New Writings in SF 19 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  The accommodation cabins of the observatory have been built on the periphery, in such a way that each cabin has at least one wall against vacuum. As the laboratory is moved from place to place, structural tensions come out in the form of cracks in the outer shell.

  In the cabin I share with my wife Clare, there are twenty-three cracks, each one of which would be capable of evacuating our cabin of its air if it were not periodically checked and re-sealed. This number of cracks is fairly typical; there is no cabin which does not have at least half a dozen.

  The largest crack in the wall opened one night while we were asleep and, in spite of the fact that we had rigged elaborate pressure-reduction alarms, we were in an advanced state of hypoxia before we were awakened. That crack affected several other cabins at the same time, and it was after this that there was a move among some of the staff to abandon the accommodation section altogether and sleep in one of the common rooms.

  Nothing came of the idea: on the observatory the twin evils of boredom and lethargy go hand in hand.

  * * * *

  Thorensen came into my office and dumped a handwritten report on my desk. He is a large, ugly man, with graceless mannerisms. He has participated heavily in the social side of life on the observatory and it is rumoured that he is an alcoholic. No one cares much about these things under normal circumstances, but when Thorensen is drunk he is boorish and noisy. Ordinarily, he is slow-moving, virtually reactionless.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Observed reproductive cycle in one of the echinoderms. Don’t bother to try to understand it. You’ll get the gist.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. I have grown accustomed to the intellectual snobbery of some of the scientists. I’m the only non-specialist on the observatory. ‘Does it have to be dealt with today?’

  ‘Suit yourself. I don’t suppose anyone is waiting for it.’

  ‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’

  ‘OK.’ He turned to leave.

  ‘I’ve got your daily sheet for you,’ I said. ‘Do you want it?’

  He turned back. ‘Let’s have it.’

  He glanced at it uninterestedly, looking quickly across the two or three lines of print-out. I watched his expression, not sure exactly what I was trying to glean from it. Some of the staff don’t read the sheets in my presence, but fold them up, place them in a pocket and read them in private. That is how it was expected they would be read, but not everyone reacts the same.

  Thorensen had perhaps less to worry about at home, or less interest.

  I waited for him to finish.

  Then I said: ‘Marriott was in here yesterday. He says that a fire killed seven hundred people in New York.’

  Interest came into Thorensen’s eyes. ‘Yes, I heard that too. Do you know anything more about it?’

  ‘Only what Marriott told me. Apparently it was in a block of apartments. The fire started on the fourth floor and no one above it could escape.’

  ‘Isn’t that fascinating? Seven hundred people, just like that.’

  ‘It was a terrible disaster,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes. Terrible. But not as bad as that...’ He leaned forward and put the palms of his hands on the far side of my desk. ‘Did you hear that ? There was a riot somewhere in South America. Bolivia, I think. They called in troops to deal with it, things got out of hand and nearly two thousand people died.’

  This was new to me.

  I said: ‘Who told you this ?’

  ‘One of the others. Norbert, I think.’

  ‘Two thousand,’ I said. ‘That’s fascinating ...’

  Thorensen straightened.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve got to get back. Will you be down in the bar this evening?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said.

  * * * *

  When Thorensen had left I looked at the report he had brought in. My function was to absorb the sense of the report, rewrite it into non-technical language as far as possible, then prepare it for transmission back to Earth via the transor. Thorensen’s original would then be photostated and returned to him, the copy being filed away in my office until our return to Earth.

  I had a dozen other reports outstanding and Thorensen’s would have to go to the bottom of the pile. Neither he nor the people on Earth would care when it was sent.

  And in any event there was no hurry. The next transor-conjunction was that same evening and it was obvious I wouldn’t have it ready by then. The conjunction after this was four weeks away.

  Putting aside the report, I went to the door of my office and locked it, switching on the electric sign on the outside which said. Transor Room—do not disturb. Then I unlocked one of my cabinets and removed from it the rumour dissemination file.

  I wrote down: ‘Thorensen/New York/700 deaths/apartment building. Ex Marriott/ditto.’ Then underneath: ‘Thorensen/Bolivia (?)/2000 deaths/riot. Ex Norbert Colston (?).’

  As the Bolivian story was a new one to me, I had to conduct a search through the Affectance Quotient 84 files. This would take some time. I had checked out the New York story the day before and found that it probably related to a fire in an office-building in Boston three days earlier, when 683 people had died. None of them was related in any way to members of the staff of the observatory.

