of silent figures, ranged upwards along the darkened slopes, shoulder to shoulder in endless ranks, like spectators in a spectral arena. Beside me a voice spoke, and it seemed to have told me everything I had witnessed of the great cosmic round. Just before I sank into consciousness for the last time I tried to tsk the question ever-present in my drifting mind, but it answered before I spoke, the star-littered sky, the five megaliths and the watching multitude spinning and swirling away into a dream as it said : “ Meanwhile we wait here, at the threshold of time and space, celebrating the identity and kinship of the particles within our bodies with those of the sun and the stars, of our brief private times with the vast periods of the galaxies, with the total unifying time of the cosmos ...” I woke lying face downwards in the cool evening sand, shadows beginning to fill the basin, the thermal winds blowing a crisp refreshing breeze across my head and back. Below, the megaliths rose up into the thin blue air, their lower halves cut by the shadow-line of the sinking sun. I lay quietly, stirring my legs and arms tentatively, conscious of the gigantic rifts that had been driven through my mind. After a few minutes I pulled myself to my feet and gazed round at the slopes curving away from me, the memory of the insane vision vivid in my mind. The vast concourse that had filled the basin, the dream of the cosmic cycle, the voice of my interlocutor — were still real to me, a world in parallel I had just stepped from, and the door to which hung somewhere in the air around me.
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68 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Had I dreamed everything, assembling the entire fantasy in my mind as I lay raving in the noon heat, saved by some thermodynamic freak of the basin’s architecture ? I held my thermo-alarm up to the fading light, checking the maximum and minimum levels. The maximum read : 162°. Yet I had survived ! I felt relaxed, restored, almost rejuve- nated. My hands and face were unburnt — a temperature of over 160° would have boiled the flesh off my bones, left my skin a blackened crisp. Over my shoulder I noticed the half-track standing on the rim. I ran tov/ards it, for the first time remembering Mayer’s death. I felt my cheek-bones, testing my jaw muscles. Surprisingly Mayer’s heavy punches had left no bruise. Mayer's body had gone ! A single line of footsteps led down from the half-track to the megaliths, but otherwise the carpet of light blue dust was untouched. Mayer’s prints, all marks of our scuffle, had vanished. I quickly scaled the rim and reached the half-track, peering under the chassis and between the tracks. I flung open the cabin door, found the compartment empty. The windscreen was intact. The paintwork on the door and bonnet was unmarked, the metal trim around the windows unscratched. I dropped to my knees, vainly searched for any flakes of magnesium ash. On my knee the flare pistol lodged securely in its holster, a primed star shell in the breach. I left the Chrysler, jumped down into the basin and ran over to the megaliths. For ap hour I paced round them, trying to resolve the countless questions that jammed my mind. Just before I left I went over to the fifth tablet. I looked up at the top left corner, wondering whether I should have qualified for its first entry had I died that afternoon. A single row of letters, filled with shadow by the falling light, stood out clearly. I stepped back and craned up at them. There were the symbols of the four alien languages, and then, proudly against the stars * CHARLES FOSTER NELSON EARTH AD 2217 “ Tell me, Ouaine, where would you like to be when the world ends ?” In the seven years since Tallis first asked me this question I must have re-examined it a thousand times. Somehow it seems the key to all the extraordinary events that have
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THE WAITING GROUNDS 69 happened on Murak, with their limitless implications for the people of Earth (to me a satisfactory answer contains an acceptable statement of one’s philosophy and beliefs, an adequate discharge of the one moral debt we owe ourselves and the universe). Not that the world is about to ‘ end.’ The implication is rather that it has already ended and regenerated itself an infinite number of times, and that the only remaining question is what to do with ourselves in the meantime. The four stellar races who built the megaliths chose to come to Murak. What exactly they are waiting for here I can’t be certain. A cosmic redeemer, perhaps, the first sight of the vast mantle of ideation I glimpsed in my vision. Recalling the period of two million years Tallis cited for life to appear on Murak it may be that the next cosmic cycle will receive its impetus here, and that we are advance spectators, five kings come to attend the genesis of a super-species which will soon outstrip us. That there are others here, invisible and sustained by preternatural forces, is without doubt. Apart from the impossibility of surviving a Murak noon, I certainly didn’t remove Mayer’s body from the basin and arrange to have him electrocuted by one of the data-processing units at the obser- vatory. Nor did I conceive the vision of the cosmic cycle myself. It looks as if the two geologists stumbled upon the Waiting Grounds, somehow divined their significance, and then let Tallis in on their discovery. Perhaps they disagreed, as Mayer and I did, and Nelson may have been forced to kill his companion, to die himself a year later in the course of his vigil. Like Tallis I shall wait here if necessary for fifteen years. 1 go out to the Grounds once a week and watch them from the observatory the rest of the time. So far I have seen nothing, although two or three hundred more names have been added to the tablets. However, I am certain that whatever we are waiting for will soon arrive. When I get tired or impatient, as I sometimes do, I remind myself that they have been coming to Murak and waiting here, generation upon generation, for 1 0,000 years. Whatever it is, it must be worth waiting for. J. G. Ballard
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70 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Take some presentday statistics, twist them around a little — as Donald Malcolm has done in his story — and you come up with some startling revelations concerning the next evolutionary step in the chain of human development. ALMOST OBSOLETE by Donald Malcolm Almost anything in the world can be reduced to a matter of statistics. The cold, cruel figures hold in a mathematical prison all that is warm, natural, human, personal, matter of fact. Want to know the yeafly consumption of shoes, tomatoes, newspapers, nappies, hairpins, bandages, needles, teaspoons, nailfiles — in fact, all the trivia that help to mould a pile of chemicals into a human being ? You’ll find them somewhere, in someone’s filing cabinet. The sum total of the phenomenon called life. Gerald Kemp had a filing cabinet full of statistical records ; to be more acurate, he had three roomfuls of them, the medical variety. They dealt with all manner of things pertaining to the human body. He was Chief Statistician in charge of Medical Records, arbitrarily attached to one of the larger London hospitals, but his work encompassed a much larger field of activity. He could quote figures to the B.M.A., to the Government of the day, to insurance firms, to anybody with a legal use for medical statistics.
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ALMOST OBSOLETE 71 Kemp’s work led him to take up a wide and varied number of Interests in his leisure time. Through this, he had probably a deeper insight into the personalities, foibles and motives of people than most. The mere recording of statistics was routine ; the correlation and interpretation of the amassed figures was more demanding, requiring an intuitive bent for spotting the unusual. Individual groups of statistics seldom tell much beyond the subject they are concerned with. But when certain, apparently unconnected facts are brought together, a picture appears, not always a pleasant one . . . The abstract rang a bell in Kemp’s acute, neatly-partioned mind. It had been taken from a recent paper in the B.M.A Journal and bore the title, RISE IN THE INCIDENCE OF MALE STERILITY. He called in his secretary. “ Miss Thane,” he began, showing her the abstract, “ I take it this doctor had access to our files for this work ?” “ Yes, sir. He came here often.” She blushed faintly and Kemp remembered that his attractive secretary had more to do with the visits than the files. “ How is he, by the way ?” he asked, grinning impishly. The girl blushed even more. “ Very well, thank you.” Still grinning, Kemp sighed, “ Back to business, Miss Thane.” Actually, his mind never left it. He went on. “ Ask Wilson to see what he can dig up on female sterility, will you ?” Referring to the sheets, he added, “ Back to 1958 please. Twenty years ; the young man has certainly been diligent, hasn’t he ?” Miss Thane was now crimson and fast disappearing into the infra-red and Kemp guessed that a deeper romance was in the offing. After she had left, Kemp settled down to study the abstract in closer detail. Male sterility had been rising steadily since 1958 with one or two standstills during the period. No dips, though. He read through the lists of causes, those ascertained, those possible, those probable. According to the doctor, the British male was in a bad way, but the outlook was bright. When Miss Thane returned with the information, he instructed her to ferret out details of sterility at birth and due to disease, accident and so forth in later life.
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72 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION The female sterility figures proved to be extremely interesting and not a little puzzling. In 1958 the ratio of sterile males to their similarly afflicted counterparts was about 2 to 3. The 40 per cent male figure had been rising while the incidence of female sterility was dipping, if anything more steeply. The percentage of males to females reporting at the clinics for help was now something like 63 per cent to 27 per cent, an amazing turn about. Kemp wondered how many people were suffering their inability in silence. Miss Thane brought in the birth figures. Examination showed that more male than female children were afflicted with incurable sterility at birth. Although the percentage was higher and probably rising, it was not quite so disproportionate as the adult figures. Kemp felt intensely sure that these trends were only part of a large picture that might not bear looking at. However, he was not a man to flinch and, no matter how big the tiger on the end of the tail he had picked up, he had to go on. That he knew ; his “ nose ” for such things wouldn’t let him stop now. His cup of morning tea, with nothing but a generous slice of lemon in it, was sent in. As he sipped it critically, he sum- marised the items that had emerged from the morning’s ferreting. One ; male sterility stood at an all-time high. Two ; females were, correspondingly, in better shape than they had been since the fig-leaf state. Three ; more sterile male babies — incurably so. Four ; what did items one, two and three add up to ? He had to confess that, for the present, he was baffled. Pushing the matter into a pending compartment of his mind, he turned his attention to things of more immediate importance. A phone jangled. “ Kemp here.” “ Jim Moffat, Manager of South Africa Insurance Company. We are revising the premiums for men in the fifty-and-over age group. Can you supply us with the latest life expectancy statistics please ?” “ Yes, we can let you have them,” Kemp told him, knocking the piece of lemon about in his cup with a spoon. “ If you send a messenger along after lunch, say, at three, he can pick them up. He’ll be able to bring the usual confirmatory letter.”
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ALMOST OBSOLETE 73 They exchanged thank you’s and goodbyes, then Kemp hung up. He called Miss Thane in. “ Male-life expectancy after the age of fifty this time,” he informed her between sips of his cooling tea. “ Seeing that Wilson’s eye is in, so to speak, give this request to him,” Kemp instructed, passing over the form he had filled in as he spoke. As she turned to leave, he remarked airily, “ Ah — Miss Thane — statistics reveal that Russian tea imbibers incline more to two cups than one ... is there any more in the pot ?” “ I can hardly argue with a brilliant statistician like yourself, can I ?” she bantered, returning with the pot and doing the honours. He worked steadily, without interruption, until lunch. This he ate at his leisure, then had a walk in the sun-lit park before choosing a bench and settling down to read his newspaper. One finds many interesting items of information tucked away in small corners of papers, rating, at most, a couple of lines of print. Because of his profession, Kemp tended to notice such minor details. This one said. “ The effects of the influx of more women into industry on the falling marriage rate are being investigated ” — answer to question in the House of Commons. Falling marriage rate ... in his mind, another seemly isolated fact clicked into place. He had no clue yet as to the final picture that was going to result when other so far unknown factors turned up and took their places. He consulted his watch, saw that it was time to return to the office — he was a stickler for punctuality — and pushed the paper into a pocket. Kemp sensed that the larger, by far more important aspects of his jigsaw were still to come. Rising, he stretched, then walked slowly to the park entrance, wondering what the world was planning behind the collective back of humanity. Kemp put a pile of work behind him before it was time to go home. He dropped Miss Thane off at her house then drove out to his suburban bungalow, where he lived with his wife and family, one boy, one girl.
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74 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION All during the drive his mind churned over the odd facts that had, in one way or another, claimed his attention that day. The impersonal statistics built up to something. What? He tuned in the car radio and caught the tail end of a report on the Commonwealth Jupiter Expedition. The public imagination was certainly stimulated by the progress of the three ships. Within two or three weeks they would reach the region of the giant world and once again the search for other intelligent life in the system would begin. The seekers had found nothing to enthuse over on the Moon, on Venus or on Mars. In most people’s private opinion, the chances of finding life, let alone intelligent life, on the satellites of the outer planets were slim. But the papers and other news fronts sustained the interest and the hope that aliens might exist somewhere out there in the wastes of the interplanetary night. By the time he finally reached home he was again thinking about the problem. He ate his evening meal with a pre- occupation that evoked comment from his wife. He was usually more appreciative of his wife’s excellent cooking. He did his best to explain, merely increasing his own feelings of bafflement and bewilderment and giving Ingrid something to puzzle over. Later, when the children were safely abed and Mrs. Kemp had gone to visit a sick relative, he settled down to watch a fortnightly programme, THE WORLD OF MEDICINE. The first part dealt with new analgesics that had been developed recently. Then the interviewer announced, ‘ Now we have with us Dr. Robert Milton, a world-renowned pediatrician, who is attached to one of our London hospitals. He’s going to tell us about some new work he’s been doing in connection with babies, a subject that interests us all. Dr. Milton.’ Kemp perked up. He knew Milton, as, indeed, he knew most of the medical fraternity in the Capital. Milton was a small, deceptively mild person with a gentle nature that helped considerably in his profession. In a soft voice, perfectly matched to his personality, he began. “ Much of the research I have been doing recently has been in connection with newly-born babies in an effort to aid the dieticians in their search for the perfectly balanced diet for the expectant mother.”
