New Writings in SF 20 - [Anthology] Page 13

  They shared. They shared their need, their giving, the secrets of body and soul. And within Jason something came together with an all-but-audible sound. He was whole, complete at last, but aware as never before of his humanity, of Michelle’s wonderful vulnerable humanity. He could never again deliberately isolate himself, for though he had mastered himself he understood the utter need of one human being for another.

  ‘Jase,’ Michelle murmured later, ‘thank you. Thank you for being you, and helping me to be myself.’ And she hugged him fiercely amid mixed laughter and tears.

  * * * *

  Five

  Dependence—Independence. Later in the night, back in his ELS, he weighed the two and absorbed the fact that too few people ever learn. You can’t have one without the other, he concluded, as he padded restlessly through the cramped space. Funny, but now he could search his thoughts and find no animosity for Stan Bolton, only sadness. It wasn’t a matter of his own wrongs any more. What concerned him was a feeling of frustration that there was no way to help the older man. Stan was trapped in a strange way, not simply by a job that demanded too much, but by the inability to rid himself of guilt. Jason had let it pass, and now there was nothing that he could do to help. Perhaps Stan had been beyond that before they met, but Jason would have given the world to be able to do something for him. It was strange, too, that within days of that miraculous afternoon with Michelle, Monihan had called him to his office, silently handing him a priority cassette and motioning him to the scanner at his desk. Jason had read with shocked disbelief, looking up to find Monihan watching him with haunted eyes.

  ‘You know?’ Jason asked.

  ‘I can guess,’ Monihan answered, rubbing his arm with a peculiar gesture. ‘You’ve been ordered back to Diamond Willow.’ Jason nodded, pondering the curt message that told him simply to pack, terminate present affairs and report this same evening.

  The manager crossed to him and clasped his hand. ‘You’ve come a long way in three years,’ he said. ‘We’ve watched you develop and you’ve got that rare quality to make it to the top. Things like the ring face modulator.’ A bitter smile flickered at his lips and was gone, as Jason started. ‘We want you,’ he said firmly. ‘Remember that.’ He took Jason’s elbow and led him to the door. ‘Now say your goodbyes, and get the blazes out of here.’ The door closed hard as Jason moved off down the hall. .

  Michelle made it easier than he had expected and he calmly added the fact that she already knew to those other bits that were coming together. Monihan was a wise, observant man, all in all. But she also made it clear that what was between them, the supple bond of sharing and understanding, had nothing whatsoever to do with the manager. For observer, he was, not manipulator. Everything Jason had gained was completely of his own fashioning.

  ‘I’m going to Montreal soon,’ Michelle said. ‘Not everyone in this organisation is bilingual.’ She smiled and gave him a long kiss, held him around the waist and leaned back to look at him. ‘Scribe the odd line? No cassettes. And life is a lot longer than we think.’ Their farewell was neutral, neither final nor promising.

  He stood in the same indoctrination chamber again and this time the three men were positively ageing. The first addressed him in a flat, dispassionate voice. ‘Jason Berkley, you have now reached the end of Phase Two. You have become capable of understanding the nature of your offence

  <>

  * * * *

  CANARY

  by Dan Morgan

  A built-in survival factor could be a useful asset in a human being, not only to save his own life but as a national early warning system against ICBMs. He might even outsmart the computers ...

  * * * *

  It was more than a scream. It was the howl of a damned soul falling for ever into the bottomless pit, a cry for help, a wail of despair, a whimper, a sob—all of these at the same time. I rolled off the bed, already awake as my feet touched the hard coolness of the floor, adrenalin flushing into my system with the recognition that this was the real thing.

  Unless someone up at Central was being extra clever and trying just one more dry run...

  I zipped up the front of the lightweight one-piece suit, stepped into some slippers and dashed from the room. I had left my watch on the bedside table and the corridor I was moving along was brightly lit twenty-four hours a day, so there was no way of telling what time it was. I had the feeling that I had only been asleep for about half an hour, but a quick glance at the wall clock as I burst into the Monitor Room told me that it was almost 3 a.m.

  ‘What kept you?’ said Carter.

  ‘Funny, funny,’ I said. That kind of pseudo-joke was only one of the reasons why I didn’t like him. I looked at the board. Three quarters of the dials were way up in the red and the enchephalo-screens were oscillating wildly. I felt a trickle of ice down my spine. Whatever it was, this was a big one—the biggest yet.

  ‘Why didn’t you call me earlier?’ I said. ‘You must have seen this building up.’

  He shook his head. ‘Didn’t happen that way. Everything was quiet. He was jogging along comfortably in his second REM period, pulse, respiration, Alpha rhythms quite normal—then whammo! the shit hit the fan, if you’ll pardon the expression, Captain ma’am. That was maybe seven seconds ago.’

