The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction

by Mike Ashley (Editor)

  Rick went inside. Johnny was very dead. It looked like he’d tried to hold the folk back from the bus bars. He hadn’t had a chance, they’d picked him up bodily and shoved him onto the contacts . . . Six had managed to die, a dozen more were hanging round the gear looking stupid, fumbling at the bars like something ought to have happened but hadn’t. Rick hauled one of them up and shoved him away. He came right back and the overseer shoved him off again. He came back again and Rick hit him, he couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t feel it. He rolled across the floor, got up slobbering blood and started feeling for the contacts again. Rick let him be. It was like giving a kid a toy to keep it quiet . . .

  The only one of the victims that showed any sign of being human was a girl. She sat just outside the door and she was crying. Stan put his jacket round her shoulders. He said, “God knows what’s with the others, but this looks like plain shock.” He started talking to her. He found out her name was Allison Foster, she’d lived with her aunt a few miles out of Freshet. She said they’d heard the music. That was all. They’d heard the music. They’d got the car out and driven up, following whatever was calling them. They’d had a blowout on the trail, had to walk the rest of the way. She told Stan, the music had stopped now. It had gone away. Then she started in crying again.

  The Controller looked up and shook his head, and they heard the sirens going way off towards Saskeega . . .

  The mountain was cordoned. The road was closed to traffic from Freshet right to Indian Valley. It seemed every research lab in the country had a team up there scraping about. They even sent some people over from Cape Kennedy. What the spaceboys wanted with bits of the busted stalk, Rick couldn’t figure. Stan said sardonically that maybe they thought the Company had little green men.

  Just about everything got analysed, the tower struts, the insulators, the rock face, bits of the cables. If there were ever any reports Stan and Rick didn’t get to see them. They were no wiser than they had been the day the thing happened. All they knew was one bright morning that tower melted. It couldn’t have happened, but it did.

  They re-rigged the feeder. A piece was blasted out of the rock, the new cables were brought inside the line of the old so the eggheads could keep their playground. Power was restored two days after the accident. The troops stayed put; Black Horse Pass was stiff with guards.

  Within a week the people who’d been saved were all dead, and that started a national scare on its own. There was talk of putting the whole of Saskeega County under quarantine. That would have been done, but nobody could find out why the victims died. Wasn’t anything physical, they just seemed to fade away. Nobody could do a thing. Rick heard the day the power went back on they had to strap them down to stop them walking to the Black Horse and doing the same thing all over. The girl Stan had talked to didn’t seem too bad, they didn’t watch her like they watched the others. They let her ram her fingers in a light socket. Somehow she kept them there till her heart stopped . . .

  Rick moved over to Stan’s place for a time because he didn’t like the idea of Judy being on her own any more. When she was with Jeff she wasn’t too bad. About ten days after the trouble he got back from Saskeega one evening and Stan asked him to go down to the workshop. He’d got something he wanted to show him.

  He’d got a nice little place rigged up at the bottom of the lot, a shed with a couple of lathes and a milling machine. The thing he wanted to talk about was standing in the middle of the floor. Rick stared at it. “What’n Hell is it, Stan?”

  He said, “Take a look. Guess at its operation.”

  Rick looked. The device was about four feet tall, a square box set on thin, dural legs. Most of the housing was taken up with circuitry. Rick was no electronics man but he knew an oscillator pack when he saw one. There was a metal cone speaker mounted above it on a horizontal baffle, and on top of that a thing that looked like the element of an electric fire. Over that again was a fine wire-mesh frame.

  Cameron shrugged. “Lower part’s obvious. Rest looks like it’d be good for warming the house. What’s it supposed to do?”

  Stan said, “It’s a bugtrap.”

  Rick was fogged. “What does it trap?”

  “It’s set for ’skeeters at the moment. Give me a hand with it, I’ll show you.” They lifted the machine outside and Stan plugged in a wander lead from the shop distributor board. He pointed at a line of potentiometers on the chassis. He said, “You get a sort of list comes with it, you set these things up for your homing frequencies. Composite note.”