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ALMOST OBSOLETE 75 Milton was a “ natural ” for the television medium and Kemp found his attention held. The speaker went on, “ We are striving to find such a diet so that many of the ills that attack and too often cripple children in their important formative years may be banished. Incident- ally,” he digressed, smiling at the interviewer, “ this line of research might do me out of a job eventually !” Very neat juxtaposition, Kemp noted mentally. “ Can you tell us something of the importance of diet, Dr. Milton ?” “ Yes, as spokesman for our team, I can. The importance of a correctly balanced diet, cannot be overstressed. The foetal child is in the most helpless stage of its life. It depends for its sustenance on its mother. While some defects are hereditary, the mother is directly responsible for the physical condition of her child at birth. Pre-natal education has never been at a higher level that it is to-day. In consequence the health of our children in the age group of birth to five years is satisfactorily better. To conclude this part, there is no excuse for the woman who fails to take advantage of the range of free vitamins available.” The interviewer commented, “ I believe that, in research of any kind, interesting facts, which have no direct bearing on the main line, turn up. Have you found this to be the case ?” Dr. Milton nodded. “ Two unusual items have been uncovered. The first one might have its origins in the diet ; we are not sure at this point. A major difference in the bone structures of males and females is to be found in the joint of the thigh bone and the hip bone.” Here a set of two X-ray plates and a pair of line drawings were shown. Using a small pointer Dr. Milton indicated a plate and a drawing. “ Here and here you see the female structure. Note the markedly angled joint of the bones. On the other hand ” — he stabbed at the male plate and the drawing — “ the joint here shows very little angle, almost a straight line.” Laying the pointer down on the table, he remarked, “ Incidentally, the pronounced angle seen on the female plate is the reason why a woman — ” Abruptly, the sound cut off. The doctor continued mouthing, then Kemp saw the two men obviously, but soundlessly laughing.
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76 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Milton began to speak again and Kemp cursed the break- down. . . discovered this. Many of the young female babies I have examined show little or no angle between the hip bone and the thighbone. “ The second item deals with the sex of the children. Women between twenty and twenty-four produce more boys than girls ; After this age, the trend reverses. In our research, we have found that the twenty-to-twenty-four age group has produced more girls. Whether or not this trend is country-wide has yet to be established.” I can soon check that one, Kemp said to himself as the interviewer thanked the doctor, counselled viewers to look in again in two weeks and the programme faded from the screen. Two more factors for the jigsaw ! A change in female bone structure and a rise in the number of girls born to mothers in the twenty to twenty-four age bracket. He’d check up the available statistics on that one to-morrow. One thing was emerging from the data he had. The changes were without exception favouring the weaker sex. He went to bed, wondering about the bit he had missed. Next day, he had Wilson run some data through the com- puter. The results confirmed that the unusual reversal of trend as highlighted by Dr. Milton’s research applied to the whole country. The change wag, admitted, not a large one, but it was significant. Kemp was worried and he couldn’t shake the feeling off. Somewhere, something big was stirring, shapelessly, purposefully. He decided to get in touch with his friend Luis Ramirez, the Director of the World Health Organisation, at his HQ in Rio. His medical statistical vaults made Kemp’s collection look like a train-spotter’s notebook. All medical statistics, from every part of the world, were sent there for correlation and integration into a world map of disease and sickness. In this way, trends were spotted before they became really dangerous and the highly trained specialist teams could be rushed to a given area where they had plenty of time to organise an effective and lasting counter-attack. With travel at twice the speed of sound commonplace, distance presented no difficulty to the W.LI.O. air fleet.
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ALMOST OBSOLETE 77 Ramirez had at his well manicured finger tips all available data from the high density population areas. The British Isles, with a slowly declining population level, was a mere irritation beside places like China, Africa, India, Russia and America. Anything unusual was bound to show up. His statistics would give Luis a starting point, show him what to look for. Carefully, he composed a letter, giving the various facts as concisely as possible. At lunch, he took the letter to the Post Office where he registered it and affixed the new stamp issued that day. A l/9d air value in black on blue, it depicted Britain’s latest Mach Two jetliner, Nova Stella. Luis was a famous collector and he would be pleased to have this cover as an extra to the special one Kemp posted at the same time. The stamp was the first issued by Britain since the set of two put out in 1960 in commemoration of a British satellite launching. Seven days passed. The work went on. Kemp attended a couple of conferences and was, if anything, busier than usual. He had three weeks leave due shortly and wanted no loose ends dangling. Within ten days, a cable arrived from Rio : URGENT YOU COME HERE STOP HAVE CABLED BENARIO DHUMAL KUKARKIN N’BOYA AND CHOU STOP ADVISE STOP. RAMIREZ. Well, Kemp thought, reading the cable, his letter must have stirred things up ! He had four days in which to make the necessary arrange- ments. He cabled Ramirez, advising him of his date and time of arrival at Rio’s beautiful air terminal. Kemp left the other holiday arrangements in his wife’s capable hands — he didn’t expect to be detained long in the Brazilian capital — and boarded a South American Nova Stella for Rio. As the plane took the air with thundering grace, his thoughts turned to the others, either starting out for or on the way to W.H.O. H.Q., in Rio. Benario hadn’t far to travel from Washington, but the others had a considerable distance to cover. Dhumal from Delhi ; N’Boya from Salisbury ; Kukarkin from Moscow and Miss Yi-Hsin from Peking. All were
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78 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION personal friends of his. In fact the coming meeting would be like a minor Royal Statistical Society get together. Absently, he glanced at one of the shapely stewardesses as she walked away from him. Of course — ! He knew now what he had missed on the television programme. His glance wandered to the window and broad expanse of the Atlantic far below. The jetliner cruised effortlessly onwards. Rio had changed, as any city changes with time. He had last been there in 1961. The change was not simply the physical one of the old buildings gone and the new structures in their places. It was more deep, more subtle than that, as if the city reflected the growing wealth, importance and status of Brazil as a world power. Vast tracks of the timeless Amazon area had been cleared to reveal a fortune in minerals, which the planet badly needed. Luis was waiting for him at the plush, now unrecogniseable Rio air terminal. The whole effect was decidedly futuristic. “ Gerald !” Ramirez greeted him affectionately, gripping his hand firmly. “ Good to see you, again.” “ And you, Luis,” Kemp responded, as they walked across the tarmac to the Customs Reception. “ You had a good journey ?” the Director asked when they had left the building and settled down in a car. “ Fine, fine.” He grimaced. “ But I’m old fashioned, I guess. I like to keep my feet on the ground.” They smiled. Kemp could see that Luis, though he was dapper and immaculate as always, was agitated. His dark, thin features kept twitching, a sure sign. “ Have the others arrived ?” “ They are all here, at my office.” “ It will be good to see them all again.” “Yes ; were our respective countries as friendly as we are things would be much better to-day.” The conversation lagged and they finished the journey in silence. There was much back-slapping and hand-shaking when they entered Ramirez’ office. Kemp reserved a special greeting for Chou Yi-Hsin. Her father had been his close friend. “ I have called you all here for a very good reason,” Ramirez began, after they were comfortably settled in their chairs.
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ALMOST OBSOLETE 79 “ Gerald sent me some interesting statistics applicable to the United Kingdom and asked me to find out if similar trends exist in the large population areas. If they exist — and they do — he asked me to give the problem to the computers at W.H.O. H.Q.” He cleared his throat and gestured to the reports in front of them. “ These give the bare figures. Before we discuss the significance of the computers’ findings, I’d like each of you — excepting Gerald — to give a brief refresher on the background.” “ Chou,” he invited the Chinese girl, “ will you start off ?” “ China is a Communist country. Consequently, the Government keeps a very firm finger on the pulse of all that happens.” She had only a slight accent to her clear voice and the men found her pleasant to listen to as well as to look at. “ The leaders are in something akin to panic. The popula- tion is not rising as fast as it did. That is good. An unwieldy population becomes hard to feed and clothe. Therefore, it becomes disgruntled and rebellious.” She paused to dab at her nose with a delicately perfumed lace handkerchief. All her gestures were graceful. Chou continued, “ But less boys are now being bom and this worries the Reds. A bonus is paid to every family which produces a boy. Also, much genetic tampering had been encouraged in an attempt to adjust the adverse ratio of girls to boys.” Her slender fingers tightened on the lace as she said, “ The geneticists failed, Professor Wang now labours in the fields.” A bit more brightly, she added, “ Arrangements are in hand to smuggle him out of China.” “ A last point, life expectancy for Chinese males is beginning to level off.” “ Thank you, Chou.” Ramirez looked round the group. He nodded at Benario. “ Robert, you next, please.” The American was a burly six-footer, balding, quietly dressed, with a voice well used to public speaking. “ Mind if I smoke, Chou ?” The girl inclined her sleek head by way of permission and Benario fit up. Of the others, only Igor smoked, but never indoors.
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80 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ Like China, the American population rise is not so marked,” he said, drawing contentedly on his cigarette. “ The tide of teen-age weddings has ebbed finally. More people are marrying after the age of twenty. In the twenty to twenty-four age group, more girls than normal are being born and after twenty-four an increase of female babies has been noted. Lastly male sterility figures are rising, but female figures still hold the balance.” He tapped ash off his cigarette as Luiz thanked him and nominated Igor to speak next. The Russian was built like a benign grizzly bear and had a voice to match. “ I have very little to add to Robert’s state- ment except that we never had so many child-unions as his country !” His eyes twinkled as the others, the American included, laughed at his unmalicious dig. “ One thing, though,” He was serious again. “ There was a rumoured parthenogenetic birth in Moscow. A sailor’s wife was pregnant despite his eleven month absence. She attested it was a virgin birth. A girl.” Click. The picture in Kemp’s mind suddenly assumed a definite shape. He could hardly contain himself. But he cooled down, withdrew his attention from the conversation and thought hard. Luis spoke up. “ I included that factor in the data processed for the computors.” He turned to Benario. “ Didn’t you hear about the Ellerman girl, Robert ?” The American shook his head. Luis pressed his tongue between his lips. “ I did hear it privately, so please say nothing. The examining doctor was certain that the girl had never experienced intercourse. She had a girl.” Livingstone N’Boya just beat Vishmu Dhumal into the conversation. “ I’ve come across a number of stories concerning virgin birth. Africa is, in some parts, still as dark as it was in the time of the man who gave me my Christian name. These stories filter in by a thousand devious routes. Who is to check them ? It is difficult.” His beautiful teeth flashed a white smile in his almost black face. Dhumal, the Indian, corroborated his African colleague’s remarks. His left eye ticked continually as he commented.
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ALMOST OBSOLETE 81 “ I, too, have heard such tales, Livingstone.” He twirled a pinkie ring as he talked and the diamond sharded with hard colour. “ But it is virtually impossible to substantiate such cases, to separate the fact from the fantasy. Medical statistical work in India, and in Africa, too, I suppose, is thankless grind.” He raised his hands, off white palms upward. “ The number of births we never hear of is legion. We can make intelligent guesses, that is all.” His coffee coloured handsome face assumed a resigned expression. Chou, who had been toying with the piece of provocative lace, stretched her lissome figure. “ In China, some things can be hidden from the supposedly all-seeing eyes. Virgin birth could be one of them. We Chinese are a philosophical people and we still value the sanctity of family above all else.” Luis pressed a button and Kemp, who had been only half- listening, returned from his thoughts, now crystallized. The picture frightened him. The Director’s secretary came in with drinks and some newspapers. Kemp looked at his steaming tea with the large slice of bright lemon and glanced up to find Luis smiling widely. He tapped a finger at his brow. “ You see, Gerald, 1 remembered !” Then Gerald’s eyes were on the girl as she departed. “ Look,” he said, “ do you know why she swings her hips ?” Seven pairs of eyes followed the sway. The girl interposed over her shoulder, “ Because the men like it, Mr. Kemp.” Kemp shook his head, grinning. “ No ; it is because your thigh bones join your hip bones at an angle. You can’t help it.” She shrugged pleasantly. “ Perhaps Nature had men in mind when she designed us,” she observed with gentle satire. “ What interpretation do you place on the computer results, Luis ?” Chou enquired. Kemp was endeavouring to translate a newspaper headline. His command of the language was enough to tell him that the Commonwealth Jupiter Expedition had found no alien life on the Jovian moons. He smiled grimly.
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82 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ I must confess I’m at a loss, Chou. The computers say that all the trends we have discussed will continue. I can only state the obvious ; something is happening and it seems to favour women.” Igor rumbled, “ More information is probably needed before anything definite emerges. I feel sure of this, though. Quite a few generations will pass before things reach their culmination, whatever that may be.” He fingered his pipe thoughtfully. “ I think I know what is happening,” Kemp told them, holding up a newspaper. “ What does the headline say, Luis ?” “ No life on Jovian Moons.” “ Right,” Kemp laid the paper down on the table. “ For many years we have speculated about alien life on the other planets, both of our Solar System and of other stars. And all the time the aliens are here among us.” “ What does that mean ?” Luis’ voice was perhaps sharper than he meant it to be. The others listened intently. “ I think we are witnessing the beginning of the bifurcation of the human race. Men are in the process of becoming aliens on their own planet. Mother Nature feels it is time for a change.” “ It seems incredible !” Livingstone exclaimed, a slight strain in his voice. “ Does it ? Women have always been the more dominant species, longer lived, more durable, less prone to killer diseases and worries. Now she is coming into her own. Some time in the future, a woman will not need a man. She will be even more capable of looking after herself and will conceive her own children by virgin birth. She won’t have to swing her hips any more. Mankind is obsolete, on this planet at least.” Chou commented quietly, “ Everything does seem to point that way.” Dhumal, who had risen and was standing behind his chair, suggested, “ Shouldn’t we tell our governments ?” Kemp’s reply was faintly derisive. “ Why ? Governments can do many things, but they can’t stop evolution.” “ If your idea is true, it means the end of the race of man.” Kemp looked keenly at Igor. It had grown quite dim in the room. A sprinkling of stars could be seen twinkling through the windows, with tropical softness.
