The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  POWERS: I suppose you could take the view that the lengthened sleep interval is a compensation device, a sort of mass neurotic attempt to escape from the terrifying pressures of urban life in the late twentieth century.

  WHITBY: You could, but you’d be wrong. It’s simply a matter of biochemistry. The ribonucleic acid templates which unravel the protein chains in all living organisms are wearing out, the dies inscribing the protoplasmic signature have become blunted. After all, they’ve been running now for over a thousand million years. It’s time to retool. Just as an individual organism’s life span is finite, or the life of a yeast colony or a given species, so the life of an entire biological kingdom is of fixed duration. It’s always been assumed that the evolutionary slope reaches forever upwards, but in fact the peak has already been reached, and the pathway now leads downwards to the common biological grave. It’s a despairing and at present unacceptable vision of the future, but it’s the only one. Five thousand centuries from now our descendants, instead of being multibrained star-men, will probably be naked prognathous idiots with hair on their foreheads, grunting their way through the remains of this Clinic like Neolithic men caught in a macabre inversion of time. Believe me, I pity them, as I pity myself. My total failure, my absolute lack of any moral or biological right to existence, is implicit in every cell of my body….

  The tape ended, the spool ran free and stopped. Powers closed the machine, then massaged his face. Coma sat quietly, watching him and listening to the chimp playing with a box of puzzle dice.

  “As far as Whitby could tell,” Powers said, “the silent genes represent a last desperate effort of the biological kingdom to keep its head above the rising waters. Its total life period is determined by the amount of radiation emitted by the sun, and once this reaches a certain point the sure-death line has been passed and extinction is inevitable. To compensate for this, alarms have been built in which alter the form of the organism and adapt it to living in a hotter radiological climate. Soft-skinned organisms develop hard shells, these contain heavy metals as radiation screens. New organs of perception are developed too. According to Whitby, though, it’s all wasted effort in the long run—but sometimes I wonder.”

  He smiled at Coma and shrugged. “Well, let’s talk about something else. How long have you known Kaldren?”

  “About three weeks. Feels like ten thousand years.”

  “How do you find him now? We’ve been rather out of touch lately.”

  Coma grinned. “I don’t seem to see very much of him either. He makes me sleep all the time. Kaldren has many strange talents, but he lives just for himself. You mean a lot to him, doctor. In fact, you’re my one serious rival.”

  “I thought he couldn’t stand the sight of me.”

  “Oh, that’s just a sort of surface symptom. He really thinks of you continually. That’s why we spend all our time following you around.” She eyed Powers shrewdly. “I think he feels guilty about something.”

  “Guilty?” Powers exclaimed. “He does? I thought I was supposed to be the guilty one.”

  “Why?” she pressed. She hesitated, then said: “You carried out some experimental surgical technique on him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Powers admitted. “It wasn’t altogether a success, like so much of what I seem to be involved with. If Kaldren feels guilty, I suppose it’s because he feels he must take some of the responsibility.”

  He looked down at the girl, her intelligent eyes watching him closely. “For one or two reasons it may be necessary for you to know. You said Kaldren paced around all night and didn’t get enough sleep. Actually he doesn’t get any sleep at all.”

  The girl nodded. “You…” She made a snapping gesture with her fingers.

  “…narcotomized him,” Powers completed. “Surgically speaking, it was a great success, one might well share a Nobel for it. Normally the hypothalamus regulates the period of sleep, raising the threshold of consciousness in order to relax the venous capillaries in the brain and drain them of accumulating toxins. However, by sealing off some of the control loops the subject is unable to receive the sleep cue, and the capillaries drain while he remains conscious. All he feels is a temporary lethargy, but this passes within three or four hours. Physically speaking, Kaldren has had another twenty years added to his life. But the psyche seems to need sleep for its own private reasons, and consequently Kaldren has periodic storms that tear him apart. The whole thing was a tragic blunder.”

