PROLOGUE

Volume one traced the development of science fiction in Britain from its birth to its blossoming in the early 1950s. Volume two continues with a more select representation of the post-war era. This is because so great a profusion of new science fiction writers appeared in Britain with the growth of the post-war market that it proved impossible for me to include all of them in this already large anthology. Therefore, in order to do some justice to a few of the missing names, I shall briefly look at some of the other important authors of the period.

Probably the best known name in British sf not included in this collection is Charles Eric Maine. Maine (born 1921) is the pen-name of Liverpudlian David McIlwain, who was another of the small clan of pre-war sf fans. He was a great friend of Jonathan Burke (of whom more in a moment) with whom he co-edited the amateur magazine The Satellite in 1938. He got his start in 1951 with a BBC radio play Spaceways which was broadcast in 1952. It was then made into a film and Maine converted it into a book. Ever since he has obtained as much mileage as possible from his work, another radio play The Einstein Highway, forming the basis for his second novel Timeliner. Since then some dozen or so novels have come from his typewriter several of which have been filmed, most recently The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970) starring Terence Stamp. Alas what short fiction he has written reads today rather dated, but his novels are all well worth tracking down.

His companion Jonathan Burke, or J. F. Burke (b. 1922) as his by-line usually reads, is best known today for the various Hammer Omnibus volumes he produced, but back in the early 1950s his name would be found in all the leading magazines as well as on a score of paperback novels. Whilst he was educated in Liverpool he was born at Rye in Sussex. He has held a number of jobs including the Public Relations Officer for Shell International. He won the Atlantic Award in Literature from the Rockefeller Foundation for his satire Swift Summer (1949). His first sf novel published was Dark Gateway (1954) although he had had a short novel Old Man of the Stars in the October 1953 Authentic. Two collections of his stories have been printed, but there are still plenty that could be revived. If only there was room....

An extremely prolific writer is the Scotsman J. T. Mcintosh, real name James Macgregor who was born at Paisley, Glasgow in 1925. He succeeded in selling some early stories to Astounding in 1950 before the British market really opened up. He has remained to this day a writer who appears mostly in American magazines, though his great output means that he does not entirely neglect the British market. He supplied New Worlds with its first serial The Esp Worlds (1952) and on the last count has made over one hundred appearances in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Even then he found time to be a professional musician, a school teacher and a photographer at one time or another.

Bryan Berry looked like being a bright new star in the 1950s when an early death robbed the field of his talent. He sold several novels to British paperback firms, and had the distinction of having three stories published in the same issue of the popular American pulp Planet Stories, all under his own name. Other writers who made a name for themselves in the magazine field in the early 1950s were Lan Wright, F. G. Rayer, Peter Hawkins and Alan Barclay. Alas these names are seen all too seldom these days.

Outside of the magazine field a few other names are worth mentioning. Nigel Kneale is famous because of his Quatermass series on television. Kneale (b. 1922) actually had a collection of his short stories published as far back as 1949, Tomato Cain, and it won the 1950

Somerset Maugham Award for short stories. The first Quatermass episode, The Quatermass Experiment was broadcast in 1953 and filmed in 1955, finally appearing in bookform in 1959. Two other Quatermass serials followed. Since then Kneale has scripted two other major sf television plays The Year of the Sex Olympics and the ingenious The Stone Tapes.

The radio equivalent of Quatermass was probably Jet Morgan who starred in the memorable Journey Into Space series scripted by Charles Chilton (b. 1927). Three separate series were broadcast throughout the 1950s and later issued in book form as Journey Into Space (1954), The Red Planet (1956) and The World in Peril (1960).

A name much overlooked today is that of Paul Capon (b. 1912) from Suffolk. Originally a writer of detective fiction he turned to sf in the 1950s and wrote several memorable novels starting with The Other Side of the Sun (1950) - the first of a trilogy about Antigeos, a planet that corresponds with the Earth on the far side of the Sun. A later novel was Into the Tenth Millenium (1956).

Then there is the mystery man of sf, John Lymington. His name first appeared in the sf field with The Night of the Big Heat (1959) about an alien invasion. It was subsequently made into a convincing film. Since then Lymington has written about a dozen novels including The Coming of the Strangers (1961), A Sword Above the Night (1962) and Froomb! (1964). Froomb! was in fact a rewrite of Lymington’s very first novel David and Goliath written in the 1930s. It was not published as Lymington was told

‘There is just no market for fantasy’. And so Lymington turned to writing thrillers for which he has become widely known under his real name of John Newton Chance. Most of his short stories are of a supernatural nature and thus not suited to this anthology.