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ALMOST OBSOLETE 83 “ No !” He surprised himself with the force of his denial. He stood up, walked to the window. “ The race of man is only beginning, my friend. Nature would not spend a million years shaping an intellect only to throw it away carelessly.” He gestured to the night. “ So far, man has found no life in our tiny system ; I do not believe he will find any. But out there, a myriad suns burn and life abounds. Man’s destiny is among the stars.” He smiled as a thought crossed his mind. “ Anyway, hasn’t the woman always stayed at home while the man roved ? Only, he has the Universe at his disposal, now.” Chou surveyed the six aliens. Slowly, they returned her smile. Donald Malcolm THE LITERARY LINE-IP As forecast in the August/September issue (No. 86) next month sees the first instalment of the new Philip K. Dick novel “ Time Out Of Joint,” although there is little that can be told about the plot in advance except that central character Ragle Gumm earns his living solving a daily newspaper puzzle entitled “ Where will the Little Green Man be next ?” There are at least four possibilities as to how the plot will eventually mature — so, no advance information. We are trying out an interesting feature in conjunction with this story. It will probably have three consecutive cover paintings and each one will be an elaboration of the newspaper puzzle background. Backing the serial will be our usual strong line-up of short stories — “ Breaking Point ” by Colin Kapp being highly recommended, plus Robert Silverberg, new author Michael Barrington and a fine story from Alan Barclay. Story ratings for No. 86 were : 1 . The Patient Dark (Part Two) 2. The Birdcage - - 3. Beyond Realism - 4. Pseudopath - 5. Complex - Kenneth Bulmer Peter Hawkins E. R. James Philip E. High Donald Malcolm
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84 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION George Longdon is back — with another off-trail idea. Just how much of an attachment could one creature develop for another if they were alien to each other in origin > And if the feeling was not mutual — what then ? I LIKE YOU by George Longdon Fragmented metal peeled away from the hole the meteorite had made and the spherical ship spun from the angular force of the impact. A round door began to open, and an object moved itself from inside the ruined vessel, flattening to escape the biting pull of the tenuous atmosphere through which the sphere flashed. As the slipstream became too powerful, the object detached itself, falling separately towards banks of clouds below. As it fell its shape changed until it was a large, parachute-shaped disc descending at comfortable speed. Cloud enveloped it, thinned slowly, and was left overhead. Water glistened below, a wide river that came through a smoke-hazed town and emptied into the sea several miles away. The parachute expanded again, slowing its descent, and glided to the water surface, collapsing and drawing together into a compact, elongated pear. It reached the river bed, resting
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I LIKE YOU 85 there while it slowly regained its natural form. A head appeared, with a single eye. The being’s mind reached out, exploring its surroundings. It touched the minds of dark, lowly things which swam nearby, primitive and only dimly conscious. But farther away was a clear, keen mind that stood like a burning candle against a background of shadow. The mimos felt new hope. Temporarily it withdrew its circle of awareness, touching again the creatures living in the medium it now occupied, noting how they moved. Then it slowly changed form. Its head grew pointed, fins appeared. Its skin glinted with scales, and purposeless gills began to open and close. It lifted from the river bed, swimming easily towards the distant bank, where the bright mind stood like a beacon. As it came nearer the surface sun touched pink and gold to its spotted sides. Terry reeled in his line and put his flies away. It had been a rotten day, he thought. A hard morning’s work at the garage, with old Bentley grumbling his head off, the tiff with Jean so that she had not come with him fishing, the broken contact arm spring in his motor cycle, delaying him an hour, then no catch. He scattered the remains of the picnic that was to have been for two into the water, then walked from the riverside trees back to his motor cycle, stowing his tackle. He was about to kick the machine into life when he realised he had forgotten his cap, thrown off while fishing. Grumbling to himself, he turned back towards the river. A man stood under the trees, half in dappled shadow. Terry gave him a cursory glance, decided he looked a bit unprepos- sessing, and bent to search amid the long grass. His cap was half under a low bush. He put it on, straightening, and found himself looking into the man’s face. Seen closely, the features were oddly repulsive — soft and flabby, not sharply formed, or having character. Yet under the softness lay the sketchy outline of a face Terry knew. His own. An unpleasant feeling ran through him. “ I — I don’t think I know you,” he said uneasily. The face was like a poorly formed wax copy. Two eyes equally as grey as his own stared at Terry, yet lacked the motivating spark of intelligence. They could have been glass eyes — mobile, yet not possessing vision. The other frowned, mimicing him. “ You will know me,” a voice said. “ I like you.”
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S6 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Terry instinctively withdrew. The lips had moved, but the ■words had not seemed to fit the motion. The voice, too, was oddly elemental, as yet without the resonance of men. Terry could only stare at him. “ You — like me ?” “ Very much. We always — ah, stick to those we like. I shall be with you a lot — always.” Terry blinked his eyes and shook his head, wondering if the hot summer sun brightly reflected from the river had given him heat stroke. He screwed up his eyes tightly, but when he opened them the other was still there. In the brief interval some of the soft formlessness had disappeared. The face was less like a melted wax copy ; more like Terry himself. The other looked at the sky, moving as if tracing the path of something across the heavens. “ I shall be staying with you now. I don’t mind, though. I think I shall be happy. I like you.” Terry experienced overwhelming exasperation. “ The hell you do ! And what if I don’t like you ?” “ That will make no difference. We are used to that. But I expect you will like me in the end. You will grow accustomed to me.” “ I’m damned if I will !” Terry declared. He jammed his cap tightly on his head and stretched to his full six feet two. Work at the garage had given him burly arms. “ I’m going home ! If I find you following me, you’ll get this !” He stuck a brown, hard clenched fist under the other’s nose, then swung on a heel and started off back across the riverside field. Damn silly trick, he thought. Some joker who looked like him talking like that ! When he reached the gate the other had caught up with him and got over it behind him. Terry turned, furious. “ Didn’t I say b off !” The other did not reply, but seemed to be studying the motor cycle with interest. Terry caught his shoulder, spinning him round. “ This is the last time of telling ! Clear out !” The other shook his head. “ You do not understand. We never — clear out, as you put it. I like you. We shall be very happy together. I shall like being with you.” “ You won’t have the chance !” Terry said fiercely, and hit.
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I LIKE YOU 87 His fist sank into the face so like his own, emerged, leaving a depression. Within seconds the depression was gone, re- forming into an image of himself. “ You will become accustomed to the idea,” the smooth, voice said. Terry hit him again, with a sobbing gasp, shocked, half terrified by the strangeness of it. The face came back again, and seemed to have gained character. He could almost have been staring into a mirror, Terry thought. He drew back towards his machine, fingers instinctively curling around the twistgrip. He wondered if he could start, jump on, and leave this caricature of himself behind. “ No.” The other moved towards the machine. “ You won’t succeed. I don’t want you to leave me. I like you. When you go, I’m coming too.” Terry felt cornered. He showed his teeth. “ What if I won’t take you ?” “ You will.” Fingers closed on his arm, tightening. For a! terrible moment Terry thought that the grip was going to become so intense that it crushed muscle and bone. The hand was transferred to the pillion. “ I’m sure this machine is intended to carry two. If not, we’ll both walk.” Terry felt that he had had enough. Clear thought was becoming impossible. Actions had developed the inevitability of a nightmare. “ It carries two,” he said dully. “ Good. We will go home.” The impossibility of it all struck Terry again, stirring him. “ Do you think it’s as easy as that ? What will Mrs. Spears, my landlady, say ?” He took a deep breath. “ I’ll tell the police ! I won’t have you around — ” “ You’ll have me.” The hand came momentarily on Terry’s arm, but did not close. “ I like you, and I’m sure you’ll like to do things for me, later. And look at me, carefully.” Terry looked, and his heart grew cold. The soft waxiness, had gone. The image was complete. His own rather tightly compressed lips, the twitch near one corner of his mouth, the eyes, the dark, unevenly matched brows. All were there. A tiny scratch near one temple, got untangling his line. Terry’s gaze slowly travelled downwards. The open-necked shirt, the brown tanned throat. The flannels, his best because Jean had been coming too. Everything.
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88 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION The eyes like his own met his gaze. “ Y ou see ? It would be difficult. Usually, you will find it best that we be happy together. I like you, and we should get on well.” Terry realised that he was panting. “ Who — what — are you ?” There was a moment’s silence. “ I— I am you, now. That is how we like it to be.” “ But — but before you were me ?” “ Oh. A fish. Yes, a fish with spots.” A trout, Terry thought. He licked his lips. “ Before that ?” “ A Chevian. They are tough. And Chevians are good space travellers.” Terry felt he was losing touch with reality. “ B-before that ?” “ A Juttisti, I believe. I almost forget. Why, yes. It was a Juttisti, I recall.” Terry caught at a straw. “ You change — often — ” “ Only when I don’t like things. I like you. And I know I shall keep on liking you. I rather liked the Juttisti. But he killed, and was to be drowned as punishment. The Chevian was only temporary, because I had a Chevian ship. But now I’m happy. I can see you won’t ever kill anyone.” “ No,” Terry said flatly, “ I don’t suppose I shall.” He started the motor cycle and got on. Smiling secretly to itself, the mimos occupied the pillion, its feet on the opened rests. In the next twenty four hours Terry began to adjust to the situation, while not accepting it. Mrs. Spears had a vacant room, and marvelled at the likeness when Terry explained that the newcomer was a cousin. Before breakfast on the Sunday, Terry’s bedroom door opened and the replica of himself, now differently clad, came in. “ I’d hoped it was a nightmare,” Terry said nastily. The mimos sat on the bed. “ I noticed all your kind don’t dress the same. I’ve modified my appearance to avoid attracting attention.” Terry studied him. He appeared to be a normal, healthy and somewhat hefty young man. In short, himself. Terry put on his shirt. “ And how long does this continue ?” he asked. “ Until you die.” The mimos smiled. “ I like you as I said. , We usually stick, when we like anybody.”
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I LIKE YOU 89 Terry fixed his tie with deadly calm. “You mean you’ll be hanging around all my life ?” “ I expect so.” Terry compressed his lips, remembering it was Sunday. “ You’ve overlooked I’d murder you first !” “ Not a bit,” the mimos disagreed evenly. “ The people we like and stick to often try. But they seldom succeed.” Terry grunted. They’d see ! Now, he already hated this copy of himself more than anything in the world. In some strange way it seemed to suck away his joy in life, as if a great sponge unable to experience things for itself, and therefore latching on to some other being. “ You’re a parasite,” he said thinly. The mimos did not try to deny it. “ Millions of years elapsed before you reached your present state of evolution. It’s the same with other normal creatures in the galaxies. We’ve by- passed all that. And we’ve some measure of free choice, which you’ve not. We’re what we want to be. And I like you, and the things you do. They’re interesting.” The door was open. Terry swung round, caught his visitor, heaved him by sheer muscle through the doorway, and slammed and locked the door. “ At least I can get rid of you sometimes !” he yelled through the crack. Feeling better, he continued to dress. He had his back to the door, and was brushing his hair before the mirror, when a queer rustling noise began. It made his skin creep. He put down the brush, steeling his nerves, and turned slowly. A large mound of mixed appearance was forming just inside the door. A thin stream of the stuff was coming through the quarter inch space between door and floor, mounting up into the mound. Before his eyes it took on form, was tall as a man, but shapeless, then shaped like a melting wax figure. Then was again complete. “ We usually stick with folk we like,” the mimos said. Terry glared at it, panting. “ Don’t you see you’ll drive me round the bend — ” “ Not quite. Not so long as I like you. You’ll have your time off, when you’re doing things which aren’t very interesting. Working, perhaps. If I was with you always it would arouse comment.”
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90 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ I see,” Terry breathed, momentarily defeated. It seemed impossible to say more. He finished dressing, went down, and ate his breakfast, not speaking, and not looking at the thing that shadowed him. The mimos seemed to enjoy bacon and egg. “ I’m cultivating your tastes,” it said amicably as it finished. “ I like you.” Terry flashed it a glance of burning hatred. As time passed Terry found that the mimos had its own system for getting what it wanted. While he worked it lazed, read, and visited the cinema. He refused to give it money, but found that it had touched old Bentley for a week’s wages in advance. Apparently Bentley had not even suspected the impersonation. The middle of the week Terry was working on a blocked petrol pump when a golden head came into view over the vehicle bonnet. He almost dropped a spanner. “ Jean !” She smiled, showing neat white teeth. “ Thought it a bit silly to go on quarrelling, Terry. I don’t really hate fishing enough to stay away because you think it goes with a picnic.” He looked sheepish. “ I was the one who was wrong, Jean. I simply hadn’t thought about it that way.” She touched his arm fleetingly and the smile he loved to see spread over her oval face. “ It was as much my fault as yours.” She paused. “ I believe yob mentioned a ride down to the shore some day soon.” Terry could not remember it, but smiled. “ Of course. This evening ?” She nodded. “ Now I’ll be off before Mr. Bentley sees me. About seven at the usual place ?” Waving, she vanished. Terry felt elated, and made a mental note that fishing and picnics must henceforth be separate items. The remainder of the afternoon passed rapidly. As he worked he planned the evening. Jean should have no cause for complaint. When he emerged from the garage a familiar form fell into step besides him. With a shock of blended hatred and despair Terry realised he had almost forgotten. “ Who was the young female human ?” the mimos asked, interested.
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I LIKE YOU 91 Terry set his teeth and jaw dangerously. “ That’s my business !” “ It’ll be mine, too.” “ I’ll be damned first !” Terry snapped, and halted. His fingers closed on the other’s arm. For an instant it was as if he gripped something very flabby, then an iron-like strength came into being under his fingers. “ The Chevians were twice as strong as humans,” the mimos stated quietly. “ But I killed two, once — unarmed.” Terry loosed his grip. “ That’s as it may be. But one thing we’ve got to get straight. When I go out with Jean you stay away ! Got that ?” The face like his own smiled. “ Actually, I don’t think I shall stay away. It should be interesting to come. And I like you. We stick.” “ But the motor cycle will only carry two !” Terry snapped. “ Me, driving, and a pillion !” “ Then we’ll go on a bus, or take a taxi.” Frustrated, Terry let it pass. Something more than mere talk would soon become necessary, he decided. He ate, changed, and slipped down to the shed where he kept the machine. A 600 c.c. twin, it was without both sparking plugs. He was searching for spares, and not finding them, when the shed door creaked. “ Looking for these ?” The mimos leaned against the door, holding up two plugs and a spare pair in cartons. Terry swore, decided to fight it out, realised he would lose, and conceded victory. “ I’ll have old Bentley’s spare hire-and-drive car.” The evening was one of the most miserable that Terry could recall. Jean was dressed for pillion riding when he picked her up, and gave him an icy look when he introduced his cousin. They rode in almost silence, Jean sitting alone in the back. Terry tried to open conversation with her, but the attempt fell on stony ground. The three of them walked along the sands side by side. Evening wind carried in the rising tide and gulls followed them, mewing. “ How nice it all is,” the mimos offered as they sat on a stone jetty. “ I like Terry.”
