The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories!

by Lake, Jay

  Waverill didn’t answer, but the panel lights showed the outer hatch activated. Through the spy cell Murdoch could see the stars as the hatch slowly opened. Waverill jumped off without hesitating. Murdoch liked the tough old man’s guts, and hoped he’d make it all right.

  * * * *

  He closed the hatch and fed new data into the autopilot. He sagged into the seat as the ship strained into a new course, then it eased off to a steady forward acceleration. He was ready to loop around another of Jupiter’s moons, then around the giant planet itself, on a course that should defy pursuit unless it were previously known.

  He flexed his arm. It was a little sorer now. He wondered when the drowsiness would hit him. He didn’t want to trust the autopilot until he was safely past Jupiter; if a meteor or a derelict got in the way, it might take human wits to set up a new course safely.

  He had all the radar units on now. The conic sweep forward showed the great bulge of Jupiter at one side; no blips in space. The three Plan Position screens, revolving through cross-sections of the sphere of space around him, winked and faded with blips but none near the center. He thought, I’ve made it. I’ve gotten away with it, and I ought to feel excited. Instead, he was only tired. He thought, I’ll get up and fill a thermos with coffee, then I can sit here.

  He unstrapped and began to rise. Then his eyes returned to one of the scopes.

  This particular one was seldom used in space; it was for planet landings. It scanned ahead in a narrow horizontal band, like a sea vessel’s surface sweep. He’d planned only to use it as he transited Jupiter, to cut his course in near to the atmosphere, and it was only habit that had made him glance at it. The bright green line showed no peaks, but at the middle, and for a little way to each side, it was very slightly uneven.

  He thought, It’s just something in the system, out of adjustment. He looked at the forward sweep. There were no blips dead ahead. He moved the adjustments of the horizontal sweep, blurred the line, then brought it back to sharpness. Except in the middle. The blurriness there remained.

  He opened a panel and punched automatic cross-checks, got a report that the instrument was in perfect order. He looked at the scope again. The blurred length had grown to either side. Clammy sweat began to form on his skin. He punched at the computers, set up a program that would curve the ship off its path, punched for safety verification, and activated the autopilot. He heard the drive’s whine move higher, but felt no answering lateral acceleration. He punched for three G deceleration, working frantically to get strapped in. The drive shrieked but there was no tug at his body.

  The blurred part of the green line was spreading.

  He realized he was pressing against the side of his seat. That meant the ship was finally swerving. But he’d erased that program. And now, abruptly, deceleration hit him. He sagged forward against his straps, gasping for air. He heard a new whine as his seat automatically began to turn, pulling in the straps on one side, as it maneuvered to face him away from the deceleration. He was crushed sideways for a while, then the seat locked and he pressed hard against the back of it. This he could take, though he judged it was five or six G’s. He labored for breath.

  The deceleration cut off and he was in free fall. His screens and scopes were dark. The drive no longer whined. He thought, Something’s got me. Something that can hide from radar, and control a ship from a distance like a fish on the end of a spear.

  He tore at the straps, got free and leaped for the suit locker. He dressed in frantic haste, cycled the air lock ... and found himself on the surface of a planet.

  He had been returned to Ganymede.

  Panicked, he fled; then abruptly, where nothing had been, there was something solid in his path. He turned his face to avoid the impact and tried to get his arms in front of him. He crashed into something that did not yield. His arms slid around something, and without opening his eyes he knew the robot had him. He tried to fight, but his strength was pitiful. He relaxed and tried to think.

  In his suit helmet radio the voice of the robot said, “We will put you to sleep now.”

  He fought frantically to break loose. His mind screamed, No! If you go to sleep now you’ll never....

  * * * *

  He was wrong.

  His first waking sensation was delicious comfort. He felt good all over. He came a little more awake and his spaceman’s mind began to reason: There’s light gravity, and I’m supported by the armpits. No acceleration. I’m breathing something heavier than air, but it feels good in my lungs, and tastes good.

  His eyelids unlocked themselves, and the shock of seeing was like a knife in his middle.

  He was buried in the ice, looking out at the place where he and Waverill had stayed. He was far into the ice and could only see distortedly. Between him and the open were various things; rocks, eroded artifacts. At the edge of his vision on the right was a vaguely animal shape.

  Terror made him struggle to turn his head. He couldn’t; he was encased in something just tight enough to hold him. His nose and mouth were free, and a draft of the cloying atmosphere moved past them so that he could breath. There was enough space before his eyes for him to see the stuff swirling like a heavy fog. He thought, I’m being fed by what I breathe. I don’t feel hungry. In horror, he forced the stuff out of his lungs. It was hard to exhale. He resisted taking any back in, but eventually he had to give up and then he fought to get it in. He tried to cry out, but the sound was a muffled nothing.

  He yielded to panic and struggled for a while without accomplishing anything, except that he found that his casing did yield, very slowly, if he applied pressure long enough. That brought a little sanity, and he relaxed again until the exhaustion wore off.

  There was movement in the vague shape at his right, and he felt a compulsion to see it more plainly. Even after it was in his vision, horrified fascination kept him straining until his head was turned toward it.

