The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “They come here, and the shock of that first contact makes them sweat out that golden gook we need. Then, the last month or so, the pain always eases off. Why? Because the two minds, the human and alien, they stop fighting each other. Something gives way, it goes soft, and there’s a mixing together. And that’s where you get the human casualties of this operation—the bleary men that come out of here not even able to talk human language anymore. Oh, I suppose they’re happy—happier than I am!—because they’ve got something big and wonderful inside ’em. Something that you and I can’t even understand. But if you took them and put them together again with the aliens who spent time here, they could all live together—they’re adapted.

  “That’s what they’re aiming for!” He struck the console with his fist. “Not now—but a hundred, two hundred years from now! When we start expanding out to the stars—when we go a-conquering—we’ll have already been conquered! Not by weapons, Aunt Jane, not by hate—by love! Yes, love! Dirty, stinking, low-down, sneaking love!”

  Aunt Jane said something, a long sentence, in a high, anxious voice.

  “What?” said Wesson irritably. He couldn’t understand a word.

  Aunt Jane was silent. “What, what?” Wesson demanded, pounding the console. “Have you got it through your tin head or not? What?”

  Aunt Jane said something else, tonelessly. Once more, Wesson could not make out a single word.

  He stood frozen. Warm tears started suddenly out of his eyes. “Aunt Jane—” he said. He remembered, You are already talking longer than any of them. Too late? Too late? He tensed, then whirled and sprang to the closet where the paper books were kept. He opened the first one his hand struck.

  The black letters were alien squiggles on the page, little humped shapes, without meaning.

  The tears were coming faster, he couldn’t stop them—tears of weariness, tears of frustration, tears of hate. “Aunt Jane!” he roared.

  But it was no good. The curtain of silence had come down over his head. He was one of the vanguard—the conquered men, the ones who would get along with their strange brothers, out among the alien stars.

  The console was not working anymore; nothing worked when he wanted it. Wesson squatted in the shower stall, naked, with a soup bowl in his hands. Water droplets glistened on his hands and forearms; the pale short hairs were just springing up, drying.

  The silvery skin of reflection in the bowl gave him back nothing but a silhouette, a shadow man’s outline. He could not see his face.

  He dropped the bowl and went across the living room, shuffling the pale drifts of paper underfoot. The black lines on the paper, when his eye happened to light on them, were worm shapes, crawling things, conveying nothing. He rolled slightly in his walk; his eyes were glazed. His head twitched, every now and then, sketching a useless motion to avoid pain.

  Once the bureau chief, Gower, came to stand in his way. “You fool,” he said, his face contorted in anger, “you were supposed to go on to the end, like the rest. Now look what you’ve done!”

  “I found out, didn’t I?” Wesson mumbled, and as he brushed the man aside like a cobweb, the pain suddenly grew more intense. Wesson clasped his head in his hands with a grunt, and rocked to and fro a moment, uselessly, before he straightened and went on. The pain was coming in waves now, so tall that at their peak his vision dimmed out, violet, then gray.

  It couldn’t go on much longer. Something had to burst.

  He paused at the bloody place and slapped the metal with his palm, making the sound ring dully up into the frame of the station: rroom…rroom…

  Faintly an echo came back: boo-oom…

  Wesson kept going, smiling a faint and meaningless smile. He was only marking time now, waiting. Something was about to happen.

  The kitchen doorway sprouted a sudden sill and tripped him. He fell heavily, sliding on the floor, and lay without moving beneath the slick gleam of the autochef.

  The pressure was too great—the autochef’s clucking was swallowed up in the ringing pressure, and the tall gray walls buckled slowly in….

  The station lurched.

  Wesson felt it through his chest, palms, knees, and elbows: the floor was plucked away for an instant and then swung back.

  The pain in his skull relaxed its grip a little. Wesson tried to get to his feet.

  There was an electric silence in the station. On the second try, he got up and leaned his back against a wall. Cluck, said the autochef suddenly, hysterically, and the vent popped open, but nothing came out.

  He listened, straining to hear. What?