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92 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Terry observed that in some way his unwanted companion had made himself the centre of the three, as they sat down. He was now smiling sweetly at Jean, ignoring Terry. “ He’s one of the best, is Terry. I like being with him.” Jean flashed Terry a glance that wounded him. “ He gets by.” Her gaze settled on the mimos. “ I never knew he had a cousin. How long shall you be around ?” “ Oh, a long time. I’d not thought of going.” Terry ground his nails into the stone. “ My cousin doesn’t have to work for his living,” he said with bitter sarcasm. The mimos nodded. “ That’s true. That’s why I stay with Terry.” The conversation lapsed. Terry flung pebbles into the sea. An evening less like that he had planned would be impossible. He wondered if he could take Jean into his confidence. The time did not seem opportune. The mimos would deny it, and he’d make himself look ridiculous. Jean would think him crazy, supposing he merely wanted to discredit his cousin. The homeward ride was uncomfortable because of its silence. Jean got out, bid them both a cool goodnight, and was gone before Terry could stop her. He jabbed the car engine into life. “ A very interesting young female human,” the mimos said pensively. “ I like your taste, Terry. We shall be seeing a lot of her, l expect.” Terry did not trust himself to answer. As the days passed, Terry knew that something must be done. A visit to the police would probably result in kind officers phoning for an ambulance while he was restrained for his own good. Telling Jean outright would be too much of a shock for her. He might have written, trying to explain, but he was not much good at letters. The mimos hung about, attached to him as a parasite is attached to its host, though by invisible ties. From the way it acted, Terry guessed it could understand, at least partially, what were his unvoiced thoughts. But when it was away, perhaps lolling at an afternoon performance in the local cinema, while he worked, he had the impression that its mental contact with him was tenuous. He was adjusting the carburettor setting on his motor cycle, during a slack period, when the idea came. Could even the
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I LIKE YOU 93 mimos survive if plastered at 90 miles per hour against the concrete and steel fencing above the cliffs, and was from there catapulted into the sea ? When the idea came Terry knew that he must keep it secret. He must not even think of the plan while the mimos was near. And if he were not to give himself away, the attempt must be made soon. He studied a road map. He had rode along the cliffs so often each section came back. There was a long stretch culminating in a slow climb towards the cliffs, then a sudden turn, with gorse on his left but the sea ahead. His only chance would be the gorse. Bruises in plenty, perhaps broken limbs, were better than a lifetime with his unwanted hanger-on. He wondered if he should try to explain to Jean, but decided against it. He had no more compunction about wiping out the mimos than swatting a mosquito that sat on his neck and bit him, Terry thought. Familiar steps joined his when he turned the corner away from the garage. Terry ignored the other’s greeting, and they walked side by side the short distance to their lodgings. Terry refused to let his mind dwell on his plan. “ I’m going sea fishing tonight,” he said when he had finished Mrs. Spears’ excellent tea. His appetite had almost returned. “ You had better not come.” The mimos spread jam thickly. “ On the contrary, of course I shall come. Though I may say no one I liked ever got away from me. The Juttisti were singularly fast runners.” Terry watched the slice disappear. “ So that’s one reason why you always keep so close. You’re afraid I’ll give you the slip.” “ Not really.” The mimos wiped his mouth. “ It’s practically impossible to do that. I’ve never heard of it happening. There were nearly a thousand of us with Juttisti we liked, and none ever got away.” Like a caught fish, Terry thought. When hook and line were good the fish did not get away. He got out his tackle, prepared sea lines, stowed fresh bait, and stalked off to fetch his motor cycle from the garage. The mimos followed him, apparently quite content. As he opened the garage door Bentley had left unfastened Terry turned, infuriated. “ Don’t you get tired of being hated V' he demanded.
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94 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION The mimos smiled. “ Not a bit. I rather like it. The people and beings we like usually hate us. It’s natural. The last Chevian would have clawed out his own throat with his own front toes if that would have harmed me.” “ Then I’d have wished him luck !” Terry snorted. He got out the twin, strapped his rod parallel with the carrier, and started the engine. The mimos slid on to the pillion, folding his toes half round the rests. Terry pulled his goggles down and took the bike out into the road, and through the town. As the built-up area slid behind, he gave the engine plenty of throttle. It helped to relieve his tension, left less chance that some thought would betray him, and would make the final burst of speed less obvious. The motor cycle ran well, exhaust note thundering back at him when he sped past isolated houses. On a few short, straight stretches he took her up to 70, the wind a tornado in his ears. He knew she would do 110 easily, with two up, but had his own neck to think of. Two shattered corpses in the would be no fun. He threaded through a village. The road opened, and began to rise. There was a dip, a bend, and then the long, slow climb towards the coast. A mile or more of it, he thought. On nearly full throttle the machine was touching 90, and he let her hum at that. The roadsides were varicoloured streaks. He could see the gorse ahead, to his left ; could see the rails like the bars of a great potato slicer. He opened the throttle to its stop, rose, and jumped. The impact was terrible. Gorse ripped through leather, coat, shirt and flesh. Going head over heels, he saw the twin strike the rails, the mimos still clinging to the pillion. The rails seemed to cut machine and pillion passenger into three sections, which blended in horrible confusion as they shot from view. Then Terry landed again, less violently, and came to rest amid thick gorse. He got up, shaking, astonished that he could move. A thumb was disjointed. Otherwise he seemed virtually unharmed. Walking unsteadily to the crumpled rails, he looked over. Far below heavy seas boiled over jagged rocks. Both machine and passenger had vanished.
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I LIKE YOU 95 It was late when he got back to town. He tidied himself as best he could, and went to call on Jean. He felt happier than he had since the mimos had appeared, blighting his life. He saw the look in Jean’s eyes. “ Only a bit of a skid,” he said. “ I— I think I was angry with myself, and things, because it was so long since I last saw you.” Her eyes softened. “ I was a bit sick of that cousin hanging round, Terry.” “ So was I.” He massaged his hand. It was not the first time he had a minor dislocation, or jerked it back in for himself, swearing. “ There’s something I want to talk to you about. And something I want to ask you. I’ve been thinking of it a long time, but never got round to it.” He finished lamely, but she smiled. The look encouraged him. “ Suppose we go in and talk, Jean ? Your Mum won’t mind.” They went into the room Jean called the lounge. Terry felt bruised all over, but happy. “ I didn’t want my cousin hanging around like that,” he explained. “ But he was a bit difficult to get rid of. He’s got no other ties, you know. And he liked me.” She nodded, not really listening. “ What was it you wanted to talk over with me, Terry ?” He sat down heavily near her. “ You know I’ve been at old Bentley’s a good many years, Jean. Though I say it myself, he thinks a lot of me. From what he’s said, I think I could pull off a partnership.” She smiled, nodding, her eyes pellucid. “ That would be wonderful, Terry. Go on.” He took her hand, stroking it, thinking how soft and smooth the skin was. Gorse had left red weals across his palm. “ There’d be plenty for two to live on, Jean, if we were fairly careful . . .” He paused, licking his lips, aware that a dim, curious rustling had begun. The sound made his skin creep. Hair rose on his neck, primitive fear blending with overwhelming hate. A mass of curiously viscid substance was gathering inside the door, mounting upwards as it flowed through the narrow space between door and carpet. Jean was sitting so that she could not see it, and he froze, not wanting her to look. “ Go on, Terry, dear,” she murmured. He sought for words, found none, and watched the mass pile up and up. It was tall as a man. A dribbling, waxy image. Then a clear-cut figure, complete in every detail. Unharmed.
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96 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ Hello.” Its voice was smooth. Jean turned half in her seat, hand flying to her mouth. Her face paled. “ I — I thought you had gone away !” “ No.” The mimos stepped forward into the room. “ We never go away. Why should I ? I like Terry.” Terry’s nails bit into his palms. His limbs shook, and fury hammered in his mind. “ I like staying with Terry,” the mimos said. “ He plays tricks, but I’ll be watching for them. I like you lots, don’t 1 Terry ?” The mimos smiled. Oh ! you bloody devil ! Terry thought. Back, unharmed, after all that. Indestructible as living protoplasm that could be cut in two, then re-form. “ Yes, I like Terry,” the smooth voice said. Terry put his head on his scarred hands and wept. George Longdon Handbook of Science Fiction and Fantasy One of the most outstanding reference works for collectors of the genre has just been completed by Australian Donald H. Tuck of Tasmania. In two foolscap volumes comprising 396 pages he has covered 2,300 book and pocket book publications from 500 collections, 350 anthologies and over 1000 novels, cross-indexed by title and author, as well as a complete listing of all magazine issues, American and British, with potted biographies of authors and even listings of known pseudonyms. The Handbook is one of the most monumental contributions to s-f and fantasy collecting yet compiled and contains answers to almost every query you are ever likely to have. It is obtainable in Great Britain, price 50/- from : G. Ken Chapman Ltd., 2 Ross Road, London, SE25 or Fantast (Medway) Ltd., 75 Norfolk Street, Wisbech, Cambs. In USA, $6.76 from : Mr. Howard deVore, 4705 Weddel Street, Dearborn, Michigan. In Australia, £3 (Aust) from Blue Centaur Book Co. Box 4940, GPO Sydney, N.S.W. or Donald H. Tuck, 1 39 East Risden Road, Lindisfarne, Tasmania. If you collect books, pocketbooks or magazines this magnificent index is a must. The price is well worth the knowledge it contains.
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ABERRATION 97 Hunting for a needle in a haystack would be a relatively simple job in comparison to the search new authors Robinson and Sones have set for their central characters — the cause of a statistical shift in consumer commodities. They handle it well, too. Dr. William Marks, head of Cybernetics, straightened his back wearily, ruefully running a hand through his wavy black hair. “ It’s no use, Karl, our checks can’t be wrong. There is a significant deviation once more.” “ It is unbelievable,” muttered his colleague, Karl Mitlenger, “ we have applied corrections to compensate for the last deviation. I can’t see how another one could have recurred so soon ?” “ But we couldn’t find the source of the last divergence,” reminded Marks. “ That in itself was peculiar. An occasional large deviation may occur at some time but two so soon, no ! Our applied checks are indisputable.” Mitlenger pondered for a time. “ Hmm, well, we can do nothing more. It is beyond us. You had better make a personal report.” Marks nodded and made to leave the cubicle. Threading his way through the main laboratory, his thoughts preoccupied, he ABERRATION Robinson and J, A. Sones i
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98 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION scarcely heard the casual greetings from other workers. The laboratory building was one of several which were the above- surface appendages of BEDO-IY, the gigantic cybernetic unit whose function was to control the city. The laboratory was, in fact, a computer centre by which BEDO-IV could receive and give information for the smooth operation of social and economic life. Marks was a member of the executive staff of the centre and as his whole life had been schooled for the service of BEDO-IV he had come to rely upon the infallibility of the great machine. He was uneasy — that the machine could have developed a fault was manifestly impossible. Marks soon reached the administration sector of the computer building. Entering an elevator he was carried up to one of the higher levels. The chief executive’s office was reached by means of an adjoining corridor. Marks tapped on the door, which opened in response to a soft contralto voice. Crossing the office he approached the secretary’s desk. “ Is the chief available ?” asked Marks rather shortly. “ I should like to see him urgently.” The secretary pressed one of a bank of studs lining her desk. “ Yes, he is here to-day. Just one moment please, Dr. Marks, while I see if he will receive you.” She spoke softly into the intercom and then looked up. “ Yes, Dr. Forbes can see you at once. You can go straight in.” Marks thanked the girl, briefly acknowledging the warm smile she was giving him, for he was one of the most eligible bachelors in the city and executive scientists ranked highly in social life. Dr. Douglas Forbes was a small, dapper man with a carefully trimmed white beard and sharp eyes. A shrewd brain and capable administerial ability had earned him the respect of his staff. He motioned Marks to a seat and eyed him quiz- zically ; people did not make requests to see him personally without good reason. “ Good afternoon, chief,” said Marks, “ I have some important results which I think you should see.” He placed the results of his calculations on the desk. “ This graph will give you the over-all picture. This divergence of curves is in error according to our checks.”
