New Writings in SF 20 - [Anthology] Read online

  The difficulty about an atomic war was that if the human race was to survive we had to be wise before the event and prevent it happening. This kind of wisdom entailed a constant monitoring and evaluation of a huge mass of data, including projected plans of both sides, intelligence reports, states of weaponry and political climate, the current Antarctica situation and a thousand other constantly changing factors. This stuff was all fed into the computer at Strategic Command, a monster about the size of a four storey building which produced a continual stream of extrapolations and probability ratings on the subject of the likelihood of atomic war.

  So far the computer had always been right, but that didn’t prove that it was always going to be so in the future. That is why when Charlie Noone turned up it was the obvious move to put him in a position where he could act as a double check on the computer. It was the old ‘Who shall guard the guardians’ principle. That’s not to suggest that Charlie was smarter than the computer, but no one had yet figured a way of duplicating his kind of talent through the use of electronic gadgetry.

  The words ‘turned up’ don’t exactly convey the complicated process through which Charlie came to be sleeping in that monitored room with a mass of electrodes taped to various parts of his body. Back at Psi Central there’s a whole department devoted to the task of finding people with Psi talents. Most of the time they’re just sifting through a mass of hearsay and conjecture. After all, the majority of people who have a talent know about it and have already made up their minds whether they want to get involved in the business of developing it further.

  It’s surprising the number who don’t. There’s a strong conservative streak in most human beings that makes them dread the idea of being ‘different’ in any way, so a lot of them go to great pains .to conceal any Psi ability and become ‘Sleepers’ whose talents may or may not come out in the next generation. Well, that’s their privilege, I suppose, but the way I see it they’re missing an awful lot. They’re like birds with functional wings who have decided for some reason that flying is dangerous and opted for an earthbound existence. Not that being a Psi is always that pleasant. Obviously there are some penalties and obligations implied in using an extra sense, but surely anything is better than being an ostrich?

  Very occasionally the Search Department pans out a piece of pure gold like Charlie Noone. They got on to him first through a newspaper story, but they weren’t the only ones interested. The way the police had it, Charlie was either a statistical freak or a mass murderer and the second alternative would have suited them much better, because they were looking for somewhere to peg the blame for three of the worst air crashes in a decade. The odds against what happened to Charlie must have been in the billions. As a travelling rep for a publishing firm he covered a lot of miles and he usually travelled by air. He had been booked on each of the three crashed planes and each time he had cancelled out at the last moment. The newspapers love those lucky survivor stories. ‘Mrs Culpeper was forced to cancel her reservation because of the illness of her pet poodle. Interviewed at her home this morning, holding the little dog in her arms, she said tearfully: “I owe my escape to Binkie, bless him! Poor little darling, I’ll never leave him again.”‘

  Charlie Noone didn’t have a pet dog. He didn’t even have a wife. She had left him some five years previously and was now living somewhere in California with a Polish gas station attendant. From what I was able to gather the marriage never really got off the ground in the first instance and although my sympathies were naturally with Charlie, I could see that his temperament was probably largely responsible. He was reasonably good at his job, capable of generating the kind of surface friendliness one expects to find in a salesman; but once I dug beneath that veneer I realised with something of a shock that he was a natural introvert, a solitary who seemed to be incapable of conducting any really intimate relationship with another human being. This disability probably stemmed from his childhood background; life with his bitch of a mother, a divorcee to whom he was both a liability and a burden. She married three times subsequently, on each occasion to men with whom Charlie found himself on terms of either indifference or downright hostility.

  At the age of thirty-five he was a fat man with a nervous laugh; a compulsive eater with a fund of dirty stories and a taste for deliberately casual relationships with ten-dollar whores, whom he never patronised a second time for fear of developing some kind of emotional dependency. It was an unsatisfactory, sterile life—but it was the only one he had, and as such it was very dear to him. Along with—or because of—everything else he was also a screaming hypochondriac, capable of escalating the slightest touch of indigestion into severe angina, or a mild cough into terminal lung cancer. He was a mass of psychosomatic symptoms which repeated themselves in an endless kaleidoscope of permutations for the amazement of any diagnostician who was prepared to take his complaints seriously.

  The way the police saw it was that Charlie’s miraculous escapes from three air disasters in under a year could not possibly be coincidental. They were right of course, but they never even considered the true reason. They were too preoccupied with the alternative theories that he was either (A) working some kind of insurance racket, or (B) he was operating some particularly ruthless murder by contract business, in which he was prepared to kill a hundred or more people in order to nail his victim. They investigated his life inside and out searching for some kind of lead that would fit in with either of these theories, but they turned up nothing but a row of negatives. Noone was a man without real friends, or enemies for that matter—most of the time he didn’t even register on people, and that was the way he himself preferred it. The police were still trying to find props to support their circumstantial evidence when our people intervened and offered Charlie a way out.

