Machines and Men

by Keith Roberts

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

A garage owner is called on to repair an Unidentified Flying Object; the seductive rhythmic pulse emanating from beyond a continental shelf village mysteriously beckons the younger submarine generation; a small town cinema projectionist screens 3-D rushes for a 24th century film crew; a divorce case in which the co-respondent is a synthetic human... Keith Roberts injects his own brand of immediacy and realism through his punchy, readably style and his considerable technical know-how into these stories, ten rare new gems in the dazzling treasury of SF.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 236

Sample

No!

No! No! No!

I said I would never use my Power again. I won’t. It’s wrong and vile. I remember what I promised myself ten years ago, walking in the dark after Mother died.

It kept her alive for years. The doctors had never seen anything like it. It was her heart …

God knows it was difficult. Not like this thing I want to do now. This could be so easy.

When Mother was alive I used to stay up nights, work round the clock on that feeble old heart, strengthening, renewing. I built a new valve once, piece by microscopic piece. Three days and nights that took me, working non-stop. Do you know how many cells there are in the ventricles of a human heart?

I do …

Mother knew what was happening. She could feel all the little adjustments going on, the million cobweb-forces twitching between us keeping her alive. She tried to give up three times. But she couldn’t die because her heart couldn’t stop. And her heart couldn’t stop because I was driving it.

Technically she did die once. I worked that heart for twenty hours before it would beat on its own again. They’d use an electronic pacemaker now. There was nothing of the sort then.

I was born with my Power. It didn’t seem wrong to use it. I couldn’t sit and let her die. I never realized though until almost the last, how she’d come to hate me. Hate my phosphorescent eyes and my million hands, tiny, invisible, never-resting hands …

I pull the bedclothes over my head, trying to make the black room even darker. I dig my face in the pillow, try to shut out the deep noise of the overrun as Julie changes up after a corner. But I only succeed in muffling my ears.

Mother won in the end. She was too clever for me. If she’d cut her wrists or opened her throat it wouldn’t have mattered because I’d have seamed up the wounded flesh as fast as the blade went through it. If she’d jumped from a building I’d have caught her and lowered her to the ground. But she didn’t do that. All she did was swallow a hundred little white tablets.

I woke in the night. I was already inside her. I knew what was wrong. Knew she’d beaten me. I was fast enough to juggle cells as they multiplied and died, but these were molecules. The wrong sort of molecules. They came pouring and flooding through the universe of her body, changing things as they came. I could see amino acids and peptones, watch proteins building up like pearly chains against a void, but now there were too many molecules. I fought them. I was everywhere at once, grabbing them, altering them, making them harmless. But it was no use. It was like a locust plague. Like trying to catch the insects one by one in your hands and kill enough to stop the swarm, and the sky dark with them for miles …

I had to walk cut from inside her, leave everything still and quiet. I ran away from the house, using my feet. I never went back. Since then I’ve never used the Power. I won’t now. I’ve been hungry, and not used it. Sat in a cell and unlocked and locked the door the long night through. It was only a poor steel thing, useless and simple, and I played with it, but I wouldn’t help myself. My mother killed herself to get away from this … thing I can do. I won’t ever use the Power again.

You can look up telekineticists in books. They’ll tell you they are people who can move things without touching them, change physical states at a distance. They’ll also tell you such beings don’t exist. Well, the books are wrong.

I’m one …

I ram the heels of my hands against my eyes. Peacocks flick their tails beneath the lids. The nervelights paint Julie in crazy colours, lilac and aniline red and burning green, but they can’t block her out.

She’s driving a wheeled rainbow. The colours lap and flow along the bodywork, stream out behind the tail. I relax the pressure and the iridescence vanishes. She is still there.

I can’t help it. I have a million hands again, groping over that flying car. I’m low down in the chassis, in the springs, feeling the shocks stream into the tempered metal. Watching the curving rush of the road, looking out through the stoneguard with the white fans of the headlights in front and the geometric cliff of the rad behind me. I’m in the engine seeing in spite of blackness the clamouring ballet of pushrods and tappets. In the steering column feeling the stresses from the wheels, the countering resistance of Julie’s arms. I linger at the steering rim, savouring the transition from metal to flesh where her hands are gripping it firm …

I feel my pulse accelerating. That pounding, that isn’t the engine. That’s my heart. I go rigid, not breathing, thinking of what I’m going to do. I poise two of my hands over her wrists, others above the roaring venturis of the carbs where I can see the throttle linkages move in unison as she drives through the bends. In a second I’m going to whip her arms behind her, pinion them, open the throttles and take control. I’m going to watch her face as the silver road snakes at her and the trees, as the revs climb and the wheelrim in front of her swings to the bends. Faster, and faster, and faster … and when she’s had enough, when she can’t take any more, I’m going to let go …

