The Lily Hand and Other Stories (27 page)

It must have been well turned nine o'clock when one of the young ones suddenly pulls out a little gadget from his overall pocket, a thing like a light-meter or something of that kind, and looks at it, and nudges his pals, and in his deadpan way says, ‘Eh, look at the time!' or words to that effect. And the older one makes motions to us, polite-like, excuse us for a few minutes, and they go into a huddle.

Then one of the boys puts his helmet on, and touches up a button or two, and the antennae start to quiver and spark. With one finger he touches out the sparks, while the other two watch him and chatter at him, laughing and making suggestions, and looking as happy as sandboys.

It all reminded me so much of three lads on the spree writing a postcard home that I leaned up against the bar and made believe to be translating as the sparks crackled.

‘Having a wonderful time. This is a smashing place. Wish you were here. Back for tea, seven light years from now.'

We were all trying to get into the act by that time. What with the free flow of beer and the general gaiety, I was about ready for anything.

Then off came the helmet again, and they were back at the bar like ferrets after a rabbit. The older one makes expansive gestures round the whole lot of us, and pulls out all he had left of the five-pound note old Biggs gave him. It wasn't much by then, not half enough to set 'em up all round, which was plainly what he intended. He soon learnt that one.

‘Sorry lad,' said Jenny, smiling at him proper motherly, and giggling because she still thought he was a card, ‘but it won't run to it. One, two, three, maybe four, see? But not the lot. Can't do it.'

He looked back at her hopefully, and never moved a muscle to let on that he understood a word. His face was brown as chestnuts, this chap, and now I came to look at him, his ears were a funny shape, narrow and pointed.

‘Sorry,' said Jenny, shaking her head vigorously. ‘Not enough – get it? Too little!'

He got it. He slipped a hand back in his pocket, and pulled out a coin and slapped it on the bar. Only it wasn't a coin, or if it was it was a foreign one. It looked like an old campaign medal or something like that.

George came along behind the bar and picked it up, and he looked at the three types all looking back at him with their trusting well-intentioned smiles, and he was fair shaking with laughing. You couldn't help it, they were marvellous. After the beer they'd put away it was a miracle they could still keep control of their faces like that.

‘You boys are a cure,' he says, his chins all wobbling like a three-tier jelly. ‘Set 'em up all round, Jenny, they're on the house. I'll keep this as a souvenir, mate – something to remember you by. And by gum, I shall remember you, too.'

So we drank to the next time, because by then this time was getting along to its last hour. It was a good hour, though, and we didn't leave until the Black Boar closed at eleven. They had an extension, being carnival night.

I went back to the field with the lads to see 'em off. If they were only going back to the ordnance depot it wasn't so far, but I just wanted to see 'em start up, and make sure they were capable of getting home safely. Me, that was half-seas-over myself! But I meant well. I liked those three, they were the real whole-hogging kind.

We went down the road all four abreast with our arms round one another, singing two separate songs, me in plain English, them in Venusian or carnivalese or whatever you like to call it. The young 'uns had a coconut each, and the little 'un had a golliwog he'd won at the fair, shooting clay pipes, and they were all as happy as piglings in clover, and so was I.

The fair had closed down by the time we got there, the lights were gradually going out, and all the decorated lorries had gone, except their space special. It was dead quiet, nobody stirring but us. They climbed into their contraption, and waved to me and grinned as they started her up. And I waved back until they were out of sight. And that was the end of the best carnival we ever had.

Except that about a week later I ran into Councillor Biggs in the market, and he grabs me by the arm and takes me on one side, looking very serious.

‘Tom,' he says, ‘about that spaceship, or whatever it was – that thing that made the big hit at the carnival. You were with those three lads most of the evening, weren't you?'

‘I was that,' I said, ‘it was the best night out I've had for years.'

‘And they never let slip where they were from?' he says.

‘No,' I said, ‘but we weren't much bothered. Why? What's on your mind?'

