A Meeting With Medusa (23 page)

Click
.

Perhaps it was a little closer. It certainly came from a different direction. It was almost as if something—moving with uncanny but not complete silence—was slowly circling the tent.

This was the moment when George Harper devoutly wished had never heard of the Abominable Snowman. It was true that he knew little enough about it, but that little was far too much.

He remembered that the Yeti, as the Nepalese called it, had been a persistent Himalayan myth for more than a hundred years. A dangerous monster larger than a man, it had never been captured, photographed, or even described by reputable witnesses. Most Westerners were quite certain that it was pure fantasy, and were totally unconvinced by the scanty evidence of tracks in the snow, or patches of skin preserved in obscure monasteries. The mountain tribesmen knew better. And now Harper was afraid that they were right.

Then, when nothing more happened for long seconds, his fears began slowly to dissolve. Perhaps his overwrought imagination had been playing tricks; in the circumstances, that would hardly be surprising. With a deliberate and determined effort of will, he turned his thoughts once more toward the problem of rescue. He was making fair progress when something bumped into the tent.

Only the fact that his throat muscles were paralysed from sheer fright prevented him from yelling. He was utterly unable to move. Then, in the darkness beside him, he heard Dr Elwin begin to stir sleepily.

‘What is it?’ muttered the scientist. ‘Are you all right?’

Harper felt his companion turn over and knew that he was groping for the flashlight. He wanted to whisper: ‘For God’s sake, keep quiet!’ but no words could escape his parched lips. There was a click, and the beam of the flashlight formed a brilliant circle on the wall of the tent.

That wall was now bowed in toward them as if a heavy weight was resting upon it. And in the centre of the bulge was a completely unmistakable pattern: the imprint of a distorted hand or claw. It was only about two feet from the ground; whatever was outside seemed to be kneeling, as it fumbled at the fabric of the tent.

The light must have disturbed it, for the imprint abruptly vanished, and the tent wall sprang flat once more. There was a low, snarling growl; then, for a long time, silence.

Harper found that he was breathing again. At any moment he had expected the tent to tear open, and some unimaginable horror to come rushing in upon them. Instead, almost anti-climactically, there was only a faint and far-off wailing from a transient gust of wind in the mountains high above. He felt himself shivering uncontrollably; it had nothing to do with the temperature, for it was comfortably warm in their little insulated world.

Then there came a familiar—indeed, almost friendly—sound. It was the metallic ring of an empty can striking on stone, and it somehow relaxed the tension a little. For the first time, Harper found himself able to speak, or at least to whisper.

‘It’s found our food containers. Perhaps it’ll go away now.’

Almost as if in reply, there was a low snarl that seemed to convey anger and disappointment, then the sound of a blow, and the clatter of cans rolling away into the darkness. Harper suddenly remembered that all the food was here in the tent; only the discarded empties were outside. That was not a cheerful thought. He wished that, like superstitious tribesmen, they had left an offering for whatever gods or demons the mountains could conjure forth.

What happened next was so sudden, so utterly unexpected, that it was all over before he had time to react. There was a scuffling sound, as of something being banged against rock; then a familiar electric whine; then a startled grunt.

And then, a heart-stopping scream of rage and frustration that turned swiftly to sheer terror and began to dwindle away at ever-increasing speed, up, up, into the empty sky.

The fading sound triggered the one appropriate memory in Harper’s mind. Once he had seen an early-twentieth-century movie on the history of flight, and it had contained a ghastly sequence showing a dirigible launching. Some of the ground crew had hung on to the mooring lines just a few seconds too long, and the airship had dragged them up into the sky, dangling helplessly beneath it. Then, one by one, they had lost their hold and dropped back to the earth.

Harper waited for a distant thud, but it never came. Then he realised that the Doctor was saying, over and over again: ‘I left the two units tied together. I left the two units tied together.’

He was still in too much of a state of shock for even that information to worry him. Instead, all he felt was a detached and admirably scientific sense of disappointment.