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ABERRATION 99 Marks waited impatiently while Forbes scanned the graph and read the accompanying mathematical summary. Even- tually his chief leaned back in his chair and their eyes met. Forbes fingered his beard thoughtfully. “ You are sure of this ?” Marks inclined his head. “Yes, Mitlenger and I have meticulously cross-checked each other. There is no possibility of a mistake.” “ This will certainly require a special meeting. My secretary will inform you when this can be arranged. In the meantime I should like you to confer with Nolan on this. We shall need more data than you have here, particularly on the extent of the deviation. I presume Mitlenger is working on this now ?” Marks indicated assent. “ Yes, I left him doing it but it will take some little time. If Nolan’s team can help, perhaps the job can be finished quickly.” “ Good, attend to it immediately. I will have someone take over your other work.” The chief activated the intercom and began to issue the necessary orders. Presently he turned again to Marks. “ Have you anything more to add ?” Marks shook his head. “ No, chief.” “ Very well — I shall expect a report by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.” Marks left the inner sanctum, in better spirits than when he entered, acknowledging the respectful but friendly farewell of the pretty secretary on the way through the outer office. Cyril Nolan, divisional head of statistics, a lean tall man of fair complexion, had been notified that Marks was on the way over to his office. He rose to greet Marks affably. “ Hello, Bill, the Old Man tells me you have a problem ?” “ A curious one too,” replied Marks, “ Look at this graph.” Together the pair leaned over the report which Marks spread out on a nearby laboratory table. Marks wasted no time in acquainting Nolan of the nature of the problem. “ As you can see, these curves of certain consumer goods are diverging. Instead of reaching optimum production as predicted they are insufficient for estimated demand. In fact, the insufficiency stimulated an enhanced demand which has set up secondary disturbances in the price structure. We ignored a similar deviation which occurred a year or so ago, and applied the necessary corrections. But this recurrence is too
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100 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION much. I think that a more thorough check is required. This is where we need your help.” Nolan puffed his cheeks in thought, “I suppose an error . . .” He saw Marks’ expression and continued quickly, “ damn, this will mean working all night !” “ Mitlenger has produced a guide for you as revealed by our own checks,” said Marks, handing Nolan a slim sheaf of papers. Nolan glanced over them. “ This is a help,” he agreed, then his voice became more decisive. “ I will get the boys working on this right away. You will have to excuse me, if this is to be finished by tomorrow.” Marks nodded, wordlessly, events were out of his hands now. Actually he felt somewhat relieved, for Nolan was a good man at his job but his mind clouded again at the thought of the problem. The present work would be mere fact- gathering, tomorrow’s meeting would entail the much more difficult task of forming interpretations. However, nothing more could be accomplished here, and he took leave of Nolan, who was already issuing instructions to his staff over the intercom. As Marks journeyed to his flat he pondered upon the implications of the deviation. Stepping upon the continuous strip-roads, which were the primary form of locomotion for pedestrians, he made his way to the faster strips. Soon he was being whisked along at a -steady fifteen miles an hour. The strips were almost deserted at this time of night, with a few people homeward bound from the stereos. How could the deviation have occurred ? The applied corrections should have settled the matter. Ten million people depended upon the smooth functioning of the city and there was scant room for errors in the finely adjusted economy. Marks allowed his thoughts to dwell momentarily upon the city’s evolution. Following the holocast of the last inter-continental atomic war the population of the world was decimated and the survivors seriously maimed. Starvation and strife were rampant in a stricken world and much of it fell into the semi- barbarism of sparring factions. A few sectors were untouched, however, by the twin fingers of destruction— radio-active pollution and social disruption. Confronted with stark reality, from these rose a people with the fierce resolve that such a catastrophe should not happen again. Law and order were
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ABERRATION 101 established, slowly and painfully. The population size had to he confined within the limits of comfortable subsistence and its germ-plasm cleansed of deleterious mutations. Arable land had to be conserved at all costs and mankind began to build skyward and into the depths of the earth. The cities came into existence, foci of activity, composed of elegant sky-scrapers whose roots burrowed deeply. The development of giant electronic brains enabled civil administration to be greatly simplified and rationalized, and the city communities stabilized between eight and fifteen million persons. • Powerful impetus was given to the neglected studies of socio- economic planning and the realization of dynamic equilibrium between production and consumption by a society forced to live within a confined space. Gradually the individual communities found a mutual interdependence and the whole globe became covered with a network of more or less autono- mous cities. The forging link was the deliberately nurtured stimulus of appreciation of scientific achievement. Arriving early at the computer centre the following morning, Marks found a message that Nolan was asking to see him. Marks settled a few routine enquiries from his technical staff and then went straight to Nolan’s room. Nolan was looking dishevelled but he replied cheerfully to Marks’ customary greeting. “ Hello, Bill, Well, we finished it. Here’s all the data you want. It’s only cost me a night’s sleep ! While you read it I’m going for a clean-up.” Marks leafed through the contents of the bulky folder, seating himself on a spare chair by Nolan’s desk. Presently Nolan returned, carrying a tray with sandwiches and coffee. He began to eat, remaining silent until Marks had finished reading. Marks accepted an offered cup of coffee, his brow furrowed. “ There is evidence ofponcerted action in the city. I wouldn’t have considered it possible for a monopolistic combine to form.” Nolan grinned. “ What is\ monopolistic combine ?” “ An archaic expression I will admit ! It implies that a group of people unite for the purpose of furthering their own ends at the expense of the community. Heavens, we haven’t seen anything like this for over three hundred years. This could be serious, leading to strife and unrest.”
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102 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ We’re not going to tolerate such anti-social behaviour,” stated Nolan. “ I’m against it on general principles and, more so, if it introduces a disruptive element into the city.” “ Undoubtedly it would, if allowed to continue,” affirmed Marks, “ but it will not — it cannot ! Have you circulated copies of your findings among the exec ?” “ Yes, I have. And, Bill, the Old Man has called a meeting for this afternoon.” Marks and Nolan continued to discuss the implications of a monopolistic tendency in the economy of the city for a con- siderable time. At length Marks took leave, to follow up a few ideas of his own and to study the results of Nolan’s labours. II Marks was feeling a little disgruntled as the time for the executive meeting drew nigh, for his own ideas had come to naught. The murmur of voices grew louder as he approached the staff room, where most of the executive members had already gathered. Marks walked over to join Nolan in conversation with two of their colleagues. Dr. Forbes was not long in arriving and the room quietened as the group dispersed around the centrally placed table. Forbes looked expectantly around the assembly. “ Each of you have had an opportunity to read the report given by Marks and Nolan. I should like to have your comments upon it later but I think that in the first instance Nolan should give us a short account of the situation.” Nolan rose slowly to his feet. “ We are confronted with the curious situation of concerted action by a group of entre- preneurs,” he began. “ You all know that the city allows considerable freedom within the general framework. The social structure is biased towards decentralisation. But just recently we have found a reversal of the bias of such a magnitude that it cannot be ignored. To overcome the corrections which we applied some twelve months ago, requires information only available to ourselves.” “ How do you know that ?” interjected a voice. “ Largely because the information is coded. Essentially it requires the solution of complex econometric matrices. A human mind cannot cope with such equations. In fact, it requires the combined efforts of both Marks and my own staff
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ABERRATION 103 to codify the material. No one person handles the lot. Even so, the only people who are trained in this work are those employed at the computer centres. At this point I should mention that I have recommended a security check on this aspect.” Forbes indicated a desire to speak. “ Allow me to interrupt here. I may say I have circulated the other centres, requesting immediate action in this matter. I have queried if any of the cybernetic coders have left without good reason. Summers of security has also been notified.” “ My belief is that the solution will not be found there,” continued Nolan, “ because of the inherent complexity of the problem. To take advantage of the information — however obtained — and to put it into practice, an organisation larger than is legal would be needed. I wish to offer an explanation later, but as it will doubtless appear fantastic, I would rather wait until the rest of you have spoken. A more likely idea may be put forward.” Scarcely had Nolan resumed his seat than Kelvin Brighton, of the mathematical division, indicated a desire to speak. “ I should like to ask if it is possible for BEDO-IV to be in error ?” “ No,” replied Marks, “ that contingency has been specifically checked.” “ I should like to ask Nolan if it would be possible for a genius to comprehend the econometric equations ?” This question came from Hedda Girvan of sociology. Nolan smiled. “ Yes, it is possible. But only if the genius was passed over by the psychological tests. This, I presume, is not . . .” “ I don’t think the idea is impossible,” broke in Girvan, sensing that the possibility was being bounced back into her lap. “ Well, if not impossible — then improbable. But there is another objection. The necessary information is not available to any one person. Even if he was capable of using the information, I cannot see how he could obtain it in the usual way ?” “ Could there have been an error in the original data ? In the data given before the deviations were noticed ?” queried Brighton.
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104 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ No,” answered Marks. “ That type of error is allowed for by the structure of BEDO-IV. Really, Kelvin, there is not the smallest possibility of error.” Nobody responded as Forbes looked expectantly around the table. “ Any further comments ? No ? Then, Nolan, will you give your explanation ?” “ Well,” said Nolan hesitantly, “ I believe that we have in our midst a telepath. After all,” he went on, to the accom- paniment of surprised murmurs and half-voiced objections, “ occasionally we do have the individual who exhibits weak telepathic powers. Usually he ends up in the entertainment world. But here, I suggest, we have something different — more serious perhaps. A high grade telepath. He probably knows from this moment that we suspect him.” Nolan sat down to the silent stares of the executive. The suggestion was indeed fantastic, yet it did fit the facts. A person who could not understand the econometric and social equations, who probably could not even draw the correct conclusions from the equations but who could read the conclusions from the mind of trained operators in the centres. How otherwise could the information have leaked for all orthodox explanations were ruled out ? Forbes let the meeting cogitate in silence for a short period before speaking. “ This is an astounding explanation but I gather that no one can offer an alternative ? I thought not. In which case we will act upon Nolan’s hypothesis. Have you formed any sugges- tions for detecting the telepath ?” This last question was directed at Nolan. “ I have a few ideas,” admitted Nolan. “ I think we should proceed by eliminating all those who cannot be the telepath. The first twenty years or so of any individual is spent in schooling and we can assume that this can offer little scope for the sort of economic activity which we have encountered. We can compute the minimum time required for the appearance of the first deviation. Sum the two and we have his minimum age. His upper age limit can be found by estimation of the time required to establish an economic group large enough to cause the deviation.” “ The computer should be able to do this with the facts at our disposal,” commented Marks.
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ABERRATION 105 “ One moment,” objected Brighton, “ how can you say the telepath will start his activities immediately upon leaving school ?” “ For reasons I will explain, Kelvin. He will be a congenital telepath, I think, in which case his emotional upbringing must have been hectic to say the least. He probably appeared unusually bright and cheeky, and suffered for it. You know what children are ! They would quickly sense an abnormality and take it out on him, he would feel the full force of childish hate and jealousy. Almost certainly he would learn to hide his power in time. But I should like to ask Hedda her opinions on this ?” Girvan quickly complied. “ Yes, indeed. This line of reasoning can be extended. May I ?” Nolan nodded. “ Our imaginary telepath would soon develop a sense of superiority. He would know all the answers but he couldn’t use them without inspiring jealousy. In all probability he would become paranoiac, contemptuous of ordinary people and antagonistic to authority and seeking power as a form of compensation.” Nolan resumed at this point. “ I had assumed the latter, the quest for power finding an outlet in economic activity. This is an accepted form of exercising power over one’s fellow men, within limits, of course. With his telepathic ability, he would be successful but sooner or later he would come into conflict with the general conduct of the city as laid down by our computer.” “ I wonder if we can attempt a direct approach ?” suggested Alan Scott from economics. “ Manipulate the market and bring into the open either the group or your telepath. This group could be broken easily.” “ I can see I haven’t made myself clear,” stated Nolan. “ There isn’t just a closely knit group, or if there is, it isn’t obvious. But this is something we can follow up easily, once we have uncovered a lead. Manipulation of the market is of no use since the telepath would be aware of any schemes as soon as we make them.” “ I have two suggestions,” spoke up Girvan. “ All permanently hospitalized persons and all long-married couples can be excluded. I don’t think the telepath could tolerate a permanent union with the opposite sex. He couldn’t tolerate the unvoiced home-truths or criticisms of his partner. By the
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106 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION way, everyone is referring to the telepath as a him but it could be a her !” Forbes half-smiled at Girvan. “ That is something to keep in mind certainly. It is apparent that the most likely means of unearthing the telepath lies in further refinements of Nolan’s elimination methods. Marks and Nolan will continue in charge of the investigations and the rest of you can submit your suggestions direct to them. The meeting is adjourned until tomorrow when I hope the size of the problem can be more accurately judged. As I see it, it is a matter of whether the criminal is one of a few hundred or a few hundred thousand people.” The executive conference dissolved with each of the members departing upon their various tasks. Marks and Nolan worked steadily into the night, conferring with other members of the executive when specialised information was required, and shaping the necessary programming of BEDO-IV. They were almost exhausted before the job was complete enough to leave in the hands of technicians. The following afternoon found the executive re-forming to discuss the second report drafted by Marks and Nolan. At Dr. Forbes’ invitation, Marks opened the meeting. “ There is no need to give details of our analysis since you have these in front of you but I feel we should consider the inferences of our results. BEDO-IV was able to pinpoint the first small deviations as occurring some ten years ago. I’m afraid estimation of the interval necessary to cause the devia- tions couldn’t be very accurate — anything from eight to twelve years. This puts the age range of the telepath from thirty- eight to forty-two years.” “ I don’t think we shall be far out in such an assumption,” inserted Girvan rather primly, “ I can’t understand how psychology overlooked his abnormal behaviour !” “ There are about one thousand permanently hospitalised people in this age-range who can be excluded. Also, another thousand have disabilities of one sort or another which cause them to be under regular surveillance. We did run an analysis of new entrants to the creches but a surprisingly large number of children start brilliantly but fall rapidly to average. Too many for this phenomenon to be of value. ’ “ That’s not too unusual,” pointed out Girvan. “ I should like to ask if the I.Q. rating has been taken into account ?”