  In the AQ 84 files, I searched first through entries for Bolivia. There had been no major riots or public disorders there in the last four weeks. It was possible that the rumour related to an event earlier than this, but not probable. After Bolivia, I tried the other South American countries, but again drew a negative.

  There had been a demonstration in Brazil the week before, but only a few people had been injured, and no one killed.

  I shifted to Central America and ran similar checks in the various republics there. I chose to discount countries in North America or Europe, since it was not likely that if two thousand people had died, there would be no connection with any of the staff here.

  I finally found the reference in Africa; under Tanzania. Nine hundred and sixty people massacred by panicking police when a hunger-march degenerated into a riot. I looked at the transor-report dispassionately, seeing the event as a statistic, another entry in my dissemination file. Before putting away the report, I took a note of the AQ. 27. Comparatively high.

  In my rumour dissemination file I wrote: ‘Thorensen/ Bolivia ... read Tanzania ? Await confirmation.’

  I then added the date, and initialled it.

  When I unlocked the office door Clare, my wife, was waiting outside. She was crying.

  * * * *

  I have this problem with which I must live: in some respects I’m on my own at the observatory. Let me try to explain that.

  If there is a group of people all basically similar, or even if there is a group of individuals making up a coherent and recognisable social unit, then there is companionship. If, on the other hand, there is no form of intercourse between the individuals, then a different kind of social structure exists. I wouldn’t know what to call it, but it certainly does not constitute a unit. Something of the sort happens in big cities: millions of people coexisting on a few hundred square miles of land and yet, with certain exceptions, there is no real unitary construction to their society. Two people can live next door to one another and yet never know each other’s name. People living alone in a building full of others can die of loneliness.

  But there’s another kind of solitude when in a group and that’s what is happening to me. It’s one of sanity. Or intellect. Or awareness.

  In cold factual language: I’m a sane man in an insane society.

  But the particular thing is that everyone on the observatory is individually just as sane as I am. But collectively, they’re not.

  Now there’s a reason for this, and it accounts for my presence on the observatory. For the benefit of the others I have been given this other work of rewriting their reports and acting in general as press officer.

  But the real reason is one of far greater importance. I’m the observer of the observatory.
>
  I watch the staff, I take notes on their behaviour and I channel information about them back to Earth. Not the most desirable of jobs, it may seem.

  One of the staff I must observe, spy upon, treat clinically, is my wife.

  Clare and I no longer get on with each other. There is nothing tempestuous between us; we’ve reached a state of acceptance of the mutual hostility and there it stays. I won’t dwell on the less pleasant incidents between us. The cabin-walls of the accommodation section are thin and any hatred to be vented must be done in near-silence. The observatory has made us like this; we are a product of our environment. Before the observatory we lived together in peace—perhaps when we get back home we may once more do so. But for the moment that is how it is.

  I have said enough.

  But Clare was crying ... and she had come to me.

  * * * *

  I opened the door, let her in.

  ‘Dan,’ she said, ‘it’s terrible about those children.’

  It registered at once. When Clare comes to me in my office, I do not know straight away whether she comes as a wife or as a member of the staff. This time, she was the latter.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said, as soothingly as I could manage. ‘But they will be doing everything they can.’

  ‘I feel so helpless here. If only I could do something.’

  ‘How are the others taking the news ?’

  She shrugged. ‘Melinda told me. She seemed to be very upset. But not-’

  ‘Not as much as you? But then she hasn’t been so involved with children.’ I had guessed that when the story of the refugees reached Clare it would upset her. Before coming to the observatory with me she had been a child-care welfare officer. Now she had to be content with study of the humanoid children outside.

  ‘I hope the people responsible are satisfied,’ she said.

  ‘Have you heard any more details?’ I prompted her.

  ‘No. But Melinda said that Jackson, the doctor who works with her, told her that the New Zealand authorities were calling in the United Nations.’

  I nodded. I’d heard this earlier in the day from Clifford Makin, the arachnologist. I had expected the further detail to be in full currency by about this time.

  I said: ‘You heard about that fire in New York?’

  ‘No?’

  I told her about it, in substantially the same detail as Thorensen had told me.

  When I’d finished she stood still for a while, her head bent forward.

  ‘I wish we could go home,’ she said in the end. I had my wife in the office now.

  I said: ‘So do I. Just as soon as we finish...’

  She glared at me. I knew as well as she that the progress of the work had no bearing on the length of our stay here. And in any case, I was doing nothing to further that work. Only I, of all the staff, contribute nothing to the progress.

