New Writings in SF 19 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  ‘This is a place I could settle to,’ whispered Susan.

  ‘Let’s smash the transceiver circuits.’

  The momentary squeeze of a slim hand spoke volumes. But there were seven of them.

  Considering the fact that scenic splendour and beauty had not been the criteria used by the robot probes, the tapes hinted a general magnificence, an imagined splendour that could only be guessed at. These pictures were only of the kindliest most hospitable regions, chosen for survival.

  Richard leaned back and stretched.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘And brandy.’

  ‘Oh, naturally.’

  On the way back with the laden tray, his foot caught the edge of a rug and he overbalanced sending the tray and its contents across the room. He fell heavily, awkwardly, the stainless steel floor seemed to come up to him in slow motion before thumping him soundly on the forehead and splitting a lip against a tooth.

  He went out like a snuffed candle.

  When he came to, Richard was in his bunk, his face stiff with sticking plaster and bruises. Susan must have lugged him into the cabin and tucked him up—tough girl. He fingered his swollen face. Tougher than she looked.

  Susan entered then, carrying a fresh cup of coffee.

  ‘Your coffee, sir; better late than never.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And next time, just wait till you get sat down before tackling the brandy—I thought you could take it.’

  ‘I’ll remember that.’ He gasped. ‘God this coffee’s hot.’

  He swallowed some more.

  ‘I’m a clumsy idiot. Thanks for cleaning my face up. You didn’t strain anything, lifting me in here?’

  She flexed her arm as if expecting a bulging biceps to pop up.

  ‘I’ve given you a shot of metabol, you get off to sleep now.’ She brushed his wounded lips with her own.

  ‘That’ll stop any capers for tonight, anyway.’

  ‘Spoil sport.’

  The next ship morning, he felt fine. The contusion and cut lip had healed rapidly under the influence of the metabol which was designed to speed the body’s healing powers. Only a slight soreness and stiffness remained.

  Entering the kitchenette after a shower, he was pleased to find himself up first.

  ‘Coffee—breakfast—roast—and crispy bacon for two.’

  * * * *

  Days wandered by pleasantly. The ship managed itself with only the minimum of human intervention. The off-duty crew continued to almost-die peacefully and the parsecs of empty space hurtled by at a velocity which only just broke the old Einsteinian laws.

  One late ship afternoon found the crew relaxing in the lounge. Albinoni’s eighteenth century Adagio lent a sonorous rhythm to the atmosphere.

  ‘I wonder why they send humans out on this sort of work? Why not robots? They could set up a transceiver easily enough. No deep, sleep facilities needed either.’

  Susan looked up sharply and then laid her head back on Richard’s shoulder.

  ‘Survival of the species,’ she answered in an oddly bitter tone. ‘Shipwreck, transceiver failure—it happens. At least we’d—there’d be an outpost of human beings on Halvar or wherever. There’s enough genetic material in the stores to impregnate an army of women. Let alone—three.’

  Richard realised he’d touched a hidden sensibility and dialled a view of the outside star field in an effort to change the subject. He cradled Susan’s head more gently. Her body, stiff with the unknown emotion, relaxed gradually into his arms.

  ‘Androids are nearly human, you know. Just because their nerves are drawn gold and their brains grown from synthetic neural tissue—they’re sentient creatures.’

  Richard knew of other differences but was willing to concede that they lived.

  ‘It’s only because they can’t, can’t have ...’ She paused, picking a clinical rather than human term. ‘Can’t reproduce. That’s why they send human people on these trips.’

  There was the barest lurch in the deck beneath them. The ship had altered course to annul a collision risk. The acceleration involved had been too fast for the internal grav fields to make complete compensation.

  The ship computer performed a continual delicate balancing act between speed and safety. An instantaneous network analysis of the space ahead; computing an optimum route, a critical path through the random obstructions.

  Another lurch threw Susan’s weight on to Richard in a flurry of frills and bare arms and legs.

  He took advantage of the situation.

  At velocities above cee, nominally empty space could become pretty congested at times. That path could become very critical.

  The deck heaved beneath them, and again china and cutlery smashed to the floor with sharp fragments caroming about like shrapnel. The couple reluctantly disentangled, it was too dangerous at the moment. The incident could be serious and although they could not aid the computer in its split nano-second decisions, the control room might be the best place.

  They made the control room unsteadily in the shifting pseudo-grav fields. More and more shifts in the grav field’s direction betokened faster and tighter manoeuvring by the ship computer.

  Richard’s inner ear mechanisms were sending violently contradictory messages to his brain. A longer and more than usually vicious jerk sent him sliding across the floor, now at a forty degree tilt to the usual ‘up’ or ‘down’. He felt his arm snap and involuntarily yelled with pain. Within instants, Susan was with him, a slim arm about his waist pinioning him to her taut body. She practically carried him to a control chair across the yawning and pitching deck and laced the safety straps across him.