I roll out of bed and slap at the lampswitch with my hand. My face and body are covered with sweat. I run the tap in the handbasin, put my head under it. The cold water shocks. I glare round. See double. The details of the tawdry room registering dim through flashing, white-lit trees. The noise of the engine, it’s drumming in my ears. I reel about, put my hand out to the rushing macadam that is a wall. I know I’ve got to break this link. I concentrate, put all my being and will into it. The images I want form somehow. Putting out an oilwell fire. Reeling fuse, waiting, pressing the plunger … Now … a huge flash, obliterating everything.

Silence. Dimness. A little room in a cheap boarding house. Faded, striped paper. Useless gasbracket draped with cobwebs. Cracked mirror. My jacket, trousers, slung across a chair. I’m leaning against the wall trembling. I go sit on the bed. Light a cigarette, drag the smoke down deep. This is better. I’m O.K. again.

I don’t think I’m just a telekineticist.

God, listen to me! Just a telekineticist … It’s true, though. I’ve got this other thing, E.S.P., psi factor, devil possession, I don’t know what its name is. To … do a job, I don’t even have to be there. I can walk through a city miles away, see the neon and the crowds, alley cats prowling, leaves and cigarette packets in the gutters, rain bouncing on the roads. I can watch a murder done there, or an act of love, and have to go find a nameboard to see where I’ve been …

Distance is nothing to do with it. Near or far, it’s all the same. For instance right now I know Julie’s driving a car. But I don’t know where. She could be a mile away. She could be in Nevada.

I think about something else, anything. I don’t want to go back to Julie for both our sakes. I pull on the cigarette. I get mad. I ask myself, what do books and names matter, what the bell’s a name? Nobody like me has ever existed before. I’ve got a wild talent.

The room is quiet as a grave. I finish one cigarette and light another from it. I still feel shaky. I get up, go to the cupboard over the washbasin. It’s a flat-brown, rickety little cupboard, fluff and muck on the top of it, badly fitting doors. I scraped a bit of paint off a door once. It wasn’t wooden. Made out of bits of Victorian newspapers stuck together to make a sort of cardboard. Next the cupboard there’s the mirror, one corner gone, glass flecked over with greasy ginger spots. That’s the sort of trash I live with. And I could have made my fortune.

I open the doors, get out a bottle of Scotch and a glass. I pour myself a treble and put the bottle back. Suddenly the room seems stuffy, full of smoke. I go to the window, undo the catch. I bang the grimy frame to free it and lever it open. Cooler air moves against my face and there’s the noise of the main road just down the hill. I lean on the sill and stare at the moving reflections of the lights. The road roars like that all night long. Julie’s on a road right now, driving somewhere. God knows where.

Something wakes up in my mind. It’s like stepping on a dog you didn’t know was there, seeing it come up at your face. It’s as quick as that. For a second I’m seeing the bonnet of a speeding car, hearing an engine louder than the ones outside. I jerk back into the room in panic. The car vanishes. I realize how careful I’ve got to be.

I lay back on the bed with the glass in my hand. I start to make up a mental image. Something I can hang like a screen in front of the thing I don’t want to see. I compose the picture all of opposites. Julie’s car is rushing along doing eighty or ninety. So I take something static. A rock will do. It’s a red car so we’ll have a neutral, blue-grey sort of rock. The car’s moving in darkness, so my rock will be in pouring sunlight. Yes, there it is, big and blue. Immensely static. Deep shadows round its base where it’s embedded in the ground. It’s a good sharp image; I can see the striations in the rock and the weathering, feel the sun heat striking back from it on to my face. I stand back mentally, appraise my work. Yes, that’ll do, it’s fine. That rock won’t ever move.

The roomlight starts to annoy me, glaring in my eyes. It’s a naked bulb on a flex, no shade. Yellow crab-patterns from the filament reaching across the ceiling. I put my hand out and switch it off. I don’t need light any more.

I finish the whisky and go back to my rock image. I recognize it now. It’s a rock I saw when I was on holiday with Bill years ago. There’s that little bay behind it and the sun-haze, the twinkle of the sea. I remember that holiday well, little bits and snatches of it are so clear. How old would I have been? Nine, ten? Something like that. I try to work out how long it’s been since I saw my brother. Must be all of six years. Old Bill was a good chap. Hadn’t got my … gift, lucky blighter.

