A Better Mantrap

SMALL WORLD

I’ll do it today, Robbie thought. I’ll run across the sky today.

He drew the bedclothes more closely around him, creating a warm cave which was precisely tailored to his small frame, and tried to go back to sleep. It was not yet morning and the house was quiet except for occasional murmurs from the refrigerator in the kitchen. Robbie found, however, that making the decision about the sky run had changed his mood, permitted the big and hazardous outside world to invade his security, and that sleep was no longer possible He got up, went to the window and drew the curtains aside.

The three mirrors which captured sunlight had not yet been splayed out from the sides of the cylindrical space colony, and therefore it was still completely dark outside the house except for the luminance from the streetlamps. The nearby rooftops were silhouetted against the horizontal strip of blackness, unrelieved by stars, which Robbie knew as the night-time sky, but higher up he could see the glowing geometrical patterns of streets in the next valley. He stared at the jewelled rectangles and pretended he was a bird soaring above them in the night air. The game occupied his mind for only a short time – he had never seen a real bird, and his imagination was not fully able to cope with the old Earthbound concepts of ‘above’ and ‘below’. Robbie closed the drapes, went back to bed and waited impatiently for morning …

“Come on, Robbie,” his mother called. “It’s time for breakfast.”

He sat up with a jerk, amazed to discover that he had, after all, been able to doze off and return to the peaceful world of dreams after the pledge he had made to himself. All the while he was washing and dressing he tried to get accustomed to the idea that this was the day on which he was going to grow up, to become a full member of the Red Hammers. His mind was still swirling with the sense of novelty and danger when he went into the bright kitchen and took his place in the breakfast alcove opposite his father and mother.

Like most colonists who had managed to settle happily on Island One, they were neat, medium-sized, unremarkable people of the sort who leave their youth behind very quickly, but are compensated with a seemingly endless span of unchanging adulthood. Mr Tullis was a crystal-logenetic engineer in the zero-gravity workshops at the centre of the Island’s sunward cap – an occupation which was beyond Robbie’s comprehension; and Mrs Tullis was a psychologist specializing in verbal communication modes – an occupation Robbie might have understood had she ever talked to him about it. They both examined him critically as he sat down.

“What are you going to do today?” his mother said, handing him a dish of cereal.

“Nothin’.” Robbie stared down at the yellow feathers of grain, and he thought, I’m going to run across the sky.

“Nothing,” she repeated, emphasizing the ending for Robbie’s benefit. “That doesn’t sound very constructive.”

“The school holidays are too long.” Max Tullis stood up and reached for his jacket. “I’m going to be late at the plant.”

Thea Tullis stood up with him and accompanied him to the front door while they discussed arrangements for a dinner party that evening. On her return she busied herself for a few minutes disposing of the breakfast remains and, her interest in Robbie’s plans apparently having faded, disappeared without speaking into the room she used as study. Robbie toyed with his cereal, then drank the chill, malty-flavoured milk from the dish. He looked around the kitchen for a moment, suddenly reluctant to go outside and face the rest of the day, but he had discovered that when his mother was working in her study the house was lonelier than when he was the only person in it. Taking some candy from a dish on the window ledge, he opened the door and went out to the back garden.

Robbie often watched television programmes which were beamed out from Earth, and so had a fairly clear mental image of how a natural environment should look, but there was no sense of dislocation in his mind as he glanced around him on a quiet, summer morning. He had been born on Island One and saw nothing out of the ordinary about living on the inner surface of a glass-and-metal cylinder little more than two hundred metres in diameter and a kilometre in length. The colony was highly industrialized – because it manufactured many of the components for larger second-generation space habitats – but it had a residential bolt supporting over a thousand families. This community, with a fourteen-year history of living in space, yielded valuable sociological data and therefore was preserved intact, even though its members could have been moved on to newer colonies.

None of Robbie’s friends was visible in the row of adjoining gardens, so he emitted a sharp, triple-toned whistle, a secret signal devised by the Red Hammers, and sat down on a rustic seat to await results. Several minutes went by without an answering whistle being heard. Robbie was not particularly surprised. He had noticed that – no matter how strict the injunctions were from their leaders at night – the Hammers tended to sleep late in the morning during school holidays. On this occasion, though, he was disappointed at their tardiness because he anticipated the looks of respect from the other junior members when he announced he was taking his initiation.

