Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  Four: Earth was unable to view the Nititian civilization from inside.

  Inside … a wave of claustrophobia swept over Harley as he realized that these cardinal facts he knew bore no relation to this little world inside. They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?

  Uneasily, Harley moved about the room; the parquet floor echoed the indecision of his footsteps. He had walked into the billiards room. Now he prodded the balls across the green cloth with one finger, preyed on by conflicting intentions. The white spheres touched and rolled apart. That was how the two halves of his mind worked. Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should—not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that "here" and "not here" seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances.

  The ivory slid wearily into a pocket. He decided. He would not sleep in his room tonight.

  · · · · ·

  They came from the various parts of the house to share a bedtime drink. By tacit consent the cards had been postponed until some other time: there was, after all, so much other time.

  They talked about the slight nothings that comprised their day, the model of one of the rooms that Calvin was building and May furnishing, the faulty light in the upper corridor which came on too slowly. They were subdued. It was time once more to sleep, and in that sleep who knew what dreams might come? But they would sleep. Harley knew—wondering if the others also knew—that with the darkness which descended as they climbed into bed would come an undeniable command to sleep.

  He stood tensely just inside his bedroom door, strongly aware of the unorthodoxy of his behavior. His head hammered painfully and he pressed a cold hand against his temple. He heard the others go one by one to their separate rooms. Pief called good night to him; Harley replied. Silence fell.

  Now!

  As he stepped nervously into the passage, the light came on. Yes, it was slow—reluctant. His heart pumped. He was committed. He did not know what he was going to do or what was going to happen, but he was committed. The compulsion to sleep had been avoided. Now he had to hide, and wait.

  It is not easy to hide when a light signal follows wherever you go. But by entering a recess which led to a disused room, opening the door slightly and crouching in the doorway, Harley found the faulty landing light dimmed off and left him in the dark.

  He was neither happy nor comfortable. His brain seethed in a conflict he hardly understood. He was alarmed to think he had broken the rules and frightened of the creaking darkness about him. But the suspense did not last for long.

  The corridor light came back on. Jagger was leaving his bedroom, taking no precaution to be silent. The door swung loudly shut behind him. Harley caught a glimpse of his face before he turned and made for the stairs: he looked noncommittal but serene—like a man going off duty. He went downstairs in bouncy, jaunty fashion.

  Jagger should have been in bed asleep. A law of nature had been defied.

  Unhesitatingly, Harley followed. He had been prepared for something and something had happened, but his flesh crawled with fright. The light-headed notion came to him that he might disintegrate with fear. All the same, he kept doggedly down the stairs, feet noiseless on the heavy carpet.

  Jagger had rounded a corner. He was whistling quietly as he went. Harley heard him unlock a door. That would be the store—no other doors were locked. The whistling faded.

  The store was open. No sound came from within. Cautiously, Harley peered inside. The far wall had swung open about a central pivot, revealing a passage beyond. For minutes Harley could not move, staring fixedly at this breach.

  Finally, and with a sense of suffocation, he entered the store. Jagger had gone through there. Harley also went through. Somewhere he did not know, somewhere whose existence he had not guessed.… Somewhere that wasn’t the house.… The passage was short and had two doors, one at the end rather like a cage door (Harley did not recognize a lift when he saw one), one in the side, narrow and with a window.

  This window was transparent. Harley looked through it and then fell back choking. Dizziness swept in and shook him by the throat.

  Stars shone outside.

  With an effort, he mastered himself and made his way back upstairs, lurching against the banisters. They had all been living under a ghastly misapprehension.…

  He barged into Calvin’s room and the light lit. A faint sweet smell was in the air, and Calvin lay on his broad back, fast asleep.

  "Calvin! Wake up!" Harley shouted.

  The sleeper never moved. Harley was suddenly aware of his own loneliness and the eerie feel of the great house about him. Bending over the bed, he shook Calvin violently by the shoulders and slapped his face.

  Calvin groaned and opened one eye.

  "Wake up, man," Harley said. "Something terrible’s going on here."

  The other propped himself on one elbow, communicated fear rousing him thoroughly.

  "Jagger’s left the house," Harley told him. "There’s a way outside. We’re—we’ve got to find out what we are." His voice rose to an hysterical pitch. He was shaking Calvin again. "We must find out what’s wrong here. Either we are victims of some ghastly experiment—or we’re all monsters!"

  And as he spoke, before his staring eyes, beneath his clutching hands, Calvin began to wrinkle up and fold and blur, his eyes running together and his great torso contracting. Something else—something lively and alive—was forming in his place.

  Harley only stopped yelling when, having plunged downstairs, the sight of the stars through the small window steadied him. He had to get out, wherever "out" was.

  He pulled the small door open and stood in the fresh night air.

  · · · · ·

  Harley’s eye was not accustomed to judging distances. It took him some while to realize the nature of his surroundings, to realize that mountains stood distantly against the starlit sky, and that he himself stood on a platform twelve feet above the ground. Some distance away, lights gleamed, throwing bright rectangles on to an expanse of tarmac.

