The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  This woman was a criminal and this was her cell.

  Somehow, when he had traveled back in time, he had ended up in the same instant of time she was in. Against all odds, but more than likely the time travel machines used a bunch of the same settings and that’s how they had both ended up in this same instant in the same area.

  The thinking went that there was so much room in the past, there was no real reason to spread out the criminals over too wide a number of time moments.

  The woman stared at him for a moment, clearly shocked at his stunned reaction. “You weren’t looking for me, were you? You stumbled in here by accident, didn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  She shook her head, clearly sad about something. Then she brightened. “Well, this is one for the record books.”

  Again, all he could do was nod. More than likely this little accident would help the sales of his book, but at the moment that was the least of his worries. The knife in her hand bothered him a lot more.

  “So, you want some pizza or not?” she asked, moving with the knife toward the couch. “I think it’s still warm.”

  “So, what did you do?” he asked, trying his best to make his voice stay level and his tone conversational, like he was asking her the time of day.

  “Stabbed a man,” she said, smiling as she held up the knife.

  This time the smile got to her eyes and he knew she was kidding.

  She laughed and then said, “Drugs. Smuggling the most recent designer drug from a modeling assignment into the wrong country. Stupid.”

  The realization hit him as to who he was looking at. Her name was Nancy. Nancy Robinson, a supermodel convicted and sentenced back when he was still working on his third novel. Her face had been all over the world net, and they had even filmed her disappearing back into time to serve her sentence.

  Now, after the six years, she had aged slightly, but was still a stunning beauty.

  “So, who are you and what the hell are you doing here?” she asked, picking up a piece of pizza.

  She bit into the pizza, watching him with her intense, green eyes.

  “My name’s Nick,” he said. “I’m a writer here researching a new book on the secrets of people living in this building. Including Donna Hayman, the woman who was supposed to be living in this apartment at this point in time.”

  “Welcome to her apartment,” Nancy said, looking disgusted. “Trust me, she’s not home and she has no real secrets, unless you call dying her hair and being behind on her credit cards a secret.”

  Then she laughed, the sound husky and odd in a weird way. She indicated that he should sit down and have some pizza. “Might as well get comfortable. It does look like you stumbled on a really big secret in this apartment.”

  He smiled and let himself relax a little. “It does, doesn’t it?”

  He took the offered piece of rich-smelling pizza and carefully bit into it. It tasted even better than it smelled, if that was possible.

  For the next thirty minutes, while they finished off the pizza, they talked and laughed about all sorts of things, and he got the short version of the events that put her in this jail cell.

  All he kept thinking was how fantastically beautiful she was, how lucky he was to have found her, and how much more enjoyable the last few weeks of his research trip was going to be. He should have started at the top floor instead of the bottom floor. He would have found her ten months ago.

  After he told her about a few of the other residents in the building, she smiled and sighed. “I like you, Nick. It’s going to be good to have company for the last two years of my sentence.”

  “I only wish,” he said, laughing. “I’ve only got two weeks left on my research time, although I might be able to extend a month or two before hitting my recall button.”

  The emergency recall button, and the main one in his time bubble in the lobby, were the only way anyone from his present could track him to this moment and bring him back. He had been warned that if something happened to those two buttons, there would be no finding him.

  She looked at him, a puzzled frown wrinkling her wonderful face. Then sadly she shook her head. “You don’t understand, do you?”

  She pointed to the door. “Your recall button is blocked in here. Go ahead, try to leave.”

  He stared at her, again trying to absorb her words. He then glanced back at the shattered wooden door that he had stepped through and the hallway beyond. There were two other shattered doors he had gone into earlier in the week.

  “This is a prison, remember,” she said, softly. “No one leaves here until they call me back when my time is up. It is why I never crashed through that door and explored the city.”

  “You don’t have the special implants to do so,” he said, pushing the panic he was feeling down. Suddenly the pizza wasn’t settling so well in his stomach. “You would not have been able to move through the air out there.”

  “Of course I have them,” she said, sadness filling her eyes. “Every prisoner has them just in case something goes wrong with the bubble. We also have special recall buttons that will only go through the bubble when our time is served.”

  He shook his head and stood and headed for the shattered front door to the apartment. She couldn’t be right. She was just pulling some sort of sick joke on him.

  As he reached the door, he started to step through the opening and his leg banged into what felt like a very hard surface. Pain shot up his leg and he grabbed his knee for a moment. There didn’t seem to be anything in his way, yet there was something there.

  “Force field around the bubble,” she said from behind him, her voice soft. “A prison far more effective than any cell invented. And it will remain in place for just over two more years.”

  “Sorry, got to go,” he said, his voice again high and showing the panic he felt. He pushed his emergency recall button and waited for the tingling feeling of the time travel kicking in.

  Nothing.

  He just stood there, with a former supermodel staring sadly at him. He clearly wasn’t going anywhere, at least for two years and twelve days.

  But at least he had a beautiful supermodel to keep him company.

  * * * *

  Six months later, he was still sleeping on the couch.

  Day after day of those six months he had stared at that stupid sign on the gumball machine.