Now he would never know what it was that had been prowling around their tent, in the lonely hours before the Himalayan dawn.

One of the mountain rescue helicopters, flown by a sceptical Sikh who still wondered if the whole thing was an elaborate joke, came nosing down the canyon in the late afternoon. By the time the machine had landed in a flurry of snow, Dr Elwin was already waving frantically with one arm and supporting himself on the tent framework with the other.

As he recognised the crippled scientist, the helicopter pilot felt a sensation of almost superstitious awe. So the report
must
be true; there was no other way in which Elwin could possibly have reached this place. And that meant that everything flying in and above the skies of Earth was, from this moment, as obsolete as an ox-cart.

‘Thank God you found us,’ said the Doctor, with heartfelt gratitude. ‘How did you get here so quickly?’

‘You can thank the radar tracking networks, and the telescopes in the orbital met stations. We’d have been here earlier, but at first we thought it was all a hoax.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What would
you
have said, Doctor, if someone reported a very dead Himalayan snow leopard mixed up in a tangle of straps and boxes—and holding constant altitude at ninety thousand feet?’

Inside the tent, George Harper started to laugh, despite the pain it caused. The Doctor put his head through the flap and asked anxiously: ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing—ouch. But I was wondering how we are going to get the poor beast down, before it’s a menace to navigation.’

‘Oh, someone will have to go up with another Levvy and press the buttons. Maybe we should have a radio control on all units….’

Dr Elwin’s voice faded out in mid-sentence. Already he was far away, lost in dreams that would change the face of many worlds.

In a little while he would come down from the mountains, a later Moses bearing the laws of a new civilisation. For he would give back to all mankind the freedom lost so long ago, when the first amphibians left their weightless home beneath the waves.

The billion-year battle against the force of gravity was over.

Herbert George Morley Roberts Wells, Esq.

First published in
If
, December 1967

Collected in
The Wind from the Sun

A couple of years ago I wrote a tale accurately entitled ‘The Longest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told’, which Fred Pohl duly published on a single page of his magazine. (Because editors have to justify their existence somehow, he renamed it ‘A Recursion in Metastories’. You’ll find it in
Galaxy
for October 1966.) Near the beginning of this metastory, but an infinite number of words from its end, I referred to ‘The Anticipator’ by H. G. Wells.

Though I encountered this short fantasy some twenty years ago, and have never read it since, it left a vivid impression on my mind. It concerned two writers, one of whom had all his best stories published by the other—
before
he could even complete them himself. At last, in desperation, he decided that murder was the only cure for this chronic (literally) plagiarism.

But, of course, once again his rival beat him to it, and the story ends with the words ‘the anticipator, horribly afraid, ran down a by-street’.

Now I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that this story was written by H. G. Wells. However, some months after its appearance I received a letter from Leslie A. Gritten, of Everett, Washington, saying that he couldn’t locate it. And Mr Gritten has been a Wells fan for a long, long time; he clearly recalls the serialisation of ‘The War of the Worlds’ in the
Strand Magazine
at the end of the 1890s. As one of the Master’s cockney characters would say, ‘Gor blimey.’

Refusing to believe that my mental filing system had played such a dirty trick on me, I quickly searched through the twenty-odd volumes of the autographed Atlantic Edition in the Colombo Public Library. (By a charming coincidence, the British Council had just arranged a Wells Centenary Exhibition, and the library entrance was festooned with photos illustrating his background and career.) I soon found that Mr Gritten was right: there was no such story as ‘The Anticipator’ in the collected works. Yet in the months since
TLSFSET
was published, not one other reader has queried the reference. I find this depressing; where are all the Wells fans these days?

Now my erudite informant has solved at least part of the mystery. ‘The Anticipator’ was written by one Morley Roberts; it was first published in 1898 in
The Keeper of the Waters and Other Stories
. I probably encountered it in a Doubleday anthology,
Travellers in Time
(1947), edited by Philip Van Doren Stern.