And, finally, Edmund Cooper (b. 1926). Whilst he is best known today for his novels, he also first appeared in one of Britain’s sf magazines with The Jar of Latakia (Authentic, September 1954). His first sf novel was Deadly Image (1958), and he has concentrated on books ever since, such as his more recent volumes The Overman Culture (1971) and Prisoner of Fire (1974).

And there I must draw the line at the risk of omitting many other names. It’s time I opened up the second part of this anthology and let you read the rest of The Best of British.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

JAMES WHITE: Tableau

The January 1953 issue of New Worlds (its nineteenth) was quite a special one for several reasons. Besides carrying the first sf story in print by J. F. Burke (Chessboard) it also printed the debut story of Northern Irish writer James White, Assisted Passage. To keep White company in the issue were fellow Irishmen Walter Willis, who contributed an article about the 1952 World Science Fiction Convention held in Chicago, and artist Gerard Quinn who supplied the cover and several of the interior illustrations.

White, who had been born in Belfast in 1928 but spent much of his early life in Canada, would soon become one of the most popular writers in New Worlds. Many of his early stories, like Assisted Passage and Tableau which follows, revolved around a military setting, but White could be versatile. His first novel, Tourist Planet (1956), centred on the intriguing idea of what holidays in space would be like. A more recent novel, All Judgement Fled (1967), dealing with the discovery and exploration of an alien ship, won him the Europa sf Award.

White is also known for his ‘Sector General’ series, which began with the story of that title in the November 1957 New Worlds. The series revolves around an intergalactic hospital, which instantly gives endless plot possibilities. In all fourteen have appeared to date, up to and including Spacebird in New Writings in SF 22 (1973).

Of all his stories it was Tableau White chose as his favourite. When asked to comment he said:

‘... this story combines two of my favourite themes, Man Meets Alien and Nobody Wants War - especially the people unfortunate enough to be fighting in one, whether they are extra-terrestrial or human beings or both. Tableau also makes the point that wars should not be won, just ended, and as soon as possible.’

* * * *

TABLEAU

James White

The War Memorial in the planetary capital of Orligia was unique, but it very definitely was not a nice object. A great many people - beings of sensitivity and intelligence - had tried vainly to describe their feelings of shock, horror and anger which the sight of it had caused them. For this was no aesthetic marble poem in which godlike figures gestured defiance, or lay dying nobly with limbs arranged to the best advantage. Instead it consisted of an Orligian and an Earthman surrounded by the shattered remnant of a control room belonging to a type of ship now long obsolete, the whole being encased in a cube of transparent plastic.

The Orligian was standing crouched slightly forward, with blood matting the fur on its chest and face. A few feet away lay the Earthman, very obviously dying. His uniform was in shreds, revealing the ghastly injuries he had sustained - certain organs in the abdominal region normally concealed by layers of skin and muscle being clearly visible. Yet this man, who had no business being alive much less being capable of movement, was struggling forward to reach the Orligian. It was the look on the Earthman’s face which was the most distressing thing about the whole, horrible tableau.

Night had fallen, but the Memorial was lit erratically by the flashes which repeatedly outlined the buildings at the edges of its surrounding park. From all over the city came the sounds of sharp, thudding explosions, while rockets grew rapidly on slender stems of orange sparks to flower crashingly into clouds of falling stars. The city, indeed the whole planet, was in festive mood. With the Orligian love of doing things properly or not at all, this meant the letting off of a great many fireworks as well as the usual merry-making. Sleep was impossible, the populace was going wild.

It was, after all, a great occasion. Tomorrow the Orligians were getting another war memorial...

* * * *

Like most single ship engagements it had proved to be a long-drawn out affair. Normally such a duel led to the defeat of the Orlig ship within a few hours, MacEwan thought with that small portion of his mind which was not engaged in throwing his ship about in violent evasive action. But there was nothing normal about this fight, he thought bitterly; the enemy had begun to learn things, to adopt Earth armament and tactics. They, too, had regressed to throwing rocks ...!

‘Closer! Closer!’ Reviora’s voice squeaked suddenly through his phones. ‘We’re too far away, dammit! They’ll get us in a minute ...’

