The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy

THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER by E. C. Tubb

The last four stories have all dealt, in one way or another, with the idea that the solution to our problems may lie in changing ourselves. Perhaps the human race will develop, or evolve, or educate itself to new abilities and new levels of understanding, where we can better cope with the challenges we are now so busily constructing for ourselves.

E. C. Tubb, who is almost unknown in this country, but probably Britain’s most popular writer of s-f, presents us with a world in which the changes have already happened. The painful period of growth has taken place; adjustment is achieved. Mankind lives well and happily—but too long.

He awoke to the sound of roaring trumpets and lay for a while, hovering in that strange region between sleep and waking, clutching vainly at the broken fabric of shattered dreams as the once-bright images dissipated into tenuous clouds of dream-mist. Then he sighed, stirred, the trumpets dwindled to the musical attention call from the bedside videophone and, opening his eyes, he reached for the switch.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Melhuey?” The face pictured on the screen was smooth and pink, with liquid dark eyes and a gentle, understanding mouth. “Mr. John Melhuey?”

“That’s right.”

“This is the Bureau, Mr. Melhuey. We received a letter from you this morning with certain enclosures.” The image shifted its eyes a little as it stared at something beyond the range of the scanners. “You realize, of course, what it is you ask?”

“I understand perfectly.” John didn’t trouble to hide his impatience. “Why are you calling?”

“Isn’t that obvious, sir? There is always the possibility of mistake. Or perhaps...”

“There is no mistake and there is no perhaps about it. You have your instructions.”

“Yes, sir. At your service, sir.”

The image died as John opened the circuit, lingering for a brief second in fading brilliance before merging with the blank, pearly lustre of the screen. John stared at it for a moment, idly wondering what the man had thought and vaguely regretting the lost opportunity to ask questions, then he sighed and got out of bed.

It wasn’t as easy as it had been yesterday, and yesterday had been harder than the day before. Stiff limbs and throbbing joints, odd twinges and dull aches, all foreign to his experience, all unwelcome symptoms of what was to come. Tiredly he entered the bathroom, stripped, and stood beneath the shower.

The water was hot, so hot that it steamed and stung his flesh into a pink glow. He revelled in it, letting it drum against his skull and run over his face, opening his mouth to the warm liquid then stooping so that it traced a tingling path down his back. He adjusted the flow to cold and shivered in the icy blast, his skin goose-pimpling and changing from pink to blue, dead white and unhealthy grey. Misery came with the cold, a chattering numbness then, as he spun the control back to hot, the relief was so great that he almost shouted with sheer animal-pleasure.

He had always enjoyed his morning shower.

Finished, he stood in the air-blast, staring at himself in the full-length mirror as he dried.

He had always been a big man in every sense of the word and now, physically at least, he was still big. Carefully he examined himself, from the wide-spread feet, splayed a little now and with sagging arches, up the blue-mottled legs, the abdomen, bulging and lax, the thick waist, the chest heavy with fat where muscle should have stood in taut splendour, the neck with its loose skin and flabby tissue.

Old!

He stared at himself, his lips twisting a little with self-distaste, his deep-set eyes bitter as he touched the engraved lines from nose to mouth, the crow’s feet marring once smooth skin, the receding hair and the wrinkled forehead. His skin bore the tiny marks of passing years, crinkled and crepe-like, too-soft and too-sagging, the muscles unable to restrain the tissue, the skin itself a too-big bag for what lay beneath.

Old!

Yesterday he hadn’t seemed so bad and the day before yesterday he had been almost young. A week ago he had been fit and a month ago as virile as he had ever been. Now he was succumbing to age, losing the battle of the passing years with the passage of each hour, paying heavy penalty for his extended youth.

“You’re worn out,” he said to the image in the mirror. “Finished. Not even the drugs can help you now. You’ve lived a long time, longer than any man once had a right to expect, but you cannot live forever. Now, with medical science helpless to stave off old age, you’re getting senile-fast!”

And it was true. Three times now he had passed his youth and virility only to have it restored by the longevity treatment. Three times—and there could be no fourth. Now he had to wait until he aged and died. Now he had to pay for extended youth by the accelerated advance of breakdown, the accumulated enemies of senility and old age. He had had a long, long summer. He had tasted life to the full, spreading his experiences across the years until now. Now was the last day of summer. Tomorrow was only winter, painful, degrading, bitter winter and bitter death.

He sighed as if bidding goodbye to what he had once been and could never be again then, with exaggerated care, he dressed himself, taking a new suit from the dispenser, smiling as he snapped the seals and slipped the shimmering garments over his body.

He had always liked new clothes.

Breakfast was a work of art. Real fruit juice. Real coffee. Real bread toasted to a fragrant brown crispness and loaded with creamy yellow butter, the soft richness seeming to hold within itself all the trapped sunlight of bygone years. He ate slowly, moving the food over his palate, swallowing with careful deliberation, tasting the food instead of merely chewing it, savouring it as if he had never eaten before. The meal finished he rose and, with casual deliberation, moved about the huge room with its scattered treasures and its quiet, subtle, unmistakeable air of good taste.

