A Better Mantrap

by Bob Shaw

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

A brilliant collection of original stories. A predatory alien accidentally teleported to Earth. A mad scientist and his imprisoned ghost. A space traveller returns to face an accusation of murder.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 234

Sample

When you love a woman you can forgive her for doing almost anything – but there has to be a limit.

And Sharly went way beyond that limit at 3.17 on the afternoon of June 12.

I know the exact moment it happened because the whole thing was recorded, though at a distance, by Arnie Archbold. He was making his scheduled round of Level Eight, pacing himself so as to be near the coffee machine when it came to break time, and was so wrapped up in visions of burying his nose in a hot foaming beaker that at first he wasn’t even aware of Sharly on the gallery above him. His recorder picked her out, though.

All members of Icewell Security, myself included, wear wide-angle buttonhole machines which serve roughly the same purpose as flight recorders on aircraft – if one of us gets himself totalled the investigation team can run a tape through afterwards and settle back in comfort and decide what went wrong. To be fair, the recorders often provide valuable retrospective evidence concerning accidents and equipment failures, and I guess I should have been grateful that there was no doubt, none whatsoever, about what Sharly did. I was off the island on a five-day course at the time it happened, but the tape showed everything…

She came out of the Field Analysis suite on Level Nine and walked slowly in the direction of Structure Telemetry on the south side of the well. Nothing in her gait or manner suggested she was under any kind of stress. That was something to which I could testify because we had been lovers for some months and, although she was wearing a loose-fitting heatsaver, I could visualize the fine lazy action of every muscle in her body. She even, and it hurt me every time I watched it on playback, performed one of her most characteristic tricks with her hair – pushing the curls upwards slightly from the nape of her neck with one hand as though they were little springs upon which she was carrying out a compression test. I had seen Sharly do that a hundred times in reality, always when she was relaxed and pleased with herself and feeling good about life, and that made what came next all the more shocking.

About ten paces from the door to Structure Telemetry she came to an abrupt halt and clapped her hands to her temples. She rocked backwards and forwards for a few seconds, then turned towards the centre of the well. The blow-ups from Archbold’s tape gave us a good look at her face in that crucial moment, and I pray never again to see anything so close to The Scream. Her eyes and mouth were circular black wounds, deep, incurable. She advanced to the gallery’s safety rail, went up the four bars as though they were steps of a ladder, and walked off the top one into space.

Cold, empty, unforgiving, lethal space.

The sudden movement attracted Archbold’s attention and dragged him around, with the result that all who studied his recorder tape got a clear view of Sharly’s body plunging down into the well. There were lights down there, but they only had the effect of deepening the blackness in between, and her writhing figure disappeared into a complicated nether world of pipe runs, valves, ice bulwarks and pools of oil and oil-scummed seawater. She made no sound on the way down and the final impact was lost amid the massive heartbeats of the primary pump.

That’s all there was to it.

Charlotte Railton had been part of the world scene as a warm, intelligent, humorous person for twenty-six years, and suddenly – for no reason that I could fathom – she was gone. They didn’t even manage to find her remains. The investigators who arrived next day by copter concluded that the body had been drawn into one of the main drainage outlets and expelled into the sea. They only stayed a day-and-a-half before heading back to Port Heiden and I received a distinct impression that if Sharly hadn’t been a Grade One Engineer they would have taken off much sooner.

I resented that a lot. In fact, resentment was the driving force that got me through the following weeks. I felt other emotions, of course – grief, despair, anger, self-pity – but I was able to keep them in check by concentrating on my sense of outrage over all that had happened. One play-back of Archbold’s tape was enough to satisfy everybody concerned that they were dealing with a straightforward suicide, and from that point on the case was virtually closed. My testimony that Sharly had not been a suicidal type and had, in any case, been in excellent spirits immediately prior to her death was politely noted and dismissed as not being relevant. The evidence of the tape was all that mattered, and even I had to acknowledge it.