MacEwan did not have to be reminded of the necessity for sticking close to the enemy ship, and many another Captain would have told the Ordnance Office so in no uncertain terms. But he had discovered long ago that young Reviora, whose voice had only recently changed and was prone to change back again at times of emotional stress, could exhibit all the outward signs of panic while continuing to use his weapons with incredible accuracy. MacEwan relegated the Ordnance Officer’s jitterings into the realm of general background noise and continued to focus all his attention oh the controls.

His idea in taking evasive action at extreme range - extreme for his ship, that was; it was nearly ideal range for the enemy - was to lull the Orlig skipper into thinking that he intended breaking off the action. Such a thing was unheard of, simply because trying to run away from an Orlig ship meant certain destruction from their primary weapon, but there was always a first time. Maybe the enemy officer would think that his ship was crippled, or out of ammunition, or that its Captain lacked sufficient intestinal fortitude to ram. Anyway, he would be puzzled and maybe just a little bit inattentive ...

MacEwan said quietly, ‘Reviora, ready?’ He pulled the ship round in a tight turn, then with the Orlig ship centring his forward vision screen he pushed the thrust bar through the emergency gate and held it there. The target vessel grew slowly, then expanded so rapidly that the screen was suddenly too small to hold it. A dull, intermittent vibration told of Reviora, with the ship holding a steady course and the enemy dead ahead, using his forward turret to the best advantage. MacEwan thought he saw a spurt of fog from a hole freshly torn in the Orlig ship’s hull, then the image flicked out of sight to reappear as a rapidly shrinking picture in the aft view-screen.

His hands were slippery and he had to blink sweat out of his eyes. Check velocity! his racing brain yelled at his slow, fumbling fingers. Move!

Jump around! And above all, keep close…!

* * * *

So as to give Reviora a chance to get in a killing burst, MacEwan had made a fast but unswerving approach. He had held his ship steady for fully five seconds. That had been an insane risk to take, but he had gambled on the Orlig ship not using its primary weapon on him for fear of his hurtling ship smashing into it even after MacEwan’s ship and crew were written off. Now however, he was fast receding from the enemy ship and evasive action was again indicated. Still on emergency thrust he began weaving and corkscrewing, at the same time trying desperately to kill the velocity away from the enemy he had built up during the attack.

Evasive action at a distance was much less effective than close up because the Orlig primary weapon had a certain amount of spread. Maximum safety lay in sticking close and moving fast. Or had done until now ...

It had been estimated that the radiation, or force, or field of stress which was the Orligian Primary Weapon took roughly six to seven seconds to build up, but once caught in that field a ship and its occupants were a total loss. Yet strangely the ships affected appeared unharmed. Provided one was extremely careful they could even be entered. But just scratch the metal of one of those ships, or stick a needle in one of the crew-men, and the result resembled a small-scale atomic explosion - but again, strangely, without any trace of immediate or residual radioactivity. Such ships were now left severely alone, their orbits not even being plotted as dangers to navigation because the first meteorite to puncture their hulls caused them to destroy themselves.

It was a super-weapon, only one of those which had forced Earth back, so far as tactics were concerned, to the bow-and-arrow level.

MacEwan only half noticed the shudderings of his ship as Reviora, using absurdly adolescent profanity, tried for a deflection shot with the remote-controlled waist turret, and the harsher, more erratic vibration of Orlig shots getting home. At the moment he was wishing desperately that there was some means by which he could simply cut and run - not, he hastened to assure himself, because he was overly interested in his own safety, but because this new development represented a change in Orlig strategy. It was a change which would have to be countered, and MacEwan hoped that the Brass back home would be able to find the answer - he couldn’t see one himself.

If only Nyberg had never been born, MacEwan thought; or failing that, if only he had not grown up into a stubborn, courageous and idealistic Swede whose highmindedness had started an interstellar war. Such wishing was sheerest futility, he knew, but even in the middle of the hottest engagement he had yet experienced there was this weak, traitorous segment of his mind which tried to escape into the world of what might have been ...

* * * *

Five years ago the UN survey ship Starfinder -crew of fifty-eight plus seven civilian specialists, Captain Sigvard Nyberg in command - had, at very nearly the limit of its prodigious range, made contact with a ship of an alien culture for the first time. A tape left by the late Captain Nyberg told of the excitement of the occasion, and a day-by-day summary gave some indications of the difficulties experienced in widening that contact.