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ABERRATION 107 “ Yes, it has,” replied Marks. “ He is obviously not a moron but beyond that I would not like to go. There was one possibility which we had a slight hope would provide a useful lead. The telepath may have changed his identity, although I will admit there is no compelling reason why he should. However, it soon became clear that the possibility is barren. Nevertheless, people do just vanish and all these instances are investigated as a matter of routine by security. The number is very small, and most are suicides, and the remainder are usually found when an attempt is made to re-establish themselves in society. “ At our request, security has re-investigated all those cases which fall into the critical age limits. The results are in process of examination but those to hand are negative. We think that the telepath would be aware of the futility of a change of identity. This is probably a hint that the telepath is a person of no mean ability. By the same token, of course, the telepath is unlikely to change his identity or behave peculiarly now that we know he exists. To come to the crux of the matter, after all eliminations, we concluded that the telepath is one of about a hundred thousand people. The names of these are being tabulated.” “ Great Scott !” ejaculated Brighton, “ how can we cope with that number ?” Forbes looked grimly at him. “ That is why we are here ! Although I must say it is a problem. If there are no further suggestions I am going to move that we ask for help from another city. The range of perception by the telepath cannot be unlimited and if another city can formulate a plan to catch him, at least it will not be immediately passed on.” “ So long as they do not tell us !” observed Nolan, “ I must say I’m in favour. A fresh mind could probably find the answer.” “ They certainly cannot refuse to help us,” commented Lloyd Weyman of genetics, who hitherto had not participated in the discussion. “ If the telepath settles in another city, he will continue his activities and cause disturbances there. Should we not initiate steps to prevent people from leaving the city ?” “ Summers has taken care of that,” declared Forbes. “ No overt measures have been taken but anyone who leaves is closely investigated. But possibly the telepath is aware of this
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108 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION and thus will not court attention by leaving. This is an example of what we are up against,” he added in a tone of exasperation. “ However, I have given thought to the problem, and the man I suggest is Professor Einbeck of KUTO- III. He is a friend of mine for one thing and, secondly, he has interested himself in certain aspects of telepathy.” The mention of Professor Joseph Einbeck as the man to approach brought forth general comments of agreement. Professor Einbeck, the biometrician, had visited BEDO-IV on several occasions and was familiar with the city. Many of the executive had personally met the Professor while his distin- guished reputation was known by the remainder. “ Very well,” announced Forbes, “ I will contact him as soon as possible and also send him copies of our reports. It is to be hoped that Einbeck will find the solution if one is to be found.” HI A month passed before Dr. Forbes received a call from Einbeck over the video. Forbes greeted his old friend with real pleasure. “ Hello, Professor, how are things with you ?” “ I keep in good health, thanks, Douglas. With regard to your problem. We have a plan to catch your supposed telepath, which we will communicate through the usual inter-computer network so as to forestall his mind reading. All we ask is that you follow our instructions swiftly and without question. You will be required to build a nurflber of encephalographic devices. These will incorporate a number of new features, based upon the Kablet-Gortz wave-forms which are known to be associated with telepathic ability.” Forbes nodded his head, his eyes intent upon the Professor’s. “ Yes, we’ll do that. But I thought . . .” The Professor chuckled. “ Yes, I know. You think these waves are too feeble, eh ? But I put the problem to Gortz himself and now we can amplify the reactions beautifully. They are trustworthy and reliable enough for this job. I want you to set aside the facilities for the manufacture of the machines automatically from here and also inform your security chief that he must accept our instructions.” Forbes nodded again. “ Certainly, Professor, we shall follow your bidding. I will make the necessary orders immediately.”
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ABERRATION 109 The two men continued to chat about personal topics for several moments until Professor Einbeck signified that he wished to end the conversation. As the video darkened, Forbes began to take action. A small section of BEDO-IV was cleared for direct programming by KUTO-III and a number of machine shops in various parts of the city were made available. After a short delay these were soon pulsating with activity. The complexity of the new encephalographic units prevented rapid construction but eventually they began to trickle off the production lines for final testing. lyleanwhile events were moving in other parts of the city. Steven Summers, head of security, did not relish the idea of taking orders from another city. Besides, in his opinion, the suggestion of a telepath picking information from the minds of the computer staff was pure balderdash, made only to protect their own people. However, when his usually competent investigators failed to uncover any questionable activity and his own technical advisers told him that a leakage was practically impossible, he began to wonder.— His mind boggled at the implications of the problem. That someone could know of all the tricks which his very subtle department could employ was anathema to him. He despaired of appre- hending the telepath but nevertheless he grudgingly, but energetically, arranged to co-operate with KUTO-III. The first instructions were not long in arriving. All security officers and police between the ages of thirty-eight and forty- two were temporarily suspended from duty and extra staff were enrolled from outside these age limits. A complete ban on travel from the city was applied. Guards began to appear at the entrance of the city precincts. An unnatural hush descended upon both the giant inter-city railway termini and the spacious airports. Sleek trains and giant aircruisers alike were stilled. People within the initial age range, who happened to be journeying outside the city, were recalled and failure to comply meant immediate and prolonged interrogation. A wave of unrest and apprehension swept the city but this had been foreseen and was soon checked by skilful psychological propaganda. News of the existence of the telepath was widely featured in the news magazines and for a short period, depen- ding upon the social stratum, he was the major topic of conversation. A number of excesses occurred, particularly among the least thoughtful groups, where certain “ queer ”
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110 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION unfortunates had a rough time. Normal activity, however, soon reasserted itself as public awareness was channelled into other avenues. The “ mind-reader ” machines, as these had been dubbed by the press, were housed in the larger community halls of the city. The wave-analysers were connected to rows of small cubicles the walls of which acted as receivers. “ I don’t know how they work,” grunted one electronic engineer when questioned by a reporter. “ They appear to work on an entirely new principle. We just fit the parts together to the directions as blue-printed. They seem to be remarkably efficient though.” With this explanation the press had to be satisfied, although it provoked some sarcastic editorial comment. Security chief Summers, a stoutish man of indefinable middle age and dynamic temperament, glared dumbfounded at the latest set of instructions. “What’s this? In batches? What’s the use of that ? All we have to do is to pass the lot through the mind-readers one by one. These damn scientists never think of anything straightforward !” “ Undoubtedly it is for some purpose,” ventured his aide. “ I know that,” snorted Summers. “ Well, here are your orders. Let’s have some action !” The new instructions were dessimated throughout the lower echelons of security. That section of the population, in which the telepath was thought to be, was going to be subjected to discreet sampling. Instead of passing the suspects through the “ mind-readers ” in a systematic order, a different procedure was outlined. The method of picking up suspects was simple. All persons between the ages of thirty-eight and forty-two were required to wear white arm bands. Refusal to co-operate in this respect, or the removal of the bands, invited instant suspicion and interrogation. The police had power to enter all private and public buildings, offices, workshops and factories, the stereo-cinemas and community centres and the homes and sky-scraper blocks of flatlets without warning and at any time. The patrol members simply selected any person who was wearing a white arm band and requested him or her to attend the next day for an encephalographic reading. Fresh feelings of unrest and discontent began to appear in the city. The unexpected visits of the police meant that some citizens were passed through the
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ABERRATION 111 cubicles time and time again. Protestations of inconvenience or inability were of no avail, for the machines were dotted all over the city by now, within reach of everyone. The process of checking through the city’s population lengthened into months with the subtly applied influence of the social psychologists effectively minimising the irritating delays of the examinations. Mitlenger looked querulously across their small laboratory towards Marks who was lounging in his chair. “ Seriously, Bill, how much longer do you think this is to continue ?” “ Why ask me ? countered Bill. “ You know as much as I do. We have to follow instructions as much as everyone.” Mitlenger shrugged. “ Maybe, but we are not getting anywhere ! I know of people who have been through the ’graphs on at least six occasions. Why, I have been examined twice myself !” “That’s not so puzzling,” speculated Marks. “The functions of the ’graphs may be cumulative. It may be necessary for a person to be examined many times before a conclusion can be reached. Or perhaps each individual is given a different test on each occasion ?” “ It is possible,” said Mitlenger thoughtfully, “ that the readers may first take a preliminary graph of ‘ normal ’ reaction, followed by the real thing after an interval.” At that moment the faint sounds of commotion reached their ears. It was very unusual for a disturbance to ruffle the sedate atmosphere of the computer centre. Both men crowded into the passage and hastened towards the noise. They encountered a young woman technician, one of Cyril Nolan’s assistants. Recognising Marks, she hesitated, then turned to face them. “ Dr. Marks ?” she inquired — Marks nodded — and she went on. “ It is your friend, Dr. Nolan, he has been found unconscious from a large dose of insomnia tablets.” Marks was amazed, this was quite unlike Nolan, in fact he never knew that he had need of drugs. “ Are you sure ?” The girl looked flustered. “ Yes, I . . Mitlenger pushed past Marks. “ Let us see for ourselves, perhaps we can be of help.” Marks nodded assent, although he knew this to be unlikely. He followed in Mitlenger’s wake, his mind still puzzling for a
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112 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION possible motive for Nolan’s action. In the main entrance they met Girvan and Weyman coming in from the street. “ What has happened ?” demanded Marks, “ is it true that Cyril is ill ?” “ Yes,” replied Girvan, “ at least, we assume so. He has been taken to hospital.” “ What is this all about ?” inquired Weyman, “ Is it possible that Nolan is the wanted ’path ?” “ Out of the question,” snapped Marks. “ You should know better than that !” Weyman’s face reddened but before he could speak Girvan stepped in. “ Of course we know better. Nolan’s lapse can’t have anything to do with his being connected with the telepath. More likely he was overworking because of the pressure which we are undergoing at the moment. All we know is that Cyril burst into the first-aid room and swallowed a half-a-bottle of quick-acting soporific before anyone could stop him. He will be out for hours.” Girvan’s voice reflected concern, for Nolan was popular among the staff. “ Maybe you are right,” conceded Marks a little dolefully, “ but I have been in constant touch with him and I haven’t noticed signs of tension.” “ We can’t do anything now, anyway,” observed Girvan. “ We must be patient until Cyril recovers consciousness.” “ Come, Bill, we still have work to do,” voiced Mitlenger, turning to leave. Marks wondered if Girvan was right. Her explanation of overwork was plausible but he was dubious. He resolved to visit Nolan at the first afforded opportunity. Forbes glanced sharply at the security man standing respectfully before his desk. “You say you wish to interview Nolan? To what purpose?” Lawson, the security man, appeared slightly uncomfortable, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “ Yes, sir, we are investigating every curious incident in this case. Normally, we would have questioned Dr. Nolan before now but, as he is one of your personal assistants, Mr. Summers said that I should contact you first.” “ Mmmh — yes. I admit that I find this business of Nolan disquieting. Dammit man, you are not suggesting that Nolan is involved, are you ?”
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ABERRATION 113 Lawson cleared his throat apologetically. “ Well, sir, I do not know what to think. We feel sure on one point. His action is at complete variance with our information on this psycho-type. Dr. Nolan would be reluctant to take soporifics, and certainly never an overdose. I can assure you of this, for I am attached to our psycho department, and I checked the assessments of Nolan’s psycho-type as soon as I received the assignment.” “ I concur with you there — I would have said the same,” frowned Forbes, “ but there is always room for error. Frankly I am curious. I should like to handle this myself.” “ With due respect, sir, I think it would be wise if I could accompany you.” The two men eyed each other levelly for a long moment, Forbes somewhat regally and Lawson firm with purpose. Forbes’ frown deepened. “ Is that really . . . huh, I suppose it is necessary in the circumstances. This is a special case — and, in some ways, a perplexing case.” Forbes leaned back in his chair. “ Tell me, are you familiar with the problem ?” “ Yes sir. I have been given the basic outline. I may say that the task appears to be a difficult one to tackle, if not unsolvable,” “ That was, indeed, our initial conclusion but Professor Einbeck appears confident,” declared Forbes, as he reached out to press one of the studs on the intercom. Almost immediately the contralto voice of his secretary issued from the tiny speaker. “ Yes, sir ?” “Ah, Miss Loren, what appointments are there for this morning ? Are there any which cannot be postponed ?” “ No, sir. There are several but they all appear to be either routine staff reports or V.I.P. visitations.” “ Right — defer the reports until tomorrow and have the visitations received by the deputy executor with suitable apologies. Also contact the Haldane Memorial Hospital to ascertain if it is convenient for me to visit Dr. Nolan in say, about sixty minutes — and notify my pilot to have the gyro available. I expect to be away for the remainder of the morning. If an important item should arise you can contact me at the hospital. Has the latest directive from KUTO-III arrived?” “ Yes, sir, just arrived. I was waiting until you were free before bringing it to you.” “ Good, please let me have it at once.”