  Rick had read something about that somewhere; how the females of certain insects emit a note to attract the males, or the other way round. He wasn’t too sure about that, but the principle was obvious. He said, “You mean the pack generates the call frequency, the ’skeeters fly in . . .”

  “And land on the hotplate over the sound source. Quick and easy. And it works, it works fine.” Stan switched the thing on. There was no audible sound; the side panels just got a sort of velvety feel, that was all. The elements started to glow orange-red; within seconds something dropped down onto the gauze, wriggled and vanished. Then another and another. Soon a stream of insects were flying down to incinerate themselves. Stan switched off. He said, “That’s enough for a demonstration. I don’t even care for killing ’skeeters at the moment, I’m beginning to know what they feel like.”

  It took a few moments for the implication to sink in. When it did, Rick felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. He said, “Stan, if you’re suggesting what I think . . . It’s crazy. And it’s too bloody horrible for words . . .”

  Stan shrugged. “I didn’t suggest a thing. I showed you an insect trap, you made your own comparisons.” He picked up a gauze frame. “I left the thing running last night. This was the result.” Rick took it from him. It was like he’d expected. The thing was coated with insects, black drifts and skeins of them. He chucked it down and Stan walked away.

  Rick followed him. Somehow, although a thing that had been in his mind for a long time had been verbalized, he still felt he had to argue. He felt mad at Stan for saying something he was so scared might be true. He said, “Stan, if you expect me to go along with a crazy thing like that –”

  The other man swung round on him. “Christ, Rick, can’t you play this quiet . . . ?” He said, “Look, I don’t believe.” He spread his hands. “I can’t believe. But I’ve followed this thing through and there’s only one answer satisfies my logic. I can’t believe that answer. But I also know, I know, Rick, that what you saw that machine do, is a model of what’s going on at High Eight. This I swear before God and His angels.” He ducked back into the workshop.

  Rick stepped after him helplessly. Stan opened a cupboard. There was a bottle of Scotch and a couple of glasses. He got the whisky down and poured a couple of slugs. Rick picked his drink up, and the glass chattered suddenly against his teeth. He set it down and looked at it. “Now I know I’m going crazy.”

  Stan rubbed his face. “Rick, listen and hear me. I may not have the chance to repeat what I’m going to say. You can’t explain the Black Horse, I can’t, none of us can. So we’ll take the things that have happened as pointers and see what they can show us. If we see something outside our technology, that’s a pity. Because, like the guy said, once you’ve eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.”

  He took a swig of whisky. He said, “We’ll eliminate sabotage. If you wanted to wreck our lines, OK, but how would you melt a tower? And we’ll eliminate the chance that we’re all asleep and dreaming this, I cut my face shaving this morning, I bled . . . We’ll also discount the idea that we’ve suffered a series of unconnected mishaps because a probability of that order is strictly in the monkeys-play-Beethoven class. We’ll take the facts as interrelated events and work from there.

  “An old hobo died. Then there was the farmer. Then the boys in the chopper, they flew nearly straight at High Eight. And Halloran up on the wires. Then the people we saw the d
ay the tower melted. Now, I know and you know, Jim Halloran wouldn’t have killed himself. It’s like the guys said, he was pulled up there. The zombies didn’t kill themselves consciously either; you know that, you were with me, you helped drag ’em off the lines. They weren’t conscious of a damn thing. I don’t believe any of the deaths have been suicides, except maybe the old tramp. People have been drawn to the lines, in particular to High Eight, and there hasn’t been a damn thing they could do about it. To me that suggests a force, a Will if you want to think of it like that. Something stronger than humans, something that can cut across the basic instinct to survive, make you go up there and . . . char yourself into a union with it. And the figures say something else. First it was one, then two, then three, then a hundred. The Will is getting stronger. So I maintain it’s a process of feeding . . .”

  Rick said hoarsely, “For the sake of God . . .”