Strangely, the vessel of what were later to become known as the Orligians did not seem to want to maintain contact at first, though neither did they show signs of hostility. Starfinder’s psychologist, admittedly working on little or no data, had suggested that such behaviour might be due either to a high degree of conservatism in their culture or to a simple case of cold feet. He had added that cowardice was not a strong possibility, however, considering the fact that the alien ship was four times the size of their own. But Captain Nyberg had maintained contact - just how he had done so was not known in detail because he was a man who disliked talking about his own accomplishments - and widened it to the point where simple sequences of radio signals were replaced by exchanges of message capsules containing technical data which enabled the two ships to match communication channels.

It was shortly after sound-with-vision communications had been set up between the ships that something went wrong. The last words on Captain Nyberg’s tape were to the effect that, far from being horrible monsters the aliens were nice, cuddly little creatures and that their atmosphere and gravity requirements seemed to be close enough to Earth-normal for the two races to co-exist on either of their home planets without artificial aids. A few words, mostly of self-identification, had already been exchanged. But the Captain intended going across to their ship next day, because he had a hunch that the Orligians were beginning to shy away again.

When the nine men in Starfinder’s tender, who had been investigating a nearby solar system during these proceedings, returned they found that the mother ship had been the scene of a massacre. Not one of the ship’s personnel had escaped, and the condition of the bodies seemed to indicate that they had been battered to death with the nearest available blunt instrument. The slaughter had been merciless, the humans being obviously taken by surprise because in only a few places was the deck stained with blood which matched no earthly group, and there were no Orligian dead at all.

The nine-man crew of the tender somehow managed to bring their mother ship home. The situation was, of course, highly charged emotionally

- much more so than normal because of the fact that Starfinder’s crew had been mixed - so that Earth, which had known peace for three centuries, found itself at war with the culture of Orligia.

* * * *

And the war, MacEwan was thinking as he frantically threw his ship all over the sky half a mile from the Orligian light cruiser, had been going on for far too long. The sense of immediacy, where the people back home were concerned, had been lost - and with it the horror and righteous anger which had started it all. Defence spending was heavy and teddy-bears were no longer stocked in kiddy’s toy stores, but otherwise there was very little to indicate outwardly that a state of war existed at all. But maximum effort was being, and would be, maintained simply through fear. Earth, had she chosen to, could have withdrawn her spacefleet at any time, could simply have left and called the whole thing off. Neither side knew the positions of each other’s home planets. But that course would have left the situation unresolved and eventually, whether in fifty years or five hundred, the Orligs were bound to discover Earth. The people of Earth were honest enough not to gain peace by dumping the problem in the laps of their many times great grandchildren.

But it was an untidy and very unsatisfactory son of war. The ‘front line’

so to speak was in the general volume of space where the original contact had been made, and bases had been set up by both sides on planetary bodies in the region, and supplied by ships taking very great pains to conceal their point of origin. The distances involved made patrolling a joke and any battle a vast, disorganised series of dogfights. Except when raids were carried out on enemy bases it was nothing unusual for three weeks to go by without a single clash, and this at a time when both sides were prosecuting the war with maximum effort. Altogether it proved what had been known from the first, that the very idea of interstellar war was impractical and downright silly. But the chief reason for the feeling of dissatisfaction was the fact that, slowly but surely, the Earth was losing.

Superiority in offensive and defensive weapons belonged to the Orligs. They had a screen, probably originally intended for meteor protection, which englobed each of their ships at a radius of two miles and which melted anything approaching at a velocity likely to do harm - meteors, missiles, attacking ships, anything. This screen could be penetrated only by guiding the ship through it at what was practically a crawl. Once through, however, the missile’s remote-control equipment immediately ceased to function and the missile drifted harmlessly past the target. On the one or two occasions when a nuclear warhead had accidentally drifted into an Orlig ship, nothing at all had happened.

Earth science had been able to duplicate this screen, but it was no good to them because the Orligs scorned the use of such crude methods of attack as atomic missiles: they had The Weapon.

This the Earth scientists could not understand, much less duplicate. They only knew that it was some kind of beam or field of force which required several seconds to focus, and that its maximum range was about thirty miles. There was no answer to this weapon. A ship caught by it became a lifeless, undamaged but untouchable hulk which needed only sharp contact with a meteorite or piece of drifting wreckage to blast itself out of existence. The Weapon was also thought to be the reason why atomic warheads refused to function in the vicinity of Orlig ships, but this was just a guess.