  ‘Forget it, Dan,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing at home for either of us now.’

  ‘What makes you say that ?’

  ‘If you don’t know, I’m not going to spell it out for you.’

  A veiled reference to our crumbling relationship. I wondered, as I had done many times before, if even a break with the closed environment of the observatory would ever restore what we had had.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s leave it at that.’

  ‘Anyway, with all these things we hear, I’m not sure I want to go back.’

  ‘Not ever?’

  ‘I don’t know. I hear—I hear that things on Earth are worse, far worse, than we are told about.’

  I found myself breaking out of my role as husband, became the observer once again.

  ‘What do you mean? That there’s some form of censorship?’

  She nodded. ‘Only I don’t see what harm it would do for us to know what is going on.’

  ‘Well, that’s your best argument against censorship.’

  She nodded again.

  * * * *

  I had on my desk a small pile of unclaimed daily sheets. I would leave the pile to mount up for a few days, then take them round myself and deliver them. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of delivering them. The attitude of several of the staff towards the sheets was casual anyway, and if they got the idea I would deliver them then they wouldn’t collect them at all.

  The worst offender in this respect was Mike Querrel, who had never, to my knowledge, come of his own accord to collect his sheets. A gloomy bachelor whose parents had died while he was still a child, he had told me once that he had nothing at home of which to receive news, so why did he have to bother about the sheets.

  True enough, his daily sheets had the least news on them of anybody’s, but there was no point in the experiment unless everyone took their sheets.

  I sifted through the pile before me. There were eleven of Mike’s, two or three others which had not been claimed and those of Sebastian, the only man who had so far died on the Observatory. Sebastian’s death had been one of the factors that had gone unanticipated, and there was no way for me to deprogramme the computer on board. On the realtime simulator back on Earth, Sebastian’s identity had been removed.

  Once every twenty-four hours the computer would print out the daily news-sheets, one for each person on board. The staff had been told that the news came up every day through the transor, but this was not the truth.

  The news came in once in every four weeks, was fed direct into the computer, and then released in twenty-nine daily instalments, roughly in the order in which it had occurred. This day, as I have said, there was to be another transor-conjunction and the next four weeks’ news would arrive. I would have access to the unprocessed bulk of it at once if I wished, but for the rest of the staff the news would have to trickle out at daily intervals.

  There was no way of short-circuiting the system; even I could not get out of the computer the personal sheets of the ‘next’ day until the appropriate time.

  Every person on board, including myself, had one sheet of personalised news, once a day, every day.

  I decided to clear the accumulated pile and took them around the observatory, delivering them as necessary. Then I returned to my office.

  Some time before the expedition in the observatory had been conceived, a man named Tolneuve had invented a system for classifying news of current events into a graded table of what he called Affectance Quotients. This ran from nought to one hundred; from nil affectance to complete affectance.

  Tolneuve’s argument was that in the normal course news of current affairs had little relevance—or affectance—to personal life. One could read of distant wars, or social disturbances, or disasters, or one could experience them vicariously through the visual media, but one was not affected in any way.

  On the other hand, some items of news did have relevance, even if it was only of a very long term, or in a very indirect way.

  Tolneuve once cited an example of this.

  While one’s life could be measurably affected by the news, say, of the demise of a well-loved and well-endowed uncle, it would not be so easy to estimate the impact of a rise in the price of some industrial commodity such as manganese. If the cost of living of one individual could be ultimately affected and measured, then the same could be said of everybody’s. Large numbers of people would have low AQs for most news and only a small proportion of the population would have very high ones.

  Tolneuve acknowledged this and derived his graded table. Applied to an individual whose entire social situation could be established, it was possible to apply an AQ to any item of news. To one man, the rich uncle’s legacy might produce a 95 per cent AQ or higher; more expensive manganese a 10 per cent AQ or lower. To another man (for example, a distant relative of the first man who was a broker in industrial metals) the same two items might have exactly opposite percentages.

  It was an almost entirely useless piece of sociological research. It was played around with for a year or two by the news-dissemination agencies, then put aside. It just had
no practical use.

  But then the observatory was conceived and a use for it was found.

  It would be secondary to a main purpose of the scientific work to be conducted, but an entirely closed social structure composed of intelligent and trained personnel, and one depending exclusively on one source for its news of the outside world, would be a perfect way of putting to experimental use what Tolneuve had theorised.

  The intention of the scheme was specific: what, precisely what, would be the effect on a community deprived of news ?

  Or in another sense: does an awareness of current events really matter ?