Sooner or later, you’ll have to make your choice. Those words still echoed in Brant’s mind as he trudged toward the brow of the hill, and the wind came down the great road to meet him. Sunbeam resented the termination of her holiday, so they moved even more slowly than the gradient demanded. But gradually the landscape widened around them, and the horizon moved farther out to sea, and the city began to look more and more like a toy built from colored bricks—a toy dominated by the ship that hung effortlessly, motionlessly above it.
For the first time Brant was able to see it as a whole, for it was now floating almost level with his eyes and he could encompass it at a glance. It was roughly cylindrical in shape, but ended in complex polyhedral structures whose functions were beyond conjecture. The great curving back bristled with equally mysterious bulges, flutings, and cupolas. There was power and purpose here, but nothing of beauty, and Brant looked upon it with distaste.
This brooding monster usurping the sky—if only it would vanish, like the clouds that drifted past its flanks!
But it would not disappear because he willed it; against the forces that were gathering now, Brant knew that he and his problems were of no importance. This was the pause when history held its breath, the hushed moment between the lightning flash and the advent of the first concussion. Soon the thunder would be rolling round the world; and soon there might be no world at all, while he and his people would be homeless exiles among the stars. That was the future he did not care to face—the future he feared more deeply than Trescon and his fellows, to whom the universe had been a plaything for five thousand years, could ever understand.
It seemed unfair that this should have happened in his time, after all these centuries of rest. But men cannot bargain with Fate, and choose peace or adventure as they wish. Adventure and Change had come to the world again, and he must make the best of it—as his ancestors had done when the age of space had opened, and their first frail ships had stormed the stars.
For the last time he saluted Shastar, then turned his back upon the sea. The sun was shining in his eyes, and the road before him seemed veiled with a bright, shimmering mist, so that it quivered like a mirage, or the track of the Moon upon troubled waters. For a moment Brant wondered if his eyes had been deceiving him: then he saw that it was no illusion.
As far as the eye could see, the road and the land on either side of it were draped with countless strands of gossamer, so frail and fine that only the glancing sunlight revealed their presence. For the last quarter-mile he had been walking through them, and they had resisted his passage no more than coils of smoke.
Throughout the morning, the wind-borne spiders must have been falling in millions from the sky; and as he stared up into the blue, Brant could still catch momentary glimpses of sunlight upon drifting silk as belated voyagers went sailing by. Not knowing whither they would travel, these tiny creatures had ventured forth into an abyss more friendless and more fathomless than any he would face when the time came to say farewell to Earth. It was a lesson he would remember in the weeks and months ahead.
Slowly the Sphinx sank into the sky line as it joined Shastar beyond the eclipsing crescent of the hills. Only once did Brant look back at the crouching monster, whose agelong vigil was now drawing to its close. Then he walked slowly forward into the sun, while ever and again impalpable fingers brushed his face, as the strands of silk came drifting down the wind that blew from home.
Hate
Introduction
This is going to be too improbable for fiction: you’ll just have to take my word that I’m not making it up. As I’d completely forgotten the genesis of the story until I dug out my yellowing notebooks, I’m still slightly incredulous.
In February 1960—almost thirty years before these words will appear in print—the distinguished film producer William MacQuitty asked me to write a movie treatment entitled “The Sea and the Stars.” This was little more than two years after Sputnik 1 had opened the Space Age (October 1957); no human being had then travelled beyond the atmosphere, and despite Liaka and other animal astronauts, there was still doubt in some circles that prolonged survival was possible in weightlessness.
Though we were of course unaware of it at the time, Yuri Gagarin was then in training for the first orbital flight (12 April 1961) and Bill and I were certain that the first person in space would be a Russian. We thought it would make a dramatic movie if we had the capsule sinking on the Great Barrier Reef and being discovered, with the trapped occupant still alive, by a diver who—no, I won’t spoil the story for you . . .