There had been panic in high places, MacEwan remembered, when the most advanced offensive weapons of Earth had been proved useless. What was needed was some form of weapon which was too simple and uncomplicated for the Orlig nullification equipment to be effective, and a tactic which would bring such a weapon to bear. An answer of sorts had been found. To find it they had to go back, not quite so far as the bow-and-arrow era, but to the Final World War period and the armour-piercing cannon, and chemically powdered rockets used in the aircraft of that period. The tactics which had been developed were the only ones possible with such weapons, but they tended to be wasteful of men.

‘Sir! Sir! Can I have the ship?’

It was Reviora, excited but no longer swearing. The tiny, wandering portion of MacEwan’s mind came back to present time with a rush. He said,

‘Why?’

‘Ammunition’s running out, but we’ve three Mark V’s in the nose rocket launcher,’ Reviora babbled. ‘It’s working now - I found the break in the firing circuit. They won’t be expecting rockets at this stage. We can use that trick of Hoky’s -’ He bit the sentence off abruptly, then stammered, ‘I.... I’m sorry, I mean Captain Hokasuri -’

‘Skip it,’ said MacEwan. He ran his eye briefly over the control panel, then switched everything to the. forward conning position. ‘Right, you have the ship.’

Hoky had had lots of tricks. Hokasuri and MacEwan were the Old Firm, the unbeatable, invincible combination who invariably hunted together. But then every team was invincible until one or the other failed to come back. MacEwan squirmed restively. His mind, temporarily freed of the responsibility for guiding the ship, flicked back over the opening minutes of the engagement. It could only have been through sheer bad luck that his partner had been Stopped, the mild-mannered little Japanese with the apologetic grin and the black button eyes was not the type to make mistakes...

Hokasuri and he had been searching the nearby planet for signs of an enemy base when they had surprised an Orligian presumably engaged on the same chore. Distance had been about two hundred miles. They had immediately separated and attacked.

The Orligs used fairly large ships; apparently the generators for The Weapon took up a lot of space. Earth craft-were very small and fast, and hunted in pairs. Though not one hundred per cent successful, this had proved to be the only effective means of coming to grips with the enemy. The Weapon had a range of thirty miles and took six or seven seconds to focus. Two ships, therefore, approaching from different directions, the while taking violent evasive action, discharging ‘window’ and performing various other acts designed to confuse enemy aim, could be expected to run the gauntlet of The Weapon until the screen which surrounded enemy ships at a distance of two miles was reached. But to penetrate this the attacking ships had to check velocity, and it was at this point that the two attackers usually became one, the reason being that there was time for The Weapon to be focused on one of them. The surviving attacker then closed with the enemy - its very nearness and extreme mobility protection against the slow-acting Weapon - and slowly battered the Orlig ship into a wreck with solid, armour-piercing shells and rockets.

Once begun such a battle had to be fought to the death, because the Earth ship would be a sitting target if it attempted to escape through the screen again.

MacEwan had not been worried about Hokasuri getting through the screen, they had done it so often before despite all the laws of probability and statistics. They were the invincible ones, the pilots with that little something extra which had enabled them to return together after eighteen successful kills. But he had seen Hokasuri Stopped, seen his ship diving unwaveringly into the planet below them and watched it explode in the fringes of its atmosphere.

For the first time then MacEwan had experienced a sense of personal anger towards this Orlig ship. Indoctrination to the contrary, previous attacks had always seemed more like a big and very dangerous game to him. But then his anger had been pushed into the background by a sudden upsurge of fear that was close to panic. The Orlig ship, which should have been helpless now that he had closed in, was hitting back. What was worse, it was using the same type of archaic weapon for short-range defence that Earth ships had developed for attack, heavy calibre machine-guns of some sort. His ship was in nearly as bad a state as was that of the enemy ...

* * * *

Now he watched the Orlig ship spreading out in his forward view-screen again. The bow-launchers were fixed mount; to line them up on the target Reviora had to aim with the whole ship, and the Ordnance Officer had to do it because MacEwan’s fire control panel was dead.

Hokasuri’s trick had been to open up the enemy ship with his guns, saving the rockets until he could place them right inside the target. It was a process which called for accuracy of a high order. Perhaps Reviora could match it.