  Coma frowned pensively. “I guessed as much. Your papers in the neurosurgery journals referred to the patient as K. A touch of pure Kafka that came all too true.”

  “I may leave here for good, Coma,” Powers said. “Make sure that Kaldren goes to his clinics. Some of the deep scar tissue will need to be cleaned away.”

  “I’ll try. Sometimes I feel I’m just another of his insane terminal documents.”

  “What are those?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Kaldren’s collection of final statements about Homo sapiens. The complete works of Freud, Beethoven’s blind quartets, transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, an automatic novel, and so on.” She broke off. “What’s that you’re drawing?”

  “Where?”

  She pointed to the desk blotter, and Powers looked down and realized he had been unconsciously sketching an elaborate doodle, Whitby’s four-armed sun. “It’s nothing,” he said. Somehow, though, it had a strangely compelling force.

  Coma stood up to leave. “You must come and see us, doctor. Kaldren has so much he wants to show you. He’s just got hold of an old copy of the last signals sent back by the Mercury Seven twenty years ago when they reached the moon, and can’t think about anything else. You remember the strange messages they recorded before they died, full of poetic ramblings about the white gardens. Now that I think about it they behaved rather like the plants in your zoo here.”

  She put her hands in her pockets, then pulled something out. “By the way, Kaldren asked me to give you this.”

  It was an old index card from the observatory library. In the centre had been typed the number:

  96,688,365,498,720

  “It’s going to take a long time to reach zero at this rate,” Powers remarked dryly. “I’ll have quite a collection when we’re finished.”

  After she had left he chucked the card into the waste bin and sat down at the desk, staring for an hour at the ideogram on the blotter.

  —

  Halfway back to his beach house the lake road forked to the left through a narrow saddle that ran between the hills to an abandoned air force weapons range on one of the remoter salt lakes. At the nearer end were a number of small bunkers and camera towers, one or two metal shacks, and a low-roofed storage hangar. The white hills encircled the whole area, shutting it off from the world outside, and Powers liked to wander on foot down the gunnery aisles that had been marked down the two-mile length of the lake towards the concrete sight-screens at the far end. The abstract patterns made him feel like an ant on a bone-white chessboard, the rectangular screens at one end and the towers and bunkers at the other like opposing pieces.

  His session with Coma had made Powers feel suddenly dissatisfied with the way he was spending his last months. Good-bye, Eniwetok, he had written, but in fact systematically forgetting everything was exactly the same as remembering it, a cataloguing in reverse, sorting out all the books in the mental library and putting them back in their right places upside down.

  Powers climbed one of the camera towers, leaned on the rail, and looked out along the aisles towards the sight-screens. Ricocheting shells and rockets had chipped away large pieces of the circular concrete bands that ringed the target bulls, but the outlines of the huge hundred-yard-wide discs, alternately painted blue and red, were still visible.

  For half an hour he stared quietly at them, formless ideas shifting through his mind. Then, without thinking, he abruptly left the rail and climbed down the companionway. The storage hangar was fifty yards away. He walked quickly
across to it, stepped into the cool shadows, and peered around the rusting electric trolleys and empty flare drums. At the far end, behind a pile of lumber and bales of wire, were a stack of unopened cement bags, a mound of dirty sand, and an old mixer.

  Half an hour later he had backed the Buick into the hangar and hooked the cement mixer, charged with sand, cement, and water scavenged from the drums lying around outside, onto the rear bumper, then loaded a dozen more bags into the car’s trunk and rear seat. Finally he selected a few straight lengths of timber, jammed them through the window, and set off across the lake towards the central target bull.

  For the next two hours he worked away steadily in the centre of the great blue disc, mixing up the cement by hand, carrying it across to the crude wooden forms he had lashed together from the timber, smoothing it down so that it formed a six-inch-high wall around the perimeter of the bull. He worked without pause, stirring the cement with a tyre lever, scooping it out with a hubcap prised off one of the wheels.