  ‘Arm’s broken—left one.’

  She strapped the useless limb to the chair arm and fought her way across to the piloting console.

  The pain was soon replaced by a blessed numbness and Richard thankfully let the safety harness take his weight as he watched Susan daintily punching buttons on the damaged board. She looked so out of place against the starkly functional instruments that Richard had to smile at the picture.

  The smile died; the girl had been hurt, her blouse had been ripped away exposing a long, deep ugly cut across her shoulder.

  But it wasn’t a cut. The right word was ‘tear’. He followed the line of the tear; starting below her right ear, down her neck and across the collar bone, down across the left breast—all without a trace of blood.

  Richard turned his head away, watching covertly from the corner of his eye. The emergency died, he felt her concentration ebb, saw her become aware of her injuries— damage; noticed her quick glance in his direction.

  She turned away from him.

  ‘I’ll get a cast for that arm. Are you in much pain ?’

  ‘No, it’s gone numb now.’

  Poor little human, he imagined her—it—thinking, so frail.

  She was away longer than necessary to get a medikit. When she reappeared, a fresh blouse had replaced the torn one. She bent over him, administering a shot of pain killer, unstrapping the broken arm. Deft fingers explored the break, righted the broken bone and sprayed a quick setting cast. Richard touched the girl’s neck with his right hand. Where the cut had been the artificial flesh was warm and whole. He stroked his fingers along the smooth, smooth pseudo-flesh beneath her blouse; no cut, no abrasion, and yet he’d seen it.

  She looked up and smiled, then bent to administer a dose of metabol.

  ‘You’d better go easy on this stuff from now on. Someone else may need a drop.’

  Richard bared his teeth in an attempted grin.

  Not you, you bitch. He voiced to himself.

  She half helped, half carried him to his cabin over the now stable floor. She helped him undress, cutting the shirt away from his broken arm.

  A sedative sent him to sleep.

  Sometime later he awoke from a fitful doze with a sense of wrongness. The bulkhead clock indicated one o’clock in the ship’s morning. There were low voices from the
kitchenette and the clink of china. One voice belonged to Susan; another was Roger’s and a third, Norman’s.

  He listened intently but could make out nothing. Stiffly, he stretched out a hand and eased open the door.

  ‘No, everything will be all right now, his arm will have knitted in a few days. You get back to the tank room and de-activate; I’ll go to bed. We don’t want Richard to see us all up and about.’

  But he had, or at least, heard them, which was as good. And memory flooded back—the voices in his last sleep period.

  ‘Man—wake the human.’

  Now he knew. Now he knew why there were only seven. No doubt he would have been told on Halvar in the normal course of events, that he was the only human aboard. The one real human being, the one real live entity among a load of wire and string copies!

  Richard lay back and watched the minute hand trace out a complete circle round the illuminated clock face. His arm was throbbing violently and he could not have slept in any case. The minute hand followed another quarter of its allotted locus and then he gingerly got out of bed.

  He felt a little dizzy. ‘Nearly human,’ she had said. Richard’s anger seethed. No wonder she’d been so vehement about androids, she had a vested interest.

  Silently he opened the door, walking in bare feet. He carried a wicked hunting knife he’d taken from his personal locker. He stole across the cold floor of the control room and gained the corridor to the deep sleep chamber. He stopped at the threshold and looked around him. Immediately to his left, Norman lay beneath the transparent cover. The too, too carefully modelled Norman. Using the knife as a lever, Richard prised the lid off the life support system. The inspection cover should have held a slave computer and interface units.

  It was empty.

  He’d seen the inside of his own several times, hundreds of wires and tiny tubes should have led from the metering devices into the tank. These would control the Ph, the ion balance and dozens of closely linked and interdependent variables of the life support fluid and the occupant’s body.

  But Norman’s tank had no such metering devices. An android didn’t need them, he merely died a total but temporary death; a shock administered to the artificial heart’s pacemaker was all that was needed to wake him, but till that shock ...

  Richard looked down at the still figure. The upper arms, the chest and thighs were covered in goose pimples now frozen into place by the sub-zero temperature. This was only a facsimile of a human being. A likeness, a machine, not alive in the same way that he, Richard, was alive.

  Hesitantly, expecting the still form to suddenly awake, Richard lifted the cover, touched the android’s chest with his knife. He applied pressure and watched in fascination as the point broke through the now brittle plastic sheath. He drew the blade downward across the thorax and the plastic broke and peeled back. Beneath the surface of the sham life support liquid stainless steel ribs were exposed. Bubbles of air pushed their way out of the chest cavity and burst sluggishly on the liquid’s surface.

  The next tank was empty, it was his own.

  The one after that was Christine’s.

  Off came the cap of the metering unit, empty, a shell, a fake like the sleeping form within the clear cover.