  It was alive; obscenely alive, a caricature of parts of a man. There was no proper skin, but an ugly translucent membrane covered it. The whole was encased as Murdoch himself must be, and from the casing several pipes stretched back into the dark ice. The legs were entirely gone, and only stubs of arms remained, sufficient for the thing to hang from in its casing. Bloated lungs pulsed slowly, breathing in and out a misty something like what Murdoch breathed. The stomach was shrunken to a small repugnant sack, hanging at the bottom with what might be things evolved from liver and kidneys. Blood moved from the lungs through the loathsome mess, pumped by an overgrown heart that protruded from between the lungs. A little blood circulated up to what had once been the head. The skull was gone. The nose and mouth were one round hole where the nutrient vapor puffed in and out. The brain showed horrible and shrunk through the membrane. A pair of lidless idiot eyes stared unmovingly in Murdoch’s direction. The whole jawless head was the size of Murdoch’s two fists doubled up, if he could judge the size through the distortion of the ice.

  Sick but unable to vomit, Murdoch forced his eyes away from the thing. Now the aliens spoke to him, from somewhere. “Pretty isn’t he Murdoch. He makes a good bank for the virus. You were right you know it does offer great longevity but it has its own ideas of what a host should be.”

  Murdoch produced a garbled sound and the aliens spoke again. “Your words are indistinct but perhaps you are asking how long it took him to become this way. He was one of our first visitors the very first who tried to steal from us. His plan was not as clever as your own which we found diverting though of course you had no chance against our science which is beyond your understanding.” And, in answer to his moan, they said, “Do not be unphilosophical Murdoch you will find many thoughts to occupy your time.”

  I’ll go mad, he thought. That’s the way out!

  But he doubted that even the escape of madness would be allowed.

  WALLFLOWER,
by Thomas A. Easton

  Originally published in Tomorrow, November 1996.

  Once Avril Montez had been able to hear the cries of children at play in the schoolyard not far beyond the tumble-down stone wall.

  Once there had been the roar of traffic on the highway, the whine of aircraft overhead, footsteps and bouncing balls on the pathways.

  Once there had even been visitors.

  Now there was nothing. A thread of obsessively piping music. Sidney Mailloux’s plaintive voice crying, “Is anyone on yet? Evan? Amelia?”

  Nothing. Nothing real. Nothing but ghosts and memories.

  She could see a pigeon pecking quietly in the bramble-narrowed path that entered through the gates, a crow sitting in the branches of the apple tree on the knoll, a seagull in the distance. They were all that was left, the opportunists, the scavengers. Pigeons and crows, seagulls and ravens, sparrows and starlings. Songbirds had been only memory even when she was alive.

  “I’m bored,” came Sidney’s voice. But there was no other sign that anyone was present. The brambles and everlasting were still and quiet beneath the yellow sky. The only movement was a small red ground squirrel emerging from its burrow beneath a stone. Once in a while, there was a skunk, a raccoon, or a mangy cat.

  “Where have all the people gone?”

  Avril laughed out loud at the echo of the old, old song. “Gone to graveyards, every goddam one of them,” she said. “Just like us.”

  Yes, she told herself. Graveyards. The rusty gates hung askew on their pillars, and the letters that said so were still there. “Eternal Rest” on one of them. “Cemetery” on the other.

  “I mean us,” said Sidney. “It’s not as if the storms have been bad lately. There’s been plenty of sunshine.”

  All charged up and nowhere to go. To either side of the gateway’s pillars stretched a stone wall distorted by frost and roots and time, something growing in every cranny. Violets in the spring, their color magnified in the lilacs that billowed in one corner of the cemetery. Wild roses in the summer. Tiger lilies in August. Wild asters in the fall. She thought of Tennyson and smiled at the thought of him uprooting roses and lilies. What he once had craved to understand no longer existed, did it?

  “Oh, shut up.” That was Ricky Moi. Shrubbery obscured the lettering carved into the face of his stone, but she could see its encircling band of visual sensors. Since it sat a little down the slope of the land, she could also see the panel of solar cells on its top. “We don’t have to chat-chat-chit-chat all the time, you know.”

  “Save your energy.” Avril had never learned this one’s name. She had never said, and bushes obscured her inscription too. But the stone was the same, as were almost all of the cemetery’s occupants. Sarcophagi full of circuitry, solar cells and light sensors, microphones and speakers. Once they had thought it would pass for life. “Maybe someone’ll finally show up, come walking through at midnight, and we can all yell ‘BOO!!’ and give the poor bastard a heart attack.”

  “The last man on Earth, and you’d do that to him?”

  “Serve him right.”

  “Might be a woman.”

  “Serve her right.”

  “I’m laughing.”

  They were waking up, then. All the eternal residents of this eternal rest home, eternal witnesses of time, rank on rank of blocky stones, surrounded by weeds and brush and brambles.

  Eternal rest? Not that, not really. They talked too much. But eternal loneliness, yes, and no way out, not so long as the sun still shone and earthquakes and volcanoes and the sea refused to cover them with mud or ash or deep, dark water.