  Or rather a way in—because once he was involved with Psi Central it was highly unlikely that he would ever get out again if the Search Department guess that he was a true Pre-Cog proved correct. As usual Goldberg was all ready and waiting with a scheme to utilise his talent before its existence was fully verified. In the old days of coal-mining, before there were any such things as efficient gas detection devices, they used to take canaries down below. The gas tolerance of the little cage birds was so low that when a build-up started the canary would die first, acting as an alarm that gave the human beings a chance to escape. And that was how Goldberg’s bright idea came to be christened Operation Canary.

  Charlie’s talent, like all really strong Psi gifts, was basically a survival mechanism and largely involuntary into the bargain. It happens all the time. Take a latent Teleport and try to talk him into giving you a demonstration. Ninety-nine per cent of the time you’ll just be wasting your breath. Nothing happens. On the other hand, put him in an enclosed area and pitch a live grenade in beside him. Then you’ll get your demonstration toute suite. The only trouble with the method is that then you’ve got to find him and depending on his ability he may be anywhere from a hundred metres to a thousand kilometres away. And when you do find him again he may not be very keen on making your acquaintance again, even when you try to explain to him that the ‘live’ grenade really wasn’t. After all, even Psi Central can’t go splattering latent Teleports over the landscape with reckless abandon.

  Charlie’s talent was a similar kind of survival mechanism. The idea that the human mind is capable of doing a certain amount of time travelling during sleep was first suggested a long time ago. After all, people have been having pre-cognitive dreams of one kind or another as far back as human records go. Charlie’s mind had this ability to explore a probability loop until it came up against the blankness of a not-Charlie situation which indicated his own death. The traumatic reaction to this experience immediately bounced him back to wakefulness and the present time, enabling him to make a decision before the nodal point was reached, avoiding the probability pattern which had led to his death in the dream—thus allowing him to progress in reality along another sequence of events which r
esulted in his survival. All of which is a rather complicated way of saying that in matters that involved his own survival Charlie had the ability to foretell the future. Whether or not he was actually changing the future is an argument I don’t intend to get involved in at this time, but it seems to me that the not-Charlie situation he banged up against in those dreams was a high-probability future which faded into non-existence when he decided not to go on any of those doomed planes. The people who died in those disasters had no choice, but Charlie did and he made the right decision ... three times.

  The first part of Operation Canary was the task of sensitising Charlie to the concept of atomic warfare. This was done by a process of education and conditioning, making all the strategic and statistical information stored in the computer available to him, so that he eventually possessed a more comprehensive knowledge of the global situation than any other human being alive. And, most important, he was given convincing figures which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that in the event of atomic war breaking out Operation Canary was situated in the prime target area, with a probability of less than 0.01 per cent of surviving the first hour. In other words, in Charlie terms: Atomic War = No-Charlie Situation.

  To check that he had been properly sensitised there were three dry runs in which Strategic Command supplied him with false information on proposed developments that were high probabilities to produce escalation. That was a nerve-wracking time for me, because my close association with Charlie made it necessary that I should not be told that the information was false. The whole thing was a variation on the grenade method of testing a Teleport of course and Charlie reacted just as Goldberg had hoped by producing a not-Charlie dream every time.

  The real difference between these tests and the grenade method was that Charlie was not told afterwards that they had been merely tests. Goldberg believed, and I was inclined to agree with him, that if Charlie were told that he had been deliberately fed with false information it might make him suspect the validity of perfectly true information in the future, and thus impair his efficiency. So Charlie went on believing what he was told and remained convinced that on three occasions he had saved the human race—and Charlie Noone of course—from atomic disaster.

  And tonight? I had no way of knowing yet whether or not somebody somewhere had already made that apparently unimportant statement or action which would send the world careering down the probability loop that had kicked Charlie sweating and screaming out of his dream. According to previous experience the nodal point should come within forty-eight hours, so Strategic Command bad that much time to make the changes in planning and disposition which would drain off the tension that was building up and lower the chances of disaster to a reasonable level. Of course there was always the possibility that they might miss some important but concealed factor and fail. That wasn’t my responsibility, thank God. My job was to take care of Charlie—and hope that the end of the world didn’t come before Tony arrived back in three day’s time.

  I don’t know why I was surprised to see Goldberg standing there in the Monitor Room when I arrived back. As far as I knew he must have been at Psi Central, a clear hundred and fifty kilometres from Operation Canary when the emergency alarm came through. And now, less than a quarter of an hour later, there he was facing me. Maybe it’s because I only have Tp myself, but the ‘now-you-see-it— now-you-don’t’ aspect of Teleportation always throws me. This, and the combination of Goldberg’s personality, perhaps.

