The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “Why not? You told me yourself you could buy things with Ming-metal parts.” And I’d let that fact sail blithely by me, a blunder on my part that was probably fueling ninety percent of my anger.

  “But I never see the manufacturing specs on anything I use,” he said. “It all comes through the Institute’s receiving department, and all I get are the operating manuals and such.” His eyes flicked to his machine as if he were going to object to Wilkinson’s manhandling of it. “I guess they must have removed any identification tags, as well.”

  “I guess they must have,” I ground out. Wilkinson had the coil out now, and I watched as he laid it aside and picked up the detector wand again. A minute later he shook his head.

  “Clean, Cap’n,” he told me, picking up the coil again. “I’ll take this to One Hold and put it away.”

  I nodded and he left. Gesturing to the other gadgets spread around the room, I asked, “Is this all you’ve got, or is there more in Bradley’s cabin?”

  “No, this is it,” Lanton assured me.

  “What about your stereovision camera? I know some of those have Ming metal in them.”

  He frowned. “I don’t have any cameras. Who told you I did?”

  “I – ” I frowned in turn. “You said you were studying Bradley’s cascade images.”

  “Yes, but you can’t take pictures of them. They don’t register on any kind of film.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it again. I was sure I’d known that once, but after years of watching the images I’d apparently clean forgotten it. They were so lifelike . . . and I was perhaps getting old. “I assumed someone had come up with a technique that worked,” I said stiffly, acutely aware that my attempt to save face wasn’t fooling either of us. “How do you do it, then?”

  “I memorize all of it, of course. Psychiatrists have to have good memories, you know, and there are several drugs that can enhance one’s basic abilities.”

  I’d heard of mnemonic drugs. They were safe, extremely effective, and cost a small fortune. “Do you have any of them with you? If so, I’m going to insist they be locked away.”

  He shook his head. “I was given a six-month treatment at the Institute before we left. That’s the main reason we’re on your ship, by the way, instead of something specially chartered. Mnemonic drugs play havoc with otherwise reasonable budgets.”

  He was making a joke, of course, but it was an exceedingly tasteless one, and the anger that had been draining out of me reversed its flow. No one needed to remind me that the Dancer wasn’t up to the Cunard line’s standards. “My sympathies to your budget,” I said briefly. Turning away, I strode to the door.

  “Wait a minute,” he called after me. “What are my chances of getting that neural tracer fixed?”

  I glanced back over my shoulder. “That probably depends on how good you are with a screwdriver and solder gun,” I said, and left.

  Alana was over her own cascade depression by the time I returned to the bridge. “I was right,” I said as I dropped into my seat. “One of his damned black boxes had a Ming-metal coil.”

  “I know; Wilkinson called from One Hold.” She glanced sideways at me. “I hope you didn’t chew Lanton out in front of Bradley.”

  “Why not?”

  “Did you?”

  “As it happens, no. Lanton sedated him right after the point again. Why does it matter?”

  “Well . . .” She seemed embarrassed. “It might . . . upset him to see you angry. You see, he sort of looks up to you – captain of a star ship and all – ”

  “Captain of a struggling tramp,” I corrected her more harshly than was necessary. “Or didn’t you bother to tell him that we’re the absolute bottom of the line?”

  “I told him,” she said steadily. “But he doesn’t see things that way. Even in five days aboard he’s had a glimpse of how demanding this kind of life is. He’s never been able to hold down a good job himself for very long, and that adds to the awe he feels for all of us.”

  “I can tell he’s got a lot to learn about the universe,” I snorted. For some reason the conversation was making me nervous, and I hurried to bring it back to safer regions. “Did your concern for Bradley’s idealism leave you enough time to run the astrogate?”

  She actually blushed, the first time in years I’d seen her do that. “Yes,” she said stiffly. “We’re about thirty-two light-days short this time.”

  “Damn.” I hammered the edge of the control board once with my clenched fist, and then began punching computer keys.