  The station bounced beneath him, making his feet jump like a puppet’s; the wall slapped his back hard, shuddered, and was still; but far off through the metal cage came a long angry groan of metal, echoing, diminishing, dying. Then silence again.

  The station held its breath. All the myriad clickings and pulses in the walls were suspended; in the empty rooms the lights burned with a yellow glare, and the air hung stagnant and still. The console lights in the living room glowed like witchfires. Water in the dropped bowl, at the bottom of the shower stall, shone like quicksilver, waiting.

  The third shock came. Wesson found himself on his hands and knees, the jolt still tingling in the bones of his body, staring at the floor. The sound that filled the room ebbed away slowly and ran down into the silences—a resonant metallic sound, shuddering away now along the girders and hull plates, rattling tinnily into bolts and fittings, diminishing, noiseless, gone. The silence pressed down again.

  The floor leaped painfully under his body, one great resonant blow that shook him from head to foot.

  A muted echo of that blow came a few seconds later, as if the shock had traveled across the station and back.

  The bed, Wesson thought, and scrambled on hands and knees through the doorway, along a floor curiously tilted, until he reached the rubbery block.

  The room burst visibly upward around him, squeezing the block flat. It dropped back as violently, leaving Wesson bouncing helplessly on the mattress, his limbs flying. It came to rest, in a long reluctant groan of metal.

  Wesson rolled up on one elbow, thinking incoherently, Air, the air lock. Another blow slammed him down into the mattress, pinched his lungs shut, while the room danced grotesquely over his head. Gasping for breath in the ringing silence, Wesson felt a slow icy chill rolling toward him across the room—and there was a pungent smell in the air. Ammonia! he thought, and the odorless, smothering methane with it.

  His cell was breached. The burst membrane was fatal—the alien’s atmosphere would kill him.

  Wesson surged to his feet. The next shock caught him off balance, dashed him to the floor. He arose again, dazed and limping; he was still thinking confusedly, The air lock—get out.

  When he was halfway to the door, all the ceiling lights went out at once. The darkness was like a blanket around his head. It was bitter cold now in the room, and the pungent smell was sharper. Coughing, Wesson hurried forward. The floor lurched under his feet.

  Only the golden indicators burned now—full to the top, the deep vats brimming, golden-lipped, gravid, a month before the time. Wesson shuddered.

  Water spurted in the bathroom, hissing steadily on the tiles, rattling in the plastic bowl at the bottom of the shower stall. The light winked on and off again. In the dining room, he heard the autochef clucking and sighing. The freezing wind blew harder; he was numb with cold to the hips. It seemed to Wesson abruptly that he was not at the top of the sky at all, but down, down at the bottom of the sea—trapped in this steel bubble, while the dark poured in.

  The pain in his head was gone, as if it had never been there, and he understood what that meant: Up there, the great body was hanging like butcher’s carrion in the darkness. Its death struggles were over, the damage done.

  Wesson gathered a desperate breath, shouted, “Help me! The alien’s dead! He kicked the station apart—the methane’s coming in! Get help, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”
r />   Silence. In the smothering blackness, he remembered: She can’t understand me anymore. Even if she’s alive.

  He turned, making an animal noise in his throat. He groped his way on around the room, past the second doorway. Behind the walls, something was dripping with a slow cold tinkle and splash, a forlorn night sound. Small, hard, floating things rapped against his legs. Then he touched a smooth curve of metal—the air lock.

  Eagerly he pushed his feeble weight against the door. It didn’t move. Cold air was rushing out around the door frame, a thin knife-cold stream, but the door itself was jammed tight.

  The suit! He should have thought of that before. If he just had some pure air to breathe and a little warmth in his fingers…But the door of the suit locker would not move, either. The ceiling must have buckled.

  And that was the end, he thought, bewildered. There were no more ways out. But there had to be….He pounded on the door until his arms would not lift anymore; it did not move. Leaning against the chill metal, he saw a single light blink on overhead.