  Stan kept on talking, overrode him. “It’s very strong now because it took the ones that died in hospital. It’s strong and it’s mean. It’s made mistakes in the past. Bad ones. But it won’t make any more. What happened to Station Seven we shall never know. Or the tower. I’d say that last time it got over-keen. It was hauling in its biggest batch to date, it got careless, allowed too big a concentration of itself in one place. Because it can concentrate and disperse. It can adjust our voltage to what it needs. This I’ve proved.”

  Rick said, “But our juice –”

  Stan stopped him savagely. “It isn’t our juice. He . . . it . . . uses the current somehow as a carrier. It can work the voltage the way it wants. For instance, it can keep surges away from the trip gear when it doesn’t want the hotplate turned off. They read on the dials, they read every place, but the lines don’t pull out.”

  “That’s crazy –”

  “Rick, you don’t know about this because it was done behind your back. For that, I’m sorry. I put recording voltmeters on that line. One on the output at Saskeega, one in High Eight, one at Station Seven, half a dozen more in between. They were set up one night and taken down again before dawn. I got the rolls here.” He turned on a shaded lamp and opened a drawer. He handed Rick the graphs. The overseer stared at them. It seemed to him in that moment the shadows in the workshop started to darken and crowd. Theories were great, but they were still just playing with words, this was something you could touch. Rick was a working stiff, he believed in something he could touch.

  The line up to the Black Horse was full of knots and snarls. The graphs showed it. There were pulses in the voltage, peaks and zeroings. There were rhythms where something had raced all night up the wires and back between Saskeega and High Eight. Something impossible, something malevolent, something terribly strong. Allison had talked about music. This was the notation of the tune she’d heard . . .

  Stan said quietly, “I ran the same test in Indian Valley. Beyond High Eight the voltage doesn’t move. The lines are clean.”

  Rick could only whisper. “What in Hell is it? You know what in Hell it is, Stan?”

  He shrugged. “How can I answer that? How can anybody? Maybe it’s the old man, the hobo. Maybe he somehow got caught in the lines. And he’s lonely, wants some company . . . Maybe it’s something that blew in with the cosmic rays, maybe we generated it ourselves from cobalt and hydrogen, maybe there was a second Creation down there in the windings, deep in the darkness and warmth, and this is the new Adam. Demon or spirit, Stallion Jim or AntiChrist himself, I don’t know. But I know why it uses our lines, why it’s sitting up there in High Eight.”

  “Why?”

  He said, “Use your head, Rick. We’re the biggest feeder into the Sand Creek Pool. And there’s the gear on the hill, the Doomsday units. Whatever we think, whatever happens, those lines are going to stay intact. The thing could flow off, it’s got a whole country to travel in, hunt in. It must have moved when it blew the stage, it must have got out when the tower went. But it comes back each time to where it knows its safe.”

  Cameron was just beginning to see possibilities. He had to lick his lips to make his voice come. “Stan,” he said. “what’s going to be the end of this . . .”

  The Controller was standing in the half dark outside the circle of lamplight. Rick saw him shrug. He said, “This is still supposition. But the way I see it, there need be no end. Look at the lines, Rick, think about them. Think about them the way Judy does. Think how they go out from the power companies to the substations, how they split into street mains, how the street mains split into the risers. Think about how they wind themselves through towns and villages, into shops and movie houses and theatres, factories, farms, hospitals . . . A forest, that’s what the lines are. A million trees on the same trunk. And if those lines go bad, and it’s starting here at High Eight . . . they could touch us all. There’d be no getting away.

  “Nobody would realize when it really started to pull. Maybe it would take the scientists, the politicians, anybody who could understand it, know what it was trying to do. Maybe we’d start a few wars, help it on with the job. One thing’s certain; until the very last of us went, Saskeega would still be manned, those lines to Sand Creek would be alive. And after that, when there was nobody left . . . Who knows? Perhaps Saskeega would still be manned . . .

  “If I wasn’t an engineer, if I wasn’t works controller for Saskeega and if I believed this, I’d get out. I’d go live in Tibet. That way I might manage to die apart from it. But I’m not a free agent. I have to say this is rubbish, this is all fools’ talk. I have to get on with the job.”