For an agonising four seconds Reviora held the ship on a collision course with the enemy while the fire of two Orlig blister turrets gouged at its hull. Suddenly the rockets were away, streaking ahead and plunging unerringly into the long, dark rent already torn in the Orlig’s hull plating by an earlier attack. Everything happened at once, then. Metal fountained spectacularly outwards and the ragged-edged hole in the Orlig’s hull lengthened, widened and gaped horribly. Simultaneously there was a sharp cry from Reviora which faded out in peculiar fashion. MacEwan wondered about it for perhaps a fraction of a second, decided that the peculiar sound was due to the sudden loss of the air which carried Reviora’s voice from his mouth to the suit mike, then he was reaching frantically for the control panel again.

Reviora was dead. They were still on a collision course!

Desperately MacEwan stabbed control keys - forward and rear opposed lateral steering jets to swing ship, and full emergency thrust on the main drive to get him out of there fast. The ship began turning, but that was all. Controls to the main power pile were cut, probably by the recent Orlig gunnery, and the hyperdrive telltales were dead, too - the ship was a wreck. Now it was skidding in broadside-on and still closing rapidly with the other ship. MacEwan hit more keys, firing all lateral jets on that side in an attempt to check velocity. Uselessly, it Was too little and too late. There was a close-spaced series of shocks as the ship ran through the metallic debris blown from the Orlig ship, climaxed by a tearing, grinding crash as the Earth vessel embedded itself exactly in the hole its rockets had blasted in the enemy hull.

The shock tore MacEwan, straps and all, sideways out of his chair and threw him on to the deck. His head hit something...

* * * *

When he was in a condition to think straight again his first thought was for the spacesuit. Captains did not wear protective suits in action for the same reason that necessitated their safety webbing being thin, flexible and generally not worth a damn - too cumbersome, and besides, the control room was tucked away relatively safe in the centre of the ship. But now there was no longer any need for his hands to be unhampered and his body able to move freely; his control board was dead. Two view-screens were still operating for some peculiar reason but that was all. There were no indications of a drop in air pressure, his ears felt normal and respiration ditto, but it was too much to expect that the crash had not opened seams even here. He was about to open the suit locker when his mind registered what his eyes were seeing in the two view-screens.

One was focused inwards and showed where the lateral jets had practically fused the two ships together before cutting out; some of the Orlig’s bulkheads still glowed red hot. The other screen gave a view outwards and showed the planetary surface only a few hundred miles off. As MacEwan watched his ears detected a whispering, high-pitched rushing sound.

There are no sounds in space. The Orlig ship, crippled, a near wreck and carrying the remains of the small ship responsible for its present condition, was trying for a landing. It was already entering atmosphere. MacEwan abruptly forgot about spacesuits and dived instead for the acceleration chair.

He was still scrambling weightlessly above the chair when the first surge dropped him face downwards into it. He had time to fasten just one safety strap, before suddenly mounting deceleration hammered him flat. Briefly, he thought that the Orlig ship must be in bad-trouble to want to land in its present state. With the damage inflicted by the Earth ship the Orligian must be an aerodynamic mess, and that without taking into account the wreckage of the aforesaid ship jammed against it like some spacegoing Siamese twin. Then all thinking stopped as he strained every nerve and muscle to keep alive, to keep his creaking and popping rib cage from collapsing on to his straining heart and lungs and strangling the life out of him.

After what seemed an impossibly long time the deceleration let up somewhat, becoming steady, measured surges of one or two G’s which he could take comfortably. Obviously the Orlig pilot had shed most of his velocity in the thin, upper air to minimise atmospheric heating, then was taking her down slow for the last few miles. Not too slow, though, or stratospheric winds might buffet her off vertical despite everything the gyros could do. This Orlig was good, MacEwan thought; he deserved to make it. MacEwan also thought that he would like to buy the Orlig pilot a drink, supposing such a thing was possible and that Orligs drank.

The control room was vibrating and heaving in a manner unnerving both to mind and body, as if jerking and swaying in time to the mad cacophony of shrieking air, bellowing engines and a banging, rattling percussion section as deceleration and air resistance tried to shake both ships to pieces. MacEwan was amazed that the wreckage of his ship had not torn itself free long ago.

