Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J F Bone

  Slowly he made his way down the corridor, leaning against the wall for support. And his fingers found what his eyes failed to see—a doorway that opened to his touch to reveal a gigantic room, brightly lighted and filled with the smell of water and vegetation. Dense rows of feather-delicate foliage met his eyes, leaves of thick stalked plants that bore huge clusters of dark purple fruit.

  Bennett looked up at the glowing ceiling overhead, wondering what made it shine with the light and warmth of sunlight, and why the light seemed to come from no place in particular. He knew, of course, that General Electronics was making new discoveries every day. But somehow the room and its strange illumination didn’t look like a G.E. development. It looked—alien! In fact, nothing within his field of vision bore the stamp of a mundane intelligence.

  He watched a gleaming black machine float slowly down a nearby row of plants in one of the long black tanks, trimming excess greenery, harvesting ripe fruit, occasionally uprooting one of the older plants with a pale pencil of force, and disposing of it with a flash of blue flame.

  There was no sound, no smoke, no ash. One instant the plant was dangling below the polyhedral body, the next it was gone. He grimaced, wondering whether that flash of flame would be as fatal for human protoplasm as it was for the plant. At any rate, he would give it a wide berth until he learned more about it.

  There was something wrong with this place. It was too still, too quiet. He shook his head in bewilderment. That was the understatement of a lifetime. Everything was wrong with this place. Strange, frightening, unbelievable. It didn’t exist and he was the victim of some freakish distortion of human thinking, some undreamed of weakness in himself.

  But, of course, that was crazy. Oh well, he’d probably find out, unless the place was as deserted as it looked. He smiled deprecatingly at the thought. Deserted places weren’t left running. Or if they were, they didn’t stay running very long. Even with full automation the supply of spare parts would eventually run out. There must be intelligence of some sort around here. The only problem was finding it—or perhaps the problems would really come when it found him.

  The enormous size of the building dawned on him as he left the hydroponics room and looked down the corridor in which he had awakened. It stretched endlessly onward, disappearing in a dull glimmering far ahead. He began to walk down its length, backtracking his earlier trail, his feet stirring up faint spurts of impalpable yellow dust that hung tenuously in the air, and swirled after him as he moved forward.

  The floor possessed a smooth yellow velvety texture which was marred only by a staggering track of booted feet—his feet—and a broader splotch where he had slept the night before. The significance of the dust registered immediately. His wry thought of a moment before was more accurate than he had dreamed! The place was deserted!

  There was no sign that this hallway had been traversed by feet other than his own, and dust of great density simply didn’t accumulate in a matter of days or weeks. It took years—perhaps even centuries—for a patina such as this to form!

  He skirted an odd, bulbous machine standing in the middle of the corridor and looked at it curiously before he went on. Judging from the smooth nozzles that extended from wall to wall below the mechanism’s barrel-shaped body, it was in all probability some sort of cleaning device. But it had stopped long ago, if the dust that covered it was any criterion. Probably the dust in the hall had started accumulating when the machine had stopped. But how long before that the machine had traversed empty halls was an unanswerable question.

  He came to a cross-corridor and turned into it, ignoring the spiral ramp that led downward from the intersection. At the moment one direction was as good as another, and the unsteady footprints seemed the best guide in a maze of imponderables.

  He was starkly incredulous when he saw other tracks mixed with his own, prints of small, high-arched bare feet obviously human in conformation. A double line of prints came from a door beside him and marched off down the hall. The prints seemed as fresh as his own, and he could feel his heart beat faster. Apparently there was life here after all!

  The strange tracks grew thicker as he progressed, and his own prints also became more numerous. It was impossible to doubt that he had been in this area before, but he had no recollection of ever having traversed it.

  He trailed the footprints through scores of empty living quarters, laboratories, communal areas, machine shops, and hydroponics gardens. He searched methodically, eliminating areas one by one until he opened the door to another hydroponics room. The neat green rows of plants and their attendant machines were no different from those he had seen in a dozen other rooms, except that the plants bore elongated yellow fruits that looked vaguely like bananas.