  “I’ve already checked that,” Alana spoke up. “We’ll dig pretty deep into our fuel reserve if we try to make it up through normal space.”

  I nodded, my fingers coming to a halt. My insistence on maintaining a high fuel reserve was one of the last remnants of Lord Hendrik’s training that I still held onto, and despite occasional ribbing from other freighter captains I felt it was a safety precaution worth taking. The alternative to using it, though, wasn’t especially pleasant. “All right,” I sighed. “Let’s clear out enough room for the computer to refigure our course profile. If possible, I’d like to tack the extra fifty light-days onto one of the existing points instead of adding a new one.”

  She nodded and started typing away at her console as I called down to the engine room to alert Matope. It was a semimajor pain, but the Dancer’s computer didn’t have enough memory space to handle the horribly complex Colloton calculations we needed while all the standard operations programming was in place. We would need to shift all but the most critical functions to Matope’s manual control, replacing the erased programs later from Pascal’s set of master tapes.

  It took nearly an hour to get the results, but they turned out to be worth the wait. Not only could we make up our shortfall without an extra point, but with the slightly different stellar configuration we faced now it was going to be possible to actually shorten the duration of one of the points further down the line. That was good news from both practical and psychological considerations. Though I’ve never been able to prove it, I’ve long believed that the deepest depressions follow the longest points.

  I didn’t see any more of Lanton that day, though I heard later that he and Bradley had mingled with the passengers as they always did, Lanton behaving as if nothing at all had happened. Though I knew my crew wasn’t likely to go around blabbing about Lanton’s Ming metal blunder, I issued an order anyway to keep the whole matter quiet. It wasn’t to save Lanton any embarrassment – that much I was certain of – but beyond that my motives became uncomfortably fuzzy. I finally decided I was doing it for Alana, to keep her from having to explain to Bradley what an idiot his therapist was.

  The next point, six days later, went flawlessly, and life aboard ship finally settled into the usual deep-space routine. Alana, Pascal, and I each took eight-hour shifts on the bridge; Matope, Tobbar, and Sarojis did the same back in the engine room; and Kate Epstein, Leeds, and Wilkinson took turns catering to the occasional whims of our passengers. Off-duty, most of the crewers also made an effort to spend at least a little time in the passenger lounge, recognizing the need to be friendly in the part of our business that was mainly word of mouth. Since that first night, though, the exaggerated interest in Bradley The Mental Patient had pretty well evaporated, leaving him as just another passenger in nearly everyone’s eyes.

  The exception, of course, was Alana.

  In some ways, watching her during those weeks was roughly akin to watching a baby bird hacking its way out of its shell. Alana’s bridge shift followed mine, and I was often more or less forced to hang around for an hour or so listening to her talk about her day. Forced is perhaps the wrong word; obviously, no one was nailing me to my chair. And yet, in another sense, I really did have no choice. To the best of my knowledge, I was Alana’s only real confidant aboard the Dancer, and to have refused to listen would have deprived her of her only verbal sounding board. And the more I listened, the more I realized how vital my participation really was . .
. because along with the usual rolls, pitches, and yaws of every embryo relationship, this one had an extra complication: Bradley’s personality was beginning to change.

  Lanton had said he was on the verge of a breakthrough, but it had never occurred to me that he might be able to begin genuine treatment aboard ship, let alone that any of its effects would show up en route. But even to me, who saw Bradley for maybe ten minutes at a time three times a week, the changes were obvious. All the conflicting signals in posture and expression that had bothered me so much at our first meeting diminished steadily until they were virtually gone, showing up only on brief occasions. At the same time, his self-confidence began to increase, and a heretofore unnoticed – by me, at least – sense of humor began to manifest itself. The latter effect bothered me, until Alana explained that a proper sense of humor required both a sense of dignity and an ability to take oneself less than seriously, neither of which Bradley had ever had before. I was duly pleased for her at the progress this showed; privately, I sought Lanton out to find out exactly what he was doing to his patient and the possible hazards thereof. The interview was easy to obtain – Bradley was soloing quite a bit these days – but relatively uninformative. Lanton tossed around a lot of stuff about synaptic fixing and duplicate messenger chemistry, but with visions of a Nobel Prize almost visibly orbiting his head he was in no mood to worry about dangerous side effects. He assured me that nothing he was using was in the slightest way experimental, and that I should go back to flying the Dancer and let him worry about Bradley. Or words to that effect.