Suddenly there was a last, violent surge of deceleration, a smashing, jarring shock, then the grinding scream of tearing metal. They were down but not still. There was a sickening, outward swaying motion and more harsh crepitation of ruptured metal. MacEwan’s eyes flew to the view-screen. It showed a stony, desert-like planetary surface swooping up to meet him. One of the Orlig’s landing legs must have buckled, they were toppling ...

The noise was like a pick driven into his brain, and he saw the ship coming to pieces all around him. Bits of sky showed in surrealistic geometric shapes which changed constantly with the shifting of the wreckage. There was a sudden bright explosion, and MacEwan had time only to remember their damaged midships launcher and the primed rocket still jammed in it, then flying, jagged-edged metal ripped all consciousness from him.

* * * *

When MacEwan came to again there was surprisingly little pain; his strongest impressions were those of numbness and extreme, clammy cold. This must be shock, he diagnosed briefly. But there was a warm wetness overlying the chill of his body that seemed to be localised in the area where he felt the dull, shock-numbed pains. He looked down at himself then, and realised how very lucky he was to be in a state of shock. He knew at once, of course, that he was dying.

The blast had left only a few shreds of his uniform, there was a great deal of blood, and his injuries ...

A man should not have to look at himself in a state like this, MacEwan thought dully. If he had met an animal in this condition he would have shot it, and had it been a member of his own species he would have turned away and been violently sick. As it was he gazed at the frightful wounds with a strange objectivity until his brain, not quite as numb as the rest of him, re-opened communications with his one good arm. He fumbled open the emergency medical kit that still hung from his belt and used the coagulant spray freely, ending by swallowing rather more than the prescribed dose of antipain against the time when the shock would wear off. With most of the external bleeding checked, MacEwan tried to lie as motionless as possible. If he moved at all he felt that he would burst open along the seams like some great big football filled with red molasses.

It was while he was trying to look around him – and endeavouring to decide why he had given himself this inadequate first aid - that MacEwan saw the Orligian.

By what freak of circumstances it came to be there it was impossible to say, but not three yards from MacEwan lay one of the Enemy. It was not a very impressive object, he thought, this small being which resembled nothing so much as a teddy-bear that had been left out in the rain. But it was not rain which matted the fur on the creature’s chest and head, nor was it water oozing from the raw ruin of its face. It was in much better shape than MacEwan, however, it was breathing steadily and making odd twitching movements which suggested returning consciousness. The broad belt to which was attached MacEwan’s holster and the pouch containing the medical kit was the only part of his uniform left intact. He carefully drew the little gun with its clip of thirty explosive bullets and waited for the Orlig to wake up.

While waiting he tried hating it a little.

* * * *

MacEwan had always been an unemotional man - perhaps that was the secret of his success as a Captain, and the reason for his unusually long period of active duty. In his particular job MacEwan was convinced that emotion simply killed you off in jig time. A man making an attack approach with hate or any other emotion -whether directed towards the enemy, or something or somebody else - clogging his mind was leaving that much less of it for the vital business of evading The Weapon. In battle MacEwan felt no hatred for the enemy, no anger that his Ordnance Officer cursed and swore in a highly insubordinate fashion at him - Reviora was invariably full of apologies on their return to base - and none of the softer emotions that could leak over from the times when he was not in battle.

There had been a girl once, a tall, dark-eyed girl who had been attached to the base Plot Room. MacEwan had eaten with her a few times, seen how things were going, then avoided her. That had been the smart thing to do; good survival. Now he was realising what an unhappy man he had been.

Hokasuri had treated the whole thing as a game, too. MacEwan had had one of his rare moments of anger when his brother Captain’s Stopped ship had exploded in this planet’s atmosphere, and when Reviora had died. But now he felt only a dull regret. He reminded himself that the Orlig lying over there was responsible - in part, at least - for those deaths, but still he could not actively hate the thing.

It was his duty to kill it, whether he hated the Orlig personally or not. Why, then, was he being so squeamish about not wanting to shoot it when it was unconscious, and trying to work up hatred for it? Was his imminent demise making him go soft, had Iron Man MacEwan turned to putty at the end? Phlegmatic, unsmiling and distant, Captain MacEwan was looked upon back at base as the embodiment of the soulless, killing machine. Now he felt as if he was thinking like a woman. Now he was thinking that, just this once, he would like to do something on a basis of emotion rather than for cold, calculating, logical reasons. It would be the last chance he would have, he thought wryly.