That was what helped crystallize my resentment against Sharly herself. Widows and widowers often feel anger – even though it is rarely expressed – towards their departed spouses for having spoiled everything by dying, and I came to know exactly what goes on in their minds. At times I actually hated Sharly for the pain she had caused me, then a reaction would set in and guilt would be added to all my other emotional burdens, and to help me squeeze out from under I would get out of bed, put on my uniform, sling the carbine on my shoulder and go patrolling the chill dark reaches of Icewell 37. I don’t know what I was hoping to find. I wanted to blame something for Sharly’s death, but the rational part of my mind told me there was no chance of encountering a convenient and suitable external agent. There was no malign ghost of Level Nine, and even had there been it was unlikely that it could have been exorcized by a spray of high-velocity bullets.

The well is a creepy and fear-making place, though, especially at night. It is an artificial island constructed from ice, and it’s hard for a non-scientist like me to accept that the localized coldness which makes it possible is imported from interstellar space.

Sharly knew as much about the telecongruency warp as anybody and she used to waste hours trying to make me understand how the focal point of the warp generator actually existed in two places at once – one of them here in the middle of the Bering Sea, and the other at some unknown location between the stars where the temperature was close to absolute zero. The position of the alpha-locus, the Earth-based focal point, could be accurately controlled and it was automatically drifted all over the island to keep the ice structure hard and strong, but nobody had any idea of the spatial location of the zeta-locus. Apparently it could have been just about anywhere in the universe. I never really got used to the idea of dangling a kind of cosmic fishing line in a distant part of space, but the notion held no fears for Sharly. It buoyed her up.

‘This is only the beginning,’ she had assured me once. ‘The telecongruency warp is a powerful tool, but right now we’re only debasing it. Using it as a heat sink to create ice castles in the ocean is easily the cheapest and best way yet of building deep-sea oil wells, but that’s only playing with the concept. What we have to do is gain control. We ought to be able to reverse the potentials, make it a two-way thing. We should be able to pinpoint the zeta-locus anywhere we want it – and when that happens we’ll be able to grow food or gather diamonds or pick flowers on any planet in the galaxy.’

When she talked that way I used to get jealous because the disks of misty white light appearing in her eyes were exactly the same as when we were making love and it was going well, but I had sense enough to keep my mouth shut about how I felt. Most people were surprised over a woman of her background taking up with a sergeant in Icewell Security, and as I couldn’t quite believe it myself sometimes I knew not to strain my luck. And in the end it was Sharly’s luck that ran out, not mine. She would never have the chance to pick those alien blossoms and I desperately wanted to know why.

I even, and this shows how obsessive my thinking became, considered murder. Post-hypnotic suggestion was one method I dreamed up – it seemed to me that somebody could have implanted a command for Sharly to walk off that gallery railing. Then there were exotic drugs which could suddenly trigger a self-destructive urge, and sonic beams which might scramble the brain and produce instant madness. Far-out ideas like those clamoured through my mind for hours on end, accompanied by equally bizarre notions about possible motives, so I was in a pretty abnormal psychological state during those nights when I was up there prowling on the high levels with the carbine nudging me in the back like a secretive accomplice. And I guess that’s why I sensed there was something badly wrong as soon as Lieutenant Oliver came through on my personal radio.

‘Sergeant Hillman,’ he said in an irritated voice when I had identified myself and reported my position, ‘what are you doing there? According to the roster you went off duty six hours ago.’

‘I know that, sir, but I couldn’t sleep tonight,’ I told him, raising my wrist set to my mouth. ‘I decided to do an extra shift.’

‘You decided to…’ Oliver sounded incredulous now, as well as irritated. Obviously the idea of a man choosing to walk the galleries at three in the morning when he could have been wrapped up warm in bed was hard for him to ingest. ‘Did you, by any chance, arrange to do Sergeant Dresch a favour and take over his shift for him?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then why can’t I raise Dresch or anybody else in the duty room?’

‘Don’t know, sir. He was there okay less than an hour ago when…’ I stopped speaking as it dawned on me that it had been quite a long time since I had heard the elevator shuttling between any of the lower levels. Maddern and Katzen were the two men assigned to do the inspection rounds that night and neither was the type to use the stairs when there was any other option. I went to the rail and looked down into the well. The galleries below formed concentric circles, all of them beaded with lamps, surrounding the dimly-seen shapes of the wellhead equipment. A freezing mist drifted over everything, giving the most distant lamps the appearance of illuminated balls of lime-coloured candy-floss. The primary pump was beating steadily down there, transferring oil to the outer tanks, and I could hear the faint sound of ocean waves coming through the ice walls, but there was no sign of any human activity. There was no waving of flashlights or bellowing of supposed witticisms – two favourite pursuits of men on night inspection.