  Wait for the Coin to Drop.

  He had come to find the secrets of the residents of an apartment building. And he had done just that.

  It seemed the resident he had ended up trapped with had enough secrets to fill a dozen books. To start off with, she was bulimic, with no desire at all to help herself do anything else. In the small three-room apartment, the sounds of her forcing herself to throw up after every meal soon went from worrisome to completely revolting.

  She had told him, on the second night, when he made a pass at her, that she had once been a man, had had the operation, and now hated everything to do with men. In fact, during the second month of his time with her, she had told him that he disgusted her.

  It seemed that everything about her was fake. She took off her small breasts every night and hung them with her blonde wig on the wall beside her bed.

  Worst of all, she was the most shallow human being he could have ever imagined in even a horror novel. The only topic of conversation that was allowed was her looks and her career and if she could save her career when she returned. She wondered if the world will have forgiven her “little mistake” as she called it.

  She had quit school in the tenth grade and seemed proud of that fact. She had brought nothing to read and claimed that she had never read a book, ever, in her entire adult life. And there wasn’t a thing he could use to write on in the entire prison cell. What little bit of writing he managed to do was to fill the last of his notes in the pad he kept with him each day before it ran out of power.

  Every day Nancy spent hours and hours and hours in the bathroom, staring at herself
in the mirror.

  Three small rooms filled with secrets. They had become impossibly small within the first week and downright tiny by the end of the first month. Plus he had no clothes to wear besides what he had been wearing, so his main chore was to cook himself something to eat twice a day and do laundry every third day.

  The rest of the time he just lay on the couch and stared at the sign on the gumball machine sitting beside the open door that promised his freedom, yet never brought it.

  The gumball machine became the symbol of his life.

  Wait for the Coin to Drop.

  He was trapped in a moment in time with the secrets he had uncovered, the same type of moment that existed when a child waited for the coin to drop in the gumball machine to deliver the promised reward.

  BEYOND THE DARKNESS, by S. J. Byrne

  CHAPTER I

  Lylwani’s slender, pink hands clutched Nad’s arm.

  “Do we have to look?” she said rather than asked.

  Nad’s bushy, blond brows only lowered over his gray eyes and his mouth tightened into a scowl of hate and defiance as he watched the execution.

  “Those are orders,” he said. “Orders! Always orders! Disobey or even question an order and you get what he’s going to get!”

  Nad’s red-headed younger brother, Ron, nervously shifted the almost negligible weight of his frail body from his club foot to his good one and drew in closer to Nad.

  “Be careful!” he hissed. “You’ll be overheard!”

  His round blue eyes surveyed the faces of the hundred or so Passengers gathered there, and his female companion, holding his hand, felt in it the reflection of his terror. Yldra, she of the long blue hair and the pale white skin, had lost her customary smile, and her great, dark eyes glistened on the verge of tears.

  “Poor Gradon!” she said to Ron. “He was so good and kind. Now he goes to the Abyss…!”

  A frightened murmur arose from the crowd of Passengers as the Door slid soundlessly aside, exposing them all momentarily to the execution chamber that would soon open into the Abyss. Sargon M-13-NT, Navigator, shoved old Gradon unceremoniously into the large chamber, and the Door closed upon him forever.

  Through its crystal clear substance they could see Gradon plainly. He turned his back on the dark destruction that approached him and faced all his old friends, a weary smile on his kindly face. As Sargon reached for the control valve, Gradon waved goodbye not only to those present but to those other thousands of Passengers who had been ordered to witness his execution in the visiplates.

  Then the valve turned, and the Passengers hid their faces.

  But Sargon shouted at them. “Look! As you persist in seeking the answers to the Unknown, so shall you be sent into it—into the Abyss, from which there is no return! Thus the discontented and the troublemakers shall die! Look, I said!”

  And the squad of Navigators with him sprayed the Passengers with pain ray until they looked. By the time Nad’s party looked up, there was nothing much left to see. A frozen splatter of blood on the outer surface of the Door, and beyond—mystery of mysteries, especially to Nad—was the gaping opening into the Abyss.

  Out there was gray-black nothingness. Why? What was it? Was it only another type of wall, a wall of endlessness beyond impenetrable walls of metal? Walls of cryosite, resistant to the terrific blows of meteors from the Abyss. Walls of emptiness and the Unknown. Walls of the mind. Seek not! Know not! Obey and be content—or die like Gradon, one of the finest men Nad had ever known.

  As some of Gradon’s closest friends cried aloud in their bereavement, the outer door to the Abyss closed, and Sargon and his men moved toward Nad’s group. Nad knew this was not without premeditation, for Sargon had evidenced a marked interest in Lylwani for some time.

  As Lylwani stepped close to Nad, and Ron and Yldra stepped deferentially aside to make way for Sargon, Nad’s lifelong frustration and indignation burst their bonds. He stepped in front of Sargon and deliberately blocked his path.

  Nad was tall, lean, tense and white. His gray eyes met Sargon’s black stare unwaveringly. Sargon was slightly taller, broader of shoulder, and thicker in the limbs and neck. His reddish complexion deepened visibly in sudden rage, and his thick, leonine mane of jet-black hair seemed to bristle.