He munched candy for a few minutes, then boredom began to set in and he thought about asking his mother to take him to the low-gravity park in the Island’s outer cap. She had refused similar requests twice already that week, and he guessed her reply would be the same today. Dismissing the idea from his mind, he lay back in the chair and stared upwards, focusing his gaze on the houses and gardens visible ‘above’ him in the Blue Valley. The layout of the residential areas was identical in all three valleys, and Robbie was able to pick out the counterpart of his own family’s house in the Blue Valley and – by looking back over his shoulder – in the Yellow Valley. At that time there was a temporary truce between the Red Hammers and the Yellow Knives, so Robbie’s attention was concentrated on enemy territory, that inhabited by the Blue Flashes. He had memorized the map drawn up by his own gang, and as a result was able to pick out the actual houses where the Blue Flash leaders lived.

As the minutes stretched out his boredom and restlessness increased. He stood up and gave the secret whistle again, making it louder this time. When there was no response he paced around the garden twice, making sure that no adults were watching him from windows of neighbouring houses, then slipped into the cool privacy of the shrubs at the foot of the lawn. A sense of guilty pleasure grew within him as he scooped up some of the crumbly soil with his hands and uncovered a small object wrapped in plastic film. Catapults were illegal on Island One – as were firearms and all explosive devices which might be capable of puncturing the pressure skin – but most boys knew about catapults, and some claimed the historic privilege of making them, regardless of any authority.

Robbie tested the strength of the synthetic rubber strands, enjoying the feeling of power the simple weapon gave him, and took a projectile from his pocket. There were no pebbles in the sieved and sterilized soil of the Island, but he made it a practice to collect suitably small and heavy objects. This one was a glass stopper from an old whisky decanter, almost certainly stolen, which he had bought from a girl in school. He fitted it into the catapult’s leatherette cup, drew the rubber back to full stretch, and – after a final check that he was not being observed – fired it upwards in the general direction of the residential area of the Blue Valley.

The glass missile glittered briefly in the sunlight, and vanished from sight.

Robbie watched its disappearance with a feeling of deep satisfaction. His pleasure was derived from the fact that he had defied, and somehow revenged himself upon, his parents and all the other adults who either ignored him or placed meaningless restrictions on his life. He also had a ten-year-old boy’s faith that Providence would guide the projectile to land squarely on the roof of the gang hut used by the despicable Blue Flashes. His mind was filled with a gleeful vision of one of their full-scale meetings being thrown into panic and disorder by the thunderous impact just above their heads.

A moment later he heard an elaborate whistle coming from one of the nearby gardens and he lost all interest in the now invisible missile. He wrapped up the catapult, buried it, and ran to meet his friends.

The glass stopper which Robbie had dispatched into the sky weighed some sixty grams and had he lived on Earth it would have travelled only a short distance into the air before falling back. Island One rotated about its longitudinal axis once every twenty-one seconds, thus creating at the inner surface an apparent gravity equal to that of Earth at sea level. The gradient was on an entirely different scale to that of Earth, however – falling from maximum to zero in a distance of only a hundred metres, which was the radius of the cylindrical structure.

In the early stages of its flight the gleaming missile decelerated in much the same manner as it would have done while rising from the surface of a planet, but the forces retarding it quickly waned, allowing its ascent to be prolonged. It actually had some residual velocity when it reached the zero-gravity zone of the axis and, describing a sweeping S-curve, plunged downwards into the Blue Valley.

And, because the space colony had rotated considerably during its time of flight, the stopper landed nowhere near Robbie’s notional target.

Alice Ledane was lying in a darkened room at the front of her house, hands clasped to her temples, when she heard the explosive shattering of the window which overlooked the rear patio.

She lay still for a pounding moment, rigid with shock, while her heart lurched and thudded like an engine shuddering to a halt. For what seemed a long time she was positive she was going to die, but her shallow, ultra-rapid fear-breathing gradually steadied into a more normal rhythm. She got to her feet and, leaning against the wall at intervals, went towards the back of the house. The mood of calmness and resolve she had been trying to nurture had gone, and for a moment she was afraid to open the door of the living room. When she finally did so her lips began to quiver as the remnants of her self-control dwindled away.