He knew about it though. That’s why we’re estranged …

I think back to that holiday, evoke as much of it as I can. The cigarette makes a steady arc in the blackness as I draw on it, let my arm sag to one side, draw on it again. The sun-glint on the water, hot sand, the tallness of cliffs. Coolness and hardness of their great flanks turned away from the sun, suck and boom of the sea in the hidden caverns at their bases.

Julie has gone on holiday. Down to the coast with Ted to laugh and kiss and lie in the sun and show off her body …

The whisky starts to take effect. I feel dopey and confused. I’d had a good thrash before I came up tonight. I’m with Bill again but he’s not sitting on the rock, he’s driving it. It’s red, it has headlights and it roars. The road slips away behind it.

The cigarette bites into my fingers. I fling it away and lie back again. My hand throbs. But I don’t bother to mend the burn. I’m glad of the pain. It keeps me within myself, lying on a bed in this rooming house, safely. I lie for an hour, watching the moon rise over the rooftops, hearing the cars on that distant road. I sleep.

It’s a hollow, confused sort of dream. There’s Julie, face underlit from the dash, eyes big and soft-looking in the light from the dials. The wind gusting through the lowered driving window, playing in her hair. Short hair, gay-unruly, curly copper-brown. She’s a redhead, but not green-eyed. Deep blue eyes, aquamarine. Dark now, solemn. She’s concentrating on the road. She’s a good driver. I can feel how good she is by the responses of the machine. She’s not riding that motor, she’s a part of it. The wheels, the gears, they’re extensions of her body. I crane round for a look at the speedo. She’s holding a steady eighty, keeping it up mile after mile. No effort. I wonder where the hell she’s going in such a hurry. This wasn’t scheduled … I wonder about the car. It isn’t hers, I’m sure of that, and it couldn’t belong to Ted. It’s just a fine motor, not flashy, not chromy enough for Ted. Not showy enough by half.

I don’t worry long; in dreams, you just accept. I watch the road whipping under the bonnet, streaming out behind the clean line of the tail. After a time I get to feel the car’s stationary, the wheels just idling, keeping pace with the flying ground. Then I seem to see the whole earth rolling under those wheels, the car fixed in space but still leaping towards the rising sun. I feel myself whirling with the planet, the tug of gravity urging my body down towards the deep core. I begin to lose all sense of identity.

A road sign goes past but I’m not quick enough to read it. I move restlessly on the bed, conscious of doing wrong, too sleepy to pull out of the dream again. I start playing with the steering.

This is fun. I’m holding the car’s wheel, hard, opening my grip and letting the rim slide to the bends, feeling Julie’s strength take the motor round. Then grip again, relax, grip … if she wanted to move that wheel now she couldn’t because I’ve got it braced; she couldn’t move it a fraction. I’m stronger than she is –

Damn –

Oh, I was too late then. A hundredth of a second was all but I was still too late. I should have known, she’s got such a touch … she felt the wrongness there in the steering column. She knew there was something. A sudden tug, unexpected, trying me out. My hands were away and gone in a flash but she felt the resistance. I saw the frown come, in the same instant I let go. She’s testing again now, cautiously, little pulls one way then the other. But the wheel is free …

I sit up slowly. A second ago I was nearly asleep. Now sleep is a million miles away. I was never so awake, so cold.

I … felt something then. Only for a moment, but it was there. A little surge of feeling, the first start of panic. And it wasn’t my fear …

I try to swallow; but my mouth, it never had any saliva. It’s bone dry, desiccated, feels raw. I find the cigarettes. My hand is clumsy, spills them over the bed and across the floor. I feel for one in the dark, light it, flick the match away. I lie there with the thing in my fingers, drawing on it, seeing the glow reflect back ghost-pink off the ceiling. My body is quiet, but not my brain or my heart. The heart thuds steady, savage; I can hear the thumping in the silent room. I’m … intensely alive, head to toes. My body feels everything, knows everything. I can sense the earth turning again and myself spread-eagled on it inching towards the sun …

That’s what I meant about Mother hating me. Right at the last, when we were fighting like that, me wanting to keep her and her trying to go away and down, I felt her mind. That’s how I know. The hate, it was like a bright flame scorching at me then getting dimmer, flickering, dying away … No words. They’re nothing. It was worse than words. Later, when the shock had gone a little, I wanted to do it again, make a contact with somebody else. But I couldn’t. The telekinesis, that was no trouble ever. It refined itself and sharpened, got more and more sensitive even though I’d left it lie to rust.

I know why my heart is protesting like this. It’s because I realized subconsciously in that split part of a second when I was touching Julie’s mind that this other thing has been growing in the dark as well. I know now I can do it again. I know I’m going to be a telepath.