  ‘Seven?’

  ‘Could be ten. I was just going to call you.’ He lounged back in his chair, looking at me with a twisted half-grin on his dark, narrow face. I was suddenly reminded that the zipper suit fitted me like a second skin.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I got it anyway,’ I said, feeling his eyes crawling over my breasts like brown slugs.

  ‘Bully for you, Captain ma’am. What now?’

  I was holding myself back from the squashy ordure of his sub-vocal level. I didn’t want to get involved with that, particularly at this time. Sometimes I thought that he deliberately channelled his thoughts that way in the hope that I would read him. Perhaps the idea of me doing so gave him some sort of twisted thrill. His lechery was too genuine to be a mere defence mechanism and he had a reputation around the site for being hell with the women. It could be that the idea of bedding someone like me excited him. After all, there had been a lot of rumours about us and a number of those ‘Did you hear about the... ?’ type dirty jokes of the kind that fed speculation.

  Tony wasn’t like that, thank God! That much I knew. Things hadn’t been easy for us one way or another, but at least we had trust and understanding. They weren’t happy about our relationship at Psi Central, but even Goldberg didn’t dare interfere directly with that particular freedom. Tony was in a Commando group down in the Western sector of Antarctica, and his six months would be up in just three days. Surely nothing could go wrong now. That would be too cruel after all the waiting.

  Tony was a normal, or Thickhead, if you prefer the current Central slang—we had our equivalents of Carter and our own in-jokes. All that old business about ‘to know all is to forgive all’ and the equating of the complete Psi-man with some kind of godlike wisdom was all very well back in the early, speculative days; but the truth of the matter is that when you take a human being and add one of the Psi talents you don’t get a god at all. Psi’s are just human beings, with all the normal human failings, plus a few others that come along with the burden of possessing a talent. Tony didn’t carry that burden. He was just an intelligent, but uncomplicated guy with a build that made him the focus of attention on any beach, and a loving nature.

  I stared back at Carter hard. ‘You know the drill. We’ve been through it often enough, surely?’

  ‘You want me to call Strategic Command at this hour of the morning?’

  ‘What the hell has the hour got to do with it?’ I snapped. ‘You think they work nine to five?’

  He shrugged, his insolent eyes still pawing me. ‘All right, Captain ma’am, if you say so. But there doesn’t seem much point in ...’

  ‘Call them and tell them that we’ve had a category AA Emergency reaction here. I
shall need a complete report on current and extrapolated probabilities.’

  I was looking at the bottom monitor screen. It showed Charlie Noone’s sweating, frightened face. He was sitting up on the edge of the bed, his head cradled in his hands. His whole body was shaking.

  ‘You wouldn’t rather talk to them yourself?’ Carter said, reaching for the phone switch.

  ‘I’ll do that later, when I’ve had a chance to examine Charlie.’

  ‘You’re going in there now ?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  He shook his head, a sly grin creeping back on to his face. ‘Boy! Sometimes I wish I was Charlie Noone.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have the guts.’

  ‘You can say that again.’ He pointed to the paunchy figure in the baggy pyjama suit who had just risen to his feet and was walking shakily across towards the wash basin trailing a mess of multi-coloured monitoring leads behind him. ‘He’s so goddamned clever, how come he hasn’t got the sense to keep himself in better shape?’

  ‘Worry about your own shape,’ I said sharply.

  ‘I’d rather worry about yours, Captain ma’am.’

  Damn him! If there was such a thing as a Psi talent for getting under your skin, then Carter had it. Thank God I would be rid of him for good in three days’ time. I turned away quickly to avoid giving him the satisfaction of seeing the flush that had risen to my cheeks and hurried out.

  Charlie Noone looked up as I entered the room and even before I went into his sub-vocal level I could sense the welcome in those trusting, washed out grey eyes. He was sitting on the edge of the bed still, bottle shoulders slumped forward. Carter was right about one thing. He looked a mess. In fact, he looked worse than he really was, because over the past six months we had been able to regulate his diet, pushing his weight down slightly by the use of lypotropics and lowering the urea content of his blood. For a man of his age and constitution Charlie was in pretty good condition. He had to be. A sudden fatal illness on his part would invalidate the entire project, because at the present time we didn’t have anybody else quite like Charlie.

  I went in. It was the welcome of his eyes all over again, but plus all the warmth I had come to expect from Charlie, Warmth, not Carter’s rutting heat. I had never detected even a hint of sexual imagery in my communications with Charlie. From my point of view it was a highly satisfactory working relationship, so uncomplicated that I had accepted it gratefully and not probed further. If he wanted to look on me as a sort of sister- or mother-substitute, then that was all right by me. I didn’t need to prove anything to myself about my attractiveness. Tony was all the man I needed.