Nothing came of the movie treatment, which is what happens to ninety-nine percent of the species. However, I thought it too good an idea to waste, and next month developed it into a short story. If magazine published it in November 1961, retitling it “At the End of the Orbit.” I prefer the original: more punch.
Almost simultaneously, I met the first man to go into orbit; one of my most prized possessions is Gagarin’s autobiography, inscribed “This souvenir of our meeting in Ceylon, 11. 12. 61.” Years later, at Star City, I stood in Gagarin’s office—exactly as he left it for that fatal training flight, with the clock on the wall stopped at the moment of his death.
When we first met, Bill MacQuitty had just produced the definitive film of the Titanic disaster, A Night to Remember; he had a special feeling for the subject, because as a boy in Belfast he had watched the ship’s launching. Later, he made a determined, but unsuccessful, effort to bring A Fall of Moondust to the screen. Failing to film submarine operations on the Moon, he returned to Earth with Above Us the Waves—the story of the British Navy’s attack on the battleship Turpitz. He also used Ceylon—where he had worked as a bank official in the thirties—as the background for The Beachcomber, a Somerset Maugham tale of colonial days starring that splendid ham, Robert Newton. (“The last film,” Bill told me, “in which Bob was—mostly—sober.”)
All this may seem a little irrelevant, but it isn’t. Because the man who watched the Titanic slide down the slipways in 1910, and might have caught me before Stanley Kubrick, has just walked into my office with the first volume of his autobiography. And I’m breaking one of my most ironclad rules, by writing an introduction . . .
I haven’t quite finished. The week after Bill MacQuitty leaves Colombo, the man who will (touch wood) finally be filming A Fall of Moondust arrives, to discuss salvage operations on the Moon.
And to make matters even more complicated, I am working on a novel about the Titanic’s centennial, in the rapidly approaching year 2012. I raised her once in Imperial Earth, but now that Robert Ballard and his team have rediscovered her, it’s time to go back to the Grand Banks.
I
Tibor didn’t see the thing. He was asleep, and dreaming his inevitable painful dream.
Only Joey was awake on deck, in the cool stillness before dawn, when the meteor came flaming out of the sky above New Guinea. He watched it climb up the heavens until it passed directly overhead, routing the stars and throwing swift-moving shadows across the crowded deck. The harsh light outlined the bare rigging, the coiled ropes and air-hoses, the copper diving-helmets neatly snugged down for the night—even the low, pandanus-clad island half a mile away. As it passed into the southwest, out over the emptiness of the Pacific, it began to disintegrate.
Incandescent globules broke off, burning and guttering in a trail of fire that stretched a quarter of the way across the sky. It was already dying when it raced out of sight. But Joey did not see its end. Still blazing furiously, it sank below the horizon, as if seeking to hurl itself into the face of the hidden sun.
If the sight was spectacular, the utter silence was unnerving. Joey waited and waited and waited, but no sound came from the riven heavens. When, minutes later, there was a sudden splash from the sea, close at hand he gave an involuntary start of surprise—then cursed himself for being frightened by a manta (A mighty big one, though, to have made so much noise when it jumped.) There was no other sound, and presen
tly he went back to sleep.
In his narrow bunk just aft of the air compressor, Tibor heard nothing. He slept so soundly after his day’s work that he had little energy even for dreams. And when they came, they were not the dreams he wanted. In the hours of darkness, as his mind roamed back and forth across the past, it never came to rest amid memories of desire. He had women in Sydney and Brisbane and Darwin and Thursday Island—but none in his dreams. All that he ever remembered when he woke, in the fetid stillness of the cabin, was the dust and fire and blood as the Russian tanks rolled into Budapest. His dreams were not of love, but only of hate.
When Nick shook him back to consciousness, he was dodging the guards on the Austrian border. It took him a few seconds to make the ten-thousand-mile journey to the Great Barrier Reef. Then he yawned, kicked away the cockroaches that had been nibbling at his toes and heaved himself out of his bunk.