And they don’t exist either.

I go back, deliberately this time, to the car. I feel as if I’m moving along a predestined course that can have only one end. I study Julie in microscopic detail.

She’s driving slower, not much above fifty. She’s still testing, veering in to the verge then back out to the cats’ eyes again. Pulling and touching at that steering, trying to account for what she felt. I don’t know what’s in her mind. I strain to make a contact but there’s nothing there. She centres the wheel and accelerates. I catch a tiny shrug, the smallest lift of an eyebrow. She’s decided she dozed for a moment. She’ll have to be more careful. She’s been driving a long time and she’s sleepier than she realized.

They weren’t her thoughts, they were mine grafted on. I know when I’m in another mind; there’s … something. Everything. Colours and textures all different. A new way of breathing, thinking. Impossible to get it into words. It’s weird. You own another body, another soul …

I’ve got to be careful here. I can’t be sure, but I think she suspects me … I meddled with her once you see. A long time back. It was late at night and I was drunk. She felt the incubus. I’m sure she knew it was me. It didn’t do any good, and afterwards it gave me hell.

I lie there a long while trying to rest. My heart is still pounding away under the bedclothes. I move my hand down and feel it bumping at my ribs like something trying to crack out from an egg. I know, in a detached way, my body won’t stand this strain for ever. Something will have to give … Somehow or other I’ve got to resolve this thing. Then I can relax.

First, I’ve got to beat the fear.

There are a lot of sorts of fear. I suppose one sort comes if you’re on your own some place and you cut an artery and there’s nobody to help and you know you’ve only got minutes. That’s fear … and another sort is when there are the footsteps in the night, and the creaks and the laughing, and the branch taps the pane, insistent there behind the curtains; but there isn’t any branch …

I’m about to enter another mind. That’s the worst fear of all …

I’ve done it before, but only seconds at a time. And then it was bad enough. This is going to be worse than opening a private diary, packed full of things about you. Worse than looking in a mirror under a glaring light. Worse than these things, more truthful than the diary, more searching than the light. I begin to see the only thing that keeps any of us sane is that we can’t communicate. Oh we can talk, write letters maybe or compose music, a poem, they’re better ways of getting across, but we still have to be tuned and nobody’s ever finally certain what the message is … We’re all in a mist, thick, like cotton-wool. We hide in it from each other, from ourselves, wrap ourselves away. Deep down we want it like that because it’s for the best …

But there’s a devil inside us, we call it hope. That last little thing the girl let out the box, that was the worst plague of all. It’s hope makes you ask the question when you already know the answer, hope makes you open that locked diary, turn on that glaring light … I don’t want to hope. I’m through with it, done. But I’m hoping …

I try to steady my heart but my own body’s out of control. I turn my ears inwards, hear the blood move like water pounding through a weir. I realise I’m gasping for air and somehow make my breathing slow down.

I can see now, all my life I’ve been moving towards this one point. I’m going to do something now that nobody’s done before. I’m going to develop, shake out my wings and soar. I’m going to do it because it has to be done. This will be a turning point in the history of the world, the first event in a new order of things. It’s going to happen here, in this damp, peeling attic room. Well, a man can’t always choose the place and time.

But why Julie; God, why does it have to be with Julie?

Got to stop thinking like that. I tell myself I don’t matter. I’m dead, dust … I try to see the bigness of what’s going to happen, the panoramic significance of it. For a few moments I almost manage it. It isn’t exactly like a vision; it’s like standing on the edge of a great sea and hearing the bawling, confused noise of it and knowing it stretches away and away for all time …

Once there was a primal cell. It hung in a void and it was complete and perfect, it knew itself … But the cell had to split, and the halves sailed away, and there was mystery. And the mystery grew, through all the years stacked on years that we call evolution. There were people, groping in the mist, trying to know; man and woman, the woman wanting to enfold, the man wanting to lose himself, go right back down to that primal core, that oneness. That’s the only peace we look for till the grave. Nothing in life but needing to join; and that’s a need we share with everything that ever lived right through time. The soul passing to Nirvana, that’s the state of not-being, of union with everything, ultimate rest … the gods will die at the Ragnarok, all things cease at Armageddon … not-being is fusion, fusion not-being. I see the whole shape of evolution, complexity increasing, the old cell running and jumping and crawling and slithering and oozing and flying, then gliding back, recombining into an all-seeing, all-knowing unit; the end of mystery. Here, in this dirty room in a two-bit town, that reversal is about to start. Two entities go back to oneness. The cell that split all that dumb time ago knows itself again.

