New Writings in SF 25 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  The sounds penetrated the ship, reaching Hallett and Udet as they arrived at the lock. The doctor realised at once that whatever was killing Mitchell was doing it very quickly. The captain and his crew had taken quite a long time to die. Now, it would soon be free. The specialists outside the ship were buzzing for admission.

  Desperately, Hallett wondered what to do. If he admitted the outsiders aboard, he might be sentencing them to death. The solution to the problem had been lurking in his mind for some time. If the people here, and, eventually, Earth’s millions, were to be saved, then someone had to go to Mitchell and accept the virus, thus committing suicide.

  Udet was looking at him curiously, while the specialists clamoured for attention. Mitchell was still screaming; but the sound was subsiding.

  He thumbed the communication button and spoke without preamble: ‘You can’t come aboard ship. There is no time to explain now. Some people are joining you on the ferry. Then get away from here.’

  He broke contact and told Udet: ‘Get the others from the bridge and leave the ship.’

  The security man started to protest.

  ‘Don’t waste time!’

  He returned, bringing O’Higgins, Gordon and the m.t. member.

  O’Higgins had grasped the import of the dilemma.

  ‘Let me stay, Neil. You’re too valuable to the project, too deeply involved-’

  ‘That’s precisely why I must stay. I helped to send the captain and the crew to the stars. This is the only way to ensure that what they did was worthwhile.’

  The ship had gone quiet.

  Clumsily, they shook hands, and the four people went into the airlock and closed the door. Hallett had never felt so lonely in his life. After a minute, the ferry lurched away from the starship. He went to look for Mitchell.

  * * * *

  Piteous mewing sounds, muted, led him to what had once been a man. Mitchell was covered in blood after his frenzy in the locker room, and just barely alive. Hallett knelt beside him, and took his hand. Briefly, something kindled in Mitchell’s blank eyes. Then he died.

  Hallett hauled the body to the refrigerator store and put it away. He went back to the bridge and sat in the late captain’s seat. The communications light was burning on the console. Salmet, trying to get in touch with him.

  ‘Neil—get off the ship, at once. You know what happened to the others.’

  ‘What will it solve if I leave the ship. Chief?’

  ‘We can send the ship and the virus into the Sun.’

  Hallett pulled the computer print-outs to him. ‘That would merely postpone the problem. That virus is less than four light-years away from the Solar System. Eventually it will reach this sector of space-’

  ‘There will be time to defend humanity against it. Leave the ship.’

  ‘The solution is here, on the ship. If you don’t hear from me within the hour, you’ll know I’m dead. Then you can send the ship into the Sun.’

  He flicked off Salmet’s protest and began to study the print-outs again. It was difficult to concentrate, not knowing what, if anything, was going to happen to him. So far, he felt no different from his normal state. That proved nothing: most parasites didn’t harm their hosts—until they were no longer of use. He took notes on a pad. The victims had suffered lethargy, sleepiness, forgetfulness, loss of coordination, disorientation. Hallett studied each heading in turn, going over in his mind the possible causes of each symptom. Fifteen minutes had passed and still he felt all right.

  Thoughtfully, he circled the word forgetfulness. Memory was possible only through the presence in the brain of message-transmitters, such as serotonin and noradrenalin, which occur naturally in the brain. They carry information across the minute gaps separating the brain cells. And those transmitters could be blocked, interfered with.

  LSD, for instance, was partially chemically similar to serotonin. Its use causes an apparent excess of transmitter material, confusing the brain which, for self-protection, tries to inhibit the action of the natural transmitter. A very small amount of LSD was enough to upset the mechanics of memory.

  The production of noradrenalin could be reduced by the use of reserpine, while chlorpromazine checked the release of the transmitter. Then there were the enzymes in the mono-amine-oxidase group, which destroyed excess transmitter material. Alternatively, there could have been interference with the brain’s RNA or the S100 and other protein molecules which were thought to assist the transference of information from short-store to long-store memory.

  Somewhere there lay part of the answer. But why—so far—was he unaffected ? Thirty minutes had sidled past. He asked Salmet a question. The answer was affirmative. He got up and left the starship.

  The first person to meet him aboard Tsiolkovsky was Serita Gordon.

  ‘I thought you would be back. Doctor Hallett.’

  Most statements made at times like this were banal and hers was no exception. Not that he cared. He was too busy approving of her appearance, noting her gleaming cascade of dark hair, when most women sported ugly crops and her obvious rejection of the exposed mammary cult, brought on by yet another resurgence in Minoan culture.

  ‘We’ll talk about that later, Serita.’ He glanced over her shoulder at encroaching officials and reporters. He whispered to her, ‘If you still want that exclusive, it was a case of the biter bit. The virus killed Mitchell by destroying his memory. And he killed it. He was a registered junkie.’

  <>

  * * * *

  THE HALTED VILLAGE

  John Rackham

  The good folk of Chesterlea went about their usual Sunday occupations in the sunshine. It took a man with the oddity of Gordon Collier to see past the normalcy of that peaceful scene to the bizarre terror beneath.