Shards of glass were scattered around the room like transparent petals, some of them hanging by their points from the drapes, and ornaments had been toppled from the small table which sat at the window. The surface of the table was dented, but she could see nothing of the missile which must have been thrown from the back garden. Alice gazed at the damage, knuckles pressed to her mouth, then she ran to the back door and threw it open. As she had expected, there was no sign of the children who for months had been persecuting her with such unyielding determination.

“Damn you!” she shouted. “It isn’t fair! What have I done to you? Why don’t you come out in the open?”

There was a lengthy silence, disturbed only by the humming of bees in the hedgerows, then the tall figure of Mr Chuikov appeared at an upper window of the next house. Alice slammed her door, suddenly afraid of being seen, and stumbled back to the front room where she had been resting. She went to the sideboard, picked up a framed photograph of her husband, and stared at the unperturbed, smiling face.

“And damn you, Victor,” she said. “You’d no right! No … bloody … right!”

While she was looking at the photograph, her hand made its own way into the pocket of her dressing gown and emerged holding a strip of bubbled tinfoil. Alice put the picture down and ejected a silver-and-blue capsule from the strip. She raised the tiny ovoid to her mouth, but hesitated without swallowing it. For the past week – in accordance with Dr Kinley’s suggestion – she had progressively delayed the taking of the first cap by an extra hour every day. The aim, the shining goal, was to get through an entire day without any psychotropic medication at all. If that could be achieved just once there would be prospects of further successes and of finally becoming a whole woman again.

Alice rolled the capsule between her finger and thumb, and knew this was not to be her day of triumph – the children had seen to that. Harold from three doors along the block, or Jean from the house on the corner, or Carl from the next street. With the casual ruthlessness of the very young they had long ago deduced that her illness made her an easy prey, and they had declared a quiet war. Alice placed the capsule on her tongue, yielding to its promise of a few hours of peace, then an irksome thought occurred to her. While she was asleep the broken window in the living room would admit dust, insects, possibly even human intruders. There had once been a time when she could have slept contentedly in an unlocked house, but the world and all the people in it had been different then.

She took the capsule from her mouth, dropped it into her pocket, and went to fetch a waste bin. It took her fifteen minutes to gather up the larger fragments of glass, an armoury of brittle daggers, and to vacuum the carpet until it was free of gleaming splinters. The next logical step would have been to contact the maintenance department and report the damage, but she had had the telephone disconnected a year previously because its unexpected ringing had jolted her nerves too much. She had even, and quite illegally, cut the wires of the public service loudspeaker in the hall for the same reason. On this occasion it would not have taken long to get dressed and go to a phone in the shopping arcade, but Alice shrank from the idea of leaving the security of the house at such short notice. Her only option was to cover the broken window in some way until she felt strong enough to have it properly mended.

In the spare bedroom, the one Victor had used as a workshop, she found a sheet of alloy wide enough to span the window, and a quick search along the shelves produced a tube of Liqueld adhesive. She carried the materials into the living room, squeezed some adhesive on to the metal window frame and pressed the alloy into position. Within a minute it was so firmly in place that it was beyond her strength to move it. Satisfied that her defences were once again intact, Alice closed up the drapes, returned to the front room and lay down on the divan. The rolls of fat which had gathered around her body in a year of housebound inactivity had hampered her in the work she had just done and she was breathing heavily. The acrid smell of unhealthy perspiration filled the room.

“Damn you, Victor,” she said to the ceiling. “You’d no right.”

Victor Ledane had been one of a team of five who had gone outside the sunward cap of a Model Two habitat to install a parabolic mirror which was going to be used as an auxiliary power source. The work was being done in a hurry against a completion deadline imposed by engineer-politicians back on Earth. As Alice understood it, one of the team had ignored standard procedure and had begun stripping the non-reflective coating from the dish before it was fully secured. Only a fraction of the bright metal surface had been uncovered, but when the mirror accidentally swung free of its mountings a blade of solar heat had sliced open the space suits of two men. And one of them had been Victor Ledane.