  There was a steel ladder at the edge of the platform. Biting his lip, Harley approached it and climbed clumsily down. He was shaking violently with cold and fear. When his feet touched solid ground, he began to run. Once he looked back: the house perched on its platform like a frog hunched on top of a rat trap.

  He stopped abruptly then, in almost dark. Abhorrence jerked up inside him like retching. The high crackling stars and the pale serration of the mountains began to spin, and he clenched his fists to hold on to consciousness. That house, whatever it was, was the embodiment of all the coldness in his mind. Harley said to himself: "Whatever has been done to me, I’ve been cheated. Someone has robbed me of something so thoroughly I don’t even know what it is. It’s been a cheat, a cheat.…" And he choked on the idea of those years that had been pilfered from him. No thought: thought scorched the synapses and ran like acid through the brain. Action only! His leg muscles jerked into movement again.

  Buildings loomed about him. He simply ran for the nearest light and burst into the nearest door. Then he pulled up sharp, panting and blinking the harsh illumination out of his pupils.

  The walls of the room were covered with graphs and charts. In the center of the room was a wide desk with vision-screen and loudspeaker on it. It was a business-like room with overloaded ashtrays and a state of ordered untidiness. A thin man sat alertly at the desk; he had a thin mouth.

  Four other men stood in the room, all were armed, none seemed surprised to see him. The man at the desk wore a neat suit; the others were in uniform.

  Harley leaned on the door-jam and sobbed. He cou
ld find no words to say.

  "It has taken you four years to get out of there," the thin man said. He had a thin voice.

  "Come and look at this," he said, indicating the screen before him. With an effort, Harley complied; his legs worked like rickety crutches.

  On the screen, clear and real, was Calvin’s bedroom. The outer wall gaped, and through it two uniformed men were dragging a strange creature, a wiry, mechanical-looking being that had once been called Calvin.

  "Calvin was a Nititian," Harley observed dully. He was conscious of a sort of stupid surprise at his own observation.

  The thin man nodded approvingly.

  "Enemy infiltration was a nightmare and threat," he said. "Nowhere on Earth was safe from them: they can kill a man, dispose of him and turn into exact replicas of him. Makes things difficult.… State security was often being broken. But Nititian ships have to land here to disembark the Non-Men and to pick them up again after their work is done. That is the weak link in their chain.

  "We intercepted one such ship-load and bagged them singly after they had assumed humanoid form. We subjected them to artificial amnesia and put small groups of them into different environments for study. This is the Army Institute of Investigation of Non-Men, by the way. We’ve learnt a lot … quite enough to combat the menace.… Your group, of course, was one such."

  Harley asked in a gritty voice: "Why did you put me in with them?"

  The thin man rattled a ruler between his teeth before answering.

  "Each group has to have a human observer in their very midst, despite all the scanning devices that watch from outside. You see, a Nititian uses a deal of energy maintaining a human form; once in that shape, he is kept in it by self-hypnosis which only breaks down in times of stress, the amount of stress bearable varying from one individual to another. A human on the spot can sense such stresses.… It’s a tiring job for him; we get doubles always to work day on, day off—"

  "But I’ve always been there—"

  "Of your group," the thin man cut in, "the human was Jagger, or two men alternating as Jagger. You caught one of them going off duty."

  "That doesn’t make sense," Harley shouted. "You’re trying to say that I—"

  He choked on the words. They were no longer pronounceable. He felt his outer form flowing away like sand as from the other side of the desk revolver barrels were levelled at him.

  "Your stress level is remarkably high," continued the thin man, turning his gaze away from the spectacle. "But where you fail is where you all fail. Like Earth’s insects which imitate vegetables, your cleverness cripples you. You can only be carbon copies. Because Jagger did nothing in the house, all the rest of you instinctively followed suit. You didn’t get bored—you didn’t even try to make passes at Dapple—as personable a Non-Man as I ever saw. Even the model spaceship jerked no appreciable reaction out of you."

  Brushing his suit down, he rose before the skeletal being which now cowered in a corner.

  "The inhumanity inside will always give you away," he said evenly. "However human you are outside."

  HARRY HARRISON

  b. 1925

  Harry Harrison's rich body of work ranges from the hardest of hard-science fiction adventure novels to merciless spoofs of the genre's conventions and politics.

  Harrison began his career as a commercial artist in the mid-1940s, working in comics as an illustrator and writer and supplying illustrations to genre magazines such as Galaxy Science Fiction. Influenced by his fellow members of the Hydra Club, a New York group of science fiction professionals, he soon became interested in writing, and sold his first story, "Rock Diver," in 1951. His short fiction was published regularly from then on.

  In 1957, Harrison sold his first story to Astounding Science Fiction, beginning a long and close relationship with that magazine and its editor, John W. Campbell, Jr. That tale, a fast-moving adventure with a broad leavening of humor, was his first of many in a similar style to feature the interstellar-criminal-turned-cop Slippery Jim DiGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat.

  Harrison's first published novel, Deathworld, kicked off a series describing the colonization of a planet crammed with hostile life, and established him as a vigorous writer of intelligent action adventures. A third series, featuring Bill the Galactic Hero, is a sharp extended lampoon of story elements from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and even Harrison himself.