  A mad, mad giggle reminded her that not everyone could take it.

  A dog barked. For a wild moment she thought her heart leaped within her chest, though she now had neither heart nor chest. It had been so long since she had seen a dog, and then it had been only a scrawny mongrel that snuffed along the ground as if searching for the master and the home it had never known.

  Another bark, and, “Want bone. Want ball. Want run and chase and....”

  “Shaddap, Rufus.”

  His dog had been no Rufus, cosseted all its life until at the end its simple mind was downloaded into a solar-powered gravestone just as if it were a sacred human being.

  His dog had been a beagle named Wooftop, and he had left it to wander. To be adopted by another student if it were lucky. To be caught and butchered and eaten if it were not.

  If only she had not been so shy. If she had had the nerve. If she had spoken to him more than that one time, petted the dog when he walked it in the quad, sat down beside him on the lawn, in the caf, even in the lecture hall where she had first seen him. If and if and if, then perhaps Wooftop would also have had a pampered life and been preserved forever after. It might even have wound up here, with her. With them.

  If only....

  “Allie, Allie, Allie....”

  Avril made a sighing noise just as if she still had lungs. “What do you want, Kirby?” He spoke to her more often than to anyone else, calling across the intervening stones as if across a breakfast table. He seemed to like her voice.

  “You weren’t paying any attention, not any, none at all, and I called your name, I did, I did. I know I did.”

  “There isn’t any rush,” said a thin, patient voice. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Well, of course, Chandra. Of course. Of course. We’re dead. But dead is boring, just like Sidney said.”

  “I’d rather be dead,” said Chandra. “I was a soldier, you know? And the things we had to do on the Mexican border.... I’m shaking my head.”

  “Did you die in action?”

  “I must have. They had to use a year-old download for this stone.”

  “It was one of those new viruses that got me,” said Kirby. “I don’t even remember what they called it. But I remember dying, yes I do. I was on a Coast Guard destroyer, intercepting supertankers filled with refugees, telling them to turn around and go home.”

  “Not that they had any hope of surviving there,” said Ricky Moi.

  “We had our orders. We didn’t like them, but we knew that letting them in would destroy the economy and use up the resources we needed. Overload the lifeboat. So, well....”

  “You sank them.” Avril had heard rumors when she was alive.

  “Yeah. We had to. They carried diseases too, you know. That’s where I got.... It was pretty nasty. Made me choke and wheeze. I was burning up inside, and then that helmet was sliding cold, cold, cold onto my head. And I woke up here.”

  Silence fell across the cemetery, broken only by the buzz of insects and the rustle of the ground squirrel in the dead leaves beneath a shrub. But it did not last. How they had died was a favorite topic of the dead, one many of them returned to again and again, chewing it over and over like a dog with an ancient bone, as if some nourishment remained in the weathered husk.

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you, Allie.”

  Many of them.

  “How did you die? You’ve never said.”

  And she never would, no matter how many times Kirby or the others asked. It was embarrassing, a shame she could have lived down only if she had remained alive.

  Several voices came to her defense: “Oh, leave her alone. Some of us like our privacy, even here. She’s got a right to take her secrets to the grave even if she can still talk. Leave her be.”

  Avril said nothing herself, though she could not help but remember, just as she did every time the subject arose.

  She had first seen Paul in biology class. At the front of the huge lecture hall, the instructor had been pointing at a chart with two lines projected on a screen. “There is only so much land suitable for agriculture,” she was saying. “Only so much water. We can grow only so much food. Yet for c
enturies we have felt that there was no limit on human numbers. We have multiplied until now....”

  Three rows in front of her. Dark, curling hair, a square angle of jaw, a muscular arm emerging from a short-sleeved shirt. Head turning to look toward someone else, Roman profile.

  When he winked at the target of his gaze, Avril felt a flash of white-hot envy.

  The instructor tapped the screen. “Erosion costs us topsoil, fertility, the ability to produce the food we eat. Irrigation has already drained most aquifers, until now we cannot irrigate. It has also poisoned millions of hectares with salt and toxic chemicals.”

  She didn’t even know who he was. She had never spoken to him. And when he winked at someone else, she raged with jealousy.

  “We have converted forests to farms. We have all the benefits of genetically engineered supercrops. But the best we have been able to do is to keep agricultural production from declining. We’ve been holding steady for years, while the population has continued to increase.

  “The effect....” Her voice rose as she pointed toward a student, who answered: “Less food per capita. More famines.”

  “Until...?” Who was he?

  “Nature brings us back into balance with the world.”

  The instructor nodded. The point was obvious, conventional wisdom in this age of the world, hardly something one needed to have read a textbook to grasp.

  “If we fail, there is a strong possibility that the human species will die out. We will be extinct.”

  Yet people still bred as if they had some special dispensation from the laws of nature. Suddenly Avril understood how they could do so, for she wished to do the same. She had seen her perfect mate, and her body tingled in anticipation of what they might do with and to each other.

  A different student raised her hand: “Could the world recover?”