A plaque of polished wood hung against the wall. A stone was mounted in the centre, a fragment of grey, crumbling rock and he stared at it; leaning forward to touch it and, as his fingers caressed the rough surface, time slipped and he was young again.

A grey plain, the hiss of oxygen and the chafing encumbrance of a suit. Sunlight, harsh and glaring through the shields, jagged peaks and, high in the star-shot sky, a swollen, green-mottled ball wreathed with the tenuous fingers of fleecy cloud.

Luna!

The rock had come from there, torn from where it had lain for uncounted years, wrenched free by a metal glove and carried as a trophy back to distant Earth. He had been the one to rip it from its bed. He had torn it free and stumbled, knee deep in luna dust, back to where the ship waited like a splinter of radiant steel in the savage light of a naked sun. Long ago now. Long, long ago. Back in his first-youth when life was a gay adventure and death a mere word. How long?

He sighed as he thought about it, not trying to read the gold-letter date on the polished wood, letting his hand fall from the rough stone and, as he turned, the too-bright memories scattered and vanished in the light of harsh reality.

A book lay on a small table, a single volume written by a man long dead, and yet containing within its pages the trapped gems of his genius, caught and safeguarded against time. It fell open as he picked it up, flattening at a favourite poem, and he scanned it, feeling a warm comfort in the familiar text.

From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving, Whatever gods may be, That no life lasts forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.

He set it down, the warm comfort vanishing at the touch of chill dread, feeling a slight irritation where always before he had relished the swing and depth of the thought behind the words. Swinburne was not for him—not now.

He touched other books, scanned other volumes, all old friends, all holding for him some special grace, some captured memory. He read a story for the hundredth time and enjoyed it as if he had read it but once. He fingered worn bindings and yellowed pages, blinking as his eyes refused their duty until he had had a surfeit of reading and put away the books and sat, staring through the high windows at the late-afternoon sky beyond.

He felt restless. He felt impatient with a strange urgency as though he had much to do and little time in which to do it. Summer was nearly over and soon would come the bitter winter or . . .

He didn’t let himself think about it.

He found a bottle, dusty and sealed, stained and bearing the arms of an emperor long dead. He held it against the light, staring at the golden glory imprisoned in the glass, caressing the bottle as if it was a thing infinitely precious, which it was, and priceless, which was almost true. He took a huge glass, a monstrous thing with a tiny stem and a balloon-like bowl. He warmed it between his palms, rolling it, nursing its delicate fragility; then, opening the bottle, he poured out the lambent fluid and, still warming the glass, inhaled the ineffable fragrance of the rare old brandy.

He inhaled and sipped, inhaled and sipped again, feeling little fires light in his stomach and warm his chilling flesh with the magic of the grape and summer suns of distant memory.

“I wonder often what the vintners buy One half so precious as the stuff they sell.” He smiled as he murmured the lines, the brandy in the glass seeming to wink at him with reflected light, smiling with its golden face and gurgling with its liquid mouth in complete agreement with the philosophy of the Persian Poet.

“You’re a snare,” said John accusingly. “You are the one true magic of the ages, the single thing which, by illusion, can turn terror into pleasure, hate into love, despair into hope. You can make all men brothers, all worries as drifting dreams, all hurt and pain as laughable memories. You hold the gift of courage. With you a man can face the world and be undaunted. With you he can ever smile at . . .”

He swallowed, drained the glass and rose from the soft, form-fitting chair in which he sat.

A bowl of fruit stood on a table of glistening plastic, the colours cunningly fashioned in abstruse designs of convoluted shades. He picked a grape, a swollen mutation from the hydroponic gardens, and crushed it against his teeth, savouring the seedless pulp and the sharp, almost acid tang of the syrupy juice. He ate slowly, his fingers not reaching for another until the first had been enjoyed to the full then, as he stared at the darkening sky outside, left the fruit and moved towards the door.

He had always liked the city.

He had always liked the medley of noises, the traffic sounds, the hum of inaudible conversations, the droning and scuffling, the humming and scraping of millions of feet and millions of wheels as the life of the metropolis ebbed and flowed.

There was a little park he remembered, an oasis of green and brown, of trees and flowers, of soft grass and winding paths among the steel and glass, the concrete and plastic of the city. Here little birds chirped their tuneless songs and the heavy scent of growing things filled the summer afternoon with heady fragrance and stately blossoms nodded with somnolent grace.

He spent a little time in the park.

There were some sculptures he had always admired, things of stone fashioned by hands long dust, holding within themselves the dreams and ideals of bygone ages, the figures staring with blank eyes as they had stared over the passing years and as they would stare for years to come.

He spent a while with the familiar shapes.

There was a street lined with garish signs and filled with the healthy, raucous, cheerfully independent voices of shouting men. A place of misty treasure and glowing illusion where flesh and blood puppets cavorted on stages and the beat of skin and the throb of brass brought a sense of reeking jungles and carnivorous beasts. Here emotions were released and bodies swayed to nerve-tingling rhythm while eyes widened and breath came fast and the pulse of blood rose until each cell and sinew tingled with the collapse of care.