Breakfast, of course, was the same as always—rice, turtle eggs and bully-beef, washed down with strong, sweet tea. The best that could be said of Joey’s cooking was that there was plenty of it. Tibor was used to the monotonous diet. He made up for it, and for other deprivations, when he was back on the mainland.
The sun had barely cleared the horizon when the dishes were stacked in the tiny galley and the lugger got under way. Nick sounded cheerful as he took the wheel and headed out from the island. The old pearling-master had every right to be, for the patch of shell they were working was the richest that Tibor had ever seen. With any luck, they would fill their hold in another day or two, and sail back to T.I. with half a ton of shell on board. And then, with a little more luck, he could give up this stinking, dangerous job and get back to civilization.
Not that he regretted anything. The Greek had treated him well, and he’d found some good stones when the shells were opened. But he understood now, after nine months on the Reef, why the number of white divers could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Japs and Kanakas and Islanders could take it—but damn few Europeans.
The diesel coughed into silence and the Arafura coasted to rest.
They were some two miles from the island, which lay low and green on the water, yet sharply divided from it by its narrow band of dazzling beach. It was no more than a nameless sand bar that a tiny forest had managed to capture. Its only inhabitants were the myriads of stupid muttonbirds that riddled the soft ground with their burrows and made the night hideous with their banshee cries.
There was little talk as the three divers dressed. Each man knew what to do, and wasted no time in doing it. As Tibor buttoned on his thick twill jacket, Blanco, his tender, rinsed out the faceplate with vinegar so that it would not become fogged. Then Tibor clambered down the rope ladder, while the heavy helmet and lead corselet were placed over his head.
Apart from the jacket, whose padding spread the weight evenly over his shoulders, he was wearing his ordinary clothes. In these warm waters there was no need for rubber suits. The helmet simply acted as a tiny diving-bell held in position by its weight alone. In an emergency the wearer could—if he was lucky—duck out of it and swim back to the surface unhampered. Tibor had seen this done. But he had no wish to try the experiment for himself.
Each time he stood on the last rung of the ladder, gripping his shell-bag with one hand and his safety line with the other, the same thought flashed through Tibor’s mind. He was leaving the world he knew; but was it for an hour—or was it forever?
Down there on the sea bed was wealth and death, and one could be sure of neither. The chances were that this would be another day of uneventful drudgery, as were most of the days in the pearl-diver’s unglamorous life. But Tibor had seen one of his mates die, when his air-hose tangled in the Arafura’s prop. And he had watched the agony of another, as his body twisted with the bends. In the sea, nothing was ever safe or certain. You took your chances with open eyes.
And if you lost there was no point in whining.
He stepped back from the ladder, and the world of sun and sky ceased to exist. Top-heavy with the weight of his helmet, he had to back-pedal furiously to keep his body upright. He could see nothing but a featureless blue mist as he sank towards the bottom. He hoped that Blanco would not play out the safety line too quickly. Swallowing and snorting, he tried to clear his ears as the pressure mounted. The right one “popped” quickly enough, but a piercing, intolerable pain grew rapidly in the left, which had bothered him for several days. He forced his hand up under the helmet, gripped his nose and blew with all his might. There was an abrupt, soundless explosion somewhere inside his head, and the pain vanished instantly. He’d have no more trouble on this dive.
Tibor felt the bottom before he saw it.
Unable to bend over lest he risk flooding the open helmet, his vision in the downwards direction was very limited. He could see around, but not immediately below. What he did see was reassuring in its drab monotony—a gently undulating, muddy plain that faded out of sight about ten feet ahead. A yard to his left a tiny fish was nibbling at a piece of coral the size and shape of a lady’s fan. That was all. There was no beauty, no underwater fairyland here. But there was money. That was what mattered.