This is it now. Go steady, boy. You’re uplifted, outside yourself. You’ve left self behind. Nothing matters except that you go steady, go slow, make your base …

I can see her face again in the light from the dash. Her eyes, mouth … little beauty spot on her lip, her teeth, hair curling against the collar of her windcheater. I never paid even Julie this close attention before. I feel I’m getting closer to the thing I want to do …

Surprise.

I know, dimly, the way I’m going to manage the jump. How to get across into the other half of perception, the part they call telepathy. It’s a sort of – twist, a piece of mental acrobatics. There’s no basic difference between this and what I could do before. But I thought … never mind. Let it go, it doesn’t matter. Sort it out later. The end counts now, not the means.

I was trying too hard before, thinking there was a difference. It’s still a case of grasping something at a distance, it’s just that I’ve never tried to hold anything as nebulous as this. Like catching a will o’ the wisp. I retain the physical picture of Julie, as clear and sharp as an image in a stereoscopic film, and I keep … moving forward is the only way I can describe it, edging after that Jack o’ lantern Thing that doesn’t quite have a form. Julie’s thought …

I’m getting a clear picture through her eyes. That’s something I never quite managed before. I realise arbitrarily how good her sight is. We watch the flick-flick-flick of the cats’ eyes in the road. Our minds are very close now. She’s half hypnotized by the winking studs. So am I.

Deeper again, nearer … Back on the bed my body has stopped breathing. I’m almost home. Somewhere a thought forms. ‘Been a long night.’ Another answers it. ‘Yes, but the night is nearly done …’

Her thoughts?

No, mine, Both mine … There’s one of hers though. In the mist. Mist? Fog, void, Primeval … It’s iridescent, with a texture, a resistance of its own. Impossible to hurry here. Like swimming under water. Nightmare, seeing the thing ahead, not able to move. Don’t know where I am. On the border of things physical … inside an atom …

It’s easy, at last. The thought, the thing that fills her mind; it’s there right ahead, opening like a flower. I’m stationary, not pushing any more, swallowing fire that doesn’t burn …

A click. A lens dropping in some complex array. Final adjustment …

Reflex. A leap, a gurgling flailing convulsion that takes me out of her, body and mind, with a cold wrenching, leaves me falling, a hundred miles up, no parachute, the ground spinning up to meet me as I come right back down to earth –

I’m lying in the little room. There seems to be a weight on my chest, pressing me down. My stomach is full of quicksilver or lead; something heavy and cold and final. A taste in my mouth, rusty, salty, like blood. Heart pounding still but slower, heavier. All effort done.

There was feeling there. A rushing sense of love, compound of sorrow and pain. And an image, vague at first and shaky like something seen through water then hardening and taking on form and colour, becoming recognizable …

Ted, grinning up at me out of the depths of Julie’s brain.

I hold a hand out in front of me in the darkness, slowly clench it into a fist. I open the fingers again and see the white half-moons on the palm darken and fill. I don’t make a sound.

I try to remember what I was thinking about a few minutes ago. It’s cloudy now and vague. I’d been going to change the course of history, hadn’t I? Achieve something of cosmic importance, reverse evolution. Give God a bit of a helping hand, solve the Mystery of Life. How completely can you fool yourself? I’m not going to solve anything. Or achieve anything. I see I was putting off the moment when I had to poke into Julie’s mind because I was scared of what would be there. I never wanted to change the universe. I only wanted one thing. Julie. It’s more than a want now, it’s a burning, a huge need. But I can’t have her. I know that finally, from what I saw in her mind.

I’m nothing. I never was anything. Telekinesis, that’s a toy for kids. I can see that now. We’ve all of us got telekinesis, we’ve had it for years. We can all move things miles off, look into closed boxes, see round corners. Well can’t we? We’ve got machines can do all that for us, all that and more, telekinesis isn’t new any longer. And the other thing, what good is that, it can show me how people hate, despise … I can see myself in their minds bloated, obscene, a reflection from a Hall of Mirrors … I don’t want to see myself like that, painted garish colours by Julie’s fear and loathing. I don’t want to see her sublimated vision of Ted. I don’t want anything any more.

Just that short time ago my Power was the reason for existence. Now I don’t want the Power. There’s nothing left. No point in going on.

I lie there a long while under the weight of that snippet of knowledge. Then, slowly at first, I begin to see the wild humour of the thing. I start to chuckle.

I roll my head backward and forward on the pillow. I can see myself now as a sort of cosmic clown, shaking my unearthly cap and bells. The image is hilarious. The laughter gets louder, bubbling out of me. I realize the noise is ringing in the little room. I try to stifle it. I hold my breath; for a time I quiver inside then I get calm again.

I still have a . . .