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114 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Within the interval of a few minutes, Forbes’ svelte young secretary entered the study, carrying the communique from KUTO-III. She paused politely before Forbes and placed the small sheaf of papers on the desk. “ Thank you. Miss Loren. If you will excuse me, Lawson, I should like to glance through this. Find yourself a seat.” Dismissing Lawson temporarily from his mind, Forbes concentrated upon the contents of the communique. Eventually he looked up. “ Flave you seen to-day’s communique ?” At Lawson’s shake of head, Forbes continued. “ There is a complete change of plan. The randomised apprehension of suspects has been dropped and the names of certain individuals are now listed. No reasons are given but the implication is clear. Einbeck has evidently narrowed the field immensely. But has this change anything to do with Nolan’s behaviour or is it merely a coincidence ? Have your people notified KUTO- III of Nolan’s action ?” “ I’m not certain on that point. My own guess would be that they have not.” “ It is certain that speculation will not get us far. If you are ready, we can visit Nolan immediately.” The men left the study, Forbes leading the way in his usual brisk manner, walking quickly through the outer office and along the corridor to the elevator. With a subdued whine, which rapidly increased in pitch to beyond the audible, the elevator whisked the couple to the gyro port nestling on the top of the computer skyscraper. They were met by Forbes’ pilot, who, with a respectful salutation, led the way to the small hover-plane. The landing platform was drenched in brilliant sunlight but at such a high altitude a perpetual fresh breeze kept the platform at a pleasant temperature. IV The gyro rose gracefully from the platform, soaring upwards in a wide arc, as the pilot steadily increased speed. Forbes lapsed into an uncommunicative mood during the journey and Lawson contented himself by watching the unfolding pano- ramic view of the city. He had little opportunity for gyro flights in the normal course of events, even as a security officer, for the method of transportation was restricted to essential
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ABERRATION 115 services or was the prerogative of high ranking personages. Whereas the computer centres were erected at the hub of the city, the hospitals were sited among the few remaining open spaces in the suburbs. The gyro port of the Haldane Memorial Hospital was humming with activity. Gyros were arriving and departing in a steady procession of bright silvery machines. Forbes’ gyro was forced to join the incoming queue but the ‘ permission to land ’ signal was soon received. The pilot set down the little plane with scarcely a jar and, scrambling from the cockpit, he held open the cabin door for Forbes and Lawson. A multitude of signs directed them to the reception desk and Lawson’s authority soon negotiated the inevitable bureaucracy which encompasses a large hospital. Presently they were ushered into a small private ward. Nolan was lounging in bed, propped up by a stack of pillows, reading a book. Further volumes were untidily piled upon a bedside cabinet. Seeing Forbes and Lawson he laid the book to one side. “ Morning, Nolan, how are you to-day ?” began Forbes, striding to the bedside. “ This is Alan Lawson of Security.” “ Good morning, chief. I’m fine now, thanks. Hello Lawson — glad to meet you.” Lawson reciprocated the greeting with a friendly grin. “ I’m glad to meet you. I can see you are indulging in some light reading !” Nolan emitted a low chuckle. “ I’m now able to do some catching up on reading I have been putting off for years ! Some econometric analysis which is, I think, off the beam— those lambda functions of Spellman’s do not look so stable as he . . .” “ Yes, yes, we can discuss that later,” broke in Forbes a little testily. “ I will come to the point — why did you behave as you did ? Why did you break into the first-aid room ?” Nolan looked serious. “ May I ask you a question first ? How close are we to identifying the telepath ?” Forbes grunted. “ Well, it would appear that something is brewing. Einbeck is still running tests but the instructions have changed — only recently, as a matter of fact. A group of individuals are now being questioned instead of samples. “ So not much progress has been made ?” Forbes cast a sharp glance at the man on the bed, for Nolan sounded alarmed.
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116 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ To be precise, no. But can we be precise ? The only valid argument I have heard is that of Hedda Girvan’s. She has suggested that, while the telepath may behave rationally as long as he thinks he is invincible, he will go to pieces once he is identified. To me that appears a circular argument. He will not break down unless he knows we have him, yet we are waiting for that very event to find him !” “ Hedda’s argument is only partly true. Do you know if everyone in the city has been through an encephalographic analysis ?” further questioned Nolan. “Well ... I do not know. Keeping a check upon that aspect would be a sizeable task. We have no equipment for that. Do you know if your department has, Lawson ?” Lawson only shook his head. Nolan laughed. “ I bet Einbeck’s KUTO-III has !” Forbes was puzzled. “ Look here, you haven’t answered my question about yourself.” “ I thought I had discovered the method used by Einbeck either to detect the telepath or to bring him into the open — probably the first. But I also realized that the telepath might pick the method from my mind, and, if this occurred, the method would fail. I was distraught for a moment, I can tell you. I tried reciting math formulae and tables but my mind subconsciously wanted to return to the implications of Einbeck’s plan — and that would be fatal ! Then I realized — of course, a sleeping draught would do the trick. Knock myself out for a while, especially so I would be removed from the centre. The telepath would doubtless be scanning the minds of the computer staff periodically but he would be too busy for random excursions elsewhere.” “ Yes, that aspect had occurred to me,” commented Forbes. “ I wondered if his faculty could be directional.” “ There was the chance that he could have mind-read me out here, in the hospital, but what else could I do ? I couldn’t stop at the centre very well. That would have been fatal !” “ You certainly had us worried.” “ Yes, I suppose so, and I’m sorry for that. I couldn’t discuss it with anyone, nor could I state the purpose of taking the drug without giving too much away. Presumably a mere flicker of a thought would have been enough for the telepath. Hermaphroditus ! Those after effects, the hallucinations — my mind will never be the same again !”
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ABERRATION 117 “ What is this method you spoke of?” persisted Forbes. “ Well, the sampling was supposed to be at random. Correct ? And the method of finding people to be analysed was designed expressly for that purpose ? We were told that the ’graph units were capable of detecting the telepath from the wave-forms of the mind. It would seem logical, therefore, looking at the matter from the point of view of the telepath, that he must not allow himself to be picked up for analysis. It could be assumed that he would be aware of any patrol in his vicinity which was likely to trap him. If he was astute he would dodge the patrols for years, if not indefinitely. As I see it, that was our problem in the first instance. Then it occurred to me, suppose the analysis was a bluff ? Unless a telepath has been analysed before, how did Einbeck know what to look for ?” “ He would check for deviations from the norm.” “ Ah, but what a task. Each of us must deviate somewhat significantly in one or more wave-patterns. I grant you, of course the fact that many of these must be known to be innocuous or related to some other known aptitude. But, aside from that, the telepath wave-pattern may be terribly complex. No, it occurred to me that there is a simpler, more direct, explanation. It only requires time and the tabulation of results. The telepath would reveal himself by failure to be picked up by the patrols ! Anyone who did not, at one time or another, pass through the mind-readers would be behaving in a non-random manner. It is difficult to see how it could be other than the telepath.” “ I see,” breathed Forbes. “ If the telepath had realized that his non-appearance for analysis could be detected, he might have risked an appearance.” “ Or inveigled someone to take it for him,” agreed Nolan, “ risky as that would be. But I plumb for the theory that the provision of machines was partly window dressing and the real objective was to frighten the telepath into not allowing himself to be analysed.” “ I can see, now, how important it was that you should not communicate the method to the telepath. Most ingenious, most ingenious indeed.” Forbes emitted a low chuckle. “ I wonder if the telepath will ever know how simply he was outwitted ?” Nolan looked at his chief with a slow smile spreading across his features. Forbes caught the expression and his merriment
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118 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION ceased abruptly ; he glared at Nolan. “ Do you realise what you have done ? I shall not be able to return to the centre !” “ Yes, I regret that Ido. But what else could Ido? If I had attempted to fob you off with some likely story, I might not have been successful and you may have returned to alert the telepath. He may have sent his mind out here to scan what I know.” “ I say,” protested Lawson, “ I’m only a layman in these matters, but if I have grasped the situation, does this mean that neither of us can return to the city’s centre ? What am I to say to Summers ?” “ Tarnation man, yes !” barked Forbes, striding around the room in vexation. “ This whole business is a nightmare. It is now a race between Einbeck’s plan and the repercussions of our stay here which might incite the curiosity of the telepath !” He halted his pacing at the far side of the room and swung round to face the other two, throwing out an arm to emphasize his point. “ I have it — there’s going to be an epidemic of some contagious disease and the proclamation of a quarantine area — right now. I know some of the top people here. They can —in fact must — arrange something.” Without more ado, Forbes tugged open the door of the room and hastened down the passage outside. .V Events in the city moved to the inexorable climax. Abruptly the method of haphazard sweeps for likely suspects was halted and fresh, more orthodox, orders were received. Certain specified men and women were to be apprehended and given a thorough examination. Marks was working in his room when Girvan came to see him with the news. Marks looked up at her excited question. “ Have I seen the latest instructions ? Why, yes, we were being kept informed here. Why do you ask ?” “ Because of the change of plan. Instead of picking up anyone who happens to be around, a list of names of about two dozen people has been given out.” “ Ye-es ?” “ Well, if the telepath is included among them, as is likely, do you not see what may happen ? He propably thinks that
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ABERRATION 119 he is invincible, if I can comprehend his state of mind. Yet if he has been detected, can you imagine his reaction ? Anything, may happen.” Girvan looked at Marks expectantly. Marks pondered. “ What can happen ? Whoever it is will be caught eventually, even if he goes into hiding.” “ It isn’t so simple as that. I think that his mind may not accept the reality of his detection, and he may behave irrationally. In fact, his mind may give way.” “ That is possible, certainly, but what of it ?” “ We ought to inform Summers. If the ’path makes a violent effort to escape he may be killed out of hand. You know the police, shoot first — think later. Technically, it will be resisting arrest but actually it will be merely the action of a frightened man.” “ That’s all very well, Hedda. What do you want us to do ? We can’t be in a score of places at once ? The arrests are probably taking place at this moment.” “ I’ll tell you what we can do ! Summers can insist that the ’path be taken alive. Just consider the opportunity of studying a brain capable of telepathy on an advanced level ! The opportunity will not occur again.” “ Surely Einbeck’s people will have made allowance for that ?” “ Maybe, but maybe not. We can at least reinforce Einbeck’s instructions. This is just the sort of minor detail Summers may choose to ignore — besides we are on the spot. Come on, Bill, Summers will have to take notice if we are at his elbow.” Marks allowed himself to be hustled in the direction of Security headquarters. There was something in Girvan’s remarks. If the telepath became violent and particularly if he had a weapon, the police might act without remorse. In a tense situation their strong bond of mutual self-protection would assert itself. The opportunity of first-hand study of the wave-pattern of the telepath was too valuable to be thrown away during a few moments flurry. The outcome could mean that potential telepaths of the future could be detected and be guided to become useful members of the community. Summers did not appear pleased when he learnt of the purpose of Marks’ and Girvan’s intervention. He glowered at the two scientists and hunched himself over the desk. “ My men have instructions to take the telepath alive, if possible, and we shall do so,” he observed gruffly.
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120 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ Is this a special order,” demanded Girvan, “ or are you relying upon ordinary procedure ?” “ It is ordinary procedure,” said Summers stiffly. Marks foresaw that direct argument would only result in spreading mutual antagonism. Nudging Girvan to silence, he decided to attempt a more persuasive approach. “ But you can see why it is so important to have the ’path alive,” he told Summers. “ Imagine how invaluable such an individual would be for the prevention and detection of crime.” Summers actually contrived to appear less sullen as he gazed at Marks through narrowed eyes. “ Yes, you have a point there. But suppose he is armed ? I’m not risking my men unnecessarily.” “ I appreciate that you will make an effort to bring in the ’path alive,” continued Marks, “ but we are perturbed that the excessive use of a neurogun may affect his mind. There have been several unfortunate incidents in the past.” Summers spread his hands. “ I regret those too, but . . .” At this moment an aide hurried into the room, hesitated almost imperceptibly at the sight of Girvan and Marks, and walked over to Summers and spoke in low tones. Summers listened unmoving for a moment then his eyes flickered to the aide and back to gaze steadily at Marks. “ Your foreboding may have become fact,” he stated, placing both palms on the desk and rising ponderously. “ A report has just come in that a suspect has gone berserk and has managed to elude capture. But he won’t get far. Now you’re here, you may as well come over to the ops-room ” he added grudgingly. As Summers lumbered from the room, followed closely by the aide, Marks exchanged a quick glance with Girvan. He wondered if his arguments would induce the security chief to be more responsive. He doubted it, for although the man had drive, he lacked curiosity. The operations room was organised bedlam, not so much as regards noise but of flickering video tubes and the continued movements of the operators in congested space. The aide guided the group to a crowded panel of small video tubes surrounding a larger one at the level of the operator’s head. Summers took in the situation at one swift glance. “ What’s happening ? Have we no cameras out there ?” The operator lost a little of his ingrained calm and looked up.
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ABERRATION 121 “ Yes, sir — he has eluded us at present but we shall pick him up again soon. The sector is now ringed.” Summers grunted a reply and waved the man back to his work. Girvan faced Summers squarely. “ I think that we should go out there,” she stated bluntly, indicating the active scenes appearing in the videos. Summers looked at her. “ All right — you can,” he said, turning to the aide. “ Who is in charge of this operation ? “ Captain Lane, sir.” “ Issue instructions that Doctors Marks and Girvan are attached to him as advisers for this operation and have them conveyed to Lane at once.” Marks knew that Summers would not concede greater authority than this and both he and Girvan fell into step with the aide as Summers acknowledged their farewells. With security forces in complete control of the strip-roads, the journey to the scene where the telepath was first detected was soon accomplished. Girvan and Marks were soon shaking hands with Captain Lane. “ Glad to have you with us,” greeted Lane, “ the name’s Lane, by the way, Regan Lane. You’re Doctor Girvan and Doctor Marks ?” Marks nodded. “ Yes, this is Hedda Girvan and I’m Bill Marks. Has Summers issued orders to capture the ’path alive ?” Lane looked surprised. “ The usual orders, suspect to be taken alive if possible but if otherwise . . .” He shrugged his shoulders. “ The situation is more important than simply that,” answered Marks and he proceeded to detail to Lane the desirability of catching the telepath alive. “ I see,” said Lane, “ and I agree. But — I am not issuing special orders ! For this reason : the ’path may know of your arguments by now and I am not letting him think that my men will give him soft treatment. If he acts rough he’ll know what to expect. If he was to think he could get away with anything he’d be even more difficult to take.” “ We appreciate that,” acknowledged Girvan. “ In fact, we’ll be frank with you. I think that he will be difficult. He may go to the limit to evade capture — just to spite us ! What we suggest is that sleep gas is used, in spite of the general inconvenience which will be caused.”