  The room was a wild place of black shadows and swimming shapes—the book leaves, fluttering and darting in the air stream. Schools of them beat wildly at the walls, curling over, baffled, trying again; others were swooping around the outer corridor, around and around; he could see them whirling past the doorways, dreamlike, a white drift of silent paper in the darkness.

  The acrid smell was harsher in his nostrils. Wesson choked, groping his way to the console again. He pounded it with his open hand, crying weakly—he wanted to see Earth.

  But when the little square of brightness leaped up, it was the dead body of the alien that Wesson saw.

  It hung motionless in the cavity of the station, limbs dangling stiff and still, eyes dull. The last turn of the screw had been too much for it. But Wesson had survived….

  For a few minutes.

  The dead alien face mocked him; a whisper of memory floated into his mind: We might have been brothers….All at once Wesson passionately wanted to believe it—wanted to give in, turn back. That passed. Wearily he let himself sag into the bitter now, thinking with thin defiance, It’s done—hate wins. You’ll have to stop this big giveaway—can’t risk this happening again. And we’ll hate you for that—and when we get out to the stars—

  The world was swimming numbly away out of reach. He felt the last fit of coughing take his body, as if it were happening to someone else besides him.

  The last fluttering leaves of paper came to rest. There was a long silence in the drowned room.

  Then:

  “Paul,” said the voice of the mechanical woman brokenly; “Paul,” it said again, with the hopelessness of lost, unknown, impossible love.

  Sector General

  JAMES WHITE

  James White (1928–1999) was an Irish writer of science fiction whose first published story appeared in New Worlds (1953). Although White’s novels are often entertaining and engaging, he is known almost exclusively for the tales about galactic medicine comprising the Sector General sequence, set in a huge space-habitat hospital located “far out on the galactic rim” and designed to accommodate all known kinds of xenobiological problems; its facilities include a computerized universal translator. Early stories in this sequence appeared in New Worlds—the first of all being the novella “Sector General” (1957), reprinted here—and several others in New Writings in SF, which gave him a reliable home for the series. Through the first six volumes of Sector General stories and novels, Dr. Conway, a human member of the ten-thousand-strong multispecies staff, solves alone or with colleagues a series of medical crises with humor, ingenuity, and an underlying Hippocratic sense of decency; equally sympathetic alien protagonists begin to appear with volume seven.

  Throughout the series, White’s capacity to conceive and make plausible a wide range of alien anatomies and their failure modes seems unflagging. The Sector General series has a strong undercurrent of pacifism (its military “Monitor Corps” exists chiefly to prevent or halt wars using nonlethal weaponry) and includes numerous instances of successful first contact achieved by giving medical aid to injured and distressed aliens, usually spacefaring ones—a trope that recurs in several of White’s nonseries stories. The hospital’s system of “educator tapes,” whereby doctors absorb the memories and skills of other-species medical experts via theoretically reversible identity transfer, is a fruitful source of complications.

  The Sector General stories are underrated within the science fiction canon, perhaps because they do not depend on typical conflict or story lines for their resolution. But this is exactly what makes them unique and still fresh to this day. “Sector General” remains one of the most potent, demonstrating White’s ability to tell an engrossing story while also exploring the hospital and presenting the reader with a unique experience.

  SECTOR GENERAL

  James White

  I

  Like a sprawling, misshapen Christmas tree the lights of Sector Twelve General Hospital blazed against the misty backdrop of the stars. From its view-ports shone lights that were yellow and red-orange and soft, liquid green, and others which were a searing actinic blue. There was darkness in places also. Behind these areas of opaque metal plating lay sections wherein the lighting was so viciously incandescent that the eyes of approaching ships’ pilots had to be protected from it, or compartments which were so dark and cold that not even the light which filtered in from the stars could be allowed to penetrate to their inhabitants.

  To the occupants of the Telfi ship which slid out of hyperspace to hang some twenty miles from this mighty structure, the garish display of visual radiation was too dim to be detected without the use of instruments. The Telfi were energy-eaters. Their ship’s hull shone with a crawling blue glow of radioactivity and its interior was awash with a high level of hard radiation which was also in all respects normal. Only in the stern section of the tiny ship were the conditions not normal. Here the active core of a power pile lay scattered in small, sub-critical, and unshielded masses throughout the ship’s Planetary Engines room, and here it was too hot even for the Telfi.