I eased the sling of the carbine off my shoulder and raised my eyes to scan the one gallery remaining above me. Saboteurs often came in over the top when they were mounting an all-out showpiece attack on a well, but I could see nothing up there apart from a circle of unblinking lights and a few stars barely piercing the greenish haze. Not comforted, I allowed the rifle to slide into my right hand.

‘What are you doing, Sergeant? Are you still there?’ Oliver was calling from Field Control, more than half-a-kilometre away at the opposite end of the island, and he was sounding increasingly annoyed. He didn’t seem unduly alarmed at that stage, but I was the one who had been living on nerves for three weeks. I was the one who was keyed up to see spectres of death in every swirl of mist.

‘I’ve been looking around,’ I said, keeping my voice low. ‘It all seems quiet.’

‘It is quiet – that’s what this is all about. See if you can raise Dresch on your ops band.’

I pressed the priority-call button on my wrist set and got no reply. ‘He isn’t answering.’

‘Damn! You’d better get yourself down to the duty room and see what he’s playing at. Tell him to contact me immediately. And Hillman?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Tell him he’d better have one hell of a good excuse for this.’

‘Right!’ I spoke crisply to conceal my deep uneasiness about the situation. The fact that it was three in the morning had something to do with it – three in the morning was a bad time, specially for somebody in my frame of mind – but, also, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Icewell 37 was under some form of attack. A mental scenario unfolded before me. International terrorist group… approach by submersible… take out guards by knife, silenced gun or gas… plant bombs… I could walk into anything down there, anything at all.

Even the thing that killed Sharly Railton.

The thought heaved itself into the full light of my consciousness like some leviathan breaking the surface of a prehistoric swamp, bringing about an instantaneous and profound change in my outlook. It happens that way sometimes. You can be alone in spooky circumstances, alone but perfectly at ease, then a change takes place. Not in your surroundings, but inside you. An unseen hand is laid on your shoulder and an unheard voice whispers a few words of warning, and suddenly you’re scared. And what makes it even more terrifying is that the silent voice is the voice of a friend. It is rueful, reproachful, concerned. Not only had you let your guard down, you had forgotten why we all need a guard in the first place – and that was oh so foolish…

‘This is crazy,’ I said, half-aloud, my gaze travelling on a circuit of Level Nine. The regularly spaced lights reflected off the back-drop of ice and from the prefabricated huts that housed an auxiliary power unit and some structural telemetry equipment. I knew that both huts were securely locked, and I had just come down from a tour of Level Ten, so the next logical step was to check out the gallery below and gradually work down to the duty room on Level Three. The elevator was only a short distance away, but it was a noisy, open-cage affair – a good way of advertising my exact movements to all and sundry.

I bolted a cartridge into the breech of the rifle, slipped the safety off and walked quietly to the nearest stair. The tower-like structure of the stairwell vibrated underfoot, and I cursed as I imagined it broadcasting messages about my position. I went down the four zig-zagging flights that took me to Level Eight, then did a cautious circuit of the entire gallery. Everything was as it should have been, and it was the same story on Level Seven and the two below that. Icewell 37 appeared to be running itself with its usual efficiency and there was no real need for human beings to fuss around the place at all – which was the principal reason for the rather hefty consumption of strong liquor on the night shift.

Now that I thought of it, Bert Dresch had been somewhat red of face and pink of eye when I saw him an hour earlier. It was possible that he was out cold in the office – it had happened before – and that Maddern, Katzen and the others were labouring to get him fit enough to answer his calls. The idea perked me up considerably and I was in a more relaxed mood when I began the circuit of Level Four. I even considered leaning over the rail and bellowing a few choice obscenities in the general direction of the duty room, which was basically a square hole cut into the ice on a level with the gallery below.