  Later novels treaded more serious ground, including Make Room! Make Room! , an impassioned novel of overpopulation, gravely told and well-formed. It was the basis of the film Soylent Green(1973), and though much of the novel's substance was lost in the transition, the film nevertheless won the 1973 Nebula for Best Dramatic Presentation.

  Harrison's later works include the To the Stars (begun in 1981) series and the excellent Eden series — West of Eden (1984),Winter in Eden (1986) and Return to Eden (1988) — an ambitiously conceived alternate world sequence based on the assumption that the dinosaurs did not suffer extinction and, in the due course of time, have evolved into saurians skilled at biotechnology. Their encounter with a savage humanity, and the irreconcilable differences between two intelligent, warring species, is dramatically gripping.

  The K-Factor, by Harry Harrison

  WE'RE losing a planet, Neel. I'm afraid that I can't ... understand it."

  The bald and wrinkled head wobbled a bit on the thin neck, and his eyes were moist. Abravanel was a very old man. Looking at him, Neel realized for the first time just how old and close to death he was. It was a profoundly shocking thought.

  "Pardon me, sir," Neel broke in, "but is it possible? To lose a planet, I mean. If the readings are done correctly, and the k-factor equations worked to the tenth decimal place, then it's really just a matter of adjustment, making the indicated corrections. After all, Societics is an exact science—"

  "Exact? Exact! Of course it's not! Have I taught you so little that you dare say that to me?" Anger animated the old man, driving the shadow of death back a step or two.

  Neel hesitated, feeling his hands quiver ever so slightly, groping for the right words. Societics was his faith, and his teacher, Abravanel, its only prophet. This man before him, carefully preserved by the age-retarding drugs, was unique in the galaxy. A living anachronism, a refugee from the history books. Abravanel had singlehandedly worked out the equations, spelled out his science of Societics. Then he had trained seven generations of students in its fundamentals. Hearing the article of his faith defamed by its creator produced a negative feedback loop in Neel so strong his hands vibrated in tune with it. It took a jarring effort to crack out of the cycle.

  "The laws that control Societics, as postulated by ... you, are as exact as any others in the unified-field theory universe."

  "No they're not. And, if any man I taught believes that nonsense, I'm retiring tomorrow and dropping dead the day after. My science—and it is really not logical to call it a science—is based on observation, experimentation, control groups and corrected observations. And though we have made observations in the millions, we are dealing in units in the billions, and the interactions of these units are multiples of that. And let us never forget that our units are people who, when they operate as individuals, do so in a completely different manner. So you cannot truthfully call my theories exact. They fit the facts well enough and produce results in practice, that has been empirically proven. So far. Some day, I am sure, we will run across a culture that doesn't fit my rules. At that time the rules will have to be revised. We may have that situation now on Himmel. There's trouble cooking there."

  "They have always had a high activity count, sir," Neel put in hopefully.

  "High yes, but always negative. Until now. Now it is slightly positive and nothing we can do seems to change it. That's why I've called you in. I want you to run a new basic survey, ignoring the old one still in operation, to re-examine the check points on our graphs. The trouble may lie there."

  Neel thought before he answered, pi
cking his words carefully. "Wouldn't that be a little ... unethical, sir? After all Hengly, who is operator there now, is a friend of mine. Going behind his back, you know."

  "I know nothing of the sort." Abravanel snorted. "We are not playing for poker chips, or seeing who can get a paper published first. Have you forgotten what Societics is?"

  Neel answered by rote. "The applied study of the interaction of individuals in a culture, the interaction of the group generated by these individuals, the equations derived therefrom, and the application of these equations to control one or more factors of this same culture."

  "And what is the one factor that we have tried to control in order to make all the other factors possible of existence?"

  "War." Neel said, in a very small voice.

  "Very good then, there is no doubt what it is we are talking about. You are going to land quietly on Himmel, do a survey as quickly as possible and transmit the data back here. There is no cause to think of it as sneaking behind Hengly's back, but as doing something to help him set the matter right. Is that understood?"

  "Yes, sir," Neel said firmly this time, straightening his back and letting his right hand rest reassuringly on the computer slung from his belt.

  "Excellent. Then it is now time to meet your assistant." Abravanel touched a button on his desk.

  It was an unexpected development and Neel waited with interest as the door opened. But he turned away abruptly, his eyes slitted and his face white with anger. Abravanel introduced them.

  "Neel Sidorak, this is—"

  "Costa. I know him. He was in my class for six months." There wasn't the slightest touch of friendliness in Neel's voice now. Abravanel either ignored it or didn't hear it. He went on as if the two cold, distant young men were the best of friends.

  "Classmates. Very good—then there is no need to make introductions. Though it might be best to make clear your separate areas of control. This is your project Neel, and Adao Costa will be your assistant, following your orders and doing whatever he can to help. You know he isn't a graduate Societist, but he has done a lot of field work for us and can help you greatly in that. And, of course, he will be acting as an observer for the UN, and making his own reports in this connection."