The safety line gave a gentle pull as the lugger started to drift downwind, moving broadside-on across the patch, and Tibor began to walk forward with the springy, slow-motion step forced on him by weightlessness and water resistance. As Number Two diver, he was working from the bow. Amidships was Stephen, still comparatively inexperienced, while at the stern was the head diver, Billy. The three men seldom saw each other while they were working; each had his own lane to search as the Arafura drifted silently before the wind. Only at the extremes of their zigzags might they sometimes glimpse one another as dim shapes looming through the mist.
It needed a trained eye to spot the shells beneath their camouflage of algae and weeds, but often the molluscs betrayed themselves. When they felt the vibrations of the approaching diver, they would snap shut—and there would be a momentary, nacreous flicker in the gloom. Yet even then they sometimes escaped, for the moving ship might drag the diver past before he could collect the prize just out of reach. In the early days of his apprenticeship, Tibor had missed quite a few of the big silver-lips, any one of which might have contained some fabulous pearl. Or so he had imagined, before the glamor of the profession had worn off, and he realized that pearls were so rare that you might as well forget them.
The most valuable stone he’d ever brought up had been sold for twenty pounds, and the shell he gathered on a good morning was worth more than that. If the industry had depended on gems instead of mother-of-pearl, it would have gone broke years ago.
There was no sense of time in this world of mist. You walked beneath the invisible, drifting ship, with the throb of the air compressor pounding in your ears, the green haze moving past your eyes. At long intervals you would spot a shell, wrench it from the sea bed and drop it in your bag. If you were lucky, you might gather a couple of dozen on a single drift across the patch. On the other hand, you might not find a single one.
You were alert for danger, but not worried by it. The real risks were simple, unspectacular things like tangled air-hoses or safety lines—not sharks, groupers or octopi. Sharks ran when they saw your air bubbles, and in all his hours of diving Tibor had seen just one octopus, every bit of two feet across. As for groupers—well, they were to be taken seriously, for they could swallow a diver at one gulp if they felt hungry enough. But there was little chance of meeting them on this flat and desolate plain. There were none of the coral caves in which they could make their homes.
The shock would not have been so great, therefore, if this uniform, level grayness had not lulled him into a sense of security.
At one moment he was walking steadily towards an unreachable wall of mist, that retreated as fast as he approached. And then, without warning, his private nightmare was looming above him.
II
Tibor hated spiders, and there was a certain creature in the sea that seem
ed deliberately contrived to take advantage of that phobia. He had never met one, and his mind had always shied away from the thought of such an encounter, but Tibor knew that the Japanese spider crab can span twelve feet across its spindly legs. That it was harmless mattered not in the least. A spider as big as a man simply had no right to exist.
As soon as he saw that cage of slender, jointed limbs emerge from the all-encompassing grayness, Tibor began to scream with uncontrollable terror. He never remembered jerking his safety line, but Blanco reacted with the instantaneous perception of the ideal tender. His helmet still echoing to his screams, Tibor felt himself snatched from the sea bed, lifted towards light and air—and sanity. As he swept upwards, he saw both the strangeness and the absurdity of his mistake, and regained a measure of control. But he was still trembling so violently when Blanco lifted off his helmet that it was some time before he could speak.
“What the hell’s going on here?” demanded Nick. “Everyone knocking off work early?”
It was then that Tibor realized that he was not the first to come up. Stephen was sitting amidships, smoking a cigarette and looking completely unconcerned. The stern diver, doubtless wondering what had happened, was being hauled up willy-nilly by his tender, since the Arafura had come to rest and all operations had been suspended until the trouble was resolved.
“There’s some kind of wreck down there,” said Tibor. “I ran right into it. All I could see were a lot of wires and rods.”
To his annoyance and self-contempt, the memory set him trembling again.
“Don’t see why that should give you the shakes,” grumbled Nick. Nor could Tibor—here on this sun-drenched deck. It was impossible to explain how a harmless shape glimpsed through the mist could set one’s whole mind jangling with terror.
“I nearly got hung up on it,” he lied. “Blanco pulled me clear just in time.”
Tales From Planet Earth Page 7