  He sent the knife edge across the back of her still white hand. The ‘skin’ stretched away from the cut revealing the metallic bone structure, the steel cord tendons.

  Clive: gold wires gleamed at their cut ends under the razor edge.

  Richard felt a kind of God-like power over these inferior creatures; these fabrications that men like himself had made.

  Roger: a charged capacitor shorted across the blade leaving a nick in the cutting edge.

  And Richard knelt and wept in front of Rosanna’s tank. So perfect, such an exact copy. He could see the golden down of hairs on the forearms, the tiny whorls of carefully sculpted fingerprints. This girl he’d never known in space, never met the robot after the initial briefing session. The computer had never matched them for duty; now, it never would complete the charade.

  The long thin, razor edged weapon sighed into a long cut. From throat to waist, cutting through the rounded breast, laying bare the metallic rib cage, the heartless heart.

  ‘God, what a joke. An eternity from Earth, no one but me and a bunch of zombies.’

  But the flesh wasn’t artfully padded plastic. Given time, a real heart would have beaten beneath the mutilated breast. Belatedly, Richard remembered the seed bank which the ship carried—enough to impregnate an army of women, Susan had said.

  The thick cold liquid was becoming tinged with a turgid flow of red blood. Human blood, seeping from the awful wound.

  Richard didn’t know that he could scream so loud. He was still screaming when Susan came.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE DISCONTENT CONTINGENCY

  Vincent King

  Benevolent Big Brother can be just as big a tyrant as his Orwellian counterpart. Life under the influence of a Happiness Generator could be a strong deterrent to progress of any kind.

  * * * *

  X knew he had to find the pliers. He’d seen some, he could remember seeing some somewhere. Perhaps a Dealer—he’d forgotten but it didn’t matter, X knew he’d find some, it was necessary. All the time he knew he’d get some somewhere.

  It was the Curator’s fault. The Curator put X on to it, on to that Luger. It was the Curator’s own fault.

  The day it started X was wandering aimlessly, passing time in the Weapon’s Hall. He moved between the inlaid crossbows—those damascene swords, all patterns and tassels, the glinting beauty, he passed there, admiring the workmanship, all the past excellences. Somehow it was familiar, it was right for him. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps there was something concealed there for him, some meaning if only he could find it.

  ‘Let me show you these ...’ The Curator was an old man. He had fine grey hair that was combed as if every hair was counted. His moustache was clipped and even, not like the fashion. His eyes were sharp blue. He was perfect, clean and polished, not for use, but like a toy—like one of the soldiers they used to have, or the picture of an astronaut. X could hardly believe that the Curator had spoken to him, he wondered if the old man combed his eyebrows and why he had not seen him before.

  The Curator led him to the pistols. X followed down long silent corridors between the great cases, past whispering holiday trippers in their gaudy clothes. The Curator ignored them, X could tell he was being taken somewhere important.

  He took X through them all, showed him the engraved barrels, the wheel locks and flint locks, he explained the coming of percussion caps and the rifling of barrels, what proof marks were and the changing shape of bullets, the making of smokeless powders. Last of all he showed X the case with the Luger.

  Something in the shape—even on that first day there was a great significance there for X. That tapered barrel, the machined perfection of blued steel, the sculptured quality that was there. It was like a heavy snake, there on the pink velvet, coiled and resting, only waiting for a hand to make it live again.

  The first time X was content to stare. To take in the shapes of the mechanism, to look at the checkering on the grips, to admire that fat butt. Through the weeks he returned every day, the Curator always talked to him, told him all about the Luger. X could hear the excitement in his voice. It was tremendous to know a man like that, out of all the others, a man that was excited and really knew about things. Once the Curator came so quickly from his lunch that there were still crumbs on his moustache and X had to smile as he listened to the words he spoke.

  ‘Pistole Parabellum Model 1900 ...’ the Curator indicated the case. ‘Pistol for war ... Borcharte-Luger Parabellum ... that was the first one. A service weapon, as they used to say. Not a toy for range practice. A barrel length of four and five-eighths inches in the standard model—7.65 mm calibre, eight-round magazine, weighed one pound thirteen ounces...’

  ‘Why?’ said X. ‘T
here were later designs. Tell me what makes it so good?’

  ‘A natural weapon, the most famous in its time. The weight in the right place, wieldy, wonderful, instinctive pointing. With it you shot where you looked. No tools to take it down, the only screws held the butt plates ... and the firing pin.

  ‘Quality. Real quality. Early twentieth-century engineering at its finest, a great example of their art. On firing the toggle-joint lever mechanism is locked while the bullet is in the barrel—no gases wasted. You see, the used case was ejected and a fresh round brought into the barrel, the toggle locked and the weapon cocked and ready to fire again—an automatic pistol. Very powerful and effective.’