Collected Short Fiction, page 157
“The armed forces to the rescue,” I said. “Or maybe just the police. Perhaps Dick Trevelyan and his boys. A bit late in the day.”
They still had a long, rough way to come across the Plain.
THE END
Sitting Duck
Of the six authors who contributed to our first pioneer issue in 1946, only one is still writing science fiction—William F. Temple—and it is only fitting that he should appear in this issue. His original story for us, “The Three Pylons,” was a radical departure from the accepted s-f theme, caused considerable controversy and probably set a precedent; it heralded the changing status of the science fiction short story
It was as though the mantle of God had woven itself about him. The tangle of habits, reflexes, desires, and memories, which passed by the collective name of Philip Hepburn, had dropped away in to the dead and useless past. Like the broken shell of a chrysalis, when the image has soared on wings up into the now illimitable third dimension.
He was incorporeal Mind brooding over Earth.
The living globe floated, glowing, a diatom in the jet ocean of space. It was a lovely thing. Three-quarters blue-green, snow-splashed with cloud, ochre-smeared with deserts, silvered where the seas caught the sun.
One quarter was colour-quenched by night, but in gentle rebellion asserted its existence through the faint luminosity of moonlight. Nevertheless, night was extending its dominion across the Pacific, advancing in arc formation.
A ten-thousand mile long pageant of sunset paraded its glory for the eyes of no-one save a few scattered islanders and ship-borne travellers.
It seemed an awful waste of beauty.
Perhaps the sunset was not made for man. Nor Earth either.
Incorporeal Mind, thinking of man, seeing through the eyes of man again, shrank to man-size. The great mantle became as tenuous as the moon’s atmosphere, in effect non-existent.
Philip was himself again.
Strange, he reflected, that this role of Master Spirit had not possessed him before. That could be because he’d never before been alone up here. There had always been human company.
Biff, blessed with happy dreams, quietly chuckling in his sleep.
And Sandy, who seldom needed his full ration of sleep, sawing, hammering, chiselling, whistling, magically shaping dull chunks of wood into toy cranes, roundabouts, spacerockets for his small son.
Philip Hepburn, however, had no son. Nor any living relative save Aunt Jean, who lived in Montrose and did little but sleep and complain of the weather. She pleaded constantly that (a) Phil should do something about the weather, and (b) he should stop interfering with it.
His defence had become automatic: “But, Aunt, I only watch the weather. I couldn’t change it if I tried. And I watch only the weather on the other side of the world from you. I can’t even see dear old Scotland.”
“Sitting and watching won’t do any good,” she’d sniff. “Time you stopped playing being a pigeon, and found a nice lass and married and settled down.”
“I shall—soon, Aunt.”
Currently “soon” meant in three years’ time, when he’d be thirty, on compulsory retirement and a good pension. When the space-station was only another star in the night sky, an interloper in the Southern Cross, and nevermore a shell bounding him as though he were the embryo of a chick.
Then he could marry and raise a family. Provided, of course, that the cosmic ray intake hadn’t too badly maltreated his genes. It was because of that risk, among others, that space-station crews were pensioned off early in life.
Coloured lights winking on the big panel reminded him that he was expected to earn that pension.
Meteorological code numbers were flashing in from the weather stations spread over his sector. They told him that at Woomera the air pressure was 1025-7 millibars, at Port Darwin the wind was E.N.E., Beaufort Scale 4, at Singapore the temperature stood at 104 degrees Fahrenheit, at Kuching the relative humidity was 93 per cent . . . From such data he began to form the general picture.
There was a small, intense area of depression off the Caroline Islands. It must be watched. It threatened to become a tornado which might go roaring west to the Phillippines or veer south to New Guinea.
All that was but part of the job. He was expected to keep more than just a weather eye cocked. Additionally, he was a kind of Indian scout, patient on a mountain, watching for the dust of war trails. Watching—and listening.