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122 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION “ We can do that. But you know that the gas is not very effective in the open ?” exclaimed Lane. He turned to a fellow officer who was rigged out with the harness of a portable radio, and spoke briskly with him. Lane turned back to Girvan and Marks. “ That’s done. What I plan to do is this. When the ’path is sighted he is to be kept in sight and surrounded at a distance. We shall then move in with the gas. We should know soon of his whereabouts for the whole area is surrounded.” “ Are there any places in the area,” asked Marks, “ which he could damage or make his presence felt in a spectacular way ?” Lane dropped his head thought. “ There are,” he said slowly, “ not many such places — this is, after all, mainly a residential district.” “ We should remember,” interposed Girvan, “ that his reaction will be vicious and directed against the city as the focus of his frustration.” Lane whirled sharply to one of the group of security men standing in a clustered group around them. “ Give me that map of the district. Ah, this ought to reveal something.” He spread the map out before them. “ You examine this area — and here — and I will look here,” suggested Lane rapidly dividing the map into three sections with a rigid finger. Marks scrutinized the map critically but before he had made much progress Lane gave out an exclamation. “ Here is something — a control point for the strip-roads and first-level subways. If I were out to cause the maximum disturbance that’s what I would choose to disrupt. It’s merely a block away, too. Come on, we had better get over there.” “ Hold on,” objected Marks. “ The fact that you have chosen this place may cause the ’path to leave it alone ?” “ Not necessarily,” asserted Girvan, “ he is probably too occupied to worry about our thoughts.” “ Not only that,” followed up Lane, “ it is well within our cordon, and unguarded, since my men will not have reached it. Come on.” With Lane and the two scientists in the forefront, the group of men pounded along the sideway, jumping quickly onto the strip road moving in the direction of the communication centre. These were situated in a regular pattern throughout the city, their primary function being that of a check point in the event Continued on Page 124
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SCIENCE FICTION BOOKCLUB the best sf at bargain cost Selectors : Arthur C. Clarke, E. J. Carnell (Editor of ‘ New Worlds ’) and Dr. J. G. Porter. The finest SF published in Britain is issued in the well produced bargain priced, library bound, unabridged and uniform editions of Science Fiction Book Club. All the most famous in SF names appear in our lists, and just look at our current programme. See what you save on these permanent additions to your library. The Programme — November 1959 - September 1960 g§ DOUBLE STAR by Robert Heinleiit. A ‘ ham ’ actor plays his finest role and saves the Galaxy. November. 13s. 6d. for SFBC 5s. 6d. gj THE CLOCK OF TIME by Jack Finney. A brilliant collection of stories on the theme of Man v’s. Time. January. 12s. 6d. for SFBC 5s. (id. 9 NON-STOP by Brian Aldiss. A novel how man relapsed to tribalism en route between the stars. March. 15s. for SFBC 5s. 6d. THE DAY IT RAINED FOR EVER. Ray Bradbury at his brilliant, unrivalled. May. 16s. for SFBC 5s. 6d. 9 A CASE OF CONSCIENCE by James Blish. An unusual novel in which theology raises interesting problems for a space-age priest. July. 15s. for SFBC 5s. 6d. 9 BEST SF 3. Edmund Crispin’s outstanding anthology. September. 15s. for SFBC 5s. 6d. SAVING YOU £2 - 14s. - OcL ON 6 BOOKS HAST TITLES. Pick & Tick THE NAKED SUN P (Asimov) 5s. 6d. TIGER! TIGER! □ (Hester) 5d. 6d. BEST SF 2 Q (Crispin) 5s. 6d. WORLD OF CHANCE □ (Dick) 5s. 6d. OCCAM’S RAZOR □ (Duncan) 5d. 6s. Would you like a free copy of Sir George Thomson’s THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE? You can have one if — once yon are a member — yon introduce another member to SFBC. Details on joining. a™® JOIN SFBC HERE To: SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB, 38, WILLIAM IV STREET, LONDON, W.C.2. 084 Please enrol me as a member of the Science Fiction Book Club. I ■will purchase six bi- monthly choices, commencing with toe.... choice. After a year, if I wish to discontinue my membership, I can give one month’s notice. □ I will pay on receipt of each hook at 5s. 6d. (plus 9d. postage and packing). □ I enclose 5s. 6d. (plus 9d. postage and packing) for the first book and I will pay for subsequent books on receipt. □ I enclose 33s. (plus 4d. 6d. postage and packing) for six books. □ Please send me past titles I have ticked. Eire and overseas members must send remittance for 6 or >12 months. Signature Address (Mr., Mrs., Miss)
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124 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION of a local breakdown. Disorganisation of the first level subways particularly could easily lead to self-propagating chaos. The procession halted temporarily in front of the communi- cations centre. Lane dispatching one of the security men around each side of the block of buildings, before striding into the main entrance. Girvan and Marks crowded in with the others to discover Lane closely questioning a woman who was still clutching a pen in one hand and obviously startled at the sudden intrusion. Lane abruptly turned from her. “ There’s only one other entrance,” he said, and pointing to a security man, added, “ this woman will show you where it is. Detain anyone who tries to enter or leave.” The man acknowledged the order and trailed after the woman clerk. “ Now we’re here we may as well run through the whole building,” Lane further announced. The security men spread out and conducted the search with practised efficiency, working slowly upwards, storey by storey. Reaching the fourth floor Marks happened to look out of an open window. A sizable crowd of people had collected in the street below, forming into small groups and many staring up at the building. Marks bobbed back as a gentle murmur arose and a succession of faces began to upturn in his direction. He exchanged a wry smile with Girvan as they mounted the stairway to the next floor. They had partially ascended the stairs when a stifled yelp reached their ears. Quickening their pace they found a security man sprawled across the threshold of a room. Marks dropped onto one knee to examine the man. “ He has been struck on the side of the head,” he exclaimed. “ By the ’path most likely. He must have been lying in wait for the man to enter this room. Hey, come back — the man’s dangerous.” But Girvan paid no heed as she began to climb the flight of stairs to the next floor, taking the steps two at a time. Some- what incoherently she made an attempt to transmit to the telepath. We mean no harm — help us — you can he of great help to us. Her thoughts raced as she sought to quell the fears of the telepath. Pausing for breath at the head of the stairs she groaned inwardly as the superfluous thought welled up unbidden in her mind — whether she should think in words or in
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ABERRATION 125 images. Her mind was suddenly convulsed by a nauseating wave of hate. She retched involuntarily, slumping forward as the muscles of her legs went limp. “ Hedda what is the matter ?” cried Marks reaching her side. “ The ’path — he is here — he has reached me mentally,” winced Girvan, “ it is awful — loathsome . . She collapsed, prostrating herself on the floor, in a renewed fit of retching. “What’s happening?” demanded Lane, arriving on the scene. “ Hedda claims to be affected by the ’path,” gritted Marks. “ But I can’t feel anything !” challenged Lane. “ Maybe not, but neither can I,” shot back Marks. “ She must be sensitive to the ’path. An empathic reaction,” he went on as his scientific training asserted itself, “ due to the closeness of the ’path and his mental state.” Lane looked incredulously at Marks. “ What now ?” “ After the ’path,” replied Marks, seeing that Girvan was being expertly tended by an officer. “ How high is this building ?” Not very high. About seven storeys from what I can remember from the street.” The search continued more cautiously and more grimly than before for the men were riled at events. The seventh floor was reached with no sign of the telepath. Marks became conscious of a rising murmur from the crowd outside. He caught Lane by the arm. “ Will there be a fire escape apparatus on the roof ?” “ I don’t know.” Lane swore. “ There is sure to be an escape of some sort. Where is the door to the roof ?” A shout from one of Lane’s men sent them both racing to the end of a corridor, where a door opened out onto a flat roof. Lane sidled up to the door to peer round the edge. “ There he is,” he yelled, bounding out of the doorway and unholstering his stun-gun in a swift movement. Marks scrambled hastily after Lane to see a dishevelled man struggling with the fire ladder. The ladder was an extending type opening into a shallow arc for spanning to adjacent roofs. The telepath was frantically trying to extend the final section to reach the adjoining roof. “ Stop that,” commanded Lane. “ Come back here.” The telepath paused in his endeavours, balancing himself precariously as he faced Marks and Lane. His face was contorted and he gesticulated threateningly.
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126 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION Lane slowly approached the ladder, his gun aimed steadily on the telepath. “ I can’t shoot without him falling,” he muttered to Marks, and raising his voice he repeated his demand to the telepath. The man only snarled, shaking his fist and renewing his attempts to free the jammed mechanism. Marks reached the low parapet surrounding the roof and peeped over. The street below was packed with people watching the efforts of the man on the ladder. At that moment, the man slipped and the gasp of consternation from the crowd could almost be felt. The effect on the man was immediate. He cried out as if from physical pain and clutched his head. Reeling drunkenly he toppled from the fire ladder, his last utterance fading to a thin shriek. Marks looked down, feeling sickened, as far below a small white circle of pavement in the midst of the crowd slowly enlarged to reveal a crumpled figure at its centre. Roy Robinson and J. A. Sones 5k 5k * >k * * jfi 5k 5k 5k ■a * 5k « * * 5k 5k 5k 5k 5k 5k a 5k 5k 5k * * >«5 * * * Muck Jfs&ues For readers and collectors who are missing any of the previous issues we can still supply the following copies but stocks are very limited Nos. 57 ; 60 to 67 ; 70 to 80 II- post free NOVA PUBLICATIONS LTD Maelaren House, 13! Great Suffolk Street, London S.E.I * * * 5k * * >k * * * 5k * 5k a * a sk sk 5k # 5k 5k 5k 5k =k 5k 5k 5k 5k 5k Jk5k«5k5k5k)k5k)k5k5k5k>k)k5k!k5k5k5k5k5k5kjk)k5ka5k5k5k5k5k)k >k 5k 5k5k=k5k>ka5k
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POSTMORTEM 127 Dear Sir, Now that Dr. Rhine has corrected his mathematics and therefore is unable to get any further results, the frail, frail, prop upon which the whole lamentable mound of psi power stories has rested has failed at last, and such stories re-enter the world of fantasy which they should never have left. With this in mind I suggest you can solve what to call New Worlds companion in this manner : use New Worlds for science fiction proper, i.e. stories firmly based in proven, undisputed facts and accepted theories and extensions thereof and relegate (and relegate is the word) to a magazine called “ Fantasy ” all stories having no such foundation. These last must include stories of telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation (what faint shadow of a suspicion of a ghost of a shred of evidence has there ever been for this, in heavens name ?) and time travel, all stories which have as a further crime, oppor- tunity for displaying that bogus psychology of which there is a great deal too much in science fiction. Better still, of course, would be to abandon psi stories altogether and leave them to the boys’ papers where they belong (and started very likely). Cautionary tales in which the “ science ” is not the point, farce and humour would of course continue in New Worlds. So the policy I would like to see for New Worlds is : more Black Clouds and Preludes To Space and few More Than Humans. This is a machine age, an age of science, and humanity is utterly dependent upon its machines and science. To be ignorant of the basic principles of the physical world is to be ill-educated, while to affect indifferences to them is plain stupid. It is depressing to read stories in New Worlds which reveal the authors’ ignorance of the simple laws of motion (Newton’s Laws) and of physics while at the same time printing story after story on this utterly damnable and childish psi power subject, which have no demonstrable basis in fact. On the one hand we have Mr. Aldiss saying the melting of floating
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128 NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION ice raises the sea level and on the other Mr. White transporting himself to Mars by will power alone. My God, My God, My God ! What grounds has Mr. Maine for saying that the “ sugar coated scientific pill ” is outmoded ? You conducted an enquiry recently into the backgrounds of your readers and found a large number of them to be technical men. Why not have a poll to see if they would rather have a thoroughly up-to- date Prelude To Space incorporating the recently acquired knowledge and conclusions from the mass of work done in space medicine, etc., or yet another More Than Human ? Let us have done with childish wishful thinking on psi (wouldn’t it be nice if we could make a man we don’t like jump off a bridge just by thinking it ?) and get back to writing science fiction. T. Haller. Derby. SALES AND WANTS 3d per word. Minimum SI- Cash with order. The MELBOURNE SF CLUB invites ail local and visiting fans to attend their meetings. Write to the secretary, Mervyn Binns,* 4 Myrtle Grove, Preston, N.18, Victoria, Australia, for informa- tion. Phone JU 1348. ASTOUNDING OFFER! One dozen different complete stf novels plus sample USA maga- zine for only 7/ fid. post free. Also Lists. Send P.O. to: — Fantasy Book Centre, 10 Sicilian Avenue, London, W.C.l. AMERICAN AND BRITISH s-f magazines from 1927 to date, and books, for sale. List fid. (refunded). 33 Rathlyn Avenue, Blackpool, Lancs. BACK ISSUES New Worlds from No. 4; many other U.S.A. and British mags and pbs/books. Send your Wantlist for quotes, or 6d. stamp for Catalogues. F(M)L., 75, Norfolk Street, Wisbech. Cambs., England. IT’S A BINDcr you want to hold those copies of New W orlds. In blue book-cloth, gilt lettered on spine, holds six copies. Simple to add or remove copies. Price 10/6d each, post free. Nova Publications Ltd.
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Another famous ATo«« Jftafja&iue Another unusual short novel in the true modern fantasy tradition by one of our most popular authors appears in the current issue (No. 37) Castle Of Vengeance by KENNETH BULMER A broken window in an advertising agency is the beginning of a bizarre adventure which leads to the building of an ideal world — a world where modern commodities are inextricably mixed up with those from ancient Rome and other places of history. Plus new short stories by : E.C.TUBB, EDWARD MAGKIN & JOHN RACKHAM and The Wonders Of ##. O. Wells by Sam Moskowitz The third article in our outstanding t£ Studies In Science Fiction ’ ’ series dealing with out- standing writers in the genre. ORDER FROM YOUR NEWSAGENT NOVA PUBLICATIONS LTD Maclaren House, 131 Gt® Suffolk Street, London, S.E.1
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Nova’s Third Great Magazine Action Packed Adventure Stories in the current issue of ^4^ If* A BDUEDTURES Bi-Monthly »/- NOW ON SALE Contains % 2 Long Complete Stories by Popular Authors Forgotten Knowledge by CLIFFORD C. REED The Savage One by ROBERT PRESSLIE Plus an exciting short story and features SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES is already immensely popular and you may find it will be sold out at your news dealer DON'T MISS YOUR COPY NOVA PUBLICATIONS LTD Maclaren House, 131 Gt Suffolk Street, London, S.E.l