Alice and he had been living on Island One for six years at the time. Those had been good years, so absorbing that she had lost contact with her few friends back on Earth, and when the Island’s community director, Les Jerome, had asked her to stay on she had readily agreed. She had known, of course, that the sociologists and psychologists were mainly interested in having a genuine space widow on tap, but with Victor gone nothing seemed very important. Obligingly, she had continued to live in the same house, had waited for the promised return of joy, and had tried not to think about the hard vacuum of space which began centimetres beneath the floor.

The trouble was … there had been no resurgence of joy.

Eventually she had settled for an inferior substitute, one which was dispensed in the form of silver-and-blue capsules, and now it was becoming impossible to distinguish between the two. The only way to restore her judgment would be to start living without the capsules, getting through one week at a time, but the point that Dr Kinley and the others seemed to miss was that – to begin with – it would be necessary to get through that first, endless, impossible day …

Alice fought to hold back the tears of frustration and despair as she realized that, on a day which had begun so disastrously, she was unlikely to hold on as late as noon before seeking relief. It came to her with a rare clarity that, for some people, the burdens of humanity were, quite simply, too great.

There was a gratifying response to Robbie’s announcement.

After initial whoops of disbelief the younger members of the Red Hammers lapsed into silence, and Robbie could tell that – already – they were a little afraid of him. He made himself appear calm as Gordon Webb and the three other boys who made up the Supreme Council took him aside for a talk. Robbie went with them, occasionally glancing back at the juniors, and was thrilled to find that David, Pierre and Drew – even Gordon himself – were treating him almost as an equal. They were holding something in reserve, because he had not yet actually made the run, but Robbie was being given a strong foretaste of what it would be like to be a grown-up, and he found it a satisfying concoction. He wondered if his parents would notice a change in him when he went home for his evening meal, and if they would speculate on what had brought it about …

“… make up your mind which valley you’re going to,” Gordon was saying. “Yellow or Blue?”

Robbie forced his thoughts back to the present, and to the unfortunate necessity of having to qualify for senior status in the gang. Because of the truce with the Yellow Knives there would be less risk in going in their direction, but there would be more glory in a fleeting invasion of Blue Flash territory, and it was the glory that Robbie wanted. The glory, the respect and the recognition.

“Blue,” he said, and then, remembering a line from a television drama, “where else?”

“Good man.” Gordon clapped him on the back. “The Flashers are going to be sick. We’ll show ’em.”

“We’d better get Robbie’s challenge ready,” Drew said.

Gordon nodded. “Are there any of the Blues watching us?”

Pierre took a small telescope from his pocket, moved out from the shade of the rhododendrons and trained the instrument on the Blue Valley residential section which was visible, at an altitude of some one hundred and twenty degrees, above a strip of sky in which the Earth and Moon could be seen sweeping by every twenty-one seconds. As the distance from where the boys stood to the heart of Blue Flash territory was less than two hundred metres for the most part, the telescope was scarcely necessary, but it was a prestigious part of the Supreme Council’s equipment and was always brought into action on such occasions.

“All clear,” Pierre droned presently, and Robbie felt a thrill at being at the centre of such military efficiency.

Gordon cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted instructions to the watchful group of juniors. “Spread out and keep away from here. Create a diversion.”

The smaller boys nodded dutifully and moved away through the neat little park in the direction of their homes. Robbie was disappointed that they would not be present to see him make his run, but he understood the wisdom of Gordon’s precautions. In addition to the risk of alerting the Blue Flashes, there was the more immediate danger of attracting the attention of adults in their own valley.

He went with the Council members to David’s home, which was conveniently empty because both his parents were out at work, and they spent some time preparing his challenge. This was a large sheet of paper which he decorated with crossed hammers drawn in red ink. Across the bottom of the sheet, in elaborate lettering which was meant to look like Gothic script, Robbie printed the message: sir robbie tullis, gentleman soldier of the red hammers, presents his compliments. When the ink had dried, the paper was folded up and tucked into an empty pickle jar, and – as the ultimate insult to the Blue Flashes – a scrap of red cloth was tied around it.