To be accurate, it was the Francini Detector which listened. It was roughly akin to an overgrown and supersensitive Geiger counter, only it whined instead of clicked. Into its circuits were built numerous electronic checking devices. It couldn’t afford to make mistakes. The F-D was selective, careful, and confident in its own final judgment. It was inoculated against hysteria. In short, it had commensense.
Its job was to report the location of any measureable mass of plutonium which began to part from the Earth’s surface, where under international law it belonged.
It could do this best from a point free from screening horizons. Say a point on a satellite orbit. Like this one, occupied by Space-station G—”Gertie” to her staff.
Gertie was in an equatorial, 24-hour orbit, 22,000 miles out, keeping exact pace with Earth as it spun. And so in relation to her appointed territory she remained as constant as the Pole Star.
From a loud-speaker came the rustle of a carrier wave and a voice precisely unscrambled: “Orange Three, report.”
Orange Three was Singapore.
“Okay, Strength One,” Hepburn reported. “That Peter?”
“Yes. Tom off now?”
“Yes. This is Phil. I came up with the rations, a couple of hours early. Dead keen on my work, that’s me.”
“Chump! I’ll bet Tom and Len and the other feller have left you to it, if I know ’em.”
“You know them too well, Peter—you’re dead right. I’m on my ownsome. They’re on their way down in the freighter, with the empties. First stop, the Long Bar. Second stop, wife’s bosom. Then three months of dolce far niente.
“Lucky devils! I’m never off the job. And it’s thirsty weather down here.”
“Only 104 in the shade, by my clock. That’s mild for your neck of the woods.”
“You forgot to wind your clock, Phil. However, stay with it. Look Homeward, Angel. So long.”
“So long.”
Look Homeward. But, as Wolfe also had it, There’s No Home. “Gertie” was his only real home. Maybe that was why he’d thumbed a lift on the freighter and got back on the job early.
He shot a side-glance at a radar screen. A blip was climbing up the reticules like a tired spider on its web. The relief ship, with Biff and Sandy aboard. According to schedule, it should have been alongside twenty minutes ago. It was running nearly an hour late—a fuel valve had jammed.
“Black One, report,” said a voice from Woomera, as Australian as a kangaroo.
“Okay, Strength One . . .”
A couple of minutes of back-chat and then back to business.
He kept his gaze averted from the master screen and its glowing picture of the world entire, lest it lure him back to dreams and delusions of grandeur. He concentrated on the narrow focus screens, skimming along the Great Barrier Reef like a high-flying jet. Making a foray out over the ocean here and there. Tracking the incipient tornado and taking its pulse by calculation. Inspecting briefly the known rocket sites in the outposts of China, and other danger spots.
In these times Singapore was a fort in a desert of non-democratic countries. Sumatra, Java, Borneo hemmed it around, hungry as the sharks which swarmed in the sea between them and North Australia.
There were rumours that had to be weighed, Intelligence reports to be brooded upon. For instance, hover-craft with strange cargo had been seen proceeding along the Kapoeas River in Borneo. “Something doing near Sanggau,” said the reports, some time ago. “Watch it.”
So Hepburn attempted to make another routine survey of Sanggau and its neighbourhood of thick jungle. Had he been successful, it would have been something like his two-hundredth survey. He’d seen nothing unusual before, and this time he could see practically nothing at all.
Sanggau lay between long mountain ranges, and cupped within the ranges was a lake of thick cloud.
Hepburn quartered it thoroughly. There was no rift in it. He was about to swing the telescope TV camera elsewhere when a tiny metallic splinter appeared in the sunlight above the cloud-lake. It glinted. He increased magnification. It had a white-hot tail. It was a pretty big rocket.
The F-D had not complained. Therefore the rocket carried no atomic war-head.
All the same, it had no business to be there. Borneo, although largely under the sway of the Other Side, was supposed to have no armed forces. And certainly no rocket launching sites.
Hepburn put out a General Alert call, at the same time locking a radar beam on the rocket. He’d already recorded the map reference of the spot from which it had erupted—quite near Sanggau.