  By the time he finished and drove off, leaving his equipment where it stood, he had completed a thirty-foot-long section of wall.

  FOUR

  June 7: Conscious, for the first time, of the brevity of each day. As long as I was awake for over twelve hours I still orientated my time around the meridian, morning and afternoon set their old rhythms. Now, with just over eleven hours of consciousness left, they form a continuous interval, like a length of tape-measure. I can see exactly how much is left on the spool and can do little to affect the rate at which it unwinds. Spend the time slowly packing away the library; the crates are too heavy to move and lie where they are filled. Cell count down to 400,000.

  Woke 8:10. To sleep 7:15. (Appear to have lost my watch without realizing it, had to drive into town to buy another.)

  June 14: 9½ hours. Time races, flashing past like an expressway. However, the last week of a holiday always goes faster than the first. At the present rate there should be about 4–5 weeks left. This morning I tried to visualize what the last week or so—the final, 3, 2, 1, out—would be like, had a sudden chilling attack of pure fear, unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Took me half an hour to steady myself for an intravenous.

  Kaldren pursues me like my luminescent shadow, chalked up on the gateway “96,688,365,498,702.” Should confuse the mailman.

  Woke 9:05. To sleep 6:36.

  June 19: 6½ hours. Anderson rang up this morning. I nearly put the phone down on him, but managed to go through the pretence of making the final arrangements. He congratulated me on my stoicism, even used the word “heroic.” Don’t feel it. Despair erodes everything—courage, hope, self-discipline, all the better qualities. It’s so damned difficult to sustain that impersonal attitude of passive acceptance implicit in the scientific tradition. I try to think of Galileo before the Inquisition, Freud surmounting the endless pain of his jaw cancer surgery.

  Met Kaldren downtown, had a long discussion about the Mercury Seven. He’s convinced that they refused to leave the moon deliberately, after the “reception party” waiting for them had put them in the cosmic picture. They were told by the mysterious emissaries from Orion that the exploration of deep space was pointless, that they were too late as the life of the universe is now virtually over!!! According to K. there are air force generals who take this nonsense seriously, but I suspect it’s simply an obscure attempt on K.’s part to console me.

  Must have the phone disconnected. Some contractor keeps calling me up about payment for 50 bags of cement he claims I collected ten days ago. Says he helped me load them onto a truck himself. I did drive Whitby’s pickup into town but only to get some lead screening. What does he think I’d do with all that cement? Just the sort of irritating thing you don’t expect to hang over your final exit. (Moral: don’t try too hard to forget Eniwetok.)

  Woke 9:40. To sleep 4:15.

  June 25: 7½ hours. Kaldren was snooping around the lab again today. Phoned me there, when I answered a recorded voice he’d rigged up rambled out a long string of numbers, like an insane super-Tim. These practical jokes of his get rather wearing. Fairly soon I’ll have to go over and come to terms with him, much as I hate the prospect. Anyway, Miss Mars is a pleasure to look at.

  One meal is enough now, topped up with a glucose shot. Sleep is still “black,” completely unrefreshing. Last night I took a 16 mm film of the first three hours, screened it this morning at the lab. The first true horror movie, I looked like a half-animated corpse.

  Woke 10:25. To sleep 3:45.

  July 3: 5¾ hours. Little done today. Deepening lethargy, dragged myself over to the lab, nearly left the road twice. Concentrated enough to feed the zoo and get log up to date. Read through the operating manuals Whitby left for the last time, decided on a delivery rate of 40 röntgens/min., target distance of 350 cm. Everything is ready now.

  Woke 11:05. To sleep 3:15.

  Powers stretched, shifted his head slowly across the pillow, focusing on the shadows cast onto the ceiling by the blind. Then he looked down at his feet, saw Kaldren sitting on the end of the bed, watching him quietly.

  “Hello, doctor,” he said, putting out his cigarette. “Late night? You look tired.”

