Afton Reynolds moaned and came forward with his arms held out pleadingly. Talmus pushed his face out of the way and started walking back to the farmhouse, then he got another idea.
“Just a minute. The guy who invented the electro-whatcha-macallit must have been a real genius. Couldn’t he have put in a sort of safety valve? I mean, the guns don’t have to burn up like that, do they?”
“No,” I agreed. “They don’t. My grandfather Vogt was and still is a genius—of sorts. He persuaded the government that anybody who was crazy enough to duel with dangerous weapons ought to be taught a lesson. A burnt child dreads the firearm, you might say.”
Afton Reynolds gave me a strange look and uttered one very short remark. Now, I’m the first to admit that my jokes occasionally fall short of perfection, but I saw no necessity for that sort of remark.
Reynolds left the Isher II News Service a week later and, frankly, it was a relief to see him go—a man who hasn’t a sense of humour will never get anywhere in this business.
Pilot Plant
Afterwards, Garnett found it difficult to decide which gave him the greater shock—the aircraft or the voice.
It had been a diamond-sharp morning in early Spring, with the green expanses of the airfield curving into the distance like the sunny cricket pitches of boyhood. From the comfort of his car Garnett watched the plane which had monopolised his life for five years go through an advanced phase of its flight development programme. The two-seat interceptor shimmered across the sky high up in the south then banked into a long, shallow dive aimed at the runway. As the machine approached, with the menacing silence of transonic speed, several hares which had been sitting on the turf shifted uneasily, displaying a kind of prescience, and began to run.
“Will pull out at approximately eight gravities.” The voice of chief test pilot Bill Makin, picked up by Garnett’s special car radio, sounded remote and somehow irrelevant.
The aircraft bit down into the denser air close to the ground and the invisible force fields that were its wings suddenly attained a ghostly visibility as air-borne moisture condensed into flickering grey streamers in the shock wave. At the far end of the runway the aircraft levelled out for a second then reared up into an impossible-looking climb.
If the wing generators were to fail about now, Garnett thought, indulging himself in a moment of melodrama, twenty tons of stainless steel and ceramic fuselage would land on top of my car. I would be killed.
“Something wrong here!” Makin’s voice had gone hard. “I’m losing my wings!”
The tattered rags of grey mist which had been flapping on the invisible wings, like a Valkyrie’s cloak, abruptly vanished. Garnett watched incredulously as the massive fuselage began to sink below its anticipated flight path then, suddenly very heavy, enter a definite and irrevocable dive. Ejector charges burst the centre section open and the precious cockpit hurled itself upwards, frantically breaking the suicide pact in which the rest of the plummeting airframe was now involved.
Garnett slammed the car’s starter button with the heel of his hand but the warm engine perversely missed its cue. He glanced over his shoulder. The fuselage was somersaulting down on him, so close that he saw the seriate rivets of its belly plates. The car’s engine whirred uselessly—and then he heard the voice.
It said, “Get me out of this, Xoanon.”
Garnett had time for one instant of wonderment before he was swept away from the sunny spring morning in a bomb-burst of sound, pain and darkness.
The room was small but airy, and its chairs had the flawless convexities of furniture never used. Garnett’s bed was positioned where he could see, beyond the banked foliage of elm trees, the distant slopes of the Pennines.
Only very reluctantly, and over a period of weeks, had the drugs begun to release their grip on his brain. He was aware of his mind clearing from the bottom like a glass of aerated water, during which process there was a slow escalation of thought. At first he could little more than observe the rhythm of hospital routine, then he began to cope with his personal affairs and, a little later, to pick up the threads of his working life. For a while the realisation that he was owner and chief engineer of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company was less important than the fact that weeks of lying in bed had given him a permanent ache in, of all the unlikely places, his heels. But gradually the knowledge ceased to be a kind of distant landmark with which to orientate himself and there came a vague feeling that it might be pleasant to get back to work. It might be pleasant, and yet there was a disturbing element somewhere….
“If you won’t drink milk I’ll simply have to put you on a course of calcium tablets.” Janice Villiers shrugged as she spoke and let her eyes wander disinterestedly around the mushroom-coloured walls of his room. She was the dietician at the discreetly expensive clinic in which he had found himself, and Garnett had the impression she had got the job by mistake. She had lush black hair, a slight cast in one eye and a kind of forthright sexiness which struck a faintly jarring note amid the pervading professional blandness.
“I don’t need milk,” he said. “My bones are as good as you’ll get.”
“It isn’t bones I’m thinking about, it’s your nerves. You must be a pretty tough little fellow to have recovered as well as you did, but your system has taken a beating. Do you want a cigarette?”
She had been quick to notice his size, or lack of it, even though he was in bed. Garnett turned his head away angrily, ignoring the offered pack. Who the hell did she think she was, making personal comments to important patients? He saw his fine-featured jockey’s face frowning at him from a mirror and sought an unrevealing way to express his anger.
“Tell me,” he said tersely, ‘do you smoke in the other patients’ rooms?”
Janice smiled and returned his stare. Her eyes were a strong, clear grey, but the slight in-turning of one of them gave her a ruefully conspiratorial look. She shook her head.
“Well, what makes you think you can get away with it in my room?” Garnett spoke coldly, but was astonished to discover that part of him was pleased with her answer.
Janice shrugged again and lit up her cigarette. “Were you afraid when you saw that plane dropping down on to your car?”
“Isn’t that an … unprofessional sort of a question?” He was working hard to elicit the normal respectful responses, but she seemed not to notice.
“Did you think you were going to die?” Her small oval face was intent.
Garnett shook his head uncertainly, remembering. Get me out of this, Xoanon. It had been a quiet, clear, perfectly normal voice—except for the fact that it had no apparent owner. He had read stories with the well-worn literary gimmick in which a man in a panic had heard screams, then realised they were coming from his own mouth, but this was rather different. He was not even the praying type, and had he been he knew of no deity by the name of Xoanon.
“Supposing you did die,” Janice persisted. “Did you ever think what you would most like to find on the other side?”
Garnett laughed incredulously. “For God’s sake! Have you been reading pamphlets on how to be an interesting conversationalist?” As on her previous visits, he finally gave up trying to establish anything other than the timeless man-woman relationship. “All right then, what would you like to find?”
“I would like,” she said, inhaling deeply and talking through the smoke with a kind of hard expertise which he found strangely annoying, ‘to waken up in a great hall with one of those vaulted green ceilings, but so big and high up that it was misty looking. And I would like to find myself in a chair facing a wise old man who was removing a kind of earphone set from my head. And I would like him to be saying, ‘Well, that was a sample of life on Sol III. If you would really like to study that planet there are a hundred thousand million of those lives to go through—or would you prefer to look at some of the other inhabited worlds of the universe?’ ;”