  ‘How was it, Charlie?’ I asked.

  I sensed a resurgence of fear and darkness at the borders of his first level as he said: ‘Bad, Jan, bad ... Worse than that time in Seattle.’

  I nodded sympathetically. A hundred and fifty people had died in Seattle. I hated to push it further, but if I could get more details it just might make the work of synthesis easier. ‘Can you tell me anything specific about the dream sequence leading up to the trauma ?’ I asked.

  Something black and horrible bounced clear up from his third level—and faded again before I could get a fix on it. Nightmare and madness lived down there and I wasn’t about to risk my sanity by trying to follow it back to its source.

  Charlie was trying to co-operate. He always did. His pudgy features screwed up with the effort of trying to remember. But I knew what the answer was going to be before he replied.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jan. Something like this happens, it seems to blank out the whole surrounding area.’

  ‘I know, Charlie,’ I nodded. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see if the computer gives us a clue.’

  He eased his sweat-soaked pyjama jacket where it was binding under his armpit. ‘It was a bad one, I’m sure of that.’

  ‘If that’s so it’s bound to show up in the probability assessments.’

  ‘You think they’ll be able to do something about it?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘That’s the object of the exercise,’ I said, with a phoney kind of cheerfulness. ‘Look, why don’t you disconnect that junk and have yourself a shower and change ? You’ve done your job for tonight.’

  ‘You’re sure it will be all right?’

  ‘If anybody complains, refer them to me,’ I said. He was such a nice little guy, and he tried so hard.

  ‘Thanks, Jan, you’re very good to me.’

  I pulled out of his first level. There’s something kind of embarrassing about seeing an image of yourself dressed in white robes and haloed like one of those medieval saints. But even that’s a hell of a lot more pleasant than the kind of thing you find crawling about in the mind of someone like Carter.

  ‘Don’t worry, Charlie,’ I said. ‘You just make yourself comfortable and leave the rest to us. Good night.’

  ‘You’ll call in the morning?’ he said anxiously.

  ‘Sure I will,’ I said, smiling. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing.’ Not even the end of the world, qualified the grinning death’s head that had been floating around in my mind ever since that moment of wakening.

  The first name of the death’s head was Escalation and his second Overkill. There had been a war going on somewhere, in the world for the past thirty years; Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Palestine and now Antarctica. Localised wars that acted as a kind of safety valve in relieving the pressure between East and West and in which only ‘conventional’ weapons were used. I had never been able to appreciate that nice semantic implication of the word ‘conventional’ with its intended impression that it was so much more pleasant to be torn limb from limb by a good old-fashioned chemical explosive than one of those nasty nuclear devices. I had appreciated it even less over the last six months.

  There was no draft these days. Wars were fought by volunteers and there was never any shortage. For one thing, there are always some people around who need and actively seek risk and violence. Then there is the Population Control Act, which says that if a couple want to have children, one of them—usually the man—has to be prepared to put his own life at risk by serving six months in the combat area for each proposed child. The idea might have sounded harsh to some of those cosy little people back in the middle of the century who were busy breeding themselves out of existence, but looked at from a purely practical point of view there was a lot to recommend it. Apart from being eugenically sound, it did away completely with accidental parenthood and its attendant evils. Only a man who had the guts to go out and fight for his child ever got to be a father. And if he didn’t come back—well, that was the law of averages ... At least that was the way it looked in the abstract. Tony risking his life that way was another thing, as I’d found out.

  The trouble with this safety valve business was that there was no guarantee. The ICBMs were still maintained in a state of readiness in their silos and submarines, backed by stocks of overkill sufficient to obliterate the human race a hundred times. Nobody but a madman would ever dare start an atomic war, but while the weapons existed there was always a chance. Conventional war or not, feelings ran high periodically on both sides. We had our extremists, a growing minority group who were agitating quite seriously for what they called a final settlement. They maintained that the government should stop ‘pussy-footing around and go for broke, by making an all-out surprise atomic attack against the other side.

  The other side had their extremists too, making the same kind of demands. I suppose their people were as careful as ours about trying to screen out that kind of nut from any area where he might have the chance of starting the atomic Armageddon, but you couldn’t always tell just who was an extremist. You read all the time about these cases where some factory worker suddenly blows his top and chops up his wife and kids with a meat cleaver. The neighbours usually get together afterwards and talk it over, some of them expressing frank astonishment that such a mild little man should suddenly up and do such a thing. Then there are others who are wise after t
he event, sniggering into their beards and saying things like: ‘I always did think there was something odd about old so-and-so.’