  He was a spare man, with a shock of grey hair and a little white beard like a Scotch terrier. Small, alert and poised, with very pale blue eyes and a clipped way of talking.

  ‘Well?’ Those eyes raked me up and down, demanding information.

  ‘Tell me one thing first,’ I said. ‘Is this another dry run, or the real thing?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, woman! You think I ‘ported clear over here at this time of the morning to play games?’ he crackled.

  I bit my lip and wished I had kept my big mouth shut. I had been in pretty bad odour with Goldberg for some time over my pending marriage. He was a nut about racial purity for Psi-people. He believed that the two strains of Psi and Normal should not be mixed, not only from the genetic point of view, but the psychological one. To give him his due, he was also aware of the hazards facing a minority group. After all, he was a Jewish/Irish Buddhist with a touch of Norwegian himself.

  ‘Anything specific?’ he demanded.

  ‘Just the usual blanket panic reaction, as strong as I’ve ever seen it,’ I said. ‘Whatever it is, the probability must be high and it’s sure to show up in the computer’s report.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Goldberg said. He turned to glare at the silent line printer.

  As if in response, it began its super-machine-gun rattle and spewed out a metre of paper before lapsing into silence again.

  Goldberg moved swiftly across and ripped the length off the machine. It took him less than a minute to digest the information, then he swore and handed me the sheet.

  ‘Here, what do you make of it?’

  I scanned the report, conscious of his eyes on me, and praying that I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself again by saying the wrong thing. Most of the figures were virtually the same as those I had seen on the routine situation report at 18.00 hours on the previous evening, and those that had changed were in the direction of easing tension rather than increasing it. Prognosis for the next forty-eight hours was less than 15 per cent. A slightly more than six-to-one chance against atomic war breaking out during that period, which was the best odds the human race had had for some time.

  “There’s nothing obvious,’ I said cautiously, handing the sheet back to him.

  He snorted. ‘What about Noone ? You think he could have made a mistake and the whole thing was just a normal type nightmare?’

  I turned to Carter, who was sitting very quietly watching us since my return. No backchat or comedy routines for Goldberg.

  ‘You have the readings at the time of the alarm?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, Captain ma’am. I gave them to the General before you arrived.’

  ‘Maybe it won’t show until we’re nearer to the nodal point,’ I suggested to Goldberg.

  ‘Meaning that Noone knows better than the Command computer?’

  ‘Not necessarily, but if the computer doesn’t have the information...’

  Goldberg ignored what I was saying. He was staring at the monitor screen, his lean face setting into hard lines.

  “Who in hell told Noone to disconnect those leads?’ he barked.

  ‘I... I thought once he’d given us the alarm there wasn’t any reason-why he shouldn’t spend the rest of the night in comfort.’

  His pale eyes blazed contempt. ‘Comfort! If you’re so concerned I wonder you didn’t hop into bed with him yourself.’

  I felt the colour drain out of my face and the muscles at the corner of my mouth were tight as I said: ‘I don’t have to take that—even from you, General Goldberg.’

  I should have known better. Goldberg never apologised. In any case, I had already ceased to exist for him as his mind passed on to other matters.

  ‘Get Wilson and Mackinder down here, on the double!’ he snapped to Carter. Then he perched his lean body on the chair in front of the keyboard and began a dialogue with the computer. By the time the dishevelled Intelligence men had arrived the printout was four metres long and growing fast. The three of them went into a huddle and I decided there was nothing useful I could be doing in the Monitor Room for the time being, so I went back to my room and got properly dressed.

  When I arrived back again nearly half an hour later they were still at it and I thought for a moment that Goldberg hadn’t even noticed my absence. As usual I was wrong. His grey head poked out of the huddle and he said: ‘Where the hell have you been?’ He pointed to the monitor screen. ‘Get that Pre-Cog of yours back in harness right away. We need everything we can get on this thing.’

  There was no point in ar
guing that Charlie was highly unlikely to get any further sleep that night and that the chances of his having yet another pre-cognitive dream were even more improbable. I went back into Charlie’s room, and poor docile creature that he was, he accepted my reassurances that everything was going to be all right—and made no objections when I taped the monitor leads back on to his body. I stayed for a while, chatting about nothing in particular, partly because I could feel the reverberations of the panic reaction still there in his first level and partly because I understood that it was at times like this his loneliness really hurt.

  I left him eventually and walked back to the Monitor Room, Mackinder was seated in front of the terminal keyboard, with Wilson looking over his shoulder. I met Goldberg in the middle of the floor on his way out.

  ‘Nothing more I can do here for the moment,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve located the nodal point?’

  ‘Like hell!’ he snapped. ‘Roses all the way according to the extrapolations—we’re practically on the edge of a golden age. Prognosis has gone down a whole point in the last hour.’

  ‘Is that bad?’