A number of radar stations picked it up, took a fix, plotted its course. It was heading out over the Indian Ocean in the direction of nowhere in particular—and still climbing.
The general opinion was that it would either reach escape velocity or go into orbit. It was big enough to carry a couple of men for a reasonable long trip, but whether it was manned or not was difficult to decide.
No news flash concerning it had been issued by the Government of Borneo. No embassy had been informed. The thing had come out of the blue and was going into the blue.
Conceivably, the Southern Asiatics were making an attempt to prove that they, too, belonged in the ranks of the spaceconquering peoples. It might be a moon-shot. If so, they must have had technical and material assistance from one or other of the Big Brothers. Hence, probably, the unusual amount of ferrying along the Kapoeas River.
Sanggau, practically on the Equator, was happily placed for a beginner’s attempt. There, the Earth’s spin gratuitously added a maximum kick.
“Maintain constant watch on Sanggau,” Singapore instructed.
“Watch all known sites,” Woomera ordered.
“Make up your minds,” snapped Hepburn, edgily. “My name’s not Argus.”
He wished now that he’d not been so precipitate, had waited to come up with Biff and Sandy. He spared a corner of an eye to note that they were still fifteen minutes’ travelling time distant. In his spot, they wouldn’t have let their tempers fray. They were steadier types. Did marriage steady a man?
Maybe he was too imaginative, over-sensitive, for this job. As he glanced ceaselessly from screen to screen, he could feel apprehension building up within him.
It was like a telepathic leakage of feeling from many other apprehensive minds. Something horrible was about to happen. They knew what it was, and feared it. He feared without knowing.
Fifths of seconds jerked away on the chronometer.
The mysterious rocket swept spacewards.
Sanggau remained buried under the unbroken snowfield of cloud.
The F-D continued dumb. Did its silence mean that it was out of order?
“Black One, anything to report?” came nasally from the speaker.
A routine phrase, robbed of impact by use, and this time making no impact at all because Hepburn was staring, shocked, at the master screen.
Quite another phrase was going through his mind: “The World’s slow stain.”
There had been a bright, brief star of light on the screen. And now, spreading slowly away from that centre, a greyish stain was obliterating India.
But this phenomenon wasn’t really happening to the face of the World. That was an illusion due to lack of perspective. The stain was in space, between Earth and Gertie. But far, far nearer to Gertie.
For a moment, Hepburn imagined the station was under fire. But that couldn’t be. He would have been warned of any guided missiles long ago. The rocket from Sanggau was still pursuing its enigmatic course afar off.
But certainly this unfolding mass of gas in space was an explosion, and a big one.
He looked anxiously at the adjacent radar screen.
“My God—no!”
But it was so. The solid blip of the relief ship had disintegrated into a clustor of ions, mere specks moving apart.
Biff would never laugh again, asleep or awake. Sandy’s son would wait in vain for another toy from his father.
And Philip Hepburn would get no relief today.
Woomera was quick off the mark. “Black One to G. Your relief ship just disintegrated. Have you any information on this?”
Hepburn tried to pull himself together. He replied, shakily: “No. No meteors or missiles registered in vicinity. Must have been an internal fault—tanks blew up.”
“Black One, okay. Damn bad luck. It’s going to be tough on . . . Wait—will come back.”
Yes, tough on their families, thought Hepburn. Tough on me, too.
Biff, Sandy, and he had formed, in a sense, a small family group of their own. There was mutual goodwill, unselfish co-operation, private jokes, understanding without words. Now it had been smashed, irreparably. He felt desolated.
Woomera returned urgently. The signaller’s shrill words came tumbling over one another like the breaking waves of the Australian surf.
“Black One to Gertie. Intelligence report just received. Balloon may be going up any time now. Watch—.”
A peculiar sound as though the microphone disc had been ripped across with a can-opener. Then blank silence—not even the carrier wave murmur.