  * * * *

  It came as a wave of total conviction. Somebody knew it was Sunday. That somebody was afraid, shivering with the despairing, hopeless helplessness of non-understanding, the kind of fear that numbs. But she knew it was Sunday. That was the one coherent thought that came through the fear-wave. And it was ridiculous. Gordon Collier applied his foot to the brake rather more abruptly than was his habit, slowed his Mini, pulled it on to the grass verge, to a halt, and sat quite still. Ridiculous; but so convinced was that somebody who was wailing in his mind, that he twisted his left wrist where it lay on the wheel and consulted his watch. There, black letters in a white slot assured him it was TUE 21st. Which he had been sure of anyway. But she was absolutely sure, still. And almost out of her mind with dread.

  Collier sat quite still, questing about as best he could to try to pin down the source of the panic thought; but the most he could manage was that it was over that way, to his left, and fairly close. He shook his head, trying to clear it a little, but that gesture had never worked in the past and it didn’t now. The terror was still there, over that way somewhere. And it was so total that it began to infect him, to make a fine film of sweat break out on his face.

  A passerby would have seen a dark-haired, square-built, homely-kindly looking man of about thirty, in no way spectacular, scowling into space and shivering a little. There was nothing about Collier to mark him out from many a thousand like him. Only he himself was aware that he had any special talent. He lived with it, uneasily, all his mature life, but never before had it hurt him as it was doing now. Someone, girl or woman, very near, half out of her mind with fear, was so obsessed with the thought that this was Sunday that no other rational thought could break through.

  He started the car again, driving very slowly, to the right-angle bend that would take him off the hill-crest road and down into the winding, bumpy, ill-kept way to the village of Chesterlea. On either side the road was steep-walled with bushes in green profusion and tall trees that cast a welcome shade. The mid-morning air droned with busy insect work and bird noise, and this would have been a particularly pleasant moment for Collier on any other day. For him a bird was more than a chirping trill and a flash of wings. To his odd se
nses there came also the wordless murmur of lively happiness, the innocent preoccupation with living. But not this day. That miasma of fear was too strong to allow anything else mind-room. All at once it grew very strong indeed, and gave way to ‘words’.

  ‘No!’ it cried. ‘No! Go away! All dead! Everybody ... dead!’

  Collier stopped again, yanked the hand-brake on hard and scrambled out, following the hysterically repeated mind-gabble. He went up the bank-side on all fours, shoving his way through thick bushes, swerving around trees, until he found her, huddled defensively in a natural retreat, a narrow gap within a ring of gorse bushes. He paused at the unwelcoming thorns, eyed her wonderingly. She stared at him round-eyed, silent, made no move at all, like an animal at bay. Her mind still babbled at him crazily. He strove to ignore it, to stare at her intelligently, and then to recognise her.

  ‘Mary Ellen!’ he said, then, urgent but gentle: ‘What’s the matter? What are you afraid of?’

  She offered no reply, kept quite still, only her eyes moving, flicking from side to side as if seeking some way of escape. And steadily, fearfully, her mind screamed at him ‘Go away! All dead! All dead!’

  He knew her barely enough to recognise, hardly enough to speak to. Mary Ellen was Chesterlea’s village idiot. No one knew her surname, nor whether she had the right to claim one. Most people said she was a love-child, some that she had been abandoned, left by the gipsies when they had been forced to quit their encampment on the moors, along with the closing of the coal-mine. His own family had moved at the same time, away from the dying village to the nearby town of Stanfield. Twenty years ago. He could only just remember her from those days as a flitting, skipping, wild-eyed slip of a girl, no more than five or six, coming and going as the fancy took her.

  He had seen her, briefly, a time or two since then, on his rare visits to this forgotten place. She must be all of twenty-five now, he thought, looking down at her where she cringed against the thorns, listening to the incoherent babble of her mind and wondering what to do. According to local gossip she was quite harmless.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked again, foolishly. ‘What are you afraid of? I heard you crying ...’

  ‘Didn’t!’ she denied, suddenly and vigorously, and her blue eyes were indignant. ‘Wasn’t crying!’ And it was true, as he could plainly see. Her face was grubby, but smooth under the dirt, and quite innocent of tear-stains. Her hysterical babble had ceased, as it always did for him when the person decided to talk aloud.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, humbly. ‘I thought you were in some kind of trouble, wondered if I could help you.’

  ‘No!’ Her rejection was-flat. ‘Go away! Let me be!’

  ‘All right. I just thought, if you were hurt or something, I could take you to a doctor and get it put right, whatever it might be.’

  Her blue eyes went wide in curiosity. ‘Doctor? What’s a doctor?’

  The fear was abating in her mind now, pushed into the background by her wonderment at a new word. There was wonder in his own mind as he began to realise the extent of her innocence. If he could gain her interest, her confidence, keep her talking, he might find out what was really wrong.

  ‘A doctor,’ he said, patiently, ‘is a man who knows how to make you well again if you are hurt, or sick, or if you have broken something. If you scratch or cut yourself so that it bleeds ..

  ‘Lick it!’ she said, abruptly. “Makes it better.’