‘Just this,' he says. ‘I was talking to that REME major two days ago at the school open day, and I said to him, “That was a great show your boys gave us at the carnival.” “Not ours, old boy,” he says, “none of ours were out that day, I should have known if they'd been planning a do like that. No, that was those GPO engineers from the weather station at Bondheath, I thought you'd have guessed.” Well, just to be sure this time, I phoned the station. All they said was, “Not us, lad, or we'd have charged you for the juice. Try the RAF cadets, it sounds like them.” And I tried 'em, but it wasn't them.

‘Tom,' he says, breathing heavily in my ear,
‘it wasn't anybody.
And, Tom, I've just been talking to George Morgan. He showed me that coin the little fellow turned out of his pocket. It's metal, but it's no metal I've ever seen.' And he hauls off and looks at me very solemn indeed.

‘Did you see 'em off? Did you see which way they went?'

‘Sure I saw it,' I said. ‘For Pete's sake, there's only one way to go from the field, isn't there? They just got in and started her up and went. You think I was still in sight when they got to the crossroads?'

‘No, I suppose not,' he said, very uneasy. ‘But I wish I knew who'd been pulling our legs, all the same.'

‘If you ask me,' I said soothingly, ‘that's the sort of elaborate joke the science students from the Tech must have had a hand in. I shouldn't look any farther if I was you.'

And he went off more than half-convinced. I hope! Anyhow, I've heard no more about it, so I take it he's given up worrying.

I didn't actually tell him any lies. It just came over me, remembering what I remembered, how different it can be dealing with ordinary folks like us at the Black Boar, and getting mixed up with authority, even as high as the Borough Council. Say you're markedly different and you drop in on our local carnival – you come with goodwill, goodwill is what you'll meet. But once let the authorities get wind how very different you are, and all they'll think of doing is pointing a gun at you. Better if they don't get wind of it, that's what I thought. Just in case those three boys ever want to pop in again for a quiet game and a pint.

So that's why I only told him half a tale. They got in and started her up and went.

Well, so they did. Vertically. That little ship took her nose off the ground and snuffed the air towards the moon, and took off like a bird. A pretty awkward bird at first, say an elderly swan; she just about got over the hedge, and she lurched a bit just for a minute, what with all that draught beer. But then she got her head towards home, and straightened out into speed and vanished like a silver flash in the direction of Orion …

I'd like to see those boys again, but in a way I hope they never do come back; our reputation's safer that way. Right now there must be one place at least in the galaxy where they think well of Earth; it would be a pity if they ever got to know us better.

The Ultimate Romeo and Juliet

All we wanted was a world.

A world to take the place of the one we'd been busy making untenable for generations before we realized how far the process had gone, and that it couldn't be reversed. A world with a breathable atmosphere, with a climate we could adapt to, if we couldn't adapt it to ourselves, with water and vegetation, and preferably fauna not too far removed from what we knew on earth. Just an ordinary world.

We'd even have settled for a smaller one than the old, if necessary. The mutants were becoming a pretty large minority by then and, though more acceptable in appearance than the earlier ones, they were mostly infertile, and there was no point in evacuating them.

But ordinary worlds were few and far between, it seemed, in any of the galaxies we had the means of reaching, or else we and the world we'd wrecked weren't so ordinary as we'd thought, and the norm was something quite different, and not for us. Because three years after the search began, we still hadn't found what they'd sent us out to find.

We were the third research ship employed on the great probe, the third team tied night and day by watches to those several tons of instruments and equipment that were to locate and document our future planet for us. The one we had would last our lifetime, but children were being born every day, not all of them the shape you'd choose for your children. We hadn't blown up the world, oh, no, reason and moderation had prevailed. Only too late. They'd even given up attributing the distortions to drugs by now, because only a comparatively few of the mothers had treatment records that showed the use of new drugs. Nobody had expected a harvest, so long after such a gradual and unwary sowing, but it had come, and whether we liked it or not we had to reap it. A doom is a doom. So there we were in space, looking for a world. Like the old one, only clean.