  “Well, idiot!” he snapped. “Step aside! Haven’t you learned your lesson yet?”

  “Yes,” replied Nad, in a strangely subdued tone of voice, “I have learned my lesson. You have all the advantages and we have none. I only intend to make a constructive suggestion, with your permission.”

  Ron whimpered in his fright and tugged at his brother’s arm, but Nad waved him back, impatiently.

  “It had better be constructive,” warned Sargon. “Speak, man! We haven’t got all day!”

  One of the other Passengers, an old, gray-haired man with pale blue eyes and a leathery skin, crowded close to listen as Nad spoke.

  “The occasional trouble you experience with us Passengers would be eliminated,” Nad said, “if you simply gave us more information. For instance—”

  “Information!” shouted Sargon. “There is no information! This is the world in which you were born, and here you will live and die! Why must you grow discontented when you are adequately supplied with food, clothing and shelter and entertainment without having to work for it? Here there are only seven thousand of you, with kilometers of spacious room in which to live and play. Yet you complain! You do not trust the Navigators upon whom your life and welfare depends. It is because of this ungratefulness on your part that we have lost patience with you, and these disciplinary measures will continue to be taken until you accept the advantages with which you have been provided! What more do you want!”

  “Sargon,” said Nad, unmoved by this tirade, “do you know your own father?”

  “Of course, stupid! I—” Then Sargon bit his lip and he reddened visibly. He had been tricked into an admission he would not have made otherwise.

  “You see, that’s the difference between the Navigators and the Passengers,” said Nad, rapidly. “We don’t know who our parents were, and parents can’t recognize their own children. The only reason I call Ron-E-251-P my brother is because you have told me he is my brother, and that was perhaps unintentional on your part. You Navigators have memory. You have deprived us of that so that we will forget. Forget what, Sargon? What is it you Navigators are so afraid that we will remember?”

  Sargon’s big fists clenched. “Shut up!” he blurted out. “Do you want what Gradon got?”

  Nad heard other Passengers gasp in alarm. Lylwani called out his name pleadingly and Ron ran away, taking Yldra with him. But the old man with the pale blue eyes drew even closer as he watched Nad.

  As Sargon advanced slowly upon him and Nad slowly gave way before him, the latter continued. Now that he had started he could not stop himself.

  “Our language is filled with strange words that we use without realizing their full significance,” he said rapidly. “Why do you say ‘day’ or ‘night’ or ‘month’ or ‘year’? What is the true meaning of these strange divisions of time where time never varies? You say that here there are only seven thousand Passengers. Are there more elsewhere? What is a Passenger, actually, other than a man or a woman who is not a Navigator and who is forbidden to enter section N or M?

  “Why is it such an advantage not to have to work? Did Passengers work before? At what—and where? These walls that separate us from the Abyss were made by men. What was here before men knew enough to make them? Why are we three distinct types of people? There are the pale, blue-haired ones, such as Yldra V-57-P, and there is a second kind, like myself and my brother, who have the letter E attached to our names. Then there is the third type, like Lylwani here, with a pinkish complexion and jet-black hair like yours. You are Sargon M-13-NT and she is called Lylwani M-781-P. Your kind has the letter M attached to all your names. You say this is our natural world in which we have been born, yet you have also mentioned the ‘growing
problem’ of inbreeding. I have heard the Navigator medicos remark that my brother’s club foot is the result of the problem. I can only conclude that our present state is not a natural one, but rather—”

  At that moment, Sargon struck Nad with all his might, and he went down hard on the metal floor with blood spurting from his lower lip. Lylwani dropped instantly beside him.

  “I let you talk,” said Sargon, “so that you would incriminate yourself completely. You will be executed, of course.”

  “Why!” cried Lylwani, rising quickly to her feet and facing him. “His crime is only recognizable in relation to arbitrary opinion on your part! What good will it do to destroy him, too? A thousand more will ask the same questions!”

  Sargon’s thick lips curled in amusement as he surveyed the lithe young woman before him, but secretly he admired again, as he had so often in the past, her long, raven-black hair lying across her shapely pink shoulders, and he hungered for her full, young lips while he thrilled at the fiery spirit that stared at him out of her dark green eyes.

  “Don’t get yourself in trouble, too, beautiful,” he said. “Take him away and get out of my sight, both of you!”

  “But will he be executed?” Lylwani persisted, as Nad rose slowly to his feet.

  Sargon raised his thick brows as though surprised by the question. “Naturally!” he said. And then he walked away with his men.

  “Oh Nad! Nad!” cried Lylwani, throwing her arms around his neck. “I couldn’t live without you! They can’t kill you! They can’t!”

  Nad was apparently oblivious to all this. He did not feel the many sympathetic hands that touched him or hear the voices of the Passengers as they crowded thickly about him. His gray eyes only stared at Sargon’s receding back.

  “If anything will preserve me,” he said, wiping more blood from his lip, “it will be hate—and the will to live until my hands have closed around Sargon’s fat neck. They won’t be able to take me until I have done at least that!”