  A girl came to the door when he opened it, a slender girl in her middle twenties, thin to the point of gauntness and dressed in a one-piece spacesuit that emphasized the leanness of her body. Her eyes were clear and bright as she returned his startled scrutiny.

  “Hello, who are you?” she asked in perfect Terran.

  He felt oddly disappointed. Instead of an alien she was merely a fellow human being. “Ensign George Bennett, ESN,” he said automatically, “And you?”

  “I thought you knew,” the girl replied. “I’m Laura Latham, of course. Don’t you recognize me? I thought most people knew what I looked like.”

  “You don’t look like anyone I know, and certainly not like Mrs. Latham.”

  “I am a bit thinner,” she admitted. “It’s very confusing.”

  “You’re not the only one who’s confused,” Bennett said.

  “The ship was travelling in hyperdrive,” she said thoughtfully. “How could I have left it?”

  “You’ve got me,” he said. “I don’t know what ship you’re talking about, or why you should want to leave it. What ship did you leave?”

  “The Constellation, of course. She’s my flagship, and I was aboard her on my way to Ariadne. I was dining with the captain. It was the first night out, except, of course there’s no actual night on a hypership. It wasn’t over eight hours ago. Now I’m here, but I haven’t the slightest idea how it happened.”

  “Don’t ask me. I woke up on the floor in one of the hallways a few hours ago.”

  “You’re lying, of course,” she said calmly. “You’re probably one of the gang that drugged and kidnapped me.”

  Gang? Kidnapped? Bennett shook his head. This woman was obviously quite mad! And as for her being Laura Latham—everyone knew that old harpy! She was at least twenty years older than the girl facing him. A plump old tyrant who ruled Spaceways Incorporated and its financial empire with the ruthlessness of a Genghis Khan.

  He looked at the girl more intently. Insanity took some pretty strange forms. Yet there was some resemblance, something about the shape of her head and the set of her jaw that reminded him of Spaceway’s boss. It might have been more pronounced if her weight had been fifty pounds greater. But even granting that, the similarity was only superficial. Her age alone denied her claim. Oh well, some psychotics still seriously believed they were Napoleon, so why shouldn’t she think that she was Laura Latham? He shook his head. If he had been doing the picking, he’d have chosen a better idealization, but there was no accounting for tastes.

  “Now take it easy,” he said soothingly. “No one has kidnapped you.”

  He didn’t want to disturb her. Heaven only knew what would happen if he really jarred her mental balance. “Let’s find some better quarters than this hydroponics farm, and talk things over in a calm, sensible, intelligent way.”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “I’m all right here,” she said. “There’s plenty of food—and I’m hungry. I’m always hungry,” she added plaintively.

  “That can be taken care of,” he said, as he broke off a huge bunch of the banana-like fruit. “We can take our lunch with us.”

  “Hmm, I should have thought of that. All right, I’ll go. It seems silly to leave, but I just don’t feel like standing
here arguing with you.”

  He held the door open and she smiled up at him. “You know, for a kidnapper you’re quite polite. You must have had a good family once.” She kept smiling. “And you have courage too. It must have been awfully dangerous to leave a ship travelling in the middle blue.”

  “For the last time, madam, I did not kidnap you! And there’s no gang here. As far as I know, we’re alone.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did I get here?”

  He was silent. It was a good question, but he didn’t have the answer.

  II

  LAURA LATHAM WASN’T much trouble. Outside of the persistent delusion that he had kidnapped her, she had no particularly annoying traits. And her monomania in that one respect wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d keep her story straight. When they had met, he had supposedly removed her from a spaceship. Now he had taken her bodily out of a shouting, farewell crowd at Alamogordo Spaceport. Bennett shrugged. She had the mind of a butterfly. She couldn’t even tell the same story twice, yet she never seemed to notice the discrepancies when she started to elaborate. Perhaps “improvise” would have been a better word.

