New Writings in SF 6 - [Anthology]

by Ed By John Carnell

  I grinned. Couldn’t stop the silly grin relaxing the taut muscles of my face. I made the most of it. I think if I hadn’t grinned I would have wept. After months, months, months of seeming helplessness it was good—so damn, damn good—to find something going right at last.

  The girl said, “I thought you’d be pleased. That’s why I said we should be safe now. There’s no danger of them catching you in the open. It’s almost over, isn’t it?” •

  “Almost. If it works. And it should. Fabricci did the calculations. The late Fabricci. I wish...”

  The next few minutes were mine. Nobody’s business but mine. Enough to say she understood. Her reactions were womanly. Just right. Not as a lover. Motherly. The mammary offering. We never grow up completely. Men. Women do. Maybe they’re adults at birth.

  * * * *

  “When you said it was nearly over—I know you meant the Barbarians. Getting rid of them. But I was thinking of the other things. Like having to kill people like Fabricci. People who were part of the scheme. People whose skills we couldn’t have done without. It ... well, was it necessary?”

  “You know it was.”

  “I suppose. Damn them! Damn the Barbarians! So few of them really, but how well they did their job of crushing us. Rascak in Belgrade—another good man I had to dispose of—he had the best way of putting it. He said it was like a disease. A virus infection. Relative to the body it invades the virus is infinitesimally small. But because it is mindless and ruthless it can kill. If it doesn’t kill it lays the body low. So low that the body can only muster its defences in slow growing progression. Like us. And sometimes the body, like us again, has to kill part of itself to cut off the infection.”

  She spoke softly, consoling. “It’s over. It’s over now.”

  I got my spine back. Stood up. “Not quite. For you maybe. I’ve still got work to do. Let’s go.”

  On the way to the cellar I waggled the Schmeisser at the old man. Just to remind him. But the menace was not the same as before.

  The cellar was spotlessly clean. The walls had been covered with white formica panelling. The floor was vinyl tiled. The control board, considering the complexity of its function, was a masterpiece of miniaturized simplicity.

  “Can you understand it?” the girl asked.

  “Not in the slightest. I’m no scientist. But I don’t have to understand it. Like we were saying about the body—it fights its invaders by conscripting many different cells with specialized functions. Phagocytes, leucocytes, cells that produce antitoxins, cells that manufacture coagulants—so it is with us. I’m a specialist. As you are. And Fabricci and all the others. You have a way of finding things. Fabricci was our finest mathematician. Rascak knew atomics. Me— I’ve got a freak memory. My job was to trot the globe, pick the brains of the other experts and file their combined talents in my memory. But there is very little of what I was told that I could honestly say I understood.”

  “Suppose you had been killed along the way? It seems strange to put so much reliance on one man.”

  “There you have one of the reasons I had to be so uncaring when I killed. I had to get here. I’m not the only one. I don’t know the exact number of Memories but I do know—or I trust—that at the precise moment tonight there will be a sufficient number of them to set off the reaction we want. It was one of my countrymen who conceived the plan originally. Gerald Blackmore. You’ve heard of him? No, probably not. A biologist. Working with the Atomic Research Authority. A lucky combination. Since we had no dead Barbarians to work on and absolutely no hope of using a live one, he had to work entirely from little bits of reported data. Like they can’t stand cold. Or that radio waves can kill them. Or that noise makes them angry. Blackmore put all the data into a pot and cooked up the theory that we could destroy them once and for all by resonance. But the effect he asked for seemed impossible to produce. Fifty thousand megatons equivalent. And all of it to be triggered simultaneously from eighteen specifically located places. So a team of freaks was assembled. While others like yourself were doing other jobs, we had to collect and co-ordinate all the information available. Actually we’ve budgeted for ten thousand megatons over the top. Somebody’s bound to be not where he should be tonight.”

  It wasn’t cold in the cellar yet the girl shivered. “Wouldn’t it be terrible? Suppose less of them arrived at their stations than you hoped for?”

  “We’ll just have to wait and see. Don’t think about it. Now you’d better leave me. The time settings on this thing have to be very precise. I must have no distractions.”

  She went reluctantly, claiming she felt useless. I had to take my turn as consoler. Told her she had done all that was required of her and the rest was up to me. Got the impression she wasn’t altogether satisfied with this, but insisted she left.

  Having a built-in mnemographic image of the world time clock helped in making the settings. Base time was taken on Hamilton, Bermuda. Four hours down on GMT. That made the big bang due at 11.13 here in Riga. Margin of error plus or minus two minutes. Checked with my Ingersoll. Flipped the three switches that brought in the nicads, watched the meters register a satisfactory surge. Set the bomb’s clock for ten hours, twelve minutes rundown. Pushed home the red button. Now, and only now, could I say it was Safe. Nothing could stop the bomb now.

  Nothing to do but wait. Sweat it out. Went upstairs and spent the afternoon and evening getting a calculated degree of mild intoxication. Thought I deserved it.