  I really was happy for Bradley, of course, but the fact remained that his rapid improvement was playing havoc with Alana’s feelings. After years away from the wing-mending business she felt herself painfully rusty at it; and as Bradley continued to get better despite that, she began to wonder out loud whether she was doing any good, and if not, what right she had to continue hanging around him. At first I thought this was just an effort to hide the growth of other feelings from me, but gradually I began to realize that she was as confused about what was happening as she sounded. Never before in her life, I gathered, had romantic feelings come to her without the framework of a broken-wing operation to both build on and help disguise, and with that scaffolding falling apart around her she was either unable or unwilling to admit to herself what was really going on.

  I felt pretty rotten having to sit around watching her flounder, but until she was able to recognize for herself what was happening there wasn’t much I could do except listen. I wasn’t about to offer any suggestions, especially since I didn’t believe in love at first sight in the first place. My only consolation was that Bradley and Lanton were riding round trip with us, which meant that Alana wouldn’t have to deal with any sort of separation crisis until we were back on Earth. I’d never before had much sympathy for people who expected time to solve all their problems for them, but in this case I couldn’t think of anything better to do.

  And so matters stood as we went through our eighth and final point and emerged barely 800,000 kilometers from the thriving colony world Taimyr . . . and found it deserted.

  “Still nothing,” Alana said tightly, her voice reflecting both the remnants of cascade depression and the shock of our impossible discovery. “No response to our call; nothing on any frequency I can pick up. I can’t even find the comm satellites’ lock signal.”

  I nodded, my eyes on the scope screen as the Dancer’s telescope slowly scanned Taimyr’s dark side. No lights showed anywhere. Shifting the aim, I began searching for the nine comm and nav satellites that should be circling the planet. “Alana, call up the astro-gate again and find out what it’s giving as position uncertainty.”

  “If you’re thinking we’re in the wrong system, forget it,” she said as she tapped keys.

  “Just checking all possibilities,” I muttered. The satellites, too, were gone. I leaned back in my seat and bit at my lip.

  “Yeah. Well, from eighteen positively identified stars we’ve got an error of no more than half a light-hour.” She swiveled to face me and I saw the fear starting to grow behind her eyes. “Pall, what is going on here? Two hundred million people can’t just disappear without a trace.”

  I shrugged helplessly. “A nuclear war could do it, I suppose, and might account for the satellites being gone as well. But there’s no reason why anyone on Taimyr should have any nuclear weapons.” Leaning forward again, I activated the helm. “A better view might help. If there’s been some kind of war the major cities should now be big craters surrounded by rubble. I’m going to take us in and see what the day side looks like from high orbit.”

  “Do you think that’s safe? I mean – ” She hesitated. “Suppose the attack came from outside Taimyr.”

  “What, you mean like an invasion?” I shook my head. “Even if there are alien intelligences somewhere who would want to invade us, we stand just as good a chance of getting away from orbit as we do from here.”

  “All right,” she sighed. “But I’m setting up a cascade point maneuver, just in case. Do you think we should alert everybody yet?”

  “Crewers, yes; passengers, no. I don’t want any silly questions until I’m ready to answer them.”

  We took our time approaching Taimyr, but caution turned out to be unnecessary. No ships, human or otherwise, waited in orbit for us; no one hailed or shot at us; and as I turned the telescope planetward I saw no signs of warfare.