  Insidiously the thought crept into his mind that her condition was the key to what had happened to himself. The signs were all there—the emaciation, the loss of memory, the insatiable hunger, and with each passing day the changes accelerated. He had fallen quite naturally into calling the rhythmic alternation of light and darkness day and night. Every ten hours the glowing ceiling dimmed to a faint phosphorescence, to brighten again to a warm yellow light after another ten hours had passed.

  Once she screamed horribly, but in the few seconds it took to reach her side she had forgotten what she had screamed about. After a week she didn’t know him from one moment to the next, despite the fact that he was almost constantly with her. She ate and drank enormously, but took no interest in her surroundings, living in a trance-like state, her matchstick arms and legs pitifully shrunken under her sagging skin. Her breathing was shallow, her pulse rapid and thready, and a raging fever made her body hot and dry to the touch. Then one day less than two weeks after he had found her she lapsed into a coma from which she could not be aroused.

  Bennett did what he could to make her comfortable—which wasn’t much. About all he could do was place her comfortably on a couch in one of the living quarters and hope for a miracle. However, he didn’t think much of miracles, and from the looks of things she was going to die. The thought saddened him. She wasn’t a bad sort even though she was psychotic. At least she had brought him some measure of companionship in this empty world.

  He sat beside the couch, watching her motionless body, and listening to the faint gasping sussurration of her breath. She was still alive, and that always left room for hope. After all, it was a known fact that women were tougher and more resistant to organic diseases than men, and he had survived. He clung to the hope, nursing it as grimly as he nursed Laura.

  And finally the fever broke. She looked dully about her, too weak to move. It was a good thing he had found her, he told himself as he lifted her up and pressed a cool palm to her brow. She would never had been able to forage for herself as he had done. From personal experience he knew what she needed most right now, and proceeded to supply it without delay. He fed her until she weakly pushed his hands away. Then she fell into a deep sleep.

  Bennett looked down at her and smiled. It was nice to know that he wasn’t going to be alone. Now that it was all over he felt tired. He could use a little sleep himself. After all, he wasn’t his old self yet—not by a long shot . . .

  Laura’s recovery was as rapid as his own had been. Within two days she was able to move about—a bony caricature of a girl, but active enough. And her memory was perfect. When Bennett commented on this happily she looked at him in surprise.

  “There’s nothing so odd about being able to remember things,” she said. “I’ve always had a good memory.”

  “Do you remember ever seeing anything like this before?” Bennett asked, gesturing around the room.

  Her gaze dwelt briefly on the glowing ceiling, the fluted pastel walls with their curiously curved corners, the low, oddly-shaped pieces of furniture, and the enigmatic double row of buttons set in a flat metal panel beside the massive metal table on the opposite side of the room.

  “No,” she said. “Where in the world is this place?”

  “I don’t think it’s anywhere in the world—if you’re referring to Earth,” he said. “And I’m quite sure it’s not in the other inhabited worlds I’ve visited. I’ve never heard of anything that remotely resembled it, and I’ve been on twenty of the Thirty Worlds.”

  “What thirty worlds?”

  “The major intelligence-dominated worlds in this galactic quadrant,” he said.

  “What are you talking about? Are you out of your mind? The only other worlds are the planets of Wolf Four and the three systems of Proxima Centaurus, and none of those have any intelligent life.”

  Bennett frowned. And then, abruptly, his expression cleared. “What year is it? he asked.

  “Anyone should know that,” she said. “It’s twenty-two thousand, eighty-nine.”

  “To me it’s the year twenty-three thousand, sixteen.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “I’ll say it is! How old are you—if you don’t object to a personal question.”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I thought you knew. You’ve been calling me by it. It’s Laura Ingalls.”

  “A week ago it was Laura Latham.”