  ‘That’s one way,’ he agreed, noticing that her hands and forearms, and her shins, were covered in minute grazes and scratches. He had a sudden and almost painful pang of nostalgia for those long-gone days when he, too, had come home smothered in gouges from blackberrying. With an effort he dragged his thoughts back to the matter in hand. ‘That’s all right for little cuts and scratches, but if you got a really bad gash, lots of blood coming out... well, you’d need a doctor to fix it. There’s a doctor in the village now. Didn’t you know that?’

  This was true. It was Collier’s reason for being here this morning. The Stanfield Weekly News had long employed him at various tasks; making up a simple cross-word square, sketching the odd cartoon, producing the occasional filler of unusual information or inspirational verse, but chiefly to ferret out snippets of personal ‘inside’ information. Davie Dodds, the editor, appreciated Collier’s flair for this, although he seldom stressed it, possibly because he wanted to hang on to something good, and if Collier ever got notions of being a ‘real’ reporter he would be very hard to replace. He had sent out his ‘treasure’ this fine morning to dig up something interesting about the new doctor in Chesterlea, of all places.

  ‘Used to live there, didn’t you, lad?’ Dodds made the point. ‘You know what it’s like. Can’t be more than a hundred folk there, all told. Never had or needed a doctor before.’

  ‘That’s true enough. There was always the first-aid post at the pit-head, or if it was something drastic they’d send for the ambulance from Danchester Hospital. I only ever saw it happen once.’

  ‘There you are, then. This chap’s name is Parker, and he’s taken a lease of the old pit-head laboratory. Had it cleaned up and lot of stuff moved in. Means he must have money behind him, right? That was two weeks ago. No signs of trying to start up a practice. The local G.P.s in Stanfield either don’t know him or won’t talk. Danchester doesn’t know anything, either. So what’s he up to, eh ? You go and see what you can find out.’

  Collier had started out expecting a pleasant morning— and now this. He looked down at Mary Ellen and repeated: ‘There’s a doctor in the village now. If you’re in some kind of trouble?’

  ‘Not the village!’ Her reaction was violent. Ducking her head she tried to cringe back further into the thorns. ‘Nobody there. All gone. All dead!’ Again he got that mental rush of fear, and the ‘Sunday’ feeling.

  ‘Now stop that!’ he snapped, losing patience. ‘They can’t all be dead or gone away, you silly girl. And it is not Sunday!’ But even as he spoke angrily at her, from the drowsing sunlit valley below there came the gentle tolling of the church bell, quiet and far-off, a thin thread of sound over the murmur of woodland life about him. Chill fingers walked along his spine. He stared down at Mary Ellen, seeing her shrink even further into the thorns at the sound of that distant bell. He had a distinct and irrational urge to turn and run. Common sense took a hand. Run? From what? The simple sound of a church bell? Just the same, there was something very wrong here.

  ‘Come on!’ He offered her his hand. ‘You come with me. There’s something odd going on here, and I intend to find out just what it is.’ She backed away from his offered hand, but he was insistent. ‘It’s all right. You’ll be quite safe in my car.’

  That brought her head up, and a sudden different interest, sensing the quick wonder in her mind he took advantage of it. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘A ride in my car. You’ll like that, won’t you?’ And he kept his hand out and open, the way one would make overtures to a dog.

  She straightened, eased away from the thorns, stood up, looked at him uncertainly. Now, for the first time seeing past the dirty rags she wore, he realised just how beautiful she was, beautiful in a vivid and disturbing way. Her wild hair, black as crow’s feathers, shone with vigorous well-being, framing a face that was smooth and guileless, yet with a curious kind of knowing. Her eyes were the blue of deep water, and as candid as an infant’s. Her skin, under the stains and smudges of dirt, was innocent of powder or paint and as silky as the bloom on a peach. Her mouth was its own red, needing no stain from a tube. All at once she smiled, her teeth startling white against her weather-tan. She reached and took his hand, came close.

  ‘I like you,’ she said, simple and direct. ‘Not frightened now.’

  His thoughts in turmoil. Collier gripped her fingers, felt that grip returned confidently, and started to lead her back to the road. The distant bell kept its regular striking, threading a continuity through his confused mind. He had known girls, many of them, but his
peculiar talent had opened them too far, had given him insight which killed any hope of intimate social relationships. At the same time that depth of insight had helped him to be gentle and understanding, hence a target and a frustration for every designing female within miles. In simple self-defence he had developed an inner barrier against women in general, almost without being aware of it.

  Now, with this half-wild, simple-minded yet utterly lovely, natural creature striding along by his side, he was confused as never before. Nothing verbal came from her mind now, just strong and warm emotion-feelings, and they were pleasant. At the crest of the bank-side he released her fingers and slid down to the road, there to turn and hold out his arms as if to a child, to encourage her to follow. Her dress at one time had been a green and white print of some kind. Now, where it wasn’t stained, it was faded, the sleeves long since ripped away, the skirt, originally brief, equally ripped and ragged, the whole garment split down one side. By some curious alchemy she looked as if she belonged to the woods, a nymph.