  He lit a cigarette. The sudden flare of light was startling. Rick saw his face for a second. He looked worried nearly to death. The overseer said suddenly, “We can kill it, Stan. Cut the lines at Saskeega and beyond High Eight, quarantine it, starve it to death . . .”

  Stan laughed. He said bitterly, “Kill it? Can you see that happening, can you see me running to old man Perkins, to the Government? What would I say, cut the lines over the Black Horse, cut ’em each end because the Devil’s in the wires and we got to starve him out? Can you see me doing that? And can you imagine them listening? I told you it was smart. It’s damn smart. There’s no way out.”

  Rick said, “Take it in your own hands. You know what’s happening, you’ve sold me on it . . . I’m with you, my boys’d do it . . .”

  Stan was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll forget you said that, Rick. But I’ll give you this warning. I forbid you as your superior to do anything that would prejudice the running of Saskeega Power. I’m still Works Controller, and, by God, if that’s my job I’m going to see it keeps on getting done. You clear on that, Rick?”

  Cameron shook his head. It was like he couldn’t think straight any more. “You can’t just let it build, Stan. It’s too bloody awful to think about. If this thing gets started . . .”

  Mainwaring shook his head. “Rick, I’m in a vice. I’m caught in the same trap as everybody else. It’s the sort of trap only the human race could have invented for itself. It could have sprung any time. It’s chosen now. We’re hooked on our own technology.

  “Those lines have got to stay in. We need ’em. We’re dead without them. Could be we’re dead with them as well, that’s just too bad. But we can’t turn the clock back. We can’t scrap electricity just because it’s turned mean.

  “I’ve told you what I know is true. But I didn’t tell you I believed it. This is one of those times when knowing and believing are two different things. I can’t let myself believe this because of what I am at Saskeega. I can’t believe it on a personal basis either because it represents the descent to what I’ve been taught to regard as unreason. I can’t take a fall like that.”

  He walked across the shed and turned on another light. Then another. Then he started one of the lathes. He said, “I stand or fall on what I’ve told you. I’m about to prove it one way or the other.”

  Suddenly, Rick was scared. “Stan, what the Hell . . .”

  He turned on the other lathe, the
drilling machine. He looked round but there was nothing else left to start up. The whole place was humming and clacking, light streaming out across the lawn in the dusk. And far-off was the Black Horse, a shadow in the night. The mountain looked ten miles tall. Stan said, “This filth can come down the wires. It got to the people in hospital. It got to the girl Allison. It made her do something I still shudder to think about. So it could be with us now. In the lamps, the lathes.

  “I say the Thing, whatever it is, is logical. So far it’s moved in steps that can and have been explained. Being logical, it knows I’m the only guy understands it and can order its death. I’ve absolved you from responsibility and also for the moment from risk by giving you the orders I did. So if it wants to stay alive it’s got to take me. And it’s got to move fast.” He put his hand on the housing of one of the lathes and looked at the mountain. He said, “I’m challenging you, you bastard. And whichever way you move you’re through. Because if I go off the book people will finally know you’re real, and they’ll know how to carve your heart out . . .”

  Nothing happened. The mountain hung in the sky like a cloud and the lathes turned softly and the belts went click-click-click over the pulleys and that was all. They waited; then Stan shut down the gear and Rick followed him back to the house.

  They heard a late night newscast. The news was weird. Throughout the States ten thousand people had been reported missing from their homes within the last twenty-four hours. The FBI were conducting nation-wide enquiries. An airliner had crashed in the Rockies, nearly five hundred miles off course. A cowboy, riding a boundary miles from anywhere, had seen a strange thing. He swore he’d met an army of ragged, empty-faced folk who swarmed past without speaking, pushed on to God knew where. There was a lot more stuff like that.

  Stan hunted out some maps and did a little plotting. The course of the aircraft, the sightings of wandering people . . . he wound up with a set of lines. They all pointed to one place.

  Rick felt he couldn’t believe his eyes. But he had to believe. He said, “Stan, by God, it’s moving. It’s started to move . . .” Stan just sat and shook his head. He didn’t answer.