  The group-mind entity that was the Telfi spaceship captain—and crew—energised its short-range communicator and spoke in the staccato clicking and buzzing language used to converse with those benighted beings who were unable to merge into a Telfi gestalt.

  “This is a Telfi hundred-unit gestalt,” it said slowly and distinctly. “We have casualties and require assistance. Our classification to one group is VTXM, repeat VTXM….”

  “Details, please, and degree of urgency,” said a voice briskly as the Telfi was about to repeat the message. It was translated into the same language used by the captain. The Telfi gave details quickly, then waited. Around it and through it lay the hundred specialised units that were both its mind and multiple body. Some of the units were blind, deaf, and perhaps even dead cells that received or recorded no sensory impressions whatever, but there were others who radiated waves of such sheer, excruciating agony that the group-mind writhed and twisted silently in sympathy. Would that voice never reply, they wondered, and if it did, would it be able to help them…?

  “You must not approach the hospital nearer than a distance of five miles,” said the voice suddenly. “Otherwise there will be danger to unshielded traffic in the vicinity, or to beings within the establishment with low radiation tolerance.”

  “We understand,” said the Telfi.

  “Very well,” said the voice. “You must also realise that your race is too hot for us to handle directly. Remote-controlled mechanisms are already on the way to you, and it would ease the problem of evacuation if you arranged to have your casualties brought as closely as possible to the ship’s largest entry port. If this cannot be done, do not worry—we have mechanisms capable of entering your vessel and removing them.”

  The voice ended by saying that while they hoped to be able to help the patients, any sort of accurate prognosis was impossible at the present time.

>   The Telfi gestalt thought that soon the agony that tortured its mind and wide-flung multiple body would be gone, but so also would nearly one-quarter of that body….

  —

  With that feeling of happiness possible only with eight hours’ sleep behind, a comfortable breakfast within, and an interesting job in front of one, Conway stepped out briskly for his wards. They were not really his wards, of course—if anything went seriously wrong in one of them the most he would be expected to do would be to scream for help. But considering the fact that he had been here only two months he did not mind that, or knowing that it would be a long time before he could be trusted to deal with cases requiring other than mechanical methods of treatment. Complete knowledge of any alien physiology could be obtained within minutes by Educator Tape, but the skill to use that knowledge—especially in surgery—came only with time. Conway was looking forward with conscious pride to spending his life acquiring that skill.

  At an intersection Conway saw an FGLI he knew—a Tralthan intern who was humping his elephantine body along on six spongy feet. The stubby legs seemed even more rubbery than usual and the little OTSB who lived in symbiosis with it was practically comatose. Conway said brightly, “Good morning,” and received a translated—and therefore necessarily emotionless—reply of “Drop dead.” Conway grinned.

  There had been considerable activity in and about Reception last evening. Conway had not been called, but it looked as though the Tralthan had missed both his recreation and rest periods.

  A few yards beyond the Tralthan he met another who was walking slowly alongside a small DBDG like himself. Not entirely like himself, though—DBDG was the one-group classification which gave the grosser physical attributes, the number of arms, heads, legs, etc., and their placement. The fact that the being had seven-fingered hands, stood only four feet tall, and looked like a very cuddly teddy bear—Conway had forgotten the being’s system of origin, but remembered being told that it came from a world which had suffered a sudden bout of glaciation which had caused its highest life-form to develop intelligence and a thick red fur coat—would not have shown up unless the classification were taken to two or three groups. The DBDG had his hands clasped behind his back and was staring with vacant intensity at the floor. His hulking companion showed similar concentration, but favoured the ceiling because of the different position of his visual organs. Both wore their professional insignia on golden armbands, which meant that they were lordly Diagnosticians, no less. Conway refrained from saying good morning to them as he passed, or from making undue noise with his feet.