The task was more time-consuming than Robbie had expected and had barely been completed when the day-care matron for the area arrived to give David his lunch. This was the signal for the other boys to suspend operations and disperse to their own homes. Robbie was not hungry, but he went home as usual to avoid giving the impression that anything out of the ordinary was happening. He decided to preserve an enigmatic silence during the meal and, as his mother’s thoughts were occupied with her morning’s work, there was virtually no conversation. The house was filled with a cool stillness which seemed as though it might go on for ever.

It was with a sense of relief that Robbie finished eating and returned to the sunlit world of comradeship and conspiracy he shared with the other boys of the neighbourhood. Gordon, David, Pierre and Drew were waiting for him in a corner of the park, and as soon as he came near he knew by the solemnity of their faces that something had happened. Pierre, the tallest of the group, was anxiously scanning the vicinity, every now and then pausing to examine some item of suspicion with his telescope.

“Ole Minty saw us,” Gordon explained to Robbie. “I think he’s following us around.”

“Does that mean I can’t …”

“No chance!” Gordon’s twelve-year-old face showed the determination which had made him leader of the Red Hammers. “We’ll wear the old scarecrow down. Come on.”

Robbie tightened his grip on his challenge, which was hidden in the pocket of his jacket, and hurried after Gordon. He was impressed by the way in which the older boy seemed absolutely unafraid of one of the gang’s most powerful enemies. Mr Mintoff was the Red Valley’s first and only old age pensioner. Robbie knew he must have been a brilliant man to have been allowed to emigrate to Island One in his late middle age, but now he was a solitary figure with little to do except patrol the neighbourhood and act as unofficial policeman. In spite of the fact that he appeared to be senile, and walked with the aid of an alloy stick, he had the knack of divining what was going on in the Hammers’ minds and of making sudden appearances at the most inopportune times.

Under Gordon’s control, the group walked to the end of Centre Street and stood in a conspicuous knot, giving every indication they were planning mischief, until they saw Mr Mintoff approaching from the direction of the park. They let him get close, then split up and made their way by separate and secret routes to the opposite end of the street, where they again assembled. A good twenty minutes passed before the stooped form of Mr Mintoff caught up with them. Just before he was within hailing distance they disappeared as before, melting into the ample shrubbery of the Red Valley, and came together at their original venue to await their pursuer. The second round of the fight had got under way.

Robbie had been certain that Ole Minty would be forced to concede defeat within the hour, but he displayed a stubborn tenacity, and it was quite late in the afternoon before they saw him give up and turn into the side avenue where he lived. They waited a while longer to establish that they were in the clear, and Robbie’s heart began to pick up speed as he realized that all the preliminaries had ended, that it was time for him to make his run …

The sidewall of the valley was constructed of smooth, seamless alloy and had a curved overhang which was supposed to make it unclimbable. Island One was an artificial environment, however, and as such it relied on complex engineering systems to maintain its various functions. The systems were designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, and most colonists were quite unaware of them, but children have an intense, detailed awareness of their surroundings, one which often confounds adult minds. Robbie and his four companions went straight to a point where a cluster of hydraulic pipes and valves made it easy to get halfway up the wall, and where a strain monitor installed by a different team of engineers provided a useful handhold at the top. He knew that if he stopped to think about what he was doing his nerve could fail, so he scaled the wall without hesitation and quickly slid on to the outer girder, where he could not be seen by anybody in his own valley. Making sure that his challenge was secure in his pocket, he turned to climb down to the surface of glass stretching away beneath.

And the universe made ready to swallow him.

Robbie froze, his muscles locked by fear, as he looked into the vertiginous deeps of space. The vast, curved window which separated two of the Island’s valleys was like a tank filled with black liquid, a medium through which darted stars, planets, the blue Earth, the Moon, seemingly miniature models of other habitats – all of them impelled by the rotation of his own world. The huge plane mirror a short distance beyond the glass did nothing to lessen the fearful visual impact – it created discontinuities, a sense of depths within depths, as bright objects appeared and disappeared at its edges. Adding to the kaleidoscope of confusion were the sweeping, brilliant visions of Island One’s sister cylinder, its own mirrors splayed out, which periodically drenched Robbie with upflung showers of white light.

He shrank back from the abyss, fighting to draw breath, face contorted with shock. Something in his pocket clinked against the metal of the girder. Robbie looked down at it, saw the top of the pickle jar containing his challenge, and moaned aloud as he realized he was not free to turn back. He lowered himself to the bottom flange of the girder, stepped out on to the nearly invisible surface of the glass, and began his run across the sky.