Hepburn snapped out of self-pity.
“Hello, Black One. Gertie here. Hello, Black One.”
No reply. Worried, baffled, Hepburn looked at the Woomera area on the screen. In a few moments he saw why he was addressing nobody. The dry dust of the outback was putting forth a white blossom, a funeral wreath with but one flower.
There had been no warning. Few, if any, could have reached the deep shelters. A thousand key men, a fabulous electronic web, unnumbered ICBMs had in mere seconds become hot dust whirling up through the air.
From the scale of it, it seemed that most of the stock-pile had gone up.
Black fear came clouding back over Hepburn’s mind. Reason ceased to advance and mumbled over and over again, like an idiot, its one conclusion: “Sabotage.”
The destruction of the relief ship could have been an accident—by itself.
The end of Woomera could have been an accident—by itself.
But both almost simultaneously . . . no. Besides, Intelligence had got wind of the imminent outbreak of war.
Well, now Gertie was expected to justify her existence and her astronomical cost.
Which meant in cold fact that it was up to Philip Hepburn. He braced his shoulders against the weight of responsibility.
First, to make Gertie as invulnerable as possible. He threw a master switch. It soaked the solar and reserve batteries for plenty, but it transformed Gertie into a fighting lady, shot adrenalin into her bloodstream. From now she would not react to approaching missiles with only a warning cry—she would lash straight back at them with her arsenal of lightning anti-missiles.
She had in reality the mythical power of the porcupine—to shoot poisonous quills in all directions.
“G to Orange Three. War footing, war footing. Black One destroyed. Acknowledge. Over.”
Hepburn clipped the words, making a sort of verbal shorthand. He waited tensely.
Nothing. Nothing from anybody.
The tension broke like elastic. “Answer, damn you!” he yelled.
Port Darwin came in, gingerly, a civilian intruder: “Green Six, what goes on?”
“Green Six, keep out. Orange Three, Orange Three, report my signals.”
Finally, courtesy of a throat-microphone and so blurred: “Orange Three to G, nerve gas attack here. Almost wiped out. One site operational. Give priority target.”
Hepburn swallowed. War had started, but not as envisaged. Not a single potentially hostile rocket site under his observation had launched a missile. The Commonwealth bases had been assaulted either from within or from the distance of a stone’s throw. It was a saboteur’s war.
How could you hit back with long-range rockets at saboteurs without also hitting your own people?
At a loss, he surveyed his screens. The puzzling rocket fired from close to Sanggau was still climbing fast. Ignoring the computer, Hepburn calculated intuitively. Yes, if it kept on track the rocket would cross Gertie’s orbit. It looked as though it were trying to rendezvous with her. There was something more than coincidence here. It was part of the general scheme, like the destruction of the relief ship.
It wasn’t cheering to discover he was being shot at. On the other hand, he wasn’t unduly perturbed by it—events on Earth were far more worrying. Gertie’s missiles could blow this lone rocket to atoms well before it could get anywhere near her.
Still, it would be as well to avoid the risk of further exports from the same source.
“G to Orange Three. Priority target, fire when ready, following reference.”
Hepburn gave the map reference of the cloud-sheltered rocket site near Sanggau.
The Singapore signaller repeated the message. He sounded even more indistinct, as though articulation was a strain.
There was a minute’s silence. Hepburn tried to order his mind, to get it handling points consecutively, A, then B, then C, and not in wild and random dashes at B, D, C, A.
A new, crisp, urgent voice scattered his thoughts again.
“Blue One to G, Blue One to G.”
“G answering,” Hepburn stammered. “Go ahead.”
“Five-nine-three-double-one-Nelson.”
Hepburn ran his finger down a table, stopped at a line, checked the figures and codeword in a whisper. Blue One was Sydney, GHQ Southern Hemisphere, and its orders must be obeyed without question. But first it had to establish its identity by a code-call that changed at every transmission. Imposture had to be eliminated.