  Around ten-thirty we stopped kidding ourselves that we were relaxed. Even the glorious stew that Elke had contrived to produce out of my stock of cans hadn’t helped. There was absolutely nothing to do downstairs, nothing to see. But downstairs we went.

  It didn’t seem possible in these clinical surroundings with their silence and with nothing in motion except the sweep hand of the clock that destiny was in the making.

  “Will it be all right?” the girl asked. “For us? The explosion, I mean. All the explosions.”

  “You’ll hardly know it happened. If all goes well and the lot goes up, the whole sixty thousand megatons, the most you’ll feel will be an eight minute tremor that will barely tickle your feet. Nothing as big as an earthquake. This is only a man-made thing. We can’t begin to compete with natural forces in magnitude.”

  “Then how is everybody so sure it will shift the Barbarians?”

  “They’re not. Only Blackmore was sure. We just have to believe him. Every bomb is sited at an existing fault in the crust. This doesn’t mean the globe is going to crack apart. What the faults will do is send the subterranean vibrations out and across the world instead of being localized near each explosion. If Blackmore is right the optimum resonance will occur one minute after detonation and will last for four minutes. Long enough, he said, to granulate the bones of the Barbarians. Less than quarter of an hour and we’ll know how right he was.”

  She lapsed into silence. Then the silence worried her and she said, nervously, “Quiet, isn’t it?”

  Agreed. But could not think of anything worth saying to break the quietness. Didn’t want to either. Preoccupied with fascination of sudden heightening of perception. Discovered it’s true—you really can hear your own heart beating.

  Seven minutes.

  Cellar was warm. Very. Could feel the sodden halfmoons of my shirt clinging to armpits. Not Elke, though. Frowning, but didn’t appear to be physically disturbed.

  One minute. My skin came alive. I swear it. Became a separate entity from me. A thing with a fear of its own. I believe that if a flea had adopted me my skin would have shrunk off the underlying flesh in terror.

  Stupidly I wanted the sweep hand to halt in its inexorable orbit round the face of the clock. Then it passed the zenith with mechanical disdain and was on the last circuit it would ever make.

  Tiny erector muscles wrenched body hairs to the perpendicular. I was furred. A ciliated motionless breathless lump of expectancy.

  For all of fifteen seconds after the clock
should have stopped I remained motionless and stupid. I knew it was fifteen seconds. I was watching. The revelation of the impossible had me tied in knots.

  Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No stoppage of the clock. No sudden surge on the meters. No tremble underfoot.

  Animation boiled into being. A fleeting notion that somewhere along the line I had made a mistake was discarded without consideration. The only mistake was in leaning the Schmeisser against the cellar wall. But I had the knife in my belt.

  “You bitch. You treacherous bitch.” And I hadn’t finished the first short, sentence before I was already carving criss-cross up and down her face and chest. No quick despatch for this one.

  “You sold us out,” I screamed. “For once they didn’t kill an informer. Because they had to get me.”

  She had her hands over her face, trying to protect it. I couldn’t actually make out the words she was mouthing, but I gathered she was putting up a big denial. I wasn’t particular. If I couldn’t get her face, her body would do. The dress came apart at the neck, slashed horizontally by the knife. It flopped to her waist. The blade followed through to the skin. And I stepped back in disbelief.

  Like the dress, the skin was unsupported at the neck. It slumped down, dragged by the weight of the spurious breasts. And where bleeding flesh should have been revealed there was a horny mottled epidermis, the colour of early morning sputum.

  The knife clattered to the floor and the Schmeisser was in my hand instead.

  She pushed her arms out full length. As if arms could stop bullets. She—he, she, it—called out. “No. I’m not. Please listen.”

  “Listen to what? More lies? You’re getting very clever, you Barbarians. And I was dense. I thought our system was foolproof. Our man-woman method of identification couldn’t be faked, I thought, because you couldn’t imitate all the functions of a man. But I overlooked the possibility that it was far easier to make a fully functioning copy of a woman.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Yes and no. I deceived you, but not in the way you think. It wasn’t my fault your plan went wrong. Nobody has more reason than I—than us—for seeing your plan succeed.”

  Deaf to her words and blind to the truth I squeezed the trigger. Kept my finger crooked until the magazine was empty and the thing was shredded. A shattered alien thing so well endowed with life that even the tattered fragments still twitched.

  “You people,” said the voice at my back, “are immensely vain. Your vanity leads you into so many mistakes.”

  The last time I had seen the old man he had carried an ancient shotgun and had watered at the eyes with fright. Now the eyes were dry and malicious. Carried death in them. Mine. The shotgun had been replaced by a glazer.

  “You should have listened to that,” he said. He pointed to the mess on the floor. “It would have told you about your vanity. It would have laid bare your conceit that yours was the one and only world we had acquired.”

  The threat of death doesn’t weaken curiosity. I asked: “She really was trying to help?”