We were probing the remotest outliers of Galaxy Parthenis I. They named it for its outline as seen from Earth, tall and slender, with projecting helmet and spear like the Athena of the Parthenon; and we were fighting shy of both projections, because the physicists' theory was that these jutting lights, brilliant blue, indicated the presence of anti-matter that was being annihilated. The galaxy was a moderately powerful radio-transmitter. I can't remember its exact observed output; nothing like the enormous kilo-wattage of Cygnus-A, but more than enough to warn us off. But the fringes of the galaxy, out of range of this violent energy, promised better. Especially Parthenope, remote at Athena's sandalled foot. Quiet, she was, and peaceful to look at, with very little radioactivity and no signs of conflict. So we were dropping in gently to orbit, and training all our instruments on the hopeful planet that might prove a possible host for our descendants.

Thank God I'm not a physicist! What I knew about matter and anti-matter in collision was limited to the things one does at school with cloud-chambers and scintillation-counters, and the trajectory plates we used to study, showing the tracks of anti-protons exploding in stars of fragments after impact with protons. Matter into energy, and energy into matter again. To me it was always a magical interchange. I never wondered at its being dangerous. Magic is dangerous.

No, my job was plain plant biology. Vegetation is stuff you can see, photograph, classify, smell, taste. You can see it with the naked eye from miles up, the unmistakable pattern of woodland and grassland and marshland and upland meadow, the colours and shapes of land. In the nightwatches that Gennadi and I kept together, as the junior members of the team, we used to sit and watch the iris-blue belt of Parthenope's zone revolving rosily into its dawn, and map the silvery strands that were rivers and the clear grey eyes of seas, and the dark, lustrous growth of forests like the furry pelts of sleeping beasts. From miles up it looked like home. Why don't we, I said every night, get on down there and settle in? This planet had everything.

There was also movement there, we could trace it with our long-distance probes, and it seemed to be animal, and pastoral at that, because it followed a daily pattern. And that meant that Parthenope had the last asset and the first drawback of a world destined for colonization. Man. Parthenopeian man, at any rate, the intelligence that compiled the pattern that moved the beasts. It was almost inevitable that where all the advantages were, there should the dominant and possessor be, also. After a few days of recording and shifting we found plenty of other indications of his presence, too: canals, fields, buildings, aircraft.

So we spoke to him from space. We had experts on board who prided themselves that between them they could break any language compiled from any of the sounds producible by the larynx of any known primate, and provide translations in the main tongue of all the known speaking groups, terrestrial or otherwise. They set to work and produced translations into some fifty basic languages of the speech our chief political officer wrote for them, and we started putting it out twenty-four hours a day, aimed at Parthenope. How we came in peace and goodwill, bringing greetings from our own planet, how we desired better knowledge of the inhabitants, and intended, with their permission, to effect a landing in order to make their acquaintance. We told them over and over that they had nothing to fear from us, that we meant them nothing but good.

‘This is like an echo of ourselves overtaking us,' said Gennadi, listening to it on nightwatch. ‘Have you read much history, Francis? Don't be alarmed, we want nothing from you but your world!'

But he was a Slav and a poet, what could you expect? We had about ten Slavs on board in our multi-racial, multi-lingual team, and at least three poets, but the Commodore was American, and his deputy good, solid Pan-African, so we could afford to carry our dreamers for ballast, like a conscience.

‘We've got the next generation to save,' I said.

‘So have they,' he said.

‘And whatever their population may be, it doesn't seem to be pushing them. We're not trying to oust them, we'll be quite satisfied to share.'

‘We always were satisfied to share what was somebody else's,' he said. ‘At least for the first few years.'

He was twenty-five, and single, and good-looking, and didn't have any troubles except for a girl in Communications who kept putting herself hopefully in his way; but you'd have thought he'd come down through time along with the Wandering Jew, with a rucksack of doom on his shoulder. He still had the black hair and eyes, and the fiery bones and the tremendous energy of the Georgians; not even world government and five generations of well-mixed marriages could breed that look and that temperament out of them. Some of the less dominant strains had given up the struggle by then, but the strong ones persisted. The English hadn't changed much, either; I knew it every time I looked in the glass. Even my space helmet, before we finally discarded them in craft, used to have a sort of bowler hat look about it.