Yet several problems remain. First of all, why was I so convinced that the story was by Wells? I can only suggest—and it seems pretty farfetched, even for my grasshopper mind—that the similarity of words had made me link it subconsciously with ‘The Accelerator’.

I would also like to know why this story has stuck so vividly in my memory. Perhaps, like all writers, I am peculiarly sensitive to the dangers of plagiarism. So far (touch wood) I have been lucky; but I have notes for several tales I’m afraid to write until I can be quite sure they’re original. (There’s this couple, see, who land their spaceship on a new world after their planet has been blown up, and when they’ve started things all over again you find—surprise, surprise!—that they’re called Adam and Eve….)

One worth-while result of my error was to start me skimming through Wells’s short stories again, and I was surprised to find what a relatively small proportion could be called science fiction, or even fantasy. Although I was well aware that only a fraction of his hundred-odd published volumes were SF, I had forgotten that this was also true of the short stories. A depressing quantity are dramas and comedies of Edwardian life (‘The Jilting of Jane’), rather painful attempts at humour (‘My First Aeroplane’), near-autobiography (‘A Slip Under the Microscope’), or pure sadism (‘The Cone’). Undoubtedly, I am biased, but among these tales such masterpieces as ‘The Star’, ‘The Crystal Egg’, ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’, and, above all, ‘The Country of the Blind’ blaze like diamonds amid costume jewellery.

But back to Morley Roberts. I know nothing whatsoever about him, and wonder if his little excursion in time was itself inspired by ‘The Time Machine’, published just a couple of years before ‘The Anticipator’. I also wonder which story was actually
written
—not published—first.

And why did such an ingenious writer not make more of a name for himself? Perhaps…

I have just been struck by a perfectly horrid thought. If H. G. Wells’s contemporary Morley Roberts was ever found murdered in a dark alley, I simply don’t want to know about it.

Crusade

First published in
The Farthest Reaches
, ed. Joseph Elder, 1968

Collected in
The Wind from the Sun

It was a world that had never known a sun. For more than a billion years, it had hovered midway between two galaxies, the prey of their conflicting gravitational pulls. In some future age the balance would be tilted, one way or the other, and it would start to fall across the light-centuries, down toward a warmth alien to all its experience.

Now it was cold beyond imagination; the intergalactic night had drained away such heat as it had once possessed. Yet there were seas there—seas of the only element that can exist in the liquid form at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. In the shallow oceans of helium that bathed this strange world, electric currents once started could flow forever, with no weakening of power. Here superconductivity was the normal order of things; switching processes could take place billions of times a second, for millions of years, with negligible consumption of energy.

It was a computer’s paradise. No world could have been more hostile to life, or more hospitable to intelligence.

And intelligence was there, dwelling in a planet-wide incrustation of crystals and microscopic metal threads. The feeble light of the two contending galaxies—briefly doubled every few centuries by the flicker of a supernova—fell upon a static landscape of sculptured geometrical forms. Nothing moved, for there was no need of movement in a world where thoughts flashed from one hemisphere to the other at the speed of light. Where only information was important, it was a waste of precious energy to transfer bulk matter.

Yet when it was essential, that, too, could be arranged. For some millions of years, the intelligence brooding over this lonely world had become aware of a certain lack of essential data. In a future that, though still remote, it could already foresee, one of those beckoning galaxies would capture it. What it would encounter, when it dived into those swarms of suns, was beyond its power of computation.

So it put forth its will, and myriad crystal lattices reshaped themselves. Atoms of metal flowed across the face of the planet. In the depths of the helium sea, two identical subbrains began to bud and grow….

Once it had made its decision, the mind of the planet worked swiftly; in a few thousand years, the task was done. Without a sound, with scarcely a ripple in the surface of the frictionless sea, the newly created entities lifted from their birthplace and set forth for the distant stars.

They departed in almost opposite directions, and for more than a million years the parent intelligence heard no more of its offspring. It had not expected to; until they reached their goals, there would be nothing to report.