  “By replacing your real contact. The one we removed while you were still half a continent away. They are a race like yours. Sentimental and emotional. And they have the same stubbornness, the same foolish bent for trying to fight the inevitable.”

  He fired at my feet. I fainted. I came to, swayed on the stumps of my legs where they formed a glutinous unity with the floor, and fainted again. Repeated the process four times before I could dig the Indian trick of detachment out of my memory.

  The stuff that was me and vinyl plastic and concrete had solidified by this time.

  And I was alone.

  I am alone. I am alone and a long time dying.

  He should have stayed. I would have talked. Through pain or through pride. Better he left. He’ll have to learn the hard way the things I could have told him. Only proves that conceit is universal. He thought killing me was the end of it.

  Maybe it is. Certainly it is. For now. We failed. Miserably. Glad I didn’t talk. Didn’t tell him how we are. How I hope we still are.

  Bending forward is impossible. Find, though, that if I take it slowly I can fold at the knees without too much agony. Trick will be to drop my hands behind me at the right moment. Mustn’t let my tibia off the vertical.

  It won’t be soon. Too much organization required. But the day will come. Another day. Another time when another fanatic like me will try to trigger another weapon.

  Passed out again. Didn’t get the hands quite right. One leg has snapped off at the stump. Bleeding. Must look like octogenarian lowering himself on the bedpan. Trying to get all my weight shifted to one hand. To get the other free.

  Find it strange that only now, when it’s all over and all the pressure is off, I can think kindly of the human race. Verdict: pretty good. There’s a word ...

  Mind hazy. Remember it now. Indomitable. That’s the word. Indomitable. Riddled with a thousand weaknesses. Yet indomitable.

  Made it. Haunched and balanced on left hand. Three more inches and the right hand will reach the knife I dropped. A one-man final gesture. I was intended to die slowly. So it must be otherwise. If they can’t do a simple thing like that right then I have hopes. Great hopes. For tomorrow.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE HANDS

  by John Baxter

  There have been many fine stories concerning aliens taking over human beings, but Australian writer John Baxter adds the grisliest touch yet in this return from a far star.

  * * * *

  They let Vitti go first because he was the one with two heads, and it seemed to the rest that if there was to be anything of sympathy or honour or love for them, then Vitti should have the first and best of it. After he had walked down the ramp, they followed him. Sloane with his third and fourth legs folded like the furled wings of a butterfly on his back; Tanizaki, still quiet, unreadable, Asiatic, despite the bulge inside his belly that made him look like a woman eight months gone with child; and the rest of them. Seven earth men who had been tortured by the Outsiders.

  When the crowd saw Vitti, they shouted, because that was what they had gathered there to do. Ten thousand sets of lungs emptied themselves in one automatic, unthinking cry. The sound was a wave breaking over them, a torrent of sound that made them want to fall on the ground and wait for its passing. But there was only one shout. By the time the cry was half over, the people had seen Vitti and the rest of them, and when their lungs were empty they had neither the will nor the ability to draw them full for another shout. There were some who did; a few standing at the back. But their shouts were like the cries of sea birds along the edge of the ocean. From the others, there was no sound but the susurrus of whispers like the melting of sea foam after a wave has receded. Nobody had anything to say. At that moment, Alfred Binns realized for the first time that he was a monster.

  * * * *

  In the anteroom at headquarters, Binns stood at the window, looking down on the city. The streets were empty now. As he watched, a family of three—mother, father and one small boy—hurried across the square below him and disappeared into the subway entrance. They must have been the last, because no more people moved anywhere on the wide, clean streets. Binns had almost forgotten that nobody lived in the cities any more. Thousands had come to see them arrive, but now the show was over and they were going back to their homes, leaving the city to those who had to live there.

  “Nobody left at all?” Farmer said. Nobody else had spoken.

  “You’re listening again,” Binns said without turning. “You promised you wouldn’t.”

  “I can’t help it,” Farmer said. He looked down at the bulge on his chest where the other brain had grown. Through the soft clear skin he could see the grey convolutions and the ebb of blood through vein and tissue. “It’s growing up.”

  “You and Tanizaki ought to get together,” somebody said. It was safe now, though at the beginning of the trip back Hiro had been sensitive about his huge belly where
the second set of intestines had grown. There had been fights, as if violence could wipe it all away, but after a few weeks they had learned.

  A man came into the anteroom. He worked very hard at not being embarrassed and for a while he almost succeeded. But Farmer was more than a normal man could take. His eyes went glassy and he turned away for a moment. When he looked back his gaze was directed over their heads.

  “Would you like to follow me ?” he said.

  They went with him along the corridor to where the debriefing was to take place. The light was soft and there were no shadows. They were all glad of that; the one thing more horrible to each man than his deformed body was his grotesque dancing shadow.

  “Disgusting,” the general said. “Barbaric. Inhuman.” He was very pale.

  “Not really,” Binns said politely. “They aren’t like us, you know.”