  “It was not! You’re being utterly ridiculous. I should know what my name is. I’ve heard it enough from Video producers. ‘Sorry, Miss Ingalls. There’s nothing today.’ I’ve heard that enough to know who I am! I don’t even know a person named Latham.”

  “You should. He gained discovery rights on Ariadne in eighty-nine.”

  “Oh—that Latham. Of course I know about him. But he landed only a week ago and the Commission hasn’t verified his discovery yet.”

  “Well, it was verified all right. He parlayed it into the biggest shipping business in the galaxy. He married some bright young Video star in ninety-two, and when he died shortly after the turn of the century, Laura Latham became the wealthiest woman in the world. And she’s built up his fortune until she has a finger in about every pie in the Thirty Worlds!”

  “Now wait a minute. The turn of the century isn’t due for another decade.”

  “So you think. My memory’s different. To me it’s sixteen years after the turn, and my papers say it’s twenty-seven.” He took his license from his pocket and handed it to her. “See—it records the year precisely.”

  “What can it mean?” Her voice was puzzled and a little afraid.

  “I think I’m beginning to understand. You say you’re twenty-two, and I think I’m twenty-five. We must have—regressed. We’re young again. ‘Something has taken us back to biological maturity. Our ages are about the norm for that. After cellular maturity we degenerate, grow old. But somehow all of our aging has been peeled off like the rind off an orange. And with our lost years have gone our memories. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

  “So we’ve found the Fountain of Youth,” she said disbelievingly.

  “You might call it that. But it’s far more scientific than mythical.”

  “I’d be more inclined to believe it if I had my twenty-two-year-old figure back again.”

  “You have young bones.”

  “And that’s about all!”

  “Well, it’s a good starting point.”

  She smiled at him. “You know, you’re not in much better shape yourself.”

  He nodded in agreement. “We probably both went through the same regressive process. In fact, it’s a virtual certainty.”

  And in the process eleven years had been carved out of his life! He found himself wondering what the lost ye
ars had been like. They couldn’t have been too good if all he had was a pilot’s license and a job working for Spaceways. He grinned wryly. Now at least he had a second chance. But it was too bad that he couldn’t remember his mistakes. He might have been able to profit by them . . .

  As Laura regained her strength, they explored the huge structure that housed them. Two indisputable facts emerged—the place was deserted, and the building was far too vast to explore completely.

  On each floor there were a hundred and twenty corridors ranging from two to ten miles in length, most of them connected by more than two hundred cross-corridors which varied in length from yards to miles. The gridwork formed by the halls indicated that the building had the shape of a gigantic teardrop—and there were well over two hundred floors. At each intersection of the hallways a spiral ramp connected the levels, making vertical traffic as easy as horizontal. Beside the ramps were vast shafts leading down into the depths.

  Bennett thought that the shafts were probably elevators, but there were no visible cars, so he left them strictly alone. One look down two or three of those vertiginous holes had been enough for him. Despite the fact that the hallways at the lower levels were clean and dust free, they showed no more sign of occupancy than the upper regions.

  There was, however, a feeling of expectancy to the endless succession of empty suites and quarters in the lower levels, a feeling that the inhabitants had just stepped out and would return at any moment. It was highly uncomfortable feeling, and they were always glad to return to the dusty emptiness of the upper halls.

  Pausing in his exploration, Bennett looked down an empty hallway that stretched ruler-straight before him. It was lined with spaced doorways on one side which opened into a succession of living quarters. The opposite wall was relatively barren, its blank surface emphasized by an occasional door piercing it.

  The plan was the same wherever they had gone—on one side rooms, and on the other an assortment of recreation and work areas. Always the two were set side by side, affording the utmost in economy of movement, and yet giving an impression of spaciousness. Each level was apparently a self-contained unit despite the fact that they were all connected by an intricate vertical system of shafts, conveyors and spiral ramps. The place was an architectural miracle—a miracle that grew ever greater as they realized its enormous extent.