He walked the street until his legs were tired.

He walked until the prickling between his shoulder blades had faded, until his anticipation had died, until despair and frustration rode with him like an invisible incubus and worry began to gnaw with its ten thousand teeth at the yielding fabric of his mind.

When?

He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know for there is some knowledge a man should not have, but...when?

Tiredly he made his way back to his apartment, walking slowly through the bright-lit streets, the sky a black bowl above his head and the scintillant trails of the ships hurling themselves from the spaceport dying like the sparks from a million fireworks against the faded stars.

When?

Now? Two minutes time? Tomorrow?

He hoped not tomorrow. He hoped that he wouldn’t have another night of old-man’s sleep in which the visions of his youth came to torment him on waking with bitter memories of what might have been. Not again the slow awakening, the rising, the horrible aging and sagging onrush of senility. Not tomorrow. Please God not tomorrow!

“If the thing is to do,” he muttered, “ ‘twere best that it be done soon.”

For if it were not done soon then it might not be done at all. Human courage and human despair have their limitations and life, even twisted and bitter, hateful and painful—life can be sweet, even though the sweetness be of bitter aloes and dead sea dust.

And he was but human.

Reluctantly he pressed his thumb to the lock, feeling a last flash of hope as he stepped into the warm, softly lit interior then, as he realized the room was empty, felt the sagging onrush of despair.

Tomorrow would be too late.

Tomorrow he would have aged a little too much, would have lost his courage, would have discovered that today’s unbearable was tomorrow’s acceptable. He had seen it before. He had seen the broken, decrepit things that once had been bright-eyed men, strong and with the clear vision of youth, had seen them huddled in their shame as they strove to cling to a life which had become a nagging burden. Tomorrow he too could be like that, hoping against hope, running a futile race against time, senile, teetering on the edge of insanity, his fine co-ordination and trained reflexes, lost beneath a welter of petty fears and niggling doubts.

Then death would be a hateful thing. Then the thought of oblivion would fill him with screaming dread and he would shrink, enjoying the pain that meant life, blind and deaf to sane counsel and the advice of intelligence.

A thing of which to be ashamed.

A thing which he had sworn he would never become— and yet? Was there still time?

The room was locked, empty, and he was alone and, looking around him, he knew that time was running out in more senses than one.

For this was the last day of his summer and he was still alive.

He sank into a chair, staring dully at the dark bowl of the sky beyond the high windows, not seeing the flash and glare of the slender ships as they rose toward space, not seeing the faded stars, the immensity of the universe, seeing only himself and what he would become. For a moment self-pity gnawed at his strength and almost he yielded to it, feeling the easy, emotionless tears of age blur his vision and sting his eyes. Then he recovered and stared about the glowing beauty of the room.

Here were his treasures and, in a sense, here was his life. Here were his memories, the little things, the trifles and yet each with its own association with the past. A statue, he reached for it and let his thumb travel with almost sensuous pleasure over the polished stone, a fragment hardly worth the price of a meal, and yet he had carried it with him for uncounted millions of miles. There a ring, a gift later returned, a gift which, if accepted would have changed the course of his entire life.

For a moment he felt the old pain, the shattering of cynicism and felt a faint regret that now, in this last day, he was alone.

And yet he would not have had it otherwise.

Loneliness was something he had lived with too long to fear now. And he could bear it until he died—if he died. The thought made him sweat, a thin film of glistening moisture over the too-soft skin, and his hand trembled a little as he reached for the bottle of rare old brandy. Death, something he had wanted, something he had paid for, something he had expected all day. Not natural death, that would come and its approach was a thing he dreaded and feared accompanied as it would be by accelerated senility and gibbering insanity. But clean, sweet, merciless death, unknown, immediate, a clean cutting off and a neat finish.

The only way to avoid the winter.

He had arranged it and the Bureau of Euthanasia had never been known to fail. He had tasted the sights and sounds, the sensuous pleasures of good food and good wine, the sight of familiar scenes and the visiting of familiar places for what he had imagined to be the last time. He had ignored the assassin who would be watching his every move, discounting what must come until nerve and sinew could deny his knowledge no longer, until anticipation hovered on the verge of being replaced by fear, and the terrible dread of having to reaffirm his intention once the night had passed.

He knew that he could never do it again.

Liquid sunshine poured from the bottle into the swollen glass. Automatically he warmed it between his palms, unable to desecrate the fluid gold even in his extremity of emotion and, as he inhaled the glorious bouquet, he smiled as an artist might smile or as a man to whom has been given one of the rare pleasures of the earth.

He had always appreciated good wine.

He sipped, letting the nectar drift over his tongue and sting his palate with its familiar taste. He sipped again then, as the glass slipped from his fingers and oblivion came with time but for a single thought, he smiled.

The assassin had been something more than just a killer.

He had been a gentleman.