But wasn’t he fooling himself? Suppose he forgot logic for once, would he use the pistol to blow the Orlig into little pieces out of sheer hate or would he do something stupid? Yellow cowardice was a motivation as well as duty or hate, and MacEwan was coming near his end. He had never been a religious man, but nobody had been able to give him concrete data on what lay on the other side, though a great many believed firmly that they knew. Was he simply scared that doing a bad thing now would have serious consequences later, after he died - even though he did not really believe there was a later? MacEwan swore weakly, the first time he had done such a thing in years.

All right, then! MacEwan told himself savagely. This mind of mine, admittedly dopey from shock and antipain pills not to mention a generous measure of sheer blue funk, will for the first and most decidedly the last time reason on the purely thalamic level. He would not shoot the Orligian. Fear of the Hereafter was only part of the reason, there was the fact that this particular Orlig, or one of his crew mates, had made a very fine crash landing.

MacEwan said, ‘Oh, go ahead and live, damn you!’ and tossed the gun away from him.

Immediately the Orlig leapt crouching to its feet.

* * * *

MacEwan only faintly heard the gun sliding down the inclined deck, falling between the ruptured seams of floor plating and clattering down through the wreckage below. He was watching the Orlig and realising that it had been playing possum, pretending unconsciousness and covertly keeping him under observation while he had the gun in his hand. A smart little teddybear, this Orlig, and now that he was unarmed ...

He could not help remembering that the muscles under those soft-looking, furry arms were capable of tearing a man’s head off, as the massacre on the Starfinder had shown.

‘MacEwan,’ he told himself sickly, ‘you have done a very stupid thing.’

At the sound the Orlig started back, then it began edging nearer again. One of its arms hung limp, MacEwan saw, and very obviously it was having to force itself to approach him. Finally it got to within three feet and stood looking down. It growled and whined in an odd fashion at him and gestured with its good arm; the noises did not sound threatening. Then the arm reached out, hesitated, and a stubby, four-fingered hand touched MacEwan briefly on the head and was withdrawn quickly. The Orlig growled again and retreated. It disappeared behind a nearby tangle of wreckage and he heard it clambering awkwardly through to the remains of its own ship.

MacEwan let his head sink to the deck, no longer willing to exert the tremendous effort needed to hold it upright. The antipain was not working too well and his brain seemed to function in fits and starts, racing one minute and completely blank the next. All at once he was utterly, deathly tired, and it must have been at that point that he blacked out again. When he came to, MacEwan’s first impression was of vibration striking up through his jaw from the deck plating. His second was that he had gone mad.

His eyes were closed yet he could see himself - all of himself, including the head lying on the deck with its eyes closed. And there was a constant gabbling in his mind which could only be delirium. MacEwan wanted to black out again but the delirium kept him awake. It was too loud, as if somebody were shouting in his head. But the words, though nonsense, were heard clearly:

... It is wrong to do this. My Family would be ashamed. But my Family is dead, all dead. Killed by the Family of this loathsome thing which is dying. It is wrong, yet here is a chance to obtain valuable data about them, and with my Family dead the displeasure of other Families cannot hurt me. Perhaps my efforts are useless and the creature is already dead, its wounds are frightful. ..

MacEwan shook his head weakly and opened his eyes. He blinked so as to focus on the odd mechanism which had appeared on the deck about a foot from his head. It was squat, heavy-looking and was dull grey except where clusters of fine, coppery rods stuck out at intervals. A thick power cable sprouted from its base and disappeared somewhere, and just behind the machine the Orlig sat on its haunches. The expression in its eyes, which were the only feature in that ruined face capable of registering any emotion, could only be described as intent.

In his present state it was hard for MacEwan to feel undue excitement or amazement. But he was not so far gone that he would not reason logically, so that he knew quite clearly what it was that he was experiencing.

The Orligs had telepathy.

In the instant of his reaching that conclusion the babble in his head ceased, but there was not silence. Instead there was a bubbling stew of half-thoughts, memory fragments and general confusion, the whole being overlaid by an extreme feeling of antagonism and instinctive loathing which the Orlig was trying unsuccessfully to control. But it was trying, MacEwan knew, and that was a good point in its favour. And the main reason for its confusion, he saw, was the fact that having opened communications with a species which was its deadly enemy, the Orlig was at a loss for words.