That was when I began to find small pieces of Dave Maddern.

I didn’t even know what they were at first.

I was about a third of the way around Level Four when I saw that the metal floor of the gallery was badly cluttered up for a distance of about ten paces, as if somebody had spilled a couple of sacks of coal and had just let the pieces lie. Drawing closer, I saw that the fragments were deep red in colour, although it was difficult to be too certain in the artificial light. I disturbed several of them with my feet and found they were as hard as glass, and my next thought was that there had been an accident with some deep-frozen melons. Then I began to notice the whiteness of bone and a few seconds later saw three-quarters of Dave’s face lying on the metal deck, like a discarded fright mask.

The shock seemed to clear my perceptions, for in that instant I became aware of other kinds of fragments lying around. There were irregular pieces of clothing – not with ragged edges, but as cleanly snapped as candy. There even were pieces of Dave’s carbine, his helmet and his boots mingling with the glittering, dark-hued shards of what had been his flesh and internal organs.

‘Oh, man,’ I whispered. ‘Oh, man!’

Suddenly fastidious about what my feet might accidentally touch, I tiptoed through the human debris, going faster and faster until I reached the uncontaminated part of the gallery at a near-run. The only conventional way of utterly destroying a man, as Dave Maddern had been destroyed, would have been to immerse him in a vat of liquid oxygen and then go to work on the frozen body with a sledge hammer – but there was another possibility.

All icewell personnel were assured that it was impossible for the alpha-locus to wander from its prescribed path. A computer and triplex controls kept it moving in a regular and pre-ordained pattern through the island, continuously reinforcing the ice structure with the unthinkable coldness of space – but since when had men been able to build perfect machines? What if accidents sometimes did happen? We were busy sucking the last drops of oil from the Earth’s crust, using new techniques that had been born of a desperate need, and no government in the world would draw back on account of a few operational mishaps. It would be perfectly natural to conceal the fact that every now and then there was a glitch in the telecongruency warp system, that every now and then the controls wavered and sent an invisible killer cruising through icewell living quarters. The bleak focus of interstellar cold would only have to brush through a man once to turn him into a crystalline statue.

I wasn’t thinking as clearly as that while I ran for the stair that led down to the duty room. Shock, revulsion and fear had numbed my brain to the extent that I could scarcely nail down a coherent thought, and to make matters worse silent voices were screaming at me, hurling confused questions. Is this what you’ve been looking for?

What have you really explained about Dave Maddern? Was Sharly, in some way that you don’t yet understand, driven over that rail? All right, you’ve frozen Maddern to death – but who or what broke him up like so much peanut brittle? And why?

I clattered down on to Level Three and sprinted a short distance along the gallery to the bright rectangle of the duty room window, but slid to a halt just before reaching it, all instincts of self-preservation newly alerted.

The place was cold.

Icewells, by their very nature, are chilly places and our part of the world never warmed up, even in the middle of summer, but this was a different sort of coldness. It was hostile, totally inimical, far more so than the polar wind, and I sensed – even before looking into the room – that it was a bad omen.

Perhaps there had been three men in the room, perhaps as many as half-a-dozen. I wasn’t able to say for sure, because the entire floor area was covered with a gruesome organic rubble, the redness of which was slowly beginning to disappear under a coating of rime frost. The furniture in the room was quite untouched, but its occupants had been pulverized, degraded, robbed of every last vestige of their humanity. Had it not been for the previous experience with Maddern I wouldn’t even have recognized them for what they were.

And, reacting according to a classic human pattern, I had two virtually simultaneous thoughts: Thank God that didn’t happen to me, and, How can I make sure it doesn’t ever happen to me?

There was no room behind my eyes for anything but those two linked expressions of self-interest. I turned towards the elevator, determined to ride it up to Level Ten and the starlit surface of the island, and it was then that I saw the thing with many legs.

It was huge – easily the size of a car – black and nightmarish, and it was rushing towards me with hideous, soul-withering speed. There was no time to think, only to react, and so I did the most natural thing in the world.

I grabbed the gallery rail and vaulted over it into space.

For a second or so I fully expected to die – just as Sharly had done – but. . .