  Powers heaved himself onto one elbow, glanced at his watch. It was just after eleven. For a moment his brain blurred, and he swung his legs around and sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, massaging some life into his face.

  He noticed that the room was full of smoke. “What are you doing here?” he asked Kaldren.

  “I came over to invite you to lunch.” He indicated the bedside phone. “Your line was dead so I drove round. Hope you don’t mind me climbing in. Rang the bell for about half an hour. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it.”

  Powers nodded, then stood up and tried to smooth the creases out of his cotton slacks. He had gone to sleep without changing for over a week, and they were damp and stale.

  As he started for the bathroom door Kaldren pointed to the camera tripod on the other side of the bed. “What’s this? Going into the blue movie business, doctor?”

  Powers surveyed him dimly for a moment, glanced at the tripod without replying, and then noticed his open diary on the bedside table. Wondering whether Kaldren had read the last entries, he went back and picked it up, then stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

  From the mirror cabinet he took out a syringe and an ampoule, after the shot leaned against the door waiting for the stimulant to pick up.

  Kaldren was in the lounge when he returned to him, reading the labels on the crates lying about in the centre of the floor.

  “Okay, then,” Powers told him, “I’ll join you for lunch.” He examined Kaldren carefully. He looked more subdued than usual, there was an air almost of deference about him.

  “Good,” Kaldren said. “By the way, are you leaving?”

  “Does it matter?” Powers asked curtly. “I thought you were in Anderson’s care?”

  Kaldren shrugged. “Please yourself. Come round at about twelve,” he suggested, adding pointedly: “That’ll give you time to clean up and change. What’s that all over your shirt? Looks like lime.”

  Powers peered down, brushed at the white streaks. After Kaldren had left he threw the clothes away, took a shower, and unpacked a clean suit from one of the trunks.

  —

  Until his liaison with Coma, Kaldren lived alone in the old abstract summer house on the north shore of the lake. This was a seven-storey folly originally built by an eccentric millionaire mathematician in the form of a spiralling concrete ribbon that wound around itself like an insane serpent, serving walls, floors, and ceilings. Only Kaldren had solved the building—a geometric model of √-1—and consequently he had been able to take it off the agents’ hands at a comparatively low rent. In the evenings Powers had often watched him from the laboratory, striding restlessly from one level to the next, swinging through the labyrinth of inclines and terraces to the rooftop, where his lean angular figure stoo
d out like a gallows against the sky, his lonely eyes sifting out radio lanes for the next day’s trapping.

  Powers noticed him there when he drove up at noon, poised on a ledge 150 feet above, head raised theatrically to the sky.

  “Kaldren!” he shouted up suddenly into the silent air, half-hoping he might be jolted into losing his footing.

  Kaldren broke out of his reverie and glanced down into the court. Grinning obliquely, he waved his right arm in a slow semicircle.

  “Come up,” he called, then turned back to the sky.

  Powers leaned against the car. Once, a few months previously, he had accepted the same invitation, stepped through the entrance, and within three minutes lost himself helplessly in a second-floor cul-de-sac. Kaldren had taken half an hour to find him.

  Powers waited while Kaldren swung down from his eyrie, vaulting through the wells and stairways, then rode up in the elevator with him to the penthouse suite.

  They carried their cocktails through into a wide glass-roofed studio, the huge white ribbon of concrete uncoiling around them like toothpaste squeezed from an enormous tube. On the staged levels running parallel and across them rested pieces of grey abstract furniture, giant photographs on angled screens, carefully labelled exhibits laid out on low tables, all dominated by twenty-foot-high black letters on the rear wall which spelt out the single vast word:

  YOU

  Kaldren pointed to it. “What you might call the supraliminal approach.” He gestured Powers in conspiratorially, finishing his drink in a gulp. “This is my laboratory, doctor,” he said with a note of pride. “Much more significant than yours, believe me.”