  Nor did I see any cities, farmland, factories, or vehicles. It was as if Taimyr the colony had never existed.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Matope said after I’d explained things over the crew intercom hookup. “How could a whole colony disappear?”

  “I’ve looked up the records we’ve got on Taimyr,” Pascal spoke up. “Some of the tropical vegetation is pretty fierce in the growth department. If everyone down there was killed by a plague or something, it’s possible the plants have overgrown everything.”

  “Except that most of the cities are in temperate regions,” I said shortly, “and two are smack in the middle of deserts. I can’t find any of those, either.”

  “Hmm,” Pascal said and fell silent, probably already hard at work on a new theory.

  “Captain, you don’t intend to land, do you?” Sarojis asked. “If launch facilities are gone and not merely covered over we’d be unable to lift again to orbit.”

  “I’m aware of that, and I have no intention of landing,” I assured him. “But something’s happened down there, and I’d like to get back to Earth with at least some idea of what.”

  “Maybe nothing’s happened to the colony,” Wilkinson said slowly. “Maybe something’s happened to us.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well . . . this may sound strange, but suppose we’ve somehow gone back in time, back to before the colony was started.”

  “That’s crazy,” Sarojis scoffed before I could say anything. “How could we possibly do something like that?”

  “Malfunction of the field generator, maybe?” Wilkinson suggested. “There’s a lot we don’t know about Colloton space.”

  “It doesn’t send ships back in – ”

  “All right, ease up,” I told Sarojis. Beside me Alana snorted suddenly and reached for her keyboard. “I agree the idea sounds crazy, but whole cities don’t just walk off, either,” I continued. “It’s not like there’s a calendar we can look at out here, either. If we were a hundred years in the past, how would we know it?”

  “Check the star positions,” Matope offered.

  “No good; the astrogate program would have noticed if anything was too far out of place. But I expect that still leaves us a possible century or more to rattle around in.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Alana turned back to me with a grimly satisfied look on her face. “I’ve just taken signals from three pulsars. Compensating for our distance from Earth gives the proper rates for all three.”

  “Any comments on that?” I asked, not expecting any. Pulsar sig
nals occasionally break their normal pattern and suddenly increase their pulse frequency, but it was unlikely to have happened in three of the beasts simultaneously; and in the absence of such a glitch the steady decrease in frequency was as good a calendar as we could expect to find.

  There was a short pause, then Tobbar spoke up. “Captain, I think maybe it’s time to bring the passengers in on this. We can’t hide the fact that we’re in Taimyr system, so they’re bound to figure out sooner or later that something’s wrong. And I think they’ll be more cooperative if we volunteer the information rather than making them demand it.”

  “What do we need their cooperation for?” Sarojis snorted.

  “If you bothered to listen as much as you talked,” Tobbar returned, a bit tartly, “you’d know that Chuck Raines is an advanced student in astrophysics and Dr Chileogu has done a fair amount of work on Colloton field mathematics. I’d say chances are good that we’re going to need help from one or both of them before this is all over.”

  I looked at Alana, raised my eyebrows questioningly. She hesitated, then nodded. “All right,” I said. “Matope, you’ll stay on duty down there; Alana will be in command here. Everyone else will assemble in the dining room. The meeting will begin in ten minutes.”

  I waited for their acknowledgments and then flipped off the intercom. “I’d like to be there,” Alana said.

  “I know,” I said, raising my palms helplessly. “But I have to be there, and someone’s got to keep an eye on things outside.”

  “Pascal or Sarojis could do it.”

  “True – and under normal circumstances I’d let them. But we’re facing an unknown and potentially dangerous situation, and I need someone here whose judgment I trust.”

  She took a deep breath, exhaled loudly. “Yeah. Well . . . at least let me listen in by intercom, okay?”

  “I’d planned to,” I nodded. Reaching over, I touched her shoulder. “Don’t worry; Bradley can handle the news.”