The wall of the Blue Valley was less than a hundred metres away, but as Robbie sprinted over the void it seemed to retreat, maliciously, prolonging his ordeal. Each leap over a titanium astragal brought with it a nightmarish moment of conviction that there would be nothing to land on at the other side, and that he would fall screaming into the endless night. And as he neared the midpoint of his run Robbie encountered a new and even more disconcerting phenomenon – the sun had appeared directly beneath his feet. Its reflected light blazed upwards around Robbie, blinding him and producing a nauseating sense of dislocation. He kept on running, but he had begun to sob painfully with each breath and attacks of dizziness threatened to bring him down.

All at once, the wall of the Blue Valley was looming up in front, criss-crossed by the shadows of a lattice girder. He pulled the glass jar from his pocket, hurled it over the wall and turned to run homewards on legs which had lost all strength.

Robbie made it to the centre of the window, to the centre of the fountain of golden fire, before he collapsed. He lay on his side, eyes tight-closed, knees pulled up to his chin, his immature personality in full flight from the world beyond the womb.

“Hold on a moment, Mr Mintoff.” Les Jerome set the telephone on his desk, picked up his binoculars and went to the window. From his office high up on the outer cap of Island One he could see virtually the entire structure of the colony. The opposite cap was at the centre of his field of view, and radiating from it were the three inhabited valleys interspersed with three kilometre-long transparencies. He aimed the powerful glasses at the strip between the Red and Blue Valleys, stood perfectly still for a moment, then picked up the phone.

“I see him, Mr Mintoff,” he said. “Right beside Frame Thirty-two. Okay, you contact his mother. And thanks for calling – we’ll get the little beggar in from there in a hurry.”

Jerome replaced the telephone and depressed the intercom toggle which would let him speak to the chief of his maintenance force. “Frank, there’s a kid stuck out on the glass. Yeah, on Transparency One just beyond Frame Thirty-two. Send somebody out to get him, and make sure a medic goes as well – the brat’s going to need a shot of something to calm him down.”

Returning to the window, Jerome leaned on the ledge and stared at the strange, confined world he had grown to love in spite of all its faults and peculiarities. He had a decision to make, and it had to be done quickly. Strictly speaking, the plight of the boy out there on the glass did not constitute an emergency situation, and therefore he would not be officially justified in closing up the mirrors before the scheduled hour. All three mirrors had to be retracted at the same time, to preserve the Island’s symmetrical dynamics, which meant enforcing a universal black-out – and there were many colonists who objected strenuously to that sort of thing. There would be a barrage of complaints, some of them from influential people, but Jerome was a kindly man with two children of his own, and it troubled him to think of a small boy trapped on the glass, suspended in space.

The sooner he could put a semblance of solidity beneath the boy’s feet and screen him off from infinity, the better chance the young adventurer would have of emerging from his ordeal without personality scars. He picked up the rarely-used red telephone which would transmit his voice to every home, office and workshop on Island One.

“This is Community Director Jerome speaking,” he said. “There is no cause for alarm, but we are going to close up the mirrors for a short period. The black-out will be as brief as we can possibly make it, and I repeat there is no cause for alarm. I apologize for any inconvenience that may be caused. Thank you.”

Jerome then contacted his Engineering Executive and gave the order which would bring a premature sunset to his domain.

In the darkened front room of her house, midway along the Blue Valley, Alice Ledane awoke with a start.

She had been skimming on the wavetops of consciousness for hours, sometimes dipping into restless sleep as her private struggle drained her of nervous energy, then surfacing again to feel more exhausted than ever. As was usual on a day like this, she had no idea of the time. She got to her feet, parted the drapes slightly and made the discovery that it was night outside.

Incredulously, she put her hand in the pocket of her dressing gown and found the day’s first capsule still there. It was sticky to the touch. She held the tiny ovoid in the palm of her hand for a few seconds, then let it fall to the floor.

Alice went back to the divan and lay down. It was much too soon, she knew, to start congratulating herself on a victory – but if she had managed to get through one day with no outside help there was nothing to prevent her getting through the others which were to follows.